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Cain thinks maybe, just maybe, he's a glutton for punishment. Because of all the places in the palace he could have chosen to while away a period of quiet he had to pick this spot.
He fell from this window, though he doesn't remember the fall, or the landing. He remembers being shot, or not shot as it turned out, and he remembers the cold, but then there's just nothing.
Of course once the snow and ice was cleared away all the balconies were rebuilt.
He couldn't fall now unless he made the effort.
There's been feet on the stairs for the last few minutes, not always coming up, sometimes pausing, sometimes going back down again. Occasionally there's a confused, frustrated sigh and a vaguely mumbled 'where am I going?'
It saves Cain from trying to guess who it is.
He stays balanced on the balcony until Glitch eventually makes his way to the top and spots him through the doors.
"Cain I was looking for you...probably, I was definitely headed in this general direction, which seems to suggest I was looking for you, though I can't be absolutely sure." There's a pause while Glitch considers the way he came. "Wow there are a lot of stairs, could you imagine coming all the way up them only to forget what you came up for, and having to go all the way down again, and then having to come back up." Glitch contemplates the stairs.
Cain adjusts his position on the balcony and waits for it like the slow inevitability that it is.
"Wow, there are a lot of stairs."
"You said that," Cain offers over his shoulder.
"Did I? Well there are a lot of stairs, maybe it's worth repeating." After a few moments Glitch comes over and balances his arms on the stone beside Cain. His new coat is very bright, clean and complicated and this one doesn't have a rip to be seen, though Glitch has neglected to button it, or work out which cuffs should go where.
He looks for all the world like he's run through a washing line and come out the other side wearing it.
Cain lets the quiet last for a while, there's nothing offensive about quiet, you could share quiet all day if you stretched it out far enough.
"I heard they were going to try and put your brain back in today."
"Yes!" Glitch says with a smile. "Yes, that's what I came to tell you! Yes they're going to try to-" he makes a confusing gesture with his hand that seems to be suggesting something vaguely gruesome. Cain isn't sure if that's his intention or not. "Today."
There's a brief period of fidgeting and a frustrated sort of exhale, and Cain is a second away from prodding him back into the conversation when he speaks again.
"It's not going to be easy what with the sensory deprivation and all those blood vessels and nerve endings and such-like. But you know what they say, no...something without something else."
"That's very true," Cain offers because it is, even when you forget the words.
"There was something else, I knew I should have written it down to make absolutely sure...can I read?" There's a brief moment of confusion and another tangent is tossed away like trash. "No, it's gone, whatever it was I've forgotten it."
Cain watches confusion, irritation and then acceptance drift past almost too fast to catch.
Then Glitch is just tapping his fingers on the stone and smiling into the wind.
Like the conversation never was.
Cain lets the silence drag on for a long minute before he speaks.
"So how do you feel about getting your brain back?"
"Oh," Glitch nods. "Well it's been a while, a long while, and I don't remember being me before. But I have been thinking," he laughs shortly. "Sometimes, when I remember to. About me, the new me, the Ambrose me. The original 'in potentia' so to speak."
"Uh huh," Cain offers because he suspects anything else before Glitch gets to the point will take the conversation off in strange directions, or just directions.
"What if I'm dull, what if I'm not interesting to be around? People with considerable power upstairs aren't often social butterflies you know." He laughs, soft and distracted. "Do you know there's a very interesting theory about how butterflies affect the weather-"
"You were worrying about being dull," Cain prods.
"I was? Well why shouldn't I, things are much more exciting when everything is new and interesting. What if, when things are older and less interesting, I'm less interesting?"
"Interesting isn't exactly the word I'd use to describe you now," Cain points out.
"Well sure I can't throw out witty anecdotes-" Glitch pauses in a way that suggests he's not entirely sure what 'witty anecdotes' actually are. "Or explain things in a coherent way for more than a few minutes at a time, but I don't think I'm dull. Of course there's one thing I'll miss that I won't have once I'm the old me again."
Cain frowns at him, genuinely curious.
"What will you miss?"
Glitch offers up a crooked smile.
"A general air of recklessness brought on by a reassuring inability to remember anything dangerous or embarrassing I may have done."
Cain has to agree that this is almost certainly an upside.
"Other people might call that foolhardiness."
"Sure, if you have all your upstairs marbles. I mean if everyone went around acting like that it would be anarchy." Glitch shakes his head, opens his mouth-
"General air of recklessness," Cain prompts, while at the same time wondering if he could somehow pre-empt the end of the conversation just by picking the right words. Which immediately makes him curious as to where randomly chosen words would take them.
"Right, recklessness, I'm going to miss that- of course none of that will matter if I die I suppose."
Which Cain isn't expecting, he slithers round on the stone.
"Who said you might die?"
Glitch snorts in a way that suggests Cain is displaying so far unseen stores of idiocy.
"They're trying to reattach a significant portion of my brain, it's not exactly..." he waggles his fingers in lieu of reaching for an appropriate word.
"Child's play."
Glitch points a finger at him.
"Yes that, exactly, it's not that. It's very, very complicated. I mean I probably couldn't do it even when I was Ambrose, not that biology was ever a strong suit for me. At least I don't think so." Glitch twirls a finger. "Mostly it's cogs and wheels and little bits of tubing. I don't get a lot of living things. I don't think I was very good with living things." There's a half frown that chases itself back and forth across Glitch's face for a while.
It strikes Cain in that moment that this might be the very last time he sees Glitch, their Glitch, all broken wires and bemused expressions and unhelpful tangents. Because by all accounts Ambrose is a far different man, quiet, reserved, focused. A man Cain doesn't know at all.
This is a farewell speech and he didn't even realise it.
Which is...an unsettling prospect.
It makes him wish he hadn't prompted quite so much. That he'd let him ramble on just for a little while.
"And I should, I should-" Glitch is lost again, and Cain doesn't mean to, he honestly doesn't, but he's been doing it for what feels like a long while and it's just instinct.
"Living things," he says without even thinking about it.
But he thinks maybe there are wires that have crossed, or touched, or just become tangled where they shouldn't have done.
Because Glitch sighs quietly, catches Cain's face in his pale, smooth hands and kisses him. It's a short, confusing moment of soft pressure and breath across his upper lip, before Glitch just as quickly swings away.
"Oh my that was forward of me." Glitch's seems to briefly contemplate if this is a good thing or not. "I'm not entirely sure if I intended that or not, but it definitely seemed the thing to do at the time."
Cain blinks, he thinks he might know in that brief confusing second exactly how Glitch feels when the wheels all just fall off of his train of thought. He honestly can't decide whether to be annoyed, amused or...some other third emotion. His mouth is wet and that's...quite distracting.
Glitch is still waving his hands and trying to apologise in his own special way.
"It's all this talk of recklessness, my brain, or what there is of it, clearly got confused and thought you looked like a perfect excuse to be reckless just standing there- and if I am going to die, well then I should get to do reckless things."
"Reckless things?"
"Stop that!" Glitch says. "You'll just make me kiss you again."
Cain isn't entirely sure if that would necessarily, all things considered, be a bad thing.
"Then do it," he says before he can change his mind.
Knocking all the wheels off of Glitch's train of thought, it turns out, is more fun than he should probably admit to.
He tugs on the unbuttoned coat, which gets him a sway, and a little stumble and then...another kiss.
If there's no Glitch tomorrow then what can it hurt, really. Cain hasn't been reckless like this in a very, very long time.
It's quite an involved area of recklessness, and Cain's a little out of practice, but luckily there isn't a lot of remembering involved.
Until Glitch is blinking at him from not very far away at all.
"I'm going to forget that," he says slowly. "But I really, really don't want to."
"We all forget things, good things and bad things." Cain can't remember where his hat is, that seems important, though he isn't sure why.
"But why did you do that?" Glitch asks curiously, like he's missed something, like he's trying to fill in spaces in his head.
"You did it first," Cain points out, because it's true.
"Did I tell you I have a general air of recklessness due to my reassuring inability to remember embarrassing or dangerous things I may have done?"
"Uh huh."
Glitch nods. "Good, that's, that's good, what?"
"I just indulged in a little recklessness of my own," Cain says carefully.
"Too much of that could lead to anarchy you know," Glitch tells him and Cain thinks he might be smiling perhaps more than is decent if he wants to preserve his reputation.