Chapter Text
Ambrosius’s head was spinning. Ballister was missing, and a search was being ordered, for all the knights to hunt down the queen killer– no. No, Ballister couldn’t be the queen killer. He wouldn’t do that. Ambrosius had no idea what happened, no idea how, but there was no doubt in his mind that his boyfriend (ex boyfriend? would Ballister even want to be his boyfriend, anymore?) was innocent.
There were logical reasons why he couldn’t have murdered the queen. She’d believed in him before anyone else did, stood up for him when the kingdom wanted him gone, and he loved her. And Ballister was the smartest person Ambrosius knew. He wasn’t so stupid as to murder the queen so publicly.
And beyond that, less logically, Ambrosius trusted him, knew in his heart that his (ex) boyfriend wouldn’t be so evil.
Which meant he’d cut off an innocent man’s arm. And not just any innocent man. The man he loved. He buried his face in his hands and fully intended to drown in guilt about this, but he pushed it away. Not now. Now, Ballister needed his help. He could be guilty later.
The city was being searched right now. If Ballister was in the city, Ambrosius couldn’t be the first to find him. But knowing Ballister, he’d probably gotten as far away as possible.
So where was he…
The tower.
It was unlikely, since Ballister knew Ambrosius knew about the place, must have known it would be a risk. But less of a risk than staying in the city, and Ambrosius couldn’t think of anywhere else.
He would try there. And if not…
Well. He’d figure something else out.
He approached the Director and she looked up at him, concerned. “Director, I- I know you ordered the search, but I… I can’t. Not yet. I’m sorry, it’s just that Bal and I… we were so close, and he betrayed us all…” He betrayed us all tasted bitter.
“Of course. Why don’t you rest in the barracks?”
Ambrosius shook his head. “Too many memories of him. I was thinking I would just go- go for a walk, clear my head. I have my sword. I’ll be safe.”
She nodded. “Feel better, Ambrosius. We’ll contact you if we find the queen killer.”
Don’t call him that, he wanted to snap, but he bit his tongue and nodded respectfully. Given how much of a mess his head was, the trip to the outskirts of the city was blurry. But somehow, Ambrosius made it to the woods, and he wandered off.
He hadn’t been here as often as Ballister, but he thought he remembered the way. They would come here, sometimes, for Ambrosius to escape the pressure of being the Golden Boy, or for Ballister to escape the harsh words of his peers and the media. Or sometimes, just to get some time alone together.
The tower came into view a little while later, and he nearly sobbed with relief as he ran to it. He knocked, but got no response. Was Ballister staying hidden? Or was he just… not here?
Or was he already dead?
Ambrosius had to know he was alive. He pushed the door open to see Ballister hunched over on the couch, pressing a bloodstained blanket to what was left of his arm.
“Bal,” he choked, stumbling forward, and Ballister flinched.
“Are you here to arrest me?” he demanded.
He didn’t blame Ballister for asking, but it still felt like he’d been slapped. “No. I’m here alone. No one knows where I am.”
“Are you here to kill me?”
“No!” His chest burned. Too late, he realized he still had his sword with him. How that must have looked to Ballister, who’d already been hurt by that sword– his sword– today. He took a step backwards. “Bal, I’m going to draw my sword now, but I swear I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to take it out, drop it, and kick it to the side. I will not cause you any more harm.”
Ballister didn’t respond, so he slowly and cautiously drew his sword and let it clatter to the floor. He jumped at the noise, but visibly relaxed when Ambrosius kicked it far away from them both.
“I’m innocent,” Ballister said suddenly, his voice pained. “Please, Ambrosius, I know how it looked, but I- I’m innocent. Please. Please believe me.”
“I believe you.”
Ballister blinked a few times. “You- you do?”
“I do.”
“You cut off my arm.”
“I did,” he whispered, and reached for Ballister before abruptly stopping himself. “Gloreth, Bal, I’m so sorry. It was the worst mistake of my life, and I- I would do anything to go back and fix it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Ballister watched him for a moment, face unreadable, before rising to his feet and shakily walking towards the kitchen. “Where are you going?”
“There’s a first aid kit in the cabinet. I need to treat the arm that someone cut off.”
Ambrosius winced. “Bal, I’m so sorry.” He ignored him. “Please let me do the stitches for you–”
Ballister whirled around to face him. He was glaring, now. “If you think I’m letting you anywhere near my arm–”
“I know. I know. I just- it’ll be easier, if I do it. You’d be using your non dominant hand…”
“And whose fault is that?” Ballister turned back around, grabbing the first aid kid and setting it down on a table.
“Mine. I know. And- and after this, you can go back to hating me. I deserve it. Just let me do this for you first, please. I need you to be safe.”
Ballister stared at him for so long that Ambrosius was sure he was going to say no. And then, to his shock, Ballister nodded. Cautiously, he approached his boyfriend (ex boyfriend, he was definitely an ex boyfriend by now, why would he want to be with Ambrosius after he’d cut off his arm ) and removed the blanket, fighting back nausea at the sight of all the blood. He avoided Ballister’s gaze as he cleaned and sealed the wound and bandaged it up, not wanting to see the pained expression, knowing that the pain was his fault–
“Done,” he announced uselessly when he finished. “I’m so sorry, Bal.”
“Just shut up.”
Ambrosius nodded and focused on cleaning while Ballister clutched his shoulder and cursed under his breath. After placing the first aid kit back in the cabinet, he just paced the room uselessly until Ballister spoke again, so quietly he had to strain to hear him. “For the record, I don’t hate you.”
“Why the hell not?” You should.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m mad at you, definitely. But I’m too relieved that I’m not alone to care about that right now.” Ballister cleared his throat. “I knew you might be able to find me, at the tower. It was a risk. I just… it was the only place I could think of where I had a chance to survive. And I figured you’d search the city first, buy me some time.”
“The official search is in the city. I’m not supposed to be here, but I- I thought you might be here, and I had to know you were alive.” He cleared his throat. “You should get some rest.” You’ve lost a lot of blood , he thought, but he didn’t dare to say it out loud.
“I’m fine,” Ballister insisted. He stood up, swayed, and nearly toppled over. Ambrosius lunged to catch him. He carried a protesting Ballister over to the couch and set him down gently, tucking a blanket over him.
“Rest, Bal.”
As he slept, Ambrosius kept himself busy trying to clean the tower, make it a not terrible place for Ballister to spend the foreseeable future. He straightened up the workspace, thinking Ballister could maybe use it to make a prosthetic arm. With that thought came another wave of guilt, and he spent a while hating himself before he decided to be useful again by coming up with a plan to prove Ballister was innocent.
Ballister woke up as he was scribbling on a whiteboard, trying to work out the details of said plan. Ambrosius noticed him stirring on the couch and rushed over, a million concerned questions on the tip of his tongue.
“Am- Ambrosius?” he whispered, rubbing his eyes. “You’re real?”
“Of course I’m real.”
Ballister shook his head. “I thought… I thought you were a dying hallucination I had.”
“I’m not a hallucination,” Ambrosius told him. “And you’re not dying.”
A million emotions flew across Ballister’s face before he lunged forward and buried his face in Ambrosius’s shoulder. Ambrosius tentatively wrapped his arms around Ballister, ready to let go the second he was asked.
“Please don’t leave me,” Ballister whispered..
“I won’t. I’ll stay. Unless… unless you want me to go. But I’ll stay as long as you need, I promise. We’re going to get through this, okay? I have a plan.”
“It’s probably a shitty plan,” Ballister mumbled.
It was a good sign that Ballister was joking around with him, right? “Okay, so, I go back to the castle and lead everyone in the wrong direction in the search. I’ll come back here next chance I get, and bring you any supplies you need. Food, medicine, any materials you might need for a- a new arm, whatever you ask for. Then, I invent a cover story and start interrogating people that I think might be the real culprit. The squire seems like a good starting point– he gave you the faulty sword, after all.”
He was silent for a while, but finally said “That was… surprisingly not shitty.”
“I can be smart occasionally.”
“Hmm. I doubt it.” Ballister smiled, weakly. “I have a lot of supplies for a prosthetic already. You remember I would sometimes work on projects when we came here? I can use some of those materials, so I probably won’t need anything else. But getting painkillers would be good, and probably some food.”
Ambrosius nodded. “Will you be okay? When I’m gone?”
“Eh. Probably not. But I’ll manage.”
“Are you sure? I can stay–”
“No, you should go. People will get suspicious. You’ve probably been gone too long already.”
“I probably have,” Ambrosius agreed. “I just… I needed to be here when you woke up.”
“I. Um. Thank you.”
“Of course. I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I love you,” he blurted, then covered his mouth. “Sorry. You- you don’t have to say it back. Sorry.”
A painful silence followed, until Ballister finally said “Bye, Ambrosius.”
Ambrosius slipped out of the tower and wandered to the woods on the other end of the kingdom before making his way back to the castle.
“Ambrosius!” the director called, when he finally got there. “Ambrosius, where were you?”
“Sorry, I… I thought I’d heard Ba- the queen killer, off in the woods that way–” He pointed to the opposite direction from Ballister’s tower. “–so I followed the sound, but then I got lost. I didn’t mean to, but it’s been a long day, you know, I didn’t have all my wits about me. I’m sorry.”
“Well. I’m glad you’re safe. You can rest. I’ll notify the knights to search that area.”
He nodded and went over to the barracks, promptly collapsing onto the bed. As the adrenaline of the last day faded, it began to hit him just how much had happened. All of their plans for the future had fallen apart, the queen was dead, Ballister’s arm…
He had nothing to do, nothing to distract him from his grief. All he could do was think about the sword slicing through Ballister’s arm, and his face when Ambrosius had cut it off, and let tears soak his pillow until he fell asleep.
It was a few more days before he could sneak back to the tower. He’d wanted to check on Ballister, but messaging him was out of the question- that was definitely being monitored. So he settled for reassuring himself that Ballister was smart, and he had a lot of survival skills from his time out on the streets, and he would be fine.
Probably.
When he approached the tower, he heard a voice that was decidedly not Ballister’s going “Boss? There’s someone coming!” Before Ambrosius even had time to think who the hell is that , someone– something– slipped out of the tower, and a pink rhinoceros appeared before him.
What the fuck…?
“Nimona!” That was Ballister’s voice, he registered distantly. “Nimona, it’s okay, it’s just Ambrosius, he’s safe– Nimona ?”
The rhinoceros, who apparently had a name , morphed into a pink-haired teenage girl.
What the fuck, Ambrosius thought again.
Ballister seemed to be having the same thought process. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The part of Ambrosius that wasn’t busy going what the fuck realized that he’d built a seemingly quite functional prosthetic arm. “You’re… a girl and a rhino?”
“I’m a lot of things,” the girl/rhino- Nimona- said. “Anyway, what’s this guy doing at our evil lair? Isn’t he on your murder wall?”
“Your what?”
“Nimona, it’s not an evil lair, and it’s not a murder wall, and you’re avoiding the topic. You’re not human.”
“You got a problem with that, boss? I just saved your ass from this guy–”
“He didn’t need you to save his ass from me,” Ambrosius started, but Ballister and Nimona both ignored him.
“You’re a mo–”
Nimona took a step towards him. “What? Marsupial? Mariachi? Meatball? ”
“You’re a monster,” Ballister whispered.
“Do not call me that!” Nimona snapped, and Ambrosius could have sworn he saw her eyes glow for just a second, until she added “Besides, you think I’m bad? He chopped off your arm! Arm chopping is not a love language!”
“It’s complicated–”
“No, she has a point. It’s definitely not a love language. And I’m so sorry.”
Ballister rubbed his forehead. “Ambrosius, not right now. Nimona, stop changing the subject. What are you?”
Nimona glared. “I’m Nimona.”
“That’s not an answer! People don’t just turn into things.”
“I do. Besides, boss, what does it matter? The whole kingdom hates you. Right now, it’s just you and the guy who cut off your arm. Are you really gonna turn away someone on your side, just because they happen to be a shapeshifter?”
He sighed, and after a long while said “Alright. Yes. Fine. Thank you for helping me.”
“Alright! I help you clear your name, and then I’m your official sidekick forever. Deal?”
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with…”
“Don’t overthink it,” Nimona said, and Ambrosius fought down a laugh. Over the course of his life, Ballister had never not overthought anything.
Slowly, he held out a hand for a handshake, and…
Nimona turned into a pink shark.
“Can you just be you, please?”
“I don’t follow,” Nimona said.
“Girl you.”
“I think the shark is pretty cool,” Ambrosius contributed. Sure, the shapeshifting freaked him out, but he couldn’t deny that sharks were cool, and pink sharks doubly so.
They both continued to ignore him. “But I’m not a girl! I’m a shark.” Nimona snapped her teeth.
Ballister sighed again and shook her fin.
“Hey, you ever put your head in the mouth of one of these? Come on. You know you wanna!”
“I should not have agreed to this,” Ballister muttered. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, if you want to help me clear my name, the first step is to find the squire. He’s the one who gave me the sword that… anyway, he might know something.”
“Alright! Let’s go kill– uh, get him. Let’s go get him.”
Ballister narrowed his eyes at her. “Only if you don’t do the… shifty-shift-shifting-shape thing. It’s too much.”
“Bal…”
Once again, Ambrosius was ignored. “I just think it would be easier if you stayed a girl.”
Nimona snorted. “Easier for who?”
“For you! A lot of people won’t be as accepting as me.”
“Really? Because he–” Nimona pointed to Ambrosius. “–seems to be doing just fine accepting me, and he’s the arm chopping guy! So I think you’re the one with a problem.”
“Ambrosius? Whose side are you on?”
Maybe he liked it better when they were both ignoring him. He scratched the back of his neck. “Yours. Always. But Bal… I think you should let her help.”
“What?”
He really wished they would go back to ignoring him. Ambrosius took a deep breath, trying to sort all his tangled up thoughts. “Last time I assumed the worst of someone, I- I cut off your arm, and it was the worst thing I’ve ever done. I never want to make a mistake like that again. So I’m trying to… not assume everyone has terrible intentions.”
“Listen to your boyfriend!” Nimona told him.
“Not my boyfriend,” Ballister snapped, like it was a reflex. Ambrosius couldn’t say he was surprised, but… this is not the time to be sad about a breakup. “But yes. He’s right. I’d be glad to have your help, Nimona. You can help me find the squire, so long as you don’t kill him.”
Nimona pouted. “Fine.”
“I wish I could help, but I should probably get back to the castle. I could barely find the time to get here today– the Director does not want to give me a break. I could maybe sneak away to help you find the squire, but–”
“No, don’t,” Ballister interrupted. “It’ll look suspicious if you’re away too often, and people being suspicious of you is the last thing we need right now. Besides, you’re leading the search, right? Yesterday I saw some knights a little too close to this place for comfort, so if you could try to nudge them in the wrong direction, that would be great.”
“Will you be okay?”
“Ambrosius, I’ve been sneaking around the tunnels of this kingdom since before I knew you. I’ll be fine.”
Ambrosius would still worry, but… he always worried about Ballister. He would be fine.
Probably.
As it turned out, he was reunited with Ballister a lot sooner than he thought. His team of knights received a distress call from the market, and really, he couldn’t be surprised that Nimona and Ballister were the cause of the distress. Ballister stole a car, Nimona helped him stuff the squire into the trunk, and the two drove off as knights fired arrows at the car.
Gloreth, Ambrosius hoped they’d be alright.
It was easier than he’d expected to sneak off a while later. The Director was busy chewing out the other knights for letting Ballister get away, so she didn’t notice Ambrosius leave. He appeared at the tower soon after.
“What happened?” he called. “Did you both make it out okay?”
“Nimona got shot in the leg, but she’s fine,” Ballister told him, not taking his eyes off the game of World Domination they were playing.
Nimona shot to her feet and jumped up and down. Ambrosius was no doctor, but he was pretty sure she shouldn’t do that after getting shot in the leg. “Boss, show him what we found, show him what we found!”
“This is the squire’s,” Ballister said, handing Ambrosius a phone. He clicked “play” on the video.
The squire was in the locker room, trying on Ballister’s armor, which was… weird, to say the least. Ambrosius watched the weirdness increase until someone else entered the room and the squire hid.
The Director.
The fucking Director.
She swapped the sword.
She killed the queen.
“Holy shit,” Ambrosius muttered. Disbelief washed over him first, and anger came a moment later. “She- how could she do that to you? We- we have to make her pay .”
“That’s what I said! We need to upload that video-”
“No.”
Nimona and Ambrosius both turned to stare at Ballister. “Why not?” Ambrosius asked. “Bal, we have proof that you’re innocent-”
“It could damage people’s faith in the Institute!”
“Uh, yeah, I sure hope it does,” Nimona said.
“Listen, the Institute’s not the problem. The Director is.”
He loved Ballister, but Gloreth, he could be an idiot sometimes. “The Institute is the problem, though! The whole system is. They’re the ones who told me cutting off your arm was the right thing to do. That’s not okay.”
“What, so the Institute cut off my arm? Because I seem to remember you being the one holding that sword.”
Ambrosius flinched. “I- I know. I’m not trying to deny what I did, or pass on the blame. But they’re the ones who trained me that way. I fucked up, but they fucked up too.”
“They brainwashed you both!” Nimona added. “Boss, you need to be questioning everything. The Institute, the wall– what do you think the wall is for?”
“For keeping us safe…”
“From what? Villains like you? Or monsters like me?” Nimona’s voice broke, and that seemed to convince Ballister more than anything Ambrosius had said.
“Okay. Alright. We’ll upload the video.”
“What are you waiting for? Go get your computer–”
Ballister shook his head. The corners of his lips moved upwards. “No. I have a better plan.”
“For the record,” Ambrosius said, knowing full well they would both ignore him. “I think this is a terrible plan.”
“It’s a great plan!” Nimona declared happily.
Ballister grinned. “It’ll be fine. Nimona’s going to cause a distraction. We won’t get caught.”
“Is it distraction time, boss?”
“It’s distraction time.”
Nimona shifted to look like Ballister, which was… disconcerting, to say the least. Then she leapt out into the guards’ view. “I’m evil, and I hate everybody!” she roared, grabbing a stuffed bear from a child and ripping it in half. Then she wrapped the cloak around herself. “Not as much as I hate myself. Can someone please give me a hug?”
The real Ballister glared.
“I hate smiles! I hate cupcakes! And I think babies are ugly!”
Ambrosius snorted, and Ballister punched his shoulder. “Stop laughing ,” he grumbled. “I do not sound like that.”
They both watched as Nimona picked up a trumpet and began to play. “I will concede that you hate freestyle jazz, so you wouldn’t do that, but the rest of her impression is spot-on.”
“Oh, shut up,” Ballister snapped, but he was laughing too.
All the guards followed Nimona-as-Ballister away, giving Ballister clear access to the news station. “Do your nerd thing,” Ambrosius told him. “You’ll do great. If the guards come back, Nimona and I will fight them off.”
“No. Not you. People can’t know you’re on my side, not yet. Let Nimona handle it. You can pretend to sword fight me, just don’t… don’t actually hurt me.”
“I won’t.” Painfully slow, Ambrosius reached his hand out to Ballister’s prosthetic arm. “Never again. I promise.”
Ballister placed his other hand over Ambrosius’s. “I know,” he said, and he looked like he might say something else (which Ambrosius would wonder about for the rest of time, probably) before he ran off to do his nerd thing.
He still wasn’t done by the time the guards came back, trying and failing to fight Nimona as she shifted from gorilla to ostrich to otter. He pretended to help fight her, “accidentally” sabotaging some of the other knights’ attempts, until Ballister reappeared and Ambrosius began to fight him. It wasn’t real, he reminded himself. This was just like the million times they’d fought in training, where they would never hurt each other for real, and they’d shake hands and hug afterwards.
Since he was distracted by Ballister, how good he was with his sword and how mesmerizing it was, he didn’t entirely see what Nimona was doing. All he heard was a crash, and when he turned around, Nimona was a little kid, her hair long and her expression devastated. Before he knew what was happening, Ballister had picked her up and swept her away, and they were long gone.
Everyone was so distracted cleaning up the mess that no one noticed when Ambrosius left to rejoin Ballister and Nimona in the tower. They didn’t notice when he came inside, either. That was understandable, considering Nimona had just flipped a table.
“Did you see the way that little girl looked at me?” Nimona asked, and Ambrosius got the sense that she wouldn’t react well if he interrupted. He stayed quiet. “Kids. Little kids. They grow up believing that they can be a hero if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different. And I’m the monster?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t know what’s scarier. The fact that everyone in this kingdom wants to run a sword through my heart… or that sometimes, I just wanna let them.”
Ambrosius watched a million emotions fly across Ballister’s face before he settled on determination. “We have to get you out of here,” he told Nimona. “We’ll go over the wall, we won’t stop until we find someplace safe–”
“No, you don’t have to do that. Boss. Your name is about to be cleared, things are about to be great for you. You’d leave all that behind? You’d leave your boyfriend–”
“Again, not my boyfriend.”
At the same time, Ambrosius said “I’d go with you.”
Ballister spun around. Apparently he hadn’t noticed Ambrosius was there either. “You-”
“Really, golden boy? You’d leave this kingdom? You’d lose everything.”
“I didn’t deserve any of it,” he said, quietly. “And none of it was as good as I thought it was. The Institute… the Director…” He cleared this throat. “That doesn’t matter to me. All I want is to be with you, Bal.”
Ballister stared at him. Ambrosius stared back, hardly daring to breathe, until-
Nimona coughed loudly. “That’s all very nice, but let’s stay. The video should broadcast soon, and I want to see the Director lose her shit.”
The Director did indeed lose her shit. As the news appeared all over the television screens, and everyone in the kingdom realized their Director was a liar and a murderer and an overall bitch , she fled. Now she was the queen killer they were searching for, and Ambrosius liked this a lot better than when the “queen killer” was Ballister.
Ambrosius stormed into the Director’s room. She wasn’t at her desk, but the door to the castle archives was open.
What the hell was she doing there? Everyone in the kingdom wanted her head, and she was… reading? Not even hiding? The door was open, for Gloreth’s sake. She may have been a massive piece of shit, but she wasn’t stupid . This had to be a trap. Ambrosius reached for his sword as he entered the archives.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of the queen and for–”
The Director turned to face him, a scroll in her hands. “Ambrosius. This explains everything.”
She showed him the scroll, and he studied it. A picture of Gloreth, pointing her sword at a fire-breathing creature. And inside the creature, in its heart, a little girl.
Nimona.
“It’s Gloreth’s monster,” the Director whispered.
For a second, some horrible part of Ambrosius agreed with her. He’d seen the damage Nimona could cause. She’d wanted to skewer him like a kebab the first time they’d met. But he knew her (thought he knew her?), and she wasn’t a monster. She was a girl and a rhino and a shark, and Ballister’s sidekick, and a kid who was so tired of being rejected by the world.
I don’t know what’s scarier, he remembered her saying. The fact that everyone in this kingdom wants to run a sword through my heart… or that sometimes, I just wanna let them.
She didn’t deserve that. And Ambrosius refused to be another person who tried to run a sword through her heart.
Last time he’d attacked without thinking, he’d hurt the man he loved. Cut off his arm . He refused to hurt someone he cared about like that, ever again.
“You’re under arrest,” Ambrosius repeated, “For murdering the queen and for framing Sir Boldheart.”
He snapped a pair of handcuffs around her wrists and dragged her towards the prison.
The television screens all around the kingdom, which had been playing and replaying the squire’s video (he hoped the squire forgave them for sharing that, eventually), cut to a news broadcast from Nate Knight and Alamzapam Davis, announcing that the Director had been arrested.
Somewhere along the way, Ambrosius handed her off to another knight. He wanted to see her brought to justice, but more than that, he wanted to see Ballister. And Nimona. In all the chaos, he managed to slip away and go back to the tower.
Before it even came into view, he heard loud music, the kind Ballister liked to blast when he was trying to focus on something. Was he working now? Ambrosius hoped not. He deserved a break, after everything.
When he opened the door, he did not see Ballister working. Instead, he saw Nimona and Ballister… dancing? They were both wearing sunglasses, Nimona was a shark, and Ballister was using a broom as a guitar.
“What are you doing?” Ambrosius laughed.
Ballister tossed him a pair of sunglasses. “It’s a dance party. Are you in or not?”
“Of course I’m in.” He accepted the sunglasses and spun Ballister around. Nimona snapped her teeth in disapproval and told them to get a room, but Ambrosius really couldn’t care less about that, not when Ballister was grabbing his face and kissing him.
Holy shit.