taxonomites | 028 ± [ location: central (locked to Cain) ] the buttons are pushing themselves

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028 ± [ location: central (locked to Cain) ] the buttons are pushing themselves

Somehow Glitch got it in his half-full head that what Cain really, really needed after a month and a scoosh of getting kidnapped, brainwashed into some bizarre alternate self, and then finding out that his two best friends had become romantically involved (...and no, that description still didn't sound perfectly right) was a housewarming gift. Not a music box, but a music player nonetheless, with an assortment of small discs he'd pulled from the palace archives. Traditional ditties, a few popular collections from well before the war, and some of the jazz that got imported from the Otherside and melded with Ozian styles.

Odds were against the gift going over too well, but Glitch was a bit desperate to get (back?) into Cain's good graces. So he struck out for Central - of course the tin man would settle in Central - and the dot on the map that showed Cain's home. There was a parcel under his arm, a scarf wound loosely around his neck, and snow flurries catching in his curls.

...maybe he should have gotten Cain a scarf instead, or some gloves, or something else warmth-generating. A very insistent half-memory told him Cain would not like the cold.

ooc - post shall contain mistletoe-induced shenanigans of a kissy and snuggly nature. BYO-popcorn :3

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As it just so happened, Glitch was not entirely off the mark in his second guessings; Cain was indeed starting to feel the cold a bit too keenly for his own liking. It seemed that no matter how he adjusted the heat of his rooms, he still found his teeth clattering the moment he relaxed enough that his jaws weren't clamped shut.

He needed something else to keep him warm, like added layers of clothing; a scarf or a sweater might be nice. He pulled on his winter coat (courtesy of the hatches), righted his hat (same as the coat), and went looking for his tablet. Never mind that he hardly ever kept it running, he still didn't like leaving it behind. You never knew what kind of messages you might miss if you didn't check it every ten minutes.

No messages were forthcoming from the headcase, just some ambling and a dependence on sheer chance that they'd cross paths. Hopefully that'd happen before his zipper froze over, he really needed a...hat.

Then Glitch spotted a familiar behatted silhouette and he grinned, trivial trepidations forgotten in an instant.

"Cain!" he called and waved his free arm before loping over to the other man. "Hey, hi, I was...looking for you."

Sometimes Cain really thought the so-called hamsters were enjoying messing with his head. You go out looking for the nearest hatch, and you happen upon one of the two people you're trying to avoid because it's easier than the alternative.

He sighed, and figured that seeing as his life had only been easy for a short while, it was bound to keep being difficult to the day he died. He had the sickening notion he wasn't getting out of this place alive; that somewhere behind the facade, all the people who 'went home' were actually ending up a source of energy or nutrition for their captors.

Or just experimented upon. He wasn't sure which option he dreaded the least. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth to blow some hot air into them. Then, not entirely reluctantly, gave Glitch one of his trademark Exercises of Brevity (tm): "You found me."

...oh right there was a thing with an awkward and whatnot. Somehow all of that had gotten lost in Glitch's calculations, which is a little absurd considering it was the driving force behind this mission.

"I did," he said, then blinked and proffered the gift. It was a wooden box, square, and easily recognizable as a music player case from the O.Z. Within there'd be a crystalline-matrix powered device and a row of song discs within the velvet-lined confines.

"A housewarming present," Glitch explained. "F-for your home, which I wanted to see." If you're willing to let me in, he didn't add, but settled for glancing around the street. "It's not far, is it?"

Cain blinked, and found himself forgetting some of the teeth grinding, building frustration at being unable to remove himself from this without upsetting his friend further. He blinked, and looked from the box and Glitch's face and back again, not knowing what to say. A house warming gift, of all the shapes a peace offering could take... For that's what this was, no more and no less - a peace offering.

And despite the fact Cain felt more and more like he should be the one to extend such tokens, he found he couldn't refuse. He took the case, looked it over, and placed it snugly under his arm. "Not too far," he said. "Nothing compared to trekking 'cross the entire Zone, back and forth.

"Thanks."

The breath Glitch didn't know he was holding escaped in a tiny puff of vapor and a relieved smile. Part of him had been afraid the gift would be shoved back and he'd have to make the long trek home in the cold (which still wasn't as chasing ghosts around the O.Z., but still), but no.

"You're welcome," he replied with a puppet-like nod. "I was just thinking, you know, maybe you'd like a little something from--" A particularly icy gust sprung up and Glitch found himself shivering, the rest of that thought carried away on the wind. "N-n-not far, you said?"

Something from home. Yes, Cain could agree with the sentiment. It was a good idea, and he could see the reason behind it well enough. Considering he was the reason, it wasn't really much of a stretch of the imagination. Glitch wanted to make things better, even if only by increments.

He reached out and patted his friend's arm and tugged him along. "I'll never know how you survived the Zone, Glitch. Don't you know you're not supposed to stay still when out in the cold?"

"Ha!" Glitch crowed and immediately began following him. Yes, following Cain, that was usually a good idea, and a good way of warding off the cold. "Luck, I think, but you're right. A body in motion tends to stay in motion and not die from exposure, that's...some law of something or other."

The specifics didn't matter, just the idea behind them. Keep the gears moving and there'd be progress, it was a surprisingly universal concept.

"Well, that's unless you count inertia," Cain noted, something along the lines of a smile starting to crinkle the skin around his eyes.

Just a block away, his building. He could see the dark green door and the steps leading up to it from here. The snow lay snugly in every nook and cranny it could, covered the bushes adorning the sidewalk, nestling into the grooves of the masonry that made up the outer wall. It was a nice building. Old looking, and just a bit worn.

Not entirely unlike himself, or so he imagined.

"Right," Glitch agreed, although his tone wasn't completely confident. He knew the concepts were all related but the jumble in his head wasn't letting them come together. It was the cold, he decided, freezing his synapses. "Inertia counts, of course."

The fact that the door was green brought a smile to Glitch's face. It was his favorite color, as the emeralds the old City's streets had been paved with, as the forested hillsides rising above his mother's estate, as the decorative shrubbery growing over the doorway--

"It's...a nice place," he declared firmly, with the air of someone who knew from bad places and was appreciative of the nice ones. Glitch glanced at up at Cain, a smile just tugging the corners of his mouth. "I'm glad you found somewhere nice."

"I was just teasing," he remarked softly, turning and taking the first few steps up to the door. He turned halfway to make sure Glitch didn't trip or skid on some hidden patch of slippery ice, and returned his smile in kind.

He nodded. "I don't have much, but I think I can scrounge up some coffee."

The smile widened at that. Glitch would take teasing any day: it seemed to be his default method of communicating with Cain, and he took it as a sign that things were better. Optimism at work, happiness replacing doubt, and it propelled him up the steps.

"Coffee would be excellent," he declared as he joined Cain. "Anything to help get warm again would be excellent."

The remaining few steps up the stairs, Wyatt took with a sort of spring to them that he couldn't remember having in a very long time. He went to push the door open for his friend, and while he fully intended to gesture for him to go on ahead, something came over him. A tingling little something running from the base of his spine, something burrowing right into his heart.

He realized something right then and there; something he felt absolutely certain he should have admitted a long time ago, a lifetime ago.

Instead of letting Glitch into the hallway, he lifted his hand to cup his face as if he'd done it a thousand times already (he hadn't, not in ten years had he done such a thing).

He leaned in - heart skipping a beat. Pulled Glitch close.

Looked into his eyes - they were warm brown, and seemed more vibrant than he'd ever noticed.

And pressed his lips to the corner of his mouth.

That little swell of happiness resolved itself as Glitch reached the top of the steps, synapses sparking with a bright new emotion. Past fondness, beyond affection, skimming the surface of adoration before plunging straight into Love, capital L. His breath caught and blinked at--

Cain, dear Cain, and why hadn't he seen it, felt it, known it before? So much time had been wasted but then Glitch was most comfortable with the here and now, where Cain was touching his face and staring at him with something remarkable in his eyes.

Blue eyes, something about another pair of blue eyes and another doorway and finding shelter from a blizzard but the memory(?) flitted away too quickly to worry about it.

The kiss was warm but he still shivered, wanted more, and so reached up to grasp the front of Cain's coat in order to hold him in place so Glitch could kiss him properly. Well, properly as he could while smiling with delirious happiness.

He'd been blind, was now blindsided by the sheer incredulity of it. His hand moved to the nape of Glitch's neck as he continued to kiss his smiles that somehow reminded him of sunshine, freshly cut grass and lying in the shade after a long day of working at the height of summertime. Like coffee and grapefruit and banter, out on the porch one chilly autumn morning.

He broke the kiss, overcome by a sudden flush of heat to his face, and ducked his head with a dopey smile of his own.

Edited 2010-12-12 21:47 (UTC)

Glitch kept smiling, eyes closed, as he caught his breath. That was...yes, precisely right, and the cold was forgotten along with most of the rest of the world.

Finally he opened his eyes to peer at Cain with a sort of wonder. It felt like everything they'd been through had led to this moment, and Glitch's grip on Cain's coat tightened.

"I...wow." That was immensely inarticulate, even for him. "That was very nice."

Which was a bit of an understatement, but he didn't trust himself to say more for fear of never shutting up.

Wyatt nodded, completely at a loss for words. It didn't matter, not with Glitch, who had a way of understanding his quiet moments and knew better than to poke and prod. He nodded, smiling still, and all he got out was a tiny little huff of air.

He didn't know what to say that wouldn't ruin the moment, had no idea how to put all those things that he'd wanted to say into actual words instead of just thoughts.

He looked up, warmth and mischief warring for the upper hand in his smile. "Morning, sweetheart."

That got a laugh, the kind that made Glitch's nose scruch up and the crow's feet around his eyes stand out. He rememebred the first time he'd heard that, how it'd made everything fall into place, it was only right that it hear it again now, only--

"Afternoon, I think," he remarked, ever one for technicalities (there was no way he'd be correcting 'sweetheart', however). To make up for it he nodded to the door since, cozy as this was, some shelter might be nice. "We should go in and..."

Talk, not talk, have coffee, go back to kissing, something.

It's the kind of laughter that just made his dimples pop, and Wyatt realized he'd loved the look of them for a long time. One more soft kiss, this time to his cheek, then he nodded affirmative- "Yeah." -and showed him into the lobby that wasn't so much a lobby but a hallway with doors and a staircase in the back.

Up the stairs, round the corner of the [-shaped corridor, and Cain stopped to unlock the door to his apartment. It faced out onto the busier street rather than the backyard, which he preferred; it gave him the freedom (and what a word to use in such a place) to watch people as they moved about their day to day existence. (He liked keeping tabs, and especially in the seeming unlikely event of an emergency - but that was as far from his mind as it possibly could be.)

"Here we are. Like I said, it's not much, but-- You know, it's more than I need, actually. As long as you're here..."

Glitch drew a breath at the kiss to his cheek but refrained from saying anything more, merely nodding before he followed Cain inside and upstairs and into the apartment.

He shed his overcoat, placed it on the hook as if he'd done it a dozen times and looked the place over, touching every surface that came in range. In his life he'd spent an inordinate amount of time surrounded by grandeur, but he'd learned to appreciate simple, cozy spaces as well. So when Cain said that--

"Oh," he said, then darted over to embrace the tin man, kissed his jaw, then buried his nose at the collar of his shirt to breathe in his scent, wanting an impressionof Cain on all his senses. "Then I'll stay." The statement was muffled but the intent was clear by the way he tightened his grip. "As long as you can put up with me, I'll stay."

He'd barely shrugged out of his coat before he was pounced, for a lack of better wording, and it made him smile. Not just the way he smiled when mildly amused, but a big, beaming grin. He closed his arms around his friend, holding him close. They'd been through so much in the short time they'd known each other, but it was enough (more than enough) for him to know with absolute certainty this was a once in a lifetime thing. They'd helped each other survive more horrors in a week than most people faced in their entire life.

He breathed deep, and his face felt entirely too warm against Glitch's cold cheek, but that was okay. It was all right. They were in from the cold, Glitch's zipper was out of harm's way (he wondered, not for the first time, why he hadn't thought to get a proper winter hat)... "Put up with you?" He asked incredulously. "You make life here easier to bear just by being around."

Glitch pulled back slightly to look at him, gathering all his attention and focusing it because Cain deserved at least that, and so much more.

"I'm glad," he said fervently. "I'm...you're a good man, Wyatt, you should be happy. I want you to be happy."

Just ten minutes ago, going out in the street in search of a new scarf (or whatever it was, he can't remember, it doesn't matter), he couldn't have said he was happy. But now...

Well, it certainly felt like a possibility. It felt like right now, right this instant, he could be honest with himself. "Just give me some time. I don't want to jinx anything, but you're giving me a lot of incentive for happiness."

He knew there's prettier ways to say what he wants to, but Glitch was the eloquent one. If anyone could put frills on words and get away with it, it was him.

Glitch's eloquence tended to come from his verbosity: throw a lot of words out and see which ones stick.

"I can be patient," Glitch replied, seriousness shot through with glee. He could also be greedy, and closed the gap to kiss Cain again. "And we've got all the time in the--"

And he paused, distracted by the ever-familiar feeling he'd forgotten something.

Expecting a kiss was one thing, but not getting it was a completely different thing. Cain blinked, and tilted his head to the side. His hand cupped Glitch's cheek, thumb stroking along the crow's feet he'd grown to love.

"...how about that coffee, huh?"

"Coffee's a good idea," Glitch said with a nod, then gave Cain one more squeeze before disentangling himself and wandering over to settle on the sofa. "And and maybe...do you have any biscuits? Something to munch on?"

Yep, food will still and forever be of vital importance.

Cain gave Glitch a lopsided grin before hanging his hat and coat beside the door, then brushed a self conscious hand over the back of his neck. "I think I can fix us something along those lines, yeah."

It was ridiculous; he hadn't blushed like this since he started middle school.

The blush got a grin that was full of mischief, and Glitch fussed with the buttons of his own coat. "I'm sure you can, you're resourceful."

Boy scout.

"Always prepared, sweetheart," he quipped, rifling through his meagerly stocked pantry. Coffee and biscuits, coffee and biscuits, coffee and biscuits...

He straightened up, a packet of ginger snaps in his hand, feeling rather like there was something wrong with this picture.

Not the banter, surely, since he and Glitch... Well, it was what they did. Comments and remarks of varying acidity was their thing.

Oh, right, coffee's in the fridge, not the pantry. He tossed Glitch the ginger snaps and then silently reprimanded himself for his own scatterbrained-ness and headed to the fridge.

That same ripple of something along his spine came over him the moment he started adding coffee to the ditto maker, but he ignored it. He was in a good mood, and he wasn't about to let his paranoia get the better of him this time.

This was a Good Thing, and he sure wasn't about to mess it up. "Black? Sugar? I don't have any cream..."

Edited 2011-01-02 18:41 (UTC)

Glitch deftly caught the packet of biscuits - oh, ginger snaps! - and happily tore into it. He'd been in Taxon long enough to have forgotten what real food tasted like, and took everyone's word for it that stuff in the city just wasn't right, but he was happy enough...

He paused in nibbling on the first biscuit because there was something in thinking about unreal things that was disconcerting. Glancing over at Cain for reassurance, he felt a wave of...fondness. Security. Yes, of course, everything was fine, and he wiped the crumbs from his lips before answering.

"Two sugars, please. I like sweet."

He smiled to himself, ducking his head at the comment, because boy wasn't that the truth. Glitch liked sweet things. Apples, biscuits... Wyatt might've known, but he didn't much like extrapolating when he had so little to go by. He knew Glitch loved apples (red, ripe ones), and he'd heard him moan enough about muglug to know he liked that too... But that was just the beginning of it. He could tell that much. Headcased though he may be, there was more brain left in him than most people got to begin with.

...even if it didn't show, at times.

Point of the matter being: He was rather looking forward to finding out what else Glitch loved, besides apples and muglug and biscuits.

"Two sugars, comin' right up."

He didn't know whose kitchen this had been before he came here. Truth of the matter was he didn't much want to think on it, but in any case it came fully equipped. As much as he needed, anyhow. He got out two cups, prepped Glitch's with two sugars, picked them up and--

And...

And set them back on the counter, going pale as death in the face.

Apples and muglug and biscuits and long mornings hiding under blankets and wind in tall grass and the sound of an engine turning over and...it was a long list. A very lengthy list and right at the top of it were blue, blue eyes and a teasing smile.

And long dark hair.

Wait a second.

Glitch looked over to Cain again, this time with a puzzled frown. Why...how...

"Um." Yeah, that was an intelligent statement. "Cain? Is...something wrong?"

Yes he was mostly hoping for verification before he jumped to any absurd conclusions.

One after the other, Cain's shoulder returned to their preferred position - all straight lines and very lacking in the fluid department. His neck felt like it was about to snap (like a twig, and he deserved it, too), but instead it didn't, and he found himself turning around. Slowly. Expecting the other shoe to drop - or to kick him in the face.

"I... Y--you're..."

He couldn't feel his face anymore. And he couldn't feel his hand drifting to his lips either.

Glitch clambered to his feet, coat open, head tilted to one side, the picture of abject confusion. His shook his head as his hands came together to wring.

"You...that was." Was, past tense, because the world was the right sort of upside-down now. The color was rising in his own face and he shook his head again. "Ozma on a pony, what was that?"

He shook his head, hand still pressed to his mouth as if to stop himself from saying something he'd regret, the wrong thing, the not quite right thing, any thing.

Maybe if he squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again this would turn out to be a dream: surreal, nice and disconcerting in equal measures, but ultimately harmless.

He tried it to no effect. All in vain. "I-I, no, that, I didn't mean... I don't know."

Glitch was less worried about saying or doing to wrong thing, much more accustomed to just letting his instincts guide him. Right now they told him to go to Cain, to..

He didn't know, he just took a few steps, stopped, took one step back, let the frown deepen.

"I don't know either," he confessed. "It was just like...you didn't mean it?"

Nope, there was absolutely no ability to focus going on here.

"No!"

If he could've, he would have backed himself right into the wall, but the kitchen counter blocked even the slightest bit of effort to that effect. He was stuck, well and good and rooted to the spot despite Glitch moving closer.

He couldn't have that; not when he felt both disappointed and relieved when Glitch backed off just as soon as he'd moved closer.

"I mean... I didn't mean it like that, like I meant it." ...no, wait, that wasn't right either. He had meant it. Even going over it all, he was struggling to find something that he hadn't meant - anything that he'd just said, for some, some sort of intensely awkward reason. But there was nothing. "Just..."

Glitch did make Taxon easier to bear just by being around, he just wasn't supposed to know it. Or he was. He should know. Cain just wasn't supposed to ever have to tell him outright, as if it was the single most important, most incredible thing there ever was.

...but when he said it, he couldn't have thought of one single thing greater than Glitch's companionship. He'd meant every single word.

He still did.

He just didn't mean it.

"Just stay where you are."

There was a flinch - it couldn't be helped - and Glitch looked around for a place to bolt to but...no, there was nothing to run from, it was just Cain and it was okay because Cain was a good man. And Glitch had said he'd stay with him, as long as Cain could put up with him he'd stay and--

That wasn't right; true but not the right kind of right. His fingers went to his lips, mimicry and realization of what had happened and his dark eyes went wide as he looked to Cain again.

"Not moving," he confirmed, although he wanted to but whether it was closer or away was up for debate. "Not moving Cain I'm not no I'm--" His eyes slammed shut and fingers moved from his mouth to his right temple and pressed. "Gods, what did they do?"

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028 ± [ location: central (locked to Cain) ] the buttons are pushing themselves

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