#I also don't know the details of his orphanhood or if N.D. Stevenson disclosed that at any point

[yrrtyrrtwhenihrrthrrt]

Another comic headcanon for the books

Ambrosius doesn't know his own birthday

He was an orphan before the institute got their hands on him, most likely abandoned as an infant since he has no knowledge or memory of his parents. I hc that he was only a month or so old at the time

So baby Amb was always sad that he didn't have a birthday (even though like half the kids at the Institution didn't either) because he wanted to feel like a normal kid. Ballister tried to convince him to just make a birthday up. "You know you arrived in September and were about a month old, just pick any day in August" but he didn't want to because it wouldn't be his "real" birthday.

So like. 10 year old Ballister in typical Ballister fashion lied about going to his old orphanage and checking the dental records and finding out that they dated his birthday to exactly August 11th and got him a cupcake. Ambrosius was so happy.

It didn't take long for him to figure out that was an entirely made-up story but he still celebrated his bday on that date because it meant a lot to him that Ballister gave him a birthday.

He didn't celebrate it for the entire fifteen years they were separate. If someone else threw him a party, he'd allow it, but stuff like that rarely happened and he never did anything on his own.

When they first got back together he was so used to not celebrating his birthday that he'd forgotten it, but Ballister didn't. Things were still too fragile to make a big deal of it, but Ambrosius woke up to find Ballister making pancakes in the kitchen, and he'd gotten him a cupcake and rented a disc of his favorite musical to watch.

And yeah he was beside himself.