Gabriel's knees are always (skinned) wrote in repose,
Re: Élan/Ronan: lucky #7
Maybe not another telepath, then, in the strictest definition. But something or someone at least marginally weird in the way that Ronan was weird, and the mere suggestion to the contrary was met with a thoroughly undignified snort. “You’re a blind guy who doesn’t need to use a cane and knows what I’m thinking about inside my head. Trust me, you are,” he said dryly, tossed over his shoulder as an afterthought as he slip-slid down an incline on damp detritus underfoot. “Or close enough, anyway.”
Back around to face the stretch of forest that stood between him and Ben’s familiar, relaxed stance where he leaned against a tree up ahead, hands in his pockets as he smiled at Ronan with an amused glint to his gaze. There was the soft murmur of his name from the hunting partner who trailed behind, but he let it roll over him like water droplets over slick feathers and shook himself free of the sour apprehension that was gathering in the man’s mind like storm clouds. “It’s okay, I know him!”
But before the distance closed between them, Ben was turning and heading deeper into the darkness of the woods with a significant look behind him, making sure Ronan followed. “Come on, you need to see this,” Ben said, with a small and beckoning motion of his hand as he led the way, angling towards a huge, felled tree whose exposed roots loomed in the air like a giant hand. Ronan wasn’t looking over his shoulder anymore to make sure Élan was following, it was too dark as the canopy of branches overhead thickened and he had to watch his feet carefully to avoid tripping as he hurried in Ben’s wake.
“What did you find? And where’s your partner, by the way?”
But Ben didn’t answer. He’d disappeared around the far side of the fallen tree, out of sight behind the jaggedly-risen roots. Ronan fumbled in his pocket for a minute until he pulled his phone free and opened the flashlight app, harsh white light carving a path through the dark to the forest floor and leaving a steely blue afterimage in Ronan’s field of vision for several seconds as he rounded the tree’s roots and came to a stop behind Ben. Still blinking rapidly, Ronan was about to ask what they were supposed to be looking at, until Ben pointed and he swung the light’s beam in the same direction.
“What -” But the question died in his mouth, turned to chalky ash, as first shoes, then legs came into view in the circle of his phone’s light. Hands, turned a greyish purple with lividity and neatly folded over a man’s stomach, and a golden glint of a familiar signet ring on the left middle finger. Ronan’s stomach dropped with a sickening lurch and he staggered, knees buckling under his own weight. The light was shivering, because Ronan was shivering, biting back a whimper as he slowly moved the light up, up, over a familiar rugby shirt, over a collar stained rust with dried blood, up to the face that he still saw in his nightmares. Murphy. His brother.