marceline, that's too distasteful! (ydidueatmyfries) wrote in thedisplaced, @ 2018-04-01 00:02:00 |
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Marceline had been awake at five o’clock in the morning when the flowers appeared. Her sleeping patterns were erratic, staying up during the day at all kinds of hours mostly to maximize her time with Baelfire. But after the battle, she’d hung back a little. He had family to look after, and Marceline hadn’t met half of them yet. Battle she could deal with, but winning over approval was not something she had much experience in. It hadn’t crossed her mind that the flowers could have even been dangerous. It should have. A thousand years of living hadn’t made Marceline that much wiser, especially when she had the power to fight her way out of just about anything. She found one made of deep and lovely reds and when she leaned picked it up and leaned in to sniff it, it smelled of sugary bubblegum. Worrying about Bae took a backseat and she smiled to herself, putting the flower in her hair and she hovered around the ship like a ghost. -- Ronan was awake when the flowers appeared, of course - they appeared at the exact moment that he woke. That was how it worked when he took things out of his dreams. There was one in his hand when he woke, so he was fairly certain it had worked, but he got up to look around anyway. The ship was quiet, most people asleep at this hour. And indeed, when he stepped out into the hallway, his flowers were everywhere. He tread through them lightly, shuffling them aside rather than stepping on them. And then he saw Marceline, hovering with a flower in her hair. Because it was Marceline, and he liked her, and they were the only ones around, he smiled and said, “You like my flowers?” -- The vampire was both surprised and pleased to see someone up at this hour. Five in the morning was a comfortable time for her. The sun wouldn’t be up for another hour or so. Too late or too early for most. Marceline didn’t normally get a lot of conversation at this point in the night. Or morning. Depending. But then Ronan spoke and Marceline’s smile vanished as she put it together. Her eyes darted between him and the flowers and she closed the gap between them in seconds. “Uh, you don’t have to do this. I mean, it’s cool. Like, um…” Marceline looked him over carefully. He didn’t look different, not in any obvious way that she could pick up, but she couldn’t help but keep looking him over just to be sure. Her hands were held awkwardly in the air, not touching him but wanting to, to make sure he was still… him. -- “What the fu--” Ronan began, stepping back instinctively when she came closer to him. He didn’t even have time to raise his hands all the way in preparation for defending himself; they got halfway up his chest and then just hovered there, uncertain, as she stared at him. She didn’t appear to be attacking him, so he didn’t have the faintest clue what to make of her reaction. “What the fuck, Marceline?” -- Marceline knew, and didn’t care, that a vampire flying towards a person at full speed could be more than a little intimidating. The gray skin and razor sharp set of teeth probably didn’t help. Her concern frowns hopefully helped defuse some of initial fright. “Oh good,” she tried, with a forced, screwed on smile. “Um, do you remember your name? Name three of your friends.” Marceline had chosen three for the simple fact that she could name three of his friends. Any strange, unfamiliar names of course would be met with more concern, as she stared at him, hovering. --- “Of course I remember my own damn name,” Ronan said, irritated. “Why the fuck wouldn’t I?” The question was so absurd to him that he didn’t bother answering the rest of it. Having recovered from his surprise, he gave her his most poisonous glare. Not that he expected it to do much. “Are you high?” — “What? No! I’m just hovering. If you remember your name you have to say it!” Ronan sounding angry meant Marceline getting defensive which meant she sounded angry. In truth, he was just starting to scare her a little. “It’s important! Just say the names!” --- “Ronan fucking Lynch,” Ronan said venomously. “Adam goddamn Parrish. Dick fucking Gansey. Noah fucking Czerny. Baelfire goddamn Everdeen.” He was angry, and she was angry, and this was really a very familiar situation for him, because he inevitably ended up angry at all his friends at some point, except right now he had no fucking clue what he was even angry about. She was just being weird. “What the fuck is your deal?” -- It was a good thing Marceline wasn’t the sort of person to care about shouting at five o’clock in the morning. Because she wasn’t. Because she did. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay! Okay?” His venomous expression was reflected right back at him with her own angry mug, except her eyes looked dangerously glimmery as though prepping for tears. “Whatever! Just don’t be stupid!” Marceline turned with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, putting herself together precisely so she didn’t cry. She didn’t breathe precisely, but if she did, it might have given herself the time she needed to remind herself that Ronan was okay. The flower was still miraculously in her hair. --- If there was anything Ronan understood, it was using anger to cover fear or hurt. He could not even begin to imagine how he had hurt her, though. The flowers were supposed to do the opposite; they made people feel better. Unless Marceline had some weirdly specific aversion to flowers where they made her act funny. He supposed it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing about her if she did. But normally he at least kind of understood her weirdness. He was still completely lost. “Why the fuck wouldn’t I be okay?” he asked. Now he just sounded exasperated rather than angry; she was clearly upset, and that sapped a bunch of his anger away. -- “Because!” Marceline said. It was the argument of a child but she wasn’t exactly thinking clearly yet. She wiped under her eyes to make sure they were dry before turning around. “This is a lot of magic. And big magic makes humans go ba-nay-nays. I get you want to make people feel better but you’re more important than that! Okay? So, just don’t hurt yourself or start calling yourself the Flower King or start thinking everyone’s name is Daisy or something.” She didn’t make him promise, though. Marceline learned that lesson loud and clear. If he was going to use his magic, he was going to use it, and there wasn’t anything she knew of that would stop him. Not even a promise. --- The first thing Ronan wanted to say was, this is not big magic. It wasn’t big magic, not to him; he had dreamed two human beings, a raven, and a mystical dream forest (twice), not to mention the orchard and the go-kart track he’d made back in Tumbleweed. Flowers, by comparison - even a lot of them, even magically comforting ones - were small magic by his standards. But he didn’t think that would be comforting to her, nor was he sure of his decision to trust her with the fact that he’d made the flowers at all, when clearly she had some misgivings about magic. “I’ve been using magic since I was little,” he said. “I didn’t even have any control over it until like a couple years ago. It’s been difficult and dangerous sometimes but it’s never made me go crazy or forget shit like that.” -- The first thing Marceline wanted to say was, yet. She didn’t have to. Her expression was deeply unhappy. Maybe he’d already been driven crazy as a kid? Maybe that was why he liked the Murder Squash song? But then what did that say about Marceline for not disliking the Murder Squash song? She wasn’t as smart as a lot of her friends. She didn’t have the answers to any of those questions. “If it’s difficult and dangerous then maybe you shouldn’t do it. Your friends would be pissed if anything happened to you. I’d be pissed if anything happened to you.” Marceline’s frown said as much. -- Ronan was quiet for an extended moment, at least a full minute. He knew that was true, and he knew he had to explain, but he also didn’t know how to explain without giving too much away. Telling someone that he had made the flowers was one thing. Telling them that he had pulled them from his dreams was quite another. And then, telling someone the full scale of what he was capable of -- even Adam and Gansey and Blue had struggled with reconciling that with what they knew to be possible. Ronan didn’t like seeing that look on people’s faces. But if there was one thing he had gotten really good at over the years, it was telling the truth enough that he wasn’t lying, but not telling the whole truth. “I have the opposite problem,” he finally said. “Not doing it is dangerous. If I don’t make things every so often, I start being unmade.” He hadn’t known that part of it for very long, only since the summer before Adam had gone to college. He also hadn’t told anyone about it, not even Gansey or Noah. Only Opal and Adam knew, because they’d been there. He still wasn’t proud of it, or entirely sure of how it worked, why the not making turned into Ronan himself coming undone. He had stopped for a long time because the ley line was getting drained, because the demon was unmaking Cabeswater, and he was still wary of using too much energy, using more than the world had to spare. He tried to stick to little things - or medium things, unless big things were really needed. The flowers were a small-medium thing, but they had seemed necessary. Everyone was so damn sad and there was so little on this boat to cheer them up. Especially when people had so many different ways of coping, there was no way they could all find what they needed. Ronan had thought about that far too long before finally deciding he couldn’t make every little thing that people needed, but he could make one thing that could magically give a little bit of cheer, even if flowers weren’t normally something that would help them. -- “Oh, snap,” Marceline said. Bae had tried to tell her that magic from other worlds could be different from magic from her world. But how different could magic really be from world to world? Like the four basic elements -- ice, fire, candy and slime -- weren’t those basically universal? “Is it like a curse?” she asked. Marceline played with her hands near her navel. She kinda wanted to hug Ronan, but that also felt like it would be against some sort of code. Not that Marcy could name the code, but she was pretty sure he’d get pissed if she tried. So she fidgeted nervously instead. “Like, do we need to do something?” she said, not liking exactly how helpless she sounded when she said it. As much as she was loathe to admit it, sometimes when it came to magic, she was outclassed. Punching only did so much. Sometimes beating magic required brains or heart. Marcy knew she didn’t always have the brains for it, and sometimes she questioned if she really had the heart, either. --- Ronan snorted, wryly amused. “No, it’s not a curse.” He paused. “Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it.” He lifted one hand and rubbed it over his shaved head. Instinctively, he felt that he could trust her; he had already blurted out part of the secret, after all. And Baelfire trusted her, which said a lot, because Ronan trusted Baelfire’s instincts. He debated internally for a moment, and then finally said, “Listen, if I tell you more about it, you can’t tell anyone. Except Baelfire and Adam and Gansey and Noah, cause they already know.” -- Marceline considered. She wasn’t smart but she’d also been alive for a thousand years and had seen how badly a promise kept could end. “As long as I don’t need to tell someone in order to save you or someone else’s life,” she amended. “Then I promise I won’t tell anyone.” Marceline couldn’t chew on the inside of her lip, her teeth were too sharp, but her lip curled inward as though she wanted to. “I just want you to be okay.” -- “If you need to save me or someone from me, you should tell Adam,” Ronan said, immediately. “Or Opal. One of them will know what to do.” He shrugged. “But I’ve mostly got it under control.” He was really touched by how much this mattered to her, although he wouldn’t ever admit to it. He ran his hand over his buzzed hair one more time, debating, and then finally said, “I take things out of my dreams.” -- Marceline frowned, half worried but half confused. “If you take it out of your dream, what happens to your dreams? Can you still dream about them? It doesn’t gunk up your head or anything?” -- “I can still dream about them,” Ronan said. “I dream… normally, kind of. I mean, I think I do. Just more realistic. They’re still, you know, weird imagery, stuff about my friends, things I’m scared of… it’s just all, you know. It can become real if I make it real. Which is only really a problem if I’m having nightmares.” He hadn’t explained this to anyone in a while. Probably the last person had been Pixie, and she hadn’t asked nearly so many questions. She’d just understood, because her magic could make dreams or nightmares come true too -- just making them come true for other people, while they were awake. “A couple years ago I learned to control my dreams. I still get nightmares, but I can… lean into them. Change them into something else. Or at least still make something in the midst of it, if I want to. Making things is all tied into energy, and there was this one -- other person, that could take stuff out of his dreams, but he took too much, and it took the energy away from other things. This whole forest that I had dreamt up -- manifested, really, it wasn’t all me -- just disappeared. And I was trying to figure out how to dream it up again, but I took too long, and that was when I started getting unmade. Just… black gooey shit coming out of me. And it wouldn’t stop until I dreamed something again.” He had skimmed over an awful lot in the middle there -- Cabeswater had disappeared and then come back when they’d fixed the ley line, but then disappeared again by sacrificing itself for Gansey, and only then had Ronan been working on dreaming it up again. But that was more detail than Marceline needed to understand. -- Marceline felt for the red flower in her hair. She removed it, gave it another smell before replacing it behind her ear. Maybe it should have been pink if it was going to smell like bubblegum, but if it came from a dream it didn’t have to make sense. She just liked it. “Okay,” she said. “Just don’t be an idiot if you need help. I’m pretty powerful and junk. Like if you dreamt up some for real nightmare monster I could probably take it.” She ran her fingers nervously over the edges of her hair. “Just as long as you’re okay. And it doesn’t mess with your head.” --- “I won’t,” Ronan assured her. “I’ve done that enough times already to learn my lesson.” He smiled a little sadly. “I actually really miss my nightmare creatures now. One of them helped me save my brother. But then it got torn up by a demon.” He hadn’t thought about his night horrors in a long time, but this was an appropriate time to think about them, he supposed. It would’ve been handy to have one of them around to scare off the pirates. But also it might have gotten killed and broken Ronan’s heart all over again. “My magic isn’t going to mess with my head. If my head gets messed with some other way, it messes with my magic. But even that, I can usually handle. If I lose my magic…” He took a deep breath. “I’ll still be fine, I mean, physically or whatever, but my dream creatures will go to sleep until I get it back, and I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do about that.” -- “I’m not sure if I entirely understand all that, I’m just gunna hold you to the part about asking for help when you need it.” But the fact that he had nightmare creatures he thought fondly of was in the plus column for Marceline. She’d scared plenty of humans in the past by her appearance alone, but Ronan never seemed bothered by the way she looked. Actually most people on the boat didn’t. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that there were other non-human looking people besides herself to soften them up first. It was actually pretty nice. Well, she did miss out on some premium pranking opportunities if no one was really scared about her giant bat monster look, but Marceline could deal with that. “I like your flowers,” she finally admitted. After a pause she asked, “Why’d you make them smell like bubblegum anyway?” --- “You were worried about how my magic might go wrong,” Ronan said with a shrug. “I was just telling you how it worked.” He didn’t really know why he’d told her so many details. Mainly because things like nightmares or losing his powers or suddenly bleeding black goo tended to happen to him out of the blue, and probably the last thing he needed was for Marceline to be freaking the fuck out about other things - like him losing his memory - if something like that happened. He smirked. “I didn’t make them smell like bubblegum. I made them smell like something comforting for whoever’s smelling them.” He lifted the flower that had been in his hand when he’d woken up, and smelled it. “Mine smells like my house.” -- Marceline’s face suddenly felt about ten degrees too warm. Despite not really breathing as a member of the undead, she happened to come down with a mysterious cough so she could cover her face with her hands. “Uh, cool. Hey, I’m going to go to bed early so I can wake up later and hang out during the day with everyone. I’ll see you around.” Yep. Marceline was real smooth. --- Ronan raised his eyebrows at her. “Uh huh. Okay, weirdo.” She really was very strange, but not in a way that unsettled him. She was unique; he’d never met anyone quite like her. But he liked people who were not quite like anyone else, because he wasn’t quite like anyone else either. “Sweet dreams,” he called after her, just for the irony of it. |