WHO: Sydney Clarke, Blue Sargent & Ronan Lynch WHAT: A sort of intervention, or at least friends harassing sad friend. WHEN: After Thanksgiving! WARNINGS: Alcohol as coping mechanisms, depression, some grief & avoiding grief. STATUS: Complete!
Blue was all for people engaging in their sadness. It was healthy, sometimes you just needed to cry it out. Or throw axes to get the anger of it out. She suspected that the stages of grief weren't just bullshit, but actual measurable levels to get through it. But she also knew that people couldn't do it alone, and after a few turned down social invitations with a small group of people, Blue knew that Syd was definitely trying to go the loner route. Blue allowed it, for a little while; she had even gone through her own. But when Syd didn't show up for Thanksgiving, and refused to engage after a few weeks, all of the determination building in Blue's tiny body refused to quit.
She was not about to let Sydney become a cocoon of sadness forever.
So Friday morning, at a mostly reasonable hour, Blue exchanged a heated, non-verbal conversation over breakfast with Ronan through a series of slight head nods toward Syd's house and intense staring—usually this tended to be the preamble right before they engaged in an antagonistic, but friendly, argument. Blue started grabbing tupperware out of the fridge, shoving it into one of her crocheted bags, and hoisted it over her shoulder.
"Me and Ronan will be right back," she declared loudly, and stomped off out the backdoor and toward Syd's.
She shouldn't have been surprised that the door was open, but she made sure to knock before entering, and then made a lot of noise so Syd didn't think they were breaking in. "Alright, Sydney I'm Giving You a Middle Name Now, and It's Abigail Until You Tell Me Otherwise Clarke! Food's here," Blue hollered into the house. The mostly dark, sad house. Blue was only mildly relieved when Dol came bounding up to greet them.
Blue glanced at Ronan as she started to unpack the containers on the kitchen island. "Rock paper scissors who knocks on the bedroom door?"
Ronan had experienced his fair share of loss over the years, which made him both deeply empathetic and more likely to give someone too much space while they suffered. Adam had only gotten a few hours, but that was the result of marriage. Syd got more room, even if Ronan did watch her closer than he ever would normally would. He might have pushed another week if Blue hadn't made her weird faces at him.
Really it was all the pressure he needed though. He stalked into the house behind Blue with a two liter of cherry coke under one arm and two quarts of ice cream under the other. His scowl probably looked a bit like a cowboy coming in out of the sun and squinting into the interior of a saloon, but he wasn't the cowboy Syd would prefer to be entering the house. Dol at least seemed happy to see them.
Ronan put the soda on the island and the ice cream into the freezer before he crouched down to say hi to Dol with a belly rub. "This shit was your idea," he grumbled. Even still, he stood and made his way towards the bedrooms. "But she does like me more," he joked. Dol tripped him as he said it and he thumped into a wall. "Motherfucker.."
Syd herself was content to stay burritoed in a giant blanket, in the guest room (where she’d been sleeping the last few weeks), TV on and Great British Bake Off playing through all of the episodes for the third time. Thanksgiving had never really been her thing before Vallo, Jesse had changed things, and so had her friends, but this year she couldn’t bring herself to actually go to any of the ones she’d been invited to. There was no part of her that was enthusiastic about everyone being friendly and lovey-dovey in front of her.
So that meant chinese food, cranberry vodka, and Dol cuddles instead. Festive.
“No, I don’t.” She came around the corner just as Ronan fell into the wall, and Dol turned around just to bump into her own legs. To Blue, she raised an eyebrow, “It’s Marion, what the fuck are you doing?” As if it wasn’t obvious. Well, at least they weren’t cleaning the place, even if she was beginning to regret having an array of mostly-empty alcohol bottles stacked across her counters. The urge to recycle would have to come later, it was difficult enough to have the desire to keep up with the dishes.
"Oh good, you're up," Blue said, completely unphased by Syd's clear distaste for having them in her house. Granted, Blue might have had similar annoyances if people came bugging her in the place where she was allowed to be alone. But Syd gave up that right when she kept skipping out on social gatherings, considering she didn't do it before. Blue was determined to nudge Syd in the right direction. Or at least upwards and out of the grief hole.
"We brought you food. Actual food. Food Gansey made that won't be questionable to eat and isn't liquid," Blue said, knocking her knuckle against one of the empty vodka bottles on the counter. It wasn't judgement that Syd was drinking—everyone had their vices, and Blue couldn't exactly blame her for going to something that made her brain fuzzy—but it wasn't sustainable. It wasn't something Blue, or Ronan, or anyone, would let her continue with for long.
"Can you turn on a light, Less Liked by Syd?" That was to Ronan, and accompanied by a sarcastic grin. "I can nuke it in the microwave? What do you want first? And Ronan's here as backup because neither of us are taking no for an answer."
Ronan cheerfully gave them both the finger and flipped a few wall switches on his way to the kitchen. The room flooded with light, so he turned a dimmer to take them back down to a reasonable level. Thankfully, the sight of alcohol bottles wasn't a huge trigger for him. It mostly made him annoyed they hadn't bugged her sooner. He ignored the bottles and pulled a plate down from a cabinet and sat them on the island.
"Just to be clear, I didn't sign up to force feed her." He moved to the drawer with silverware. "But there's a french toast bake in that bag that tastes pretty decent and I will sit here and glare at you until you eat some of it." He dropped down onto a stool at the island and pulled Blue's bag closer to dig through it. "I don't know what else the maggot put in here."
“That pretty much sounds like force feeding,” Syd deadpanned, wincing at the light being turned on, even as it was dimmed. It was really, really tempting to go lay down on the nearby couch and pretend they weren’t there, because Syd knew that her stubbornness could rival their own when she wanted it to. But that sounded like a lot of energy, fighting them off, and she just got annoyed at herself for thinking of it.
So she dropped her cocoon blanket onto Ronan’s shoulder and moved past Blue to start gathering some empty vodka bottles for the recycling bin. Even without much of an appetite, the french toast bake thing sounded good. She just didn’t want to admit it right out of the gate. So instead she scowled as her arms got quickly loaded. “Did you two just show up to guilt me for not coming to the thing?”
"Mashed potatoes, stuffing, turkey, some kind of cheesy thing that I think is still good if you warm up," Blue explained, pointing at the containers as Ronan started to unbag them. "And the French toast bake, which is excellent, but now Gansey put himself on a pedestal, and I expect this every morning."
She almost thought their presence here would do Syd some good—she was already collecting empty bottles to recycle—but as Blue reached bodily across the counter to rip a lid off, she paused at the guilt thing. Blue frowned, exchanged another patented look with Ronan before turning on Syd "Pshaw. If you think for one second that me and Ronan, usually insusceptible to most,if not all guilt tripping, would come over here just to do it for you? No way."
Blue sighed, taking bottles out of Syd's hand and replacing it with one of the containers. "But as your friends, we wanted to make sure you're not disappearing under the weight of everything. If you don't want to come and be social, fine. I get it. Ronan gets it. Everyone else also gets it, because we've been in similar situations before and no one is going to make you feel bad about it," Blue said, her expression soft and empathetic, in an attempt to bridge this gap that had formed between them after Jesse's disappearance.
"But we're not going to allow you to not be social in order to wither away alone."
Ronan raised an eyebrow as the blanket landed on him. It was tempting to shrug it off directly onto the floor, but he knew exactly how messy his living space had gotten when he was in the worst of his depression. He didn’t want to give her anything to pick up off the floor, so he lazily folded it and draped it over the stool next to him.
“What she said,” he nodded at Blue with his chin. “But less words.” His gaze shifted back to Syd. He’d have been annoyed to know he looked visibly concerned despite every effort to tone it down. “You don’t even have to talk at all, if you don’t want. We just…fuck, you know.” He shrugged and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “We love you, shithead. And you need to eat so why not help us clear out the massive amounts of leftovers we have.”
Syd ended up with the container in her hands and the bottles gone, and she wanted to be made about it. She didn’t really have the energy to be mad about it, but she wanted to scowl just cause that was how her heart felt. Her brain felt. Everything felt like a giant scowl.
Somehow that was more exhausting in a way, one of those dumb frowning-takes-more-muscles rules that sounded like bullshit, probably.
“Yeah.” She didn’t know if she was agreeing or just talking to fill the void where she was supposed to speak. Syd did give in and grabbed a fork, though, and put herself down into one of the chairs. “Holidays were never great for me even before this, so, don’t expect a lot, okay?” Jesse made them better, more bearable than the years of being left with a nanny or caregiver while her parents fucked off to aruba. “I just can’t really with the happy couples and whatever.” It was probably a good thing the wedding had happened first so she didn’t look like a complete shithead avoiding that too.
"No one expects anything, promise," Blue said, making an X over her chest. She wasn't going to push Syd into doing things; if she was adamant about them not being inside her house, Blue would have packed up and left. She understood feeling overwhelmed by people and obligations, but she also knew that sometimes it was necessary. Loneliness was not a solution to being alone.
"I can be a mad couple. I'm really good at arguing." Blue sounded pleased, shooting a glance at Ronan, her ultimate argument partners. But they weren't a couple, just halves of ones. "Or if you want to see a fight, get Gansey talking about Republican family dinners in DC." That got Blue less riled up these days, but it was fun to watch Adam's eyebrow twitch with restraint from commenting immediately.
Blue quickly busied herself with dropping the bottles into a bin, or that she hoped was a trash bin. She'd have to come back later and offer to clean. But for now, she leaned on the counter. "Me and Ronan are pretty good company though. And we bring low-key holidays. We'll feed you, not ask questions, and offer to blow up things in your honor." The last part was to Ronan, with an added eyebrow raise. "Right?"
Ronan was self-aware enough to know he fell under "happy couples", even with them dealing with their own loss. It was still a little bit of a mindfuck to realize it though. Under different circumstances, he might've had to fight off a smile about it. But the mood in the room was down enough that it was easy to raise an eyebrow at Blue instead.
"Right. Or you know. We can just shut the fuck up and watch some tv together. Throw spoonfuls of stuffing at your face." He pulled a few bowls out of the bag and squinted at Syd. "You call the shots here. Just let us hang out for a bit, whatever the fuck you can handle. Okay?"
For as ridiculous as Blue was, Syd loved her for it. It even made her huff out a quiet laugh, with the arguing promise. It still hurt her heart a little to know that even Blue and Gansey at their worst (that she’d seen) was something she’d take right now for herself. Minus the curse.
She started stuffing her face with french toast bake instead. It was good, fuck. She didn’t like admitting that part.
Around the mouthful of food, she shrugged and mumbled. “Yeah, alright. You guys can stay. I was just watching feel-good baking competitions and judging them to Dol but he doesn’t give a fuck about proper bread proofing.” And neither did she, really, given she’d never made a loaf of homemade bread in her life. But maybe now it was time to give it a try. “All that’s required is talking shit about people’s skills. It’s easy.”
Despite offering to leave, Blue was glad that Syd didn't take them up on it. She didn't want to admit she had been worried—she would have hated people hovering over her too—but she was. Her attempts to not to fuss were slowly becoming obvious, so she snatched up another container to give herself something to do.
"So what you're saying is you just want to hang out and judge people?" Blue asked, perking up, eager to sit with Syd and maybe absorb some of that sadness off her. It was a small wish, and maybe a little ridiculous, but if Blue could help by watching someone bake in a tent with a British accent, then so be it. She squeezed Syd's arm, just for a second, just to say I'm here, we're here, no matter what.
"I'll have you know," Blue said and she started toward the living room, "that I have no idea what proper bread proofing is, but I'm going to have a lot of opinions about how other people do it."