WHAT: Ronan dreamwalks to tell his husband Gansey is here again, and the corrupted thing wearing Adam's face is angry. (i.e. Ronan's very long day continues.) WHERE: Cabeswater dreamspace WHEN: Sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, 2033 WARNINGS: Some violence STATUS: Complete
Ronan knew this wasn't the best idea. It was certainly the worst fucking timing after the day he'd had. And it could very well be setting their whole plan up for failure. But Adam was psychic and corrupted. He'd know Gansey was here on his own soon enough. So what if Ronan selfishly reached out to tell him with the foolish hope that it might reach inside that dark heart and bring his husband back to the surface for even a moment?
So what. He nearly kicked himself for that thought. But it was too late. The dream was forming around him with his mental shields down. He'd spent the last few years building them up even stronger than they'd been back in the days he kept the Lace out. Unfortunately, with his energy running low and Nora to protect, he was risking sleep less and less to spare all the power it took to keep Adam out of two dreamer's minds.
He was so fucking exhausted. Even with a new sweetmetal tattoo to keep him upright - tiny, but fresh - Ronan was weary down to his bones. It made falling asleep feel almost too good. He had to bite the inside of his cheek, hard, to keep himself focused.
Cabeswater grew up around him, familiar and awful all at once. The inky darkness reached for him, calling to him. He ignored it.
"Come out already, Parrish," Ronan called out angrily. "I know you know I'm here. I can feel you lurking."
Adam was lurking. He was always at the edges of Ronan's dreamscape attempting to get in. It was pathetic existence, the kind that Adam Lynch would have hated for himself. He despised pity, he wanted nothing more than to turn away from anything resembling remorse or obligated compassion. But this Adam didn't care. He feasted on sorrow, he filled himself with misery, and he survived off his fury at being trapped like a caged animal. He was nothing, if not his unwavering anger and his withering resolve at recognizing the people he loved as anything but his enemy.
Years inside of Cabeswater as his prison made Adam more feral, more quick to lash out. And so the moment the forest grew dark and foreboding into the mind of his husband, Adam had been there, prowling at the edges waiting for the right moment to come to him. He would take an invitation, though.
Spacial logic never applied in dreams, and certainly not why Adam was scrying—continually, constantly, biding his time—and so at come out Adam was a pair of eyes in the darkness of the trees, then suddenly behind Ronan, arm around him, hand to his throat. This was not a sensual embrace of two lovers but one of a predator catching prey.
"You came," Adam whispered, devilishly pleased, with his mouth pressed against Ronan's ear. His voice sounded unreal, otherworldly with the same guttural depth that Cabeswater would speak Latin. But it was all sorts of wrong coming from Adam. "You've been keeping me out for so long. A change of plans? A change of heart?"
There was no way to be prepared for Adam in this state, no matter how many lies Ronan told himself. His emotions warred with each other - the joy of hearing Adam's voice after so long without, the horror of hearing it sound so menacing, the thrill of Adam's mouth at his ear, the agony of knowing this Adam would sooner bite off his ear than whisper sweet nothings into it.
Ronan stayed rigid in Adam's grip. He might need to fight here, but it wouldn't be a physical thing. He was still the Greywaren even if he was using precious magic for this foolish choice.
"My plans are all still the fucking same. My heart too." Between one word and the next, he was suddenly ten feet away, facing the corruption wearing his soulmate's body. "How's your jail cell treating you?" He should just get to the fucking point, but Ronan missed Adam so much that he was already being stupid about this.
Adam's expression went from cruelly handsome to furiously displeased when Ronan slipped from his grasp. He may have been able to tear into Ronan's dreamspace, but Adam would always be a second-fiddle visitor to the Greywaren. He could play the threads of Cabeswater's magic interwoven in his whole being, but Ronan was the thread itself. That was why he was stuck here.
"You're mocking me," Adam said, flat, with his ghastly stare. His eyes grew dark and hungry as the shadows of the forest stretched around him. It was the embodiment of his fury and leaking corruption from inside of him.
"How's my jail cell? How's my jail cell?" His voice grew louder, more hostile, as every muscle in his body tensed, hands white-knuckling the air, twitching to pluck at invisible strings. Even in the dreamspace the ozone was clear, sharp, the tell-tale sign of magic that Adam was attempting to pull free. But now the air reeked of old rot.
"This is the prison you put me in!" He lunged at him then, all vicious determination, but Adam came to an abrupt halt, a foot from Ronan's face. Cabeswater had warped and wrapped around his limbs, holding Adam back, holding him down.
"Quare huc venisti, Greywaren?" Adam asked in a fast, harsh whisper, surveying Ronan with his nightwash-colored eyes. Adam was straining against the branch-like restraints to crowd as much as he could into Ronan's space but he never getting any closer.
It was a good thing Cabeswater's corruption wasn't the same as a demonic kind. The forest had a will of its own still and it wanted its Magician and its Greywaren alive. This was the only reason the deal had worked at all. But even knowing that, Ronan couldn't entirely hide his wince. This pain - seeing the love of his life driven mad and hating him - might have been an old "friend" by now, but that didn't make it hurt any less.
"I put you here to save you, shithead," Ronan spit back, risking moving closer into that small space between him and Adam. "But I know you can't hear that. Not like this." He watched the vines slither and shift across Adam's chest and neck. It took every ounce of willpower not to reach for them, to pull them away. Stop hurting him, he thought. The vines slackened, their Greywaren's influence subtle but instinctive. Ronan corrected his thoughts immediately and the vines strengthened their hold.
"I want to believe you're still in there, Adam. I…I need to fucking believe it." His teeth ground together and he turned his head away. Adam's eyes were haunting. "Gansey needs to believe it."
He let that sentence hang in the air for a second. "He's here. From the past. Can you feel him?"
Knowing he wouldn't get closer, even with the understated way Ronan lost control of the vines because of emotions, Adam stopped straining and allowed the vines to pull him back. A few dozen feet away and he was less of a threat. That was until he started pacing, prowling around the edges of the clearing that had been so neatly structured for them in the dreamspace. Adam circled Ronan, fury in every step, oozing decay left behind in every footprint.
"I wanted you to say it," Adam bit out, whispers of his voice echoing out from the trees say it, say it, say it. "Did you believe I couldn't feel him? Feel the other piece of me—" That sounded like Cabeswater, rough and jarring, struggling against Adam's own vocal chords. "The moment he arrived. But you tricked me into this prison, the person you loved." Adam was nasty as he said it, as if he was attempting to truly stab Ronan with the words physically, rather than emotionally.
His head jerked unnaturally to one side, then the other, in frenetic movements. But his eyes, his nightmare eyes, never stopped staring at Ronan. "But how do I know this is not another trick? How can I ever trust you again?"
He held out his hand, scared and ruined, broken and healed incorrectly, from Adam's attempts at escaping the reality of Cabeswater, and not a dreamspace. "You could bring him here," Adam said, deceptively hopeful with an edge of vileness. "Show him the havoc and the torture you have caused me."
Every word felt like razor blades scraping off all of Ronan's supposed thick-skin. He'd always been softer than he pretended to be and marrying Adam and starting a family together had been the nail in the coffin for any claim at being a hardass. Now his heart was as big as it was devastated.
"I don't expect you to trust me any more than I trust you. I just…fuck, I don't know why I'm here." The trees whispered his deepest thoughts: I missed you, I miss you, I love you. Ronan glared at the swaying black forest around them and then clasped his hands behind his head, trying to breathe in deep and lock Cabeswater back out of his subconscious. "I'm an idiot but I'm not stupid enough to bring him here. I thought, maybe, Gansey being around might give you back a piece of your soul. Something to pull you back into yourself. A fucking…tether, whatever."
Cabeswater didn't like that, apparently. At the word 'tether', vines began to slither towards Ronan menacingly. He crushed one under a boot and the other four shrieked and withdrew. Greywaren, the ground hissed, both a threat and a subservient prayer.
Adam should have been affected by the words I miss you and I love you. Maybe somewhere, deep inside of his cold contaminated heart, he missed and loved Ronan too. But there was nothing that seemed to penetrate his stony exterior. If anything, it seemed to antagonize Adam more. No one, not even Adam, could have predicted that his bond to the forest would ruin him, would ruin them.
"You show the other me a kindness, a desire, as if we're different, but we are the same person," Adam snarled, at the same time Cabeswater reached for Ronan. The dark vines were like an extension of Adam, and he grabbed for Ronan in the same impulse to tether. But Cabeswater snapped up his wrist and held it back, a war between help and harm.
Adam didn't fight back, but left his arm held aloft with the twisting pulsing vines biting into his thin skin. The veins in his arm seemed to grow black, corruption evident. Shadows coalesced at their feet, and Adam growled.
"If you won't bring him here, and you aren't going to let me out, then leave, leave!" Adam shouted, his mouth curling to bear his vicious teeth. He was vibrating with his fury, an unnerving look for someone who always, desperately, kept his anger in check to not become a ghost of his past.
“Don’t act like you aren’t fucking different. You’re poisoned by this shit—” Ronan gestured at the nightmare forest around them. “--You’re not stupid.” He was almost glad even though there was enough of Adam’s baseline personality to be a tricky asshole, there was also enough corruption to make him too impatient to be truly terrifying. It seemed like it was getting worse though. The shouting was enough to pull Ronan out of his naïve hope, at least for the moment. He clenched his jaw and breathed through his nose.
“Fine, I’m going. Just…fucking eat something. You look like a cadaver.” He looked like Adam had as an abused teenager, only worse. Gaunt and ferocious. Cabeswater was keeping him alive but at the price of all his humanity, it seemed. Ronan turned away, readying himself to wake up without bringing any of this horrible place back with him. It would take more of his fading power and battered concentration then he cared to admit.
The request seemed to set Adam off more than anything else did before. The care, the concern for the person he had become, when Ronan still left him locked inside the boundaries of his own making. Adam yelled, something miserable and incomprehensible, all savagery and wrath of the thing he was now.
Where Cabeswater could have held him back, could have kept him from doing harm to Ronan, a surge of power, otherworldly and unexpectedly, raged through him. Adam was ripping free of his branch-like manacles, and surging into Ronan. Pinning him between one of the blackened trees and the weight of Adam's own body against his back, Adam's fingers splayed across Ronan's skull, fingers digging in like a vice. He wrenched Ronan's head back with one arm, so that Adam was peering over him, twisting him into a painful backbend.
His cruel gaze turned deliciously wicked, an unnatural abrupt calm settled in his shoulders. Adam smiled, like he knew he had won—not just this minute or this day, but something else more important and devastating. Adam had been testing the limits of Ronan this whole time, and his expression said he was satisfied with the results.
He licked a sinful line from Ronan's throat to his ear. Into it, Adam whispered, "Tell Nora dad says hi," before slamming Ronan forward with unexpected strength, face first, into the tree and out of the dream.
Ronan hadn’t considered himself complacent coming here, but he was clearly unprepared. Adam had never been able to break free of Cabeswater’s hold before now. Everything happened too fast and suddenly Ronan was pinned and hearing words that would likely haunt him forever. Worse, he was ejected from the dream with a shock of pain that he carried into the real world. When his usual dream paralysis gave way, he rolled over, gasping, blood pouring from his broken nose. His vision spun in torturous circles.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he hissed. "Well that sucked ass." This was bad. This was so bad. He pressed a hand to his face and pushed to his feet. He’d come out to his old dream barn for this, with its depressing silence and darkness. Nora was with Sargent and Gansey, not here by his side. He was both glad for that and upset that he couldn’t simply get up and hug his kid immediately. His heart was an anxious drumbeat as he grabbed his backpack and sword holster and headed for the door. It was dark now, but there was no way he could wait here for the sun to come up. He needed to be with Nora.