WHAT: Ronan shows up in Fitz' dream to tell him to maybe stop dreaming so loudly. WHERE: Fitz' Dreamscape WHEN: Last night WARNINGS: Nah, I can't think of any STATUS: Complete NOTES: If anyone wants to have had a weird stress dream about climbing along an ominous cliff last night, feel free!
Under his feet, the chasm yawned, empty and eternal. He took a breath, too shallow, but the best he could manage, and shifted his hand over, his foot. A cascade of scree fell under his foot, disappearing into the grey mist far below.
Fitz froze, hands frozen and cramped, and then released the breath he’d been holding as his foothold held. He sucked in another, and took another step. He could see the solid ground before him, could see the safety, but no matter how far he spidered across the mountain face, it never seemed to get closer.
His muscles ached, and sweat streamed down his back, he knew he could not stop. To stop would be certain death. The mountain would crumble from under him, or he’d spend all his strength clinging to the mountain and wouldn’t have enough left to get him to safety. And so, he continued inching across, step by treacherous step, hold by unstable hold.
Ronan wasn't generally a dream sneak. He valued his privacy so he valued other people's privacy. But with his grown powers and the full reach of Vallo's ley magic, he felt the pull of unprotected dream magic like a tugged cord down a long corridor. It wasn't calling to him but it wasn't not calling to him either. It was foreign as much as it was familiar. And it made him too fucking curious to ignore it.
Folding himself into Fitz's dream was easy enough. Possibly too easy. The guy really needed to protect himself better than this.
His dreamscape seemed to be toying with him. Ronan walked carefully along the edge of the cliffside above Fitz for a moment, inspecting the scene, before he crouched and raised his voice. "Hey man, what's your deal? You've practically got a neon sign outside this place but you look like you're in a fight with your subconscious and your subconscious is a dick."
“I’m sorry?” Fitz asked. He understood that the man had been speaking words, but none of the words made much sense to him. He didn’t know what a neon sign was, but he was able ot puzzle out subconscious after only a moment’s thought.
The man must have been a Skill user and a powerful one at that, for him to have entered into Fitz’s dream so easily when they’d never met and had no sort of connection. For him to have gotten passed Fitz’s walls – except no. Fitz hadn’t put up any walls before he’d gone to sleep. He hadn’t thought there was anyone else with the Skill in this world that he’d found himself in. But if he’d been brought here through a Skill pillar, then it only made sense that others had been brought here the same way.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, but this time it was an apology and not a question. “I’ve been told that I dream loudly. I hadn’t thought it was necessary to put up my walls. Did I disturb your sleep?”
And then, because staying still was just as dangerous as it had been before the man had shown up, dream or no, he began his slow, painstaking shuffle again.
Ronan’s curiosity increased. The guy didn’t seem bothered having someone traipse into his dream. And yet he was still struggling along. Maybe he wasn’t a dreamer. But then he was aware he was dreaming and that said a lot. Ronan reached out in his mind and shaped the dream, only slightly at first, giving Fitz a wide ledge to stand on and calming the winds that buffeted the cliffside.
“You know you’re dreaming, but you’re just going along with it like this? Can you control any of this?” He hopped down without warning, landing smoother than he would’ve in life. He could sprout wings and fly away if he wanted. In the dreamspace, there was next to nothing Ronan couldn’t do. “Fuck, right, listen, I don’t usually do this. Fucking barge in. Dream is going to give me shit for it.” Leaning haphazardly over the edge of the ledge, he whistled at the chasm below. “I’m Ronan by the way.”
Fitz let out a breath and tentatively trusted his weight to the ledge that had formed beneath him. He surreptitiously shook out his cramping fingers. “No, I don’t seem to have any Skill at manipulating my dreams, though sometimes I can sometimes enter into other peoples. My Skill is… erratic sometimes, though.” He wondered immediately if he should have shared so much, and then wondered what it mattered: if Ronan was here in his dream, that meant that he already knew Fitz had the Skill, he would have it himself, and it would not take him long to realize that Fitz’ Skill, though better since his healing by the coterie, wasn’t something he always had a lot of control over.
“I’m Tom. If anyone tries to give you a hard time about this, you can tell them it was my fault; I attest to that much.. Is Dream your Skillmaster?”
"My skillmaster?" Ronan huffed, part laugh and part scoff. "Nah, man. I'm my own man. They call me the Greywaren at home." So far, that title hadn't meant anything to anyone here and he doubted it ever would. But it was a badge he liked to keep. What he was and where he'd come from hadn't had any other names. There hadn't been words to give them any.
"Dream is the Lord of Dreams though so he knows pretty much everything happening to people who are asleep." He gave a little wave out at the sky, at nothing in particular, as if to say hi to Morpheus wherever he was at the moment. With that done, he turned his attention back to Fitz and nodded towards the cliff. "Do you want me to clean this up or do you need to keep struggling along to feel better about yourself? Nightmares are the fucking pits. Rather hear about this Skill business."
Fitz stared uneasily up at the sky, as though Dream might suddenly appear there. He knew he downtimes projected his dreams, but his dreams were his own. There were too many secrets in dreams, and the idea of there being a mean out there, the so-called Lord of Dreams, made his nerves prickle. He kept it from his expression, however, and resolved to strengthen his walls from now on.
"I'm not especially attached to this landscape," he said. "And struggling along has never been very good at making me feel better about anything." Rest and quiet, those years spent alone in his cabin with Hap, hunting alongside Nighteyes, those were the years that had helped everything.
"Cool. Didn't want you to be all why are you fucking with my dream so much, get the fuck out. I mean, you can still say that, but you know." Ronan shrugged and gave the space around them his full focus. He didn't need to do anything really, just think. But sometimes he liked to touch the ground or the objects he was shaping, to feel them form in his hands. He pressed a hand against the cliffside and willed the world around them to shape into the Barns.
A cow mooed in the distance, followed by a half dozen other cows answering it. Ronan's house sat quietly across the way. All the details were there, as real as life. As peaceful too.
"So you've got a 'skill' and it's not dream manipulation. But you can dreamwalk." He dropped down onto the stairs of his porch and kicked his feet out in a relaxed sprawl. "Are you a witch? Do you cast spells and stuff?"
"You've more courtesy than my daughter then," Fitz said, and immediately wondered if it has been wise to mention Nettle. Well, Fitz was almost entirely sure that she wasn't in this universe anyway – he'd tried, those first few days, to reach anyone he could with the Skill: Dutiful, Thick, Chade, Nettle, with no results – so perhaps it didn't matter.
He let himself smile at the scene that unfolded in front of him though. It was peaceful, and while the architecture of the house itself was unfamiliar, the bucolic setting was not. He settled down on the steps beside Ronan, stretching his legs out in front of him and took a moment to enjoy the breeze and the lolling of the cows.
"No, not a witch," Fitz said. "And no spells or anything like that. The Skill is…" he paused. The magic of the royal line of the Farseers, was more than he wanted to say; even if he followed it up with the addendum that plenty of people without Farseers blood had it, it would lead to too many questions. "It's a magic from home that a small portion of the population is born with. It's a magic of the mind, I suppose you might say. Users of the Skill can communicate over long distances, mind-to-mind, with the Skill. There's a variety of ways to use it though. The Skill can be used to heal by encouraging the body to speed the healing process. And some Skill users can use it to manipulate others' dreams though. My daughter is strong in that ability. But I didn't even know that was possible until she started visiting my dreams. There's a lot of the Skill that has been lost to time and greed; I'm sure I don't know a fraction of what it could be used for. I discovered its healing properties entirely by accident, for instance, and still don't know enough about it to be entirely comfortable with it. But you say you don't have the Skill? How does your magic work, then?"
“Sounds like it could be badass,” Ronan said, genuinely impressed. Every bit of magic he bumped into in Vallo was always interesting and fascinating, even if he wasn’t a nerdy researcher type like Gansey. He’d have to tell his best friend about this one though. “Maybe you’ll figure out more shit you can do while you’re here. In Vallo I mean. It took me too long to figure out what I could do.”
There were a lot of personal and traumatic reasons for that, but Ronan wasn’t the oversharing type. It was enough “growth” that he was still sitting here, sharing his ability to give Fitz somewhere calm to rest after the stress of his cliffside dream. Even now he contemplated how much to say. He wasn’t particularly secret about it all anymore, but Fitz was still new to him. And anybody with mind powers was someone to be careful with, anyway. He settled for the general truth, without elaboration.
“I can bring things out of my dreams into the real world. As for how it works, it just does. I need ley line energy or a pool of magic to pull from to do it, though. When magic gets cut off here for one reason or another, I’m basically screwed.” In more ways than one, but Ronan didn’t admit that much.
“That’s a powerful magic to have,” Fitz said, frowning. The Skill had plenty of uses, not all of which he’d shared with Ronan: Skill Commands could make people do as you told them to, and sometimes they were next to impossible to reverse, even when you wanted to. Skill Hazes could confuse the minds of the people you targeted: King-in-Waiting Verity had used the power to confound Red Ship captains during the Red Ship wars to sail headlong into rocks or squalls, thinking the water clear and the skies blue. But bringing one’s dreams to life, that was like nothing Fitz had ever heard of. “Can you pull people from the Dreams too? Say a sweetheart? Or me; could you have me appear in the waking world wherever it is you are now?”
Ronan wasn't sure he liked this line of questioning, but he'd started this and he wasn't too cowardly to answer with the truth. "I can yeah. Pull people from my dreams, that is. If I pulled you or anyone else I was dreaming about, I would make a copy. A fully living person, but not actually you. You know what I mean?"
It was one of Ronan's biggest fears, really. He'd already dreamt several people into being, one while convincing himself he hadn't dreamt him at all. The thought that he might lose control again and pull his husband or his best friend from a dream was a nightmare that would follow him all his life.
"I've got better control than that though, so don't worry. No fucking clones," Ronan promised.
Fitz wondered if any summoned clones would have his memories and his secrets, and decided that he wouldn’t ask. Tom Badgerlock was a simple man, a man with no hidden past. A man who had been born to simple folk, had worked as a soldier for a time before retiring to raise his foster son in the relative seclusion of their homestead, and had taken up work again as a bodyguard and then a queen’s guard when it had come time to pay for his son’s apprenticeship.
A simple man who could Skill.
Well, he supposed that he preferred the idea that Ronan would pull out a copy of himself rather than the real-deal either way. Fitz didn’t like the idea of anyone having that much power over him. And if a clone of himself ever showed up, he supposed he could just kill it. Wouldn’t that be metaphorical.
“I won’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure you know your powers best.” He leaned back and closed his eyes to the breeze. “What are some of your favourite things to do with your magic?”
"Dreaming animals," Ronan answered, with no hesitation. It was one of the things that gave him the most joy and made him feel like his ability was putting something beautiful into the world after years of dreaming nightmares into being. "And making light, really." He had a quiet obsession with dreaming light.
Probably from being born into a shapeless darkness.
"What's yours?" He crossed his arms over his raised knees and squinted one-eyed at Fitz. "Your favorite thing to do that is."
Fitz thought for a long moment, head tilted to the sky so he could feel the dreamed sun on his face; it felt as real as the cliff under his hands had felt p. "The Skill isn't something you should enjoy too much," he said after a long moment. "It's easy to become lost in it, lost enough that you'll never return. But… but there's a sense of connectedness. Sometimes, it's nice to just sit, to see how all things in the world are connected and where I fit into that web of networks. To see how I belong, to see that I belong."
That was the Wit, not the Skill: being connected in the Wit let you find your place in the world, let you see where you fit among the complicated network that held together the grass and the ants below and the trees and the birds above. Being too connected to the Skill meant being swept away in the Skill Current, becoming one with the thoughts and feelings of every other person and losing all of yourself in the process.
Ronan wouldn't know the difference though; Fitz wasn't betraying the fact that he was Witted. People in his own world likely wouldn't have recognized the difference between the two in the way that Fitz had described. He hadn't spoken of what had truly been his favourite part of any of his magics: his connection with Nighteyes. The wolf wasn't here, not in this world, not a comforting presence in his mind, always there when he needed him. But the rest of his Wit kept him grounded.
Ronan smirked and watched the cows mill around in their pasture. "Sounds like some hippie shit," he joked. "You probably don't know what that is though." Explaining a joke made it not funny anyway. And he could understand what Fitz was talking about, even if his first instinct was to tease him.
"But I get it. There was a time when I was sort of uh…disconnected from my body or whatever. And I moved around through magic objects. I couldn't remember what it was to be a person. I just kept getting drawn to the people I loved like a magnet." He shrugged. "It didn't feel all that bad at the time. Isolated but I couldn't remember anything ever being different at first. Took a lot to pull me back. And this." He held up his arm, the one covered in green scale tattoos from shoulder to wrist. In the dream, it hummed with magical energy, because it was its own ley magic source.
“I do not,” Fitz confirmed, but he smiled all the same. He doubted it was complimentary, but he also doubted that Ronan was being insulting, either. The Fool had teased Fitz mercilessly sometimes, jests that would seem cruel and insulting to anyone else, and to Fitz they’d always seemed a kindness.
“Isolation can be very comforting at times,” he said, and he understood too what comfort there could be found in being disconnected from ones body. It was part of what made the Skill so tempting.
He didn’t reach to touch the scaled arm, though he wanted to, if only to see if it was flesh or if it truly was scaled. He’d met someone, a young man, a boy, really, who represented the Bingtown Traders who’d been covered in scale. He’d been touched by dragons, the Fool had told him. “You got that when they were able to bring you back?” he asked. “Is it real? I mean, does it look like this in the waking world, too?”
"It's what brought me back. A friend tattooed it on me and the magic gave me a link back to my body." Ronan left it at that, even if there had been more to it. This guy he'd just met didn't need to hear about how he had to choose to live, to be something both human and not, before the magic was enough to wake him. And anyway, he'd been here a while.
He glanced back towards the door of the house on instinct. Adam wasn't inside the house here in the dream, but it was enough of a visual pull to make him stand up.
"But no," he finally answered. "It's got a little more oomph here. This is kind of like its home. Dreams." He shrugged and rubbed a hand over his shaved head. "Look, I should probably go. If my husband gets the psychic vibe that I'm off wandering around in dreamland, he's gonna worry and shit. Probably come looking."
Husband startled Fitz, but he didn’t let it show on his face. There was a lot about this world that was different from his own. The fact that a man could apparently marry another was hardly the least of it. He’d do better not to dwell on it.
“I won’t keep you,” Fitz said. “Thanks for helping me back there. I’ll make sure to throw up my walls once you’re gone.” He leaned back on the patio, and felt himself smiling at the cows in the distance. “I think I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind.”
"Be my guest. It's your head." Ronan hopped to his feet and brushed his hands off unnecessarily on his pants. "Should be quiet. But if you hear something farting but don't see anything, I'd head inside," he smirked cryptically. Gasoline was a minivan-sized boar with lethal gas and could disappear in a cloud of stinky smoke or appear in one if that appealed to him. Ronan could have chosen not to put him in this dream version of the Barns, but he'd been more focused on making sure he didn't make copies of his loved ones here in a stranger's head.
"Catch you later," he said, disappearing himself - without any stinky smoke. Who said he wasn't considerate?