Ronan Lynch (alteridem) wrote in valloic, @ 2021-01-19 08:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, the raven cycle: blue sargent, the raven cycle: ronan lynch, ~plot: sgvallo |
Snowglobe Vallo Log: Blue & Ronan
But today he reached out for his boyfriend and found nothing but cold sheets under his searching hand. He pried one eye open. Then the other.
The room wasn’t just missing an Adam. It was missing the dim dreamt lights that hid in various corners of the room. It was missing furniture and parts of the walls. It smelled musty. Abandoned. There was dust and grime on every surface.
Ronan’s breath caught in his chest, solid as a block of ice. He could tell he wasn’t dreaming, unfortunately. That didn’t stop him from trying to set it right - as he always did now when dreams went the way of nightmares.
“Put it back the way it’s supposed to be,” he said.
The room remained unchanged.
“Put it the fuck back.”
The only thing that moved was the creepy clock in the corner a ten year old Declan had bought him. It was a stupid looking cat with big eyes and it’s tail flicked back and forth. The noise was jarring in so much silence.
Ronan leapt out of bed, tripping over discarded items on the floor.
“Adam?” His shout echoed out through the house and he realized the door was busted, dangling open on one hinge. He haphazardly pulled on clothes and shoes and rushed out into the hall, calling out a houseful of names in a suddenly hoarse voice.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.
The house was in shambles, like an apocalypse had snuck in while he wasn’t looking.
Had he done this somehow? Had he made this all real? He leaned against a hallway wall and tried not to let fear overwhelm him. He didn’t have time to puke.
Ronan stumbled further down the hall. “Goddamn it, is anyone here?!”
Blue was having a similarly bad morning. She had worked the late shift at Nino's, and after Richie's strange and quite frankly unnerving premonition in the booth by the window, she was struggling to settle down for the night. It helped that Gansey was an insomniac who continued to stay awake far after she had claimed sleep, burrowed next to him on the bed—a change from his late night stalking around the house.
But naturally she woke up cold and alone and to Ronan's shout across the house. The bed that she had shared with Gansey was stripped bare, a long gash down the center of the mattress had Blue slowly sitting up terrified. It was not how she wanted to wake up, with fear clutching her chest.
The rest of the room came into view, in similar disrepair. Broken walls, dirty floors, and a smashed window letting in eerie half-light. Even worse was the way an unnatural murk was trickling in, leaving a dense layer at her feet.
Broken down, abandoned, creepy fog. Richie's vision was happening now.
Blue, in nothing but her pajamas and her combat boots, threw open the door, scrambling into the hall and nearly taking out Ronan in the process. Her wide eyes stared up at him, concerned and frantic. She worried if he was going to be sick, and how much she was not ready to catch him if he randomly passed out.
Grabbing his biceps, Blue squeeze-shook him. "Do not throw up on me, Ronan! I need you to be clear headed, so whatever blame you're probably placing on yourself right now is not helping this situation." That's what Gansey or Adam would say, right? Blue lacked their finesse, but she had an excuse—weird apocalyptic worlds could do that to a person.
“Blue, thank fuck.” Ronan did not appreciate being shook at this moment, but he was too relieved to see her to bark at her for it. Everything still felt very wrong though. In his bones, in his blood. It felt like a distant cousin to the demon unmaking him from the inside out. Something about the magic of the farm was deeply wrong.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he added belatedly, even as he hooked an arm around her head and briefly hugged her. Wind howled through a window downstairs. Ronan clenched his teeth. “Any sign of anybody else? Hear anything? See anything?”
"Don't tell me what to do," Blue chirped back, but it was affectionate, filled with relief. It was telling that she wasn't Sargent or Maggot in this instance, but Blue. She clung fiercely to Ronan, even as brief and harried as the hug felt. No time to stand around comforting one another, there were things to do. People to find. If Ronan was here, that meant Gansey had to be too. This meant Richie's vision was incomplete, right?
Blue shook her head fast, but still shot a glance back to the door to her room. As if Gansey would appear out of the empty space. "No," she confirmed. "Not yet. But that doesn't mean anything. They could be somewhere else, maybe not even the house. Maybe outside. We could try the network—" Ugh, she sounded hopeful, and they would need that now.
When she looked up (and up) at Ronan, her face fell. Blue wasn't a psychic, but she had been around enough to know that something sixth-sense-y was happening. "Hey," Blue said, in a softer voice than she used before with Ronan. "What is it? Aside from the obvious?"
Even though he’d predicted her answer, it still left a bitter taste in Ronan’s mouth. Gansey wouldn’t have wandered off in this. Adam would’ve woken Ronan first. This was bad and it was getting worse by the second. He grabbed Blue’s hand and dragged her back down the hall towards Matthew’s room. He had to see it empty for himself.
“I don’t know. It’s like...I know what my farm feels like, the magic here, and it’s fucking off. It’s corrupted or some shit, I don’t know. But look around us!” He gestured at the cracked walls. “Everything is off. We have to make sure no one’s here and then...fuck. See if it’s just the Barns.”
Blue squeezed his hand, feeling strangely secure hooked together with the dreamer. Even if he was frantic and frustrated, which somehow made Blue feel more unmoored (how could the vision be worse?), she was thankful for Ronan. She was thankful for the reminder that she wasn't alone.
"I'm looking, I see it. I'm just trying not to freak out because that doesn't help anyone and I am really bad at comforting people in bad situations!" Blue snapped, but there was worry in her voice. Her plans had been to meet at Morningside with Richie, but Ronan wasn't supposed to be part of the equation. The Barns were supposed to be intact, untouched. So seeing it in disarray hit Blue in a different way than it did Ronan, but it didn't mean she was unaffected.
When they opened the door to Matthew's room and found it in the same abandoned disorder, Blue was watching Ronan's face. It was a long time before she said, "It's not just the Barns. I know it's not." Blue stepped past Ronan into Matthew's room but went straight for the window.
"Ronan," Blue said, ushering him over to look. The fog was covering everything: a barn was completely destroyed and left in ruin; the grass mottled brown and yellow with decay; and further back on the property, a dark spot of dying trees.
“Let’s just save the comforting for when we know what the fuck we’re dealing with,” Ronan snapped right back. It almost had a little heat - although it wasn’t really aimed at Blue at all - and he frowned immediately after like he regretted it. Not that he’d admit as much. Stepping into Matthew’s room stole away the urge to speak at all anyway.
The sharp sting in his gut was growing, spreading up behind his ribs. He had to force himself to take the few steps over to the window.
Cabeswater looked like a hulking shadow of death. v“Fuck.” He knocked his fist against the wall and then ran both hands up over his face and head. “Okay. Fuck, so...” His hands dropped away. “This is the thing you said Richie saw. Parrish was all twisted up in knots yesterday too. Tell me again. Tell me everything you saw,” he demanded.
This was bad. Extremely bad. Whatever she told Ronan, Blue inherently knew that the real questions didn't have answers: how do we fix it? How do we get home? She forced herself to look away from the window.
"I only boosted him," Blue said, trying to recall the events that led to her sitting across from him in the booth at Nino's, staring into a bowl of soda. Had that really been only yesterday? "And he did his whole version of scrying and when he came out I made him write down everything," Blue said, a little defensive. This wasn't her first time gathering vision intel, but her brain was so rattled by it happening now, that she wished she had taken that paper from Richie.
Blue started counting off on her fingers. "Everything was run down. Uh, check. He said the city looked familiar and we figured out the building he could make out was Morningside. So, check? There was the creepy fog—" Blue gestured out the window. "Extra check. And then he said he saw me there. We planned to meet at Morningside because we thought it would be just us."
She looked visibly upset now. Like it was her fault somehow for not better preparing people. "That's all I remember. Maybe we could—" Blue was interrupted by a loud crash, sort of like a window shattering somewhere downstairs. She grabbed Ronan’s arm, instinctively. Not scared, not scared, she was not scared.
Ronan made a face at her correction - a you know what I meant face - but didn’t say anything out loud. He was too busy listening and piecing together things in his head. And wishing the psychic closest to his heart was here to help straighten out this mess.
He didn’t realize he was grinding his teeth until the crash reverberated through the house and Blue stiffened beside him. He instinctively moved between her and the door and lowered his voice to a whisper.
“He only saw you two? What about monsters?” More sounds of scuffling and cracking wood sounded from below. Ronan darted forward and shut the bedroom door as quietly as he could. “Fuck, shit, okay. We’ll have to go out the window. Matthew’s room at least has the overhang from the first floor, we can slide down and it’s less of a drop.”
"I asked him about the weird fog, but not monsters. But you usually don't have one without the other, right?" Blue said, in the most indoor voice she could muster. For a brief terrible moment she didn't even want Ronan going to close the door, but she knew that it was the best solution given the unknown entity crashing around downstairs.
Even as Ronan explained what they needed to do—sneak out the window, slide down off the roof—Blue's face scrunched up in worry. She mumbled something along the lines of maybe a less of a drop for you, as her attention darted around Matthew's room. It was empty and torn apart, but the multi-sport-playing sunshine boy definitely had something stashed somewhere. Blue was quick to yank a baseball bat from under his bed. They needed a weapon that wasn't just relying on Ronan to box it.
She went for the window, and panicked briefly when it didn't slide easily open. There was no good way to be quiet, but Blue tried. The window betrayed her, squealing and scratching along the track. The crashing stopped but Blue didn't. She was out the window in record time but she didn’t get far. v"Ronan, c'mon," Blue demanded. She needed him. They had to get through this together. "I'm not going to leave you behind!"
The sound the window made pulled a grimace out of Ronan and he moved to better guard her if something decided to crash through the door. It didn’t happen, but it was only a matter of time because something - several somethings from the sound of it - was clambering up the stairs. They were narrow stairs and there were rooms in-between the top and Matthew’s door, so he could only hope it would slow them down.
“Go, go, go,” he hissed. It was unnecessary really because Blue was a brave little shit and she was already out the window as the words hit the air. He crawled out after her, slipping on the damp shingles of the overhang. It was frigid out here. He wished he’d grabbed a jacket but it was too late.
“Here, I’ll lower you down,” he said, grabbing her by a forearm as he adjusted his perch to be more stable. Something heavy and snarling bashed against Matthew’s bedroom door. “Time to put some hustle into it, maggot!”
Being so short, being low to the ground made Blue excellent for balance and stability. But all that went out the window—literally and figuratively—when she was rushing down the roof of the Barns. They just had to make it to the ground and break for the waypoint. Neither of them had keys for the cars. Ugh, hindsight.
She let out a small yelp hearing something slam its large body against Matthew's door, and almost did the same ice-skating slide across the shingles as Ronan. Her only saving grace was the counterbalance the baseball bat gave her.
"I'm hustling! Don't rush me or we're both going over and breaking ankles and—" Why was she fighting him on this? She tucked the bat into her pajama pants, which were tucked into her combat boots creating a long, makeshift pocket and swung herself around, back to the edge. Blue began her descent, still clinging to Ronan.
"Don't drop me," Blue said, but it wasn't unkind. It was full of legitimate terror. For him, for her, for everyone they left behind. But she was feeling the soft give of the damp earth and grass beneath her boots before she couldn even overthink it. "If you even think about jumping—" Blue heard another skitter across the hardwood inside. "Do it fast."
For some reason, this whole ridiculous situation reminded Ronan of the cave and how desperately he’d held onto her to keep Gansey from tumbling even further down into the pit. How scared he’d been. How angry that Cabeswater wasn’t protecting the people so close to his heart.
His grip on her was just as tight now, but he was stronger too. Older, wiser.
Okay, older at least.
He exhaled in a rush as her feet touched down and he could twist himself around to hang from the edge. There was a crash from the room and Ronan spotted something with big teeth and bigger claws through the window before he let go.
Glass shattered above them.
“Shit, run. Run,” he ordered, nudging Blue in the direction of the waypoint. If it wasn’t working, they’d have to make a run for the road and they’d be exposed as shit, but there weren’t a lot of options here. On the plus side, Ronan spotted his axe sticking out of its usual stump on the side of the house. He jerked it out as they ran by.
“At least some things haven’t changed. Let’s hope Morningside is more of the same.”