abraxaslogs | [ OPEN ] pre-event (until...)

It doesn't look unpleasant to Ronan. It looks like a stubborn flower sprouting from the cracks between concrete. He can believe what Kylo's telling him because he can see it written in those features, the unfamiliarity of compliments, even if it's still hard to believe he's the first.

"Lucky me," Ronan purrs with more gravel than usual, on account of Kylo crushing his throat earlier.

This is all very uncharted territory for Kylo, who until very recently hadn't spared much thought at all for his own attractiveness (or otherwise). It doesn't make him uncomfortable, exactly. He quite likes it. But the slight heat rising under his skin at the rumbling purr of Ronan's voice has his fingers curling into a loose grip, digging idle pressure into the mattress he's perched on. He couldn't explain why if asked.

"You," he leans in a fraction to tell Ronan over-firmly, "Are supposed to be sleeping."

Ronan bites back a reflexive yes, daddy. This isn't Gansey or Bryde he's talking to. He just met this guy a few minutes ago. While he's not exactly scared of a punch to the face, he doesn't want to push so far that Kylo rescinds his generous offer.

Instead, he says, "I'll close my eyes if you promise to keep talking."

This time, he laughs. It's short, sharp, and more like the sudden rumbling release of tectonic plates finally dragging past the point of tension than anything else.

"What shall I talk about?" he asks, deciding to indulge Ronan— if only for his persisting audacity. "It might surprise you to learn I don't know any bedtime stories."

Ronan looks wickedly pleased by that laugh. "Tell me why you're always hiding all of that under a helmet." That, of course, being the strange and beautiful face Ronan has the exclusive privilege of looking at right now.

Oh, but he's supposed to be sleeping. He takes in Kylo's features one more time, like he's committing every detail to memory, before he obediently shuts his eyes. A deal's a deal.

Well.

That's his own fault for bringing the helmet into play in the first place. Kylo considers the question thoughtfully, possibly just long enough to have Ronan wondering if he'll back out on the arrangement.

"Sometimes," he says eventually, "people make... assumptions. They see a face and assign it a story. I didn't choose the face or the story I was born to. So I chose a new one to tell my own. My face."

It feels a little hollow, now. Before Ronan can latch on, he adds:

"...And it helps to have a helmet in certain environments. Poisonous atmospheres. Extreme cold. The void of space."

That all sounds like a more personal story than Ronan was anticipating from the subject of helmets. He appreciates the answer, though, considered and delivered so thoughtfully when it would have been just as easy to brush it all aside with the latter excuse.

His eyes are open again before he even realizes it, studying Kylo once more. He could make plenty of assumptions about what he sees there, but something tells him the story Kylo's referring to is more complicated than the one Ronan's inventing.

"So you're famous."

If he could sense the ebb and flow of the Force right now, Kylo would feel Ronan's eyes on him— but he can't, and so he remains unaware. His own gaze has drifted to the idle study of his hands, resting now on his knees. His mouth twists wryly at Ronan's suggestion.

"I am."

He glances over, catching Ronan in the act of disobedience. His lips tug further into the slanted curve.

"Infamous. I don't think you're even trying, Ronan."

Ronan likes the way he says Ronan.

"Maybe you should have knocked me out," he says, holding Kylo's gaze without any shame at having been caught.

But after a moment, he shuts his eyes in another attempt to obey. He should take advantage of this rare opportunity to rest. He doesn't know when he'll get another one. The trouble is, Kylo's company seems like an equally rare opportunity, and Ronan wants to drink in as much of his attention as he can.

And it's holding him together, this distraction. He doesn't know what will happen when he eventually finds himself alone. He won't let himself even turn his thoughts to the possibility.

"I'm infamous, too," he murmurs. "But I don't hide my face."

The look Ronan earns for his trouble with that remark suggests that knocking him out isn't entirely off the table— but also that he's pleased. Which he is. Both by the way Ronan holds his gaze in unapologetic challenge and the way he eventually yields it.

He swallows the defense aching to burst free, deciding that spending too long explaining why wearing his helmet isn't hiding, actually, will likely have the opposite than desired effect. Instead:

"It seems we're all famous here. Doesn't it. I wonder which of your exploits caught our hosts' attention..."

Ronan had been hoping to hear the defense, the justification, as much as of the story as Kylo's willing to tell. The premise sounds like a tale his father would have told, this knight whose geis forbade him from revealing his true face because too much else would be revealed about him along with it.

Turnabout is fair play.

"Are you trying to ask me what I think it was?"

Admittedly interrogation play is a lot less fun without the ability to pull Ronan's secrets right out of his head. Kylo watches him with an amusement that feels very nearly fond— certainly appreciative.

"I'm curious," he admits. "Surely it has to be more than a history of picking fights in the hope that your opponents will knock you unconscious."

Ronan breathes a soft laugh, though his humor evaporates almost instantly as his thoughts turn in the direction of the world he just left behind. The life he just left behind.

...Assuming he left at all. Maybe he's still asleep. Maybe he'll never wake up.

"I was trying to free magic," Ronan says. His eyes are open again, unwilling to stay in the dark, which suddenly feels bottomless. Infinite. "It's been trapped for as long as anyone can remember, tied to ley lines. It was being strangled. I wanted it to be everywhere, so I started destroying everything that got in the way."

Kylo digests that confession for a while, nothing but the sound of their breathing breaking the silence between them. He imagines a world without the heaving tide of the Force flowing through and tugging on everything, a reality where it had been tamed into lines— like trading corridors between planets, or water trained into canals.

Hideous.

"Unnatural," he comments. "If magic is what you call the Force. That's the name we give it, where I am from. The connection between all things. The strain and balance surrounding, penetrating and binding together everything that exists. Anything made to limit it should be destroyed."

Unnatural. In the most literal sense.

"Exactly!" Ronan hisses as he sits up, forgetting the assignment entirely. What a fucking relief to find someone who agrees with him! He'd been starting to worry he'd lost his mind or lost touch with reality or something, because he was the only one — the only one — who felt this way.

"It was so weak I couldn't even feel it most of the time. Whenever I did, it felt like... like coming back to life. Like I was dead before that. But then it'd fade again and I'd go right back to dying. Do you feel the Force all the time?"

This time, Kylo doesn't scold or so much as raise an eyebrow as Ronan starts upright. He watches him instead, recognising the ferocity of his reaction as a very familiar flavour of relief.

Ronan, Kylo suspects, hasn't had a lot of support in his quest.

"Always," he says. Even now, with his connection dulled and muted he can still feel something. "Without it there is no life. The Force is life. Every living thing knows it. Even those who try to deny the truth. They know it. Deep within. They know what they are."

Listening to Kylo describe it makes Ronan ache, the words chiseling away at the wall he so hastily constructed around his heart during the last dream. These are the words he's been waiting to hear. He's been waiting for them for so long that it's hard to trust them now. The stare he fixes on Kylo is more scrutinizing than meditative, searching rather than reflecting.

It's very easy to see how Kylo might be one of his. It feels a little like looking into a funhouse mirror, some details drawn forward and others pushed back. Did his subconscious create a home out of fairytales to replace the one he lost? Did he make a more desirable, more entertaining companion to watch over him? How is he supposed to tell whether this is a fantasy?

Ronan looks away.

"They cut me off from it. Before I got here. They want me to die."

Another pause follows. Kylo doesn't need access to the inner workings of Ronan's heart to recognise the current running through them both, an unexpected commonality.

"They're afraid," he murmurs. "Addicted to their own limitations. If you refuse to accept them, they will do everything in their power to destroy you."

Power, of course, being the key. Kylo's gaze has drifted back to his hands. His fingers curl. Nothing happens.

"You'll see. When the haze lifts. I'll show you why they will always fail."

Ronan hadn't known what to expect from Kylo. He hadn't really expected anything at all, considering the grave his trust had dug for him back home. But these affirmations, after everything that's happened, sound suspiciously like everything he wants to hear. Yes, here is the kinship he'd been searching for. Yes, every word of that is true. Yes, finally, here's someone who knows.

Reluctantly, he turns his gaze back to Kylo. Not fully, but askance, as if looking too closely might reveal something deeper that Ronan can't bear to see. His heart can't take it. He can't let himself fall in love with another one of his dreams.

"I hope that's a promise," he says.

It's possible that everything Kylo says is a promise. He may not have the richness of the Force heavy at his back, but the intensity of every deliberate word suggests commitment. There's a strange, crackling current of energy threaded into the low thrum of his voice. Determined would be one word for it, perhaps, but it's bigger than that. Relentless.

"It freed me," he says. "When they tried to kill me. It can free you, too."

Free is the very opposite of how Ronan feels. They sucked the air from his lungs. They cut off his wings. His fellow dreamer, his own brother, Adam... All of them had conspired to destroy him. After everything he'd done for them. He'd saved all their lives and they repaid him by delivering him to his enemies and leaving him to rot with nightwash. He'd thought he'd been alone when he'd been living a solitary life at the Barns, but even that loneliness can't compare to this.

The only person who believed in him was the one who'd been created by him for that purpose. Everyone else would rather see him dead than see him become powerful. What is it about him that makes it so hard for anyone to believe he can do good?

All at once, Ronan understands what Kylo means.

"I never needed any of them."

Not too long ago, Kylo had reached out his hand and pleaded with another traveler on the same path to recognise exactly this. Exactly. The rush now is the direct inverse of the frustration he'd felt then as she'd refused to listen to him, wild and heady in its unexpected alignment. Ronan gets it. He sees.

"Let it go," he agrees. "Everything. Everything you tried to do, everything you tried to be to satisfy them. They have no answers to give you. No power over you. They never did."

What is this place? What world did he invent now, spun from his father's stories and populated with men like this one, urging him to go on even though he's lost everything? Ronan feels dizzy. He shuts his eyes, touching his fingertips to his temple.

Let it go. He's never let anything go. He's not sure he knows how.

"I need to sleep," he murmurs, though what he means is, I need to dream, and he doesn't know whether that's even possible anymore. But the void inside him is growing, starved and yawning. He has to try, at least, or this thing will devour him just like they all hope it will. Ronan lies back, pressing his hand over his eyes.

"Then sleep," Kylo murmurs.

It will be so much easier, once he can reach out through the Force and push Ronan under. The matter of a moment. Idly, he tries it now— flexing his fingers, attempting to find the flow and strain connecting them to each other— but there's nothing to grasp hold of. Nothing but the low, background hum at the very edges of his awareness, like perceiving shifting levels of light from behind closed eyelids.

He hardly notices how his breathing has slid into synchronicity with Ronan's until he realises Ronan is following him, now, his chest rising and falling at a steadily, smoothly slowing pace.

Kylo knows the dark. If Ronan will let him, Kylo will guide him into it just like this. One breath at a time.

[ OPEN ] pre-event (until...)

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