[ OPEN ] break the earth with your tiny head.

[nightwash]

WHO: Ronan Lynch & whoever
WHAT: A catch-all for the month!
WHERE: Castle Thorne
WHEN: Throughout March

Comments

closed to yennefer;

[nightwash]

Ronan has done his very best to ignore it. It's not like he gives a shit about Yennefer. She's proven to be a huge pain in the ass and he's reasonably sure she wants to get him out of the way so she can have his man all to herself. Her business is her business and Ronan's business is Ronan's business and they only ever overlap where Kylo is concerned.

But he's noticed. He can't help but notice. He can't believe no one else has noticed, or if they have, they haven't done anything about it, because it's still going on. Why the hell are they letting it go on? Around the castle, okay, fine. But at the Summit? Where the other factions could easily see what he's seeing and figure out they've lost one of their most powerful assets?

He can't keep being quiet about it. If no one else is going to say it, he's going to have to.

When he finally finds her skulking about the halls (intentionally avoiding contact with anyone, he's pretty sure), his long legs carry him to her faster than she can escape. "Hey," he says when he catches up to her, cutting straight to the chase. "What the fuck happened to your magic?"

[vixening]

Yennefer is tired. She feels a bit as though she's been tired for months. Between the dreams she had, the subsequent conversations, and then the summit that followed soon after, she has been on the move and tense for weeks. Months, even. But it has also kept her distracted, just as well - she hasn't been kept up to date on the happenings in the castle, doesn't know what it is Kylo and Ronan have been keeping to. She sees them both at the summit, but beyond that, there has been very little interaction.

Part of her had thought about going to Kylo, when she first woke up from that dream. Part of her had wondered if maybe, just maybe, he would have known a way to help her. Another part wasn't sure if staying in the castle at all would be safe. It was why she hid away, why she fell ill, why she had been considering other options at all.

She'd been careful at the Summit, but had known that she couldn't stay behind. Falling ill and staying back from responsibilities at the castle were one thing, but when the Queen herself was making an appearance at the event in the name of peace? She wouldn't risk it. ( Nevermind her own questions, nevermind what had opened to her there, that she did not end up taking. )

It is strange, to be back in the castle and to realize that hiding, in the way she had before, would draw more attention than not. And with the amount of people she had approaching her at the Summit who were all from Thorne, she couldn't continue that way. It's why Ronan can find her at all, though he's not wrong in assuming that she is avoiding contact at the moment, heading back to her room to rest from the work of keeping up appearances.

That is where she is, when he catches up to her. When he accosts her in one of the more secluded hallways and cuts right to the chase, the sharp edge of her tone slipping right between her ribs. Her eyes widen momentarily, out of panic and something a bit more feral, before she hisses back to him.

"What the fuck, Ronan?" Her eyes quickly dart off in each direction of the hall, making sure they're alone, before she turns back to him - anger flaring. "Nothing." Not her finest performance, but the suddenness of his approach coupled with everything from the Summit has her feeling a bit unsteady. "What's wrong with you?"

[nightwash]

Ronan levels a flat look at her. "Don't do that," he says, keeping a low voice only for the benefit of her privacy. "I'm not some brain-dead noble. You can't just 'oh, nothing' me."

He pauses to look over his shoulder, fully aware that this isn't something she wants to advertise. It's why he waited to be sure they wouldn't be overheard, and they're alone still, which ought to reassure her. When he looks back at her, his features are even less patient than before.

"I can't help you if you won't tell me what happened."

[vixening]

Her nostrils flair in anger if only because there is something to be angry with. Ronan's flat look and impatient eyes push in on her, backing her further and further into this corner, and the panic of it doesn't quite settle.

But then he does look over his shoulder, does doublecheck the same halls she had. They are alone, or as alone as they can be in this castle, in any castle at all. But she has as much faith in this being safe as she did back on the streets of Oxenfurt.

"I don't need your help." She cuts back sharply, because she doesn't. She doesn't need Ronan's help, she doesn't need anyone's. Maybe that is where she went wrong. Turning to someone, reaching for help. As if that has ever worked for her before.

Except that's not entirely the truth, is it? Yennefer hesitates, for just a moment, before something in her starts to shift subtly. "It can't be helped." Is what comes out, softer and a bit like an open wound. An almost concession.

[nightwash]

After almost a year of dealing with Hennessy's bullshit, Ronan's grown accustomed to this. The panic masked as indignation. The proud refusal of assistance. He understands, too, how terrifying the prospect of hope can be. It's so much easier to call something impossible from the start than to strive for it and fail. He knows that terror personally.

So he's not dissuaded. Ronan holds a steady gaze on Yennefer, ignoring her first protest altogether before lifting an eyebrow at the second one.

"Try me."

open to all; bad moon rising

[nightwash]

Ronan could tell something was wrong the moment he woke from the dream.

He'd awoken paralyzed, as usual, which meant he'd brought something back with him. Observing his body from the outside, however, he couldn't immediately tell what it was he'd manifested. His frozen body had looked wrong to him, but that was typical of the waking dreamer, that lifelessness. The dream always takes everything from the dreamer. It's an amputation of the soul, cutting out a piece to create something new from it.

And this dream... This dream took a very big piece of him.

He hadn't realized it at the time, but it also took a very big piece from something else: the Singularity. Ronan's body lay there for over an hour, faded and funereal, and this was wrong because the ambient magic of Thorne was ordinarily so thick in the air that he'd be restored from even the most complicated dreams within minutes. But there was nothing there to nourish the dreamer, and the astral Ronan watched in helpless panic, wondering if that body's heart had stopped beating altogether.

It hadn't. Some agonizing amount of time later, he'd regained the use of his limbs and finally sat up, searching for his dream.

Now, hours later, he still hasn't found it. There's nothing worse than knowing he manifested something enormous without knowing where it went or what it even is. It wouldn't be the first time a dream has appeared some distance away from his body, but it's definitely the first time he's failed to find it. Something powerful enough to have taken a gigantic gulp out of all the magic in Castle Thorne. What the hell could it be?

Drifting through the corridors, trying to investigate without arousing suspicion, his body is still shaky and weak enough that he has to stop now and then to brace himself against the wall. He feels like he's not getting enough air. It's not air he's lacking, though. He knows. He'd tried to create magic out of magic and now he's cannibalized himself. If the Singularity doesn't restore itself soon...

[harmonian]

Sasarai had been asleep.

In his dreams he'd been walking through an empty desert when a chasm suddenly yawned open beneath him. Sand flowed into the blackness of the pit and Sasarai was caught in the tide of earth, struggling uselessly until he was pitched backward into nothingness. The shock of the dream woke him up in a cold sweat and he felt the True Earth Rune humming into the back of his mind.

In its ancient, wordless voice it told him that something had tugged on its power during the night.

Sasarai groans, climbs out of bed, dresses himself and heads out into the hallways of Castle Thorne. Mages rush past, talking in hushed whispers. Someone mentions having accidentally doused a candle they'd been trying to light.

He drifts down the hallways and stops when he feels the True Earth Rune coil inside him and walking ahead of him is Ronan.

"Ronan!"

[nightwash]

Ronan winces at the sound of Sasarai's voice. He's well-practiced at hearing a scolding in the pronunciation of his name, and Sasarai reminds him of his stringent older brother even on the best of days. He doesn't need this right now.

"I'm busy," he calls back without turning or slowing his pace — which is already too slow for the evasive maneuvers he'd prefer to be taking.

[harmonian]

"Stop!"

His voice is sharp and commanding, the same tone he uses to order his troops on the battlefield. He doesn't expect Ronan to obey, but he hopes the boy at least senses he's serious.

"The Rune woke me up. Something tried to grip its power... That was you, wasn't it?"

[nightwash]

Ronan stops. Not because Sasarai commands it, but because the accusation is one that's better confronted now than later. Right now, he's fairly certain he's the first one Sasarai's mentioning this to, which means it's a problem that can still be contained.

With a sigh, his shoulders sag and he shoves his hands into the pockets of his robe, looking a bit like a sheepish child caught stealing from the cookie jar. He turns around slowly, lips pursed and head cocked just slightly to the right.

"What makes you say that?" he asks.

open to all; nightwash

[nightwash]

It takes almost a full week for the nightwash to appear. Previously, he might have regarded that as some kind of miracle. Before he was summoned to Abraxas, death had always been just hours away, and the only thing that could delay his impending doom by a few more hours was dreaming or ley energy. But for over nine months in Thorne, he's been able to live a normal life. He's been able to forget the feeling of wasting away, the desperate hunger, the quiet terror.

Now it's caught up with him.

The first time it slips, he's in the dining hall. A drop of inky liquid blackens his stew. He freezes when he sees it, watching it contaminate the food that was failing to satisfy him anyway, his stomach turning with dread. Within seconds, the nightwash is flowing from him like a bad nosebleed, spilling over his mouth and down his chin.

It comes and goes after that, severity rising and falling with the fluctuations of the Singularity. When magic is surging, he's temporarily cured. When it dips again, his starvation returns — and the nightwash with it.

People start to notice it immediately. It's impossible to ignore, after all. When he's walking down the corridor and the black starts to spill from his ears or from his eyes, the courtiers stare and scuttle away from him, whispering to each other about a curse, it must be a curse. When he's in the training yard and he doubles over retching on the toxic stuff, the guards order him away and tell him not to return until he's recovered. When he's in the library, searching frantically for answers in the mages' books, they're snatched away from him after his black tears stain the pages.

As the week progresses, he can't pretend to keep living his life. He's confined to his dormitory because he can't walk, can't see, can barely breathe around the fluid bubbling up from his lungs. The sheets of his bed are stained with it, a black so dark all light seems to disappear into it. The moment it's wiped away, more of it spills out of him. It's a horrible, grotesque sight to behold.

The nightwash is eating him away from the inside out.

training yard.

[londonbound]

Rhy drops his training sword to catch him. He's careless, tossing it aside with a clatter, his knee hitting the stone hard enough to prompt a reflexive wince-- but he can see Ronan crumpling, and he won't let him hit the ground.

The guards' rough demeanor is not appreciated.

"Leave us," Rhy snaps, as though he has any power here. "I'll take care of him."

[nightwash]

Ronan snarls, "I don't need—" But whatever he was going to say next is lost in another round of gagging. He can feel the nightwash coming up his throat like bile, and he whips his head away from Rhy to spit as much of it as he can onto the dirt.

He gets his throat clear enough to drag in several deep breaths and then he straightens his back, refusing to let Rhy carry him around like an invalid. His legs still work.

"Don't fucking worry," he calls to the guards, who keep gawking at him and his black-stained mouth. "You won't catch it."

[londonbound]

Rhy's hand settles comfortingly on his back, waiting for him to finish before helping to pull Ronan up to his feet once he makes the attempt. He won't insist on making Ronan lean against him if he doesn't seem like he'll double up again or go weak-kneed, but he stays close regardless, within arm's reach as much as he can.

Hiding the panic he feels while Ronan moves away from the black substance he coughed up, Rhy doesn't bother adding anything aloud to the asshole guards, but the cold anger in his eyes makes an attempt to freeze them in place with disdain alone. He leaves them to clean up and follows Ronan back inside, struggling to keep from reaching out for him again until they have a bit of privacy.

"Ronan," he calls when they reach an empty hallway, soft but urgent. Rhy touches his shoulder. "Wait. Look at me. What happened back there? Are you sick?"

[nightwash]

Ronan despises the worry in Rhy's eyes when he meets them. For so long, he's been able to pretend this isn't happening, and they only just got to be together again, and now he has to explain this shit. It's going to be like it was with Adam all over again.

"Not sick," he mutters, tasting nightwash on his tongue. He swallows it down and wipes furiously at his mouth with the back of his hand.

He might as well get it over with while he can still talk.

"It happens when I don't dream. I stop being. You know, use it or lose it. I'm rotting."

dormitory

[impressionism]

"This is fucking fucked."

It's been a long week of slowly watching Ronan die while being utterly unable to stop it, which means that Hennessy's vocabulary has become a steady stream of curses when she deigns to speak to anyone at all. It's also been a week since she's gotten more than twenty minutes of sleep at a time, so her coping skills -- as much as she's ever had any -- are compromised.

She's mostly been avoiding their room like the coward she knows herself to be when it comes to anyone's death but her own. She's seen herself die; she knows how that goes. But this -- this sense of utter powerlessness is worse than even the fact that she's going to lose one of the few people she's let mean anything at all to her again, and that's what's kept her away more than anything else. But she keeps finding herself back here, because not so long ago she'd been the one dying, and he hadn't let her.

She doesn't have to let him die alone. So she's here, pausing in her pacing around the room to flop on the end of his bed and inform him of just how fucked this whole entire situation is.

[nightwash]

When Ronan opens his mouth to speak, his words gurgle out between wet gasps of air, "What... the fuck... are you... shitting yourself... ov—?"

He loses the last word to a violent cough, nightwash spurting up from his throat and past his lips like a horrible little volcanic eruption. He throws his face to the side, hacking up several more mouthfuls of ooze before he manages to suck in a real breath of air.

"Jesus fuck," he hisses, wiping his mouth in vain. There's really no point. Everything around him is soaked in black, but it's all he can do to preserve some dignity, trying not to lie here drooling on himself.

[impressionism]

"What do you think? Asshole."

She grumbles resentfully, refusing to look at him. It's a little late for I told you so, but she's been radiating the general sentiment at him for days now. Dying like this is the worst thing he could've done to her, worse than stabbing her through the heart with VEXED TO NIGHTMARE, which she'd always fully expected him to do one day in retaliation for what she'd done.

But this way -- this way forces him to watch the end that waits for her if she intended on living very long after him. She doesn't, but that's beside the point.

"I always knew you'd die helping someone who didn't deserve it. Kinda thought it'd be me, though."

dorm; cw for body fluids, emeto, talkin' bout dead stuff, the whole 9 yards

[homeostatic]

McCoy really only knows of Ronan by reputation, by sight, pointed out to him by the mages who seem to be slightly in awe of the man. Quiet, pale but handsome, with a thoughtful face he vaguely remembers first seeing under a full moon, on a battlefield he earned a title for and promptly discarded.

They don't travel in the same circles, even in a place as relatively small as Thorne so, what glimpses he has of the other man are always brief. McCoy doesn't know anything is wrong until well after his own magic troubles have started, but soon he can't ignore the smell in the dormitories, the telltale stink of sour putrefaction slipping under his own door. To say it's alarming would be putting it lightly-- the few courtiers he questions look uncomfortable and simply scurry away, but one he nearly collars like a misbehaving pup finally points out Ronan's room.

It's horrible to see another person like this, left to suffer, to sink slowly in the sticky wash of fetid black ichor. Bones sweeps in with the sweet scent of Georgia spring and gapes for just a second, automatically breathing through his mouth so his stomach doesn't churn into useless knots from the smell. He's handled a fair few corpses in his lifetime, in various states of decay; doesn't like it but needs must when the Devil drives, and for a moment he honestly thinks he's got to do it again, steeling himself for the inevitable when he draws nearer to Ronan's bedside.

Except he's breathing.

"My god, kid." Ronan's probably, what, close enough in age to him, but the phrase falls from his mouth like a bad habit. A look of pure venom gets flung over his shoulder, like he could sling it back at everyone who's walked past the man's room and done fuckall for him, before he turns back to swipe black away from his mouth with a handkerchief.

"Ronan, I'm a doctor; Doctor McCoy. I'm gonna roll you onto your side here, and try to make it easier for you to breathe."

Useless reaction goes followed by useful action, a second's hesitation before he commits to getting his hands dirty: literally, pulling back soiled bed linens and moving to maneuver Ronan into the recovery position.

[nightwash]

Ronan makes an impatient sound, as if Bones is troubling him more than helping, but he doesn't fight the maneuvering. He doesn't exactly have the strength to.

Once he's on his side, though, breathing does become a little easier. He coughs a couple times, splattering a fresh spray of black across his pillow, before dragging in an unobstructed breath of air.

"Doctor," he utters scornfully, although Bones isn't the real cause of his bitterness. "Don't bother. It's terminal."

[homeostatic]

He pauses, just to take that in with a slow sigh-- damn --and folds the handkerchief inside out, wiping the black liquid off Ronan's face with firm but gentle swipes.

"Well, I still can't let you waste away in your own fluids, you deserve better than that. I'm gonna try to tidy you up here in a minute."

"Hey!" he barks back at the courtier who, miraculously, stuck around outside Ronan's door, hovering with an air of uncertainty. "Congrats, I need a gofer and you're it."

Bones ticks off a number of things for the young man to fetch for him, while the kid nervously eyes the black smears on the doctor's hands and Ronan's huddled form behind him. Soon enough, the courtier races off after barely closing the door behind him, and Bones places a hand on Ronan's upper arm.

"This'll feel a little strange, but it'll get you cleaned up." It takes him a sec to demonstrate what he means, the seconds ticking while he tries reaching for the spell he's after, then a second and third time. Then it drops, like a sudden plunge into cleansing water, radiating outward from McCoy's warm touch, leaving Ronan, his clothing, his bed, everything around them, actually, as clean and fresh as a daisy.

near the end of the month.

[londonbound]

When Ronan's condition got worse, Rhy was told he had to stay away. He'd tried to argue, but Ronan has always been so adamant as to the danger he poses to Rhy, specifically; the same reason they can help each other is the reason that he can hurt Rhy more than anyone else can, or so Ronan believes, and thus there's nothing to be done. Rhy waits.

Anxiously, checking in with Kylo when he can't talk to Ronan, trusting everything is being done to help him as much as possible. It is all he can do. Wait.

Eventually, happily, it's over. Rhy doesn't understand the full scope of how bad it was; he doesn't need to. He was plenty worried already.

When Ronan is finally ready to see him, Rhy is there, slipping into the room to look for him, wide-eyed and restless.

"Ronan? How are you feeling?"

[nightwash]

It's like night and day, the difference between this Ronan and the Ronan who was suffering from nightwash just a short while ago. People don't ordinarily recover from a life-threatening illness in the blink of an eye, but apparently he has, because he looks bright and fresh when Rhy walks into the room. There's no trace of the nightwash on or around him, and although he's lounging in bed, he sits up so quickly that it almost looks like he's about to launch himself out of it.

"I'm fucking fantastic," he answers without a hint of irony. "I could fight fifty men. I could conquer Europe. You can get close to me now. I won't eat you."

[londonbound]

The worry melts from Rhy the instant he sees Ronan, falling from his shoulders with all its weight, revealing a bright, plainly relieved smile. He practically bounces to the bed, planting one knee on the edge immediately to lean over and kiss Ronan on the mouth. It's brief, warm and affectionate but not distracting. Just happy.

"Oh, thank fuck. You had me worried, you absolute clod."

Sitting more comfortably on the edge of the bed, Rhy tugs him closer into an embrace. One-armed. There's a little parcel held off to the side in his other hand, for now, tied up with a glossy red ribbon.

"You can fight as many men as you want, as long as you make time for me."

[nightwash]

"It's a deal," Ronan says, looping his arms around Rhy's waist to keep him close. "Win-win."

Rhy may not have been trying to be distracting, but Ronan is all too eager to be distracted by him anyway. He nibbles affectionately at Rhy's ear before stealing another kiss from him. Even with so many other worries to preoccupy him, he's missed Rhy terribly. It's a relief to be with him again, holding him like this. It's exactly the kind of comfort he needed earlier, but it had been too dangerous for him to seek it then.

As he breaks the kiss, Ronan notices the parcel and cocks his head to peer at it with exaggerated interest. "Is that for me?" he asks, genuinely surprised. Gifts are rare for Ronan. Few people ever see the point in giving them to him.