everyone leaves [dated to 10/29/2015]

[thedreamthief]

By the time Ronan goes looking, he realizes he has no idea how long Adam has actually been gone. Maybe only hours, maybe a day or two. Maybe nearly a week.

After Noah's visit the other night, Ronan had made a decision. And, as necessary a decision as it is, Ronan is being an absolute coward in going through with it. Still, after three days of successful avoidance and not so much as a text from Parrish, Ronan starts to wonder.

He tries the sporting goods store first where he learns Adam hasn't been in since his last shift, which was days ago. The garage gives him the same news: no sign of Adam since Sunday.

Adam Parrish doesn't skip work. Ever.

Gut twisted in knots, Ronan swung by Adam's apartment, then his own. He tried Gansey's and Blue's (no answer), then Noah's (also no answer). He tried the fucking factory they haven't even moved into yet, the cat cafe, the park and the beach. He's called Parrish's phone at least three dozen times and Gansey's almost as many until Gansey had finally replied to say he hadn't seen or heard anything in days either, the carefully concealed worry only making Ronan's own spike white-hot.

Ronan slams on the brakes, tires squealing.

The realization is a punch to the gut, nearly knocking Ronan to his knees before turning into white hot flame as he does a U-turn in the middle of the road, heading toward the first place he can think to find Kavinsky.

He jumps out of the Pig when he gets there, nearly bangs down the door to the warehouse with his bare hands, rage and fear and desperation vibrating off his skin.

"Kavinsky! Kavinsky, you fucking cuntrag. I'm gonna kill you, I swear to God. I'm gonna fucking cut your head off and stick it on a goddamn pole."

Comments

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky wanted to mention Parrish again. He wanted to pry it apart, pick at the wound, make it keep bleeding. He wanted to know what he does that made dusty Adam Parrish think he had any right to act the leash holder for Ronan Lynch on any occasion than Dick Gansey handing it over to him.

More than that, he wanted to give Ronan back a piece but something more of their weekend together. There was no fucked Camaro, no horror to dispose of, no dreamed of movie theater in Kavinsky's house to get shitfaced in while he admired the lines of Ronan's face and took an illicit picture while he was passed out drunk. All there was was them.

He snatched at Ronan's fingers like a bear trap, still vibrating from the assault, still vibrating from Ronan's own mixed emotions. He stepped in toward him.

"They'll never understand it anyway," he said, pained and soft. Nonspecific if he meant the dreams or the demons or needing to get fucked up in some way to manage it. He still had Ronan's hand in his possession. "You gonna join me? You liked it last time."

[thedreamthief]

Kavinsky grabs Ronan's fingers in a tight grip, but doesn't push. And doesn't pull.

Ronan stays exactly where he is, gaze dropping to the dangerous curve of Kavinsky's lips. There's something in Kavinsky's tone, something raw and uncharacteristically broken that catches Ronan's attention. It's too easy to recognize, too easy to understand.

Maybe that's always been the issue here, the reason Ronan finds himself so drawn. They understand each other in a way nobody else ever could.

"I was desperate last time," Ronan says because that feels true. He knows about the Pig, can imagine how anxious he might have been then to get it fixed before Gansey and Adam returned from DC. Kavinsky's probably lying, he almost always is, but Ronan knows there's a possibility that, even desperate, Ronan had liked it. This churning, uncontrollable power in his veins is maddening. He's tired of being scared to sleep, tired of waking up panicked, tired of the fucking things that shred him to pieces when he's not careful.

So maybe he's still desperate after all.

Ronan lowers his hand, dragging his fingers down Kavinsky's chest and stomach as he does so, pulling his fingers back just shy of Kavinsky's waistband, but still keeping close. His eyes drop again and then back up to meet Kavinsky's.

"Show me."

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky wanted to correct him, wanted to point out that there was a time between the last time and the last time, wanted to fill in all the details and pot holes in Ronan's memories that nobody else could until the pavement was black and smooth as silk, as ice, wanted to remind Ronan that there was a difference between their dreaming weekend and the slick moment they'd had in the office, and their agreement under beer and duress in the dream place.

Ronan's fingers felt as much like the thorns of the dream place as the actual thorns felt like fingers. They could tear him apart. Kavinsky's jaw clenched for a moment. He looked toward the ceiling again, putting a word up to a God he no longer believed in and had stopped believing in a long time ago. Ronan Lynch was something like the serpent, where normally that was Kavinsky. He didn't know how he felt about all that.

When he looked back down, Ronan was just looking up. Their eyes met and locked.

Kavinsky affected his best casual, flippant smile. Unlike Ronan's burning fingers leaving his skin just below his navel, Kavinsky reached out and hooked a finger into the waistband of his jeans to drag him the half step closer until they were nearly touching. The cigarette smoldered and smoked between them.

"Come up to my office."

[thedreamthief]

A tug and Ronan's pulled in, close enough to nearly take the cigarette smoke straight from Kavinsky's mouth. The scent of it is still sweet and rich and Ronan breathes it in before he nods.

He remember Kavinsky's "office" from the substance party, remembers the tab Kavinsky had fed him, and the subsequent high. He remembers feeling it all night, every sensation heightened for hours, remembers finding Adam, going back to the apartment on his bike, remembers the hard linoleum of the kitchen floor beneath his knees and the weight of Adam's dick in his mouth.

That hadn't been the last time, but nearly. And Ronan remembers it all.

He doesn't push Kavinsky's hand away, but he does turn to head back toward the stairs, buzzing exhilaration thrumming through his veins as he takes one step at a time. At the top, he glances back, catching Kavinsky's hungry eyes again, imagines he can hear Gansey's voice of warning in his head, imagines it going quiet.

Ronan's made his choice.

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky was a lingering wraith, half a step behind Ronan. Not out of lack of resolve or confidence, but there was a certain dubiousness in the situation. They had an agreement, made in the dream place and sealed however briefly with the trees to watch that promise made, that Ronan would give him time to teach him. But Ronan's urgency, here, now was a dangerous thing. It was a thing not unlike what had made the Kavinsky pater familias or Prokopenko, an urgency of desperation in the face of terrifying lose.

Ronan Lynch didn't want to be here; he was here because he had nowhere else to go. Kavinsky wasn't a balm, an oasis, some harbor in the tumult of torturous creativity that they were; he was a splinter that had to be suffered because it was too deep to be excised.

If all he got was to chew Ronan up and spit him back out, he would make the most of it.

At the top of the stairs, he slung a casual arm over Ronan's shoulders, dragging him toward the door to the office.

[thedreamthief]

Ronan's tempted to shrug Kavinsky off him, as disgusted by the mock display of friendship as he is excited by the touch. Kavinsky's arm is heavy, his skin bare, and he smells like cloves and booze and musk.

Nothing like Adam, and nothing like Gansey.

He lets himself be dragged into the familiar room, pulling away only once their inside, but keeping his eyes locked on Kavinsky. Nothing here has really changed since the last time except for a scattering of new dream things, none of them the strange half-formed concoctions of Ronan's own dreams.

"This where the magic happens?" he asks, lips curled in a sneer as he crosses his arms over his chest.

[mitsubishievo]

"Well I haven't got the Evo," Kavinsky said, letting Ronan pull away though he wanted to call his bluff, point out his lingering gaze. He wanted to pin him like a insect in a shadow box. Instead, he stubbed out the cigarette, now nearly to the filter at any rate, on the underside of the desk. He dropped the dead butt into a small trash can and hopped up onto the desk, where he'd been laying when Ronan had come around.

From behind the desk, he pulled the box with the designer drugs. He rifled in it for a moment, pulling out the dwindling supply of the green and red pills from Henrietta. While he'd managed to pull the things he needed for an approximate cocktail of the green pill, he hadn't tried for the red one. It was a something he'd dreamed up himself, something that had no equivalency except from dreaming. And every time he tried here, it came out wrong.

So it was a damn good thing they weren't dreaming a fucking car out on a time frame.

"You gonna stay awhile, or you got somewhere to be?" He pulled out the cocaine as well, but that was for him. Even vibrating with this strange loss of his, Kavinsky didn't think Ronan would take up on an offer for it.

[thedreamthief]

He eyes each box, the one filled with a scattering of red and green pills and the other, smaller one, full of what Ronan can only assume is cocaine. Kavinsky doesn't offer Ronan anything from either one, but he has a feeling it's only a matter of time. He'd been all too eager with the acid tab before.

Kavinsky's question is a shard in Ronan's belly, a reminder that no, Ronan has nowhere else to be. Nowhere else that needs him. He's felt separated from his friends for months and now one of them is gone entirely.

He shoves it down though, lets it twist in his gut as he drops his arms and steps forward. "You wanted a week, right? You've got a week."

Reaching out, he takes a single red pill, brow furrowed as he looks at it more closely. He has no idea what kind of drug it is, whether it's real or a dream thing, whether that even matters. Glancing at Kavinsky again, he says, "Or is this not a good time?"

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky took back the red pill, gentle like he was dealing with a child, and clucked his tongue. His fingers had a memory of Ronan's tongue around them as he pressed a red pill against them, the brief moment of tongue and teeth and lips and the thought of all that other places than his fingers. It sliced through him again now. But he had time now.

He hooked a finger into Ronan's belt loop when he was close enough and drew him across the remaining space. "As good a time as any. Might even be better than our little weekend. You aren't up shit creek and haven't got head trauma from a car accident. Though I don't look quite so gallant, having not just saved your sorry ass from your nightmare."

He could feel the thrum of the dream place. He wondered if it went along with Ronan's heartbeat, or someone else's, or with something else entirely.

[thedreamthief]

Ronan can't help wondering how much of that is true. He hadn't come into Darrow with a head injury, hadn't brought in the terror that had been clinging to the roof of the Pig. But it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that he'd been injured back home. He doesn't know every detail, but he's heard enough from Adam and Gansey to paint a very vague, very muddled picture.

And now Kavinsky is filling in some of the missing pieces, little by little.

"Gallant, right," Ronan remarks with a silent snort, nearly rolling his eyes. He glances down at the pill, now between Kavinsky's fingers. "Don't fucking start with the ABCs on this shit. I'm not a fucking toddler. Just show me what I'm missing."

[mitsubishievo]

"You don't want this one."

Kavinsky set the red pill aside, back among its scant brethren, and then pulled out a green pill instead. He held it up to the meager light. It glinted, more green than it ought to have been, obviously a dream thing, obviously from home.

"Think of what you want. Think of every part of it. Don't let it come to you--go in there and pick it the fuck up."

He turned the green pill toward Ronan, tapped it against his lower lip. "You might want to sit down. Dreaming on your feet takes a few tries."

[thedreamthief]

Frowning, Ronan watches Kavinsky set the red pill aside and pull out a green one. It glints in the light, overly bright in a way that definitely isn't natural.

He considers Kavinsky's words and knows, instinctively, that he can't try for the first thing that comes to mind. Nor the second. At worst his desires are intangible, inconcrete things - at worst they're nothing he has the right to want much less make real.

In truth, Ronan's never much wanted for material things, a side effect of being able to create fucked up versions of almost anything he could ever imagine. He doesn't get attached to things in the way Gansey does, doesn't ache for the shit he doesn't have like Adam.

Eyeing the pill, Ronan takes a step toward the desk and rests against the edge of it, feet still on the ground as he reaches for the pill. "This some fucked up sleeping pill then?" he asks, glancing up at Kavinsky.

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky watched the gears turn in Ronan's head, could practically hear them grind. He wondered what sort of thing Ronan would choose to bring out, given the order of know what you want. Ronan was an impulsive thing; Kavinsky didn't know if Ronan knew what he wanted, half the damn time. That was a lesson for another day, maybe.

"It's a dreaming pill, for things like us," he said simply. "Gives you all the benefits with none of the messy side effects. REM cycle in 2-point-5, in and out."

Kavinsky handed over the pill, though he longed to feed it to Ronan. With Ronan resting on the desk and the pill handed over, he moved away, picking up the dime bag of cocaine. Two lines, and maybe he'd be able to drown out the noise in his head a little bit, enough to enjoy the edge of hysteria in Ronan that had driven him here.

[thedreamthief]

For things like us. Things. Because Kavinsky understands what he and Ronan are better than anyone. However much Gansey would like to sugarcoat things, whatever excused Adam might make, Ronan is still a thing.

A monstrous thing.

Ronan takes the pill, eyes on Kavinsky's as he sets it on his tongue. It's small enough that Ronan doesn't worry about needing to wash it down with anything, just lets his mouth produce enough saliva before tipping his head back and swallowing.

It doesn't hit instantly, but nearly so. Ronan breathes, his hands dropping to the lip of the desk as his eyes slip closed and then he's hurled forward into sleep.

Think of what you want.

He's in Henrietta. He's sitting with Gansey and Adam and Noah at the gelato shop. Blue's there, too. It's someone's birthday and they each have a bowl. Noah's is bright green and then purple and then pink, changing with every spoonful. Grinning, Ronan reaches over, ignoring Noah's protests as he takes the bowl--

Ronan's eyes open and he's hovering, just outside his body for a second, for two seconds, the bowl of gelato rests on his sloped leg and it falls to the ground before Ronan can snap back into himself to catch it, a mess of purple and pink and yellow.

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky watched.

It was different than dreaming in the Evo, something about it. Perhaps, without all the support of the seats in place, Kavinsky could see more of the effect that the drug had on Ronan: the swift roll of sleep coming over him, the flicker of his eyes under the thinness of his eyelids, the slow materialization of his dream thing.

That was always the remarkable thing. After Proko, he'd had one video taken of his own dreaming, and could never watch it again after. Watching something come out of a dream was a nightmare in and of itself. He understood, now, why his father had flipped shit.

But Ronan dreamed the most pristine things, for an instant.

The bowl tumbled to the floor, and Kavinsky made no motion to step over and catch it in the moment between its materialization and Ronan's waking.

"Ice cream? You dreamed ice cream?"

[thedreamthief]

Ronan blinks down at the overturned bowl, the ever-changing colors spilling across the floor. The container looks just as it had in the dream too, white with the blue and pink emblem of the gelato place Noah loves so much.

He wonders if it actually tastes any good.

"It's gelato," Ronan corrects him with a faint smirk. It may not be a car or drugs a dozen forged licenses, but Ronan thinks it's not too bad for a first try, for doing it on command.

He sits back on the desk more fully now, legs hanging off the edge as he juts his chin out toward Kavinsky. "Bet you didn't do better on your first try."

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky looked down at the little container, rather than at the rainbow-oil slick of colors the gelato kept changing and felt a strange pang of longing for Henrietta. He didn't even like Virginia, and small, insular Henrietta had never been home except for having people in it that he had called his, or something like his. But Henrietta was more like a home than Darrow was capable of being, with its strange face of New Jersey mocking him.

"Sure as shit," Kavinsky agreed. He crouched beside the desk, tapping and scraping a line of cocaine. He left the bag with the pills on the desk, took up the line in a quick, fluid, practiced motion and then leaned back on his heels.

He didn't answer for a long time, looking back down at the overturned gelato. "My first conscious try was when I was six. So, nah, not much better."

[thedreamthief]

Six. Fuck.

Ronan knew at that age, of course. He knew he was different, that the things he woke up with in the morning -- stuffed bears that smelled like real ones, puzzle pieces for that puzzles that didn't exist, a toy car that moved on its own -- hadn't been there the night before.

For years, Declan had called him crazy, had insisted they were all just things Declan himself, by order of their father, had snuck into Ronan's bed in the middle of the night. Little presents while he was away.

It'd taken Ronan years to figure out the truth. And then it had been Declan's job to convince him to be quiet about it.

Ronan takes a second to wonder how much would've been different had he been an only child, how much he would've realized ahead of time, if he would've ended up the same as Kavinsky with a father dead by his own hands and a squadron of minions of his own making. Would Gansey and Parrish have ever entered his life? Would Noah have chosen to haunt him? Would he be passing the time in between dreams by doing lines of coke off a dusty factory desk?

"Did you have those when you were six?" Ronan asks, nodding over at the pills.

[mitsubishievo]

"You gonna be my shrink now, too, Lynch?"

The single line was enough to make Kavinsky vaguely warmed to the core, a little loose in the shoulders. He rose beside the desk and then turned to sit on it, the pills between them. It was not the front seat of the Mitsubishi, warm and close and intimate. It was not the dreamed-up home theater with the squeaking, singing seats where they had drunk and laughed and, Kavinsky was still convinced, he was the only one that remembered much of that night--and now, he was the only one who remembered any of it.

He picked up one of the pills, scrutinizing it. "After I was six. Before my father. It was Ambien then. Mom thought it'd help the nightmares. It didn't."

He looked past the pill, at Ronan. "What do you want me to make you?"

[thedreamthief]

"I just asked you a fucking question," Ronan replies, but he quiets when Kavinsky actually answers, surprised by what appears to be the honesty in it.

He's never tried any sort of drug to help with the sleep and the dreams, though maybe he should. Declan's taken sleeping pills, he knows. Maybe there's something to be said for them after all.

Then again, he's not sure he wants to try anything Kavinsky's taken a liking toward.

His lips curl at the question, teeth bared as he juts his chin forward. "Make me a way home." It's impossible, he knows. Or at least he thinks he knows. Kavinsky can do a shit he can't, so maybe there's away. If he wants it badly enough. If Ronan's asking.

[mitsubishievo]

It was a disaster of a request. Kavinsky had spent the past three weeks walking and driving and trying to find a way to get out of Darrow, picking his way around the edges of the dream place to try and find the spot where he woke up. He imagined that everyone that ended up here did the exact same thing, that Ronan had been trying to get home for--Lord, how long had he been here, except he hadn't left Kavinsky's side, except Ronan, this Ronan, had never been at Kavinsky's side.

Kavinsky put down the green pill and picked up one of the red ones.

"As I lay me down to sleep," he said, and lifted the pill up in some mockery of a toast. He contemplated it for half a second longer, then put the pill in his mouth, and swallowed in dry.

He had the mind to ease himself back onto the desk, so he didn't careen down onto it or the floor, but then he was past sleep, perhaps past dreaming. He was not in the dream place, where he went even now, but past it, in the pure, cosmic hum and pulse of the energy that powered the dream place, and had existed in his bones before Henrietta.

He visualized the energy, a cosmic cable or rope. In New Jersey, there had only been the one; in Henrietta, there were three, and the dream place was a result of that convergence. Kavinsky could feel more than one pulse in his bones, but all he could visualize was one cosmic rope.

That certainly posed a problem.

But handling the energy was dangerous, more power in his hands than he was used to, like sticking a fork in a light socket and holding on as it electrocuted you. Kavinsky could feel blisters forming on his palms--in the dream and in the flesh--the longer he held onto the cosmic rope and tried to think of a way to get the other lines to appear.

He woke with a start from pain, with nothing to show but cosmic rope burn and a headache creeping into the edge of his vision.

[thedreamthief]

Kavinsky sets aside a green pill for a red one and settles back onto the desk, his legs dangling off one side and eyes slipping closed. Ronan stares at the fall of dark eyelashes against Kavinsky's cheeks, the way his entire expression relaxes, goes soft in a way Ronan's never seen before.

It's an almost instant sleep, Kavinsky's mouth falling slack, his bare chest rising and falling in slow, even breaths.

Ronan watches, gaze trailing down the length of Kavinsky's body and back up again, catching on Kavinsky's neck when he wakes with a start, dark eyes flashing open.

"Didn't work," Ronan says, though there's nothing like disappointment in his tone. You have to hope for something, expect something, to be disappointed. Instead, noticing the burns on Kavinsky's hands, he reaches out to take one, holding it gently and tipping it palm-up. "This normal?"

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky wasn't sure if the burns were an improvement on the ichor or not. He had gotten past the dream place, for the first time since being in Henrietta, but only to the avail of burns and more of that awful dissensation in his hands.

"Not particularly. But, learning's dangerous." He looked up at Ronan. "Don't touch the electric fence."

Whether or not Darrow itself was some elaborate dream, a coma-vision, something else entirely was still a mystery. He didn't think it could be, because in no dream of his would he have imagined some Alice in Wonderland version of a Jersey boardwalk, nor imagined Ronan Lynch and dusty Adam Parrish standing close together at a substance party. Kavinsky's dreams liked to torment him, but never quite like that.

He closed his hands in toward the burns, feeling the skin protest. It was a point of reality. His fingertips closed into the blisters--pain and protest and reality.

"Gonna take more than a couple heel clicks to get back home."

[thedreamthief]

"Maybe you should sing a song," Ronan says with a smirk, gaze still locked on Kavinsky's fist, the burns hidden away in the curl of his fingers.

He wonders if Kavinsky's tried to dream himself back to Henrietta before or if he's only tried just now. He wonders if there's even the remotest possibility that it could work. He wonders exactly what the extent of Kavinsky's powers really is.

Shifting against the desk, Ronan folds his arms over his chest. The gelato is little more than a shimmering puddle of morphing colors on the floor and he turns his attention back to Kavinsky. "So far, man, I'm not that impressed. What else you got?"

[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky hummed We're Off to See The Wizard, and then looked down at the shitty gelato cup on the ground. He considered it for a moment, the familiar emblem and the unfamiliar contents on the floor. He squinted a little.

Then, he leaned back a little. With one hand--the one still dark from the ichor of his earlier cigarette retrieval--he scratched idly at his stomach. The other supported his weight on the desk, despite the aching, screaming burn on his palm. He wondered, briefly, how it would feel to run his hand across Ronan's skin, how his hands would protest the contact, how Ronan might protest the contact for an instant before he relented.

"You know what I could really go for right now?"

He picked up one of the green pills and popped it into his mouth with a smirk. "Ninos."