do you want to hear about the deal that i'm making?

[nightmarist]

WHO: Residents of the Meadows
WHERE: The Meadows outside De Chima
WHEN: November 12 & 13
WHAT: The world didn't end. What now?
WARNINGS: Look to the subject headers.
NOTES: This is a mingle/catch-all log.

The plan had been this: Create a new world. An inconceivable task, so impossible that the other imPorts hadn't even suggested it as an option, despite having witnessed for themselves what the Greywaren could do with a sufficient amount of energy. Only Kylo Ren and Ronan Lynch could be mad enough to make a plan like that while the rest of them scrambled and grasped at straws.

Ronan had tried to warn them, too. The energy required to make a new world would cost as many lives as Atropos intended to take, and while he couldn't stop himself from doing it, he could at least hope that they would stop him before it was too late. And though he wasn't stopped, exactly, he was mercifully delayed. He'd give them until the very last minute, he promised the wizard. If they could perform the ritual properly, there'd be no need for a world-ending Plan B.

The 12th was spent in the chapel, Ronan on his knees, praying and waiting for news. Kavinsky, the most cunning rat among them, had come up with a decent scheme to get the ritual done right. He was supposed to join them once the pieces were in place, so that they'd all be together and ready to board the ark if Atropos broke through despite the imPorts' efforts.

But Kavinsky never came home. And the world didn't end. So where does that leave them, now?

Comments

waking

[nightmarist]

Ronan doesn't go to sleep intending to dream. He doesn't intend to sleep at all, actually, but the exhaustion takes him just as the morning light begins to filter in through the stained glass windows. Seated in a back pew, he rests his cheek on Kylo's shoulder and slips out of consciousness the moment his eyes shut.

When he opens them again, he finds himself staring into his own face. Not Murphy's, and not even really his face, but the face he left behind in Henrietta. Somehow this clone is both older and younger than him, which is a detail Ronan doesn't even attempt to reconcile. His head is shaved, the way Ronan's used to be, but he looks worn out in a way Ronan isn't, as if he's been ill for a long time. He's seated backwards in the pew in front of Ronan, facing him dead-on, arms folded and draped over the back of the seat.

Ronan looks around. Kylo's nowhere in sight. It's just him and himself, one on one. The clone reaches out to smack his cheek, redirecting his attention back to him.

"Clear your mind of whimsy," he says.

"Asshole," Ronan hisses.

They rise from their seats in unison, mirrored, and the clone points across the chapel, toward the scorch mark left by the lightsaber Kylo once plunged through his heart. "It's dark where you're going," he tells Ronan, and Ronan sneers back at him, already hopping the pews to get a better look at what's over there.

He should have expected it, really. His corpse, just as Kylo left it. Or maybe just how Ronan imagines Kylo left it, because its arms have been arranged like Glendower's bones, and Ronan almost certainly wasn't laid to rest like a king, sword in hand. "Poor bastard," Ronan mutters, leaning over his corpse to get a closer look at its oddly serene expression. Maybe not too poor a bastard. Worse ways to go than instantly and painlessly in his sleep.

The glint of sunlight draws Ronan's gaze away from the corpse and down to the sword. The blade is a sooty matte black. Logically it ought to be impossible, the way it's catching the sun, gleaming like chrome, but dreams never make much sense. Ronan reaches for the handle immediately, prying the sword from his corpse's stubborn hands, and as he lifts it up, he catches its name engraved across the guard: VEXED TO NIGHTMARE.

The corpse opens its eyes.

So does Ronan.

At some point during his sleep, he must have been laid on his back across the pew, because he wakes in the very same position, VEXED TO NIGHTMARE clutched in his hands. The stink of burnt flesh hangs in the air. Ronan can't tell from here, outside his body, whether he's brought his death back with him, too.

[photophobic]

Kylo, too, is posed in something of an image of return. The chapel's pews, as he learned in his week of vigil, are not wide enough for two— especially not for two as broad as they are. But then, as now, he'd wanted to allow Ronan's sleeping form to rest in this, his place of refuge. And he'd refused to leave him alone.

This had been the solution Kylo chose then and chose again last night: Ronan, laid carefully along the narrow pew, and himself stretched out on the floor alongside, cold floor discomfort mitigated with a scattering of pillows originally intended for facilitating prayer. He'd slept fitfully, his dreams populated with distant and filmy shapes that refused to resolve into meaning. If they'd been visions, they'd been transmitted on a frequency Kylo isn't equipped to receive.

He stirs with the light and the heavy stench of death, blinking with bleary confusion as he sits up. There's a moment where he isn't sure when he is— the smell, the particular quality of light through the windows, the shape of Ronan's body laid out as if for burial... but it passes in a breath as all the days between then and now begin to slot back into place, and all the hours they'd spent waiting, fingers and fears laced together into something stronger than either of them.

But it didn't find them, and they never had to face it. The End they'd resolved to make a Beginning. It never came.

"Ronan?" he murmurs, reaching to push hair back from his face despite knowing it could be a while before he can answer.

It isn't the strangest-looking thing Ronan's brought back with him, the sword. But it gives Kylo an odd feeling, looking at it, like...
He doesn't know. But something in him thinks, it's about time.

[nightmarist]

Good. Good, he must be alive. Kylo would probably know it if his heart had stopped beating. Now all Ronan has to do is wait to return to himself.

A minute or two passes before he truly feels Kylo's touch. His lashes flutter and his eyes sharpen. His lips part for a sigh. The rest of his body feels impossibly heavy, but he can turn his head to look up at his beloved.

Hoarsely, he notes, "We're still here."

The two of them. The Meadows. The planet. He'd been afraid earlier that if he shut his eyes he might never open them again.

[photophobic]

Kylo nods, fingertips gentle as they trace the contours of Ronan's face. He loves this face. And now, he doesn't have to fear seeing the weight of all that death reflect back at him, every time he looks at it.

Having drawn up onto his knees to watch over him, Kylo bows down to kiss Ronan's brow. Here. Together. He'll prove it.

"Just as it was," he murmurs. "Whatever they did. She isn't here."

[nightmarist]

Ronan allows his eyes to slip shut once more as Kylo kisses him, soothed by these tender little gestures, these soft secrets between the two of them. The end of the world seems very far away. The stench of death that followed him out of his dream has already been replaced by frankincense and candle smoke. They're safe in this sanctuary again.

Feeling returns to his fingertips. He's suddenly aware of the cool metal against his skin, reminded of his prize: VEXED TO NIGHTMARE.

"...Did Kavinsky come home yet?"

[photophobic]

Kavinsky isn't home. Kylo knows it before he rests his head on Ronan's shoulder and reaches, reaches, senses spreading out, searching... and never snagging on the familiar, writhing knot of soured invention and listless hunger. Maybe there was something about it in his dream. Maybe, despite what most people would consider evidence to the contrary, he simply feels Kavinsky would have been here with them if he could have been.

Home. No. Kavinsky hadn't come home. He breathes out, slowly.

"I don't feel him," Kylo says, lifting his head. There are a lot of tugs and strains missing, when he thinks about it. And a weight. There's a terrible, terrible weight... missing. Dark matter. Gravity lensing. His eyes flick to the sword in Ronan's hands.

[nightmarist]

Dread is already beginning to twist itself up in Ronan's gut, but he doesn't surrender to it yet. There could be plenty of reasons Kavinsky isn't here. Those words could mean a lot of different things. It doesn't have to mean what Ronan's afraid it means.

"But the ritual's been done, right?" If they're all still here? "Did he stay in Jeopardy?"

[photophobic]

Fifty imports with a connection to magic at the Church of the Ancient Web Mistress in Jeopardy on the next full moon, when the connection between worlds is at its weakest.

That had been the plan, hadn't it. Maybe the imPort community had been so caught up in their collective handwringing over the potential sacrifice of two children they hadn't even realised the possibility that they were the price to be paid for the preservation of this world. Fifty imports with a connection to magic might just leave a hole the size of the absence he feels. And Kavinsky... might be one of them.

Kylo reaches for his comm device. No messages. Nothing from either Kavinsky or Apollo, who had said he would be there for the ritual, willing to be his contact. Nothing from anyone. Nothing, even, from Dameron.

And silence on the Network.

"I think he did," Kylo says. Jeopardy. The city that hadn't existed before the boundaries between realities began to weaken. "I think... they all did."

[nightmarist]

Ronan turns his eyes to the ceiling overhead. His fingers tighten around the sword grip, holding the weapon against him like a child would hold onto a stuffed animal - for comfort. His jaw works, holding a tight frown on his face, while his mind turns over the possibilities.

This wasn't their plan. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Kavinsky was supposed to come back.

"And..." He doesn't want to ask, but he has to, if he's going to figure out where to go from here. "You're just guessing. Because you can't feel him. So he's gone?"

[photophobic]

"Ronan," Kylo says, maybe a little more firmly than he'd intended. He doesn't like not having answers, and he doesn't like... he isn't sure what it is he doesn't like, but it's wrapped up in you're just guessing.

He lets out a frustrated breath.

"I don't have the power to give you that answer. Not here. What I can reach of the Force here lacks... depth. All the time. I can't tell you why I can't find him. Or any of the others."

He stabs another irritable message into his phone.

"No-one's answering."

[nightmarist]

Ronan exhales sharply through his nose, a formless argument for as long as he lacks the information he needs in order to give it words. What he's sure of is that this isn't a matter of Kylo's skill or the limitations of the Force. They've all gone someplace too far for contact, further than Jeopardy, maybe out of this universe entirely.

If he wasn't so weak, he'd be flickering over to the ritual site right this instant. But he's still drained from the dream, from manifesting this mysterious weapon.

His dream self had warned him about something. What had he said, again?

It's dark where you're going.

"We can't just leave him there."

[photophobic]

That, for reasons Kylo doesn't care to examine too closely that mostly revolve around Ronan's happiness, was never in question. He looks up from his phone, meeting Ronan's eyes. Call me, he'd just finished typing. It's the third message he's sent the dream thief since the world failed to end.

"No," he agrees. "And we won't. But wherever he is. He can't find his way back."

Which is a demand, really, because Kylo knows full well what Ronan might decide to do if not warned otherwise. Don't go after him without me. He breathes out slowly, laying his hand on top of Ronan's where they grip the sword.

"Together. Once you're recovered."