[CLOSED]

[photophobic]

WHO: Kylo Ren & Joseph Kavinsky
WHERE: The Meadows
WHAT: Back when Ronan was going goop
WARNINGS: Discussion of death/dying/loss, probably involving inappropriate language tbh

Kylo isn't his usual self. That much is immediately apparent, despite there being fewer outward indicators of the change he's going through written on his face than some of the other residents and visitors to the Meadows. No crazy hair, no alterations to the oversized solidity of his body or the shape of his face, nothing anyone could point to in particular— but he moves differently, somehow. There's no baseline of absolute confidence in his power humming in every step as he tracks Kavinsky into the woods, but he isn't quite the miserable figure of despair he'd once been in a dream they shared, either. He's resolved.

Fresh from Ronan's bedside, he carries the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. Of all their various attempts, this has to be what works. They are, he knows with the horrific intimacy of feeling Ronan's unmaking as it continues to progress, rapidly running out of time.

"Joseph?" he calls. Kavinsky's close by, he can feel it, but he can't see him through the trees.

Comments

tw animal death

[pillz]

"Here."

Kavinsky is: here. He's sitting in a clearing with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a leather knapsack, very fashionable and lightly worn, sitting on the ground beside him. He looks somewhat more rumpled than he did when he first arrived at the Meadows with Josh Foley in tow, and he'd already been rumpled before. Drinking all day, trying to get the freakish Joker-green out of his hair.

Then drinking to try to dream right. Get the higher cognition out of the way, stick to the fuckin' intuition. Not that that's helped, with the cryochamber or the iridescent pills or the dreamergy battery. None of them has worked. But Noah thinks this might, so.

So.

"You ready to kill some li'l pine martens, Kylo Ren?"

[photophobic]

Kylo's long strides pull to a sharp stop, leaving him looming over the dream thief as a particularly solid shadow. Kavinsky looks... there's a strange tragedy to him, here, one Kylo's caught glimpses of before, but seeing him like this, clearly crumpled up and tired with having channeled so much of his frenetic energy into effort after fruitless effort but smoothing himself out to try again?

Something in Kylo knows he wouldn't work that hard.

"Which ones are the pine martens?" he asks, as if it makes a difference which of the many native species he doesn't recognise by name Kavinsky's considering sacrificing. He glances around them, not yet joining him on the ground. "I can get you what you need."

tw drugs (previous)

[pillz]

Wow nobody better say that shit to Kavinsky. As far as he's concerned, dreaming takes very little out of him; it's the rest of the world, the life that he drains from his environment, that pays for it.

His pride is injured, that's all. Who likes failing? No one. And so, his objective is simply: to win.

God, they need to fucking win. When are they going to fucking win.

"They kind of look like weasels, but fat."

Joseph Kavinsky is not winning: any zoological knowledge trivia contests any time soon. He squints up at Kylo Ren, one eye nearly shut in the sunshine. "Once I saw a nature doc where one was eating up some honeycomb, and I was coming down off some oxies so I ended up going full on Winnie the Pooh with a jar of honey and barfed it all over the bathroom. Bad situation."

[photophobic]

Kylo's mouth tugs like it wants to smile. He has absolutely no idea what a lot of what Kavinsky just said means, which is hardly new. Feeling something of the restless twist Kavinsky chose not to give voice to writhing beneath it isn't, either.

"I think," he says slowly, turning back to fix his eyes on Kavinsky's face from an assessment of their surroundings, "we are going to need a lot of fat weasels."

Or, they could use something else. His amusement evaporates.

"I meant it. When I said you could have anything you needed from me. Whatever power you need to dream this for him. I'll find it for you."

tw implications of animal death

[pillz]

Kavinsky rocks his head back and closes his eyes. He's been drinking a lot today. His face feels kind of numb; he can barely feel the wind's brisk kisses on his cheeks. Too bad it's winter. Too bad for all the creatures and other living things, the more vigorous processes of life have been suspended in these cold days of rest. Less energy for the taking.

He doesn't feel bad for them, really. It's the luxury of being his particular brand of fucked up; most of the time, he doesn't feel very much at all.

"If you can pull everything in like a thousand foot radius, I think that's gonna do it. I mean everything. The slugs, the worms, the beetle eggs, squirrels, badgers and foxes and micro fuckin' bacteria. There's a salt lick that way," Kavinsky jerks his thumb over his shoulder without looking, "and a river there. Some luck, there's gonna be deer and fish around. The trees." Bare-boughed though they are, almost every one of these was planning on coming back in the spring. "The roots where the grass ain't there up top anymore. Sunshine."

At least it's sunny today.

"If you pull it all, I think that'll be enough."

Bright light, to shine down on what promises to soon be a barren and desiccated circle of a wasteland.

"Or you can pull half out of a two thousand feet reach, if you can finesse it like that." He jams his vodka bottle into a nearby lump of snow. "That make sense?"

[photophobic]

Now, Kylo sits down. Settling opposite Kavinsky in cross-legged contemplation as if about to lead guided meditation, he's an overloaded abundance of feeling where Kavinsky is its curious absence. Far from here but immediate in his mind, Ronan's existence is dwindling away. There's so little left, and what remains is no longer capable of responding— but to do this, to gather all this energy, he'll have to let go.

Will Ronan feel it? He doesn't know. It seems like it should be impossible for him to experience abandonment, now. In any case, Kylo has to believe Ronan knows he would never let go for anything less than the chance to bring him back.

"You're thinking of life as if it exists in... finite portions," Kylo says, eyes lifting from the brooding study of his hands. "As if we're here, surrounded by a thousand cups of it, and your only option is to drink each one dry in turn. And you could do it that way. These creatures— they don't know how to draw on the Force and replenish themselves. They don't have that power."

But Kylo? Kylo does. For Kylo, life is the visible expression of something deeper.

"Use me," he says. "My connection to the Force. That's why Ronan had to die, to stop the imPort community from dreaming the end of the world into existence. It made him— his capacity to create— limitless. Do you see? These things can only give you what they have. What they hold. I can give you... as much as I have the force of will to ask for."

[pillz]

Or maybe Joey isn't feeling nothing at all, because suddenly his brain is jangling and irritation flashes hot down his nerves, and he should know better than to open his mouth but it's like his jaw is having some kind of pressurization problem because it hurts at the hinge for a split-second right before he says:

"If you're that fucking powerful, why haven't you fixed him?"

And because he's Joseph Kavinsky, he doesn't feel bad right away, of course. He jangles in his head angrily about how maybe if Ronan and Kylo had spent more time confronting each other about their limits, admitting to weaknesses, being a team in the harder ways instead of the easy ones, then they wouldn't be in this mess. It's a mean thought -- more than one. Five mean thoughts. Ten. Fifty. His relationship with Murphy, the other one, had been better. Murphy knew how to be hard with him, and they had never bought into any idiotic mythologies about their infinite powers or whatever, whatever.

Infinite power. Does anyone believe in that? Even the three shitlord sisters didn't always win together. Couldn't. That was fucking ridiculous and

and now Kavinsky can't think of anything to do besides glare at Kylo Ren with poisonous ire.

[photophobic]

Kylo stares, hard, his fingers curling into his palms so tight it's beyond crushing, or digging or gouging, it's just pain.

"If I'm that powerful," he says, tight and clipped. Fury roars in his ears. "It isn't about magnitudes of power, Joseph, and you. You know it. Do you want power?"

There's a dangerous, horribly congealing thickness to the air, pressure building as he speaks. A crackle of static, a hundred warning signs. Kylo's anger aches to gather everything it can into the burst of lightning Dooku taught him, unleash it in a demonstration of suffering. Power? Power is meaningless.

"I feel it. All the power you could want. Raw and untamed. And useless. All of it. Useless! I need you—" he pauses, crushes his teeth together. Tries again, pushing past the bright flare of rage surging in his chest with increasing ferocity the longer he looks at Kavinsky's face, all the discordant notes of bitter, soured aggression filling his head, thrumming through his blood. "I need you. To make it into something that can save him. So do it."

[pillz]

Kavinsky's face empties out like that of a sulking child.

He had a terrible thought, awhile ago, as he sat and drank and waited in this clearing. That if Ronan had always needed a fucking leyline, then Kylo Ren was a decent enough surrogate, apparently. Which means this won't work. And for some unknowable, obscure reason, the fact that it then won't be Kavinsky's fault does not make him feel better.

"The point I was fucking making, is my dreaming is different from Ronan's. I can only use life energy. Probably something to do with the fact I'm fucking dead, in the other world." He rubs his fingers over his eyes. "I don't get tired from using my power for that exact fuckin' reason. Pull from whatever source you want, Ren. But for anything other than bio-electric juice, you're gonna have to operate as a conduit." So many magical fucking conduits. "And unless you can push it through a different organic body, I'm gonna need to drain it straight from you."

Which is certainly the explanation he could have offered earlier, instead of snapping and bitching, but what kind of normal functional person would he be if he did that? He palms a vivid red pill, forcing it out of his thoughts, the question of: what the Hell is unmaking?

What if it's not death? Death, they can come back from. But to be permanently transitioned into a different state -- he doesn't know.

"And this ain't gonna be a little monster I throw out in the middle of the road. This could be a real fucking risk, Ren. You get me?"

Welcome to being the cup, Kylo Ren.

[photophobic]

He's still furious.
But that's okay. It's good, even, possibly— considering the foolishness he's about to engage in. Anger sustained him for years, kept him alive when he should have died from his wounds, kept him fighting in the face of futility. He'll use it now.

What was it Ronan had said? Something about Kavinsky refusing to stop. Unable or unwilling. And why would he stop, if dreaming never exacted its toll on him? If there was never any meaningful cost, is it any surprise the results never satisfied? No. Anything capable of being a magic to save and supply Ronan will require a price. He's certain of it.

Just as he's certain he's willing to pay it to a degree that can't be guaranteed otherwise.

"When have I ever blinked," he says sharply. "This is how you get enough. Do it."

[pillz]

"Don't act like you fucking knew about it," Kavinsky snaps in turn.

But they might both be accused of acting like Ronan would be okay with this, or that they're explicitly ignoring his unspoken but painfully obvious wishes -- that he would never want to put Kylo at risk in order to do it. He'd sooner lay down and die. Be unmade? Die? Die or be unmade.

The dream thief slaps the pill into his own mouth with a fop sound. Cabeswater, the leyline, whatever it was that Henrietta had, is more like a person than a battery, he's gathered from talking to Noah, from listening to various Ronans over the years. There's an intelligence to it. And that is probably going to be a problem, because he's not now nor has he ever been a greywaren.

He's not even fully a person. But it's fine.

He picks up the vodka bottle, snorks down the pill. Lies back, and closes his eyes. His brain falls silent, and his heartbeat s l

o w s.