There's an entirely new horror in this— he's a helpless, formless observer as the scene unfolds below. Ronan who is not Ronan draws himself up, sliding his fingers through Kylo's hair to push it back from his face with a tenderness Kylo knows he should be more than disconnected witness to.
And then, when the warm, still body beside him fails to stir or respond, the dream realises what it is.
It doesn't want to accept it. Kylo can hear the desperation in Ronan's voice, the urgency as the fantasy made flesh tries in vain to rewrite the story. If Kylo can wake now, it won't need to accept the uncomfortable truth. It won't need to be afraid.
But Kylo can't wake. He can't do anything but watch. Can this Ronan feel him? Can Kylo reach him from here, with his consciousness bled out of his body?
Aurora Lynch had been a simply-made creature. She had be certain of her duty, certain of her place in the lives of her husband and children, content even in the face of her cruel fate and brave when confronted with assured destruction. Ronan had loved and admired these things about his mother. But he'd never fully considered the ownership of these qualities and whether or not they came with the knowledge of her nature.
The Ronan Lynch who exists here is as true as she was. But he is neither confident about his nature nor crafted to address it with any of her grace. He grabs hold of Kylo and shakes him as if drawing him back to the waking world will somehow confirm that the Ronan who is here is the Ronan who's meant to be here, and not an accident. Not a wish.
I'm here, Kylo shouts silently, the sight of Ronan seizing his body triggering a hot flash of something similar to rage. But it isn't rage, and it brings him nothing of the relief and release it should.
He'd shaken Ronan like that. He'd tried to wake him for what felt like hours. He'd shouted. He'd paced and cursed and trashed his things, and it had achieved exactly what he'd known it would from the beginning: nothing.
Trying to force himself back into his body doesn't appear to work— it feels like it should, somehow, as practiced as he is with extending his senses and willpower beyond the confines of his body— but he can't find any connections to follow from wherever he is, whatever he is.
Time stretches out, distorted without measure. Ronan's efforts accomplish nothing. And then, eventually, Kylo takes a breath and feels it— and it's a relief unlike any other he's ever experienced.
Ronan does not shout or pace or trash anything. He remains at Kylo's side, watching closely for that moment of return, and he hardly allows himself to blink. He knows the terror of this paralysis, the price for exchanging a sliver of his life in order to breathe it into something else. With every dream, the dreamer attends his own funeral, never knowing for sure whether that motionless body will find the strength to return to life.
At that subtle change in breath, Ronan recognizes the second Kylo is Kylo again. He bows down to steal a kiss from his lips, like this is a fairytale of the more conventional variety. "It won't be long now," he promises Kylo, laying a hand over his heart.
It feels so horribly, painfully close to being true. Ronan's lips press against his exactly as they should. His hand rests over his heart with precisely the right weight, promising stability— and tenderness, promising care. His voice, the words he chooses, the sweetness of his focused attention and the familiar hum of his presence. It's perfect. All of it.
But it isn't.
Kylo can't yet move. He's weak in a way he's never felt before, an experience all the more unsettling for the lack of any explaining injury beyond the obvious. The amputated part of himself wearing Ronan's face, animated by his restless fear that he's lost him forever.
He swallows, his lips barely parting, everything he is feeling impossibly heavy.
Ronan can feel how much this wasn't supposed to happen. How much he isn't meant to exist. It's the worst thing in the world, to be an unwanted dream. A failed attempt or a mistake. How agonized Ronan's own nightmares had been when he accidentally brought them into the world, how they had hated him for his cowardice and his incompetence. And how he'd hated them in return. Murdered them. Buried them. Pushed them out of his memory.
His wrongness is written into him. He yearns for the real Ronan as much as Kylo does, but also yearns to be him. It isn't as simple as resenting Kylo for creating an imperfect dream or destroying himself so that Kylo can try again. Within him remains the unfortunate tug of hope that he can still become what Kylo wants him to be.
So he waits, curled up against his dreamer, loyal and terrified.
Ronan's fear feels tangible. Heavy as the invisible, nonsensical weight pinning him down, keeping even his eyelids from opening. Kylo hates it.
He hates it because this copy of Ronan is right to be afraid. They're trapped, now, in an endlessly reflecting loop of suffering— because he isn't an unwanted dream. He's a forbidden one. Nothing good can come of this.
He hates it too because even though he knows, even though he can see the danger, he can't turn away. He can't stop aching to release Ronan from his fears, he can't stop wanting to pull him into his arms. He can't stop wanting to tell this lie that he's the truth.
Slowly, inevitably, the weight of his dreaming releases him— but the weight of Ronan's terror remains. Kylo sucks in a shuddering breath and loops his arm around the dreamthing's body, dragging him closer. His heart races.
"Stop that," he demands. Pleads. It's hard to tell. His voice is thick and slow, and he doesn't dare look, yet. "Stop it."
There was a place back home, at the Barns, where Niall Lynch's failed dream things were left to accumulate over the years. Ronan had always thought of it as a workshop, but this was because Ronan was also a craftsman back then. When Ronan pictures it now, he sees the long barn as a tomb. Even before their creator's life was snuffed out, those dreams had been locked away with nothing but the knowledge of their own inadequacy.
Kylo traps him close and Ronan holds him in return, his arms warm and real and still somehow not Ronan Lynch's arms. "I know you don't believe in me," he says. If Kylo had believed in him, then he would be right. "But I'm Ronan. I am Ronan. You're with me now. You don't have to worry anymore."
"Don't," Kylo warns without having any solid idea what he means by it— but he doesn't push this echo of Ronan away. He can't. If anything, his hold is surer, his grip tighter, more insistent.
What is he going to do with this thing? He can almost hear the question trembling through its thoughts. What is he going to do with me. What can I do to be enough. He feels sick with a blend of feelings never designed to fit against each other.
I'm not going to hurt you, he wants to say. Shout. Lie. And it would be a lie, no matter how much he tried to bend it otherwise. He's already hurt him. His very existence is hurt. Dread and fear. That's what Kylo has given him with this unplanned gift of life.
"What do you want me to do," he asks suddenly, twisting to face him. His eyes are sharp and focused, but it's like they don't want to be. "Tell me what you want, Ronan. Right now."
Ronan can see his own grave in the way Kylo looks at him. He remembers standing over one he'd dug, himself, and gazing down at an aborted twisted coil of razor-sharp claws and oily feathers. Is there any use in begging? He knows where the wrong ones go.
"I wanna get up. I wanna go downstairs and eat breakfast. I wanna fix the fence by the cow pasture. I want you to let me."
It's going to take nothing. He's been alive for less than an hour and it will take seconds for Kylo to crush every bone in his body.
"Please," he whispers. "It'll be like nothing ever happened."
Kylo stares, his breathing unnatural and ragged. He's given this creature dread and fear, and now he receives the punishment for it. In his arms he has Ronan, so much of Ronan as to be indistinguishable from the original— terrified and begging for his life, already knowing it won't be enough.
Ronan had never been afraid of him. But this isn't Ronan, is it? It's what Kylo fears he could be. A Ronan who would look at him and see a monster.
"No," he says, his voice beginning as a low, tightly measured thing but quickly swelling into vicious, violent panic. He doesn't let go. "No, you're not running away from me. Are you Ronan Lynch? Are you? Do you think I could do that to you, to him? Is that what you think I am?"
"You love me," Ronan insists. Oh, he is so certain of that. He can feel the love that helped to shape him, all these details drawn from a thousand lingering gazes upon the beauty of Ronan Lynch. Kylo sculpted him from longing. "You want more than anything to keep loving me."
Kylo's hurting him. Coiled in those desperate arms, Ronan's shaking now.
He pleads, "Kiss me. I won't go anywhere. Stay in bed with me and I'll be everything you always wanted. Remember when you first dreamt about me? That's the life we'll have now."
When has love ever been enough to protect anyone from being harmed? Kylo's parents had loved him. He'd loved them. It hadn't stopped them abandoning him. It hadn't stopped him from plunging his lightsaber into his father's heart. Love, for everything it claims to be, is no guarantee of safety. If anything, it's a promise of the opposite— and Kylo knows it, so Ronan knows it. It's why he's shaking. He knows what Kylo will always do to anything he loves, in the end.
Kylo just wants the trembling to stop.
He isn't gentle when he kisses Ronan's mouth. He isn't tender or sweet or careful as he pulls Ronan's body closer and pins it beneath him. He loves Ronan the same way he loves all his scars: possessively.
"Show me," he demands, barely pulling away from his lips. "Show me you remember."
In the wake of that kiss, Ronan is nearly breathless. Crushed beneath Kylo, he's never been small or fragile, but he feels that way now. He wishes he could have no body at all, that he could return to being the exact dream Kylo wants to be shown. He's not that dream, though, any more than he's Ronan Lynch.
"It's ours," he presses anyway. Everything in him is screaming to curl in, to defend, to guard himself against the wrath of his maker. But that would be a betrayal of both the promise and the dream.
He unfolds beneath Kylo. He does remember. Kylo had wanted him so Kylo had him: a sprawled offering of pliant limbs and the assurance that he would never be alone. He repeats, "I'm yours. You won't hurt me. You can't do anything wrong."
After all, dreams serve the desire of the dreamer. He just so happens to know that the desire, this time, is a violent one.
It breaks out of him, then— a choked, miserable sound, something like a sob might be, if Kylo finally permitted himself to cry. If he didn't smother it immediately, crushing his mouth to the warm, perfect replica of the junction between Ronan's neck and shoulder, hiding his face there.
It's ours, or I don't want it.
He remembers both times he'd said those words: his clumsy attempts to tell Ronan that he needed to be a choice, a decision, something Ronan wanted.
But he isn't wanted. It isn't desire that has Ronan unfurling himself in offering— not Ronan's desire, anyway. It's obedience. Fearful obedience, woven into this thing Kylo's made with his useless, desperate longing.
And he's so horribly, brokenly desperate that he can't stop.
Kylo drags himself down the perfectly remembered shape of Ronan's body— a starving, wretched monster reduced to his basest, ugliest parts. He's nothing better than the hunger of grasping hands and fierce, bruising kisses as he claws at this punishment he's made for himself: the only relief he's ever found distorted into torment.
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And then, when the warm, still body beside him fails to stir or respond, the dream realises what it is.
It doesn't want to accept it. Kylo can hear the desperation in Ronan's voice, the urgency as the fantasy made flesh tries in vain to rewrite the story. If Kylo can wake now, it won't need to accept the uncomfortable truth. It won't need to be afraid.
But Kylo can't wake. He can't do anything but watch. Can this Ronan feel him? Can Kylo reach him from here, with his consciousness bled out of his body?
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The Ronan Lynch who exists here is as true as she was. But he is neither confident about his nature nor crafted to address it with any of her grace. He grabs hold of Kylo and shakes him as if drawing him back to the waking world will somehow confirm that the Ronan who is here is the Ronan who's meant to be here, and not an accident. Not a wish.
"Wake up, you asshole."
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He'd shaken Ronan like that. He'd tried to wake him for what felt like hours. He'd shouted. He'd paced and cursed and trashed his things, and it had achieved exactly what he'd known it would from the beginning: nothing.
Trying to force himself back into his body doesn't appear to work— it feels like it should, somehow, as practiced as he is with extending his senses and willpower beyond the confines of his body— but he can't find any connections to follow from wherever he is, whatever he is.
Time stretches out, distorted without measure. Ronan's efforts accomplish nothing. And then, eventually, Kylo takes a breath and feels it— and it's a relief unlike any other he's ever experienced.
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At that subtle change in breath, Ronan recognizes the second Kylo is Kylo again. He bows down to steal a kiss from his lips, like this is a fairytale of the more conventional variety. "It won't be long now," he promises Kylo, laying a hand over his heart.
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But it isn't.
Kylo can't yet move. He's weak in a way he's never felt before, an experience all the more unsettling for the lack of any explaining injury beyond the obvious. The amputated part of himself wearing Ronan's face, animated by his restless fear that he's lost him forever.
He swallows, his lips barely parting, everything he is feeling impossibly heavy.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
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His wrongness is written into him. He yearns for the real Ronan as much as Kylo does, but also yearns to be him. It isn't as simple as resenting Kylo for creating an imperfect dream or destroying himself so that Kylo can try again. Within him remains the unfortunate tug of hope that he can still become what Kylo wants him to be.
So he waits, curled up against his dreamer, loyal and terrified.
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He hates it because this copy of Ronan is right to be afraid. They're trapped, now, in an endlessly reflecting loop of suffering— because he isn't an unwanted dream. He's a forbidden one. Nothing good can come of this.
He hates it too because even though he knows, even though he can see the danger, he can't turn away. He can't stop aching to release Ronan from his fears, he can't stop wanting to pull him into his arms.
He can't stop wanting to tell this lie that he's the truth.
Slowly, inevitably, the weight of his dreaming releases him— but the weight of Ronan's terror remains. Kylo sucks in a shuddering breath and loops his arm around the dreamthing's body, dragging him closer. His heart races.
"Stop that," he demands. Pleads. It's hard to tell. His voice is thick and slow, and he doesn't dare look, yet. "Stop it."
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Kylo traps him close and Ronan holds him in return, his arms warm and real and still somehow not Ronan Lynch's arms. "I know you don't believe in me," he says. If Kylo had believed in him, then he would be right. "But I'm Ronan. I am Ronan. You're with me now. You don't have to worry anymore."
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What is he going to do with this thing? He can almost hear the question trembling through its thoughts. What is he going to do with me. What can I do to be enough. He feels sick with a blend of feelings never designed to fit against each other.
I'm not going to hurt you, he wants to say. Shout. Lie. And it would be a lie, no matter how much he tried to bend it otherwise. He's already hurt him. His very existence is hurt. Dread and fear. That's what Kylo has given him with this unplanned gift of life.
"What do you want me to do," he asks suddenly, twisting to face him. His eyes are sharp and focused, but it's like they don't want to be. "Tell me what you want, Ronan. Right now."
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Ronan can see his own grave in the way Kylo looks at him. He remembers standing over one he'd dug, himself, and gazing down at an aborted twisted coil of razor-sharp claws and oily feathers. Is there any use in begging? He knows where the wrong ones go.
"I wanna get up. I wanna go downstairs and eat breakfast. I wanna fix the fence by the cow pasture. I want you to let me."
It's going to take nothing. He's been alive for less than an hour and it will take seconds for Kylo to crush every bone in his body.
"Please," he whispers. "It'll be like nothing ever happened."
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Ronan had never been afraid of him. But this isn't Ronan, is it? It's what Kylo fears he could be. A Ronan who would look at him and see a monster.
"No," he says, his voice beginning as a low, tightly measured thing but quickly swelling into vicious, violent panic. He doesn't let go. "No, you're not running away from me. Are you Ronan Lynch? Are you? Do you think I could do that to you, to him? Is that what you think I am?"
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Kylo's hurting him. Coiled in those desperate arms, Ronan's shaking now.
He pleads, "Kiss me. I won't go anywhere. Stay in bed with me and I'll be everything you always wanted. Remember when you first dreamt about me? That's the life we'll have now."
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Love, for everything it claims to be, is no guarantee of safety. If anything, it's a promise of the opposite— and Kylo knows it, so Ronan knows it. It's why he's shaking.
He knows what Kylo will always do to anything he loves, in the end.
Kylo just wants the trembling to stop.
He isn't gentle when he kisses Ronan's mouth. He isn't tender or sweet or careful as he pulls Ronan's body closer and pins it beneath him. He loves Ronan the same way he loves all his scars: possessively.
"Show me," he demands, barely pulling away from his lips. "Show me you remember."
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"It's ours," he presses anyway. Everything in him is screaming to curl in, to defend, to guard himself against the wrath of his maker. But that would be a betrayal of both the promise and the dream.
He unfolds beneath Kylo. He does remember. Kylo had wanted him so Kylo had him: a sprawled offering of pliant limbs and the assurance that he would never be alone. He repeats, "I'm yours. You won't hurt me. You can't do anything wrong."
After all, dreams serve the desire of the dreamer. He just so happens to know that the desire, this time, is a violent one.
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It's ours, or I don't want it.
He remembers both times he'd said those words: his clumsy attempts to tell Ronan that he needed to be a choice, a decision, something Ronan wanted.
But he isn't wanted. It isn't desire that has Ronan unfurling himself in offering— not Ronan's desire, anyway. It's obedience. Fearful obedience, woven into this thing Kylo's made with his useless, desperate longing.
And he's so horribly, brokenly desperate that he can't stop.
Kylo drags himself down the perfectly remembered shape of Ronan's body— a starving, wretched monster reduced to his basest, ugliest parts. He's nothing better than the hunger of grasping hands and fierce, bruising kisses as he claws at this punishment he's made for himself: the only relief he's ever found distorted into torment.