What Nightmares May Come

[somnioergosum]

Who: Ronan and open
What: Ronan brings back a bleeding flower from his dreams. Ronan tries to cover the evidence. Ronan is so in over his head.
Where: In or near communal housing first floor
When: Wednesday Morning, 3AM
Warnings: Brief description of a mutilated corpse, a bleeding flower, and Ronan being the traumatized joy that he is.
WhyNotes: Prose preference but can answer back in brackets. You can grab him anywhere from inside the shared floor to just outside it while he figures out what to do with a magic bleeding flower.

Ronan dreamed of his mother.

He did everything he could not to. He tried sleeping pills (didn't work and made him hallucinate). He tried drinking (honestly, he already knew it wouldn't work and just wanted to get drunk). He tried working himself to exhaustion (didn't work and he woke the next day to fully body aches that lasted longer than the hangover).

In the end, it all came back to Aurora Lynch. He'd loved her beautiful golden hair. He'd loved it so much that when he dreamed his brother, he gave it to him. And in these dreams, he wished he could say it was he noticed first but he couldn't give it that honor. That went to the blood, the glimpses of crushed bone, the crunch of a vertebrae beneath his hand.

No, Ronan didn't dream of his mother. He dreamed of what used to be his mother. Then, he'd touched her broken body out of instinct. He did the same now, replaying the moment in this dream.

"Mom?"

His thoughts went back to the first object he'd brought back-- the first he remembered, in any case-- a flower. Something living to banish this from his mind. But it twisted, as it always did, and the stalks burst through his mother's corpse. Petals bloomed, their beauty tainted by spirals of blood.

Ronan woke. He stared down at himself, an invisible presence hovering over his body. He couldn't move but he felt the flowers in his hands. Worse, he saw that they weren't just covered in blood; they were bleeding.

Shit.

It felt a century before he returned to his body and only a half century extra before he could move his pinky. Then he jolted out of bed. Blood trickled down his fingers.

Jesus, why couldn't he dream of daffodils?

Ronan could be quiet if he needed to. Counting on that skill to overcome his rattled nerves and tremor in his hand, he slipped out of bed. Time to dispose of the evidence.

Comments

[somnioergosum]

With his back to Ivar, Ronan's tattoo should have been visible. But in the dark, his entire back just looked like a jumbled mess of black. The ravens, trees, and a myriad of other shapes just weren't distinct enough. The lighting was enough to make out only hints of it. Unlike Ivar's eyes, they didn't shine.

Against Ronan's best efforts, he felt something like sympathy for this guy. At least growing up, Ronan hadn't looked different. Acted different? Yeah. But he had the opportunity to make a good first impression. It was his choice to waste it. Not that Ivar was doing a good job at putting Ronan at ease with what opportunities he did have. Sympathy or not, the jury in Ronan's mind still wasn't leaning toward a favorable verdict.

"Yeah, that'd throw people off." He turned his head so it was in profile to Ivar and pointed two fingers at his own eyes. "It's cool you don't need contacts for that." Oh right, Viking. "Those are things you put in your eye. They can change its color or make you see better, if your eyesight's shit."

[ragnarsson]

Ivar could see only a little of the tattoo covering Ronan's back. It was extensive, much bigger than the tattoos he was used to seeing on other Vikings. He wondered what it would look like on the light of day. Night tended to hide people, but as proven by that bleeding flower, it could also reveal a lot about them.

Sticking things in someone's eye just sounded painful, so he'd have to take Ronan's word for it. "I got them from my father." Ragnar had the same icy blue shade as his son, something people had definitely first noticed about him, since he wasn't a very physically tall man. "He's dead now." It was all Ivar had to remember him by. His eyes and the few precious memories that he'd been able to form.

He wondered if Ronan was able to sympathize. It was hard to see past the prickly exterior. But then Ivar himself was known for using his anger and the chip on his shoulder to keep people at arm's length. It was easier not to get hurt that way.

[somnioergosum]

Ronan looked away quickly so all that was visible of head was its back. His shoulders went tense and he exhaled, as one would after taking a drag on a cigarette, though Ronan had never indulged.

"Mine too," he said in a detached tone.

His eyes weren't ice blue like Ivar's. There was no abnormality. But they were blue and, like Niall Lynch's, they burned. The last time Ronan had seen his father's eyes, they were probably spattered on the floor with the rest of his face.

Why didn't he dream of that anymore?

"What a fucked up pair of orphans we are." This time when he spoke it was darker, a cross between bitter and sneering at his own self-pity, as if his own disdain for the emotiona made it any more acceptable.

[ragnarsson]

Ronan carried himself like a coiled wire that had been stretched too tight. Ivar wondered what would happen if it ever snapped. The mention of orphans by him got Ivar to snicker. "Well said." Ivar had never allowed himself to wallow in grief. Anger is what had sustained him all his life, so he'd merely turned the slow-burning feeling towards making things right.

"Someday, I'm going back home, and getting my revenge on their murderers." England first, to deal with the king that had supposedly been his father's friend, only to stab him in the back. Then back home to Kattegat to take care of Lagertha, his father Ragnar's first wife, who had shot his mother dead just for ambition.

[somnioergosum]

Ronan reached the door to outside. He paused, both to try and determine if someone was outside and to collect his thoughts. The more awake he got, the more aware of how fucked up this plan was and, consequently, how fucked over he was. But he had thoughts of revenge to comfort himself in, ugly as the process had been.

"If people tell you it's overrated? Don't believe them." Ronan wiped his hands on his pants again, trying to get the last of the blood off before opening the door. The night's chill didn't hurt but it hit his overexposed body hard enough that he shivered.

[ragnarsson]

"Never did believe it. Getting revenge on one of my father's murderers was one of the most satisfying moments of my entire life." He felt the gust of air as Ronan opened up the door, but it didn't seem to affect him. Norway had six months of winter out of the year.

He didn't follow Ronan outside. Frankly, Ivar wasn't sure he wanted to know what Ronan was going to have to do to dispose of such a flower. This had been one of the strangest nights the Viking had ever experienced. As he went back up to the fifth floor, the one thing he kept remembering was the way Ronan's back had looked, muscles all tensed up and with a tattoo that he couldn't quite decipher.