middleofsomewhere | Memory Cave

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Memory Cave

After the passengers see a glimpse of a life that is not their own they appear in a cave. It is light, a strange moss glowing on the walls and ceiling illuminates the cave nicely and it is large enough for them to pace around in without trouble.

They are not alone. In the cave with them is another voidtrecker. Maybe someone they know well, maybe someone they have only seen in the aisles of the train. But they are together in this cave together.

The cave has no exit, at least not yet. They know that it will, eventually. When the time is right.

But for that time to come, they first must talk...

(OOC: For reference: memories!)

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Time is a hazy concept in Henrietta, in Cabeswater, so Ronan does know for a moment. It was summer - maybe? Had it been summer, or did Cabeswater just think it was summer in the memories surrounding that one? No, it was summer. He hadn't dropped out of school yet, because senior year hadn't started, so Ronan could say with some confidence:

"About a year ago." A little over, technically, since it was just his birthday, but there wasn't any point in being too exact about it. "Greenmantle hasn't been a problem for a while now."

Adam's plan had taken care of that. Adam had asked Ronan for the impossible and Ronan was so irrevocably in love with Adam that he couldn't refuse him even though it went against every fiber of Ronan's being to dream lies. Maybe that was the connection? They'd both been battling someone, but no. If he'd been waiting for a message, then that memory would have been more recent. He only learned to respond to texts when Adam went away to Harvard. Even then he still usually called Adam instead of texting back. It couldn't have been about Greenmantle at all.

Well, no connection there, so what else? A screen, goofing around with a friend. Events which mean nothing to Tidus, and if time didn't even connect their visions... not even the real, actual present time would. That was all more than two or three years ago now, Spira's history. What did Yunalesca mean anymore?

With thinking getting them nowhere, Tidus sighs, and starts to slowly walk the misshapen circle of the room, more almond-shaped. Grooping a hand to the walls, feeling out for--something. Anything.

"It hasn't been on my mind," he says, a reason to cross out, but Tidus is starting to doubt the visions meaning anything. "Maybe this is...a trap? Some kind of trick..."

He's mumbling, unsure--simply searching for anything that'll help them get out of this weird space.

«What do you want,» Ronan asks the dream in pointed Latin, because that's what he always does. It never seems to work as well here, but he's grasping at straws. «I don't understand.»

The dream just repeats that the way out will appear when the time is right. It doesn't budge at his pushing and that's more frustrating than anything, because he's used to being the most powerful person in the room at any given moment. It's because Chainsaw isn't here to focus what he's doing, he supposes. That and the fact that this isn't Ronan's dream.

It isn't his -

"Fuck," Ronan says suddenly, "it's because I'm a dreamer and you're a dream. Memory? I don't know if there's a difference, where you're from."

Tidus's fumbling stops on the word dream, feet turning him back around a second later, his twitching mouth undecided on how to respond--if to respond. His annoyance was already starting to grow (turns out, he's not great at unravelling puzzles), but hearing that out loud is a topic he isn't here to address.

"So what? I know what you can do." He says it more to the cavern, whoever or whatever it is that's causing this, a new frustrated edge spoke with. "What did what I see have to do with any of that? Yunalesca didn't. She just made the Fayth for the Final Aeon." He waves out a hand.

"She had nothing to do with--that. Me," he adds, if a few heavy seconds later.

"This isn't my dream. I didn't do this." The words are carefully enunciated, Ronan dropping most of his accent to make sure what's his saying is as clear as possible. "Something higher than me is controlling the dream, but we're supposed to figure out something before it lets us go."

I don't want to play this game, Ronan tells the dream and gets silence in return. He breathes out, slowly and tries not to be angry. Ronan doesn't have to be angry all the time anymore. He doesn't, but he's angry that forces he can't see are making him dance like a puppet for their amusement.

Anger isn't productive, though. Ronan's learned that in the space between yelling at Adam in the aftermath of dreaming lies and sitting in this cave. This isn't Tidus' fault. It's not his fault either, and apparently the only way out is to solve the riddle before them.

"You killed your father," Ronan says. It's even, but blunt. "Mine was murdered by Greenmantle. Reality is a state of mind for both of us. Where does that leave us?"

"I know this isn't you," Tidus says, pausing that growing heat in him, looking back over to Ronan to ensure him. It's not him he's getting frustrated at, doesn't want to accidentally direction his anger at. "I get it."

He speaks it after Ronan makes it clear, not looking to point fingers, on purpose or otherwise. Figures then that he needs to try and not let his emotions get the better of him--which, good luck with that. Tidus breathes in, a look about the cavern, as useless as all the last times he does it.

You killed your father.

Four words pluck out the heat. It plucks out all the rest too, and Tidus doesn't turn back to Ronan. He doesn't ask how. He doesn't think of why. It's a game of guessing that he doesn't want to play as the realisation sinks in what Ronan must have saw. His old man... turned into the Final Aeon, holding what was left of him after.

What they had to do. What his old man wanted them to do.

He says nothing.

You didn't have to put it like that, the voice in Ronan's head that sounds like different people depending on the day says. Today it sounds like Noah, like the ghost of something Ronan's forgotten, and that's probably symbolism. He knows. People have never been his strong suit.

"Sorry," Ronan says after a moment. The words are quiet, his father's Irish accent bleeding through. "I shouldn't have said it like that."

He doesn't make excuses for himself, but there aren't any. Once, Ronan and Matthew were like twins in their outlook on life. Then their father died and Matthew got to keep his sunny smile, because Matthew didn't know how to do anything but smile, and Ronan took the grief for them both. Everything about him sharpened, although he's never been sure whether that was to protect himself or make sure that everyone around him was fucked up too.

"I have a brother like you." Ronan doesn't know if that's part of the riddle or not, but it seems relevant. He thinks of the sun glinting off Matthew's perfect blonde curls and his easy-going smile. Is that a thing all living dreamthings have in common? An easy-going nature and bright, golden hair? "His name is Matthew."

I don't want to hear you say anything, Matthew had said to him on his birthday, still and lifeless like one of the cows at the Barns, because now I know you're as big a liar as Declan.

"I should have told him, but Declan didn't want to. I don't even remember dreaming him." He was three, according to Declan. The fact that everything Matthew is orients itself toward Ronan is both exactly what he must have dreamed and something that terrifies Ronan. "I just remember wanting a brother who loved me. He told me I was a liar, when he found out, and I think he did it because he doesn't have enough free will to hate me."

In a way, telling Ronan that he was as big of a liar as Declan was worst and Matthew knew it. For all the ways that Ronan could be terrible, the one thing he never did was lie, at least by his own definition. To call him a liar was to call him out on every carefully worded thing he'd ever said, but that wasn't the same thing as hating someone and part of Ronan knew that if there ever was a situation in which Matthew could be convinced to hate someone? It should have been finding out that he was a dreamthing. It should have been having his whole existence shattered instantly.

That Matthew apparently couldn't hate him was worse than what he'd say to Ronan, in the end.

Ronan speaks, but it's his father he imagines for the longest time. Piecing together what he might have seen, but with no urge to ask. You killed your father. That says plenty, but says nothing at all. It doesn't say who his old man was, why they did it. Does it? He remembers that screen, waiting. MANAGEMENT. And here--why was it his father being shown, when what he finally deserved was rest?

But he understands what Ronan is doing. History for history. A personal truth for one back. He got it before, but as blunt as his words were, the wound was fresh enough to let it sink deep. Pushed in now, still, but no one was wielding it.

No. Whoever, whatever was behind this was. A game they had to play.

"My dad became the last aeon." It's spoken low, slow; a voice attempting dissociation and calm, but coming out of the mouth of someone incapable of hiding their heart. "The Final Aeons were used to destroy Sin. But when they did that, the one summoning Sin--it takes over the aeon, the Fayth behind it. You become the next Sin. And the souls of the dead becomes its armour."

A cycle repeating. The spiral of Spira. The laugh in a tragedy.

"They didn't know that. Nobody knew, so that's how we ended up taking down Yunalesca, since people believed in the Final Aeon. She made them into the Fayth. My dad..." His fingers are clenching, tightened into fists. He hasn't turned from the wall. A small silence before he can continue, speaking in the same poor display of detachment. "Sin protected our dream. But as long as Sin was around, it would keep destroying Spira. It did for a thousand years.

"We ended it," he finishes. "The dream. Sin. It's all gone."

Him, his father. Everyone. There was nothing left for him to hide.

"I dreamed a place called Cabeswater, once. An in-between space where I would always be safe, because I was Greywaren." It feels weirder to tell this story, because it's not quite his story. It's Gansey's. "My - Adam, from the memory you saw. He became Cabeswater's eyes and body for a while and it made him a magician. Then, when my friend Gansey died, we asked Cabeswater for something impossible."

Please, he said to Cabeswater as he asked for Gansey's resurrection, amabo te. And Cabeswater had not quite resurrected Gansey so much as reshaped itself to be Gansey.

"The world was being unmade," Ronan says, so acutely aware of the way these stories match up to each other. For Tidus, the problem was the dream. For Ronan, the problem was reality. "Bit by bit a demon was unmaking our entire world, and Gansey died to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice stopped the demon, of course, but then Gansey was dead and what are people meant to do without a king? So we asked Cabeswater to bring him back. We asked, and Cabeswater became Gansey. A true king."

When some people say king, they simply mean a ruler. When Ronan says king, what he actually means is god without magic which is something else entirely. That's not important for the story, though, so he doesn't bother to try and make his words move across languages.

"I'm sorry about your father. And your dream - the hardest part of dreaming is waking up."

Kings don't have a place in Spira. They're concepts important only to people on the train, to those that actually care. Tidus understands the importance, but not really what they mean as Ronan talks about them. The title less meaningful than the weight put behind it, what comes before it. They asked a dream to return a friend, and the dream became them.

It's fantastical, but dreams becoming real--it's not so strange, in the end. Sin protected their reality, but touching Sin made them real, his father and him. If just enough to realise the world around them.

"How is he? Your friend. Gansey." Were they one and the same? What does it mean, for a human to become a living dream? But also: "He's-- connected to you, right? Dreams in your world... they live as long as you live."

So as long as Ronan existed, so did his dreams. So did the people, around him.

"Gansey's not quite my dream. When I made Cabeswater, a dream used me as a conduit to become real." Which is, he thinks, not so different from what's currently happening. "I don't own Cabeswater. It's more accurate to say Cabeswater owns me."

None of that is quite an answer to what Tidus asked, because the answer is that Ronan doesn't know and Ronan doesn't lie, even about things as innocuous as this. Gansey left Henrietta with Blue and Henry after graduation and they text, but that's different than knowing how Gansey is. That wasn't the way Gansey and Ronan's friendship worked before the fall of Glendower and nothing about their relationship fundamentally changed afterward.

"Gansey is connected to me because he's Cabeswater," Ronan says, neatly skipping over the part where Gansey was always Cabeswater and time is like a circle, "but I don't know what happens to him if I die."

It's not his place to pry. He wondered because he was curious, it caught his attention, but Tidus realises the question isn't really answered fully, if intentionally or otherwise. This world or whatever may want to dig, but at most, Tidus just wants something familiar. As close as it can get.

It's why he says nothing himself about it when he could: about becoming real from a dream. Able to interact with the world outside Zanarkand, but in the end--in the end, still a dream to his core. Even then, still as lost as everyone else.

Ronan may already understand, but there's no reason to cement it. Death is unavoidable, life is stupid complicate--but nobody needs more reason to worry. To fear.

"Us--from Zanarkand," Tidus starts instead, a desire to be clear at least about one thing, "it was based on a city the Fayth remembered, but we-- we were real. We were dreams, but-- I don't know anything about the Zanarkand that used to exist. I'm just...me. I had a family. I wasn't anyone else but me."

Not a memory--just a hope to let a place cherished live on, even if it was tucked away, hidden from the rest of the world. But the people there lived too, and it was just a memory, an exhibition.

He has to at least make sure that's known, for them. The people now gone.

"Of course you were." Ronan sounds confused, because reality is not an external condition for him. Of course a dream would be real: it wouldn't be a dream if it wasn't. "Chainsaw isn't any less a raven because I dreamt her."

It's the first time he's told someone directly that Chainsaw is not, in fact, a "real" raven that he's hand-reared for some reason. He assumes Tidus would know she isn't, even though there's really no reason that he would. She gives off a faint, unnerving magic but it doesn't necessarily point to her being a dreamthing. She's also something like a familiar, which is what Ronan has told some people when asked about her more unnatural qualities, and there's enough of those in other words that most people don't ask more questions.

A familiar isn't quite the same as a psychopomp, but Chainsaw has functioned like both: a grounding tool for Adam's scrying and a guide for Ronan's dreaming. It would be better and easier to dream if Opal were present too, but Ronan supposes that Opal is enough her own that she would have to come onto the train under her own power.

"I just mean, I'm not a memory," Tidus explains, note low, but not quite sheepish. "They made Zanarkand from their memories, but after that... I'm pretty sure there wasn't another Tidus a thousand years ago."

It's the closest thing that comes to humour from him since all this, but it's soft, the actual desire to joke not present. Tidus hadn't known about Chainsaw, ad notes it, even if he doesn't comment on it. For him, a dream isn't supposed to know it's a dream--not dreams like him anyway. And dreams (or dreamers) walking around isn't a concept anyone knows to care or be concerned about in Spira. Not like Ronan's home.

Ah. Ronan had almost forgotten he asked whether there was a difference between dreams and memory, where Tidus is from. Apparently there is, and isn't that funny? Memories are nothing but dreams with more power, in Ronan's experience. What are Cabeswater or Lindenmere but memories? Things that are older than time, maybe, taking shape in the form that Ronan knew best: forests.

It is not yet time, the dream says to him, and Ronan breathes out. There's something to come to terms with here, maybe. Tidus admits that he's a dreamthing and implies that he found whatever it is that Ronan desperately wants: a way for dreamthings to wake up even when their Dreamer is dead. If the context was different, Ronan would demand to know what he did. Here, it's not worth asking because the answer is that Ronan won't be able to replicate it. He's learned, from some of the things that have happened, that it's the train's doing.

What is there for Ronan to admit, though? He's been Greywaren for long enough to wear it like a second skin. Tidus already knew that anyway. There's nothing much in the difference between their fathers: Niall a perfect and untouchable thing until he'd been dead on the driveway and a man called Jecht who Tidus desperately wanted to be proud of him. What is there but - oh. He supposes the last piece of context is, maybe, Adam.

"The clock I dreamed when you asked. It keeps track of when I last spoke to Adam." There's something left in the gaps of this non sequitur that Ronan doesn't quite know how to bridge for Tidus. Absently, he rubs at his nose and his fingers come away black. "Fuck. I don't know what you want! Adam is my second self, I love him the way Achilles loved Patroclus."

He's not quite directing this at Tidus, more at the dream itself as black goo drips from his nose. There's no way to fix the nightwash here, but it would figure that he's incompatible with a dream controlled by someone else.

"Ronan-" Tidus takes a few steps towards him, concern in that name when he sees the smear, the residue on him. Something's happening, he doesn't know what, and he doesn't know if it's this stupid dream or some other problem. No, what else can it be than the dream? And Tidus looks at the ragged walls of the cavern, luminescent, unhelpful, useless.

"I don't need to know his life story," he adds to the open space; wanting to help, but what even is this dream searching for? "You love Adam? I love Yuna--I loved her, I still do. She would have died if Yunalesca got her way. And I never told her I'd go when I always knew--because I didn't want to see her cry. 'Cause I was scared."

He speaks, rambles, taking the declaration of love and going with it too, searching in his own history some way of helping Ronan, if that's even the key. A force in those last words, an ugly truth. Because I was scared. Because I was a coward. Because I didn't want to die. Because she was the only thing keeping me standing.

"Yuna showed me what being alive was," he says, the words meaning more than their face, not filled with beauty or solely admiration. "In a real world."

The ugly truth of it, but also the will to live on, and to hope for change.

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Memory Cave

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cw: minor body horror

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