[for ronan]

[formicine]

It takes Blue a while to get to Cabeswater, and walking that length of time eases some of the frustration and second-hand hurt she's feeling under her skin. There's something about being alone outside that, when she isn't just getting herself home after a long day at work, eases the tension in her muscles and settles her thoughts.

She's angry with him: angry for him hurting Adam so badly, frustrated that he's sullenly avoiding everyone, that he can't see what he's doing. But she also has an idea of Ronan, and she's not going to let him build up his walls and drop out of their lives more and more, not without saying something.

"Ronan?" she calls, feeling the slightly weird shift as she steps across where the woodsy areas of Darrow end and the sentient forest begins. She can hear the leaves rustle; they always seem to be talking, to her, even when they're not.

"You know where he is, don't you?" she addresses the trees, grumbly, and not really expecting anything from them.

The cool air warms, a little, as she goes further in, peering around.

Comments

[thedreamthief]

Ronan watches Blue carefully as she wrings out her dress, wonders what Gansey or Adam would think to see her like this, if they'd find it as appealing as Ronan would find Adam soaked to the bone in only a single clingy shirt and jeans.

She holds out the guitar to him and Ronan eyes it skeptically. "Why? You wanna keep it for something?"

Before she can answer, though, he takes it, grabbing it by the dented body, smoothing a hand over the splintered wood. "I could just dream up a new one," he tells her, but he's holding this one possessively. Protectively. "A better one."

[formicine]

Blue's a little glad she didn't wear something sheerer today, and a little annoyed, pragmatically, that it's Ronan she's with and not a member of her family, because she'd be stripping down to her underwear if she were at home and had gotten caught in the rain. After a minute she settles on taking off her boots. The ground's dry with a thought, but it's still cool.

"I like it," she says belatedly, stubbornly, watching him run his fingers over the wood. "There was nothing wrong with this one." Her brow furrows. She can feel how stupid it all sounds, but she feels defensive and cross about it. "Anyway, I didn't ask you if you could dream up a new one, I asked if you can fix it."

"At very least, you owe me a song after all that rain," she adds after a moment, expression softening.

[thedreamthief]

There's a metaphor here, Ronan knows, and he isn't if he appreciates it.

But there's something in her tone that almost sounds like a challenge and Ronan's never been one to back down from that. So, glaring at her, he pulls in a breath and forces himself to focus. He's not as good at this as he is actually dreaming, not as good as Kavinsky, though he never comes away with his fingers dripping in black.

There's a tug in his chest, in his gut and he breathes through it, finds what he's looking for, and... asks.

When he opens his eyes, the guitar is as whole as when Blue had first arrived and there's an inlay of blue and green twining ivy around the sound hole.

"You're not getting a song," he says, but he holds out the guitar, offering. "Do you play?"

[formicine]

Ronan looks at her as though doing what she's asked is a triumph somehow, over the obstacle she's made of herself. She finds herself holding her breath a little as he closes his eyes, unsure if she's trying to hope the guitar better with him or just waiting with her challenge.

Blue doesn't know what she's expecting to happen, if she thinks she's going to see some gradual change or healing but that's not exactly how it happens. It's not something she watches happen. Instead, between one breath and another, there's a whole guitar in Ronan's hands -- the same guitar, only whole and with a new shiny inlay. The other one doesn't disappear, it just isn't, like this one is.

She blinks at it.

Blue reaches to take it, her hands small next to Ronan's. "Not ...well. Jimi does, though." She sits down with it anyway and curls her hand into an "A", one-two-three across the second fret and strums her thumb across it. "Put it on the list of things I'll do one day, I guess," she says with a little wryness, picking the chord apart, one string at a time.

[thedreamthief]

Taking the guitar from him, Blue trums an A chord and Ronan's pleased to find he'd managed to make it tuned this time, at least. The note hangs in the air for a moment before drifting into silence before she starts picking, soft and slow.

"This place gives you nothing but time," Ronan points out with a shrug. "Why wait?"

He realizes, belatedly, that they've both calmed the hell down, as though Cabeswater's parting storm clouds took the mood with it. Not entirely, though. There's still an itch under Ronan's skin and there's still a sharpness in Blue's eyes. This isn't a truce, not exactly.

Still, it's a little too close to one so Ronan smirks. "Maybe you could write Gansey a love song."

[formicine]

Blue had been a little bitter, grouping guitar in with the things she'll never do someday: be a cultural anthropologist, backpack through Poland, save her mother, meet her father or decide she doesn't care, not go to prom, kiss Gansey, make up her own future stubbornly.

But guitar is far from one of those things.

Blue can't just admit that Ronan's right though, so she says "is that an offer?" with an arched eyebrow.

She hasn't quite forgiven him, but she understands it. That might be worse, in a way, but a less angry one. She takes a second to press down on random notes, frowning as she picks at the strings. They sound a little dull under unpracticed fingers.

Ronan's smirk is sudden and sharp and she flushes, scowling. "You're not supposed to know about that," she protests. It's sort of nice, though, that it's coming up like this, and not in a fit of jealousy.

"It'd have to have a verse in Welsh," she jokes, tucking at her hair. "Or I don't have a shot."

[thedreamthief]

"There's a lot of shit I'm not supposed to know about," Ronan points, a swell of bitterness overriding the calm. He's spent the past five or six months being told stories about himself, struggling to catch up, to be the Ronan his friends and Blue remember and failing at every step. He's not supposed to know what Kavinsky did, he's not supposed to know Kavinsky's dead, he's not supposed to know Maura's gone or that Parrish won his case.

But he does. He didn't live a fucking minute of it, but he knows it's true. At least for some other Ronan out there.

He scowls a little as she plucks at the strings, but the heat in it is already starting to fade as he drops to the log he'd been sitting on before, legs tucked up close. "You and Dick aren't exactly fucking subtle. There a reason you're trying to be?"

[formicine]

Blue tips her head at that, because she thinks he's not referring to the same sort of shit she means. Other-Ronan didn't know about them, either, because it's the sort of thing they're not supposed to be making obvious.

She's a little pink, looking down at the guitar as if she can figure it out by staring at it. "It started right after I broke up with Adam," she says, and makes a face because she doesn't feel like she broke up with Adam; he didn't really break up with her, but she's not sure the whole thing didn't collapse, maybe never existed at all. It just stopped being, slowly and all at once. Like Noah, or the broken guitar.

"We didn't want to hurt him," she says, and even that sounds stupid. "Or you --" She glances up. That doesn't sound stupid, it sounds awful, because it bares an inevitable truth: that Ronan is possessive of everyone. He has to know that about himself, though.

"I don't know why we keep doing it," she admits. "Gansey doesn't think he gets to have favorites," she shrugs one shoulder. "And there's not -- I'm not sure what we're doing," she admits to her fingers on the strings. "I don't think there's any way this ends well. But --" She hits each of the two E strings, an octave fit together in an oh-well.