mitsubishievo | (no subject)

Ronan could dream all this into place, he knows. There's no need for him to be nailing two pieces of wood together, to be measuring and re-measuring, sawing and nearly busting his thumb repeatedly with a hammer.

But if there's anything Ronan has in this fucking town, it's an abundance of time. And, not that he'll admit it, but he sort of likes having something to do.

He's taking a break for a quick drink when he notices his phone buzzing with a text message, probably either Adam asking if he wants to do lunch or Gansey with some useless fact he'd found buried in some book in the library.

Ronan frowns when he sees that it's actually Kavinsky and he looks over toward the large front doors of Hywel, like he can see the asshole through the murky glass. Grabbing his beer, Ronan tosses his phone aside and stalks toward the door, squinting into the overcast cold at a woman leaning against the Ferrari parked just outside. He barely acknowledges her as he steps further out, looking for Kavinsky and feeling a familiar roil of irritation in his gut at the realization that the shithead is just fucking with him.

Kavinsky watched Ronan come out, and there was the moment, the lack of recognition and the irritation on his face that roiled in Kavinsky's stomach. He'd had that own lack of recognition waking up that way; Newt had had it when he'd walked into the apartment with his key. But with Ronan, this posed a specific problem of how to let him know it was him.

He whistled at him, sharper and shriller than normal. "Hey, Lynch," he snapped. There was no way he could manage anything close to his regular pitch, but it was definitely his regular dismissive tone.

The woman whistles sharply and Ronan turns his attention back to her, scowling. She's regarding him with a familiar look of faint contempt and something prickles under Ronan's skin, a strange sort of knowing.

"The fuck are you?" he asks, noting the Ferrari again, an almost exact replica of the one he and Kavinsky had beat to shit inside Cabeswater months ago. "Where'd you get the car?"

Kavinsky rolled his eyes, moving to sit on the hood of the Ferrari. He didn't blame Ronan's reticence, to him or to the Ferrari. It wasn't as if the Ferrari had been in particularly spectacular condition the last time Ronan had put eyes on it. It wasn't as if Ronan had any reason to not be reticent around him.

"I found it in a dream," he said, flicking around on his phone a bit before tucking it in his pocket. He rifled, for a moment, in his jacket pockets until he came up with a pack of the dream clove cigarettes he liked to anything he could buy in Darrow, for the taste and the smell.

"Quit being a shitheel and let me inside before a freeze to death. I'm a half foot shorter than normal."

It takes a minute for Ronan to fit the pieces together: the familiarity of the girl's mannerisms, the curl of her lip as she slips the phone back into her pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, the car. And it's fucking crazy, Ronan knows it's fucking crazy, but after everything else he's seen of this city, not to mention the shit he's seen in his own fucking dreams, it's the kind of crazy that isn't impossible.

"Holy fuck." It bubbles out of him, a grin spreading across his face that he can't hold back. "Shit, man, who'd you piss off?"

Kavinsky rolled his eyes, ignoring the way that Ronan was smirking at him in favor of lighting his cigarette and opening the passenger side door of the Ferrari to pull out the manila folder with the medical records he'd gotten from Lee.

"That's none of your goddamn business, and also, as I'm currently a goddamn lady, it is doubly none of your goddamn business," Kavinsky said. There was an idea in his head to throw the folder at Ronan's chest--proof that he wasn't bullshitting, that he hadn't been--but it was a thick one, with a lot of papers, and notes, and extra things in there beside the copies Lee had given him.

"Now are you gonna invite me inside or what, fuckweasel?"

"Don't care what's between your legs, shitheel, you're not a fucking lady," Ronan replies with a snort.

Eying the envelope in Kavinsky's hands, he gives it a quick nod, then cocks his head. "That your cancer research?" he says with just enough emphasis on the words to show his clear skepticism even now. "Mr. Magnanimous."

"Suck a whole basket of dicks, you absolute Mick," Kavinsky said with an affected eye roll. He walked toward Ronan, keeping the folder closed until he was close enough to shove it against his chest. He was forceful about it. Even shorter than normal, having lost some of his strength, he hadn't given up any of his force and presence.

"At least you're respecting my pronouns," Kavinsky bemoaned, flapping a hand for a moment before he ruffled his fingers through his hair. Honestly, he couldn't have given less of a shit if Ronan had been a shit about the whole tit thing. It probably would have been in line with their dynamic.

Kavinsky probably would have tried out that whole theory he had going that short women kicked harder because they were closer to Satan thing.

"I've been working on it for like two weeks. Guy's terminal so, like, curing is a pipe dream but hey. I like to dream big."

Ronan's only a little surprised by the force behind Kavinsky's shove, stumbling only half a step and still fighting a smile as he grabs the envelope before it can fall to the ground.

"Fuck your pronouns," he says, but it's half-hearted at best, mostly said before Kavinsky can get the mistaken impression that Ronan respects anything about him at all. He flips open the lid of the envelope, eying Kavinsky briefly, suspiciously, before looking inside.

There isn't much to see without Ronan taking out everything, but he sees a name he doesn't recognize, scrawled words in Kavinsky's handwriting.

"Still having a hard believing this isn't bullshit," he says then, but he's reaching into the envelope to pull out the large sheaf of loose papers. They flap in the breeze and Ronan's tempted, for half a second, to let go and watch them scatter. "What's in it for you? Just the fuckin' thrill of it?"

"It's a project," Kavinsky said, and shrugged a little bit. It wasn't just a dream, either. Aglionby had been challenging in a lot of good ways, advanced science classes and access to the library there which Kavinsky had relished strictly for the ability to hone in on how to make the most effective drugs he could; how to turn a car into a goddamn mystery of physics. Being out of school, being in Darrow, was a strange sort of drifting. Kavinsky had no want to go back to school--not like Newt, who'd never been. But he missed chemistry and biology and physics, and that's all this should have been.

"You can't tell me you haven't been bored fucking shitless in this pisshole of a cage, Lynch," he said, tapping ash off his cigarette. Then, he gestured a little, like he wanted to say something.

He wanted to say a lot of things, actually. For once, he was holding back, a deliberate stop on the vitriol he had roiling in his head constantly. Instead, he settles on, "I still resent your first assumption was I'd only help the guy if I was fucking him."

Ronan arches an eyebrow at that, lip curling into a sneer. In his experience, Kavinsky hasn't ever done a damn thing that didn't in some way benefit himself, including their days spent in a dreaming, drugged-out haze. Ronan doesn't believe for a second that Kavinsky helped guide him through controlling his dreams out of the goodness of his heart. He wanted something from Ronan. Something he'll never have.

But Kavinsky's standing in front of him now and, despite Ronan's better judgment, he can't help but wonder. Kavinsky seems different, and not just because he's several inches shorter and has a softer jawline.

"How the fuck you planning on testing this shit?" he asks finally, flipping through the papers with one finger.

"I hadn't gotten to that part of the plan yet," Kavinsky said, shrugging mildly. He finished his cigarette and stubbed out the butt under the heel of his boot, then stood there a moment, trying to look stoic and stern. A shiver cut through him, ruining the effect.

"Christ, can we go in already? I'll tell you where I'm at, for fuck's sake, but it's fucking freezing out here."

It was a wholly different beast they were working with here, after all. This was not training for the dream-world marathon. This was some sort of bullshit relay where neither of them knew the course yet.

Ronan eyes him again, reluctant still. Adam will pitch a fit if he finds Kavinsky in Hywell. Blue, too.

But neither of them are due back for hours. And he's curious.

"You fuck up anything, I'll kill you," he says, turning to open the door, walking in ahead of Kavinsky and then locking it behind him. Nodding toward two upturned buckets standing in as makeshift sawhorse, he says, "Sit." He reaches over then to smack the loose sheaf of papers against Kavinsky's chest. "And start talking."

Kavinsky stumbled more than Ronan had when he slapped the envelope into his chest, but he took it, sitting down on the upturned bucket and shaking the papers out to spread them out. In amongst the x-rays, blood panels, chemotherapy course treatment plan, and various other medical documents were various photocopies of medical textbooks and handwritten notes in Kavinsky's sprawling, spidery handwriting. At times, he realized now, some of his notes had shifted in Bulgarian in Latin script; at times, he realized, some of them had shifted into Cyrillic.

He carded his fingers into his hair and puffed out a breath. "It's what it says on the tin, at this point. Guy's got cancer. Chemo's going positively, but it's inoperable on an individual tumor basis. I thought, you know, maybe taking him out to the dream place and sort of...hoping for the best? Dream it out of him? That was pretty early on, I gave up on that plan."

He shifted through the papers a little bit, trying to sort out his thoughts, trying to explain where he was at in the process. He'd never had to turn to anyone else before; it felt something like admitting defeat, or weakness, and he hated that. Especially with Ronan Lynch.

"So I was thinking, instead, if it could be something that was more like a specific gene therapy? But administered like the chemo. Like...there's biopsy results in here, I think, so that should give an idea of the complex of what the cancer cells are like?"

He looked up from the papers and at Ronan, trying to feign confidence. It was harder said than done.

Kavinsky staggers a little and Ronan doesn't bother hiding a smirk before he kicks at the bucket opposite bucket and stakes his own seat on top of it. For a moment, he's distracted by the length of Kavinsky's hair and his too-delicate bones. The mannerisms Ronan knows so well are all there, the restless, vibrating energy of him.

It's still fucking weird though, like Kavinsky's possessed the body of an unsuspecting girl against her will, using her as a puppet. Frankly, that's not something Ronan would put past him.

Eventually, Ronan's pulled away from his thoughts by what Kavinsky's actually saying, gaze dropping to the mess of papers as Kavinsky hands them over, scanning through them. It's a mess at first of medical terms and Kavinsky's terrible handwriting; he picks out words written in English and Latin, ignores the ones he either can't read or understand.

After awhile, he looks up at Kavinsky again, eyebrow arched. "Chemo's shit," he says because he knows that much. Then adds, "What about a drug?" even though it feels obvious. "You're good at dreaming those. What about a drug that attacks the cancer, one to either kill it outright or one he has to take forever to kill it every time."

Kavinsky was aware of Ronan's eyes on him, the weight of him looking him over with a heavy scrutiny. Kavinsky did nothing about it. There was nothing to do about it. It didn't matter, really. Ronan was always going to think what he was going to think, was always going to harbor whatever thoughts he was going to.

"Yeah, I thought of that," Kavinsky said with a nod, but sighed a little. He shuffled through the papers rather than looking at Ronan, rather than thinking about whether he was going to act strangely like everyone seemed to be on Valentine's--even he had been. It was a couple days after, nobody had been yesterday, but it was suddenly a worry in the back of his head, with the way that Ronan was staring at him.

"I thought of that already," he said again, more firmly, "but then I worried about mutation rates, immunity. Trauma. Obviously not bodily trauma, like...like dreaming his lungs out and dreaming him a new pair, or something like that."

It isn't an unreasonable worry, Ronan thinks. There are too many unknowns, too many ways in which they could fuck it up, too many ways in which the man's own body could fight the drugs.

Not for the first time, Ronan thinks this is a ridiculous idea. They're not fucking doctors. Dreaming up a dozen cars, even dreaming up animals is a schoolyard trick compared to dreaming up a cure for a fatal disease.

Frowning down at the papers again, Ronan scans through, reading more thoroughly this time. "Skin cancer," he says, largely to himself, trying to work through the mess in his own head. It feels like too big of a puzzle, too massive an undertaking. How the fuck does Kavinsky even think this could be possible?

"Drugs could at least be a start," he says eventually, brow furrowed. "We can dream new ones, new interpretations based on his immunity or potential mutations. He's still going to be monitored by a doctor, right? We can monitor progress that way. Fuck, I don't know, man. What else you got?"

Kavinsky leaned back a little, watching Ronan look through the charts, the notes, all the papers. When Ronan stuck on the drug thing, Kavinsky made a noise of mild protest, but it was weak. With Newt's condition, he was just more acutely aware of the hospital in Darrow, of the fact that, as long as he was here, as long as they were here, that would be a fixture in his and Newt and Al's lives.

Was he willing to have someone live a life like that? Or was just a thing that you started doing in your mid-thirties anyway, something that became apropos to most adults, whether you had cancer or not, and Lee would just have the added benefit of eagle eyes on all his situations.

"Could get things underway, yeah," Kavinsky finally conceded, but it was still reluctant. Finally, softly, he said, "Parrish knows about the dream place. Other people too, here. Because it's really here. What if..."

Kavinsky faltered then, pulling a face at the papers, angry at his own false start and uncertainty.

The mention of Adam sets Ronan instantly on edge, eyebrows raising as that familiar Kavinsky-specific itch under his skin starts to burn. The tone is different than it has been before, there's no hint of a sneer, no shit attempt at an insult that Ronan can see coming.

But it's still more than enough to raise his hackles.

"What?" he says, all skepticism once again. Adam's involvement with Cabeswater goes far deeper than just knowing about it, but Ronan isn't sure how much Kavinsky knows and he sure as hell isn't sharing. "You really think taking him in there and just dreaming him better will work? Do you think we can just ask the fucking trees to fix him?"

If Ronan is honest, he isn't certain it wouldn't work. It would have to be him who asks, though; Cabeswater has made no secret of how much it despises Kavinsky. But at what cost to Cabeswater. Ronan's only heard the stories of what happened back home, of how he and Kavinsky nearly drained Cabeswater dry, of how Adam had to step in and fix it with his bare hands, moving stone and wood and water to make it whole again.

Would that happen again? How much power goes in to saving a person from certain death?

Kavinsky watched Ronan's scrutiny, watched his skepticism, and read it for what it was. There as something there, some piece that Kavinsky still didn't have, that he didn't understand, that explaining how Parrish knew about the dream place and explained how he'd stopped the birds over a month again and explained a lot of things. There was something there, and for once, Ronan was the one with the cards, and Kavinsky didn't blame him for not sharing, but it still rankled.

"What if we didn't dream him better," Kavinsky said. He pulled his lighter out of his pocket, flicked the flame on and let it die; flicked it on and let it die. He stared at the cartoonish art on it and turned it around in his palm. "He doesn't know how we work. The whole thing came up because we were talking about some of the wizards and shit in town, and he knows some of them. So if we just take him out to a magic forest and tell him to dream himself better--if he asks the dream place."

There would still have to be contingencies, because the likelihood of that working were negligible at best. Kavinsky pocketed the lighter, staring at his notes again. "It's stronger here. It's a real place."

Again, it isn't a terrible idea. While Cabeswater tends to bend itself easily to Ronan's requests, whether he be in the forest or not, it doesn't listen to only him. But he and Kavinsky know how to control it where others don't, possibly can't.

That, by itself, could be worth testing.

"What makes you think he'd have better luck than we would?" he says instead, eying the lighter as Kavinsky fiddles with it a second, considering snatching it from his hands before Kavinsky finally slips it back into his pocket. "Just because he's the one asking? Do you think he'd have a fucking clue how to even do it?"

"He knows what he was like when he was healthy," Kavinsky rationalized. It wasn't much to go off of, but it was something, something that had struck him while he'd been thinking over various other ideas.

He huffed a sigh and scrubbed at his scalp a little, frustrated. "If we take him there and just tell him to, I dunno, meditate on it, that could do something. The forest is a fickle fucking bitch sometimes."

It hated him, after all, but it had tolerated him when he brought Newt there, it had taken him back to the hot summer day he'd left and it had let him pick through time and dreams to Aglionby for the birds and to his grandmother's garden outside Sofia for the sunflowers. If Lee was just there, and he knew how he was supposed to feel, maybe--.

"You're right, a drug's probably easier."

"It's as good an idea as anything else," Ronan says, frowning down at the papers again and shaking his head.

He flips through a few more, trying to picture the guy in his mind based on what notes and photographs he has to go off of. If anyone knows this guy's body and what it might take to fix it, it would be the guy himself. Lee, apparently. He's a person with a name and a face and a life. Lee Fallon.

"Lee's been sick for awhile," Ronan says after awhile, his frown deepening. "You think he even remembers how it feels to not be sick anymore? You think he'd have any better luck figuring that shit out than you or me?"

Edited 2016-02-22 17:46 (UTC)

"The guy does, like, yoga and distance running in his spare time while his body is fucking falling apart around him," Kavinsky said, not really a retort but side knowledge that wasn't in the charts, knowledge he had from talking to the guy, from having wine with him and sitting across the table and acknowledging that this was a real person.

If he could just dream Lee new, it would be different. It had been his very first thought. He knew he was capable of it, and Lee was already dying, so it wouldn't be more blood on his hands.

"He's been sick a long time, but I think he knows the ins and outs. He's been in the damn thing long enough."

Ronan doesn't respond to that right away, but he takes it in, idly rifling through the papers in his hands, picking up snatches of notes here and there, messy scrawls about cells and genomes and biopsy reports.

The idea that this guy meditates is what catches, though. Dreaming isn't the same as meditation as far as Ronan understand it, but there's an intrinsic link between the two, an acknowledgment and manipulation of the rested mind. Lee may not be a greywaren, may not have the power he and Kavinsky possess, but he might have some experience other people lack.

"So we take him in and let him try it out," Ronan says eventually, rubbing his fingers along his bottom lip. "Test it first, see if he has any sort of control at all. Train him, maybe."

Kavinsky nodded a little. The dream place minded him a hell of a lot less when he was with others, he'd found, was more subdued and easier to work with and around. Like when he and Ronan had worked the Ferrari over, when he'd brought Newt there and dreamed birds and flower seeds.

The dream place would never treat him the way it treated Ronan, whispering in his ear the way that it did. But now that it was a physical thing, Kavinsky could at least make an attempt at getting it to do what he wanted, from time to time.

"How many tries do we give it before we try something else?" He looked down at the papers, furrowed his brows, cracked his knuckles. "How many tries do we give it before we give up?"

"Like I'm supposed to fucking know?" Ronan replies with a derisive snort.

It hits him then, that he's sitting on the ground floor of Hywel and actually having a pretty civil discussion with fucking Kavinsky of all people. It's a Kavinsky with a different face and a different body and he doesn't know if that's why he feels slightly more inclined to listening to him or not, but it feels bizarrely comfortable all the same.

"How long has he got again?" Ronan asks, reaching for the papers. "Couple months? What if we try it for a few weeks, start shit out small. Like... fuck, I don't know. See if he can dream himself a yoga mat or something."

"Hospice time," Kavinsky confirmed. Six months was a long stretch, probably, but Lee had looked fairly hale and whole when they'd had their little discussion at the end of January, and just as when he'd picked up the paperwork shortly thereafter.

Dying in summer sounded like a miserable way to go out. On the other hand, it had always been Kavinsky's ideal. If there was a time to go, that seemed the way to do it. But his body wasn't chewing itself up from the inside out, or the outside in. He had no room to talk, probably.

"Does he need to dream up a material thing, though? If we're going to have him, I dunno. Focus inward and shit. Wouldn't messing with the forest make more sense? Like, the weather or something? Hell, I can do that without pissing her off too badly. The birds prefer the summer anyway."

He leaned back, rocked on the bucket he was sitting on a few times until it threatened to topple him and he had to scramble to his feet instead. "Shit. Anyway. I dunno, like when I changed the glass into ice and whatever. Yeah--that might be better. Less 'dream something into existence' more 'change something that's already here'. Because he's already there, right? So...if he's changing himself..."

Again, it's not something Ronan had considered. His dreaming has always been exterior -- material things, animals, objects. The idea to create something internally or even alter something internally hasn't ever really occurred.

And there's a part of him that isn't sure if it's even possible.

"You ever try it before?" he asks Kavinsky instead, hiding a smirk when Kavinsky nearly topples backwards off the bucket. Even if Kavinsky doesn't have the same relationship with Cabeswater that Ronan does, he's been doing it for longer, has years of practice on Ronan himself. "Dream a change in yourself. Do you even know if it can be done?"

"Yeah, I gave it a shot," Kavinsky said. The dream place wouldn't change something intrinsic, he knew, but he had tried, for years. He'd tried again, a time and a half, to dream himself right again when he'd woken up like this, but the forest just seemed to laugh at him. Something intrinsic.

"We're not asking him to change who he is. Just fix himself. And if it doesn't work, then it'll be the drugs instead. I should be able to do those."

He stood there, toed at some of the shit scattered around the warehouse floor. He was suddenly, uncomfortably aware again of where he was and the boy he was with and the fact that Parrish might be upstairs. Softly, he scoffed, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

"I should get going."

Ronan frowns down at the papers again, still doubtful. There's a possibility it could work, but there's just as much of a possibility that Lee, not knowing what the fuck he's doing, could accidentally dream away his skin cells entirely or double up the cancer cells. There's no way to test it short of experimenting on themselves, maybe cutting off a finger and dreaming a new one into place.

And Ronan isn't sure he's willing to go quite that far for a complete stranger.

Kavinsky's standing a moment later, awkward as he shoves his hands in his pockets and Ronan arches an eyebrow.

"I'll think on it," he says in reply, organizing the papers back into one neat pile as he stands himself. "You want these back?"

"No, I've got a set. Sorry about the Cyrillic text and the transliterations in the notes, I shoulda translated that before I brought this set over--" Kavinsky waved a hand vaguely, making a face that he was apologizing to Ronan Lynch of all people. After the words were out, there was no way to take them back, but they left a weird taste in the back of his mouth, all unfamiliar.

Darrow was making him soft and unsavory.

"I'll let the guy know we've got some sort of plan, at least. See when he's feeling up for heading out for a little nature retreat. Try it for a few hours the first time around, see if anything sticks. Go from there."

Ronan can feel his eyebrows lifting in slow surprise. Kavinsky seems to realize what he's doing, cutting himself off quick as he flaps one hand.

"I'll figure it out," he says. not bothering to hide a smirk as he gets to his feet. He's always been taller than Kavinsky, but he feels like he towers now, Kavinsky's new body depriving him of a few crucial inches.

Nodding, he tucks the papers under one arm. Says, "Tell him to call you on a day he feels like shit. Headache or upset stomach or something. We could start with that, see if he can dream himself into feeling better."

Kavinsky sneered, just a little at Ronan standing over him like he was supposed to be intimidated by his height or something. They were not so different in height, regularly, though Ronan was broader across the shoulders, and had gotten even more so in Darrow--not that Kavinsky had noticed or wanted to, not that he could see that more with his eyes level at Ronan's chest--

He sneered more, down at his feet, tapped a board with the toe of his boot and nodded. He wasn't threatened by Ronan and his posturing any more than Ronan was threatened by his, any more.

"I'll let you know then."

Despite the unfamiliar face, the curl of Kavinsky's lip is as recognizable as it's always been. Ronan grins in response, glad to have gotten under his skin a little. There's a comfort in it, a reminder that not everything is fucking ass-backward after all.

"Yeah, you do that," he says, nodding toward the door, an invitation for Kavinsky to let himself out. "Good luck getting your dick back."