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"Fucking - hell - there you are!" Hennessy called. She was bruised and bloodied and really hated this fucking forest. She'd been right the first time, anything that was not Ronan Lynch was treated with a borderline fatal lack of concern.
Which was how she'd known he'd be here.
No sign of his weird little satyr girl, or his raven, but there he was - Ronan Lynch.
He lay pretty as you please in a field of long grass - golden wheat and blood red and dying brown. Staring at the ever shifting sky. If not for the way his eyes tracked the clouds, she might have thought he was asleep. Hennessy wasn't sure anything could sleep in a dream-world, but being fair, she'd never tried.
"Hey," he said, like nothing.
"Hey? That's all?" She put her hands on her hips.
A weak slip of a smile stole across his face, thin lips cracking. "You look like shit."
Huffing, Hennessy tapped her boot, refraining from kicking him only just. "Yeah, well. My sister clocked me one for almost ending her and your boyfriend is a terror. Come on."
Ronan's silence was worse here, because it was everything. The wind stopped whistling through the grass. The birds Hennessy hadn't noticed were singing, fell quiet. The man before her barely breathed. It wasn't the expectant, challenging silence she was used to from him. It was heavy. It pressed down on her skin and made her feel like she needed to gasp for air. For something to do, she scuffed her heels in the dirt.
"Look - I fucked up. We have to go."
Hennessy had made herself one simple promise - she wouldn't say he'd been right, because he hadn't been, and she wouldn't say they needed him.
When Ronan breathed in, it was like this whole world breathed with him. The ground near shifting under Hennessy's feet. "I can't."
"I don't think you've even tried," she declared, planting her bravado where bravery should be.
Slowly, Ronan shook his head. "I'm here."
"Yeah. Like I knew you would be. It's the one place I knew-"
"No." He didn't sound angry.
God - suddenly she wanted him to be angry so badly. She wanted the Ronan Lynch who showed teeth. Who showed off.
"You killed the dreams,"
"I fucked up." Hennessy hated repeating herself.
"And I didn't wake up."
The third repetition died on her tongue. "What?” She floundered. They had discovered, dreaming with Bryde, that piece of shite, that dreaming things felt different than going places. Not more or less real, but different. Dreaming of a forest felt different than going to a forest. “But you're here…" And he felt -
"I was dreaming when you killed the line, remember?"
God help her - she did. "Where's your body?"
Shrugging was, evidently, too much movement for his depressed, corpse-like arse because he pursed his chapped, bleeding lips instead. A shrug without shrugging. "Connecticut, I think. Might be gone by now. Scavengers."
"Are you telling me you're dead?" It was impossible to consider. Impossible. If he was dead, then she killed him. And they won. Ronan Lynch was dead and she would have to face the crowd of people all badgering her and yelling at her and… she'd have to face the end of the world, alone.
"Who's dream do you think I am?"
Hennessy didn't follow. "C'mon man. Stop taking the piss. You exist. We just have to find a way to bring you back out. I bet between your brother and boyfriend - and wouldn't I like to be the middle of that sandwich,"
Nothing.
"Even though they have been sniping for the last week. Did you know they're basically carbon copies? Weird. It would be like if I'd wanted to date one of my girls."
Nothing.
"You're a person." Hennessy kicked him. He didn't flinch. Barely moved. "You exist. Now come on."
"Do you think I was made to be like this?”
“Shut up.”
“I wasn't my father's dream. Or my mother's. So - whose dream was I?"
“Mine, I think,” she said it brightly, Hennessy-the-shithead bright. “I was as little as you were with Matthew and I thought ‘Instead of a girl, this time I want a sad-sack of a white boy who will kill any hope I have of fixing the world!’”
But Ronan shook his head again, he wasn’t listening. "I thought I was over this. You bring the monster out of your dreams and you accept it. You don't hate yourself, you never did. You just don't know how to live in a world that wasn't made for you, either. You're drowning. You drown. You die."
It was dream-speech. Half words, half feeling, all floating on the wind and Hennessy shivered with it. She was half sure Ronan didn't mean for her to hear it, but had no defense against it.
Or maybe he should have said it a long time ago and didn't.
Tears pricked at her eyes and she watched, hateful, as they leaked out of the corners of his, too.
"I think I was wrong."
The slow, almost meditative way he spoke was getting to her. It was so unlike any side of Ronan Lynch she was familiar with. Hennessy kicked him again.
He twitched his fingers, like shoo-ing away a fly. "I think you were right."
"What was I right about? And can you come and say that to your adoring public? Come on! You're lips to God's ears, as they say."
Hennessy had to wonder if her desperation was obvious enough that he could pick up on it, even like this.
"I wasn't thinking like a dreamer. I was thinking like a thief. I don't think I knew how to be anything else. I never tried. Maybe I was made like that."
"Oh, fuck that! Get off your sorry arse and help me fix this."
"No."
"What d'you mean, no?"
"I belong here, Hennessy. Ashes and dust. I think… I served my purpose."
"What do you think it was? What was your great purpose? Being a neurotic, insecure head case about your boyfriend? Pushing away everyone who ever cared about you? Throwing away second-third-fourth chances because fuck it! Who cares?"
At some point, she began yelling.
"You're not special, Ronan Lynch!"
Hennessy said that, while standing in an otherworldly forest he'd brought through from another place of existence. A forest which loved him.
"Look. You can dream yourself a new body."
He dreamed people - how could it be any different. That is what they did. They made impossible things. They were impossible things.
"If I replace every single part of myself, am I really the same person?"
It was only because she was looking for it that she saw the fine lines that began to sink in and around his eyes and mouth. Then his hair started to grow, wild black curls that at first made him look like Declan and then grew past where he kept it and began to gray at the temples. With a croaking laugh, Ronan reached up and pushed the curls off his forehead, away from his scalp and Hennessy wrinkled her nose in horrified disgust as they fell away, revealing the shorn head she knew.
"I think the worst part is… Declan always hated how much like dad I was. That's why he hated me. He knew I was just a copy. He knew, right? Copies making copies."
“Ronan. Lynch.” Finally, she touched him, knelt in the dirt which was not dirt in grass that was not grass, she grabbed his face and made him meet her eyes. Finally, she said the thing she came here to say, the thing she would rather bite her tongue in half than say because it was simple and true. “Come with me. Don’t let me be the only one.”
When his hands came up to cradle her face in return, they were scared and weathered. Pale skin stretched over knobby and swollen joints. “How long did it take you to find me?”
As though time had meaning in this place. Hennessy almost scoffed. But she did know. Somehow. “I asked for you. Maybe half an hour?”
He nodded, “Do you know the way home?”
She did.
“I can give you fifteen minutes, no more.”
“What? No. You have to come with me. You don’t know what it’s like out there.” The desperation was creeping back into her voice, tight and high and Hennessy hated it. She hated sounding like that. She hated sounding like Jay.
The Ronan she knew, the Ronan everyone was waiting for would have flung that back at her. ‘Whose fault is that, I wonder?’
This Ronan, decaying before her eyes, crumbling away to dust off of bone that looked ancient, said “Take care of them, Greywaren.”
And then it was just her. Just Hennessy, left with old bones in a dying field. The dreamworld around her beginning to crumble.
“Coward!” She screamed it, sobbed it, panted it, running through a path her feet knew while her head was still stuck on the lack of Ronan anywhere she looked. “You fucking coward.” Hennessy burst through the trees and back into the world just as she felt the forest world turn on her like a hive sensing an invader.
Even when the transition from dream to real came with the burn of the lace or fucking dry drowning, it had never felt like this. Stumbling out of Lindenmere felt like running face first into a wall. Hennessy fell over her feet, swearing, and rolled to a stop by Jordan's feet.
"Well?"
She didn't know who spoke first, couldn't tell the distant, expectant voices of Declan Lynch and Adam Parrish apart at first. In response, she spat a mouthful of dirt in their general direction. Feeling shaky and vulnerable, Hennessy handled the hope on her sister's face and the heavy expectation of the rest of the crowd as well as she ever did.
"What the fuck did you do to him?"
"Excuse me?" Declan's already perfect posture became stiff as a board.
"Heloise," Jordan tried but Hennessy was having none of it. How could she? A sentient forest just tried to rip her to pieces as it hid the man who saved her life from her after she fucking damned him.
"Don't you fucking Heloise me!" Hennessy managed to stagger to her feet. "Did you know?"
"Know. What?"
"Did you know he was just a dream?"
She may as well have stabbed him. She'd never understood the expression 'lost all colour' when it applied to white people until this moment, when Declan Lynch's face washed out, going slack as he swayed in place.
"God. I cannot believe he was right. You were the only real person in your family and you hated that, didn't you Declo? Is that why you hate him?"
His mouth moved, it said 'I don't,' but didn't say any more.
"What the fuck is a Greywaren, anyway?" She was aware she was shouting just as she was aware of the there-but-not boundary of the dreamed forest behind her. Was and was not. Aware but didn't care.
"What did he say, exactly."
No amount of dreaming with Ronan had prepared her for Adam Parrish. His thoughts/feelings/hopes were saccharine, worshipful, obsessive. The picture she'd seen had been normal. Depressingly normal. He'd complained that she'd seen it but on some level, had wanted her to see it. Wanted to share that with her. Hennessy had seen a lot of herself reflected in Ronan Lynch, and that part was no different. They were both so embarrassed of the mere existence of their hearts.
Adam Parrish that existed in reality was... God he was weird. He was cold, and sharp and...It was like he was pulling her apart whenever he looked at her.
"He called me Greywaren, and then his fucking nightmare forest tried to eat me."
"No," Adam said, "What were the exact words? Ronan doesn't lie -"
"Yes he does." Hennessy said automatically.
"No," Adam said again, in the same educational tone. "Ronan talks around the truth, Ronan hides things even from himself, Ronan deflects. Ronan doesn't lie. He wouldn't have lied to you."
"Yeah well he wasn't exactly himself, was he?"
"Adam," Finally, one of Ronan's other friends spoke up. And wasn't that novel, Ronan Lynch had friends. The speaker was Mr. Future Investment Bankers of America. The man who made something under Hennessy's skin crawl.
The calm look on Adam’s face melted away like it’d never been there, and Hennessy realized she wasn’t the only one holding on by the skin of her teeth. "No, Gansey.” He snapped, “I've been patient,"
"Oh, you have not," scoffed the tiny girl next to Mr. Of America. Standing a full head shorter than Adam, spiky hair and all, she still somehow managed to look down at him. When she turned her eyes toward Hennessy, big and brown and dripping with sympathy, Hennessy flinched before she even started. “Are you okay?”
What kind of -? “No!” The hysterical laughter burst from her without a second thought. “No, absolutely not, are you mental?” The words tumbled out without any sort of censure. One she started, she couldn’t stop. “All I wanted, all I have ever wanted, is not to end the fucking world. I wanted to create, I wanted to live and maybe, fuck, do something other than survive! Be normal! Only, hey! Turns out the world needs magic to turn, so I fucking doomed it anyway, and now the only person who can possibly help me is the man who I screwed over so badly he’s completely given up on life. And, oh, I might have killed him! Only we’re not really sure, are we? How can we be sure, when he’s a dream person, trapped in a dream place, and-”
“That’s enough.”
The words rang through her, vibrating off her very bones.
“Everyone, calm down.”
It was like the hysteria drained away without her consent, leaving only an exhausted kind of relief. “What the fuck,” Hennessy whispered.
Beside her, Jordan shivered, and despite her still aching cheek and recent misgivings, Hennessy was helpless but to reach for her. She noticed too late Declan also reaching but there wasn’t enough of any resentment or anger left in her to snarl at him the way he deserved. Instead, they both took one of Jordan’s hands and held on, as through for dear life.
Mr. Of America looked like he was posing for a JCrew ad, leaning casually against the hood of a burnt orange 70s camaro in a crisp polo. One arm wrapped around his chest and the other cupping his own chin as if in deep thought. Christ. How the fuck was this man a friend of Ronan’s? He looked like he wanted to sell her a timeshare. He looked like he was heading to a young republican rally. He looked like he belonged on some college campus somewhere, playing hacky sack and reading intro philosophy texts. “What did you mean when you said he’s given up?”
Jordan squeezed her hand. Hennessy took a deep, shuddering breath.
“I mean - that’s not Ronan, is it? He wasn’t at all angry with me. Didn’t insult me once, no jokes of any kind. And,” she hesitated, not quite sure how much of his dirty laundry she wanted to air. But, fuck it. The world was ending. Hennessy looked at Adam. “He didn’t mention you, not once. Which - I don’t know if you know this or not, but he’s fucking arse over tits for you. Dude’s obsessed.”
Judging by the small, unhappy smile that twisted his thin lips, she thought he might have known.
Mr. America nodded, seriously. “We have to consider the possibility that Lindenmere may have been baiting you. Or else, that his consciousness has merged with that of Lindenmere. If he is a dream, he could feel accepted there in a way he never did.”
“Bullshit,” Declan spoke for the first time. “Ronan knows he is loved. Ronan knows how much you all love him. His family loves him.”
“Are love and acceptance the same thing?”
Declan didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“Well, now what?”
She heard Declan take a deep breath, felt Jordan sway between them, torn between who to support and choosing them both. “Gansey,” Hennesy couldn’t help but think this was the first time she’d ever heard Declan sound…bare. Honest. “What do you need?”
“I think,” Mall of America Man said slowly, “I think I can talk to it. But we’re going to need a dreamer,” he nodded to Hennessy, “and a Magician,” Adam rolled his shoulders, and Hennessy wondered, not for the first time, exactly what he was. “And some energy. Jane, will you?”
The short girl did not look like a Jane, but she grinned like she was. “Between you and me and I think we have that covered. Should we wait for Henry?”
Gansey grimaced. “If our goal is to draw Ronan out of the forest, having Henry here might be counterproductive, as much as I miss him. Besides, I think checking on his mother and her contacts is the best use of his considerable talents, at the moment.”
“If we’re getting rid of people Ronan hates, me and Declo may as well fuck off,” Hennessy laughed, meanly.
Surprising her, Adam said, “He doesn’t hate you.” He didn’t specify who he meant, because it was meant for both of them. “If he really hated you, he wouldn’t try so hard.”
“To what?” Declan spat.
Adam shrugged, and went back to what he’d been doing, drawing lines and symbols in the dirt outside the border. “Anyone have a spare sacrifice?”
Hennessy couldn’t figure out if he was joking, and from the looks he got, no one else could either.
“Anyone have a match?” Hennessy jeered and for the first time since meeting him, the smile that stretched across his face comforted her in its Ronan-like savagery.