La Ronde Corvi (The Raven Cycle)
Nov. 7th, 2019 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starfishstarLA RONDE CORVI
Summary:
“We can talk about something else,” Blue offered.
Then Ronan realized “something else” meant: something other than your nightmares.
Or: five ficlets in which each of the gang gets a chance to help one another through past and present traumas.
Characters: Ronan Lynch, Blue Sargent, Adam Parrish, Noah Czerny, Richard Gansey III
Words: 4,500
Read on AO3, or here below.
Notes:
I realized at some point, while rereading The Raven Cycle, how clearly all four of the boys have trauma in their pasts, maybe even literal PTSD. (I don’t know if that was a deliberate authorial choice, to make their backstories align like that, or just because giving characters dramatic backstories is kind of the thing to do!)
Ronan has been having horrific nightmares since he found his dad murdered; he seeks out extremity and danger, where he can have a moment of feeling nothing. Gansey has shaped his whole life around his survivor’s guilt after he was saved on the ley line (and also, when Malory visits, he quite clearly describes a younger Gansey having PTSD flashbacks). Adam’s trauma is the most explicitly described: there’s that scene at the party in Washington where someone jovially slaps the back of Adam’s neck, and in his mind instantly he’s back home, falling down the stairs after his father hits him. And Noah, I mean: he LITERALLY reenacts his death.
So I started thinking about these various characters and their traumas, and ways they might comfort and support each other. I also was thinking it would be fun to write something with all five of them in “la ronde” style – a format borrowed from improv theater, where we have a scene with Characters A and B, then Character B continues into a scene with Character C, and so on until it loops around and the final character has a scene back with Character A. I’ve arranged it so that the characters who interact here are ones who had a little less interaction in canon, as a challenge for myself to figure out what their dynamic might be like.
These five ficlets are set at different times through canon, roughly reverse-chronological (the first four chapters each relate to the events of the books, working backwards, though the final chapter is a bit of a wild card).
The title means “la ronde of the raven”…at least if I was right about the use of the genitive case in Latin!
NOTE: The mentions of danger or violence here are brief and only happen in dreams/flashbacks. But they do include a description of a car accident, and also a brief mention of Adam’s abuse at the hands of his father (as well as of course references to Noah's current state) so please be forewarned if any of that will be upsetting!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I. RONAN (BLUE)
Ronan woke with a gasp like drowning.
He’d been dreaming, of all things, of the crash in the Camaro: the long, empty slide into blackness as the road disappeared but the car hurtled onward into a nighttime of darkness that felt slick and unreal.
But this time, in the dream, it wasn’t Ronan in the car, with the glass shattering, the passenger door crumpling, the seatbelt slamming the breath out of his chest. This time it was his father. And the car crashed
and crashed
and crashed
and every time, Niall hit the windshield and his body shattered into a thousand fragments, just like the glass.
Ronan woke, frozen and helpless like always. The only thing he brought with him was a shard from the windshield, blood trickling where the glass had cut his palm. He dragged air into lungs that still felt bruised from impact.
When he could move again, he turned his head and found Blue standing in the doorway.
She was a compact silhouette of short, pointy hair and large, draping T-shirt, and in the dim light her eyebrows were as spiky and alarmed as her hair. She looked embarrassed, but defiant, to have been caught looking at him.
She said, “You shouted.”
“Maggot,” Ronan said, but it came out breathy and quavering, more like a question than any kind of declaration of strength.
And it clearly wasn’t very threatening, because Blue didn’t bother to answer, just made her eyebrows even pointier.
Ronan tried again. “What are you doing here?” This time his voice sounded like itself.
“Oh, just.” Blue said. “Whatever.”
Which meant she was here staying overnight with Gansey, and was embarrassed to say so. Ronan smirked at her. She frowned at him. It was an impressive frown, almost Calla-worthy. Ronan half expected Blue to call him Snake.
Instead, she came and sat on the edge of his bed.
“We can talk about something else,” she offered.
First he thought “something else” meant: something other than Gansey and Blue, and the fact of her spending nights in the apartment, and how hilarious and awkward the two of them were about the whole thing.
Then he realized “something else” meant: something other than your nightmares.
He could still feel it pulsing in his chest, the adrenaline rush of pure panic. The unforgiving line of the telephone pole as it slammed toward him in the center of his field of vision. Far, then near, in one inevitable blink. His breath still came raggedly, and he knew Blue could hear it.
“For example,” she said, “I could tell you about the reading Calla did for a client yesterday. Some investment banker or something, who was passing through town. He thought he could go to a psychic, waste twenty dollars and get told some platitude about there being a lot of money in his future. But he made the mistake of consulting Calla.”
She inclined her eyebrows at him, to make sure he appreciated the humor of this. Ronan obligingly grinned. His racing heart was finally working its way back down a few notches, from desperate gallop to still-anxious canter.
“You should have heard Calla go at him,” Blue said, settling herself more comfortably into the mess of blankets that was Ronan’s bed. “Telling him that everything wrong with the world right now boiled down to him thinking of people as profit margins, instead of fellow suffering souls. I could hear her lecturing him all the way from the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room.”
Ronan nodded, hazily, sinking deeper into the warm nest of his blankets. Blue didn’t seem to mind his dwindling attention. She went on telling him anecdotes from life at 300 Fox Way, little scraps of daily life that had no particular point except for the calm they evoked, the sense that somewhere in the world, there was a place where life carried on exactly as it should.
She talked; no, she regaled. She wove stories, until the individual words blurred into one long lilt of gentle Henrietta accent, a softly swelling tide that carried him gently, gently toward a quieter place. Ronan’s pulse slowed. His mind settled down to a sleepy trot.
“Thanks, maggot,” he mumbled, as he drifted down, down, spiraling slowly into a place where he might dream of pleasant things, of ravens and forests and kings, nothing more sinister than that. He heard Blue’s snort of approving disbelief just before he drifted away completely, into the soft dark of untroubled sleep.
II. BLUE (ADAM)
Blue sat at the top of the stairs outside the second floor of Monmouth Manufacturing. Her shift at Nino’s had ended earlier than expected, and inevitably her internal compass had drawn her here. Sooner or later, one of the boys was sure to come along and let her in.
For now, Blue rested her cheek on top of her knees, glad for a quiet moment after four hours of Aglionby boys yelling for iced tea.
She looked up when a worn pair of sneakers appeared on the slice of floor she could see from the sideways position of her head: Adam.
He came and sat on the step next to her, likewise an interloper here at this apartment that was Gansey’s, and Ronan’s, and Noah’s, but not his. He smelled faintly of grease, or some other mysterious car engine smell; identifying it was far beyond Blue’s purview as someone who could barely operate a vehicle even under constant instruction.
But then again, she probably smelled of pizza grease, so pretty much they matched.
“Blue,” Adam said. It wasn’t really a question, or even a greeting; it was more a statement of presence. An acknowledgement that he was here, and listening.
She very, very nearly opened her mouth to pour out her worries about her mother. About where Maura had gone, what “underground” meant, and if she was ever coming back.
But Blue shut her mouth again, and gazed instead into the air above them, where dust motes floated hazily in the open space above the stairs, their motion a slow and solemn dance.
Adam had no parents at all to love him. How dare she complain about a mother who loved her, but was temporarily misplaced?
Adam gazed up, too. “It’s all right to talk about your mom,” he said, in his slow and reassuring Henrietta drawl.
It still gave her a jolt of gladness when he let his accent slip out around her. Even with Gansey and Ronan, Adam always seemed to keep part of his mind fixed on tugging his Henrietta-ness back from view. But when it was just him and Blue, he was a little freer. He must know how similar they were, two children of Henrietta dirt. It hadn’t worked out between them, not in that way, but they could still recognize what bound them.
“Just because I had shit parents growing up,” Adam went on, “doesn’t mean no one can ever talk to me about theirs.”
Blue tipped her head, still resting on her knees, so she could look at him fully. She studied him for a while, to be sure he meant it. He seemed to mean it.
Finally she said, and it hurt to admit it, “I don’t know how to do this.”
Adam just looked at her, a level gaze, not judging.
“My mom’s always been there,” she said, turning her mouth down to her knees again, so she didn’t have to look at his understanding eyes. “I never even had to think about it. Even with all the stuff I used to be mad about not having, I always had the things I really needed. I never had to think about what I would do if someday I suddenly didn’t.”
Gansey was right, I’m rich in love.
She swiveled her face back toward him. “How did you do it, Adam? Every time you realized your parents weren’t going to show up for you the way you needed?”
Adam’s eyes were deep and far away. Blue could almost seeing him looking down into the depths of his childhood, sifting through the unhappy memories to find the most relevant ones. There must be a lot to sift through; he’d had to survive on his own for so long.
To her surprise what he said was, “You never stop hoping.”
In fact, Blue was so surprised that her head forgot to loll dolefully on her knees, and she jerked up to look at him. “What?”
Adam shrugged, uncomfortable now that it was him they were talking about. “You never stop hoping, even when you know it’s stupid. I still wake up sometimes thinking my mom is gonna call and say something nice, offer to help me somehow. And then I have to remind myself, every time, that past performance is the best predictor of the future.”
Blue thought of her house full of psychics. She thought of her mother’s tarot cards that recounted a future that would come true, probably, but rarely in the way you thought it would.
This was one of the few things she felt she could offer wisdom about, despite her absolute lack of psychic ability. “No,” she told Adam. “The past is the best predictor of the past, that’s all. It can’t tell the future.”
Because somebody is going to love you, she thought. She wanted to say it out loud, but she wasn’t sure it was something Adam was ready to hear. Probably not your mother, and I guess definitely not your father, but somebody is going to adore you.
Blue still felt a little sorry about how it hadn’t ended up being her. But it would be somebody. She knew that as much as she knew anything.
“I suppose.” Adam shrugged. Then he said, “I think I’m okay with it, though. Having hope, even if it’s sometimes stupid. Because hope is what keeps us alive.”
Blue imagined Adam, all those years before she’d known him. Lonely inside his own family, growing up with nothing to his name, nothing ever handed to him. How hungry he must have been for something more.
That hunger, that hope, had gotten Adam to Aglionby. It had gotten him Gansey, Ronan, Cabeswater, everything. Clearly it was something that had always lived inside him.
“We will find her, Blue,” Adam said.
And to her surprise, Blue found she believed him.
III. ADAM (NOAH)
“Eventually you stop reliving it,” Noah said.
Adam turned. Noah hadn’t been behind him, and now he was. Noah also didn’t usually show up here at Boyd’s Body & Paint when Adam was working late. But Noah didn’t seem to notice that there was anything strange about him being here, so Adam didn’t mention it.
“You stop reliving what?” Adam asked, though he thought he knew.
Noah shrugged, in his slouchy way. It was less that his shoulders went up and down, and more that his head became less distinct about how far it was above his shoulders.
“You know.” Noah flapped a hand. “The bad times.”
He came and sat on the front bumper of the car Adam had been working on, its dark green hood gaping open like a hungry mouth. Adam gave up for the time being on the spark plug wires he’d been testing and reached instead for the nearest rag to wipe his hands, perpetually stained with grease.
Noah propped one foot up on the bumper so he could lean his cheek against his knee, a very human posture that made him look almost like a real and corporeal boy. The illusion was nearly perfect – except that when he first sat down on the bumper, the car didn’t dip at all under his nonexistent weight.
“Like me,” Noah told Adam. “I don’t relive the time when I died.”
Adam knew this wasn’t true, and wondered if he should say so. He’d watched Noah jerk and twitch through those ghastly eleven minutes more times than he liked to think about. But Noah never remembered, afterwards, that he’d done it. Was that better or worse?
Adam thought about the disastrous Washington party, and especially about one particular moment early in the evening: someone had jovially slapped the back of his neck, and Adam was gone. His body still stood in a fancy house in his fancy suit among fancy people, but his mind was plunging down the steps outside his parents’ trailer, reeling from his father’s punch. His hands were scrabbling for something to break his fall but finding nothing, always nothing. He was hitting the ground, his face in the dirt, a terrifying whine ripping through his ear that would never hear again.
All because some unknowing stranger had touched him without warning.
Noah looked at Adam, his eyes unusually focused. He was probably hearing Adam’s exact thoughts, and Adam hated it. He hated anyone being able to get inside those most helpless moments of his life. He didn’t want those moments to define what Adam Parrish was.
“Time goes around and around,” Noah said. “It’s a circle, kind of. No, not a circle. But a looping thing. It’s always coming back.” He waved his arms around, trying to illustrate this.
Adam squinted at him. There was something oddly transparent about Noah right now, even though he wasn’t actually translucent at the moment. “Is that supposed to be reassuring? Because endlessly reliving the worst parts of my life sounds like pretty much the opposite of that.”
“Time goes around,” Noah said. “Well, really it all happens at the same time, you just can’t tell because humans aren’t like that. People are more like a line. Memories are like a line. So you can keep going, even if time is going around.”
Adam worked this strange statement over in his mind, to no avail. Finally he gave up and said, “Noah, that’s –”
“Creepy, I know.” Noah shrank into himself, head drooping between his slumping shoulders.
“No,” Adam told him. “Not creepy. Just confusing. I’m trying to understand, but I don’t.”
Noah wavered, like he was thinking of disappearing, but eventually he seemed to settle on staying. He took a deep, if unnecessary, breath. “All that matters is, you can move beyond it. The bad stuff keeps existing, but you get further and further away. You don’t have to keep circling back.”
Adam wondered about that emphasis on you, and what that meant for Noah. He wasn’t going to ask about it; if he did, Noah probably really would disappear.
Instead, he went and sat on the bumper next to Noah. This time, the car did dip gently from the added weight. The clock on the back wall of the garage ticked.
“I guess that makes sense,” Adam said finally. “That stuff’s never going to go away, but at least it ends up further back in the distance.”
“Yes,” Noah said, sounding relieved. “That’s what I meant.”
Adam pictured a future where he didn’t flinch anymore; a future where his father’s punches still existed somewhere inside him, but they were nowhere near the top of his mind, nowhere near the most relevant or interesting thing about Adam Parrish.
That future sounded like a pretty good one.
“Yeah,” Noah agreed, once again answering a thought Adam hadn’t spoken aloud.
“That, though,” Adam said, but he elbowed Noah in the ribs as he said it, to show he didn’t mean it in a bad way, “that is creepy.”
Noah ducked his head, but for once he didn’t look on the verge of fading away. His eyes stayed focused, instead of giving way to that encroaching emptiness that meant he was already elsewhere, even if his body was still here. And he laughed, an unusually bright sound that filled all the dim recesses of the garage. Then Adam had to laugh too, with a feeling coursing through him that was not quite relief, but maybe a memory of it, or a promise.
A memory of a future that hadn’t happened yet, but one day would.
IV. NOAH (GANSEY)
Things were always happening all at once.
It wasn’t that many things happened at the same time, it was that one thing was always happening at all times. And yet no one else seemed able to think in a circle, the way time was a circle. It made it so hard to keep track of who already knew what.
He’d told them he was dead. He told them so many times. But it never seem to stick, not until the day Gansey exploded into Monmouth Manufacturing shouting, “Noah! We need to talk. Noah!”
It wasn’t until much later – after a funeral, and the relocation of some fairly irrelevant bones, and a nighttime visit to a creepy old church on the ley line that Noah generally tried not to think about too much – that Gansey began to seem like he maybe understood, or at least was trying to.
Because there was a day, sometime in that sometime later, when Gansey sought Noah out and apologized, awkwardly but gallantly, for the way that his first reaction to learning the truth – learning about the most awful, most never-ending moment of Noah’s life – had been to storm into Monmouth Manufacturing and demand that Noah give him answers.
It was a little after the end of the school year, Noah was pretty sure, or maybe it was a weekend. Anyway, it was warm and sunny and the light spilling in through the old factory windows felt friendly. Adam was at work, and Blue was at work, and Ronan was out finding the kind of trouble Noah didn’t really like to think about.
And Gansey asked, “Noah, are you here?” So Noah was.
Gansey set his pen aside. Latin books were spread out across the desk in front of him, charts of declensions and cases, and helpful guides to aspect, tense and mood. But Gansey’s mind didn’t seem to be on Latin.
“I think I get it,” Gansey said, turning in his chair to face Noah, who’d sat down on the edge of Gansey’s perpetually unmade bed. “I suppose you never really leave that moment, is that right? In a way you’re always there at the point of – well –”
For someone who spent so much of his time pondering mortality and seeking its antidotes, Gansey could be surprisingly uncomfortable speaking about death.
But that was all right, because Noah was, too.
Noah shrugged, and Gansey went on: “I do realize it’s hardly comparable to your experience, but I think I can relate to the feeling. There’s some part of me that’s always thinking about that day in the woods. I’m always hearing that voice that tells me I will live because of Glendower. And it seems like I’m always feeling –”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but Noah saw how he shuddered, flinching away from something that wasn’t here, now, but was, then. Hornets on his skin, turning him from boy to sack of meat in mere moments.
“So I get it,” Gansey said. “I understand why you sometimes – rage, or seem to maybe get a little lost in things.” He looked at Noah with that typical worried furrow between his eyebrows, probably thinking Noah would be offended by this reference to his more erratic tendencies.
Gansey didn’t know that occasional bouts of erratic behavior were the least of Noah’s worries. Gansey didn’t understand that what happened in any individual present moment was never really the whole point.
Like now: while in this present moment sitting on the edge of a bed next to a Gansey surrounded by Latin texts, Noah was also in the past, hovering over a ten-year-old Gansey who writhed among the springtime thorns and the leaves, with panic in his eyes that he didn’t yet have words to express. And Noah was in the future, crouching over a rain-spattered Gansey who tumbled to the ground amidst oak leaves and bright October grass.
This moment in the quiet afternoon sunlight of Monmouth Manufacturing was important, but so were those moments. And all of those moments were now.
“I just want you to know that I’m not okay with what happened to you,” the now-Gansey was saying earnestly. “It’s not right, and it’s not okay, and I’m going to ask Glendower to fix it.”
Because this Gansey – Noah remembered, now, he’d placed where in the circle of time they were – this Gansey still thought he could lean against fate and cause it to shift aside, just by wanting hard enough.
“I’m going to fight for you,” Gansey said. He said it in his kingly voice, the one that really did sometimes make magic spring forth, regardless of what fate had to say about it. “And no matter what happens, I want you to know that someone sees. I see what happened to you, and I will never think it’s okay.”
“Thanks,” Noah said. “It’s nice to know that.”
And it was. It made everything that came after a little easier.
V. GANSEY (RONAN)
Gansey sat in the driver’s seat of the Camaro, in the quiet dark of the parking lot outside Monmouth Manufacturing, with nowhere in particular that he had to be.
He contemplated the Camaro’s ugly, beloved dashboard: the cracked black vinyl, the neatly symmetrical sets of dials, the glove compartment that fell open unless you thumped it just right. It was peaceful, sitting here in the Pig in the hushed middle of the night.
Well, “middle of the night” was a turn of phrase. More precisely it was 5 a.m., or perhaps 4 a.m.; Gansey hadn’t looked at his watch in a while. It was generally better if he didn’t allow himself to know just how bad his insomnia was this time.
Ronan swung open the passenger-side door and insinuated himself into the passenger seat in one long, ostentatiously smooth slide of motion. “Where are we going?” he demanded by way of greeting.
“We are not going anywhere,” Gansey informed him with a frown. Ronan ought to be sleeping, but of course he wasn’t. “I am sitting in my car. And now, it appears, so are you.”
“Don’t act all professor at me,” Ronan growled, his voice low and dark with the night and the sleep deprivation. He scowled back at Gansey, a far more fearsome gesture than Gansey’s own frown could ever be.
Gansey ceded ground with a sigh, slumping back against his headrest. “Sorry. I should have said: Hello, welcome to the Pig in the middle of the night. What brings you here?”
“Same shit as you, man,” Ronan said.
Gansey nodded at that, and they sat in silence for a while.
Gansey’s mind was whirring over everything, as always: what Blue thought of him, if he would ever truly find Glendower, if he would be able to save Noah, if he would be able to save Adam.
For that matter, if he would be able to save Ronan from Ronan himself.
“You’re thinking way too fucking loudly,” Ronan complained. “I can hear you worrying from all the way over here.” He shifted in his seat, putting one black-booted foot up on the dashboard, clearly settling in for a long stay.
Gansey glared at him. “Feet on the floor.”
“But it’s a piece of shit anyway,” Ronan protested.
“Feet on the floor, please.”
“Yes, Dad,” Ronan grumbled. Grudgingly and with demonstrative slowness, he settled both feet back onto the scuffed rubber mat that nominally protected the floor of the Camaro.
It was very quiet. It was very dark. They sat for a while, there in the quiet and the dark.
Finally Ronan said, “What’s bothering you?”
He asked it so offhandedly, gazing out through the dark blankness of the passenger-side window, and somehow that made it easier to answer a question like that, one that was so tangled up with feelings and distress.
“I’m not sure I’m doing enough,” Gansey said, quietly. He, too, stared out into the night through the windshield. “I died and was brought back, and for what? What have I actually done?”
“You’re seventeen,” Ronan said.
“But am I doing enough for –”
You he didn’t say. My friends. Because even in the depths of night, even in the dark of the Pig in a silent parking lot in gently sleeping Henrietta, there were some things one didn’t say.
Besides, it was Gansey’s job to protect, to be the one who held it all together. If he couldn’t do that for the people he most cared about, then what was he good for?
“Don’t feel guilty about living, man,” Ronan growled. He kicked restlessly at the underside of the dashboard, and this time Gansey didn’t reprimand him. “Because that’s just stupid. Live, or don’t, but don’t sit around having angst about it.”
Easy for you to say, Gansey thought.
But of course that wasn’t true. Living wasn’t easy for Ronan, not the doing nor the saying of it. So Gansey didn’t say the thought aloud.
“You should be more like me,” Ronan told him. “I don’t feel guilt about anything.”
Gansey turned to face Ronan, whose profile was little more than a collection of sharp angles in the darkness. “Is that true?”
And Ronan turned away, because he would always rather tell nothing than tell a lie.
“Look,” Gansey said, settling his hands on the steering wheel, just to have a place to put them. “It’s not that I’m unhappy about being alive. It’s only that I don’t know what I did to deserve it.”
Ronan swung around to fix Gansey with blazing eyes. “You’re not the only one,” Ronan snapped. “Nobody knows why. That’s the whole point, that nobody knows. You just have to make the best of it.”
Gansey studied Ronan, there in the dark: this impossible friend of his, this strange and angry boy, so often bent on destroying everything around him. Or at least pissing everything off. Ronan did such a good impression, so much of the time, of not caring about anything, that sometimes even Gansey was fooled.
In a very low voice, staring straight ahead, Ronan said, “No matter how much we think we know, we really don’t. We don’t know what the meaning is. You have to make your own meaning. That’s all you can do.”
Gansey rolled that around in his mind. It made an undeniable kind of sense. There was so much he couldn’t know about life; maybe the best he could do was to make his own meaning and strive for that.
After some consideration, he told Ronan, “Surprisingly, that actually does help.”
“Which is why you should always listen to me,” Ronan said, once again smug and insufferable.
Feeling wilder than his usual self, Gansey leaned over and punched Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan grinned and punched him back.
“So, come on, are we driving somewhere or not?” Ronan demanded.
“All right,” Gansey agreed, taking the car key from his pocket. He turned the key in the ignition, and the Pig sputtered to glorious life.
.
Summary:
“We can talk about something else,” Blue offered.
Then Ronan realized “something else” meant: something other than your nightmares.
Or: five ficlets in which each of the gang gets a chance to help one another through past and present traumas.
Characters: Ronan Lynch, Blue Sargent, Adam Parrish, Noah Czerny, Richard Gansey III
Words: 4,500
Read on AO3, or here below.
Notes:
I realized at some point, while rereading The Raven Cycle, how clearly all four of the boys have trauma in their pasts, maybe even literal PTSD. (I don’t know if that was a deliberate authorial choice, to make their backstories align like that, or just because giving characters dramatic backstories is kind of the thing to do!)
Ronan has been having horrific nightmares since he found his dad murdered; he seeks out extremity and danger, where he can have a moment of feeling nothing. Gansey has shaped his whole life around his survivor’s guilt after he was saved on the ley line (and also, when Malory visits, he quite clearly describes a younger Gansey having PTSD flashbacks). Adam’s trauma is the most explicitly described: there’s that scene at the party in Washington where someone jovially slaps the back of Adam’s neck, and in his mind instantly he’s back home, falling down the stairs after his father hits him. And Noah, I mean: he LITERALLY reenacts his death.
So I started thinking about these various characters and their traumas, and ways they might comfort and support each other. I also was thinking it would be fun to write something with all five of them in “la ronde” style – a format borrowed from improv theater, where we have a scene with Characters A and B, then Character B continues into a scene with Character C, and so on until it loops around and the final character has a scene back with Character A. I’ve arranged it so that the characters who interact here are ones who had a little less interaction in canon, as a challenge for myself to figure out what their dynamic might be like.
These five ficlets are set at different times through canon, roughly reverse-chronological (the first four chapters each relate to the events of the books, working backwards, though the final chapter is a bit of a wild card).
The title means “la ronde of the raven”…at least if I was right about the use of the genitive case in Latin!
NOTE: The mentions of danger or violence here are brief and only happen in dreams/flashbacks. But they do include a description of a car accident, and also a brief mention of Adam’s abuse at the hands of his father (as well as of course references to Noah's current state) so please be forewarned if any of that will be upsetting!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I. RONAN (BLUE)
Ronan woke with a gasp like drowning.
He’d been dreaming, of all things, of the crash in the Camaro: the long, empty slide into blackness as the road disappeared but the car hurtled onward into a nighttime of darkness that felt slick and unreal.
But this time, in the dream, it wasn’t Ronan in the car, with the glass shattering, the passenger door crumpling, the seatbelt slamming the breath out of his chest. This time it was his father. And the car crashed
and crashed
and crashed
and every time, Niall hit the windshield and his body shattered into a thousand fragments, just like the glass.
Ronan woke, frozen and helpless like always. The only thing he brought with him was a shard from the windshield, blood trickling where the glass had cut his palm. He dragged air into lungs that still felt bruised from impact.
When he could move again, he turned his head and found Blue standing in the doorway.
She was a compact silhouette of short, pointy hair and large, draping T-shirt, and in the dim light her eyebrows were as spiky and alarmed as her hair. She looked embarrassed, but defiant, to have been caught looking at him.
She said, “You shouted.”
“Maggot,” Ronan said, but it came out breathy and quavering, more like a question than any kind of declaration of strength.
And it clearly wasn’t very threatening, because Blue didn’t bother to answer, just made her eyebrows even pointier.
Ronan tried again. “What are you doing here?” This time his voice sounded like itself.
“Oh, just.” Blue said. “Whatever.”
Which meant she was here staying overnight with Gansey, and was embarrassed to say so. Ronan smirked at her. She frowned at him. It was an impressive frown, almost Calla-worthy. Ronan half expected Blue to call him Snake.
Instead, she came and sat on the edge of his bed.
“We can talk about something else,” she offered.
First he thought “something else” meant: something other than Gansey and Blue, and the fact of her spending nights in the apartment, and how hilarious and awkward the two of them were about the whole thing.
Then he realized “something else” meant: something other than your nightmares.
He could still feel it pulsing in his chest, the adrenaline rush of pure panic. The unforgiving line of the telephone pole as it slammed toward him in the center of his field of vision. Far, then near, in one inevitable blink. His breath still came raggedly, and he knew Blue could hear it.
“For example,” she said, “I could tell you about the reading Calla did for a client yesterday. Some investment banker or something, who was passing through town. He thought he could go to a psychic, waste twenty dollars and get told some platitude about there being a lot of money in his future. But he made the mistake of consulting Calla.”
She inclined her eyebrows at him, to make sure he appreciated the humor of this. Ronan obligingly grinned. His racing heart was finally working its way back down a few notches, from desperate gallop to still-anxious canter.
“You should have heard Calla go at him,” Blue said, settling herself more comfortably into the mess of blankets that was Ronan’s bed. “Telling him that everything wrong with the world right now boiled down to him thinking of people as profit margins, instead of fellow suffering souls. I could hear her lecturing him all the way from the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room.”
Ronan nodded, hazily, sinking deeper into the warm nest of his blankets. Blue didn’t seem to mind his dwindling attention. She went on telling him anecdotes from life at 300 Fox Way, little scraps of daily life that had no particular point except for the calm they evoked, the sense that somewhere in the world, there was a place where life carried on exactly as it should.
She talked; no, she regaled. She wove stories, until the individual words blurred into one long lilt of gentle Henrietta accent, a softly swelling tide that carried him gently, gently toward a quieter place. Ronan’s pulse slowed. His mind settled down to a sleepy trot.
“Thanks, maggot,” he mumbled, as he drifted down, down, spiraling slowly into a place where he might dream of pleasant things, of ravens and forests and kings, nothing more sinister than that. He heard Blue’s snort of approving disbelief just before he drifted away completely, into the soft dark of untroubled sleep.
II. BLUE (ADAM)
Blue sat at the top of the stairs outside the second floor of Monmouth Manufacturing. Her shift at Nino’s had ended earlier than expected, and inevitably her internal compass had drawn her here. Sooner or later, one of the boys was sure to come along and let her in.
For now, Blue rested her cheek on top of her knees, glad for a quiet moment after four hours of Aglionby boys yelling for iced tea.
She looked up when a worn pair of sneakers appeared on the slice of floor she could see from the sideways position of her head: Adam.
He came and sat on the step next to her, likewise an interloper here at this apartment that was Gansey’s, and Ronan’s, and Noah’s, but not his. He smelled faintly of grease, or some other mysterious car engine smell; identifying it was far beyond Blue’s purview as someone who could barely operate a vehicle even under constant instruction.
But then again, she probably smelled of pizza grease, so pretty much they matched.
“Blue,” Adam said. It wasn’t really a question, or even a greeting; it was more a statement of presence. An acknowledgement that he was here, and listening.
She very, very nearly opened her mouth to pour out her worries about her mother. About where Maura had gone, what “underground” meant, and if she was ever coming back.
But Blue shut her mouth again, and gazed instead into the air above them, where dust motes floated hazily in the open space above the stairs, their motion a slow and solemn dance.
Adam had no parents at all to love him. How dare she complain about a mother who loved her, but was temporarily misplaced?
Adam gazed up, too. “It’s all right to talk about your mom,” he said, in his slow and reassuring Henrietta drawl.
It still gave her a jolt of gladness when he let his accent slip out around her. Even with Gansey and Ronan, Adam always seemed to keep part of his mind fixed on tugging his Henrietta-ness back from view. But when it was just him and Blue, he was a little freer. He must know how similar they were, two children of Henrietta dirt. It hadn’t worked out between them, not in that way, but they could still recognize what bound them.
“Just because I had shit parents growing up,” Adam went on, “doesn’t mean no one can ever talk to me about theirs.”
Blue tipped her head, still resting on her knees, so she could look at him fully. She studied him for a while, to be sure he meant it. He seemed to mean it.
Finally she said, and it hurt to admit it, “I don’t know how to do this.”
Adam just looked at her, a level gaze, not judging.
“My mom’s always been there,” she said, turning her mouth down to her knees again, so she didn’t have to look at his understanding eyes. “I never even had to think about it. Even with all the stuff I used to be mad about not having, I always had the things I really needed. I never had to think about what I would do if someday I suddenly didn’t.”
Gansey was right, I’m rich in love.
She swiveled her face back toward him. “How did you do it, Adam? Every time you realized your parents weren’t going to show up for you the way you needed?”
Adam’s eyes were deep and far away. Blue could almost seeing him looking down into the depths of his childhood, sifting through the unhappy memories to find the most relevant ones. There must be a lot to sift through; he’d had to survive on his own for so long.
To her surprise what he said was, “You never stop hoping.”
In fact, Blue was so surprised that her head forgot to loll dolefully on her knees, and she jerked up to look at him. “What?”
Adam shrugged, uncomfortable now that it was him they were talking about. “You never stop hoping, even when you know it’s stupid. I still wake up sometimes thinking my mom is gonna call and say something nice, offer to help me somehow. And then I have to remind myself, every time, that past performance is the best predictor of the future.”
Blue thought of her house full of psychics. She thought of her mother’s tarot cards that recounted a future that would come true, probably, but rarely in the way you thought it would.
This was one of the few things she felt she could offer wisdom about, despite her absolute lack of psychic ability. “No,” she told Adam. “The past is the best predictor of the past, that’s all. It can’t tell the future.”
Because somebody is going to love you, she thought. She wanted to say it out loud, but she wasn’t sure it was something Adam was ready to hear. Probably not your mother, and I guess definitely not your father, but somebody is going to adore you.
Blue still felt a little sorry about how it hadn’t ended up being her. But it would be somebody. She knew that as much as she knew anything.
“I suppose.” Adam shrugged. Then he said, “I think I’m okay with it, though. Having hope, even if it’s sometimes stupid. Because hope is what keeps us alive.”
Blue imagined Adam, all those years before she’d known him. Lonely inside his own family, growing up with nothing to his name, nothing ever handed to him. How hungry he must have been for something more.
That hunger, that hope, had gotten Adam to Aglionby. It had gotten him Gansey, Ronan, Cabeswater, everything. Clearly it was something that had always lived inside him.
“We will find her, Blue,” Adam said.
And to her surprise, Blue found she believed him.
III. ADAM (NOAH)
“Eventually you stop reliving it,” Noah said.
Adam turned. Noah hadn’t been behind him, and now he was. Noah also didn’t usually show up here at Boyd’s Body & Paint when Adam was working late. But Noah didn’t seem to notice that there was anything strange about him being here, so Adam didn’t mention it.
“You stop reliving what?” Adam asked, though he thought he knew.
Noah shrugged, in his slouchy way. It was less that his shoulders went up and down, and more that his head became less distinct about how far it was above his shoulders.
“You know.” Noah flapped a hand. “The bad times.”
He came and sat on the front bumper of the car Adam had been working on, its dark green hood gaping open like a hungry mouth. Adam gave up for the time being on the spark plug wires he’d been testing and reached instead for the nearest rag to wipe his hands, perpetually stained with grease.
Noah propped one foot up on the bumper so he could lean his cheek against his knee, a very human posture that made him look almost like a real and corporeal boy. The illusion was nearly perfect – except that when he first sat down on the bumper, the car didn’t dip at all under his nonexistent weight.
“Like me,” Noah told Adam. “I don’t relive the time when I died.”
Adam knew this wasn’t true, and wondered if he should say so. He’d watched Noah jerk and twitch through those ghastly eleven minutes more times than he liked to think about. But Noah never remembered, afterwards, that he’d done it. Was that better or worse?
Adam thought about the disastrous Washington party, and especially about one particular moment early in the evening: someone had jovially slapped the back of his neck, and Adam was gone. His body still stood in a fancy house in his fancy suit among fancy people, but his mind was plunging down the steps outside his parents’ trailer, reeling from his father’s punch. His hands were scrabbling for something to break his fall but finding nothing, always nothing. He was hitting the ground, his face in the dirt, a terrifying whine ripping through his ear that would never hear again.
All because some unknowing stranger had touched him without warning.
Noah looked at Adam, his eyes unusually focused. He was probably hearing Adam’s exact thoughts, and Adam hated it. He hated anyone being able to get inside those most helpless moments of his life. He didn’t want those moments to define what Adam Parrish was.
“Time goes around and around,” Noah said. “It’s a circle, kind of. No, not a circle. But a looping thing. It’s always coming back.” He waved his arms around, trying to illustrate this.
Adam squinted at him. There was something oddly transparent about Noah right now, even though he wasn’t actually translucent at the moment. “Is that supposed to be reassuring? Because endlessly reliving the worst parts of my life sounds like pretty much the opposite of that.”
“Time goes around,” Noah said. “Well, really it all happens at the same time, you just can’t tell because humans aren’t like that. People are more like a line. Memories are like a line. So you can keep going, even if time is going around.”
Adam worked this strange statement over in his mind, to no avail. Finally he gave up and said, “Noah, that’s –”
“Creepy, I know.” Noah shrank into himself, head drooping between his slumping shoulders.
“No,” Adam told him. “Not creepy. Just confusing. I’m trying to understand, but I don’t.”
Noah wavered, like he was thinking of disappearing, but eventually he seemed to settle on staying. He took a deep, if unnecessary, breath. “All that matters is, you can move beyond it. The bad stuff keeps existing, but you get further and further away. You don’t have to keep circling back.”
Adam wondered about that emphasis on you, and what that meant for Noah. He wasn’t going to ask about it; if he did, Noah probably really would disappear.
Instead, he went and sat on the bumper next to Noah. This time, the car did dip gently from the added weight. The clock on the back wall of the garage ticked.
“I guess that makes sense,” Adam said finally. “That stuff’s never going to go away, but at least it ends up further back in the distance.”
“Yes,” Noah said, sounding relieved. “That’s what I meant.”
Adam pictured a future where he didn’t flinch anymore; a future where his father’s punches still existed somewhere inside him, but they were nowhere near the top of his mind, nowhere near the most relevant or interesting thing about Adam Parrish.
That future sounded like a pretty good one.
“Yeah,” Noah agreed, once again answering a thought Adam hadn’t spoken aloud.
“That, though,” Adam said, but he elbowed Noah in the ribs as he said it, to show he didn’t mean it in a bad way, “that is creepy.”
Noah ducked his head, but for once he didn’t look on the verge of fading away. His eyes stayed focused, instead of giving way to that encroaching emptiness that meant he was already elsewhere, even if his body was still here. And he laughed, an unusually bright sound that filled all the dim recesses of the garage. Then Adam had to laugh too, with a feeling coursing through him that was not quite relief, but maybe a memory of it, or a promise.
A memory of a future that hadn’t happened yet, but one day would.
IV. NOAH (GANSEY)
Things were always happening all at once.
It wasn’t that many things happened at the same time, it was that one thing was always happening at all times. And yet no one else seemed able to think in a circle, the way time was a circle. It made it so hard to keep track of who already knew what.
He’d told them he was dead. He told them so many times. But it never seem to stick, not until the day Gansey exploded into Monmouth Manufacturing shouting, “Noah! We need to talk. Noah!”
It wasn’t until much later – after a funeral, and the relocation of some fairly irrelevant bones, and a nighttime visit to a creepy old church on the ley line that Noah generally tried not to think about too much – that Gansey began to seem like he maybe understood, or at least was trying to.
Because there was a day, sometime in that sometime later, when Gansey sought Noah out and apologized, awkwardly but gallantly, for the way that his first reaction to learning the truth – learning about the most awful, most never-ending moment of Noah’s life – had been to storm into Monmouth Manufacturing and demand that Noah give him answers.
It was a little after the end of the school year, Noah was pretty sure, or maybe it was a weekend. Anyway, it was warm and sunny and the light spilling in through the old factory windows felt friendly. Adam was at work, and Blue was at work, and Ronan was out finding the kind of trouble Noah didn’t really like to think about.
And Gansey asked, “Noah, are you here?” So Noah was.
Gansey set his pen aside. Latin books were spread out across the desk in front of him, charts of declensions and cases, and helpful guides to aspect, tense and mood. But Gansey’s mind didn’t seem to be on Latin.
“I think I get it,” Gansey said, turning in his chair to face Noah, who’d sat down on the edge of Gansey’s perpetually unmade bed. “I suppose you never really leave that moment, is that right? In a way you’re always there at the point of – well –”
For someone who spent so much of his time pondering mortality and seeking its antidotes, Gansey could be surprisingly uncomfortable speaking about death.
But that was all right, because Noah was, too.
Noah shrugged, and Gansey went on: “I do realize it’s hardly comparable to your experience, but I think I can relate to the feeling. There’s some part of me that’s always thinking about that day in the woods. I’m always hearing that voice that tells me I will live because of Glendower. And it seems like I’m always feeling –”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but Noah saw how he shuddered, flinching away from something that wasn’t here, now, but was, then. Hornets on his skin, turning him from boy to sack of meat in mere moments.
“So I get it,” Gansey said. “I understand why you sometimes – rage, or seem to maybe get a little lost in things.” He looked at Noah with that typical worried furrow between his eyebrows, probably thinking Noah would be offended by this reference to his more erratic tendencies.
Gansey didn’t know that occasional bouts of erratic behavior were the least of Noah’s worries. Gansey didn’t understand that what happened in any individual present moment was never really the whole point.
Like now: while in this present moment sitting on the edge of a bed next to a Gansey surrounded by Latin texts, Noah was also in the past, hovering over a ten-year-old Gansey who writhed among the springtime thorns and the leaves, with panic in his eyes that he didn’t yet have words to express. And Noah was in the future, crouching over a rain-spattered Gansey who tumbled to the ground amidst oak leaves and bright October grass.
This moment in the quiet afternoon sunlight of Monmouth Manufacturing was important, but so were those moments. And all of those moments were now.
“I just want you to know that I’m not okay with what happened to you,” the now-Gansey was saying earnestly. “It’s not right, and it’s not okay, and I’m going to ask Glendower to fix it.”
Because this Gansey – Noah remembered, now, he’d placed where in the circle of time they were – this Gansey still thought he could lean against fate and cause it to shift aside, just by wanting hard enough.
“I’m going to fight for you,” Gansey said. He said it in his kingly voice, the one that really did sometimes make magic spring forth, regardless of what fate had to say about it. “And no matter what happens, I want you to know that someone sees. I see what happened to you, and I will never think it’s okay.”
“Thanks,” Noah said. “It’s nice to know that.”
And it was. It made everything that came after a little easier.
V. GANSEY (RONAN)
Gansey sat in the driver’s seat of the Camaro, in the quiet dark of the parking lot outside Monmouth Manufacturing, with nowhere in particular that he had to be.
He contemplated the Camaro’s ugly, beloved dashboard: the cracked black vinyl, the neatly symmetrical sets of dials, the glove compartment that fell open unless you thumped it just right. It was peaceful, sitting here in the Pig in the hushed middle of the night.
Well, “middle of the night” was a turn of phrase. More precisely it was 5 a.m., or perhaps 4 a.m.; Gansey hadn’t looked at his watch in a while. It was generally better if he didn’t allow himself to know just how bad his insomnia was this time.
Ronan swung open the passenger-side door and insinuated himself into the passenger seat in one long, ostentatiously smooth slide of motion. “Where are we going?” he demanded by way of greeting.
“We are not going anywhere,” Gansey informed him with a frown. Ronan ought to be sleeping, but of course he wasn’t. “I am sitting in my car. And now, it appears, so are you.”
“Don’t act all professor at me,” Ronan growled, his voice low and dark with the night and the sleep deprivation. He scowled back at Gansey, a far more fearsome gesture than Gansey’s own frown could ever be.
Gansey ceded ground with a sigh, slumping back against his headrest. “Sorry. I should have said: Hello, welcome to the Pig in the middle of the night. What brings you here?”
“Same shit as you, man,” Ronan said.
Gansey nodded at that, and they sat in silence for a while.
Gansey’s mind was whirring over everything, as always: what Blue thought of him, if he would ever truly find Glendower, if he would be able to save Noah, if he would be able to save Adam.
For that matter, if he would be able to save Ronan from Ronan himself.
“You’re thinking way too fucking loudly,” Ronan complained. “I can hear you worrying from all the way over here.” He shifted in his seat, putting one black-booted foot up on the dashboard, clearly settling in for a long stay.
Gansey glared at him. “Feet on the floor.”
“But it’s a piece of shit anyway,” Ronan protested.
“Feet on the floor, please.”
“Yes, Dad,” Ronan grumbled. Grudgingly and with demonstrative slowness, he settled both feet back onto the scuffed rubber mat that nominally protected the floor of the Camaro.
It was very quiet. It was very dark. They sat for a while, there in the quiet and the dark.
Finally Ronan said, “What’s bothering you?”
He asked it so offhandedly, gazing out through the dark blankness of the passenger-side window, and somehow that made it easier to answer a question like that, one that was so tangled up with feelings and distress.
“I’m not sure I’m doing enough,” Gansey said, quietly. He, too, stared out into the night through the windshield. “I died and was brought back, and for what? What have I actually done?”
“You’re seventeen,” Ronan said.
“But am I doing enough for –”
You he didn’t say. My friends. Because even in the depths of night, even in the dark of the Pig in a silent parking lot in gently sleeping Henrietta, there were some things one didn’t say.
Besides, it was Gansey’s job to protect, to be the one who held it all together. If he couldn’t do that for the people he most cared about, then what was he good for?
“Don’t feel guilty about living, man,” Ronan growled. He kicked restlessly at the underside of the dashboard, and this time Gansey didn’t reprimand him. “Because that’s just stupid. Live, or don’t, but don’t sit around having angst about it.”
Easy for you to say, Gansey thought.
But of course that wasn’t true. Living wasn’t easy for Ronan, not the doing nor the saying of it. So Gansey didn’t say the thought aloud.
“You should be more like me,” Ronan told him. “I don’t feel guilt about anything.”
Gansey turned to face Ronan, whose profile was little more than a collection of sharp angles in the darkness. “Is that true?”
And Ronan turned away, because he would always rather tell nothing than tell a lie.
“Look,” Gansey said, settling his hands on the steering wheel, just to have a place to put them. “It’s not that I’m unhappy about being alive. It’s only that I don’t know what I did to deserve it.”
Ronan swung around to fix Gansey with blazing eyes. “You’re not the only one,” Ronan snapped. “Nobody knows why. That’s the whole point, that nobody knows. You just have to make the best of it.”
Gansey studied Ronan, there in the dark: this impossible friend of his, this strange and angry boy, so often bent on destroying everything around him. Or at least pissing everything off. Ronan did such a good impression, so much of the time, of not caring about anything, that sometimes even Gansey was fooled.
In a very low voice, staring straight ahead, Ronan said, “No matter how much we think we know, we really don’t. We don’t know what the meaning is. You have to make your own meaning. That’s all you can do.”
Gansey rolled that around in his mind. It made an undeniable kind of sense. There was so much he couldn’t know about life; maybe the best he could do was to make his own meaning and strive for that.
After some consideration, he told Ronan, “Surprisingly, that actually does help.”
“Which is why you should always listen to me,” Ronan said, once again smug and insufferable.
Feeling wilder than his usual self, Gansey leaned over and punched Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan grinned and punched him back.
“So, come on, are we driving somewhere or not?” Ronan demanded.
“All right,” Gansey agreed, taking the car key from his pocket. He turned the key in the ignition, and the Pig sputtered to glorious life.
.
