Memory swap at Alpha Complex

[fictor]

Ronan’s Memories

Along with the memories, Steve is lucky enough to get a SOUND TRACK (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT0s-eCDVFY ). Feel free to have it come with the knowledge that Ronan made (dreamed) Adam a mixtape with this song on it.

1) Sober, it took Ronan a long time to sleep, and when he did, his mind was a black, still pool with no bottom.
In his dreams, they came for him, his night horrors, with their claws and their beaks. In the dream, he didn’t run and so they shredded his skin.
Ronan was a black, still pool with no bottom.
He woke in a mess of his own blood, his arms clawed open. This was that night’s souvenir: a flayed skin and a failing heartbeat.
Noah stood before him. His eyes were wide and black.
“I’m getting Gansey,” he said.
Gansey and the Pig preceded the ambulance by only a moment. Ronan hadn’t known, then, how Noah had managed to retrieve him so quickly. He’d been barely conscious as Gansey sprang from the Camaro, gloriously disheveled, his shirt unbuttoned to the collarbone.
“Ronan,” he’d said, voice tragic, already blaming himself, making it about them and not Ronan, “You damn fool.”

2) Ronan driving up a long dirt road toward a junked out trailer house where a man is beating a boy on the porch. As Ronan gets closer, it’s clear that boy is Adam. He gets out of the BMW, punches Adam’s father hard. The exchange blows, Ronan ends up on the ground getting kicked by Robert Parrish. The police arrive and break up the fight, cuff Ronan and put him in the car, placing a hand on the back of his head to guide him in the back seat at which point Ronan says “I said I’ve got it, Man. Do you think I’ve never been in one of these before”. This scene bleeds into a court room. Adam is on the stand when Ronan and Gansey walk in. For the first in possibly his life, Ronan’s tie is straight; his shirt is tucked in and he looks fucking respectable as fuck.

3) Ronan is younger than he’s been in any of these memories. His head isn’t shaved and his hair is gasp dark brown and curly. He doesn’t look angry and there’s no sign of tattoos. He’s wearing pajama pants and a tee shirt as he walks out of a large farmhouse that sort of rambles across the land as if it was added onto through the years because of need rather than something planned. He walks down the gravel drive barefoot, a confused expression sweeping over his face. That confusion turns to fear and horror as he moves faster up the gravel driveway. “Dad!” he screams a couple of times before falling to his knees beside the body of a man that resembles Ronan a great deal. There’s a pool of blood around the man’s head and it’s fairly clear that his skull has been bashed in with the tire iron sitting next to the body.

4) The last memory begins a good deal like the first. Ronan is lying in a (Catholic) church pew, the smell of beer all around. He is absolutely, completely smashed. His forehead is resting on his forearms and his hands are sort of tucked into the hollow between his neck and his chest, cupped around something. Gansey’s shout precedes him and it’s that same hollow, terrified “Ronan” that had been in the first memory. That terror fades away to resignation and relief when Ronan lifts his head and it’s obvious he’s fine. There’s no blood this time. When Gansey asks what Ronan has, he uncups his hands to reveal a tiny, fledgling, ugly as sin, baby raven, who cracks open her beak and makes god-awful sound.