truthplot pre-play

[iwasmore]

Dawn is breaking, golden light peaking in through the windows, so Noah drags himself up and pads out of his bedroom, barefoot and sleep-rumpled. He knows even before leaving his room that the others are still asleep, he usually wakes up first if no one's got an early work shift and this morning is no exception. Blue stayed over last night, which means everyone is here, so even though Noah's appetite still isn't back to normal he decides it's a good morning to make pancakes.

He gathers all the ingredients, and just as he has a few pancakes cooking up to fill the room with that nice aroma, he knocks on both doors. "Hey! Wake up! Breakfast!" he calls, obnoxious and loud. "If you don't get your butts out of bed Cinnamon's gonna get your share!"

Comments

[thedreamthief]

There's a certainty in Noah's words that gives Ronan pause and his eyes narrow as he realizes Noah still hasn't explained his own secret, that he's being fucking cagey as shit about it.

He glances at Blue briefly and nods. "I didn't get it when we first found it," he explains. "Had a weird fucking feeling the whole time, but I chalked it up to that time is circular bullshit. Wouldn't let myself believe otherwise. I mean, fuck. Dreaming a goddamn cow is one thing, but a whole fucking sentient forest?"

It's not accurate though. He hadn't really pulled Cabeswater from nothing. It's always been. Ronan just... formed it. Even now, he's not really sure how.

Adam drops heavy into a chair and Ronan frowns at him, anxious suddenly as he crosses one arm over his chest and juts his chin at Noah. "Yeah," he says, turning his attention to Noah. "Fuckin' spill."

[iwasmore]

Everyone is looking at him, and Noah doesn't know what to say. This is something only he knows, something he's purposefully kept to himself, something they could never possibly know back home, an experience that seems impossible to explain. So he doesn't try.

"I told Gansey about Glendower," he says, glancing at each of them, from one familiar face to the next, his voice made quiet from the memory of it. Gansey's small body, twitching and dying on the forest floor. He'd watched both of Gansey's deaths again and again with the goal of returning to the first until his words stuck. The words that would set everything into motion that needed to happen. "You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live with you should not."

[formicine]

Blue's been pacing a little as they talk, and she leans on the back of Adam's chair when he sits, moving her hands to rest on his shoulders. It's not a lot of contact, something he can shrug off if he wants to, but she feels like it's needed. She doesn't think anything she says will fix what's on his back -- someone can't just be told not to think that way -- but he's among the them she loves and she can't just not.

She doesn't know what to say, just raises an eyebrow at Ronan's rhetorical question. It's -- ridiculous. Like they're friends with a lanky, angry, car-racing god.

Blue raises her eyes to Noah. His words take on a mythical quality, and she can hear them in Gansey's voice, explaining. "Is it -- true?" she finds herself asking, very small. When she speaks again, it's a little more demanding. "All of what we've done, all of -- Gansey. Was it true?" It's not that she doesn't trust Noah, but everything she thinks she knows feels like it's disintegrating.

She's never felt more completely small and mortal, in this room with a Greywaren, a magician, the time-traveling spirit who might be the reason they're all friends. And her. The best table at Starbucks.

[incognoscibilis]

Adam doesn't think about it; he leans his head back toward Blue, the back of his skull resting against her loose shirt, not actually touching her body.

They're a room full of miracles and eldritch horrors, young gods gathering for pancakes.

Everything he's known about the world for the past year has suddenly fallen into a funhouse, everything twisted and inverted, rerouted and reshaped. Noah was the one who started Gansey's obsession with Glendower. Ronan dreamed Cabeswater into being.

God. No wonder Cabeswater's Latin grammar is so atrocious.

"When did you know?" He poses the question to both of them.

[thedreamthief]

A shiver runs down Ronan's spine when Noah says those words. He can't count how many times Gansey's told him the story, uttered those same words, remembered in his brush with death. His brush with Noah.

So what the fuck does it mean?

Blue's the first to speak and Ronan's gaze drags to her, notes the way Adam leans back into the billow of her shirt. His jaw clenches and his skin prickles, but not out of jealousy. Part of him isn't sure he wants Noah to answer the question, but then Adam asks his own.

He's looking from Noah to Ronan and back and Ronan shoulders hunch as he steps back to lean against the counter, looking from Adam and then to Blue with a shrug. "Always," he says, something like guilt twisting inside him. "I mean-- I recognized it that first time. It just took a lot longer to believe it."

[iwasmore]

Noah is looking across the kitchen at Blue from where he remains in front of the fridge, the door of it cool against his back. He hears her thoughts and he misses most of what the others say.

"I couldn't have done it without you," Noah says without preamble in protest to how Blue thinks she's lesser than. Like her energy isn't important, like she's just some girl. "You stalled me decaying until the timing was just right. Fox Way kept me solid. They wanted to send me to rest, but I needed more time and you told them no." He conjures memories, the jumble of them, trying to untangle and straighten them into something that makes sense to the others, that fits an explanation they'll understand. He doesn't worry about saying too much. His pale blue eyes never leave Blue's. When has she ever been anything less than extraordinary?

"Calla touched me and knew, Jimi held me. They let me stay. Because of you. Because you saw me as a friend and not just a dead thing. I had to get the timing right," he says, but he thinks he's repeating himself now and so the words slowly trail off.

He finally looks away, blinks, glances at the others. "Everything happened all at once and sometimes over and over."

[formicine]

Blue presses her face against Adam's hair, not a kiss so much as a little familiar contact (oh god, does this thing on her back mean she really can't kiss anybody?) and sighs a little at the tension in the room. Adam's hair ruffles at it.

She's not sure who he's asking, but when Ronan answers she sort of assumes it's him. His shoulders are hunched, defensive. Blue's a little annoyed at him, his immediate reaction, but she still wants to reach out. Knowing Ronan it wouldn't be very welcome. Not immediately, not from her.

She still doesn't know what that means, and it's twisting inside of her. Cabeswater is a dream; Gansey's revival is made by Noah. Is any of them real at all?

Then he's talking, eyes fixed on her, and she looks up at Noah, surprised. She listens, confused and caught. Not all of it makes sense to her, but she finds her eyes filling with tears anyway. The idea of Noah decaying, being sent to rest, it clenches like a cold fist in her -- and thinking of herself back home with Calla and Jimi and if Noah's telling the truth, her mother -- and that, whatever reason he had for telling Gansey, she had helped --

"Oh," she says softly, overwhelmed.

"I don't understand all of this, but that's not new," she adds, a little more wry and herself.

[incognoscibilis]

Infinity, Adam thinks again. The loop that has no beginning or end. Noah made Gansey and Gansey found Ronan and Adam and they found Blue and Blue powered them all and Blue needed them, needed Gansey to live, and everything they knew of Gansey was made from Noah's dying, eternal command.

"It's a good thing you made pancakes, Noah," he says, unable to process the depth, the complexity of it all. "Since everything is circular."

It's a bad joke. Stupid, inappropriate, but he likes to believe it's the kind of thing Gansey would say right now. Gansey, master at tension-breaking. Adam, who lives in tension.

[thedreamthief]

Noah's eyes lock on Blue for a moment and he speaks only to her. Ronan can't help but wonder what he'd heard, what Blue had thought in the few seconds before Noah opened his mouth.

Not that it matters. What matters is what he says, the images that twist to life in Ronan's mind of Noah decaying and suffering and holding on because of fucking timing whatever the hell that even means. He reaches out instinctively, his good hand to the nape of Noah's neck, feeling skin and muscle beneath his fingertips.

It stops him from wanting to throw his fist into the wall instead.

He glances over at the sound of Adam's voice, notes the way Blue's leaning forward, her chin gently rested on Adam's head. His frowns and, despite himself, snorts a half-laugh. It's not an Adam thing to say and they all know it. But it's not like any of them can ever forget the giant, ever-present Gansey-shaped hole.

"We could've had fucking bagels instead," he says, giving the back of Noah's neck a light squeeze before pulling him closer against his side.

[iwasmore]

Noah smiles faintly at Adam, though part of him still seems vaguely not entirely there, not entirely in the present. The way he'd get more often as a ghost, not so much after the spell that's kept him here.

"Copper's the only one who ate any," he says sadly, and gratefully leaves his post in front of the refrigerator at the touch of Ronan's hand, leaning instead against his side. He doesn't like to think about Gansey's death. Both of them.