fandom_clinic | FTEC, Wednesday, Evening Shift [Nov 07]

The hot chocolate fairly who was also known as Isabel decided to pay another visit. For no reason.

Really.

"Am I interrupting anything?"

Ronan smiled warmly as she came in. "Only tedium," he said. "How are things?" His smiled turned a bit dry. "Thanks for... well. Letting me ~~handwavily~~ pass out in your room last week."

"I'm not going to tap dance to break the tedium. But I can hang out for a bit," Isabel offered. "And don't worry about. I'm just glad I could help."

"You did," Ronan said. "More than helped, really. I..." He hesitated. "I'm guessing you'd like the rest of the story."

"If you're ready to tell it," she shrugged. "Otherwise, I can sit here and run through my collection of elephant jokes. So, no pressure."

"I'd rather start with the elephant jokes," Ronan replied quickly, perhaps too quickly, anxiety over the events of his time away still rampant.

Isabel recognized a delaying tactic when she saw it. But she had time. All night if need be. "Why do elephants paint their toenails red?"

Ronan stared at her for a moment. "... I'm almost afraid to ask. All right, I don't know; why do elephants paint their toenails red?"

"So they can hide in the strawberry patch of course," Isabel replied as if it were perfectly obvious. "What time is it if you see an elephant in your car?"

As she asked the question, she set Ronan's hot chocolate on the counter, opened the lid of her own and added the required Tabasco.

"Time to get a new car?" Ronan asked in response, as he opened the lid of his own hot chocolate and sprinkled in some cayenne from a small jar he'd brought with him for just such an eventuality.

"Damn, You've heard that one before," she grumbled. "Should I continue? I've got a bunch of them thanks to my dad."

"I can do without any more of those," Ronan said, laughing a bit. "They're almost more painful than..." He trailed off. "Well, They're... yeah."

"Sorry," Isabel said quietly. "I was just trying to make you smile. You honestly don't have to tell me anything, not if you're not ready."

"I got called home about the chalice," he said. In a complete non-sequitur. "Um, it's one of the four major treasures, it's associated with water. I wielded one of the other treasures, so Annie -- Nita's aunt, did you meet Nita when she was here visiting Carmela? -- asked me if I wanted to come and help out over the weekend."

"No, I didn't." She pulled one of the lobby chairs around the back of the desk and took a seat next to Ronan. "So you went of course."

Ronan nodded. "Yeah, definitely. It ended up getting stolen -- the chalice, I mean -- like, two hours after I got home, so we tracked down the thief to a couple of worlds sideways. It's... different Earths? Kinda like how people here are from different worlds, but these worlds all operate on the same premise that mine does -- wizardry, and the origins are the same, and it's all just distance from Timeheart. Like my world is one of a sheaf of Earths, and the others that people are from are from different sets. Or something. If that even makes sense." And he totalyl wasn't theorising as avoidance mechanism, why do you ask?

"It does, yes. And you can thank my time here for that." Not that she didn't have questions. What was a Timeheart for one, and why would someone want to steal the chalice. But they could wait. "Did you get the chalice back?"

"Yeah. Wasn't hard, actually; it was just a couple of Fomori who wanted to cause some mischief. But when we tried to come back..." He shrugged. "Annie got through all right, but when I tried to get back to my world, I was... stuck."

"Fomori?" Isabel asked. She'd heard of a lot of different things during her time in Fandom but that was a new one.

"One of the earlier invasions of Ireland," Ronan clarified. "They, led by Balor -- who's an incarnation of the Lone Power -- fought the tuatha de danaan in the second Battle of Moytura. Whenever wizards recreate the battle, which happens pretty much whenever the land gets restless, we have to fight the Fomori again. I... Balor was the first major incarnation of the Lone Power that I faced."

"That sounds like an interesting story," she said, taking a sip of her hot chocolate. "You'll have to tell me one day." Since she was more concerned with what had happened recently. "But going back to your trip sideways. What happened? Were you able to figure out why you were the one that got stuck?"

"I don't think it was any one thing in particular," Ronan said. "Just... I got stuck." He smiled softly. "You might as well ask why anyone here at Fandom turns into an animal. But yeah, I was stuck sideways, with no apparent way home; I wandered for a couple of days before making my way to a small village, where I met Michaela."

Random chance. Joy. "And she looked out for you." It wasn't really a question.

"Helped me find the lay of the land, so to speak," Ronan replied. "Her Ireland is further out than mine, so it's... not darker, exactly? But things aren't as good there as they are at home. There's a weird combination of science and religion. Once she understood how much exactly I wasn't from around there, she taught me what I needed to know to survive. And... and we, and her -- our -- friend Ciaran, did what we could to help the people around us, while they helped me look for a way home."

"Which you found eventually." She leaned a little closer, knowing this was going to be the toughest part.

Ronan nodded, slowly. "We tracked down lead after lead for ten months," he said. "After that, I just... I couldn't keep looking, so I decided to stay." He hesitated before this next, almost not saying it, but he managed to continue. "Stay with Michaela. You'd have liked her, I think," Ronan added. "She was a shapeshifter, switching gender -- and form in general -- as easily as we'd change a shirt. She lived as a girl most of the time, but I... got to know Michael, as well."

"Michaela or Michael, she was still the same person inside. A good person it sounds like. I'm sure I would have liked her," Isabel agreed. "She obviously had good taste."

Ronan flushed, just a little. "About a month after I decided to stay, we got news about another possible way home -- a sword known for cutting the unseen. We'd used a sword for that before, see? One of the other treasures is Fragarach, it can be used to cut doorways between worlds. I wasn't going to go looking for it, but Michael convinced me to go."

After setting her cup aside, Isabel held out her hand, remembering any number of times she'd needed that tangible contact when she talked about Antar. "What happened?"

Ronan took the hand gratefully, setting aside his own hot drink as he swallowed anxiously. "We... The sword was in an old temple," he said. "We went in, and... it was a trap. The sword was real, obviously, as I'm home, but the rumour got to us from one of the Fomori clans in the area. They were... upset at the three of us because of our work to help the local humans."

"They led you in with what you really wanted." As a tactic, it made perfect sense. But it wasn't something she wanted to happen to a friend.

"What... what almost hurts the most is that Michaela knew it," Ronan said; he was starting to switch effortlessly between the two forms of the name, without even thinking of it. "Knew that I wanted to go home more than I wanted to stay, no matter what I said... Was it that obvious? I... I didn't love her as much as she loved me, but I thought... I thought I loved her enough. Enough to be happy." He looked away, but still his hand stayed in Isabel's. "I guess I was wrong. Or maybe I just don't deserve to be happy."

"If you love someone, you understand them. And she loved you," Isabel said quietly, "so she knew that home was important to you. I think she was very brave to be willing to let you go."

She was quiet for a moment, trying to get the words right. "You deserve to be happy. Don't doubt that."

Ronan didn't reply to that last bit, instead returning to his narrative. "In the temple," he said, "the Fomori had us trapped. Michaela... distracted them, giving me a chance to go after the sword. Her last words to me before she was overtaken were that she loved me." He pulled away, his chair spinning away from Isabel. "I don't even know if Ciaran made it out alive."

There really weren't any words for that, Isabel realized. No magic words to take the hurt away. She got to her feet and rested her hand on his shoulder.

Ronan leaned back against her hand, not able to say anything else, as tears streamed from his eyes.

"Oh sweetie..." she murmured. "Let it out."

It wasn't the first time he'd cried since getting back; his first few hours, in fact, had been spent holed up in the middle of the woods, before heading out to rejoin his family and friends. Since then, though, the only real time he'd cried had been after the disastrous lunchdate with Johnny, and the 'conversation' with Isabel where he'd passed out.

And at no point before had he gone through the events of the year again. Maybe now the tears could help him heal.

"Was this the first time you've really talked about it?" Isabel asked, slowly rubbing his shoulder.

Unable to speak, Ronan merely nodded, one hand coming up to wipe at the tears running down his cheeks.

Even though their experiences were totally different, somethings, like how much remembering hurt, were still the same. "It gets better. Eventually. I promise."

Smiling weakly, Ronan merely said, "It can't very well get any worse."

"No. Probably not," she agreed, wishing there was some way she could make it better. "What can I do for you?"

"You're already doing it," Ronan said. "Just... thanks. For everything."

"Any time," Isabel promised, leaning down to give him a hug. "Any time."

FTEC, Wednesday, Evening Shift [Nov 07]

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