half dream and half dreamer

OUT OF CHARACTER:

Name/Handle: James
Contact: safeaslife#0150 / safeaslife / PM
Other characters: N/A
DF Alum: N
Reserve: Link
Referral: N/A

IN-CHARACTER:

Character name: Ronan Niall Lynch
Character journal: beochaoineadh 
Series name: The Raven Cycle
Canon notes: Pre-series; specifically the night before his father's death (I'm fine if you want to count this as an AU, but it is part of the canon timeline, and referenced semi-extensively in canon, so I didn't by default)
Species: Half dreamer / half dream
Age: 15

Arrival Condition: A teenage boy, but otherwise fine ;)

History: (The TRC Wiki is sort of a mess, so have some words instead.)

Ronan is the child of a dream and a dreamer, and thus composed of both. A more complete description of dreaming follows below, but the important part is this: Ronan sometimes wakes with his dreams in his hands. He has seemingly done so since close to infancy. It is an ability that he shares with his father, and that is said to have shaped much of the experiences of Ronan and his brothers; they all grow in the shape of their father's dreams.

Ronan and his two brothers grow up together at the Barns- a farm in Virginia shaped from love and magic, and populated by strange creatures of his father's imagining, from rainbow colored fairy cows, to peacocks colored like gemstones, strange blue flowers and trees like a painting. Ronan's childhood and home life are strange things: his father Niall is a charming storyteller from Belfast, who seeks adoration and not trust. Aurora, Ronan's mother is Niall's perfect golden bride, and the Barns is their fairytale kingdom. His father would regularly vanish for months at a time, and return with impossible gifts and wondrous presents. Ronan is never sure if he disappears because of his job, or just because he's a scoundrel. There is no extended family- an "aunt" and "uncle" in New York, but Ronan speaks of always being aware those were terms of affection and not proper titles.

Ronan's grandest dreams all seem to happen when he's very young, and as such, he doesn't remember dreaming them, doesn't remember that he he created them. Not long after Ronan turns three, he dreams his younger brother Matthew. He's frustrated because his older brother Declan never seems interested in his ideas, and so accidentally dreams himself a loving younger brother that will actually want to play with him. He dreams a semi-sentient magical forest where he can dream when he's awake, although he does not find it outside of his dreams until years later, but it becomes a recurrent dream for him. He dreams himself a playmate in his dreams, a scruffy little girl with goat legs that can help save him from his nightmares that he calls Orphan Girl.

Declan is neither a dreamer or a dream, and at only a year and a half older than Ronan, is the one left to contend with the things that he brings back. He thus grows up with a very different view of dreams and magic than his younger brother does. When Ronan dreams himself a flaming sword, it is Declan who saves him as his flame-retardant pajamas go up in flames, making an inferno of his bedroom curtains. Declan is also pulled into the magical black market world their father operates in and that funds the family fortune. Ronan on the other hand, is kept largely insulated from the shadier sides of his father as the clear favorite: Declan is made very aware that Ronan is to be protected in ways that Declan is not. None of this bothers Matthew, as he knows he is their mother's favorite, but neither of the younger brothers seem to parse what that says about their older brother's experience with their family.

This however does not really sour Ronan and Declan's relationship growing up. Declan takes the responsibility given to him of protecting Ronan to heart. But there is this tension under the surface that Ronan isn't able to name- and there is a more general inability to speak of the things that he goes through. So his childhood is happy, but fraught in its own way, because the Lynches are an impossible family, operating in the shadows and built on secrets, and it is the entire shape of Ronan's world.

As a nebulously young child Ronan shows his mother something he dreamt, and she tells him to bury it forever, and emphasizes that these things are to be kept as secrets. Ronan notes this to be the only time they talked about his dreaming. So he grows up very isolated: not just from the rest of the world, but from the rest of his family, because there is this fundamental part of himself that he isn't supposed to share even with them. For the majority of his life, his only friends are his two brothers.

When he's thirteen, Ronan searches the Barns for evidence of where the family fortune comes from during one of his father's month-long absences. On his father's return, Ronan tells him that he knows where the family fortune comes from. Niall tells him not to tell, specifically meaning the dreaming, and Ronan doesn't until well after his father's death.

In brief- Niall dreams magical objects, and sells them on the magic black market. But Niall is a braggart and a liar and profit alone isn't good enough. And this is where the lie that gets him killed comes in: he tells people that he has a magical artifact called "the Greywaren" that allows him to take things from his dreams, and when people try to buy it off him he refuses and cons them into buying something else.

The complicating factor is that Ronan is the Greywaren. He doesn't first hear about this until well after his father's death, but Niall and Declan both seem to have been aware for far longer. When Ronan is twelve, Niall taunts a notably unstable buyer of magical antiquities called Greenmantle with the Greywaren, sparking the man's obsession to possess it that gets Niall killed. It's notably this sort of sloppiness that is the real source of a lot of Declan and Niall's friction as the boys get older. It's less the fact that he likes Ronan better or that he dragged Declan into his black market dealings and tax fraud or that he expects him to protect Ronan and doesn't protect Declan in turn. It's the fact that Niall's bad at it and reckless and he makes things infinitely harder on his eldest son.

Then at the end of Ronan's freshman year, Richard Campbell Gansey III comes to Henrietta in his bright orange 73' Camaro. Gansey is obsessed with finding a dead Welsh King- Owain Glendower- that he believes is sleeping in Henrietta and will grant a favor to the person that wakes him. He also believes that Glendower is responsible for bringing him back to life when he died following an allergic reaction to bee stings when he was ten. Ronan and Gansey become fast friends- Ronan's first that he isn't related to, two impossible boys, with Ronan easily pulled into Gansey's quest.

Ronan and Gansey spend the months until summer with their time split between looking for Gansey's king, and hauling junk in an effort to make someplace livable out of Monmouth Manufacturing- a forgotten warehouse that Gansey bought for cash when he first came to town. The third week of June, Niall is murdered in the driveway with a tire iron while Ronan sleeps in the house yards away. He personally finds the body, and his personality shifts in a sudden and drastic way noted by both Gansey and Declan. He is a "new, dangerous Ronan".

His canonpoint is the night before that happens.

Personality: Ronan is a wildfire of a boy, bright and soft and warm, he is the version of himself that Gansey's misses, that he yearns for every time he sees the spark of it in the colder, crueler version of himself that he becomes. This is Ronan before grief and trauma strip whole pieces of himself away. A Ronan who struggles viscerally, but in ways that aren't as self-destructive, where he doesn't need Gansey to keep him from tearing his claws into himself. His happiness is carefree pleasure instead of tinged with darkness. But he is still a wild thing.

Ronan craves for adrenaline, he likes things that burn both in the literal and metaphorical senses. When he first meets Gansey, the other boy is noted as most commonly presenting the side of himself that Ronan terms Gansey-on-fire. This is what originally draws them to each other and why they click so well, why Ronan is able to take to him when his family is so insular- because they are both magical and they are both wild. And Ronan adores this side of Gansey with an intensity that he usually reserves for things with engines.

He has not yet slid into late-night streetracing, but he still loves cars. In fact one of the defining characteristics of all of the Lynch Brothers is said to be that "they all loved cars, themselves, and each other". Ronan loves cars even more than the other two. He mentions his hell-orange Camaro being one of the first things that he notices about Gansey, and Gansey is noted to have never trusted Ronan with the keys or in the driver's seat. It is past his canon point, but seems relevant and worth mentioning: cars, gasoline and explosions very directly translate into attraction for Ronan. They are the metaphor through which he comes to terms with the fact that he's gay, and how he references his attraction to Kavinsky for much of the novel in which the other boy features. And those things are pretty clearly parts of who Ronan was before the trauma. The shift is that prior to his father's death, these things came in the form of fascination and not self-destruction.

Ronan still has a lot of communication issues pre-canon. As mentioned in his history section, these are largely baked into the strange shapes of his family dynamic, and are also things that are pointedly emphasized to him from an early age. So he is still the boy that can't express himself with words and sometimes needs to have a shouting match with his body when processing intense feelings. The main differences here is that he isn't the boy for whom "all of his feelings that weren't happiness were anger", as happens later. He clearly has a lot more breadth of emotion, with more nuance, and every piece of softness that comes up in canon seems to Gansey to feel like a callback to this Ronan. He still conveys his feelings in large part through his body language, but this is more open, expressive. And he can feel these things without having them dive into darker urges. He doesn't have to say something vicious to balance out his vulnerability, he doesn't love things so much he wants to destroy them.

At this point Ronan is a boy that plays the harp, Irish pipes, and other Celtic instruments. He participates in Music Competitions, and is raised on Alice in Wonderland and Pygmalion and myths and legends and fairy stories told with Ronan and his brothers all piled onto a single bed to listen. His favorites are the ones where his father tells stories about him. He is a little bit of a dreamer, not just because of his powers, but because of how he experiences the world.

He's clearly raised in a way where he values community intensely, even if at this point this is a very insular sense of community. The idea of wanting a community of dreamers / people with magic is something that it takes him about six books to realize, but will likely become much more obvious much faster in game. It seems to be implied that the loss of belonging, and the loss of home is a big part of the damage that is done to him when his father dies. Because not just does he lose his father, but his mother is tied to his father, and so falls asleep forever three days later, and the boys are all told they can't live at the Barns anymore. Declan both refuses to fight against their father's will, and transitions from Ronan's brother-and-friend to brother-and-caretaker, which makes him one more person that Ronan loses. Even perfectly pleasant Matthew is ruined in the aftermath. Gansey is basically the only thing in his life that stays the same.

Ronan's life basically dissolves in front of his eyes, and he'd never really lost anything before, never felt alone. Ronan is a ball of anger and guilt- so much guilt- and has nothing to do with it, no way to cope with it. He looks into the mirror and sees the face of his dead father until he shaves off his curls out of sheer desperation. And this is still something he carries with him, in terms of vulnerabilities and the things that hit him hardest: loss and being alone. So his arrival in game will hit some similar notes, but there is a world of difference between being taken away from his family and watching his family die and be torn away from him.

Abilities: 

• The Greywaren: Ronan is the Greywaren, which seems to be a specific type of Dreamer, one who can talk to the magic trees. It also seems implied to have something to do with Ronan's ability to pull the trees from his dreams, to be able to give form to them as trees. Much later in the series, it is remarked that a Greywaren is "both King and Shepherd", but what all of this specifically means is still a bit in flux.
• Son of a Dream and Son of a Dreamer: Being half-dream seems to make him notably vulnerable to energy fluctuations based on later canon. I'm sure this wont be a problem.
• Dreaming: Sometimes when he goes to sleep he brings his dreams back with him. Ronan has the ability to pull objects from his dreams into reality when he sleeps. These are permanent. These can be replicas of things that exist in the real world, or the strange and impossible: a song you can hold in your hands, a switchblade of beaks and talons, rain that feels like happiness and sadness, ravens, nightmares, little brothers, a beautiful wife. In canon this ability is compared to warping reality, as when he finally gets good at it (thanks to Kavinsky, and a lot of practice), he can more or less shape reality with what he brings from his dreams.
  • If it works in the dream it works in reality. Which is to say that dream objects don’t necessarily obey the rules of the normal world. A remote control plane with no batteries or engine still flies because that’s how it worked in the dream. Some dream objects can seem viscerally wrong, where their operation breaks some fundamental rule of reality. They still work, it just makes them uncomfortable to observe.
  • It can be difficult for Ronan to only bring back one thing. This can range from the semi-harmless to things that are dangerous, or even potentially lethal: sometimes he wakes up surrounded with feathers, sometimes the bed is covered in murder-crabs, and the worst are the night horrors. Being taken from a dream does not change something’s nature. If it’s murderous in the dream, it will still be a threat in reality.
  • The larger and more complicated the thing he’s trying to take from his dream is, or if it’s tonally dissonant from his usual dreams, the more likely he is to bring back things he didn’t intend or trigger a nightmare - and thus night horrors.
  • Dying in a dream does not cause him to die for real, but does prevent him from bringing things back with him intentionally. However, if he tries to pull himself out of his dream prior to dying, it is possible for him to wake with his injuries, and these can be deathly serious.
  • Ronan has a dreamspace, typically connected to a magical forest, but independent of it. I don't imagine he'll bring the forest with him, but his dreaming functions without it. Dreamspaces are shaped by intention and feelings, by asking and desire. For Ronan, who has trouble with working through the things that he wants, this is a double-edged sword.
  • Ronan at this point in canon, does not know how to control what he dreams, or what he brings back. So he tends to bring back what his dreams give him instead of what he asks for. Kavinsky will hopefully help him in this regard, but it's definitely going to be a process.
  • A psychopomp is “a very excellent dreamthing”, Ronan has Orphan Girl: a small blonde girl with goat’s legs that lives in his dreams. A psychopomp is a way of focusing his dreams and can also work with dreams, to find inventive ways to change things when they start to go wrong: ie, shift toward nightmares.
  • When Ronan first wakes up after pulling something from his dreams he’s initially paralyzed, which seems to range in how long it lasts for, depending on what’s convenient for the narrative. Needless to say this can be very bad depending on what Ronan brings back with him- the dreams aren't paralyzed.
  • And then there's the nightwash. It doesn't come up at his canon point, but that seems to have been because of the magic forest, which he is not going to have the benefit of. But basically, Dreamers literally need to dream, if they go too long without bringing something back, they start to die.
  • Ronan's dreams, even before his father's death, are noted to not be pleasant places. 
  • He knows when he's awake and when he's asleep.
• Boxing: Ronan is a pretty skilled fighter in terms of someone with no physical enhancements. His father taught him and his brothers to box, seeming to begin when they were very young, and Ronan is held up as being good enough to teach others. It's years in his future, but he does say that the only two things more dangerous than Declan, are Ronan and Kavinsky.
• Driving: So, Ronan isn't a streetracer at this point in canon, but he definitely has the aptitude and the interest, let's say.

Personal Item: Keys to his father's BMW.

Sample: Here! (Both journals are mine; decided I needed more babyface icons basically immediately, sweats)