Ryden Oneshots

Ryan Walks Into A Wardrobe

“What kind of place is this, then?” snapped Ryan. “I thought centaurs and shit were supposed to be fairytales.”

There was another one of those mutual incomprehension moments, and once again the faun recovered quicker. “Yeah, so you're weird,” he said. “But that reminds me, I'm supposed to offer you hot chocolate and stuff. Come on, we can talk more about it once we're back home. I'm freezing my hooves off out here.”

“I don't like hot chocolate,” said Ryan.

Brendon threw his hands in the air. “You're a real fucking chore, you know that? Look, it's perfectly simple: you follow me to my home, we talk about Narnia and shit and have hot chocolate and whatever, and then I betray you to the Witch.”

He looked at Ryan's expression, then down at his note, and swore softly. “You'd think they'd write the DO NOT TELL THEM THIS PART before the sentence in question instead of after, wouldn't you?” he said conversationally, fishing a pen out of one of the many pockets on his shoulder bag and scribbling something on the paper. “So that didn't go all that well.”

“This betraying,” Ryan said carefully, “what would that mean for me, precisely?”

“You know, the usual,” Brendon said vaguely, still engrossed in his note. “A bit of torture, some questioning, death by stoning.” He looked up and grinned. “Pretty painless way to go, I'm told. At least compared to some of the alternatives.”

“You call dying by having stones inexpertly thrown at you the painless alternative?” asked Ryan, who had now moved into some state of shock, where everything felt rather detached and fluffy.

“Not that kind of stoning,” Brendon replied, now stowing both pen and paper back in his bag. “The one where she turns you into a stone statue. I really think it's one of the best options, if you're given a choice. Do you think we could maybe skip the whole hot chocolate bit and move straight to the betraying? I'm out of milk anyway.”

“Or I could escape,” Ryan suggested, but without much hope.

Sure enough, Brendon laughed at this (quite loudly). “Even the trees are on my side, OK,” he informed. “You would get about five yards. You're free to try, of course.”

“Look,” Ryan tried desperately, “I never asked for any of this. I was just trying to find my old pastel suit.”

“The pink one?” Brendon asked, then clapped a hand over his mouth.

Ryan blinked twice. “You know my pink suit?” he asked. Brendon looked suddenly guilty, and the mystery of why Ryan's forage into his closet had needed to extend past the two first rows of clothes now started to clear. “What have you done with my pink suit?”

“OK, so first of all, that suit was fucking ugly,” Brendon said quickly. “And secondly, you hadn't used it for probably six months. And I needed fabric for my rag rugs.”

“You cut up my suit?”

“My friends love my rag rugs,” Brendon said defensively.

“Alex bought that suit for me!”

Brendon rolled his eyes. “Well, Alex is an idiot,” he said. “Oh, fuck.”

Now Ryan was beyond perplexed. “You know Alex?” he said. Brendon replied with a long mutter in which the words not know as such were barely recognisable. “Wait, you've been spying on me?”

“So what if I watch your side now and again?” Brendon asked. “Nothing interesting has happened here since the White Witch took over. The snow put an instant stop to the nude dancing, which was practically the best point of being a faun, and the last decent party was before Aslan left for the Far Isles. Even the wine production dried up eventually, what with—you know—the lack of grapes these days. And we haven't had a single Christmas yet, which suggests that the month Whitey chose to literally freeze this country in was fucking November. Life on this side sucks. Practically the only entertainment I get these days is peeking through the doorway.”