In the Valley
secret santa for @outtasolutions87 rythna enemies to lovers with a hint of meddling from ridge :) T rating, no warnings, 2881 words. Crossposted to A03
Preview: Rythian is on him in a flash, knocking him down into the soft dirt and crushing the seedlings. Lalna finds his arms firmly pinned under Rythian's knees, and Rythian's raised hand simmers with a magic that Lalna knows the pain of all too well.
After Blackrock, Rythian and Lalna refused to even speak to each other. Frustrating for Ridgedog, who needed them both to at minimum take a look at the proposed modifications to the next world. He realized he wasn't entirely sure when the whole thing had spiraled from friendly rivalry to actually enemies, but Zoeya's missing arm and her desire to sit this round out probably had a lot to do with it.
Ridge looks over the plans for the new world, and sighs, dragging his hand through his hair that ruffles and then slips right back into place. He considers for a moment longer, then a wry smile forms as he slides the marker for Lalna's landing spot next to Rythian's.
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"No." Rythian says as soon as they both step out of their Yoglabs provided pods onto the fresh soil. He glares at Lalna firmly, crosses his arms, and stands his ground. "I will not work with you."
Lalna huffs as he fully frees himself and his labcoat, and pointedly rolls his eyes. "You think I did this?"
Rythian remains statuesque. "I would not put it past you."
"Well, I bloody didn't, alright?" Lalna's voice is snappy, and he waves a hand at the hills that rise around them and trap them in this valley. He reaches back into his pod, pulling out his pack and slinging it across one shoulder. "You can walk away too, y'know." There's a note of teasing under the hardness as he begins to walk away, drawing up short as he clears the view block of the pods. "Goddamn it." He swears, loud enough to for Rythian to hear.
Rythian laughs sharply, smug in the fact he'd noticed first, the way the hills were more than that- high enough to take multiple days to climb, and perfectly ringing them with no easy way out. In the valley itself sat enough resources to eventually break the mountains down to size- trees and animals- but not enough for two men to each build their own way out- not without doubling the work for both.
Lalna gazes up, considering. He certainly didn't want to appear weak to Rythian, nor did he want to share the supplies in his bag- trinkets left over from the previous world to give him a leg up on any trouble. He moves with as much determination as he can manage, keeping his back to Rythian as he approaches a tree and makes quick work of tearing the materials from it, speeding through the first steps to a pickaxe, and taking his crafting table with him to the nearest outcropping of stone. He hears Rythian's exhale behind him, exaggerated by the mask, and notes the soft footsteps that pause at their landing site then travel in the opposite direction. "Stubborn." Lalna mutters as he drives wood into rock, as if he too is not guilty of it.
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The days pass slowly, with their efforts focused on themselves. Sparse gardens, and animals lost to creatures of the night, enough to dent their efforts of reproduction. Not even luck favors them. A lack of drops leaving them with seeds and the barest amount of iron. When they catch each other's gaze for a moment, the unspoken distain passes between them and they quickly turn away before it can change. The thoughts that drift through their heads of lending a helping hand are quashed under the internal reminders of the bad blood between them, and the resentment that the other must hold for them.
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Ridge grows impatient. He watches Rythian and Lalna tiptoe around each other, rather than inciting anything. He knows they need to clash to resolve anything, so he tips his hand a little, reaching down into the world when they are both asleep, setting a band of pillagers on their meager farms and causing destruction and chaos.
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"Rythian!!" There's a furious pounding at his door, and the mage rouses himself with a groan, then squints as he realizes the cabin is still dark. His senses quickly come back to him, the softest purple tint entering the corners of his vision as he rises and hears too the sound of rowdy violence from outside. He throws on his armor, kept close to his cot, and cross the space to the entrance with a few long strides. The hinges of the door suffer as he pulls it open, and glares out into the night at the sight before him.
Pillagers- from where? how?- he pushes the rationalizations aside to focus- are tugging their animals away, the farms trampled over and the licking orange of small fires threaten both his cabin and Lalna's. Lalna has stepped away, back to the wall as he yells with frustration and aims a weapon into the crowd.
A beam of green sears into flesh, and Rythian only half-flinches from the sound and flash, before Lalna sees him and gestures violently with his free hand at the destruction.
Rythian finds himself nodding instinctively, reaching just back inside the door to take his sword from it's hiding place. Enderbane went where he did, and it seemed Lalna was the same. The blast had caught the attention of the mob, and they were quickly approaching the two men. Rythian grits his teeth, and goes to work.
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The light is creeping into their valley as they survey the damage. Lalna's cabin was long gone, along with his animals. Rythian had fared better, in that his cabin still stood and a few more spots of farm lay untrampled. The animals that escaped death had run from the noise, and would need to be rounded up.
"We're being fucked with." Lalna snarls, as he kicks aside a charred beam and fishes out some dishes from under it, pitching a broken bowl too far gone to be saved hard against the nearest pile where it shatters further. He makes a further sound of anger, and then whirls to Rythian, stood there silently and callous. "Say something! What are we gonna do now!"
Rythian laughs, softly, shrugs at Lalna. "We? This is your problem."
"I warned you!"
"You dragged me into your fight."
"THEY WERE TRYING TO BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN!" Lalna's voice raises, a redness creeping up his neck to his cheeks. Then his shoulders sag, the exhaustion of the night showing through. "But fine. Have it your way. I save your ass, and you can leave me out here to starve."
Rythian rolls his eyes at the exaggeration, but his crossed arms give a little in their tightness, and he turns on his heel sharply before Lalna sees the hint of honest amusement. "I guess you can have some food." He begins to leave, and allows himself a smile as he hears Lalna jog to keep up. "Some." he adds, and the spark of joy curls in his chest when Lalna's gait falters at it.
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They're getting on alright. Expanding the cabin has helped ease the feeling of nearly stepping on each other's toes. Each feels more comfortable going to bed at night with a distrust of the man nearest him, rather than a worry of the clearly manipulated outdoors. The cliche runs through Rythian's mind more than once- about keeping your enemies closer.
Breakfasts are stiff, Lalna's griping about his lack of coffee and jam for his bread grinding against Rythian's uncaring sensibilities. Often Rythian finds himself driven out of his own kitchen to eat in the outside, too half-asleep to muster the energy to force Lalna to shut up.
By lunchtime, enough work has been done that Lalna is just eager to dig in, and Rythian finds that the silence is pleasant, especially when Lalna sheds his labcoat and rolls up the cuffs of his jeans in the heat of the day, leaving himself more exposed.
By dinner, they talk. Short discussions, but talking nonetheless. Mostly about the world, the goals they're working towards in order to facilitate their exit from the valley. And Ridge. How they'd like to knock him down a peg for this, the obvious meddling that he'd done to clearly get back at them for not helping him set up the world. They carefully avoid straying into conversations about the past.
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Outside the valley, reclining in his manor, watching his inhabitants bond over the campfire, Ridge smirks.
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It goes south one afternoon. They had worked through their normal lunch period, and found themselves both at the same end of the garden, hunched over in the way that both their backs would complain about it that night.
Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the comfortable routine they'd slipped into that had softened Lalna. He reaches out to tap Rythian's arm.
Rythian is on him in a flash, knocking him down into the soft dirt and crushing the seedlings. Lalna finds his arms firmly pinned under Rythian's knees, and Rythian's raised hand simmers with a magic that Lalna knows the pain of all too well.
"Woah, woah!" Lalna holds his hands loose and open, eyes wide, a loopy grin of adrenaline. "Food. We gotta eat."
Rythian seems frozen, the look on his face one of a man ready to go to war. He is full of fury and weariness.
"Food." He repeats, and the magic in his hand starts to simmer down, but the weight of him is still heavy on Lalna. "You touched me... for food."
Lalna sighs. "To get your attention."
Rythian's hand lowers, but he leans foward and digs his knees in deeper. "You should know better, Lalna." The anger doesn't bite as hard as intended.
"I'm sorry you can't handle a normal interaction." Lalna tries to shift his hips and legs, and winces as he feels more plants snap under him. "You're fucking up the garden."
Rythian scoffs, and pulls off suddenly, removing all points of contact between them. "You're not normal." He snarls, and disappears around the corner.
"Fuck." Lalna mumbles to himself and pushes himself up out of the dirt, tries to follow, but finds that Rythian has made himself scarce.
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He does his best to repair it. The garden, the fragility of the space between them. He takes his breakfasts quietly, but even then Rythian stiffly exits.
So he makes himself withdrawn and invisible, eats quickly and leaves the kitchen empty for Rythian's use. He works his schedule around Rythian's, giving the other man room to breathe without his guard up.
Until Rythian confronts him over it. "You're avoiding me."
Lalna tenses, hunching his shoulders up around his ears as Rythian blocks him in the hallway and doesn't let him pass. "It's called giving you space."
"Coward."
"Politeness!" Lalna snaps back, and drums his fingers against his leg. "What do you want, a fight?"
Rythian's pause is more than enough.
"Fine." Lalna growls, and fullbody shoves Rythian into the wall, clamping his mechanical hand around Rythian's wrist to yank it above his head and pin it.
Rythian's breath leaves him sharply, and he tries to drive his knee into Lalna, but Lalna has already pressed them chest to chest. "This what you wanted?" Lalna says into Rythian's ear as their other hands wrestle for control.
There's a familar hiss from Rythian, one that makes Lalna's spine tingle as the mask struggles to contain the way his jaw unhinges.
Rythian gains an upper hand, slamming them against the other side of the hall as he twists his free hand up into the labcoat and slides Lalna up the wall to hold him on tiptoe at eye level.
"Years." Rythian snarls, and the masks slips from his nose, down over his cheeks and Lalna is treated to the sight of his maw, purple and jagged as ever. "You ruin my life and think you can play nice?"
"It's a new world!" Lalna struggles, digging his mechanical fingers into Rythian's skin until it threatens to split. "Get over it!"
Rythian bites him. Searing pain lances through his shoulder, and his fingers spasm, draw blood, and then go limp as his human hand beats against Rythian's back. The snarl from Rythian's throat rattles out in a wet sound and into Lalna's skin, unrestrained rage and suppressed emotions pouring out.
"You-" Lalna spits, cutting himself short of a swear, and electrocutes Rythian until he's dropped, and then slides down the wall to cover the wound with with a sharp inhale.
Rythian stumbles back, wiping his mouth clean and yanking the mask up. His eyes are thin slits, but the anger has subsided, and he almost looks sheepish for the outburst.
"We... didn't choose to stay here." Lalna says through harsh breaths, as the healing in the world conveniently starts to kick in, stitching him up like nothing happened.
"Yeah." Rythian acknowledges, dropping down to sit across from Lalna and glancing down the hallway at the ability to exit the situation slipping away.
"We get out of here and we make Ridge regret fucking with us." Lalna holds his hand out across the gap between them. "Then we go our separate ways."
Rythian considers it. A common enemy would do them both some good, a place to direct the frustrations that had been built up from being trapped.
He takes the offer.
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They make short work of the problem after that. It turns out they'd both smuggled more than their preferred weapon in, and with the starter supplies between them, Lalna gets the foundation for power and processing laid.
And as they found themselves lingering over meals together, even when the planning was done, neither of them mentioned it. When the nights dipped into painful cold and Lalna shoved their beds together, insisting in the science behind body heat, Rythian only protested enough to get an extra blanket in the arrangement.
Their goal drew nearer with each pickaxe saved up, the food cooked and preserved for the trek.
They're almost sorry to leave the cabin behind in the end. It had become homely, their living habits dropping into sync with each other as their knowledge of the other took over.
They board it up as if they might come back to it, but release the animals. The mountains seem much less daunting with companionship, and they scale up and over them.
They sleep huddled together in sleeping bags, back to back to ease the creeping feeling of defensiveness that threatened to creep in the closer they got to confronting Ridge.
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Ridge had turned off his monitors, preferring to let them take him by surprise. He'd enjoyed watching them working together, the fruits of his mild meddling. Of course, taking the focus of their ire was a bonus. He waited patiently in the entry of his tower, politely grounded.
He senses their approach before he hears them. They are equally polite enough to try the door, and finding it unlocked, do not break anything. The shared discontent they direct at him is delicious, and he greets them with an easy cocked grin. "Ah, gentlemen. What can I do for you?"
Rythian's head nods ever so slightly, and Ridge feels the swirl of power approach him as Lalna levels his laser at Ridge.
"You know what you did." Lalna speaks for them first, ever the chattier one.
Ridge gives them an easy shrug. "Was the landing site not to your liking?"
Rythian scoffs, and Ridge is shoved backwards against the wall with a push of forceful magic. Lalna's laser hums up to full power, his finger on the trigger.
"Hey, no need to get rough!" Ridge's grin slips from ignorance to smarmy. "You're getting on rather well with each other."
"Just shoot him." Rythian says dryly and Lalna's grin splits his face wide as he burns a rather large hole in Ridge's chest, and relishes the yelp he gets from the demi-god.
"Worst thank you ever." Ridge is poking at the hole around his perfectly cauterized clothes and questioningly human form. "Get out of my manor before I toss you around like rag dolls."
"Let's go." Rythian withdraws his grip, and Lalna flips Ridgedog off before following after Rythian. They let the door slam behind them, and Ridge allows himself a small smirk of a job well done.
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"Hey!" Lalna jogs to catch up with Rythian, and Rythian half turns his head to acknowledge his presence. "So.. what do we do now?"
"I do not know." Rythian's tone is still dry, but there's a glimmer of curiosity in his eyes. "Go build another lab, preferably with no nuclear options this time."
"But..." Lalna swallows down the last remnants of his pride and strikes into the same pace as Rythian. "We could redo the valley. Ridge did a crap job."
"You want to go back there?"
Lalna shrugs. "My machines are there. You had a not-half bad start into whatever magic you're doing."
Rythian finds the softness of optimism on Lalna's face endearing. The gnawing thoughts of their past inflictions on each other still lurked, but the days together had filed them down to fangless whispers.
"On one condition."
The optimisim blooms into hopefulness, and Rythian has to look away before the pang in his chest turns into fondness. "We get you jam and coffee."
He can hear the genuine smile on Lalna's face. "Sure. And I'll expand the garden for you."
They head home.
