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Adam wakes up alone.
It takes a few seconds for his brain to arrive at the realization that this is unusual, even more so because he wasn’t sleeping on his twin size mattress above St. Agnes’ office in the first place. Slowly, as he raises his head from the pillow and his sleep-bleary eyes take in the clues around him — the ceiling, uncracked and white unlike the one at his apartment; the empty space of rumpled sheets next to his body, cold to the touch when his hand inspects it; the window looking out to the fields and rolling hills spread out behind the farmhouse; the curtains drawn open, letting silvery beams of moonlight spill inside — it comes back to him: he’s at the Barns, in Ronan’s childhood bedroom, in Ronan’s bed.
And Ronan isn’t there.
This isn’t surprising by itself. Adam has been sharing a bed with Ronan Lynch for five months now, and he’s been privy to the restless, insomniac creature he becomes in the early hours of the morning for far longer. Even on the rare occasion when Ronan does manage to fall asleep, the absence of nightmares cutting his dreams short is never guaranteed. More often than not, it is Adam who is stirred to half-consciousness at some horrendous hour by Ronan’s attempts to disentangle their bodies so he can get out of bed and blow off some of his anxious energy; or fetch his expensive headphones and stay perched with his back against the headboard (or the wall, when he sleeps over at St. Agnes), his fingers carding through Adam’s hair and his eyes closed, techno music in his ears booming as low as possible so that Adam can go back to sleep. On more than one occasion Adam has even followed him inside the BMW to speed down empty backroads, stop by a deserted open field and trade all kinds of kisses under the stars.
Sometimes, when it’s bad, Adam will find Ronan sitting on the other end of the mattress, something hollow and raw in the blue of his eyes. He wraps his arms around Ronan’s chest and presses his hearing ear against the spot between his shoulder blades, getting lost in the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, and they do not move for a long time.
So it’s a familiar feeling, waking up alone, but it does not become less unpleasant with every new experience. Especially when Adam can remember falling asleep with his legs tangled between Ronan’s, his cheek squished against Ronan’s collarbone, Ronan’s arm under the weight of his body and curled around his waist to keep him near, so closely and intricately intertwined like the branches of an ivy tree that either they drifted apart in their sleep, or Ronan must have been incredibly careful not to wake him up. Both ideas upset him.
Now that Adam knows what it feels like to start the day next to someone, next to Ronan, all warmth and touch and contact everywhere, he can’t help the twist of disappointment taking root in his chest when the realization hits that he’s alone. Compared to the everything else he spends his every waking moment worrying about — see: money studying homework time sleep college work food money rent time class homework college money studying food work college rent money time sleep college food money sleep rent time money — it’s almost a nice problem to have. Key word being almost.
His face twists with his need to yawn and he turns to grab Ronan’s phone from where it rests on the nightstand; thankfully, by the work of some miracle, it has a little percentage of battery left from when Ronan put music on earlier in the night, despite his refusal to charge it, like, ever. The screen’s bright light so abruptly slicing the darkness makes Adam wince in pain. Rubbing the back of his hand against one of his sore eyes, he ignores the countless notifications of unread text messages and one from some game Blue once downloaded without Ronan’s permission that Ronan secretly enjoys playing when he’s bored. The notification reminds him of a sale on a hundred special blue crystals for one dollar and ninety-nine cents. Adam raises an eyebrow and does a poor job of keeping his judgment in check.
The hour is 4:32 a.m., according to the phone, which means Adam got a little under three hours of sleep. But it’s also Saturday now, which means he isn’t needed at the garage until well into the afternoon. He has time. He drove from work to the Barns for dinner yesterday, and sans his shift and church time for Ronan, reading time for Adam on Sunday morning, they get to spend the whole weekend together. It’s a rarity Adam has been overworking himself all week for, doing overtime and one extra assignment each night in spite of the exhaustion forcing his eyes closed, just so that he could be free of most responsibilities and focus solely on Ronan. He feels ridiculously happy at the thought, biting back a smile even if there’s no audience to witness it.
(It’s not lost on Adam that, if someone had told him a year ago that he would barely be able to hold in his excitement to spend time alone with Ronan Lynch, of all people, Ronan Lynch as in his boyfriend of five months, Adam would have stared with such contempt it would have sent them walking away without another word. It’s strange, the way some things turn out, except it’s also not.)
He wonders where Ronan is. He wonders if he should go find him. Goad him back into bed. Or maybe join in on whatever he could be doing. Either way, he’s suddenly gripped by the urgency to be next to Ronan.
Adam sits up, and it’s only then that he notices the blood.
His eyes are still not fully used to the semi-complete darkness that casts the room in shadow, the moonlight in hues of blue only suggesting the shape of the strange and impossible objects all around him that at this point Adam can trace from memory nonetheless. But he sees them now: big, fat droplets that look starkly black against the wooden floor and draw a path across the bedroom that leads to the closed door. And when he looks at the other side of the bed next to him, finally awake enough to pay attention — yes, blood, too, a little damp under Adam’s fingers, dark against the baby blue sheets.
Adam’s heart plummets to the bottom of his stomach, and before he can form a coherent thought to calm himself down, he’s already jumping out of bed and tugging on his discarded boxers that he retrieves from the floor and a wrinkled band t-shirt that he snatches from the chair by Ronan’s desk.
When Adam steps into the hallway, pushing the t-shirt down his torso, the house is dark and eerily still. He’s always had the distant, vague idea that the Barns breathe, somehow, shift and transform in little pieces underneath his feet with an energy of their own, neither alive nor asleep like the dreamthings in the namesake barns. Adam tries not to think anything at all about what the stillness could mean in this place, what the dangerous quiet that wants to stab him in the chest implies; he tries to keep the absolute worst scenario out of his head, but his heart is set on an erratic pace banging against his ribcage as his eyes follow the trail of bloodstains to the other end of the hallway, where a faint glow of warm, yellow light sneaks out from underneath the bathroom door.
The last time there was blood on their bed because of Ronan’s dreams, two months ago, Adam ended up burying a body under a tree near the edge of the property and burning their blood-soaked mattress to ashes. Ronan didn’t go to sleep for four full days afterwards, until he finally passed out in Adam’s arms at St. Agnes.
Now Adam swallows audibly; he needs to give himself a moment before facing the fear. He wills himself to take a careful step, treading with caution, and his foot has barely touched the floor when he hears, “Adam?” in a voice so small he thinks, for a second, that he’s imagined it.
But he hasn’t, because when Adam turns his head he finds Opal watching him intently, three steps down the landing of the staircase. Her big dark eyes are gleaming with worry in the night and she has her wrist attached to her mouth, teeth chewing on what’s left of the band of Adam’s old watch in a gesture so reminiscent of Ronan that seeing it on her always makes Adam’s heart ache. Her other hand is tightly gripping one of the wooden posts holding up the handrail, as if it’s the one thing keeping her anchored.
Adam has half a mind to be surprised by her presence. Before going upstairs, he and Ronan last left her under the dining table, where she had curled around herself and promptly fallen asleep while they were having dinner (“She probably fucking ate all the mice in the barn out back,” Ronan had said, not without some reluctant endearment mixed in with the overruling disgust, when Adam had wondered if she was hungry).
“Opal,” he says now, and his heart stops and restarts. Relief is possibly bleeding out of him. If Opal is awake and speaking to him, then Adam can at least push the absolute worst scenario to the back of his mind.
Opal looks at him very hard, the way she sometimes does, like she knows many things he doesn’t even though he is by all technical means an adult and she doesn’t look older than six. Adam, despite his growing anxiety, stays very still. She must decide something in that moment, that Adam has, impossibly, done something right, because next thing he knows her hooves thump on the three steps that separate them and she throws herself at Adam’s leg, wrapping her tiny arms around his left knee. The wool of her sweater scratches his skin and the twigs and sticks and pieces of dried mud stuck and crusted in the crocheted fabric dig uncomfortably into his calf, but out of habit Adam immediately drops a light hand over her skull cap, palm splayed on the crown of her small head.
“Opal,” he says again, voice a whisper. It’s a wonder he can hear himself over his frantic heartbeat, the way it’s echoing in his ear. “Opal. Why are you awake?”
“Kerah nocuerunt est,” Opal tells his leg.
Ronan is hurt. Ronan is hurting.
Logically, Adam was already aware of this. The confirmation still makes his heart skip a beat.
“Did you see him?” He feels her head nod yes under his hand. “While you were dreaming? Or here?”
She thinks about this. “Here. Down,” she says, which Adam translates as downstairs.
What could have led Ronan downstairs? Had he brought something back with him? Something dangerous? Had it hurt him, and he’d had to drag it outside? Had he killed it? Had he brought back another body, already dead, and refused to let Adam help him? Goddamn it, he thinks. If only he hadn’t been so tired from working too hard all week long. If only he’d woken up with Ronan leaving the bed. If only he’d been there.
“Is he still down?” Adam asks Opal. “Or is he in there?”
Her head turns from one end of the hallway to the other, her cheek cold on Adam’s skin. “There.”
Adam glances at the bathroom door. It’s still closed. There is no shadow moving under the light, and he wonders if Ronan can hear them.
“You should go back to sleep, Opal.”
She chokes down a sound not unlike a whine. “But Kerah —”
“Opal,” Adam repeats, voice kind. “At least go rest. I’ll make sure Ronan’s okay.”
Opal releases his leg and takes a step back to look up at him, making the hand on her skull cap fall away. She tilts her head to the side and her eyes suddenly become very sharp as she searches for something buried behind his features. Adam hopes he looks braver than he feels.
Finally, after a long, pregnant moment, Opal nods, mostly for herself. She grabs Adam’s hand, clammy as it is, and presses a kiss to the back of it. The familiar gesture makes him feel a little better, a little more fearless, knowing that this wonderful and wise and strange little satyr girl trusts him with her creator. His heartbeat settles, if only slightly.
“You should go to Declan’s room,” he adds, as an afterthought. Adam still doesn’t know what he’s going to have to deal with, and at least Declan’s room is in the landing of the staircase half a story away from whatever is inside. It’s not like Opal is very selective about where she chooses to sleep, anyway.
“Okay,” she says simply. “Bonam fortunam, Adam.”
Adam hears more than sees her take the stairs and disappear inside Declan’s room, and he only resumes walking when he listens to the click of the door closing. He avoids the creaky floorboards with the instinctual grace of someone whose entire self-preservation used to reside in making himself as small and invisible as possible, because certain habits are simply ingrained in Adam Parrish’s body like second nature, but he knowingly makes his footsteps heavier. Ronan must be aware that he’s awake and coming to find him, and Adam wants him to know.
The light spills onto the hallway floor and Adam steps inside the small yellow rectangle, coming face to face with the door. He wants to kick it down, and he wants to never have to open it. He settles for resting his hand on the doorknob, not yet turning it.
“Ronan,” he says, then once more, “Ronan. Are you in there?”
No one answers. Adam feels the silence stretching and stretching and stretching, the moment becoming infinite, stretching stretching stretching...
“Adam,” comes Ronan’s voice from inside, rough and a little forced but so unequivocally Ronan still. Adam presses his forehead against the door, letting relief wash over him for a second, and then Ronan says, clearer now, “Parrish. Shit. Go back to bed.”
“What, no. I’m coming in.”
“Parrish, you —“
Adam opens the door, and his eyes squint at the light — too much, too sudden — before they travel down to Ronan.
He’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bathtub, the white curtain messily drawn open to one side, his torso bare and the hollows of his collarbone slick with sweat. Because of his position, his long limbs bent and crammed into the narrow width of the tub, he’s facing Adam and his back is leaning against the tiled light-green wall, head tipped up and the inviting curve of neck all exposed to him. His eyes are open, the pale storm in them always shocking no matter how many times Adam has found himself lost in it, and he’s staring with the usual weight he knows his gaze can hold. There is a darkness there that Adam can recognize, though.
Something heavy and unpleasant grips Adam’s heart, wrapping its ugly shape around it and squeezing.
“Jesus, Ronan.” Without looking he closes the door behind him, locking out the past hesitation, and crosses the bathroom in three strides, perching himself on the edge of the bathtub to peer down at Ronan. Now that he’s getting a good look, he can see how Ronan is only wearing a pair of black boxers and in the space between his legs he’s nursing a bottle of vodka only a quarter on its way to empty, long fingers curled possessively around its neck. Adam tries not to physically react to this — he wasn’t aware Ronan kept anything stronger than beer in the house, apart from some old Irish whiskey and homemade wine of Niall’s from the time before his murder, and he doesn’t want his instinctual revulsion or his judgment or his worry to show.
And there is also the matter of the blood.
It’s mostly dry by now, a cartography of crisscrossing red rivers running down Ronan's forearms and incriminating smudges on his thighs, but there are darker lines and scratches slicing his pale skin from elbows to wrists, overlapping with the older marks, white and scarred, that Ronan tends to cover with his ever-present leather bands. There’s so much blood. On the floor of the tub there is even a little pool of light pink water, probably when the dripping blood got mixed with water or, worse, spilled vodka.
Ronan’s eyes are clouded, but there’s a softness in them, too, his usually sharp edges blurred at the seams by the liquor. There is no heat behind his voice when he says, “I told you to go back to bed.”
“I’m bad at listening.”
Tentative, with movements slow enough to give Ronan time to refuse him, he stretches out his arm and lets his hand hover near Ronan’s face; when the rejection doesn’t come, Adam presses the flat of his palm against his cheek. Ronan’s reaction is immediate — he inhales sharply at the contact, his eyes shuttering closed, but before Adam can retract the touch Ronan shrugs one shoulder and traps Adam’s hand between his skin. Despite the knot of worry stuck in his throat, Adam can’t help the tug of endearment he feels rushing through him, warm and reassuring.
“You had a nightmare,” Adam states, less a question than a certainty, and is overwhelmed by a wave of deep sadness when Ronan’s brow furrows painfully in silent confirmation. Under the yellow light, his dark eyelashes cast shadows on the honed, attractive lines of his face. “Are you hurt? Opal told me you were hurt.”
“They’re fine now.”
“Just let me see,” he insists, sounding all too pleading, and is pleased when an uncharacteristically cooperative Ronan releases his hand and extends his left arm for inspection, inner forearm up. Adam observes the injuries closely, his touch careful so as not to cause any pain, but Ronan doesn’t even open his eyes to witness it. And, Adam ends up determining, he’s right: the cuts are not bleeding anymore and seem to be closing up already. It’s the same in his other arm. These new ones are not deep enough to scar, certainly not deep enough to warrant an ambulance trip to the emergency room like the last ones had, but Adam’s chest still clenches at the sight. Up close, he can see the injuries are not as violent as the old scarred tissue, jagged and angry-looking and raised from when the doctors stitched his skin back together.
But there’s just so much blood. Way more blood than those cuts would guarantee.
Instead of letting Ronan have his arm back, Adam coaxes his palm open and rests his own hand on top of it, squeezing lightly. “Hey. Let me in?”
This gets Ronan to open his eyes again and stare at Adam, pale and icy blue lingering on ocean deep blue for a moment, and then he nods and starts wiggling to the side. Adam wastes no time, swiftly retrieving the vodka from Ronan’s hands without as much of a protest from Ronan, and leaving it carelessly on the sink, as far away from his grasp as possible. He gets inside one leg at a time and sits down facing Ronan’s side, knees to his chest. Wordlessly, he maneuvers a pliant Ronan into shifting until they’re front to front, and pushes Ronan’s knees open as wide as the narrow tub allows it so that the sides of his legs are pressed against the cold porcelain and Adam can drag himself into the space between them. Finally, he hems Ronan in with his own legs, the soft skin of his thighs against Ronan’s sides, his ankles meeting at Ronan’s back.
Their faces are very close, a breath apart, and Ronan has been looking at him closely all this time with a more sober gaze than before. When Adam snakes one arm over Ronan’s shoulder, Ronan falls into him willingly, fingers tight against Adam’s waist and burrowing his face against the juncture of shoulder and neck. Adam hooks his chin over Ronan’s other shoulder and trails a soothing hand up and down the length of his spine.
He doesn’t know how long they spend like that, silent, trapped in a hug. He’s distantly aware that the pink water beneath them has soaked a patch of his boxers, plastering the fabric to uncomfortable places of skin in a way impossible to ignore; he’s distantly aware of how warm he feels under Ronan’s body heat, since he’s a walking furnace; he’s distantly aware of the faint smell of vodka coming from Ronan and how grateful he is at the moment for not associating that particular liquor with his father’s drinking habits. None of it is at the front of his mind. What matters is Ronan, only Ronan, and the sound of his breathing and the tufts of damp, hot air hitting the base of Adam’s throat every time Ronan exhales shakily, and the way the tension stored in the muscles of his back melts under the touch of Adam’s fingers, and the slight burn of his stubble where it scratches the sensitive places of Adam’s neck.
“What happened?” Adam whispers.
It takes Ronan a while to answer, and Adam waits patiently. Ronan’s head moves until it’s only his forehead that’s resting against the curve of Adam’s neck, and he tells him, voice low, “What you said. Nightmare.” A pause. “I brought most of the blood back from it. I could feel I was waking up so I asked for some shit that would heal me quickly so I wouldn’t bring all of it with me. Some magic water bullshit. But I forgot to take care of the — all the fucking blood, and... Well. Yeah. You saw.”
Adam hums, considering all of this and the cuts on Ronan’s arms, old and new. The former had also come from a nightmare, as willing to destroy Ronan as Ronan had been to destroy himself back then. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Another pause. “Not really.”
Another hum. Adam’s arms tighten around Ronan. “I wish you would’ve woken me.”
“You need to sleep,” Ronan protests his exhausted argument — they’ve had variants of this conversation before. “You were tired.”
“And I don’t care about that. I wanna help you, no matter what you bring back.”
“I can deal with it myself. My shit, my problem,” he says with a bitter fierceness, and before Adam can open his mouth to retort something to this, Ronan carries on, “I just — I got distracted. First I needed…”
It’s not hard to piece it together: Ronan, woken up bleeding and covered in blood he’d bled in his nightmare, silently escaping the bedroom to go clean himself up before getting sidetracked by the urge for a drink, something strong enough to distract him from… whatever he’d dreamt about. He might not rely on alcohol the way he used to before the wonderful and terrible summer of last year, when every occasion warranted at least two cans of beer to get through the night, but despite being better now, Adam knows, Ronan still finds himself tempted. He must have gone downstairs to look for the vodka (the kitchen, maybe; Adam truly doesn’t know where he might be keeping more alcohol) and in the process unknowingly awoke Opal, who followed him up the two flights of stairs and waited, tucked between shadows, until Adam found her, all while Ronan drank his sorrows away locked in here.
Lonesome. That old, painful thought comes quickly.
“I want to help you,” Adam repeats. “Let me help you.”
“Ha. Really fucking rich, coming from you.”
“Ronan. Don’t start.”
“Don’t pry into my shit, then.”
“I’m not trying to — God.” He takes a breath, waiting for his anger to quell. His voice was getting too loud, and now is not the time for a fight. “I’m not trying to pry. You don’t have to tell me, but. You can. Anything. You know that, right? I’m not going to — to judge you, or something. It’s not gonna make me run away.” Adam thought Ronan already knew this, but he’s willing to reassure him a thousand times over until it sticks.
Ronan is still so tightly wound, muscles hardened with tension, but he hasn’t moved, or made any indication that he’s going to answer. Adam tries to remain as motionless as possible, quietly anticipating whatever comes next. He thinks Ronan is just going to ignore him, that he’s choosing his silence while they simply stay knotted like this, but then he buries his face in Adam’s neck once again and his hands slide under the hem of his stolen t-shirt — Adam has to suppress a shiver at the unexpected touch — to dig his fingers into the meat of his back.
It feels like an admission of something.
“Ronan,” Adam says, this time gentler, with the care the name deserves. He thinks he knows what he’s going to follow that with, something nice and reassuring, not unlike what Adam’s heard from Ronan himself when their situations have been reversed, Adam shaking with a lifetime of horrors fresh in his mind and Ronan holding him together so he doesn’t fall apart. But then the question rushes out of him, unschooled: “What were you dreaming about?”
He was not aware that he needed an answer to that before he asked, but he does. The feeling clenching his stomach, his heart, his throat, is fear. Worry. Adam is not afraid of Ronan, but he’s afraid for him.
“What the fuck does it fucking look like,” Ronan snaps, but the effect is lost when he’s muffling the words against Adam’s neck and he knows it. Adam pinches his side in silent admonishment; Ronan sighs, his warm breath tickling Adam’s skin, and presses a kiss to his throat, which is the closest thing to an apology Adam is probably going to get. “Fuck. I’m just. I’m fucking tired.”
Adam frowns. “Have you not been getting enough sleep?”
“Not really.”
He thinks about this for a long, punishing moment. Adam usually prides himself in being able to read Ronan, but, truth be told, he hadn’t actually noticed anything was wrong. They barely saw each other all week, apart from that time on Tuesday afternoon when Ronan drove him from school to the garage and then back to St. Agnes, a mere total of half an hour spent together between the short drives and making out on the driver’s seat of the BMW, and against the door of the passenger side, and at the Boyd’s parking lot, and at the door of Adam’s apartment. Thirty minutes is better than nothing, Adam knows this, but it’s still too little in comparison to how much time he wishes he could spend with Ronan. Which is most of his time, really.
Then there’s that guilty train of thought: if Adam hadn’t been so goddamn stubborn, so insistently focused on his jobs and his studies and literally everything else, maybe it could have been more time, maybe he would have been there, maybe he would have distracted Ronan long enough for one night to let him sleep without nightmares, even if the mere thought of it makes him feel incredibly arrogant less than a second later.
But Ronan had seemed so happy tonight, before all this. He barely let Adam get out of the Hondayota before he was hauling him up and wrapping his arms around his waist and kissing him full on the mouth, needy and sloppy and perfect. “I missed your ugly face,” he’d mumbled against his lips, way too soft for the words to sting, and they had spaghetti for dinner and fooled around and fell asleep sometime between slow and chaste kisses, content twin smiles on their faces. All evening Adam had felt so still inside, so peaceful, so glad to finally be able to rest next to Ronan, too caught up on his own happiness to notice any warning signs.
And look at where that’s gotten them.
If, maybe, should have. Isn’t that the entire story of Adam’s life?
“God, Ronan. I’m so sorry.”
”Don’t.”
”But I am. I’m sorry I… I couldn’t be here.”
“Don’t fucking apologize, Jesus. You got your own shit, too. I get that, Parrish. I know you can’t just —” Ronan cuts himself off to take a deep, ragged breath and it takes Adam one long second to realize, with something akin to both horror and pain, that Ronan is holding himself back from crying.
“Hey, Ronan, fuck,” he starts, and immediately hates himself. Tenderness, receiving and offering it, is still something he’s clumsy with, amidst his attempts to get more accustomed to it, but damn it if he isn't trying. “It’s okay.” One of his hands clutches harder at Ronan’s hip, his thumb starting to rub circles against the jut of his hip bone, while the other one moves to the back of his head to stroke his short and prickly hair, hoping to make his words count. It is okay. Whatever storm is raging inside Ronan, Adam can bear it.
“Adam,” Ronan says, and his voice would be a whimper if Ronan Lynch ever did anything like whimpering. “Adam, I’m so fucking tired of this. Why is it so heavy? Why can’t I just make it stop?”
And now he does sob, two broken cries. It sounds horrible and painful and like he’s choking, like he can’t quite breathe, and it’s so miserable that Adam’s heart hurts. All he wants is to crawl inside Ronan’s chest and take the pain away; he’s wanted nothing but to avoid pain all his life, but he’d carry Ronan’s without protest, if it meant he wouldn’t sound so desperately tormented ever again.
“Always the same fucking thing, the same fucking nightmares. I close my eyes and it’s — it’s Cabeswater dying and the old night horrors and it’s the fucking unmaking and — and Gansey, and it’s my dad and it’s — Mom, and I just — I thought I was fucking over this. Why can’t I be over it, why don’t I get to… Fuck. Fuck.”
“No one expects you to, Ronan,” Adam says slowly, patiently. “You know it can take time. You can take as much as you need to — to sort things out, and —”
“But what if I can’t! That’s the goddamn shitting thing! Is it always going to be like this? I don’t want it to fucking be like this, I don’t want to have to carry this fucking thing with me for the rest of my life, waking up and missing everyone all the fucking time. Every day, forever. Fuck that, fuck that. It’s heavy and it hurts and I don’t want it anymore, it’s too fucking heavy. I don’t want to have to feel like it’s going to fucking kill me every single time, except it doesn’t even do that, I don’t even get to die so that it stops, I can’t even fucking kill myself to make it stop and make everyone’s lives fucking easier because of Matthew and Opal and Chainsaw and the fucking cows that are never going to wake up anyway.”
Adam’s head goes blank halfway through. I can’t even fucking kill myself bounces, like an echo, around the walls of his mind.
He remembers the fall of junior year: Gansey’s trembling voice on the other side of the house phone in the middle of the night and the way his father’s hand had felt like around Adam’s wrist, caught before he could sneak out the door of the double-wide, and lying in bed with a strange feeling bubbling like acid in his stomach while his overworking brain processed the shocking news to ignore the pain of new bruises. He’d never presumed Ronan to be happy back then, but he’d never presumed him to want to die, either. Someone like Adam, who had always been so concerned with survival, could not fathom the thought of Ronan doing that to himself.
He remembers going to the hospital the next day after school. He remembers the beeping of the machines, the bandages around Ronan’s forearms already tainted with blotches of red, and the uncomfortable silence when Declan had stepped inside the room to announce he was going to find some coffee. Gansey’s low tone, horrified and helpless, when he met with Adam at the hospital door and explained that Noah had been the one to find Ronan, that there had been so much blood, that the doctors don’t even know how he did that to himself, I mean, Jesus Christ, I don’t know what to do. The brochures Gansey collected from somewhere, mindlessly passed to Adam as Gansey brushed his thumb against his upper lip over and over again. (“AFTER AN ATTEMPT,” the first page of one read, and below, “How to take care of your family member”.) The roads of Ronan’s veins, dark and hypervisible under his paler-than-usual skin, as thin and transparent as an off-brand sheet of paper. The sad, faraway look in his blue eyes, too drugged up to make any sense. Matthew’s tear tracks on his chubby cheeks.
He remembers feeling vaguely feverish later that night, stuck under a car at Boyd’s, just as well as he remembers his sickly relief when a little under two months ago in a night spent at St. Agnes, his fingers had dipped beneath the leather bands and traced the hidden raised skin, and his lips ghosted over the scars as reverent as Ronan is with Adam’s own marks, and then Ronan had told him, I don’t want that anymore.
And Ronan doesn’t lie, but he could always change his mind.
It’s not like these past few months haven’t been without their obstacles. Some days have felt like nothing but obstacles, and Ronan more than anyone has too much grief to carry in the aftermath of that terrible day, the end and beginning of the world at once. There have been nights of burying bodies, yes, but also of holding a shaking Ronan, sobs wrecking through him, and cleaning up blood and helping to patch up injuries after objects as innocent as a rose have come back from his dreams with thorns. The first month after Ronan officially quit Aglionby, immediately after winter break, Adam would spend entire days worried about him, thinking about what he could be doing or dreaming or not doing, to the point where most nights he would drive out to Barns after work and have to force Ronan to do basic tasks like eat and shower and go outside for some fresh air because he would just forget to move, lying in bed for hours and wasting the days away without realizing. It’s a little better, now, knowing Ronan is slowly settling into his new life at the Barns, beginning to process his grief, the smiles coming in easier, the good days slowly beating the bad ones.
Ronan wanting that, though, even now… Adam is as unprepared for the knowledge of it as he was the first time.
He’s familiar with the idea of it, what it could look like. He’s familiar with Ronan, dying on the floor of a church. He’s familiar with the sounds Ronan softly gasped out when he was being unmade by the demon, his limbs thrashing in that dismal second after his paralysis ended but right before being pulled back under. All of them come together in Adam’s head to conjure up one terrible, terrible image, and —
“I’m not — shit. I’m not actually going to do anything,” Ronan interrupts the thought, the Ronan that is holding Adam just as Adam is holding him, the real Ronan. He must have sensed Adam’s panic, the stutter in his breathing, his traitorous heart skipping several beats, attuned as he always is to Adam’s reactions. “I wouldn’t do that to Matthew. Or Opal.” A pause. “Or you.”
Adam asks, hesitant, “But do you… want to? Do it, I mean?”
Ronan considers it. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “Sometimes. But it’s not like before.” Before the summer, Adam supplies, when they were burying nightmares made reality and Ronan was bleeding out anger through so many open wounds, careless with his life and his dreams. The death grip of fear around Adam’s heart loosens a little. “I used to want it, you know? I used to — like, all the time. Now it’s the, the, the idea of it. Only when it’s too much, and I don’t know what to do with all of it. But I wouldn’t do it, it would be stupid. It’s better now. I don’t want you to think that I just… you know. I wouldn’t. Not again. But sometimes I can’t — I can’t help it, without Opal or Cabeswater in my dreams, and everything turns sideways so fast and I have to scramble not to bring all this shit back like the last time. And this week fucking sucked, Adam, God, I was so glad you came tonight before I had to fucking ruin everything —”
“Don’t say that. You didn’t ruin anything.”
“I did, though. You shouldn’t have to worry about how fucked up I am. I don’t want… ugh.” He grunts, words failing him. “I’m not supposed to deal with this shit while you’re all still around. I’m supposed to keep it the fuck together and make this matter before you — leave.” He spits out the word like it is poisonous.
Like leaving is imminent, and coming back isn’t.
And, oh. Adam can put the pieces together now.
“Ronan, we’re coming back,” he says. “Gansey and Blue and even Cheng, they’re all coming back. And so am I.” At Ronan’s silence, Adam insists, “I’m coming back, Ronan.”
He breathes out an exhausted, resigned sigh; the sigh of someone who’s considered this exact answer before and is ready to dismiss it. Amidst all the hurting, Adam feels a hot flash of anger coarse through him. “Until you change your mind, Parrish,” Ronan says, “when you’re out there conquering the world or whatever the fuck. You’ve always wanted to get out of here, and what the fuck are you even gonna come back to? This? Yeah, right.”
Adam can’t help but sound irritable when he replies, “Yes, actually, I am.” Being hidden away from each other suddenly feels unbearable. “Can you just. Look at me for a second.”
“Parrish, you don’t gotta —”
But Adam pays him no mind; the hand on the back of Ronan’s head moves to grip the nape of his neck, and he doesn’t fight it when Adam pulls him away from his hiding spot until they’re face to face, Adam’s eyes crossing slightly with the effort to stare openly at him when they’re invading so much of each other’s space.
Ronan’s eyes are closed, his long lashes damp with tears that didn’t fall, and he looks very beautiful in the dim bathroom light. Adam brings both of his hands to the sides of his face and presses their foreheads together.
“Ronan. I’m leaving, yes, but I’m coming back. Not because I feel like I have to, or because I feel like I need to clean up your messes. I’m coming back because I want to and I’m here right now because I want to. Because you’re here, and I want to be with you. Being with you is, it’s good, for me, okay? I’m happy. Why do you think I… I mean. God. You know I — love you,” he says, but it comes out strange and unpracticed and his voice breaks in the middle of it, because Adam has only ever said those words once before in his entire life, in the dark of St. Agnes, tumbling on the edge of wakefulness, and they’re not easy words to say. Not yet. So he says them again, stronger, surer, shaking a little but with enough feeling, “I love you. I’m not giving you up, I’m not changing my mind about you. I’m all in. Okay? You’re stuck with me, Lynch. As long as you want me, I’m coming back.”
”Of course I want you,” Ronan says immediately, without hesitation, voice rough but open. His eyes are still closed. “You know I do, Adam.” And yes, Adam does, but he still gives in to the burning urge to smile a small smile, senselessly happy, he wants me. It's always such a rush to hear it confirmed in words. He leans closer to Ronan’s body, if that’s even possible.
“Then I’m coming back.
“And about — the other thing. I can’t. I can’t promise it’s not always going to be like this. But, for whatever it’s worth, I’m always going to be there. I want to be there. You matter, you matter so much, Ronan, to me and to Gansey and Blue and Matthew and Opal and, and Chainsaw and even Henry. And Declan,” he adds, chest warming with pride and gladness when Ronan’s lips twitch. “I’m so fucking glad you’re here. That we’re… this. I don’t care about anything else. You’re not fucked up. You’re hurting, and nobody is expecting you to act like you aren’t. You’re not fucked up.” Really, if there is one person who is fucked up in their relationship, it’s Adam, but he already knows how Ronan would react to that. He pushes invisible hairs behind Ronan’s ear, fingers lightly stroking the sensitive patch of soft skin. “And if you can’t stop the bad dreams, I’m still going to be there when you wake up. Always. Even if I’m not here, you can call, or text, and I can come visit, and we’re gonna make it work until I’m done with college. I told you. We will. I’ll be there. I can carry the things that hurt for you when they become too much, because you carry mine for me, too.”
That, more than anything, ever, is true: Adam is not afraid of what lurks inside Ronan’s head. He’s witnessed his night horrors and wandered inside his nightmares and commuted with his dream forest and kissed all of his scars; he’s seen him so angry he didn’t look human and laugh so hard he looked like a god and cry silently for the parents he lost that he looked like nothing more than a boy; he’s watched him die and saved him from a pool of acid and wrapped his hands around his throat and had those same hands kissed with utmost reverence mere hours after they’d tried to kill him. He’s woken up next to his worst nightmares and his most beautiful dreams, full of light, and he wants to keep waking up next to them for as long as Ronan will let him.
Because Ronan has done that for Adam and so much more. He has dreamt hand lotion and ridiculous mixtapes filled with the same terrible song six times and quilts that are never too warm and flowers the color of Adam’s eyes and Cabeswater, God, Cabeswater. He brings Adam cheap dinners at the garage and drives him to the trailer factory at ass o’clock in the morning, Parrish, who the fuck gets up this early just for the promise of extra time together and holds his hand under the table at Nino’s and punched Robert Parrish in the face and kisses Adam like he can’t believe he’s not dreaming, like he’s drowning. He’s smart and funny and loyal and ridiculous and the most infuriating person in the world, but he stayed, stubborn bastard that he is, when Adam did his best to push everybody else away. He thought of Adam as worthy long before even Adam himself could.
How can Ronan believe Adam will ever want to leave him?
“You’re impossible,” Adam tells him, entirely too earnest, but he can’t find it in himself to care about it. Ronan deserves the honesty. “And amazing and wondrous and magic. I wish you could see that.”
When Ronan replies, his voice is hoarse. “Welcome to my world.”
Adam can’t not kiss him for that.
It’s sweet, unhurried, the sort of kissing that is just because. Ronan’s lips are soft against Adam’s chapped ones and he gets lost in the feel of it, his brain forgetting about everything but Ronan and the way his tongue carries a little of the aftertaste from the vodka when it licks into his mouth. He puts his arms around Ronan’s neck and Ronan’s hands move up his back under the fabric of the t-shirt and when Adam sighs into the kiss Ronan swallows his breath for him.
They don’t pull away for a while, but once they do Adam reluctantly gets up and goes find some alcohol and a first-aid kit in the cabinet under the sink. He rubs a wet wipe around the new injures and tries to clean up as much of the dried blood as he can, kissing the first part of Ronan’s arm his lips land on every time Ronan hisses in discomfort, and then covers the cuts in bandages as neatly as possible. He hands Ronan the shower head and helps him get out of his boxers so he can wash himself, while Adam makes him promise to wait for him inside the bathroom as he searches for a mop downstairs and cleans the trail of dark red drops on the floors.
It takes him longer than he’d prefer, but at least once he’s done there’s no more traces of blood in the living room, Ronan’s room or the hallway. He stores the vodka in the fridge, dubbing it a tomorrow problem, and checks on Opal before going back for Ronan; he finds her asleep under Declan’s bare desk in the middle of a cocoon of blankets and old Aglionby sweatshirts and rocks and sticks. Inside the bathroom, Ronan, with a towel wrapped around his waist, sits on the edge of the tub. He succeeds at a small, tired smile when he sees Adam, and twines their hands together once he’s in his reach.
“Let’s go back to bed,” Adam says, and tugs Ronan toward the bedroom.
They both change into new pairs of boxers and wordlessly slip into bed, facing each other on their sides. Adam forgot to replace the stained sheets, but Ronan mentions nothing about them as he covers their bodies with the comforter and rests a light hand on Adam’s hip.
“I’m not sleeping,” Ronan says, sounding tired, eyes already closed.
“Okay,” Adam says simply. “Wake me up if you need to. Do you want me to stay here tomorrow? I could call Boyd and cancel my shift.”
“Who are you and what have you done to my boyfriend.”
“Asshole. I’m serious.”
“I’m not a baby, Parrish. I can deal. Plus you need the cash.” He sighs, but it’s with contentment. Easy. “I could drive you into town. Pick you up after your shift.”
“Yeah?”
“Mhmm. In the meantime I could hang out at Monmouth with the throuple from hell or whatever. And then Gansey’s gonna want to do dinner at Nino’s when you’re free, even if Sargent’s not working.”
“Probably,” Adam agrees.
“We could stay at St. Agnes, too. Opal feeds herself the first shit she finds running out there, so that’s covered. And we can come back Sunday at noon after Mass.”
Adam is aware of how big he’s smiling. “What about your church suit?”
“Fuck, you’re right. No fucking way I’m bringing that all the way there.” He pauses, thinking it over. “We’ll just have to come back home, then, and I’ll drive for Mass in the morning.”
Adam inches closer to him, then closer still, stopping only when their bare chests are pressed together. He kisses Ronan, feeling the thrum of his heartbeat next to his own, and then says against his lips, “Yeah. Home.”
They kiss some more until Adam stops to yawn into Ronan’s mouth, making Ronan yawn in turn, and then they’re laughing breathlessly and kissing again.
Once they’ve settled down, both still awake and sharing breaths in silence, Ronan brings one of Adam’s hands to his mouth and admits to his skin, “You do help. With the things that hurt.” He presses his lips to Adam’s knuckles. “Thank you. Amo te.”
Adam feels the odd and warm tingle behind his eyes that might mean he wants to cry, so he keeps them shut, just in case. He bends his head to kiss Ronan’s collarbone and, lulled by the sound of Ronan’s breathing, he falls asleep.
When Adam wakes up the next morning with sunlight invading the bedroom and the sounds of the farm outside, Chainsaw’s caws somewhere in the near distance, Ronan is paralyzed next to him, a blue flower Adam doesn’t recognize cupped against his chest. His eyes are lost somewhere outside his body and his brow is furrowed, so Adam holds himself up on one elbow and waits until Ronan can blink to steal the flower from his hand.
The blue of its petals is deep and vibrant, the shade of cobalt, and Adam thinks it’s trying to look like a rose, pointy thorns adorning the length of its stem. Adam presses the pad of his index finger against one of their tips, feeling Ronan’s heavy eyes on him, but when he pulls away he is unharmed. Under the sunlight, the petals glow with specks of gold. It’s unlike any flower Adam knows of, impossible and amazing and wondrous and magic like the dreamer that brought it to life.
“Morning,” Adam says, smiling down at Ronan. “Can I keep this one?”
Ronan kisses him yes.