Chapter Text
Ronan Niall Lynch had a hand kink.
This was not strictly true. More accurately, Ronan Lynch had a kink. And that kink was for a body part. A specific body part. Which specific body part changed depending on the person. He would never be sure why it worked that way, but somehow each transfixion was held in one part of their bodies, and whether he wanted to or not, whether he wanted them or not, and regardless of how badly or shamefully or regretfully, that was the part he dreamed about.
For Gansey, it had been (still was?) his throat. Ronan could never stop watching the way he swallowed, the way his neck glided like a golden pillar from his Atlantic shoulders to his Hellenic jaw, as though the head upon him were a trophy. Because Gansey never huddled, his neck was always the purest and most elegant support of his confidently lifted chin. It was kind of annoying that Ronan was notably taller than him, actually. It was only by lounging that he could gaze up to his jaw from the underside, following the sloping sinew over his esophagus, tracing on either side with his eyes the divot he knew thrummed with an ichorous pulse.
For Kavinsky – though Ronan bit this down and liked to pretend that this part of him didn’t exist – it was shoulders. Whether he despised or was thrilled by the sight of them, it was always that curve of the shoulders that defined Kavinsky to him. Like the curve of a road slicing through jacked mountains, like the hunch of a panther, like a pauldron, it was the most outward part of Kavinsky; a knob of bone like a moulded gearshift, one whose connections to the whirling engine you could trace beneath translucent skin, all collarbones and scapulas. Ronan would never be able to forget that gruesome way his shoulders had been thrown back, scraped wide, to accept death – like a vulture casting open its ugly wings.
For Adam Parrish, Ronan’s kink was hands.
In all accuracy, Adam Parrish’s hands were not really the most Adam part of him. Adam, really, to any unbiased viewer, was: freckled elbows and knobbed wrists; Adam was: wide-set eyes and thin mouth; Adam was: that gently sloping spine; Adam was: subtle, slim boxed hips and long legs like trees, the color of cat-tails.
But for all intents and purposes, to Ronan Lynch, the end-all be-all of Adam Parrish was and would forever be his hands.
Hence, kink.
To be perfectly fair to Ronan Lynch, it must be acknowledged: Adam Parrish’s hands were the doers of some extraordinary things. They were the spreaders of Tarot cards, the lighters of scrying candles, the jerkers of wrenches, the wipers of axle grease, the writers of best-mark essay assignments. Adam Parrish’s hands were the pagers of books, the smoothers of brows, the clippers of hair, the clutchers of small change. Adam Parrish’s hands were the movers of rocks, the repairers of energy, the wielders of magic. They were Cabeswater; they were sorcerers; they were every way Adam built his own damn road of bricks to climb out of the hellpit from whence he came.
That was not why Ronan liked them.
Or maybe it was. He didn’t know why he liked them. But Ronan was the haver of a kink, and he did know exactly the manifestations of what that meant (not least due to the frequency of his fixations to haunt his dreams). Which is to say, that without any particular reason for his attachment to or admiration of said hands, Ronan knew what he liked about them:
He liked their fingers. He liked that they were long and brown, that all their edges were rounded off but that the tips ended in soft squares. None of that tapering bullshit for Adam’s hands; no, these were not candlesticks or fashionable women’s jeans. They were machinations of wood, the fine-fingered ends of branches, knuckles like swollen knots, stymying and natural.
He liked that the dips where Adam’s fingers met his knuckles were shaped like ‘U’s instead of ‘V’s; very long Us, slim slim gaps the perfect size for pencils or rubber bands or charcoal sticks. He liked imagining his own fingers, which were like rope or bones or knotted metal, slipping in between them.
He liked the way the knuckles could have been veins themselves, or violin strings, tenuous and strong, highway dividers, ridges. He liked how Adam traced his own thumb over them sometimes, unconsciously, when he was thinking. He liked that Adam felt things to think, liked watching his thumbpad drag over the gentle mountains.
He liked how flat Adam’s palms were. How square. How they stopped flat at the bottom as if to say: Look. Stop. That’s all. The hands could have been their own entities. No gentle sloping here; his palms were arid and quiet, a map of barely ridged lifelines and the soft almost-plushness of his lower thumb muscle where it met them.
He liked the thumbs themselves, actually; unnecessarily long, like Adam Parrish tended to be. (Not quite tall in the way Ronan was tall; where Ronan was a snow leopard on its hind legs, all haunches and lithe prowl and general largeness, Adam was an ent or a long-legged stag, an elegant young colt, all legs and knees and thin and long and strange.) Adam’s thumbs stuck out like… well, like sore thumbs, flexible and smooth and careful, with rectangular pads and carefully clipped nails. They bent all the way back in a perfect hitch-hiker’s thumb; Ronan Lynch wanted to be the one to collect him into the passenger’s seat.
He liked the bones and sinews that made up Adam’s most sensuous (in his opinion) instruments, liked the surety of them, liked that they were molded hard and smooth on the underside with the subtle callouses of a laborer, but still slender and artful and delicate as a scholar’s; they were flexible and certain and wide-spreading like a magician’s, with the raised veins and straight creases of someone who often clenched their fists - while still gleaming the virgin knuckles of someone who had never punched another human being.
(Ronan was not sure if Adam was, himself, a human being. It seemed possible that he was some sort of reenvisioned myth, a cryptid of Henrietta, Virginia with Very Beautiful Hands.)
In summary, Ronan Niall Lynch had a hand kink, and it was all Adam Parrish’s fault.