Chapter Text
“And I would find myself and not an image.” — William Butler Yeats
SPRING
Adam Parrish had come a very long way on his own two feet. Literally, as a part-time mechanic without his own car, forever feeding change from the tip jar at the barista gig into the machine to top up his SmarTrip card, walking the final mile. Metaphorically, in that he had gotten from Henrietta to D.C. from sheer force of will.
It hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t been enough. Adam wasn’t enough. Not on his own. His fingers tightened fractionally around the stem of his champagne flute.
“Parrish,” Gansey cautioned. Only Gansey would notice a motion so small.
Adam took a sip of the champagne to hide his irritation. “Yes?”
“You should be celebrating,” Gansey said.
“This is celebrating.” He gestured with the champagne. “See? Celebrating.”
They were standing at the edge of the room, the mingling politicians blurring into a mess of white faces and whiter teeth in front of Adam’s eyes.
“You understand you’re walking out of this evening with two job offers, right?” Gansey gave a little huff like disappointment. It bothered him, that Adam hadn’t relaxed since they got here two hours ago. Something in the back of Adam’s mind was pleased by Gansey’s obvious irritation that Adam wasn’t having a good time.
“I already said thank you.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“Like what? Myself?”
“I don’t want to do this tonight. This is a good night. Isn’t this a good night?”
The earnestness in Gansey’s voice deflated Adam. Do not fight with Gansey. Do not fight with Gansey. It wasn’t his fault that Adam needed him.
This wasn’t how he had wanted it to go. He wanted to get a job on his own. But it was April. He graduated from Georgetown in a few weeks. It had become extremely apparent that he had miscalculated the long-term/short-term benefit calculus of unpaid summer internships versus expanding his normal semester jobs from forty hours between them to eighty. He’d done the latter so he could pay his tuition, but as a result, he lacked the kind of work experience required for an “entry-level” job anywhere. Adam at the moment was a barista, a mechanic, and a library tech, and he didn’t want to be any of those things, because he hadn’t dragged himself through all those years of punishing academics to be one of those things. Gansey’s mother had offered him a job on her team—campaign or legislative staff, whatever he wanted, permanently or just until he had enough experience to get something else—but that was verboten, not only because of Senator Gansey’s politics.
It was difficult to understand the business cards in the inner pocket of his suit coat as anything very much different from that, however. Gansey had brought Adam to this random bipartisan dinner and reception his mother was hosting for some cultural and diplomatic delegation from Ireland so that Adam could get a job, any job, because Adam was out of time. Gansey had stood next to him while he shook hands with both sides of the aisle. Gansey had introduced him to the right people, had steered the conversation the way it needed to go, had subtly name-dropped Adam’s thesis advisor’s name, had done all of the work. Adam had smiled and nodded and picked up the thread and conducted himself appropriately, and that was all it took, because he was standing next to Richard Campbell Gansey III.
I made it out of Henrietta without him. I made it a long way without him. This is just the last meter over the line.
“Are we done with business, then?” Adam asked. He wanted to go back to his shitty apartment and take a cold shower and sleep for a year. He had a short shift at the garage starting at eight tomorrow, then class at one, another class at four, then a nice long shift at the library until close, the kind that was long enough for him to make real progress on a term paper while he waited for someone to ask a question or check out a book. Then he would head to Nino’s and hang out and work on the term paper until Blue’s shift ended. Then he would walk her home, then walk to the Metro out to his own apartment. It would be a long day, tomorrow.
“We are done with business,” Gansey confirmed. “We can move directly to pleasure—oh, now who is that? Here?” He had spotted someone filtering in from a neighboring room. He had asked who the man was, but in a tone that meant This is an unexpected acquaintance, as opposed to all the expected acquaintances I’ve already forced on Adam Parrish. The stranger was tall, probably even taller than Adam, his black hair buzzed short. He wore a black shirt with his black suit, a Republic of Ireland flag pin on his lapel. The man scanned the crowd as if on instinct when he walked in the room, but when he spotted Gansey and Adam, his sullen expression broke into an incongruously friendly smile.
“Gansey, do you know him?” Adam asked as the man cut a path through the crowd to them.
“Dick,” the man said before Gansey could answer, “Jesus Christ, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it?”
He sounded American, Adam realized, disoriented.
“Ronan Lynch, as I live and breathe.” Instead of taking the proffered hand, Gansey wrapped him into a brief and vicious hug. “Ronan, this is Adam Parrish,” he said, after he’d released him. “Adam, this is. Well.” He hadn’t looked at Adam since he’d spotted the man, and he hadn’t stopped beaming, either. He didn’t look at Adam as he asked the stranger, “What are you even doing here?”
Adam’s stomach roiled with jealousy and champagne. Who the hell was Ronan Lynch?
“Dicklan got himself into the Government. God only knows how. But, you know, with your mother hosting this whole thing, he brought me along.”
“Adam is from Henrietta, too,” Gansey said.
The stranger looked to Adam, finally, and Adam felt something snap. He would not like Ronan Lynch.
“Town,” Adam said. “Not gown.” He wasn’t usually mean to people right off the bat, but Lynch was obviously a snake. It was how his smile had turned unkind as soon as Gansey said Adam’s name. It was how the unkind version fit his face better than the smile he’d had for Gansey.
“Obviously,” Ronan Lynch said.
“I knew Ronan at Aglionby,” Gansey explained.
Of course he did. Jealousy felt an awful lot like vertigo, the room shifting underneath Adam’s feet, rearranging itself into a scenario where Ronan Lynch had been Gansey’s friend first.
“What are you doing tonight? When do you go back?” Gansey was asking. “Where are you staying? Does Declan still have that place in Georgetown?”
“Nothing, eight days, yeah, there. Sold all the other foreign properties, but he kept that one.” It took half a beat for Adam to understand by foreign Lynch meant outside Ireland.
“Come back to mine. You too, Adam,” Gansey said, as if remembering now that Adam was still there. He continued on as if Adam wasn’t. “It’s been what, four years? It must’ve been. I want to hear about… whatever it is you’ve been doing on the farm, since you’ve ever heard of a phone.”
“I wrote you,” Lynch said, sounding very slightly put out. “Isn’t that better than texting anyway?”
“Postcards that are almost entirely dirty jokes? No. That is not better.”
Adam realized now this man must have been the one to send the postcards from Ireland that graced Gansey’s fridge one at a time. Gansey changed out the postcard on the magnetic clip regularly. Adam had never flipped one over to read; they seemed private.
The vertigo turned to something more like burning.
“Let’s go, then,” Lynch urged. “You’ve made your appearance, I made mine, I found you; let’s go. Did you drive?”
“Yeah, the Pig is still running. Parrish taught me how to fix it, I’ll have you know. Okay, yeah, Adam—?”
“I was thinking of heading out now anyway,” Adam said. It wasn’t a lie.
“Come with us?”
Adam shook his head, softening it with a smile. “No. No, I’ve got… stuff. See you tomorrow though, okay?” Maybe if he’d said come with me, not us. But no, Adam would have said no either way, surely, because it would be stupid otherwise.
Gansey’s disappointment showed, but he didn’t push it. He had already pushed Adam enough today. “See you tomorrow. I’ll text you.” He raised a fist for a tepid bump.
“Cool. It was nice meeting you, Ronan.”
“I’m sure I’ll be seeing you, Parrish,” Gansey’s best friend before Adam replied.
Adam noticed he did not say it was nice to meet him.
On the Metro home, he wondered if Ronan Lynch felt Adam had replaced him in Gansey’s life.
He felt warm at the thought.
“Parrish isn’t normally like that,” Gansey told Ronan in the car.
“Like what? He barely said three words, he wasn’t like anything.”
“Rude. He’s just…” Gansey sighed. Ronan watched him slouch further into the driver’s seat. “He’s upset with me.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea, honestly. I thought the night went very well. I got him a job.” Ronan snorted. “Two jobs, actually. Mutually exclusive jobs. Two job offers.”
“And you don’t know why he’s mad?”
“Fine, I know why he’s mad,” Gansey admitted. “He doesn’t want me to do anything for him. He doesn’t believe in it.”
“Bootstrapper like your mom?”
“Worse,” Gansey said gravely. “That whole crowd, safety net for me, bootstraps for thee. But Adam, no, he’s the other way. Safety net for thee, bootstraps for me.”
“Prick.” No heat to it.
“He has his reasons.”
Ronan didn’t ask. Gansey wouldn’t tell him someone else’s secrets.
“So you’ve been in Ireland?” Gansey said eventually.
It was funny: In the fifteen minutes in Gansey’s car that still smelled exactly the way it did when they were sixteen, Ronan had managed to forget they hadn’t spoken in four years. He hadn’t heard Gansey’s voice in four years. “That’s right. Yeah. Um.” Gansey was asking for a full accounting, but there was nothing to say. He had dropped out of high school and done fuck all since then, more or less. “You know Declan went back right after he graduated, to go to Trinity. And he took Matthew after, well.”
After their father had been brutally murdered. After Ronan had found Niall Lynch in the driveway, half in and half out of the charcoal grey BMW. After that, Declan had left Ronan in Virginia to finish his education, while he took Matthew back with him to the old country because he had things to deal with and Matthew was too young to be left alone. At fifteen Ronan was apparently not too young to be left alone, ergo, he stayed.
Ronan continued, “He did his shit, but the farm went to me. In the will. When I turned eighteen.”
Gansey drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Ronan knew he disliked Declan’s decision to leave Ronan in Virginia while taking his younger brother away. There had been no good options when their father was murdered and their mother fell into a coma that lasted six weeks before she finally passed too, but to Gansey’s mind, Declan surely had chosen the worst among them.
Ronan wasn’t happy about it either, but Declan drove out from Dublin every Sunday to go to mass at the parish church where their parents had married near the Barns, and after a few years of sitting beside him for that, he had a hard time keeping the rage going. Ronan had burned his anger so long and so hard it had burned through all the fuel.
“You were always planning to go, weren’t you,” Gansey said, finally.
Ronan wondered what had given him away, that the choice to go had been planned. It must have been the car. Shipping the BMW across the Atlantic cost a fortune, but Ronan couldn’t leave it or sell it. Gansey, himself no stranger to frivolous and complex logistics, would have spotted the weeks of planning right away.
“Yeah. Yeah, I was.” He didn’t bother apologize for not telling Gansey in advance, for the way he had stolen off in the night from the warehouse they’d converted to an apartment, leaving most of his belongings and a note: I withdrew from Aglionby. I’ll write to you. There was nothing for it. “I wrote, didn’t I? Like I said.”
“You did. And I forgive you, you know.” Gansey kept his eyes on the road, straight ahead.
“You shouldn’t. You really shouldn’t.”
“I do anyway, you asshole.”
“What about you?” Ronan said finally. “What’ve you been up to?”
Apparently this had been enough to settle whatever discomfort Gansey had felt from the four year absence, because now he launched into an explanation of his college application process, his program of study at Georgetown, his mother running for Senate, winning the seat, Helen’s latest three hobby-jobs. He didn’t bring up a girlfriend and Ronan didn’t ask.
Gansey also gave a comprehensive update on his never-ending quest to find a Welsh king buried in the mountains. Now, Gansey explained, he was undertaking a postbac research fellowship that was ostensibly supporting him while he applied to graduate schools this year but mainly, of course, supported his quest for the sleeping king. Gansey had one last year to fuck around in Henrietta before he had to leave and go somewhere else: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or maybe somewhere further afield: Chicago, Stanford, or Oxford or Cambridge. Gansey had landed in Henrietta at fifteen with what felt like infinite time in front of him, and now he was down to just over a year before his best shot at finding Glendower was gone.
Gansey didn’t ask Ronan to help him this time. They weren’t fifteen anymore. It was the only thing that was different.
Gansey told him about Adam Parrish, whom Gansey had met on the first day of classes and found right away had grown up in the same town as Aglionby. Adam Parrish, who was better than Gansey in Latin despite never studying it in a classroom, who knew all about Glendower and had all manner of brilliant ideas.
Ronan didn’t tell Gansey that he had seen Adam before. That he recognized him from Henrietta. Ronan did not lie, but he had secrets. Adam Parrish had been Ronan’s selfish secret for a long time.
It was dangerous now that the secret had a name.