Chapter Text
This is how they come together.
It is August, and it is unbearable.
Monmouth Manufacturing found itself in the same predicament: trapped in the middle of the eternity of August and completely unbearable.
At least in Ronan’s opinion.
Despite the sputtering A/C system lethargically pushing cool air into his room and the dream fan he had pulled out in utter desperation the previous night working at its highest capacity, his room was still humid and suffocating. No, forget the stark, dry heat he had heard of in California, Virginia raged a smothering brand of summer that threatened to choke him. Henrietta, in particular, was no better.
So he found himself, eagle spread on the marginally cooler floor, wishing he could dream up a winter to scare the sun behind some clouds. Rain, even, could serve to help alleviate this heat.
He closed his eyes, stared hard at his eyelids, and, for a moment, thought he had succeeded: something roared and cracked outside, and he flicked his eyes open, expecting thunder and lightning, wind and rain. But the sun was still sinking to meet the horizon as dusk fell, and the sky was just as blue as it had been five minutes ago.
Ronan Lynch hates summer.
Chainsaw looked at him with one eye as he picked himself up off the floor, yawning and stretching cantankerously and obnoxiously, making faces at her in return.
Another something – thunder? – cracked and clapped through the early evening outside, and Ronan held his arm out to his bird before leaving the factory to investigate and/or beat the shit out of whoever was taunting him.
On his way, he kicked Gansey’s door open to check if he had come back from D.C. yet – he had gone to help Helen with something, Ronan couldn’t be arsed to remember what, and had mentioned that he wouldn’t know when he’d be back. He’d looked like he was in pain when he said this, like Ronan couldn’t bear to live without him for longer than necessary, and, oh Ronan, my dear, I am so dreadfully sorry that I shan’t know when I get back until I get back, oh Ronan, I am so sorry.
Granted, he really hadn’t sounded like that, but Ronan had rolled his eyes all the same and had told him to get on with it and leave so he could get on with it and trash the Pig (which was to be left behind). Gansey had turned white at the idea and promptly fixed him with a look that made Ronan grin maliciously.
For whatever reason, he was thankful Gansey’s room remained empty of its owner. He didn’t bother with Noah’s hole in the wall and thundered down the stairs.
Adam Parrish stood out front of Monmouth, bent over the engine of his car.
“Shit, Lynch, fuck, sorry, my car – “ Adam said, hitting his head on the raised hood of the tri-coloured car. “I didn’t know you were here.”
Ronan raised a brow. “Then why are you here, Parrish?”
“I thought Gansey was here.”
“Well, he’s not. And besides,” Ronan said petulantly, “what do you need him for? I’m right here.” He grinned and leaned against the stair rail, shaking his shoulder to get Chainsaw to perch elsewhere.
Adam made a face. “I don’t even remember. The car just – broke down, three feet away from where I was going to park – “ he motioned helplessly at the space between the front bumper of the Pig and the tri-coloured car.
Ronan didn’t respond, and instead gazed unblinkingly at the other boy. Adam sighed and turned to face him.
“Do you need something?”
Ronan smirked. “Nope.”
Adam blessed him with his gaze for a moment more before returning to the engine of the tri-coloured car. His shirt had been folded neatly and placed on the top of it, and he already had grease covering his fingers and parts of his chest. Ronan, obviously, was perfectly content to sit there and watch him work.
Adam Parrish was a masterpiece painted in a language Ronan wasn't sure he was allowed to speak.
This boy, this creature, standing in front of him was something he wasn’t allowed to touch; allowed to think of; allowed to breathe around. The last most was a product of his own doing. His lungs shuddered every time they were within feet, yards, speaking distance, and his heart was no better.
This was how they came together: Gansey, a boy, a king, a god, wrapped around his own finger and around everyone else’s, pulled, like flies to honey, the sharpest knife in the crowd and the deepest, darkest pool of water from the forest into the same world, the same circle, and told them to play nice and left them there.
And the raven fell in love with the boy.
So it goes.
In the almost-dark, as Adam twisted his way around the sides of the car to reach various parts of the engine, Ronan could make out a jagged scar that languidly stretched itself from his third rib around to his opposite hip. It was stark white against his sun-warmed skin, and Ronan’s brows tangled as he came up with novels of explanations for it. All of them had the same antagonist.
“So,” he said, his voice sharp, “D’you remember why you were going to talk to Gansey yet?” He pushed himself off the rail and took a few steps forward.
Adam tensed, his back to Ronan, and leaned against the car for a moment, hands curled over the mouth of the engine. “No,” he said tersely, and resumed his work.
When Ronan came to stand beside him, he frowned, but said nothing.
“Am I going to have to pry it out of you?”
Adam turned to face him. “Yes, Lynch,” he said sardonically.
Ronan smirked.
He jerked his chin at the scar on Adam’s front. “Where’d you get that?”
“Where do you think?” Adam replied. “He hit me and I hit something else. The end.”
Adam turned to focus on the tri-coloured car again, but Ronan took a step forward, invading his space. He placed a finger on the scar, his left index, just over his heart, and flicked his eyes up to see Adam’s reaction.
This was not allowed. Ronan felt like he was breaking a thousand rules, each and every one of them one of his own, but Henrietta’s August made a night like tonight seem endless. Eternal. Unrepeatable. Tonight, this night, was the last before a jump over a chasm, the last before anything.
It was, for some strange reason, the perfect setting. Humid, swirling air that played tricks on his mind, making him think that rain could come to Henrietta in the middle of August, a broken down, shitty car that deserved someone far less that its owner, and a distinct feeling of falling off of a cliff, dancing delightedly through his veins.
Fuck rules, really.
Adam met his gaze and swallowed, but didn’t move. Ronan stared hard at his chest, counting his breaths, for what felt like hours before he put on a mask of complete indifference and looked Adam in the eyes again.
“How long have you had it?”
Adam scoffed. “God, Lynch, you’ve seen me without a shirt on before, haven’t you? I don’t know. A while. Can’t remember when I got it.”
Ronan shrugged and held Adam in place with his fingers on his hips, pressing lightly into his skin. His eyes traced his scar, circled around his ribs, passed lightly across his stomach.
“Why d’you care, anyway?”
“Evening the field, Parrish. You’ve seen my scars, I get to see yours.”
“Everyone and their mother has seen you shirtless, and yet you’re still as white as you are in the winter.”
Ronan gave him a smile, all teeth, and Adam batted his hands away so he could keep working.
It was dark now, and the decrepit lights outside Monmouth flickered on, joining the solitaire light coming from Ronan’s room upstairs. These lights painted a whole new picture for Ronan to see.
Everything looked unreal, like he was trapped in someone else’s dream. Not his own, never his own – those he would be able to spot, feel in his gut, from miles away. Those centred around forests and a crude replica of the person in front of him, dreamed to life and so utterly flawed in comparison to its real, live, flesh and blood counterpart. Dream-Adam had a gaze that bit and tore and ripped at his heart and body; Real-Adam had an unfathomable gaze that threatened to drown him any moment. He savoured that feeling more than anything else. But maybe not as much as the feeling of Adam’s skin under his fingers moments earlier.
But the lights from Monmouth, in harsh and warm and sickeningly stark tones of yellow and orange, etched out Adam’s bone structure, his skeleton, in the barest of terms. Lilting cheekbones, a spine assembled effortlessly from glowing vertebrae that looked like embers, shoulder blades that sung in a key that ripped through Ronan and made him weak and unstable in front of him.
Adam Parrish was a furious collection of feather-light bones, an assembly of bowed tree limbs and stones and all things natural but inhuman.
Adam Parrish was little but natural - his heart pumped magic and the smell of smoke and leaves and blood that’s shared through trees and ravens and deer.
But none of it human, none of it fathomable, none of it knowable.
At least, that’s what Ronan thought until he dreamt of a raven and held it and named it and became the prince of a world that man is not privy too.
Maybe they are of the same kind, two creatures of unfathomable delights and failures and magics.
He just knew that he wanted to feel Adam’s skin under his hands, bow his head to his shoulder, sing his praises against his mouth. Because, once taken, a drug this strong is little less than enthrallingly addictive.
Ronan stared for so long at Adam that he didn’t notice when the other boy decided to look back.
“Ronan.”
He jerked. “What, Parrish?”
Adam didn’t answer him immediately, but wiped his hands on a towel he had pulled from the trunk and closed the hood of the car.
“I – “
“Speak up, Parrish.” His voice was harder that he wanted it to be.
“I didn’t come to see Gansey.”
Ronan blinked. “What?”
Adam had placed himself on the other side of the car, which infuriated Ronan to no end, if he truly meant what Ronan thought/wanted/hoped he meant.
“I didn’t come to see – “
“No, I got that,” he huffed out, “What do you mean you didn’t come to see Gansey?” Treading lightly truly was not his style, but he caught his breath and took a measured step towards Adam. Thankfully, he didn’t move back, just resolutely kept his eyes fixed on Ronan.
“I know about – the – “
“The what?” Ronan prodded, taking smaller, quicker steps towards him.
Adam was facing the lights, and when he closed his eyes, giving himself a moment to collect his thoughts, he stopped Ronan in his tracks. Eyes closed, stance so open, painted gold and vivid yellow and orange and the moon on his shoulders –
And the raven fell in love with the boy.
“That what?” he said again, his voice barely above a whisper.
“You.”
Adam flicked his eyes open.
“You. I know about you. About how you like me.”
The night, tonight, was, for some strange reason, the perfect setting. The all-encompassing feeling of jumping off a cliff, heart pounding wildly inside its cage –
“And?”
This was hope. This was fear. This was everything Ronan shied away from, bottled up the distance between him and Adam.
“And maybe… it’s not one sided.”
It wasn’t safety, but it was close. “Prove it,” he whispered.
Adam furrowed his brow. “What?”
“Prove it.” Prove to me this isn’t a dream, he thought. Wildly. Crazily. Prove to me this is something I’ve decided to torture myself with.
Adam held his gaze, eyes that had been on fire seconds before in the light now dark, comforting seas, oceans of water that beckoned Ronan closer. Always closer. Eyes like that could never push him away.
Adam reached a hand up and rested his fingers on Ronan’s cheek, tracing the bags beneath his eyes, and sighed tiredly.
“I found out – figured out the rent.” His voice was a gentle hum, the barest of touches on Ronan’s ears. He leaned into Adam’s hand slightly, forcing himself to remain frozen as it trailed down his face and neck and stopping at the edge of his shoulder, where his fingers made circles on his skin.
“And then I saw how you looked at me. And damn you, Lynch, if I didn’t see it, I felt it.” He was really whispering, telling secrets in the dark to himself, to the stars, to the boy that was more raven than any of them in front of him.
They were a breath apart, toes touching through shoes, breathing the same air. Adam reached for Ronan’s hand, with the one by his side, and tangled their fingers together for a moment before resting them on Ronan’s hip.
He took a shallow, worthless breath, and pressed his lips against Ronan’s.
This was safety.
Ronan curled a hand around the back of Adam’s neck, ran his fingers through his hair, pressed them into the nape of his neck, wrote epics in Latin that spanned from wood-carved shoulder blade to wood-carved shoulder blade. He shuddered under Adam’s hands as he ran his fingers up and down Ronan’s spine, hooked them through his belt loops and pulled him closer.
Ronan was kissing Adam, and it felt like water sliding across his face and every inch of his skin, like the best thing in the world. Adam pulled his lower lip between his teeth, and Ronan closed his eyes tight to keep from making any sort of noise. His fingers brushed the skin under Ronan’s tank, and Ronan wanted to feel Adam’s palms pressed against his stomach, his chest, his back, his fingers tracing his tattoo – because honestly, what is the point of a tattoo if the boy you’re kissing isn’t going to touch it? Mark it with his teeth and repaint it with his lips?
So he pulled himself away, painfully, and held Adam’s face while he caught his breath.
“Upstairs?” he whispered against Adam’s jaw, and suddenly he was being pushed backwards and Adam was grinning cautiously at him and all Ronan wanted to do is prove to him how he’s not a snake, not to Adam, never to Adam.
He let Adam lead him up the stairs, and watched his muscles and bones and the mechanics of his body.
Oh, the maps he could draw on this boy’s skin:
Follow his collarbones down to his rib cage (cage, cage, keep his heart trapped there, fluttering heartbeat like a rabbit’s) and across his chest, trace his spine and make knots around his vertebrae. Tuck fingers under his shoulder blades and make legends with teeth and lips.
Ronan lost his shirt on the way to his room, and thanked God that Gansey wasn’t home, that Noah had been out for the past couple of days.
And so they were standing in Ronan’s room, the only light his desk lamp and the moon and Ronan pressed his lips to Adam’s throat and thought that he’d make a key for his map across Adam’s collarbones; wind a trail down his chest; mark the spot of a monument on his hip bone. Adam ran a hand over his head and locked his arm around Ronan’s waist, digging his fingers into the skin on his back. Adam’s skin was smooth and warm and hot against his, his lips insistent and mouth hard.
He pressed kisses along Adam’s jaw, and they’re moving towards Ronan’s bed and his blood is singing about how this isn’t real, but Adam’s fingers on his skin, Adam’s skin under his hands, Adam’s lips against his begged to differ and desperately insisted otherwise, keening and wanting and all things that filled Ronan with need. He pressed against Adam desperately and kissed him desperately and breathed against his shoulders and jaw desperately, all of it shallow and not enough. It was the type of desperation where you’ve got a second before it’s all gone and that second isn’t even a moment. A moment implies a conclusion, a sense of chaotic closure.
Seconds call up pictures of Adam walking out the door, leaving Ronan behind mid-breath and desperate.
Because this is Adam Parrish, Adam whose name rolls off of Ronan’s tongue: A-dam, Adam who is worthy of everything Ronan could give him, Adam who he has been infatuated with since the day he laid eyes on him. (Because that’s how they came together, Ronan wanting to press himself against Adam and make his lips turn shades of purple and red and leave moons on his collarbones and neck.)
He had a dam behind his eyes and his hands shook as he moved them over Adam’s body, hurriedly, worriedly, as if he were probing for the other boy’s pain. Adam gently moved him backwards, and he stumbled and fell onto his bed.
When he opened his eyes again, Adam was hovering over him and he closed his eyes and waited for it all to end because it can’t possibly be real.
“Problems, Parrish?” he managed as Adam didn’t move, just looked at him with his dark water eyes.
“Say my name,” he whispered. He pressed his lips against the spot where Ronan’s jaw met his ear. “Say my name.”
“Adam,” Ronan whispered back, clutching the other boy to him with his hands and arms and everything he had.
Adam kissed his neck.
“Say it again.”
“Adam.”
Adam kissed his jaw.
“Say it again.”
“Adam.”
Adam kissed his shoulder.
“Say it again.”
“Adam,” he gasped as Adam nipped at where his tattoo crept over his shoulder.
Ronan grasped at Adam’s jaw, pulling him back so he could crush his mouth against his. Their lips slid against one another’s, teeth and tongue, and Ronan ventured to Adam’s neck and felt the hollows his bones made and wanted to spend hours retracing the steps taken to carve his skeleton, his bones, his muscles.
Adam made a guttural noise as he flipped them over, chasing Adam’s lips with his own, thumbing Adam’s shoulder blades.
His veins thrummed as Adam shuddered under his touch, clung to his hips and watched him through his eyelashes as Ronan laid praises and poems across his chest, from shoulder to shoulder, between every bone in his ribcage, over his heart, lower to his hipbones, until Adam pulled him back up and caught his lips again.
Ronan pressed into him, Adam murmuring his name against his mouth and pulling him closer, closer, until Ronan was afraid he’d crush him, but Adam just wrapped his arms around him and kissed him harder.
Adam whispered God under his breath and Ronan felt like the holes in his gut, his wild desperation, were starting to fill back up, with every gasp he nudged out of Adam, every touch of skin and bone, and he filled himself with them until his head was spinning and he was breathless.
They fit together, so naturally, the two of them, wrapped around each other, Adam’s narrow hips riding on each and every one of his thoughts. And suddenly they were both creatures of Cabeswater, ensnared in webs of trees and magic and hurt and the smoke on Adam’s skin and the dreams Ronan weaves even when he’s awake, little more than flesh and blood and bone and soul.
Ronan pulled back to catch his breath, brushing his lips against Adam’s between breaths, bowing his head to rest his forehead between Adam’s neck and shoulder. Adam ran fingers up and down Ronan’s spine, circled the points of Ronan’s shoulder blades, curled themselves into the nape of his neck.
Was this a dream?
No.
He kissed Adam, deeply, catching his bottom lip between his teeth.
Was this real?
He felt Adam’s fingers on his skin, his palms hard on his body, his bones sharp into his flesh, his breaths ghosting across his face and neck, and closed his eyes tight.
“Ronan.”
He met Adam’s gaze, late night, dark room gaze, tired and blinking. Adam touched his cheek with a hand, running a finger down to his jaw.
“Can we - ?” Stop.
Ronan gave him another last, lingering look before nodding and reaching beyond him to push open the window.
He sat on the bed next to Adam, watching his chest rise and fall.
“Are you staying here?”
Adam opened his eyes, meeting Ronan’s gaze. “If that’s all right. I can sleep on the couch – “
“No,” Ronan said quickly. His voice was rough but he held Adam’s gaze. “You can stay here.”
Was this real?
Adam nodded his thanks and reached for Ronan’s hand, eyes on their fingers as they twined together.
“Can you sleep with me here?”
I don’t sleep. “Yeah.”
Adam nodded again, eyes still on their hands.
“All right,” he whispered. He gently pulled Ronan down next to him and let out a breath. “All right.”
Was this real?
Ronan watched him fall asleep, their hands still clasped together, and thought that maybe he could learn Adam’s language if it meant touch and safety and only the good kind of desperation, not depravity.
Was this real?
Yes.