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Niall Lynch dies and with him dies something in Ronan. Everything else just falls asleep.
There is no name for this yet, the howling, the echoing, the hunger.
The tire iron gnaws at him, so blunt and violent, and he wants -
None of the paramedics knows what happened to Aurora. Someone says they can't stay here, and later he'll remember thinking: no, this is my home. But Declan says it's the law because Niall wrote it down himself and Ronan doesn't believe him, he thinks Declan is a liar. Declan is the one who called the police in the first place.
Ronan is buried under every feeling he ever felt for Niall, buried under every memory of Aurora, buried under every question Declan can't, or won't, answer him, and he needs to get out out out just for long enough to breathe.
This is the first time he meets Joseph Kavinsky, really meets him, not just acknowledges his presence. Someone gave him the number, what feels like centuries ago when he was just a sixteen year old boy with too many sharp edges, and he remembers how he couldn't understand why anyone would need chemicals when they had fists and a beating heart. He doesn't quite understand now but he doesn't care what it is as long as it will take him out of this body.
When he calls and someone picks up, there's just a lot of laughter and some cursing at first, and Ronan thinks, this is not fucking funny, so he simply says, "Kavinsky." The laughter ceases and then Kavinsky replies, "Lynch. I've been waiting for you to call."
He's named him the adress and the time and the price (it went more like "might as well come over tonight, you know Skov's place don't you?"), and Ronan shows up at the given adress at the given time with money he took from Declan's wallet. He doesn't know that Kavinsky knows what desperation looks like because he sees it in the mirror every morning.
Now he stands at the door of a run-down trailer somewhere at the edges of Henrietta. He doesn't actually believe Kavinsky lives here, because he's seen him at their fucking expensive private school, but he's still surprised because he imagined him differently (what he actually thinks is he didn't believe someone selling drugs and favors of any kind to be this good looking from up close).
So when Kavinsky with his lazy grin and his gold chains and his sun glasses asks, "What do you want, rich boy?" Ronan doesn't say fuck off, he says, "Whatever makes me forget myself."
What makes him forget himself is a small white pill that he washes down with beer, and Kavinsky sits him down on the bed between his posse (Jiang to the right, Prokopenko to his left) because Ronan has nowhere to go anyway. Swan is pacing the length of the trailer, from the open kitchen to the closed bedroom door and back, until Skov boxes him into the chest, hard, and they sort of fight while everyone watches lazily. Kavinsky prepares lines of coke on a tablet at the kitchen counter, and the trailer is altogether too small for the six of them, and they bump into each other and lean even closer together because the pounding bass of what Ronan guesses is Bulgarian hip hop makes their words unintelligble.
After a while he feels something rise up in him that may be happiness or amnesia, and right now it's hard to tell if there's even a difference between the two.
When someone, possibly Prokopenko, substitutes the beer bottle in his hand with something that says Неміроф on the label, he doesn't ask. It's tasteless and burns all the way down his throat and the warm feeling it creates in his stomach goes well with amnesia. (Or happiness. Whichever.)
After the first bottle of vodka and another pill it all becomes a bit of a blur, so it's hard to tell who came up with the idea of the stick and poke. Maybe Prokopenko, who cuts himself on a smashed beer bottle and muses over how you could cut pictures into your skin. Maybe Jiang, who shows off his newest tattoo that begins somewhere below his navel and vanishes into the waistband of his jeans. Maybe Kavinsky, who seems to naturally enjoy all things potentially hurtful or dangerous or mind-altering.
"Get undressed, princess," Kavinsky orders with a gleam in his eyes that Ronan enjoys altogether too much - but he'll resent himself for that in the morning, not now, and he figures taking off his shirt will make Kavinsky look at him like that just a little longer. Someone makes him lay facedown on the rickety kitchen table, shoving a bit too hard so Ronan's cheekbone collides with the edge. "Fuck you," he curses, and Jiang says, "Don't be a pussy, it's going to get worse than that."
His phone won't stop ringing because he's fought with Declan and left without saying why and where and when he'd get back, and when Swan has enough of it he just takes it out of Ronan's jacket und throws it against the wall. The ringing stops and the phone is probably broken, but he'll deal with that later.
He feels strangely helpless with too many pairs of hands holding him down and the air brushing over the heat of his skin. He flinches as someone touches his back. "Stop fucking moving," someone hisses, and Ronan feels fingers trailing around his shoulder blades, and then Kavinsky leans close to his ear and whispers, "Just give in to it and let it happen." And the warmth of his breath is gone so fast Ronan wonders if it wasn't the drugs telling him.
The first time the needle breaks his skin he doesn't even notice through the buzzing of the vodka, but repeated three, five, eight times he starts to feel the stinging and it gets worse. Something wet gets smeared by one or three or six hands, possibly blood, and if they're taking turns or it's all Kavinsky's warm hands caressing his back, he doesn't know.
Ronan thinks that maybe he was so frozen with grief that he broke in two along his spine, and now somebody needs to stitch him back together in a mess of ink and blood. His fingers curl harder around the neck of a bottle of vodka that seemingly came from nowhere, taking a sip every now and then. Everything is sensation, the small world of the trailer kitchen tinted red through cigarette smoke and half-closed eyes. He doesn't remember asking what they're doing, a picture or a word or just a mindless constellation of drunken ink points, and he doesn't really care because by now it's the pain that counts and keeps his thoughts from whatever dark places are hidden in the back of his mind.
He may have fallen asleep at some point. When he comes to, his back feels like a minefield somebody walked through, but he sits up and looks around to find three of the boys asleep - Prokopenko and Skov tangled on the bed, Swan on the floor with his back leaning against the wall. Jiang and Kavinsky are awake, cross-legged on the kitchen counter, and share a joint while watching him calmly.
"The fuck," Ronan murmurs feebly. The white pills have probably stopped their magic long ago, and there's an undefined sickness in his stomach. He feels like he's forgotten something important. He came here for a reason, only right now he can't remember, and maybe he doesn't want to either. Kavinsky smirks at him and his eyes are definitely not on Ronan's face. Ronan hops down from the table, but his muscles seem to work delayed from his mind and he falls forward with his nose in the grubby carpet, right in front of Kavinsky's feet. Jiang is half hysterical with laughter.
"Why, what a nice gesture," Kavinsky comments, "to hand yourself to me on a silver platter," and Ronan would bet he's half-serious if he'd trust his mind right now.
"Stop fucking flirting," Skov mumbles from the bed, "you're waking up my mom."
Ronan didn't see Skov's mom, it's possible she came home when he was asleep and is now dreaming softly in the only bedroom this trailer has to offer, but this reminds him of something -
"Gotta get home," he says, standing up clumsily, and when he loses his balance again he falls right into Kavinsky. The latter doesn't seem surprised at all, just holds on to him and says in a low voice, "Home, huh? And where would that be?"
He's trying to think but his head hurts and Kavinsky smells good and the arms wrapped around him are warm and strong. He wants time to stop right now because he gets the feeling something terrible is about to happen.
"Home," he repeats, "you know." He's lifting his head just to rest his chin on Kavinsky's shoulder.
"You're making me fucking sick," Jiang announces, jumping from the counter to sit on the floor next to Swan.
So Kavinsky slings his hands around Ronan and half urges, half drags him to the door. "Come on, fuckhead, we don't want Jiang throwing up all over Skov's pretty carpet," he sneers.
Ronan doesn't really notice what's happening until they're outside and the night air clears at least some of the daze he's in. The horizon is bright on the wrong side, so he asks, "What time is it?" and when Kavinsky tells him, he curses and says, "My Dad will fucking kill me." Kavinsky just looks at him, studies Ronan's face with a curious expression on his own - is it pity or maybe cruelty -
And he remembers.
Someone drops all the sadness in the world back onto his shoulders. God, how could he forget? He closes his eyes and he doesn't know how to breathe anymore and he wants everything to be dark and kill him already - he wants to scream and tear the world down, but he's so, so weak, he's shaking and maybe crying and his legs give in under him, and he still doesn't fall, because Kavinsky holds him - just holds him tight. In this moment, Ronan understands that he is going to die, that Kavinsky is going to die, that every living being will face this someday and he's not strong enough.
But Kavinsky just keeps his arms wrapped around him and whispers, "I know, I know, I know," like a mantra, and something in his voice tells Ronan that Kavinsky is no stranger to his secrets.
At some point, Kavinsky must have let go, because Ronan finds himself with his face in the soft grass. Kavinsky sits next to him with a phone missing half of its parts at his ear and says, "Come and pick up your trash," to the person on the other end of the line, before he shoves the wad of bills Ronan gave him earlier into the back pocket of Ronan's jeans, letting his hand rest there for a long, long moment as he grins at Ronan and says, "that's for lying half naked on the kitchen table."
***
When Ronan wakes up, he's lying in a bed fully clothed in jeans and a blood-stained shirt. His head is hurting terribly and the first thing he does is doubling over and being lucky to find a bucket next to the bed. Declan is by his side in the matter of seconds, but it's just a lecture of "how could you" and "why did you" and "you should know better", one sentence melting into the next.
The only thing Ronan remembers is that his father died and he took a small white pill. Still, when Declan manages to drag him into the shower, he finds blood crusts scattered across his shoulder blades and blurry forms in dark blue ink.