#something about ronan dreaming himself a little brother because he felt lonely
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finders--keepers · 1 month ago
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“His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he’d let them overflow and now there wasn’t a damn place in the ocean that wouldn’t catch fire if he dropped a match.”
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“Creature was a good word for him, Ronan thought. What the hell am I?”
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“Ronan said, ‘Matthew’s mine. He’s one of mine.’ Adam didn’t understand. ‘I dreamt him, Adam!’ Ronan was angry - every one of his emotions that wasn’t happiness was anger. ‘That means that when - if something happens to me, he becomes just like them. Just like Mom.’”
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“Was Adam injured, was he bored with Ronan, did he prefer the company of his urbane new friends, calm down, Ronan, stop being needy, Ronan, get yourself together, Ronan, you’re always the car crash, Ronan.”
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ravenvsfox · 4 years ago
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Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold
Summary: He keeps remembering the chafe of Ronan’s shoulder against his ribs as they got oriented in his little bed, the glisten of tears and nightwash wringing his lovely eyes, the lonely twist in his unguarded late-night voice over the phone, the one that Adam had almost liked, because it meant that he was indisputably missed. It was worse, that Ronan had been trying so hard for Adam, because it was easier to tell when he stopped.
(Adam's perspective throughout Mister Impossible, as his worry reaches a fever pitch, and the two versions of himself begin to converge)
Word Count: 9.5k
Warnings: mi spoilers, death/suicide mention
A/N: batshit middle books my beloveds. adam pov or bust 😌
Read on AO3
In high school, Gansey would very occasionally call Adam in the middle of the night.
He would speak low and fast, his panic pinched between thumb and forefinger and held at a respectable distance. Adam would smother the receiver with his palm and step outside of his family trailer, listening hard for movement at his back.
The news was always the same: Ronan Lynch was on his latest rampage or bender, exercising his dark talent for bullying his way into people’s lives and then breaking down all of their windows and doors trying to get out again.
Gansey would fret and apologize, guilty for luring Adam out of his wolf-den, guiltier for neglecting his duties as Ronan’s warden. Adam would wait tiredly on the line for Gansey’s anxiety to exhaust itself, and then dutifully join the search party.
He would step into his beaten tennis shoes and pry his bike from the fence, silencing the silvery shock of metal on metal, and avoiding the reedy whir of the spokes by holding the whole thing aloft until he reached the gravel road.
From there, he would venture out into the abandoned Henrietta streets, the crunch of his tires cutting clean through the woolly midnight silence. He often circled the perimeter of the park nearest Monmouth, stepped through the great dark portal into St. Agnes, and nipped under the old bridge, squinting into the darkness for the challenging shoulders, the oil-slick BMW gleam, the slump of a body or clatter of bottles.
This is a part of Gansey that I admire, he would think. And with equal fervour, this is a part of Gansey that I resent. This blood attachment to Ronan, who was not even attached to himself. The insomnia that seized two heads of the lopsided Cerberus that Adam, Ronan, and Gansey were all part of, a restlessness on either side of him that shook him awake over and over again.
He chased Ronan’s shadow, hating him. Hating his thoughtlessness, his privilege, his chokehold on Gansey’s interests, his purposefully and continuously ruined potential, and yet bristling with anxiety at the idea of finding him bleeding.
They hadn’t known then that he was a dreamer, but they’d felt the ear-popping pressure of his grief, glimpsed the hulking animal of his self-loathing, urged onwards by the twin spurs of Declan and Gansey, the past and the future, digging into his sides.
Adam had seen Ronan, teeth bared, hurling himself at rock bottom, and he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes and pulled him back by the collar.
Things are completely different now, but he still finds himself sleep-raw and petrified, reaching after Ronan in the dark.
He examines himself in the mirror of the communal bathroom in Thayer hall. The overhead lights are an unflattering yellow, the sink has a long dark hair stuck to its basin, and Adam’s face is gaunt and bruised with lack of sleep.
He’s losing it, a little bit.
He takes his own pulse, focusing on the faraway burble of the ley line. Everything, lately, seems far away.
As if through a stranger’s eyes, he slips from the seafoam tiling and bleach tang in Thayer’s North bathroom to the accordion door of the trailer toilet, the creaky cubicle shower, his gawky, hurt reflection in the burnt-out light. This version of Adam had to watch his best friend’s best friend escape suicide watch and get screaming drunk in public, treading mud and malicious dreams all over Monmouth manufacturing.
He can still smell the salt tang from teenaged Adam’s ocean of disdain.
Now that he loves Ronan, his irritation has only gotten sharper, more deadly. Ronan performs each perilous swan dive into the unknown, each foolhardy act of self-sacrifice, as if the people who care about him aren’t gasping spectators. It makes Adam furious.
Perhaps neither of them have changed as much as they wanted to believe. As Gillian keeps advising the crying club—with the confidence of a seasoned psychiatrist—progress isn’t linear.
He keeps remembering the chafe of Ronan’s shoulder against his ribs as they got oriented in his little bed, the glisten of tears and nightwash wringing his lovely eyes, the lonely twist in his unguarded late-night voice over the phone, the one that Adam had almost liked, because it meant that he was indisputably missed. It was worse, that Ronan had been trying so hard for Adam, because it was easier to tell when he stopped.
He slides fingers over his temples, smooths a knuckle over each eyebrow to ease the tension he always carries there. Sleep is a little knot of gristle lodged at the back of his throat; he can’t swallow it and he can’t spit it up. It never used to be this hard to put his problems to bed. He would worry the weight on his chest into small pieces, and go to sleep knowing that even the worst things about his life were organized correctly.
This time though, he’s out of sorts, divided, always busy but always spinning his wheels. He has a white-hot secret pressed to the roof of his mouth.
Every time he folds himself into bed, his subconscious helpfully reminds him that Ronan might be dead. And then a highlight reel plays in his head like an In Memoriam: Adam’s hand cupping Ronan’s nape, a barn silhouetted against a melancholy sky, a fistful of dreamt light, a dozen hard-won smiles and a hundred easy ones, a white handprint on a flushed thigh, a colourful joke to placate a brother, a kiss pressed to a dream’s forehead. All of that—gone. And Adam, at Harvard.
He highlights long patches of text in his sociology textbook, drinks a sensible amount of jack and coke at Eliot’s birthday party, declines Gansey’s calls by sending cheerful and conciliatory texts, and drifts through the library with his hand knotted in the strap of his satchel, looking for something that he can’t really articulate. He reads the same line of theory over and over and over and over, feeling like he’s scrying, like his focus isn’t his own.
He did all of this before Ronan went missing too, but now it’s a whole different class of performance. It used to be, I’m convincingly attentive, I’m sipping overpriced coffee on the way to class like a good Ivy leaguer, I’m making an impression on my professors, I’m forging friendships. Someday I will cash in these relationship tokens, and it all will have been worth it. It felt impossible that his life could be so simple and rewarding.
Now he thinks, I’m studying for finals and my boyfriend is being hunted by people whose job it is to kill him. I’m drinking a latte and the only people I’ve ever loved have left me, and I'm alone again. I’m putting my hand up in class and somewhere, Ronan’s life is changing, rapidly, dangerously, without me.
He lies to everyone, all the time, and tells himself that this life he’s building is more important than anything.
Once, as they cleared placemats and mugs full of stagnant coffee from the kitchen table, Ronan—still cobwebbed in his most recent dream—had detailed the sensation of hovering over himself afterwards. He was unable to manipulate his physical body or even really recognize it as his own, and his consciousness, detached, had its own limbs, its own intentions. He was like a parasite trying to wriggle back into its host.
Whenever Adam consults his double in a bit of glass, he imagines himself as a nimble dreamer, peering down, working to bring a fantasy to life. He can see his own outline, a slick college student with a flat, pleasant affect and a gaggle of soft-shelled friends. He plays his role impeccably well, but he can’t fit himself into it. If he passed himself in the hallway he would not stop.
Looking in the mirror now, he feels a red pang of fear, then a supercut of the ways he used to let himself love and be loved, then resentfulness hot on the heels of his worry.
His reflection withers, and he looks deliberately down at his hands. It’s a Tuesday, and he needs to sleep, or his tightly-scheduled Wednesday will be a misery. It’s a Tuesday, which means he hasn’t spoken to Ronan in—he stalls. Call me, he thinks, miserably. Just call me.
He can deal with a multitude of challenging and improbable situations if only he can see them clearly. Ronan is, for whatever reason, keeping him in the dark.
The not knowing is bad. It’s not how he functions. It’s not how they function. But instead of dwelling, he puts his back into the narrative that is now his reality: Impeccable student. Devoted friend-group. Tough break-up. Bright future.
Ronan isn’t here. Can’t ever be, physically, so far from the ley line. Adam has to be.
“Croissant, as ordered.” His gaze snaps up, connecting—not with his own image, but with clever, horn-rimmed Gillian. “They tried to foist it upon me without butter, if you can imagine that.” She deposits a crinkly brown and tan paper bag in front of him, and then two little plastic pots of butter. Adam regards the squashed shape of the bag’s contents with confusion.
It’s— “Is it Tuesday?”
“Wednesday,” Eliot corrects airily, licking jam from their thumb.
“My god, Adam. Whatever happened to your infallible circadian rhythm?” Fletcher asks. “You are the Swiss timepiece by which we measure our days.”
A terrible wave of vertigo strikes him, and he’s grateful to find himself sitting, at one of two conjoined wrought-iron tables in the courtyard near Thayer. He can feel the ley line breathing for the first time in a long time.
He must have gone to bed after his late-night breakdown in the bathroom. He must have. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was. His hand strays to his hair. Wet. He’d woken, showered, and met his friends for breakfast, and he can barely remember it.
“Sorry,” he chokes. “Sleep deprivation is catching up to me, I think.”
“Aw, chicken,” Benjy says affectionately. “I’ve sung those end of term blues. The profs think we’re machines. Don’t even get me started on Dr. Fraundberg’s Lit Crit for assholes.”
“Whyever would we?” Eliot says. “We want to make it to class before noon.”
“Har-har. You wound me. Adam you’d better get a tissue ready, I’m about to tear up.”
“Also,” Gillian says, pointing her be-honeyed knife in Eliot’s direction. “Speak for yourself. I want to make it to class never.”
“Your presentation is going to be exceptional,” Fletcher tells her. “Your rough draft already drove me into paroxysms of jealousy. I don’t know why you’re so concerned.”
“I don’t just want to pass,” Gillian says. “I want to win.”
“Admirable,” Benjy sniffs.
“You’re being awfully quiet, Adam,” Eliot says, at length. He’s aware that they’re all trying very hard to act like they don’t notice how poorly composed he is.
“Can’t a man savour his pastry, Eli?” Fletcher rumbles.
“No, that’s fair,” Adam sighs. The four of them peer at him expectantly, eyebrows arranged into an array of benign and non-threatening shapes. “It’s possible I’m having a slight breakdown,” he says, adopting the grim hyperbole of a student for whom finals are the beginning and end of their emotional upset.
Everyone at the twin tables indulges in a bit of mild laughter.
“What a coincidence, so am I!”
“Well if it’s only slight, I’ll stow my concern.”
“Harvard or personal?”
He smiles faintly, and says, “kind of both. The personal is political, or something.”
He thinks he’s laying it on thick, but Gillian grins at him. “'Atta boy.”
Fletcher goes to take a sip of his tea, but chokes when his phone lights up with an incoming text message. “Criminy, is it eight already? Starting the day with a bang, as usual. I’ll meet you at Weld this evening, yes?” he asks, shaking out his tweed jacket and thrusting an arm through it, securing the remains of his bagel between his teeth with his other hand.
“Of course,” Adam says. Fletcher gives him a thumbs up, mouth charmingly stuffed, and sweeps away across the now bustling courtyard.
“Hey magic man,” Eliot says. “Will you do a reading for my sister tonight? The break-up with Margot is hitting her kind of hard. I’m pretty sure she just wants to be told she’ll find love again.”
Adam watches the juddering impact of Benjy kicking Eliot under the table.
He shrugs. “First come first serve, but I’ll give her the friends and family discount.”
“You’re a prince,” Eliot says, blowing him a kiss. Adam tries to imagine any of his friends from Henrietta doing such a thing, and can’t. “Come along Benjy. Bookstore or bust. They’re giving out discount computing textbook codes at sixty dollars a pop.”
A slip of paper for sixty American dollars. Adam’s head aches profoundly.
Gillian waggles her fingers at their friends as they depart, then she turns and fixes Adam with that familiar amateur therapist look.
“What?”
“Are you sleeping?” she asks bluntly.
“I’m a very good sleeper,” Adam says wryly. “Ask anyone.”
“But are you actually doing it?”
“Yes, Gillian.” Liar, liar. “Do you want me to keep a dream journal as evidence?”
“Oh, yes please.” That shark’s grin. “I’d pay to know what the fuck is going on up there.” She taps her own temple to indicate Adam's guarded mind.
He spreads his hands between them. “I’m an open book.”
She hums, only half-smiling now. “I dunno. That Southern charm. I’m never quite sure if I should trust a politeness that perfect.”
“On that note,” Adam says, standing. He’s relieved to find that he’s wearing matching socks, and his pant legs are rolled just so. There’s a tiny streak of yellow on one of his shoes, and with a jolt he realizes that it’s dream-crab guts. He presses on. “Thanks for the croissant. And the psychoanalysis. Send me the bill.”
She salutes him with her coffee cup. “You couldn’t afford me.”
He laughs, and turns, and then spends the whole walk to his 9 AM class trying to straighten all of the haywire compasses in his brain so they point due north.
His assignment is in his bag, pressed neatly into a navy blue folder. He has three classes today, a meeting with his supervisor at three, a study block set aside from four to six, then dinner, then tarot readings all evening—his phone rings. His treacherous heart leaps. Ronan.
He stops mid-stride, scrambling for his cell in the front pocket of his bag.
“Hello?”
“I—oh��Adam! I didn’t expect you to pick up. How on Earth are you?”
“Gansey.” He exhales through his nose. “I’m just on my way to class.”
“Fantastic to hear your voice. How’s—not that one, Jane, the I-90—exactly. How’s Harvard? Are you batting away job offers yet?”
“Constantly. How are your nature hikes and hippie communes? Contracted any backwoods diseases yet?”
“Charming. I’m actually in remarkably fine form, health-wise.”
“Is that a brag?”
A guffaw. “More of a curiosity. It’s actually part of the reason I’ve been trying to get in touch. Have you noticed any surges of power from the ley line lately? I mean, of course you have, but do you have any idea what’s causing them?”
He frowns, pinning his cellphone between his good ear and shoulder as he heaves open the ancient door to the physics building. “I could give you my best guess.”
A beat, and then, “I’m listening, Parrish.” Something about the way he says it makes homesickness pulse painfully in Adam’s chest.
He finds a semi-secluded stone slab bench behind an empty stairwell, and slings his belongings across it before he replies, “Dreamers.”
“Dreamers,” Gansey repeats, but it sounds like he’s saying of course! “Plural?”
“At least three.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure yet.”
“Ronan hasn’t spoken to you,” Gansey guesses.
“Not—in a few days.”
“Is everything alright?”
He swallows, and is horrified to find tears burning at the back of his throat. There’s no pretending with Gansey. It’s why he never calls him.
“Adam,” he says quietly. “Is he in trouble?”
He struggles with his composure for several long seconds. “Possibly.”
A world-weary sigh. “I really wish you had called.”
“Yeah, well,” he says vaguely. He checks his watch. 8:23.
“So he’s playing with others. Why would Ronan want to do that?”
“I think—he’ll do anything not to feel powerless.” He understands as soon as he says it that it’s the pockmark in the windshield from which all of the damage is splintering outwards. “And people take advantage of that.”
Gansey makes a thoughtful noise, somewhere a thousand miles away, and it clicks in a lock and opens Adam’s shoulders up. Maybe he doesn’t have to be alone in this fight. How could he have forgotten careful, persistent Gansey?
“Well. He’s certainly not powerless. I almost feel back to my pre-Cabeswater self. Everything is pleasantly linear. And Blue is—lighting up.” In the background, he hears her say supercharged with relish. “I can only imagine what it’s like for full-blooded dream stuff, with all of that energy at their disposal.”
“I don’t know if I like it,” Adam says carefully. “It’s good for a while, helping all the Matthew’s of the world, and then what? Where does all of that diverted power end up? What makes dreamers qualified to harness it without their worst nightmares manifesting?”
“You’re worried about the Lace.”
The last time they spoke, Adam had told them briefly about his last scrying session, warning them to look out for the hateful, faceless thing that had pierced his cells and magnified all of his pain and fear until all he could possibly do was scream.
“I’m worried about Ronan. I know he’s in over his head, and I know he won’t believe it until it’s too late.”
“Sounds like someone I know. Don’t bite off more than you can chew with this, Adam. I know you’re enormously busy.”
It stings, a little. “I’m still going to—I’m obviously still going to make time for him. Especially when he’s—“
“Struggling. Yes. I understand perfectly.” It occurs to Adam that, unlike his well-meaning Harvard friends, he actually might. A needling murmur in the background, and then, “listen, Blue’s telling me that you should get in touch with the psychics, and Mr. Gray.”
He nods. The rhythm of problem-solving is soothing his frazzled nerves. “I’ve been considering it. I’m also pretty sure that Declan has been keeping his own tabs on things.”
“My money’s on yes,” Gansey says. Adam half-smiles. His money has been on a lot of things. “Poke around when you can. See what turns up. I’ll give Ronan a call, not that it’s ever done me much good before.”
“I’m pretty sure he ditched his phone.” He checks his watch. 8:24. It feels like it’s been much, much longer than a minute. There is so much day ahead of him.
Ordinarily, he would be compartmentalizing better than this. No feverish Gansey phone calls directly before class. No pleasure with his business. No finesse when logic will do the job just as well. But the subterranean, black-eyed Adam is still within him, tethered to the ley line and to his friends, and he wants very badly to fix this.
“Ah, Ronan,” Gansey sighs. “It’s always got to be him, doesn’t it?”
“I know,” Adam says narrowly. “If he’s not looking for trouble it’s looking for him.”
“You sound like Declan.”
Adam makes an offended noise in the back of his throat. Blue must be leaning across Gansey, because she says “that’s a new low,” almost directly into the receiver.
“I’m hanging up now,” he says flatly.
“Update me if anything changes? We’ll come home the moment things go south.”
He resists the urge to check his watch again. “Don’t cut things short on my account.”
“Well. Don’t disrupt your studies on Ronan’s. I’ve never known you to put your future on hold for anything.”
“I’m not—“ he stops. “Ronan is a part of my future.”
“Good,” Gansey says warmly. A test, then. And like most tests, there was never even a possibility that Adam wouldn’t pass.
______
It’s easy to tell when a dreamer is suffering.
As the energy from the ley line ebbs, dreamt creations judder and bolt like horses loosed suddenly from the service of a carriage, galloping towards safer pastures. If the dreamer is in more immediate peril, the dream simply folds its limbs into an agreeable shape and passes into sleep.
In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Adam lies awake in bed, dangling his hand between the wall and his bed frame, feeling along the subtle unfilled crack in the plaster. A flagpole casualty, from the day that everything stopped being enough for Ronan, and he slipped away on a dreamt current like a dark Ophelia.
He’s being dramatic.
He feels the drywall flaking, and digs his thumbnail into the split, wanting to rip the whole wall open with his fingers.
He keeps picturing Matthew’s half-lidded eyes, cloudless and blue as a wide prairie sky. The slouch of his posture, the tarnished golden head, the body briefly without a pilot.
Matthew had looked—Adam turns in bed, taking his chalky hand from the wall and fisting it in the sheets. He had looked like a faded old pillow, tucked unobtrusively into the chair by the window. He wouldn’t respond to Declan’s call, fluttering his drowsy lashes, and Adam had thought, ah. This is how I find out. His heart slumped over in his chest, dizzy with sudden grief. The tarot cards in his hands were dead leaves.
This is what happens when your life is tied to my brother’s, Declan had said, diverting his horror into scorn as he often did. The death of any one member of his family ensured the destruction of another. It had always been that way.
Matthew eventually roused, and Adam had closed his eyes and turned his face towards the ceiling until he could be normal again. He felt suddenly foolish for peddling lies to college students when magic was so obviously in the room with him.
Earlier, he had called Maura over lunch, and she vaulted right over small talk to ask him, with concern, about his loosening grip on his psychic inclinations. She’d said, “You do know that the ley line isn’t the source of your problems, right? Give yourself some credit. You can fuck things up in a completely non-mystical way.”
She pulled the Magician, reversed, and the eight of wands, and then, without further comment, passed the phone to Mr. Gray.
Unexplained weaponry, he’d reported. The Lynch brothers loosed on two separate worlds at the same time. Buttoned-up Declan for the first time unbuttoned, schmoozing with an array of dangerous and connected people, trading in secrets just as his father had. Purposeless Ronan for the first time with a purpose, wading out from the murky waters of his dreamspace and bringing the tides with him.
Bryde, the name in the corner of everyone’s mouth, joined all at once by Ronan’s and Hennessy’s.
Renegades, liberators of dreams, scorchers of earth. He could see, easily, why this would appeal to Ronan. A mission, finally. A father figure to guide his hand. A world that wanted his dreams, and wouldn’t crumple under the weight of his unusual ambition.
When they were teenagers, Aglionby was just another one of Adam’s jobs, but it was one of Ronan’s nightmares. He would go to school, a hooded bird of prey, seething with resentment and squandered ability. He longed for the Barns because of what they represented: the childlike belief that his family would never die; the possibility for creatures like him to roam free; a landscape powered by unconditional love.
Bryde, Adam knows, must be offering him the same relief. Exquisite flight, after the cage.
It’s not possible, is the thing. It’s a pipe dream. A Niall Lynch fairytale.
Foresight has never been Ronan’s strong suit. He gets it into his head that a solution is right up until the point that it falls apart in his hands. He throws himself entirely into belief. It makes him an extraordinarily loyal and trusting person. It also makes him stubborn, rash, and susceptible to manipulation.
He believes in one facet of something, and the rest follows. He can’t just take a sip—he downs the bottle.
Adam is a boy on a bicycle in November, needing to find Ronan alive so that he can hate him without feeling guilty about it. He never stops oscillating between resentment and love, reality and unreality, understanding and disappointment. He wants to be normal so that he can choose to be abnormal. Sometimes he wants the cards without the magic.
He closes his eyes and remembers a slumbering mouse against an angular cheek. He imagines Matthew like that, perpetually immobile, perpetually innocent, like a taxidermied puppy. The pieces of Ronan’s consciousness that will linger after his death, statues in a graveyard. Tamquam—tamquam—
What would Ronan be without his dreams? Here, Adam thinks. He’d be here.
He stays in bed for another wasted hour, and then stands up, disoriented, in the dimness of the room. Fletcher is snoring softly. Someone outside their cracked window is shuffling over the concrete stoop. His upstairs neighbour is playing tinkling soundtracks while he sleeps. Adam can’t be here anymore.
He plucks Fletcher’s laptop silently from its charging station, tucks his bare feet into stiff leather shoes, drags the cardigan from his desk chair, and lets himself out into the hallway. The glare from the overhead light pins him against the wall for a moment.
He shuffles half-blind down the hall and upstairs to the solarium, nearly losing one of his unlaced shoes in the stairwell in the process. The lights are blessedly shut off up in the attic, and he feels his way to the nearest of the tables hunched in the shadows. Aching with fatigue, he sits, unfolds his stolen laptop, and gets quietly to work.
He’s never had the time nor means to be truly proficient with technology, but he extracted a handful of leads from Mr. Gray, and he’s been in touch with a friend of Benjy’s—a computer science grad student and hacking hobbyist.
He chases key phrases down rabbit holes and assembles news articles, tracking Ronan’s movement by his “unexplainable” signature (code for mind-fuckery, joyful innovation, and dark humour). Adam is a practiced note-taker and serial obsesser, so it’s barely a strain to find Ronan—whom he knows better than anyone—cropping up all over the continental United States.
“What are you doing,” Adam murmurs. The sky lightens gradually to periwinkle. He has work today, but his shift doesn’t start until noon. His mouth is bone-dry, and his head feels cotton-stuffed the way it always does when he’s pushing his body to its limit.
When it’s late enough in the morning to be socially acceptable, he messages Benjy’s friend with the bare bones of what he’s looking for: a project under wraps, a lonely last name, a suppressed pattern. They correspond, remotely, until Adam is reading government files over watery coffee, wearing sweatpants, dress shoes, and a cardigan with cracked elbow patches.
He pores over it all, cross-referencing dates, and ignoring the widening sink-hole in his chest.
Industrial espionage isn’t at all Ronan’s usual brand of destruction. Highly controlled, not much up-front gratification. A little more political than Ronan usually leans. A lot more ambitious. Whatever their agenda, ley energy is flowing more easily now that it's unobstructed on such a large scale. Adam has been feeling its effects rippling all the way out to Boston, a persistent background pressure, unavoidable as a migraine.
It’s clear that the Moderators are desperate to eliminate Bryde’s party. Their reports are a comedy of close calls.
Slowly, Adam begins to understand the scope of things.
Billions of dollars in damages, manmade structures ripped from their foundations. Magical fugitives hunted by a team that specializes in murdering the targets they call Zeds. Visionary headlights pointed towards certain apocalypse. A world that is always awake, but always, always feels like it’s dreaming.
It’s pretty much exactly as he feared. Night terrors. The Lace. Beasts and legends. Adam holds his head in his hands. It’s more than what Ronan must be imagining. It’s more than Aurora waking happily in Cabeswater, powered by the swaying trees. It’s the indiscriminate waking of every incredible thing that’s ever been dreamed.
He’s struck by a wave of hopelessness that rushes all around him and tears at his hair. Ronan, dreamer of baubles that dispense music and light, cars that go very fast, and menageries of curious creatures, recruited to a cause that transmutes creation into chaos. Ronan, promising to wait, and then running full tilt at a future that can’t possibly keep Adam in it.
His dream half is going to destroy his human half, and he’ll take everybody else down with him.
If he could just see him, maybe—
His jaw creaks, teeth clenched tight against the emotional groundswell. The late morning sunshine strikes him, and he feel more like a vague, pale shape than a person. Like a dream, maybe.
Alter idem.
If Adam can’t reach Ronan, maybe the Moderators should.
He feels the weight of that awful thought burning a hole through his stomach lining. He can’t think about it. He needs to go to work.
_____
The next evening, he experiences a surge of power so acute that it nearly puts him in a coma.
It’s another Wednesday night, and another batch of his peers hitch polite smiles to his heels as he passes them by, winding his way up into the high, arched sunroom at Weld hall. They’re all wishing for magical solutions for their mundane problems, the opposite of Adam in nearly every way.
He bumps knuckles with Benjy and Eliot in turn, pulls up his chair, and knocks his last reading from Persephone’s deck, mostly out of habit. He consults his phone idly as his friends try to make pleasant conversation, holding up a finger when he finds a new batch of texts from Gansey.
John Amos power plant in WV shut down Monday
Intense. maura said she could’ve brought HER dreams to life afterwards
no word from Ronan yet? Leads from Declan? pls advise
I’ll assume no news is good news
He puts his phone in his satchel and fastens it closed. Every new scrap of information he gets feels like a stroll through Ronan’s security system at the Barns—hopelessness compounding and compounding until he staggers out the far end weeping.
He needs to focus on something productive. He nods at Benjy to start letting people inside, straightening the notebook where he usually scribbles his observations. Here, he is an adjudicator: powerful, organized, and reserved, tallying points and offering constructive critique.
His curious audience starts pouring in then, amateur wiccans and wannabe believers, aggrieved last-resorters and skeptics following friends’ recommendations. It’s a brighter collection of characters than Aglionby could ever have hoped to foster.
Gillian texts him to say that she just passed Weld and his line-up was out the door. He is a prim and unobtrusive con artist, a false prophet, and business is booming.
Eventually, a bespectacled girl who looks anywhere from five to ten years his senior sits across from him, tucking a bag armoured to the teeth with candy-coloured enamel pins between her feet.
“Hi,” she says nervously. “Anna.” She stretches her hands out in front of her, then thinks better of it and drops them into her lap.  “I’m not sure how this usually goes, so you might have to hold my hand a little bit.”
“No problem,” he says smoothly, passing his deck across the tabletop. “Just go ahead and shuffle. Concentrate on what you want to ask the cards.”
She does as directed, struggling a little to keep the papery stack in check. Not a natural born card sharp, then. He studies her neat black shirt, tucked precisely into a plaid skirt. A Marilyn mole drawn on just above the corner of her mouth. A pride flag pin he doesn’t recognize next to a cat wearing a cowboy hat, and the word “rude” in cursive.
She holds the deck fleetingly to her chest, eyes squeezed shut like a child making a birthday wish, and then plops it in the centre of the table. A card slips near the top, slightly uneven, and Adam plucks it free.
He hums thoughtfully. “Eight of cups. Okay. So you’re having some trouble with letting go.” She frowns and nods once, quick.
He lays out the rest of a simple five card spread neatly between them. A couple of stray swords, the chariot, a wand.
“It seems like things are stagnating in your personal life. Maybe your friend group used to feel like your family, but you feel like they’ve lost interest in you. And you love them, but Anna, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re pretty sure you were done with them before they even started pulling away. Right now you’re kind of just going through the motions. A couple of years overdue to convocate, right? Everyone else moved on to greener pastures.” He taps his thumb thoughtfully against the bones of his opposite wrist. “It’s not even the loneliness that gets you. It’s the not knowing. Are you supposed to chase after them? Is there another community out there for you? There is, you know.”
He notices another card spilling loose, and he grabs it without thinking. The Magician again. He thinks, huh, caught in the coils and dust of Persephone’s overturned cards.
And then the waking world disappears.
Adam is airborne, tumbling up into the atmosphere on a geyser of ley energy, whipped by branches and light. He throws his arms out to stop himself, but he’s only a projection, so his momentum doesn’t slow.
Something—Lindenmere? The cosmos?—shows him a series of images: an upturned nose made from oil and turpentine, a coiled old tree stump, a red-haired woman grinning toothily and then exploding, a rose the colour of warm dark skin, a pale scar-split hand cradling a silky head, the animal haunch of something black, a terrible voice booming turn back—
He skitters away, panicked, and bumps into his own body. Or not his own body. A double, blinking confusedly in the bathroom mirror.
His doppelgänger turns to leave, and Adam reaches after him, through the mirror, following himself into a version of Thayer which is not Thayer. Everything is alive, in this reality. Energy sings and saws its fingers together.
It’s a memory, but it’s also the present, and it’s also a nightmare. Wake up!
Obediently, the city wakes.
He gasps, although he doesn’t have a mouth. It’s the heaving first breath of a sleeping witch, like Gwenllian turning in her grave.
Adam struggles against the current of wild power, thick and pungent as gasoline. Everything feels more intense near magical artifacts, dream stuff, supernatural fault lines, and it is with great effort that he hunts for something familiar, something heavy enough to bind him. He was unprepared for this, and although everything around him is bitingly familiar, he's lost. He wheels around and around, reaching for his most trusted tethers—Gansey, Ronan, Blue, Persephone—
Persephone.
He follows the lingering perfume of her intuition, feeling blindly for those old handholds in her tarot deck, that familiar grip, like the hilt of a trusted weapon.
And then he finds himself looking again at the girl, Anna, her fate bunched around her narrow shoulders. And then at his own empty body, a glowing card clamped between his fingers. As soon as he’s aware of looking at himself, he’s looking out of himself, and he stands up quickly, overturning his chair.
“—Adam? Jesus Christ, are you okay?”
“What on God’s green Earth was that?”
A palm between his shoulder blades.
“Don’t touch me,” he chokes.
The hand retreats. A murmur: I’ve never seen him like this.
“Is it—is it bad? Am I going to be okay? Is it bad?” Anna keeps asking, horrified.
“You’re fine,” he manages to say. “I’m sorry.” The ‘o’ in sorry comes out a little wide and swerving.
“You went blank,” Benjy says, voice high with residual panic. “For like—ten minutes. Beyond hyper-focus.”
“I thought it was a gimmick,” Eliot says. “But a ten minute gimmick? What is this, Las Vegas?”
“I got carried away. I have to,” he swallows. “I need a minute. I promise everything’s fine.”
“Do whatever you need to do,” Eliot says quickly. “But, fair warning, I’m going to ask you a hundred questions when you get back.”
“And then I’m going to ask another hundred,” Benjy says. “Magic man.”
“A riddle, inside an enigma, wrapped in a sweater vest,” Eliot muses. He can tell they’re still shaken. He’ll have to deal with that, later.
“I'll be right back,” Adam says, touching them very lightly on the shoulder as he passes. The ley line is bursting, and he feels so flushed with its vitality that it almost makes him sick.
He stumbles past them, all the way out of the building and into the street. The winter air tears at his thin shirtsleeves, nips at his sock-less ankles. He shields his eyes against the sun, watching a bird swoop low overhead. A silvery, seagull-sized thing, but with knobby legs that taper into—he squints. Hooves?
He keeps moving, propelled by the mad urge to catch the bird, to pin the wild magic down so he can understand it.
Adam walks for what feels like a long time, trying to find the source of all of this haemorrhaging power. He spots a couple of fidgety-looking students, a few more curious creatures. Somewhere, faraway, there’s music crooning, and it sounds exactly the way a hot shower feels.
He stops in the middle of Oxford street, head cocked towards the natural history museum across the way, the orderly buildings, the sparse evening foot traffic. Business as usual. All of it screaming with energy.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a parade of scuttling creatures marching towards an invisible destination. Frowning, Adam crosses the street, chasing the peacock blue shimmer from an unfurled wing. He slows, stooping in the alley to pick one of the strange insects from the stream. He peers through a nail-sized hole in its head. Its spindly legs wave fearfully for a moment, and then it goes limp in his hand.
The ley energy punches out of him, and he sits back on his ankles, winded.
Adam gazes down at the jewelled beetle in his palm, its siblings scattered out like shell casings around his knees. Dreams, all of them. Briefly, impossibly roused in a dead city. He stands, letting the beetle drop from his hand and bounce across the concrete. He kicks them all hurriedly behind a nearby bench, mind racing. Bugs from an exhibit next door, no doubt. Dormant animals, transplanted from their habitats and pinned in place for decades.
What kind of ecoterror was wrought to bring about a flash flood of energy in a drought? How must Ronan be feeling, out there in the world, wracked with waking dreams? What unimaginable monsters were just stirring in the shadows because of him? Is Bryde one of them?
His lives are merging. The distant rumbling of thunder is overhead now, and the downpour is rolling in. There’s no way he’ll be able to keep dry.
Standing in that alleyway by himself, drained and ordinary again, he feels terribly alone.
He weighs his feelings against his logic for several agonizing minutes, standing still and watchful as a predator. He recalls the jarringly clinical accounts of Ronan's most intimate dreams, the sparsely encoded language in those government files outlining the world-ending dangers of something Adam had, for a long time, shared a bed with.
If something happens to Ronan now, it might kill Adam. If something happens because of Ronan, it might kill everybody.
Another minute, and he has his phone out and ringing.
“Hello?” Declan answers. Oddly, it’s not his usual prickly greeting. He sounds almost jovial.
Adam looks out into the darkening street, feeling like a death omen, a shadow across someone’s doorstep. “We really need to talk about Bryde.”
______
It’s the worst possible time for Declan to be withholding information from him.
Adam had graciously tipped his hand and Declan was, infuriatingly, holding back, as if this was a low grade in Ronan’s high school algebra class, and not the cataclysmic fuck-up of a powerful dreamer.
Declan, so uncannily like his brother in vulnerable moments like this, had thought of Matthew first. A world where dreams could stay awake, he’d marvelled. As if they could afford to think so small.
Once, Adam had awoken to find his arm glued to the bedspread. Ronan had dreamt a bee-less hive in the night, and it was oozing a steady stream of honey into the sheets between them.
“Score,” Ronan had said, when he’d rolled back into his body. “Sting-free. Fucking vegan.”
“What happens when we don’t want any more honey?” Adam had asked, critically. Ingesting dreams always felt like a slippery subject. “Does it shut off like a faucet?”
It didn’t. Ronan filled a dozen amber jars full, and then abandoned the hive in a dusty kiddy pool in one of the barns near the back of his family property.
A month later, Opal had crept in through a window looking for trouble, and emerged, shrieking, in a viscous flood of syrup.
Combing the mess out of Opal’s fur, her little legs slung across his lap, Ronan had complained about the magnitude of the clean-up job he would have to do, the special honey hoover he would have to create, what a waste of a dream it would be. Adam reminded him of his faucet idea.
“Too late for that, Parrish,” he’d griped.
It was their pattern. A marvel, too good to be true. Adam, the skeptic. Ronan, too in love with creation to care about consequences.
Eventually, it will all be too late.
Ronan will pursue this liberation fantasy, this golden daydream, even if it never stops oozing. Even if it makes the whole world uninhabitable.
______
That night, Adam tries to scry for the first time in months.
He gently pushes the crying club—only tenuously placated after the tarot incident—to have drinks without him, claiming stress-induced fatigue. He leaves his study notes open and blinking on the bed, lights a sad little tea light, and casts himself out into the ether.
Straining hard, he searches for the familiar contours of Ronan’s dreamspace, plucking the distant strings of the ley line and listening for the particular timbre of Ronan’s consciousness.
He doesn’t like walking this tightrope without a net, but Harvard isn’t exactly flush with psychic spotters. He keeps a delicate balance, far from his body, inching closer and closer to Ronan’s mind, the safe plateau at the end of this rope.
Eventually, he finds himself in a grey bedroom. It's full to the gills with water, there's a toy sailboat bobbing past at chest height, and storm clouds huddling nervously on the ceiling. Adam’s hair plasters instantly to his scalp.
“Ronan?” he calls, sloshing through the curiously luminous water. It starts raining harder. A familiar, curly-headed child stares at him through the darkness, eyes sharpened into silver points in the moonlight. “Ronan?” he asks again, gently this time.
A muffled sentence, a sad, crumpled expression, and then Adam is staring at a closed door.
“What—let me in! Ronan!” He pounds at the door. “Come on!” He can still feel rainwater, unnaturally warm on his neck.
A voice in his head, not Ronan, whispers, turn back.
“No,” he snaps, knocking harder. “Just let me—“ A sudden gust of wind in his sails, and he’s ejected from the dream altogether.
He pinwheels for a horrifying, weightless moment, struggling to tune back in to the feeble light from his stubby candle, and then dragging himself, hand over fist, back to his dorm room.
“Fuck, Lynch,” he says, when he has a voice. “Don’t be stupid.” He recrosses his legs, shaking off the pointless, clinging feeling of rejection.
When he tries to reach out again, searching, searching, Ronan’s expecting him. He never makes it past the threshold.
Back in his body, he knocks his candle over, relishing the controlled destruction, the spill of wax, the sizzle of the squashed wick. A fire he can actually put out.
______
The next time Adam scrys, Ronan looks like himself. Maybe a little scruffier, with what looks like a tunnel piercing on his right ear, and a rare openness to his posture. He’s lounging in a pasture up against a sleeping cow, boots up.
As Adam watches, he tips his shaved head back into its mottled hide, and the sun makes his eyelashes into lit matchsticks. He loves him very much. He’d almost forgotten.
“Don’t lock me out,” he says quickly. Ronan opens his eyes, and when he sees him he smiles instinctively.
“Adam,” he says, vaguely. And then he locks him out.
“No,” he cries. “Would you listen to me.” He feels for the fissure in space and time, the pocket where Ronan is dreaming, sweetly and inaccessibly, about the only home Adam has ever known.
Nothing gives. Nobody replies. He crawls back to Harvard, weak with misery.
In the next dream, Ronan is older, driving a boxy jeep over a foreign landscape. Rolling Irish hills, skies humming with artificial energy. A woman who can only be Jordan Hennessy, chattering in the passenger seat.
Then it’s Ronan with his head in his dead mother’s lap, stroking the downy wing of a black swan.
Then Ronan and Hennessy again, opposite one another in a sunny gallery. One of them examining an impressionist portrait no bigger than a postcard, the other examining the exit.
Then Ronan, discovering Matthew’s corpse in a dim hallway, blinking furiously at the stranger crouched over his prone body. “What did you do?” He sounds like a kid reprimanding his sibling for getting them both in trouble.
Every time Adam gets close, some defence mechanism stops him, like a firm hand against his chest, pushing him away again and again.
He doesn't know what to do except keep trying.
______
Blankly, he looks down at a sink full of tinfoil and uneasy water. In pieces, he becomes aware of his surroundings—green stalls and laminate countertops, a row of hundred-watt lightbulbs, and somebody rattling the locked doorknob.
“Adam, are you in there?” Fletcher. “We’re going to be late. It’s nearly ten. Adam?”
“Just a minute, sorry,” Adam slurs. He stares closely at his face in the mirror until he recognizes his own features. He has an exam at 10:30. He glances down at his watch. 9:52. He had been so sure that he could just drift for a few minutes, maybe catch Ronan before he woke up. That was almost an hour ago.
He drains the sink, hands shaking, cuffs getting damp. The lightbulb filaments float behind his eyelids when he blinks. He throws his satchel over his shoulder, smooths his hair up and out of his eyes, and rubs the bags under his eyes until they hurt.
When he lets himself out of the bathroom, Fletcher is directly outside, tapping a nervous rhythm on his hips. His hands fly from his body and into the air at the sight of him.
“Adam! Thank god. I’ll cancel the search party.”
“I got lost in my notes,” Adam says, as they both make for the stairs.
“Of course you did,” Fletcher says warmly. “A supremely Adam move. I just hope you’re taking care of yourself. Gillian thinks you might be—well—not spiralling, but—“
“I’m handling it.” He takes several mental paces backwards. “Uh—poorly, clearly. I’m sorry Fletcher, I didn’t mean to snap.”
Fletcher, to his credit, recovers quickly. “I can’t imagine going through my first semester of college and a break-up at the same time. You’re a stronger man than I.”
Adam rather doubts that Fletcher can imagine going through a break-up at all, but he nods conspiratorially. They hop down the last few steps and out into the chilly sunshine together.
“You’d be amazed what one can do out of necessity.”
“Too true. We all have our hidden depths, don’t we,” Fletcher says thoughtfully. For a moment, Adam considers telling him—something, looping him into this tangled web with him, but then he says, “now, chapter twenty-three wasn’t on the outline, was it? I beg you to say no. Lie, if you must.”
And Adam is a student again. He doesn’t have out of body episodes. He doesn’t carry wads of tinfoil in his trouser pockets. He doesn’t keep deadly secrets from people whom he is mostly pretending to like and understand.
They walk onwards, towards a test which Adam will rouse himself for long enough to ace. Then he will think of the next thing, and the next. Appease these school acquaintances of his. Tinker with finicky car engines. Make flash cards. Drift into the beyond using one of Fletcher’s three-wick candles from pottery barn. Text Declan, who activates Ronan’s accountability in a way that Adam does not. Call Gansey, if he can bring himself to face his disappointment.
And clear away his feelings, which keep pouring out of him like so much honey.
______
Ronan hangs up on him, and Adam holds himself in the biting wind outside the library for a very long time.
He’d thought, if he could only speak to him, that he could begin to undo Bryde’s poisonous influence. They know each other. They’ve known each other. Ronan would listen to Adam’s fears as he always does. Adam would appeal to Ronan’s heart, which tends to ache for helpless things. They would see how lost they had become without each other. Adam would be allowed back into Ronan’s dreams, and Ronan would be allowed back into Adam’s future.
Why didn’t you text back?
As if they’ve been suspended in time since Ronan’s last tamquam, and none of it—the running away, warding his dreams against Adam, abandoning his phone, trusting a complete stranger over his friends and family—had ever happened.
It’s absurd. He should have expected it. Ronan was searching for a reason to stay, and when he looked for his reflection, his second self, Adam wasn’t there. For a single moment, he wasn’t there, and now he’s paying for it.
Impatient, wrathful Ronan. Leaping from the moving vehicle because Adam was going the speed limit. Going rogue, and then calling Adam with all of these stinging accusations, like he was the one who’d been abandoned.
He thinks again of Bryde manipulating Ronan, preying on his loneliness, his love for his brothers, his fear of himself. This big bad rumour, older and crueler than the Lace itself.
And Ronan letting himself be manipulated, putting on blinders, using Adam’s brief silence as an endorsement for a glorified joyride with unthinkable global ramifications. Self-destructing because things got a little too quiet.
Adam feels hot rage taking ahold of him with its sticky fingers.
Then he thinks of Ronan saying I need to see you, his thin, frightened voice finding Adam from somewhere out there in the city, and his anger goes clammy.
There’s no way Ronan will call again. Negotiations were off as soon as Adam refused to house them both from the Moderators.
And now, without Hennessy, Ronan is the last arrow in Bryde’s quiver. He’s going to be the explosive that brings everything down. He’s going to be buried at ground zero.
If I'd replied an hour sooner, would he really have waited? If I’d gone to school closer, would I have noticed him disintegrating? If I explained that my dream isn’t what I thought it would be either, that he’s the only thing that feels real, would he have said it back to me?
After everything that’s happened, am I going to be the one who gives up on Ronan Lynch?
Everything is so fucked.
He calls Declan.
He picks up on the first ring. “Parrish—”
“He hung up on me,” they both say at the same time.
“Mother of God,” Declan moans. “Then there’s no hope. He thinks I sold him out to the Mods.”
“Did you?”
“No. I did exactly as we discussed. I negotiated for his safety. I thought—I mean, you said it yourself, Adam. Being anti-apocalypse is a pretty solid platform.”
He shakes his head. “Ronan won’t see it that way. He’s not like us. He doesn’t want to be moderated even a little bit.”
“Believe me, I know that. The way he was talking—about the world screwing them over, all of them, dreamers. That’s not the way my brother thinks. That’s all Bryde. And now he’s taken him—Christ—Christ knows where.”
“He wanted to see me,” Adam feels compelled to say. “He was trying to come here.”
“He said that? That's good,” Declan says, relieved. “Where—“
“I let him get away,” Adam says, through numb lips. “I let him go.”
______
He texts Gansey, things have gone south, and then he turns his phone on silent.
His puts his fingertips to the floorboards, a knobbly hand on either side of a scrying tableau: the leaping flame of a candle, a well-organized pile of cards, his overturned phone and discarded tie. He’s just finished crying, and he feels volatile and ill-prepared even as he ties himself to the flickering light.
His mind races through the night like a skipped stone. Vaguely, he pictures a vast body of water and a glittering mountain range, with no horizon line in-between. Darkness reflected in darkness.
“Ronan,” he calls. The dreamspace whirs and grinds its gears and won’t reply. “You know this is wrong. You know, or you wouldn't be hiding from me.”
It’s all water out here in this sublime mirror-space, but it’s also warm, like the steam rising from a hot spring. Something is moving, changing things on a chemical level.
For a moment he thinks he sees himself, a wan doppelgänger with its hands raised. But it’s not Adam. It’s Bryde. Cool, sturdy, a pale Atlas holding the dream together on his back. He recognizes him instinctively.
Adam deliberately throws his mind closer, into the terrible heart of this fire Ronan is creating. Smoke whispers and catches all around him, and it’s even harder to tell the difference between things now. No horizon, no seam, no reality, no death.
What have you done? What are you doing?
The heat is quickly becoming unbearable. Adam is stretched too thin, and the fire is fraying him, eating through each fibre of his connection to reality.
Ronan, please, I need you to stop. I’m losing my grip. Listen to me.
And then, without any warning at all, he collapses on his dorm room floor.
He hacks and retches, lungs full of phantom smoke. Everything feels very wrong. He thinks for a second that he’s blind, but it’s not his vision, it’s another, less tangible sense, it’s—
He scrambles backwards on his hands, heaving. He tries to pull himself up onto his bed, head first, then chest, but he has to stop with his face buried in the comforter.
Ronan is—he must be—he’s—
“God, no, oh my god, no, no.”
He needs to throw up. He needs to call somebody. There’s complete silence in his head.
He was slingshotted back to Cambridge, swatted back along the zipline to his body, because there was nowhere else for him to go.
He’s sure, in a very non-magical, intuitive way, that every dream in the world has just collectively collapsed. Adam staggers to his feet. There’s a smoke alarm going off, somewhere. A background hum of electricity groaning as it shuts off. A high, scared voice.
As if in a trance, he goes to the window.
There are five dead lightbulbs in the nearest row of street lamps, what looks like a sleeping child out in the middle of the square, and a woman clutching her chest and sitting slowly on a bench.
Panic is deadening his senses, crawling blackly into his mouth and nose and eyes. He thinks of Matthew sitting weakly by the window. Opal slumped over a stump in the woods. Chainsaw falling from the sky like a stone. Gansey’s Cabeswater heart decaying in his chest. Ronan, either dissolving into nightwash or felled by a Moderator’s bullet, dead, lost, or powerless.
Every morsel of magic, every innovation, every cherished friend, every sacred place, turned off like a faucet.
The world outside, drooping and disconnected, is now exactly as ordinary as Adam has been pretending it is.
The ley line is gone.
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ganseybois · 3 years ago
Text
an aged-up declan x gansey prompt for @we--are---not--afraid (who didnt even ask for this LMAO) but because this is where we are now and i’m feeling tired and chaotic so
Richard Gansey III didn’t want to be here, doing this, but ultimately he had decided he no longer had control over himself. There was no other explanation for what was happening, and how fucking often it was happening.
He felt so out of his own body that he had even been swearing more. But he supposed that’s what happened to you when you started sleeping with a Lynch brother. It started somewhere toward the end of Adam’s time at university, where they were all gearing up to get ready for the rest of their lives. Adam to return home, Blue and Henry planning trips and dreams, and Ronan preparing to spend the rest of his life with the man he loved. Where was Gansey? For some reason, he had felt unhinged. And when one was unhinged, they went to the Lynch brothers, and more often than not that led to two things: drinking, or sex.
He had chosen the latter.
The first time Gansey and Declan Lynch had slept together, it had been as disorienting as it had been pleasurable. They both assumed it was a one-night stand, something that was fantastic but would never happen again because it couldn’t. Because this was a dangerous line to walk. This was crossing some kind of code, probably, with Ronan. But it had just been too damn good to stop. So their one-night stand turned into something regular, where one of them called the other for what they needed, and before they knew it, they were casually sleeping together. Gansey knew he had to stop it but he had not yet found the courage. Every time he tried to talk to Declan about it, Declan would distract him, and he was just so damn good at what he did that Gansey didn’t fucking know how to stop.
But he was here now, at Declan’s annoyingly beautiful home, ready to try and stop it again. Matthew wouldn’t be home, he was living with a girl now, which meant he could talk to Declan privately. Talk. Talk, and only talk.
Gansey took in a deep breath and exhaled before he rang the doorbell. When Declan opened to him, Gansey had to remind himself immediately: it doesn’t matter that he looks like this, do not have sex with him.
Declan’s curls were, as always, perfectly tousled. He had the same straight nose Gansey had, the kind that hadn’t been broken upwards of three times the way Ronan’s had. He was annoyingly handsome, standing there in his casual clothes. When he wasn’t wearing a suit is when Gansey liked Declan best, in the same way that Declan liked Gansey best when he was wearing just jeans and a t-shirt. Gansey didn’t like that either—the very fact that they had things they liked best about each other meant that this had already gone too far.
“Hello,” Declan grinned, and it was so knowing that Gansey almost gave in right then and there. “I saw you this morning, I didn’t think you’d need it so soon.”
Gansey scoffed, trying to downplay the blush rising up his neck. “I wouldn’t think so highly of yourself, if I were you.”
“Oh?” Declan grinned, hooking his index finger down Gansey’s jeans, tugging at him. “I have video evidence that would prove otherwise.”
Gansey’s blush was disgustingly obvious now. “You will never show that to anyone.”
“No,” Declan agreed. “That’s just for when I’m lonely.”
Gansey cleared his throat, feeling hot. “We need to talk.” he closed the door behind him, Declan already leading him to the office. He must have been doing work.
“About what?” Declan asked, leading Gansey over to the desk. His laptop wasn’t there, but there were some books and papers scattered on the desk. A little neater than Gansey’s chaotic workstation back at Monmouth though. He pressed Gansey against it so his backside was digging into the edge. Gansey didn’t know what he was doing, but this time, he would talk to him.
“I just...” he frowned when Declan took off his shirt. “I don’t think this is a good idea, the two of us.” Declan, who was a boxer just like Ronan, had an impressive body. It made Gansey’s head spin.
“Why’s that?” Declan asked, his tone serious, but his smile suggested that he was mocking Gansey. He unbuttoned Gansey’s jeans.
“Well because,” Gansey swallowed, his hands suddenly unable to move to stop Declan from what he was doing. His hand had already slipped past Gansey’s underwear. He let out a long exhale, irritated. “Ronan would be furious.”
“What else is new?” Declan began to stroke him.
Gansey clutched the edge of the desk. Gansey sometimes wondered if Declan was also a magician. “We don’t even like each other.”
“You don’t have to like me to get fucked by me, Gansey.” He leaned forward, his mouth by Gansey’s ear. “And I think it’s very clear that you really fucking like me.”
Gansey wanted to say something witty, something smart, call him a name. But none of those things were really Gansey. So he did what he had already done a million times now and gave up, gave in to what he wanted. He pressed his mouth against Declan’s, moving up on the desk so that he was sitting on it, crushing papers underneath him. Declan was quite vocal about his fantasies, and Gansey wondered for a moment if doing it on the desk was another one of his. Knowing he had Gansey on the place where he worked.
“Jesus,” Gansey choked out as Declan tore his jeans off. They were moving fervently, as if they had been apart weeks rather than a few short hours. Declan had stashed lube in one of the cabinets of the desk, which confirmed Gansey’s suspicion that this fell into one of Declan’s fantasies.
It was funny, how Declan on the outside was a polite, presidential-looking sort, all business. But when it came to this, when it was just about them getting what they wanted out of each other, they both became other people.
“You’re still so open,” Declan murmured in his ear.
Gansey didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of moaning, he had already failed so much today, so he just grabbed Declan's face and brought him in for a passionate kiss, tongues clashing, each of them trying to gain ground on the other. It happened all so fast, Gansey being opened up, Declan putting on a condom, pushing in, knocking the wind right out of Gansey. He let slip a moan this time, right into their kiss, and that made Declan snap his hips so he was all the way in.
They both swore at the same time, but Declan smiled. “I like you like this.” he moved slowly. Gansey felt like someone was sitting on his chest. He was even having trouble sitting properly, the papers underneath him making it difficult. “Pliant, open, just full of want.”
Gansey wanted to argue, but the truth was, Gansey’s entire life had been full of want. Want for something more, something magical, and right now, something so pleasurable that it messed with his damn brain.
“Declan,” Gansey said kindly. “Please shut up.”
Declan laughed. “Yes, my king.”
Gansey nearly blew it right then and there. He tried to force that sentence out of his mind and instead focus on the sweet, sweet slide of Declan Lynch moving in and out of him. The way his back, legs, and ass were all hurting a little from the wood. How that even made it better. He wrapped his legs around Declan, one arm slung over his neck, kissing his shoulder, his neck.
Gansey shivered, a thought teasing him.
“You okay?” Declan asked, slowing down.
“Don’t stop.” Gansey breathed. “I just...” he put his forehead against Declan’s. “Next time, wear your suit while you fuck me here.”
“Oh, God,” Declan moaned, roughly thrusting, making Gansey whine. Declan soon began to chase that sound out of Gansey over and over, hitting that sweet spot that made Gansey want to scream.
It was over embarrassingly quickly, even for Gansey. He really couldn’t hide how much he wanted this, how good it felt. The way he enjoyed the sound of Declan’s skin hitting his, the way Declan knew that if he sucked at a spot on Gansey’s neck as he fucked him, it would bring Gansey closer faster. He liked when Declan didn’t listen to him and didn’t shut up, and instead whispered everything Gansey pretended he didn’t want to hear. It was all too much, and all too good.
“Come on,” Declan put his hand between them, wrapping it around Gansey’s dick.
Gansey tried to kiss him but Declan pulled away. “Wha—”
Declan’s smile was not so businesslike. In fact, it reminded him a bit of Ronan. “I want to see your face this time.”
Gansey felt scandalized. And then he felt stupid for feeling such a way. But he had to admit, it was a turn-on, Declan wanting to watch him climax, the two of them never breaking eye contact. It was even more pleasurable because his own climax seemed to spur on Declan who became ruthless with his thrusts, and as quickly as it had begun, it was suddenly over.
“What the fuck.”
Gansey and Declan’s heads snapped over to Ronan Lynch who was standing in the doorway, who looked just about ready to commit a violent crime.
“Ronan—”
He snarled at his brother. “I’ll kill you.”
“Ronan, wait—”
Declan pulled out too quickly and they scrambled for their clothes, and Ronan was walking over and Gansey did the only thing he could think to do because Ronan was raising his damn fist, and stood right in front of Declan, putting his hands up.
Ronan stopped.
Quickly, Gansey said, “Ronan, don’t.”
Ronan’s entire body spasmed. “Don’t use that voice with me.” It was the one he always used when the Lynch brothers were about to have a throwdown. “What’s he done to make you fuck him?”
Declan scoffed. “I was doing the fucking.”
Ronan stepped forward again but Gansey pressed his body against him, pushing him back. “Ronan, Jesus, nothing. Is it impossible to believe that I do this freely?” He felt a little more like himself now, now that Declan had, God help him, taken care of him.
Ronan looked like he wanted to throw up. After all, he had just walked in on his brother and best friend having sex, and judging from his expression, Gansey had been right and that this did seem to violate some kind of code between them. Gansey expected Ronan to yell, or push him aside and actually punch Declan in the face (it did make Gansey secretly happy that Ronan was angrier with Declan than with him), but Ronan did none of that.
He looked truly disgusted, but said, “Really?” he motioned to the two of them. “Are you sure?” He was, very clearly, only talking to Gansey. They had spoken badly about him enough times for Gansey to understand where Ronan’s confusion was coming from.
“As sure as one can be considering the situation.”
Annoyed, Ronan snapped, “I don’t know what that means.”
“I still don’t know what he and I mean.” Gansey stressed.
Ronan’s frown remained, but after looking between the two of them a few more times he mumbled, “Well, I’ll definitely have nightmares tonight. But fine. Whatever.”
Declan, who looked just as angry with Ronan as Ronan was with him, muttered back, “I wasn’t aware that I needed my younger brother’s blessing.”
“You do when you’re fucking my best friend,” Ronan growled. “I came here to plan Matthew’s birthday with you, and now instead I have to throw up into a toilet.”
“Grow up Ronan, we all have the same parts.”
Ronan looked at him incredulously. “What the hell does that even have to do with it? I still don’t want to see you having sex.”
“So then leave.”
“Fine! Fucker.” And leaving Gansey standing there, with his hair standing every which way, the middle Lynch brother stormed out, calling out a goodbye to Gansey, slamming the door hard behind him. And then he opened it to slam it again, just to piss Declan off (who did, in fact, yell out a curse word). Gansey wanted to be surprised by the sudden abrupt ending to the conversation, but this is what life was when you were involved with not one, but two Lynch brothers.
“Well,” Declan said. “That went well.”
Gansey turned around, and found himself grinning. “You’re an idiot.”
“You know, you don’t talk to anyone else so rudely.”
“No one else gets under my skin the way you do.”
Declan Lynch smiled, and it was, unfortunately, very beautiful. “Lucky me.”
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toast-the-unknowing · 5 years ago
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What are the #thots on CDTH?
This is begging for one of those “edgy/depressed/dumbass bitch/thot/bastard” memes, but sadly you sent it to someone with no patience for slapping together graphics, so you get a lot of words instead. Behind a cut, for length and SPOILERS.
I really enjoyed this book, my reactions to most of the additions to canon were positive, it felt a wide range of emotions while reading it and upon finishing I found that it had knocked me sort of off center in that way where I don’t want to write anything ever again, or read anything, or really do much but stare out of windows. I know that feeling will pass, but I’m soaking in it for now. I haven’t yet discerned if there are going to be any substantial changes to the ways that I write these characters, when I write these characters again.
I loved Ronan in this book, which was a relief. I had been a bit worried that Maggie intended for him to end up as Lonely God Ronan, isolated and just too damn special for the rest of humanity, but it now appears that is very much not the plan. It hurt watching him be trapped at the Barns, wanting something different from life and not knowing how to get it, and it was amazing to watch him forge a connection with someone new and find the capability that he has to help other people, instead of just kind of thinking of himself as the fuck-up.
Holy Shit I felt emotions about Matthew, that was unexpected and unprecedented. Fuck did that boy make me sad. I am greatly looking forward to seeing where his story goes, now that he actually has one. I want some quality Matthew & Jordan dream duo bonding time.
I want, just, quality Jordan content in general, I love Jordan, I need more of her, she was wonderful.
Hennessy leaves me cold, but I had a very similar reaction to Ronan until most of the way through The Dream Thieves, so I am giving her the benefit of the doubt and waiting to see what happens in the future.
HOLY SHIT I LOVED EVERYTHING ABOUT DECLAN.
It did crack me up that it literally took one page for the book to start talking shit about him, but I also found the whole “Declan is deliberately, crushingly boring” idea interesting. It surprised me but still makes sense in retrospect, which is the best kind of surprise. I hadn’t pictured him as the kind of guy who would go to work and let people snap at him and call him by the wrong name, but I think my understanding might have been a little closer to the version of Declan that still thought he could have Senator or Congressman in front of his name. I think Declan might be the character I most have to reconsider, but I’m happy with how he was portrayed here and I’m looking forward to doing that reconsideration, and to seeing what happens to him next in canon.
God but he just continues to be the hardest working brother, and he still fucks it up, but he doesn’t want to fuck up, but he just shouldn’t have to deal with all of this shit, and ow, ow, my heart.
I adored Declan/Jordan and every moment where she delights in surprising an honest reaction out of him. “I see the real you when no one else does” is EXACTLY my kind of ship.
I had really wanted this trilogy to force Ronan to reexamine his understanding of his father, but getting to see Declan do some actual work on processing his pain is fantastic too. I love all of the moments where he admits that he hates Niall. It fucked me up so bad, because it’s like he doesn’t want to be thinking or saying it but he just cannot keep it in. It’s like his emotional nightwash, but he doesn’t get to dream it away.
@comicsohwhyohwhy​ and I once discussed the problem of Ashley, and we JOKINGLY suggested that maybe the Ashley from TRB and the Ashley mentioned in TRK are two different Ashleys, that maybe Declan has just dated a string of women named Ashley, and then we had a good laugh about how absurd that would be, and I cannot fucking believe that that has turned out to be canon. I am oddly delighted with this development.
I am happy with the Adam content that we got and with the size of his role. I felt like the book did a good job of honoring his importance in Ronan’s life, letting him be present and matter and affect Ronan (and disagree with him in productive ways where they didn’t just argue and where he wasn’t just Declan 2.0), while still keeping him in a support role, since that was apparently the goal. I’m unclear on what kind of role he’s going to have going forward, but it looks like he’s being set up to have some kind of character arc, with the “Adam is lying to everyone who knows him” situation, so I really do want that to pay out and go somewhere, even if he does continue to be a supporting rather than featured character.
That whole Harvard situation breaks my heart: Adam’s friends think that his family is wonderful and that his boyfriend is a violent drunk. I can’t imagine any interactions around that that aren’t fucked up. Adam having to defend Ronan to his friends any time he comes up, but not being able to tell the truth, so he just sounds like he’s making empty excuses for someone that’s bad for him…which is something that he has in fact had to do, but not about Ronan, about the parents that all of his friends are “jealous” of him for having. Fuck. FUCK.
I loved every mention of Gansey and Blue. I can understand why Maggie doesn’t want to include them as characters, but that could have easily ended in a situation where they’re just…noticeably absent, and instead we got this, confirmation that they still talk to their friends and love them and are involved in their lives, plus we got A+ Gansey-texts-like-an-old-man content.
I enjoyed Farooq-Lane a lot just from a standpoint of being an ordinary normal person who gets put into a weird as shit situation and then…continues to be an ordinary normal person who has ordinary normal reactions to things. I find that kind of shit fascinating – it’s the kind of thing that makes for great comedy and improv, but it can also be very effective in drama, and we really got to see a wide range here.
What. the actual. fuck. is up with the New Fenian and Mor O Corra. Like I mean okay the Lynches have to live through all their parent trauma again, yeah I get that, okay Niall apparently made a dream double of an actual woman he’d slept with which like, wow I didn’t think Aurora could be retroactively creepier but damn if Niall didn’t find a way, blah blah I get all that. But like. What is – what is that relationship, exactly? Between them? Niall’s ex made a dream copy of him, too, but like…as a kid? Or one that doesn’t age? Has Mor O Corra out-creepered Niall Lynch? What the actual fuck is up with those two. I almost don’t want to know. I kind of love being this weirded out.
Bryde is really goddamn tiresome. I am expecting he’s going to turn out to be a villain and honestly that can’t happen fast enough for me. Although I  anticipate that we’ll see Ronan buying into his crap more before that happens, so, it looks like we get to look forward to a lot more overblown insufferable monologues about how “special” we are and how we’re better than those gross boring mundane people. Blah.
I’m kind of disappointed that this is apparently a series where the stakes are THE END OF THE WORLD and where the protagonists have to fight a SHADOWY INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION that can send ARMIES of WELL-ARMED HIGHLY TRAINED OPERATIVES to HUNT DOWN THE PEOPLE WITH SUPERPOWERS – this is 90% of all fantasy stories, and it’s boring, and I’m tired of it. I like that the stakes in The Raven Cycle are small but still immensely meaningful. What happens in The Raven Cycle if the characters don’t succeed? Gansey dies. Ronan dies and Matthew falls asleep. Adam doesn’t go to college. Blue doesn’t get to travel the world. The world doesn’t explode, but we still care so so much about seeing them succeed, because we care so much about those characters living and getting to build the future they want. That’s a thousand times more interesting to me than “we have to…[dramatic music, put on sunglasses] SAVE THE WORLD.” Spare me.
I’m still going to read the other two, obviously, and I’m not even really mad about this, mostly just rolling my eyes. But I expect that Maggie is going to use this plot device I don’t care about to do things emotionally and character-wise that I do care about, and that’s the important part.
There is one actual thing that pisses me off with this book, that I actively hate and wish was not a part of canon, that I will probably just ignore and pretend isn’t canon, at least once I have wrapped my head around the fact that it even happened in the first place: why the fuck does Ronan go to confession.
I was willing to accept in The Raven Cycle that Maggie had no interest in doing anything with the fact that she had made the Catholic character and the gay character the same character, because Ronan is actively figuring himself out in the course of that series, because there’s so much else going on in his head and his life that I can buy that religion isn’t his top priority, because hey, I kind of liked that the series wasn’t one more Sad Story About A Sad Gay Who Is Sad Because Homophobia. I can accept a Ronan who goes to mass every week because that’s family time, because that’s tradition, because that’s what Lynches do.
But going to confession – with some degree of regularity! – is not going through the motions. When I was a Catholic school girl and an ALTAR SERVER who went to mass twice a week, confession was still a “maybe once during Lent, if we get around to it” kind of deal. What the hell does Ronan say in confession, exactly? He’s not confessing to the shit that he actually feels guilty about, playing god and creating life, because that’s a secret. He’s not confessing to the thing that he’s getting told every week is going to send him to hell. So what is he doing there?
This ceases to be “skipping past homophobia so we can just have a nice happy gay story for once (or at least a story that’s unhappy for other reasons)”. This is firmly into “deliberately and cruelly ignoring the real pain and suffering that the Catholic Church inflicts on oppressed people every single day” and I think it was a grave, grave misstep.
So my super general #thots: loved it, largely positive, some things I’m iffy on but excited to see where they go, a couple of plot elements/characters I don’t care for but can put up with for the sake of all of the good, one big negative that will probably feature only very very sparingly in canon.
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