#this is completely unedited so please ignore any mistakes 😌

[kelliealtogether]

So I can't get enough of the fanart of Adam with a beard that @try-set-me-on-fire has been blessing us with, and I wrote a little something inspired by this art of theirs because we love a beardy, unkempt, mysterious Adam Parrish.

Adam Parrish never anticipated growing a beard would itch.

Before averting the end of the world, he always shaved before his facial hair made it past the stage of stubble. Unlike Gansey, Adam had the capacity to grow something other than a scraggly tuft on his chin, but — as evidenced by Ronan when he lowered himself to show up for classes prior to dropping out — scruff took the dignity of the Aglionby uniform down a peg. Dignity being an aspect of the school uniform he needed most, Adam lathered up every morning with dollar store shaving cream and used a dollar store razor to clear his jaw, cheeks, upper lip, and chin of the faint blond fuzz that appeared overnight. It was the last step of the perfunctory routine he’d crafted to get ready with minimal effort and time, a step that often left his face dotted with bloody bits of toilet paper, the quantity driven by how much sleep he’d stolen the night before.

That routine followed him to Harvard, moving from his tiny, antiquated bathroom in his apartment above St. Agnes to a shared dormitory bathroom, where it stuck around until Adam returned to campus after a two week leave of absence because reacclimating his soul with his body was a lot more difficult than he initially planned. 

Not to mention with Ronan back from the sweetmetal sea, and with every ley line everywhere awake, Adam wasn't exactly rushing to return to classes.

But when he did, the Adam Parrish who returned to Harvard wasn't the same Adam Parrish who had left campus one evening to scry and find his boyfriend. The Adam Parrish who returned to Cambridge for his final semester in the Ivy League aligned closer with the Adam Parrish he'd been the past summer at the Barns. An Adam Parrish who didn't have to perform, not because it didn't matter, and not because he didn't care, but because he didn't want to. He didn't have to. The past few weeks had given him some perspective on what really mattered, on the fragility of not just his own body and mind, but the whole world, and as soon as he admitted that he didn't want to stay at Harvard and that he didn't want to keep acting like a cut-rate Gansey, he reached a level he'd learned about in his first semester psychology class but never personally experienced. 

The morning he returned to campus, Adam put the picture-perfect student who looked like he belonged on brick-paved walkways and around stacks of leatherbound library books on a shelf behind his closet door. He donned flannel instead of tweed. Jeans instead of slacks. He shoved his feet in old, scuffed sneakers instead of pristinely polished secondhand brogues, and he wore an old oversized Harvard sweatshirt Blue had found him in a thrift store after he’d gotten his acceptance letter instead of plain, drab sweaters Adam bought because he thought they looked academic. 

In the end, he returned to wearing all the clothes he’d initially left behind at the Barns when he’d driven away in August because they didn’t match who he’d wanted to become at Harvard. 

He’d really been such a fool not all that long ago. 

Without cuffed sleeves and cuffed hems, he became almost unrecognizable. Unimpressive. Unremarkable. The dorm proctor stopped him and asked him who had signed him in as a guest before realizing she was talking to Adam. Professors did a double take when he stopped by during office hours to turn in make-up assignments. Classmates who always asked him to study with them hardly looked his way. Just a change in wardrobe alone — from classic to comfort — stripped away so much of the false front he’d put up for months, enough that the Crying Club didn't notice him waiting for them when he asked them to meet him in Thayer's basement so he could provide an explanation and attempt an apology.

Then Adam’s already-perfunctory morning routine became impossibly more perfunctory when, first, he ran out of the styling paste he used to wrangle his self-cut hair into something presentable, and then — a few days later — ran out of shaving cream. 

Unless he looked closely at himself in the mirror — steam swiped away to make a lopsided circle large enough for his shower-pinked face — Adam couldn’t tell he hadn’t shaven. In the thin, sickly gray of the bathroom, he had to tilt his head one way and lift his chin before the coarse, fair hair on his jaw caught a little bit of light. Straight on, he looked the same as he always had: feather boned, gaunt cheeked, thin lipped, wary eyed. 

Except those wary eyes had recently lost their dark circles. 

That first morning, Adam told himself he’d stop by a drugstore and pick up more shaving cream, but he didn’t. And he didn’t the next day. And he didn’t the next day either. By the fourth morning, he finally began looking slightly scruffy. Or maybe slightly rugged. Nothing like Ronan — who grew a five o’clock shadow by noon — but when Adam ran his hand across his jaw, rough hairs scraped his palm, and he didn’t have to move his head a certain way to see the stubble on his face. A distinct coating of fair hair covered most of the bottom half of his face, a subtle shadow Adam didn’t totally hate, and if he left it alone, he’d save himself five to ten minutes every morning. 

So he left it alone. 

But then it started itching. 

“The fuck is that sound?” Ronan asked during one of their nightly phone calls. 

While Adam sat on his bed in his Harvard dorm, Ronan sat in a hotel room somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains, priming to track down a dreamer he’d been encountering in dreamspace the past few days. In an effort to help, Adam had flipped some tarot cards onto his comforter, and while figuring out their meaning, he’d started absently scratching his jaw right by where he held his phone to his right ear. 

“What?” Adam replied, hearing Ronan’s question but not picking up its meaning, too absorbed in figuring out how Temperance fit into any kind of reading involving Ronan. 

“That sound,” Ronan said. “It’s like I’m in a damn cabin in the woods and the monster of the week’s trying to get through the door.” 

Adam furrowed his eyebrows, still focused on the wispy figure pouring smoke-like water from one cup into another. “The monster of the…” Slowly, Ronan’s words sank in and Adam stilled his fingertips on his face before dropping his hand into his lap. “Oh.” 

“Oh?”

“I was scratching my face.” 

“Why? Do they have fleas at Harvard? Bed bugs? Magical mosquitos?” 

“No,” Adam said flatly. “I ran out of shaving cream and haven’t shaved in a few days and my — beard? I guess it’s a beard. My beard itches.” 

Silence stretched across the phone line for so long Adam checked to make sure the call hadn’t disconnected because Ronan’s phone died, but the time still ticked upward on the screen of his phone. He’d simply rendered Ronan speechless for a few moments because he hadn’t picked up a razor in a week. 

“You have a beard,” Ronan said when he finally got his wits back about him. 

“It’s not really a—” 

“Don’t tell me it’s like that little soul patch thing Dick tries to grow everytime he has ideas about being manly.” 

Laughing dryly, Adam gave up on interpreting Temperance and laid back on his bed, rubbing his hand over his cheek to ease the itch instead of scratching as he replied, “It’s not like that. But it’s not a beard beard. I said it’s only been a few days.” 

“Send me a picture.” 

“I’m not sending a picture.” 

“Because it’s coming in uneven. I bet you look mangy.” 

“I do not look mangy.” 

“I bet you do. That’s why you won’t send me a picture.” 

“I do not look mangy,” Adam repeated. “Jesus, Ronan. If I send you one, will you quit saying that?” 

“I make no promises, Parrish.” 

A half hour later, after they finished their call, Adam did take a photo of himself. Mostly because when he sent a rare selfie to Ronan, Ronan sent one back, even if it was only one side of his face or a close up of an eye. And because it was for Ronan, Adam put a little effort into the photo, shifting his head on his navy pillowcase until he found a good angle and smiled a little when he hit the shutter button. He looked at the photo briefly before he sent it to Ronan, and it surprised him that his facial hair wasn’t growing unevenly at all. One spot near his left ear was a little thinner than everywhere else, but his facial hair was an otherwise perfectly even layer half a shade lighter than the hair on his head.

Yet this did not stop Ronan from sending Adam a picture of a mangy dog instead of a selfie, followed by a single-worded message moments later. 

Shave. 

Usually, Adam left contrariness to Ronan, who had perfected the art of antagonism a long, long time ago. But something about the single-word reply irked Adam. It came across as a directive, an order, even though Ronan would never mean it that way, and it tightened Adam’s jaw, making it ache as well as itch. He closed out of the message and willfully ignored it the rest of the night and into the following morning, when he found himself in Walgreens to pick up a new tube of toothpaste. 

On his way through the store to the register, Adam didn’t avoid the shaving aisle and instead paused in front of the cans of shaving cream for a long minute. He stared down the red, white, and blue cans of Barbasol, and leered at the far fancier cream-and-navy Aveeno Therapeutic Shave Gel. 

Shave. 

It seemed like only yesterday they’d made up in the sweetmetal sea, where the two of them had intertwined and recounted their rights and wrongs, made their admissions and their apologies. And Adam wasn’t mad at Ronan. A year or two ago, he would have been, and receiving a photo of a scabby, patchy-haired dog would have sent them straight into a fight. Now, Adam well understood it was Ronan being Ronan, which meant he was being a dick despite the fact he loved Adam. So Adam wasn’t mad, but he was a little peeved. 

Just peeved enough to be petty. 

He turned away from the myriad shaving creams and shaving balms and aftershaves and headed to the front of the store to buy his single tube of toothpaste. Then he walked back to campus, let himself into his dorm, and — wastefully — threw away the last of his razors. 

The next few weeks, neither of them brought up the beard thing. Once, Ronan asked if Adam got shaving cream and Adam indirectly answered that he’d gone to the drugstore. However Ronan interpreted that was up to him, but he didn’t ask about it again, leaving Adam to assume he’d interpreted the response as a positive toward Team Shave. They exchanged photos but no selfies, simply snapshots of tangled roots obstructing a ley line or reawakened Rockefeller beetles crossing Harvard Square in a tidy single-file. And when they talked, Adam did everything he could to keep his hands away from his face, even going so far as sitting on his hands after putting Ronan on speaker. 

Finally, in the fourth week of not shaving, the itching waned, and when Adam looked in the mirror, the hair on his face had definitively turned into a beard. Thick, blond hair covered his jawline and chin and it crept toward his cheeks and down his neck. A full mustache crossed his upper lip, and the space between his bottom lip and chin had filled in almost completely without bare spots beneath the corners of his lips he’d seen on other men. All together, it served to make him look far older than nineteen. Wiser. A little mysterious. Rough and rugged and a little unkempt — something he’d never been before — like he’d been put through the wringer. 

In a lot of ways, he had. 

And the worst — but probably easiest and most bearable — wringer was yet to come, because as spring break loomed ever closer, Ronan reminded Adam of the plans they’d made long before Adam had returned to Cambridge. “You’re still coming to the Barns, right?” 

“Yeah,” Adam told him. It wouldn’t be like last summer, when the Lynch family farm had been paradise for Adam and Ronan. Mór Ó Corra and the New Fenian would probably be there if Ronan didn’t force them out of the place for a few days — for entirely selfish reasons, Adam hoped he would — but Adam would never turn down the chance to go back to the Barns. To go home, though that location constantly changed depending on where Ronan was any given day. “My last midterm is Thursday and I’ll ride down Friday.”

���You’re taking the bike instead of the shitbox? Are you gonna return the favor?” 

“I’m planning on it.” 

Adam could hear the devil of Ronan’s smirk when he said, “Good.” 

Midterms raced by despite long nights, long papers, and long exams, and Adam cleanly survived them. He even thought about leaving for the Barns on Thursday night until he remembered his journey back from Virginia on his dreamt motorcycle. Exhaustion on that ride had done him no favors despite having a lot to think about, and he’d rather get to the Barns in one piece than be scraped off the road somewhere in New Jersey. Catching up on sleep could wait until the Barns though, and Friday he woke with the sun so his wheels hit the road before rush hour, his new facial hair adding some padding and warmth beneath his helmet that hadn’t been there before. 

Nine hours later, when he turned up the Barns’ rutted driveway, Adam knew he’d find Ronan waiting for him on the farmhouse’s front porch. Probably leaning against the same pillar he’d leaned against the night of his birthday when Adam joined him outside and they’d kissed for the second time. Thoughts of that night, of getting his hands on Ronan again, of kissing him again carried Adam down the driveway, and when the woods opened up into the rolling fields of the farm, the first thing Adam saw was Ronan, a dark silhouette against the whitewashed house, leaning against the exact same pillar. 

Only the BMW occupied the gravel parking area in front of the house — Mór Ó Corra and the New Fenian presumably made to temporarily flee — and as Adam nuzzled his motorcycle next to Ronan’s recovered car, Ronan started his slow descent from the porch. 

The reckoning came as Adam slowly unbuckled the strap beneath his chin and lifted his helmet from his head, and he hadn’t fully freed himself of it when the crunch of gravel beneath Ronan’s boots stopped and Ronan said, “You shitbag. You said you got shaving cream.” 

“I said,” Adam started, pulling his helmet all the way off and setting it on the motorcycle’s seat before he looked at Ronan, “that I went to Walgreens.” 

Ten feet away, Ronan stood with his arms crossed over the front of his black zip-up hoodie, his pale blue eyes narrowed to slits as he looked at Adam. He looked no more indignant than normal with his lips pressed together in a thin line and the fingers of both hands curled into the sleeves of his sweatshirt, but for a long minute, he just looked, and Adam looked back. He wanted to close that ten feet between them — badly — and throw his arms around Ronan, get him close again, but Adam had lobbed the ball over the net by not picking up a razor in six weeks. It was Ronan’s turn to volley. 

And volley Ronan did. 

Throwing his arms down at his sides, he stalked across the gravel left between them and instead of pulling Adam into a hug, he took hold of Adam’s cheeks. “What the fuck, Parrish?” he growled, thumbs beginning to brush over Adam’s beard, from his cheeks down to his jaw, over and over again. 

For the first time in his life, Adam understood why cats and dogs liked being pet. All the tension from nine hours on a bike melted from his muscles as Ronan’s thumbs skimmed across his beard, and Adam almost closed his eyes and sighed. He didn’t, because he wanted to watch Ronan as his gaze traveled over Adam’s face, assessing his sideburns and mustache and neck line. Finally, Adam replied, “I thought it’d be funny. You pissed me off. With shave.” 

“You asshole,” Ronan said, thumbs stopping but still holding onto Adam’s face. “I didn’t mean it.” 

“I know.” Adam had always known. Things weren’t like that between them, except for when Ronan wanted them to be. “Do you like it?” 

“Yeah,” Ronan replied, nodding as a slow smile crept across his lips. “Yeah, I think I do.” 

“It’s not mangy.” 

Ronan laughed loud enough it echoed off the farmhouse and startled Chainsaw — perched on the porch railing — into flight, and as she soared circles overhead, Adam and Ronan wrapped their arms around one another and pulled each other close. 

“No, it’s not mangy, Parrish,” Ronan said, and just before he put his lips to Adams, he added, “It’s a damn nice beard.”