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This is what he’s addicted to; the morning hours when Parrish is finally finished with his homework, when he’s finally succumbed to the exhaustion that surrounds him like a cloud and is asleep in his bed, his hands fisted in his pillow, his face passive and relaxed. Ronan always thought it would be creepy to have someone watch him sleep, and he always thought it would be creepy to be that guy – the guy who is obsessed with the object of his boundless and bottomless and unfathomable affection sleeping. But here he is, more addicted to the way that Parrish surrenders to it, utterly untouched by the hazy magic of dreaming, and unbothered by the distracting possibility of oblivion.
Ronan will never know what’s happening inside of Adam’s head, because Adam is impossible to read in a way that is both peevish and satisfied, but he admires the lack of terror that Parrish attaches to sleep. Adam can sleep anywhere. He turns off like a light and turns back on at even the slightest touch, so Ronan is careful to not even breathe too heavily in his direction.
But it’s an addiction all the same, watching Adam sleep. It makes sleeping himself easier, when he can manage it, and it makes his hypersomnia less fearsome.
Tonight, though, where the look of Adam’s unguarded face would be providing him with some comfort, it’s giving him nothing but anxiety. Summer is holding on with brutal force, the soggy Virginia heat permeating the wood of Adam’s apartment, permeating the air and drenching them both in sweat and humidity. Ronan is hyper aware of how Adam looks like he’s passed out from something more strenuous than calculus and unmanaged grief and it’s incredibly distracting on one end and offensively stimulating on the other.
This is where he is.
Turned on by a boy sweating in his fucking sleep.
Ronan shifts on the shitty air mattress he purchased out of sheer perverse desire to not have to sleep on the crappy bare boards (buy a fucking rug, Parrish had not ended well at all) and tugs his pillow over his face when he hears Adam stir, put his feet on the ground.
Adam’s bare feet are a fucking miracle and Ronan is 100% he doesn’t have a foot fetish and he does not want to suck on Adam’s toe but he’s also pretty sure that admiring the arch of his foot as elegant is bordering on a kink that Ronan does not want to deal with. He turns away, because he figures Parrish is getting up to piss, but then Adam walks around the mattress and towards the door.
“Hey-“ Ronan begins, cranky, and not sure why. “Where are you going?”
There’s no response and Ronan is even more peeved – it’s one thing to be ignored, it’s a completely other to be ignored by Adam. It fills Ronan with a white-hot shame, like he’s wasting his time, but he can’t convince his stupid fucking heart that this difficult straight boy is not worth setting his sights on.
Adam reaches for the door and opens it, and a rush of even more oppressively hot air fills the room, and Ronan sits up. “Parrish,” he begins, scrambling, not bothering with a shirt either. “Where the fuck are you-“
He reaches for Adam’s wrist and Adam passively collapses against him, and Ronan realizes he’s still asleep, totally and completely and unwakeably so, and now there are miles of hot, sticky skin against Ronan’s.
Ronan wonders if he’s in heaven or in hell and he can’t really tell, and he decides it must be hell when Adam flops in his Adam Parrish exhaustion way so that his head is tucked right into Ronan’s shoulder, and Ronan can’t quite support his weight so they’re suddenly both on the air mattress.
To make matters worse, Adam is still snoozing, his breath slow and regular and coming out in a smooth, soft in-and-out.
Ronan has never really been this close to Adam before. He’s never had this much contact with him, he’s never had this much nude skin on his ever, unless he was counting wrestling with his brothers on hot Virginia summers by the pool (and he doesn’t). He’s never been so close for such a dedicated amount of time, quiet and unwatched enough that he could really count the freckles on Adam’s high cheekbones.
He feels gross, though, taking advantage of it. His cock is definitely interesting and that’s a fucking horror show of it’s own, but he can’t bring himself to actually move away quickly, to try and wake Adam up. This may be the only time in his entire life that he can hold him close and pretend that they have something more than a one-sided creepy crush and a burgeoning friendship.
God, he thinks, all he wants in his entire fucking life, is the boy in his arms right now.
Which is why before he can dwell on it, before the spike of anger can force its way out of his chest, before his brain can lie more about how this could happen one day, he hefts Adam, still inexplicably sleeping, and puts him back in his bed. He stands and looks at him and the same feeling that always fills him when he looks at Adam comes back, only this time it’s worse, so he goes to the bathroom and jerks off, methodically, thinking of nothing as best he can (and finally coming when Adam’s hands replace his own in the movie inside his head), gets dressed, and leaves.
He doesn’t tell anyone.
~~~~~
So naturally it happens again.
A few days later, on a Saturday night, after Adam trudged home from work and Ronan and Chainsaw showed up at his door, they did the usual. Ronan harassed him. Adam worked on a history paper. Chainsaw stole Adam’s pen and Adam bribed her with a discarded candy wrapper to get it back.
It’s three in the morning when, by some miracle, Ronan is asleep. He’s so asleep he almost misses it, the click of the door opening, but it’s Chainsaw, beautiful and clever and infinitely smarter than Ronan, he thinks, who caws once. Ronan opens his eyes just as Adam is making his way down the stairs. “Parrish,” Ronan says, dragging himself up, “what the hell-“ he starts, before he remembers the other night. The heat is still oppressive, and Adam is dragging a sheet behind him like he’s five and he needs a security blanket, but he’s otherwise only wearing his briefs.
Ronan scrambles just as he hears Adam’s feet slapping the wood in that methodical way of someone shuffling, and he practically flings himself down the stairs. If Adam falls and cracks his perfect fucking head open, Ronan will burn the entire fucking church down.
(Later on, he’ll say a private rosary for thinking that.)
(Ronan doesn’t even like praying with a rosary.)
But Adam makes it to the bottom of the stairs and starts pushing at the door that leads outside, and Ronan catches him then, his hands going to Adam’s fine waist. “Jesus Christ,” he says, and this time Adam doesn’t collapse against him. Instead he stands still, his head bobbing down to his chin like he’s praying, his hands still holding onto the door. “Fuck,” he mutters, and pulls on Adam’s wrists, then.
It takes almost half an hour; Adam doesn’t wake up the entire time. But finally he half-carries, half-drags him back to bed, and leans back in the doorway before he bars the door with a chair, and goes back to lying on his air mattress and staring up at the boy sleeping in his bed, oblivious to the world.
~~~~~
The unfortunate part of this is that the only person who Ronan knows who sleepwalks is Declan, and fuck if he’s asking Declan for advice. Matthew is equally useless, because Matthew, despite living in the same dorm as Declan for two years, slept like the dead (information once funny because they could draw on his face, and Matthew wouldn’t ever really get upset, but now distressing that Ronan thinks it might be his fate one day) and so he was never the one to deal with Declan’s midnight jaunts.
So Ronan spends a week with his nights occupied by Parrish, who gets increasingly anxious in his sleep, and his days occupied by researching what the fuck could be causing his sleepwalking. The internet suggests stress, which isn’t surprising, considering that Adam has basically heaped the entire world and at least two different planets on his shoulders.
(It also makes Ronan uncomfortable, for a minute, when his brain doesn’t lie and supplies a truth that he keeps from himself; Declan must have had that kind of strain on him, too, because why else would he start sleepwalking?)
He knows he’s on the edge of cracking, smashing onto the ground like Humpty fucking Dumpty when Gansey either notices, or, more likely, can’t stand not talking about it anymore. “Um,” he starts, one day, coming into Ronan’s room, and Ronan actually scowls at that.
“Spit it out,” he snaps back, and regrets it immediately. It’s exhaustion that speaking, and he knows that Gansey understands that – if anyone does, anyway, it has to be Gansey, whose insomnia is as heavy as Ronan’s – but that doesn’t mean that Ronan gets to talk to him that way.
Gansey sighs, though, a sound that suggests he’s an old hat on this particular rodeo, and maybe he’s a bit fed up with the main attraction being roping this bull. Ronan scowls. Gansey speaks. “You know, if you’re not sleeping well at St. Agnes now, maybe you should try the Barns.”
Once upon a time, Ronan would have probably taken that as a succinct and clear invitation to fuck off home, neglecting Declan, the law, and saying fuck it to his inheritance for permission to go home. Now, he doesn’t. Now it feels less like going home than ever.
He doesn’t know when this shit got so complicated inside of his head.
“Gansey, if I could close my eyes, I’d pass out right away,” he replies, because he doesn’t lie even when he really wants to. “This is not infuckingsomnia.”
“You’re not afraid, are you,” he begins, looking like he might be bracing for a fight. Bless Gansey for recognizing that shit for what it was. But he’s still talking. “You haven’t brought back a night terror since-“
“No,” Ronan interrupts, and stands, and kicks his nightstand. It’s made of metal, so its only protest is to skid slightly over the floor. He glares at it. God, he fucking hates this.
He looks up to see Gansey’s face, his eyebrows up over the rims of his glasses, and Ronan realizes that his display of temper was ridiculous. He can feel his jaw go mulish, he can feel his exhaustion bearing down behind his eyeballs, and maybe the worst of it, he can feel the redness color his face and chest. “I can’t fucking talk about it,” he says, and Gansey’s peering now, at what Ronan is looking at on the computer screen, and he makes a growl of protest. “What the fuck, man, I could have been looking at porn!”
“You lock your door when you look at porn,” Gansey replies briefly, “and you get absurdly quiet,” he adds, with the knowledge of someone who isn’t wrong. There are secrets in Monmouth Manufacturing – Gansey could probably build an entire castle using them – but the masturbation habits of the residents was not among them (even if the topics were). He looks back at Ronan. “Are you sleepwalking? What happens if the Greywaren sleepwalks?”
Lying is just not an option. “No,” he replies.
Gansey is on the path now, beating through options. Sometimes Ronan wishes that Gansey wasn’t so caring or that his brain wasn’t so fucking big. Why does he have to hang out with geniuses? “Well it’s not to help Declan, that’s for sure, so-“ and then he pauses, and Ronan knows he has it.
Ronan does not want to have this conversation. Ronan hasn’t even told Adam – Adam, who is trudging through his days like his feet are lined with lead and his head is also burdened with its fair share – and this isn’t about not knowing what do as much as it’s about how Ronan has had this intimate thing with a boy that is fully asleep, and some part of that still feels uncomfortably sketchy. He tries to leave but Gansey actually blocks his egress. “Fuck, man,” Ronan says, more a whine than anything. “Can we not?”
“If Adam is sleepwalking, that’s serious,” Gansey says, putting his hands on Ronan’s shoulders, as if to emphasize. More likely to keep him in one spot. “Does he know?” he asks, because Gansey wasn’t born yesterday, he knows how this operates. He knows how Ronan operates.
Apparently Ronan’s silence, or the look he has on his face, speaks volumes. “You have to tell him,” Gansey practically commands.
If Ronan hadn’t wanted to tell Gansey, he sure as fuck was not going to tell Adam, Adam, who would immediately turn it into a thing, Adam, who doesn’t know that right now there are days where Ronan has to physically restrain him from going out the door. “It’s probably stress, after midterms he’ll be fine,” Ronan replies, but it sounds like a lie even to him.
“You can’t know that, you’re not a doctor,” Gansey replies.
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Ronan snaps, “it’s not like you ever address your sleeping problem either. At least mine’s because I can literally kill people with my fucking dreams.”
Gansey sighs again. “This isn’t about me, don’t try and turn it around,” he says, sounding weary. “You need to tell him,” he tries. “What happens if he gets hurt? That’s not all right, Ronan. You can’t live like this. You’re going to snap.” He goes quiet. “I could help-“
Ronan just stares at Gansey, who stares back, undaunted. There are times where Ronan is glad that he can’t seem to intimidate Gansey at all, but this is not one of those times. He wishes that he could just stare Gansey down and get precisely what he wants, which is to not have to reveal anything to Adam.
“Do it soon,” Gansey advises, patting Ronan on the back.
Ronan glares his best venomous glare, but Gansey just turns in response.
~~~~~~
But Ronan, predictably, does not tell Adam anything.
The same night, Ronan shows up to sleep – well, to guard Adam’s sleep – with Chainsaw nudging and nibbling at his ear. Adam opens the door and looks at Chainsaw, who is busy worrying Ronan’s earlobe. “Baby’s fussy,” he notes, idly, and Ronan comes in.
“She gets cranky when she’s tired,” Ronan replies, as if they’re talking about a toddler and not a young corvid. He lifts his shoulder a bit, sign that she should get off, but she worries at his ear and spreads her wings. “Come on,” he protests.
She makes a noise and Adam extends a hand. She peers at him, curious. She likes Adam. In fact, Ronan sometimes thinks, she likes Adam too much, sitting and comfortably accepting his fingers stroking her head. Ronan protests this for reasons that probably have to do with the fact that he cannot sit and idly let Adam pet his head.
He also tends to black out a little, at the edges, if he thinks too long and too hard about Adam’s hands anywhere near the shaven lines of his scalp.
Finally, Chainsaw acquiesces and hops over to torment Adam, and he walks over to the bed, stroking her back. “She’s not the only one,” he says. “Look what I got you,” he then says, and Ronan is about to have a stroke if Adam actually got him something.
“You didn’t h-“ he begins, and then sees that Adam was talking to the fucking bird. In a corner of the room there’s a perch – it’s clearly made of found materials. An old coat rack, with the rust sanded down and two of the hooks pulled off acts as the base, and then there’s a rack of antlers, bleached clean by the sun tied firmly on. “That is the ugliest fucking thing,” Ronan says, and while it’s not a lie, he’s still kind of amazed that Adam spent his time and energy on building the bird a perch.
Adam doesn’t seem bothered by the words. “She needs to stop shitting on my desk at night,” he says, holding her up so she can examine it. She looks like she approves, and finally she opens her wings and hops on. The thing doesn’t even skid from her weight. “I thought she probably should have a bed of her own.”
“I could have bought one,” Ronan points out. “Or brought one of the ones at Monmouth.”
Chainsaw, meanwhile, is testing it out, shuffling from one end to the other. The base is solid, huge, and while it isn’t bolted to the floor, there’s so much support she couldn’t counterbalance it if she tried. “My house,” Adam says.
“My fucking bird,” Ronan protests. Chainsaw caws, as if telling them not to squabble, or to thank Adam – it’s hard to tell – and fluffs up a minute before she settles. Ronan feels a little tug on his heart, and he’s not sure if it’s because his stupid dumb fucking bird is so cute, or because Adam had the thought, or foresight, or whatever, to think of something like this.
Adam doesn’t argue. He just walks over to his desk. “If that’s all, Lynch, I have a load of work to do.”
Ronan keeps looking at Chainsaw, who is spreading her wings and enjoying herself and being perfectly well-suited to her perch, and decides that he can’t ruin her night. If Adam finds out, he’ll probably kick them both out, and she’s like his fucking baby. She’s about to go to sleep.
At least one of them should.
Predictably, after Adam’s passed out, exactly two hours into his peaceful and unaffected sleep, he gets up and he’s out the door just as Ronan is waking up from real, honest to god sleep, the kind of blackout sleep that he thinks must be his brain seizing up and taking pity on him. He hears the door close and scrambles, sheets tangling in his legs. Adam hasn’t made it down the stairs since Saturday. “God fucking damn it, Chainsaw,” Ronan mutters as he practically stampedes down the stairs and makes it for Parrish.
The thing that Ronan didn’t tell Gansey is that Adam’s been fighting more when this happens, and Ronan’s read enough about sleepwalking to know that’s not good, because it’s not normal. Fuck, he thinks as he grabs Adam, what if he has a fucking tumor?
Adam elbows him in the nose. “Give me a fucking break,” Ronan snarls, too invested in keeping Adam from going out the door to freak out about all the touching. He would have thought that all this nighttime wrestling would have inoculated him, like some vaccine against the hypnotic cocaine that is Adam’s warmth and smell, but no. If anything it’s made it worse. Even when he’s pulling Adam back – even when he’s getting another elbow to the rib (fuck if they aren’t sharp) Ronan still wants more, craves more, and in the harsh light of day accepts that he probably won’t get more.
Right now, though, Adam is fighting. “Come on, don’t be a shit-“ and he’s not entirely sure how he planned on finishing that sentence because suddenly he’s interrupted.
“Why don’t you let go?” Noah asks, doing that creepy thing where he just shows up, and it’s pretty indicative of how far gone Ronan is into keeping Adam in the building that he doesn’t let go.
Barely.
“Jesus fucking Christ and all the fucking saints, you have to stop doing that,” Ronan snaps, and Adam stamps on his foot. Fantastic.
Noah shrugs like this isn’t a thing, which it is, and looks at Ronan. “So?”
“So what?” Ronan asks, and Adam surges forward again. “Are you seriously going to stand there like an asshole and not help me here?”
“Let him go,” Noah suggests.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Ronan practically yells, and Adam still doesn’t wake up. It’s a fucking joke.
Noah sighs, like this is all very obvious, and opens the door. Adam practically makes a break for it. “You keep fighting him to stay,” he points out, “but maybe he needs to go.”
Ronan’s hands fly off Adam, and Adam ambles.
“What the fuck are you implying?” Ronan asks, because suddenly there is a what. Because in their world, sleep is suddenly more than just closing your eyes and getting shut-eye, and dreaming something uncomfortable and waking up with a boner because they’re all teenagers. It’s more than just passing out and catching up on things. Sleep is a weapon, sleep is magic.
Adam is magic.
Ronan hates the implications.
“Well,” Noah says, as Adam ambles, shuffling and half-naked (great) “maybe it’s a Cabeswater thing.”
Ronan stares out at the parking lot, where Adam continues to walk, one foot at a time, into the distance. “Go get me a shirt and a pair of jeans,” he commands, and follows Adam into the night. “And don’t wake the baby, she’s like a fucking dragon if she doesn’t get enough sleep!”
It’s almost an hour before they get where Adam is leading them. Ronan’s feet hurt; at least he’s wearing clothes, but luckily without K around Henrietta is fast asleep, and not watching this odd parade of boys making their way into the thickest part of the wooded area at the end of Lafayette Street.
“I’m bored,” Noah announces.
Ronan rolls his eyes. “Well this was your fucking suggestion” he snarls, “and at least you’re wearing shoes, so shut your trap.”
“You could have asked for shoes,” Noah replies in his most prim Aglionby tone, which isn’t really all that prim, but it’s remarkably haughty for Noah. Usually he goes more for mournful. Once he tried spooky but Noah is about as spooky as Casper, most of the time.
(This is a truth that settles badly in Ronan’s gut, because it’s not the truth at all. Sometimes Ronan looks at Noah, really looks at him, and thinks that there are monstrous things in this world, but the abyss behind Noah’s eyes when he is worried or upset would frighten all those monstrous things away.)
Another five minutes pass and finally Adam shambles to a stop. “Is this it,” Ronan says, after they stand there a couple of minutes, “because if it is this is really antifuckingclimatic.”
“I’m going to go get Gansey,” Noah volunteers, which is actually helpful, especially for Noah, whose been having odd moments lately. Honestly, the thing that surprises Ronan most about him being dead was how goddamned long it took for them to realize. In retrospect, it seems so obvious.
Ronan doesn’t really want Gansey here, but the prospect of walking back is daunting and he’s not calling Matthew – Matthew barely has a drivers permit, let alone a car, but he could get one without too much trouble. But there’s a prickling at the back of his neck that says he shouldn’t. Like maybe this is something that could turn dangerous.
If magic is involved it’s not going to be a walk in the park. Despite it being, so far, a literal walk in the park.
“Yeah, okay,” Ronan agrees, and Noah vanishes, leaving Ronan and Adam alone again; Ronan wearing a muscle shirt and a pair of pretty disgusting jeans, and Adam wearing almost nothing and snoozing standing up like he’s a horse. This is weird.
Adam stands there for almost five more minutes before Ronan starts talking. “If this is just stress, you’re costing me a fuckton of real legit sleep and like, probably at least two years of my life, you know,” he says, finally sitting in the grass and taking his frustration out on a nearby rock. Kicking it isn’t nearly as satisfying as it would have been had he been wearing shoes, Ronan decides. “And if you sleepwalk, I can’t believe you share some trait with Declan, of all fucking people. Why couldn’t you be an insomniac like the rest of us?” he argues, not focusing on the fact that Declan is an insomniac too.
Another minute passes. “This is bullshit,” Ronan mutters, getting up. “Fuck you for doing this. Fuck you for bringing me here.” Fuck you for making me feel like this, fuck you for making me feel something other than rage or grief of bottomless fury, fuck you for having those fucking cheekbones, fuck you for making me wish that I could love someone else, but instead all I get is the impossibility of Adam fucking Parrish, he wants to say, but he doesn’t, because Adam would be the contrarian who chose that fucking moment to wake up.
“Fuck you too,” someone says in the darkness, and Ronan spins, and there’s a ghost of a boy standing in the clearing.
Ronan’s fists are up before he realizes it, and he’s pushing Adam back. The voice is familiar. “Where’s K?” the boy asks, and Ronan realizes-
-realizes with a start that it’s Prokopenko, or the illusion of Prokopenko, maybe, because as far as Ronan knows the rest of Kavinsky’s cronies buried Prokopenko-
-buried Prokopenko-
The dream of Prokopenko looks like he’s covered in mold and grime, the dirt in his mouth and in his hair. He looks like he’s clawed his way out of an early grave (shit) and he looks forlornly like he’s lost, hesitant, unsure. Ronan doesn’t remember Prokopenko ever looking this way, except when Kavinsky ditched him.
Adam still sleeps on. “How the fuck are you even,” Ronan begins, standing right in front of Adam.
“Where’s K?” Prokopenko asks again, the sound of his voice like it’s a wail of grief, like he knows the answer. Aurora was never like that. Even with all the love Niall installed in his perfect dream of a mother, it’s like he knew she had to have some independence, otherwise he would never be able to leave her alone. Kavinsky wasn’t so kind, or so considerate. He forged his dog with a loyalty that bordered on cultish, a love that wasn’t love as much as it was tamed and controlled obsession.
“Dead,” Ronan responds, flatly. Prokopenko’s mouth opens and a something rotting and equally dead as Kavinsky falls out, along with a tooth. The other thing that falls out is a kind of grief that Ronan recognizes from his own twisted heart, the cries of someone whose entire world is falling apart.
And that’s when Adam wakes up, jolted suddenly by Prokopenko’s cry, and Prokopenko collapses, his voice cut off like someone pressed mute on the world, his body collapsing too fast for Ronan to catch him if he even could be bothered to try.
Ronan doesn’t have to check to know. Prokopenko is asleep again.
(Is he dreaming? Is he trapped in a nightmare where he knows, now, that Kavinsky is dead? Where his loyalties run vapid and pointless circles around a boy who doesn’t exist anymore, around a master who abandoned him with no regard at all? Or in his dreams, does Kavinsky show up, is there an endless carnival of grotesqueries and drugs, a hazy wonderland of highs and crashes and the smell of gasoline?)
(Ronan doesn’t know.)
(Ronan doesn’t want to admit he cares, so he tells a different truth. That it doesn’t matter.)
“Why are you here?” Adam says, reaching one hand to rub his eye. He looks disarmed, completely harmless. It is a strange look for him, to be so unbearably vulnerable. “Ronan,” he says sharply, and the look evaporates.
“You fucking brought me here,” Ronan snarls, staring at Prokopenko’s sleeping corpse. “What the fuck is going on, Parrish?”
Adam looks peevish, then, annoyed and irritated and defensive, and at least that’s familiar enough to get Ronan into fighting form. “You’re supposed to be asleep.”
“That’s a laugh fucking riot,” Ronan responds. “Because so are you.”
Adam looks at Prokopenko’s body, then, like he’s finally noticed it, and Ronan looks away. He thinks he hears the Pig roaring in the distance. Gansey to the rescue. “Wait,” Adam says, “wait, we can’t leave him,” he says.
“Who the fuck cares,” Ronan argues. That howl is definitely Gansey.
“He’s the only sleeper I’ve managed to wake!” Adam argues, and Ronan turns and looks at him. It’s like a slot of puzzle pieces. This isn’t an accident. This isn’t wild Henrietta magic, a sleeping magician and trees and a dreamer. This is where they buried Prokopenko, and this is where-
Ronan relishes in the feel of the cussing coming out of his mouth because he does not relish Prokopenko’s weight as he picks him up and puts him in the back of the Pig. He doesn’t know where the fuck his life went off the rails that led to the ditch where he stuffs the back of a car with dead things, but here he is. He slides into the passenger side of the car, and Gansey looks woefully unhappy to be here. “You know, I miss the days when a midnight call from Noah to come get you was just because you were drunk somewhere,” he says balefully.
“Don’t fucking start with me, Gansey,” Ronan snaps as he curls into the passenger side.
“I’m just saying that this is far too much like crime scene cleanup,” he says as Adam slides into the back. Noah is sitting there, his mouth a pout. Gansey looks back. “Well? Where are we taking this one?”
Ronan throws his hands up in the air in exasperation. “It’s not like my family’s farm isn’t already a dumping ground for this kind of shit, why the fuck not?”
~~~~
They put Prokopenko in a barn, covered in blankets. Kavinsky’s friends had done a shit-terrible job of burying him – the grave couldn’t have been so deep, and it turns out dreams don’t rot well, which is oddly comforting to know. Asleep he looks unhappy still, his mouth turned down in a deep frown, even though the only thing betraying his life is the constant and slow in-and-out of his breathing.
And then they go into the house. It’s only four in the morning, and after Ronan and Adam both shower, they’re alone for the ten minutes that Gansey is washing the dirt from the barn blankets and Prokopenko and probably jerking one off to the maggot, considering Ronan knows that he calls her whenever he thinks that Ronan’s out for the night. Noah didn’t come inside; he said he wanted to see the cows.
Adam is in Matthew’s old bed, wearing a shirt emblazoned with the name of an Irish music contest on it. Ronan is pretty sure that it belonged, at one point, to Declan. His hair is curling at his temples and Ronan thinks he can overlook the fact that Adam is in his little brother’s bed wearing his older brother’s shirt, as long as he can imprint the way that Adam looks right now, sleepily in the house that Ronan grew up in, looking tired and long-limbed and comfortable for once.
But Ronan doesn’t leave well enough the fuck alone. “You were trying to wake up-“
“Please don’t,” Adam says.
“You were sleep walking,” Ronan replies, crossing his arms. Shut up, he tells his brain. His brain does not listen. “I had to fucking follow you for a whole fucking hour.”
“I didn’t ask you to,” Adam says in response, burying his face in Matthew’s pillow. “I didn’t ask you to!”
“You didn’t have to do it,” Ronan points out, and he doesn’t know why he’s arguing this. It’s like he can’t just let it go. Adam was doing something kind (that was doing real damage to the both of them) for Ronan. He doesn’t know why he can’t just accept those things anymore. Once he might have been able to. A kind action. No one ever thinks him capable of them, so no one ever thinks to do them for him.
He doesn’t know why those words make Adam look at him, though. He doesn’t know and he feels pinned to the wall by Adam’s gaze, like the brightness of his eyes and the sharpness of the angles of his face have made it impossible for Ronan to move. Maybe the honest truth would be that this is what Adam Parrish does to him. Makes him unable to move. He rubs his face, mostly to get Adam to stop looking at him. To stop seeing Adam look at him.
When he looks up Adam’s crossed the room. “Let me do something nice for you,” he says. “It’s all I can give you, and it didn’t even work right,” he tries, and it’s very soft.
“Don’t lie,” Ronan says, and he thinks this is it. He can’t breathe. If he breathes, Adam will go away, as if Adam is some kind of easily startled wild thing instead of a boy whose floor is Ronan’s second bedroom.
“It’s not a lie,” Adam tells him. “You need someone magical.”
“What the fuck do you think you are?” Ronan snarls, and Adam kisses him, and the world must be ending, the entire planet must be spinning backwards, his whole life must be exploding, because there’s nothing that’s prepared him for this, for Adam’s mouth on his own, for Adam’s hands curving possessively over his wrists and his lips on Ronan’s and he thinks, well, it’s good to know that this is what a heart attack feels like.
Which is of course why this is the moment that Gansey bounds into the room. “So I was thin-oh. Oh. Well.”
Adam pulls away and Ronan looks at Gansey, who looks like he’s just become very interested in the crown molding in the hall. “Ah, is this, well, look at that detailwork,” Gansey says. His face is a shade of red previously unknown outside to man outside of Rothko paintings. Ronan is mortally offended he knows that. “Well, good night!” Gansey proclaims in the fakest cheer that he can muster, and he bounds off in the other direction.
Adam looks at Ronan, and turns, and Ronan catches his wrist. “No,” Ronan says, “you don’t need to do whatever magic that was for me.”
Adam lifts his head. “I’ll do whatever I want for you,” he announces, and this time, Ronan is the one who kisses Adam.
~~~~
Ronan is asleep, barely, when movement wakes him. He turns to look up, and Adam is there. It’s the Barns, and Adam smells like moss and Cabeswater and home, and it’s arousing to the point of distraction. “Are you sleepwalking again, because Parrish, we just fucking did this-“
“Shut up,” Adam says, and slips in next to him. Ronan’s bed isn’t any wider than Adam’s bed in St. Agnes but it doesn’t matter. They have to curve around each other, tangle up in the spaces until there’s no negative space left. Ronan thinks he’ll die this way.
Adam turns off like a light, his breathing evening out. Ronan worries – what if Adam realizes he’s making a mistake? What if he wakes up afraid of Ronan’s hands, mistaking them for hands that mean violence? What if he wakes and thinks that no, he’ll go back to the tender and privileged arms of heterosexuality, because bisexuality is a danger that he can’t afford?
But Adam sleeps like he trusts Ronan, his hands curling at Ronan’s side, his curls on Ronan’s pillow. Ronan has never wanted anything like he wants the boy in his arms.
And here he is.
Ronan quiets the loud, honest part of his head, he folds his secrets up like priceless linens and tucks them away against his ribs, but there’s one less secret there.