Chapter Text
Gansey first noticed Adam Parrish in sophomore year. Adam sat three seats away from him with a crinkled and tabbed copy of Macbeth and a shiny spiral notebook. His notes were organized, albeit illegible, and spoke for his diligence. But his posture was tired. He spotted him over the months walking across the quad, studying in the library, hitching his bike to the posts in the parking lot. He once even saw him peddling to school one morning while Gansey was broken down on the side of the road, the Pig’s hood steaming in the cold.
Gansey didn’t pay much attention to him after that, until Adam came in late to school one day, pink and coated in sweat. Adam sat right next to Gansey in the seat he had been saving for Ronan and asked if he could borrow his notes from the past fifteen minutes. Gansey felt a little self conscious handing his moleskin journal to Adam, who’s spiral looked like it had recently been dropped in a puddle. Adam scanned the notes. His tongue filled his cheek.
“Why have you emphasized Hecate?” Adam asked, pointing to the hastily scribbled arrows pointing to the name. “Did Morris mention something?”
Gansey bit back a grin. He ducked his head to whisper to him as Morris’ lecture continued. “No, I just had a thought about it. I wonder if Hecate was an important figure in England around that period, and I wonder if that interest extended to Wales.”
Adam pursed his lips. “I think you might be reading into that too much. English literature purists were big on classical mythology. Not to mention, Shakespeare was trying to please King James with Macbeth , right? This is around the time of witch hunts. Hecate was the goddess of witches, so her inclusion might have just been a crowd pleaser.”
Gansey had not considered this. Then, he just couldn’t help himself. He said, “Do you want to know why I was interested?”
Adam seemed more interested in taking notes. He handed the journal back to Gansey, who launched into an explanation. Adam, kindly, split his attention between the projector and Gansey.
“Well, there’s this legend about a Welsh king—”
“Ah,” Adam interjected. “Glendower.”
“Do you know about him?” Gansey asked, leaning forward on his elbows.
“No, I learned about your academic interest through osmosis.”
Gansey scratched his neck. “Yes. It’s an academic interest of mine.”
Adam glanced at him, as if to say, riiiiiight , and looked away to jot down some notes. Morris was going on about the importance of dreams as a literary device in Shakespeare. Gansey watched Adam underline the words inner desires , ghosts , and foreshadowing . As Morris answered another student’s question, Adam seemed to consider speaking, then landed on a decision.
“Shakespeare was born over a century after the guy died. If you’re interested in literature from the time period, there’s a lot of Welsh poetry having to do with the topic …”
Adam faltered, then began to rattle off some names of poets, and Gansey listened intently. As the other went on and on, Gansey smiled. His view was flooded with a barrage of manufactured futures. This boy, with intelligent eyes and an itch to scratch, this is who Gansey wanted to share his world with. This is who he wanted to drag through the forest outside of Henrietta, with whom he wanted to share the wish that Glendower promised. Oh, Noah would have loved him.
“How do you know all this?”
Adam may have blushed. It could have been nervousness, or embarrassment, or stress. Gansey wasn’t sure. “I was kind of—”
“Parrish. Gansey,” Morris called. “Stay on topic for the literature of this class, please?”
Not for lack of Gansey’s trying, they rarely spoke after that.
Now, Gansey wished he had. He should have pressed Adam for more. He should have extended a hand out to Adam, the same hand he offered Ronan, the same hand he offered Noah. Now Adam was all alone in a hospital that smelled like nothing, like there was not a living organism, not the most microscopic of tardigrades, in the air. He looked so cold. Gansey didn’t want to leave him.
Where was Adam’s family? Did they know he was in the hospital? Did they even care? Ronan was right, of course. Gansey wasn’t Adam’s friend, but he wanted to be. Oh, how he wanted . He wanted to know Adam Parrish with the same fervor with which he wanted to find Glendower. Ronan was right, again, that Gansey didn’t want to leave Adam alone because it hurt his sensibilities to do so. He knew nothing about Adam Parrish except the romanticized abstraction he had created in the other’s image. The sensible thing to do, Gansey decided, would be to get up, get in his car, and go find someone who cared about Adam to sit beside him. Someone who knew him.
So he did.
Adam didn’t know how long Ronan had been teaching him how to drive the Camaro. He had gotten the hang of it. Sometimes Adam would find that he couldn’t feel the gear shift, like the sensation disappeared, and his hand would slip. The first time, Adam ended up moving too fast and began breathing quickly, asking what he was supposed to do if he couldn’t feel the gear shift. How was he supposed to drive if his hand passed right through it? How can a ghost drive? Ronan had grabbed his hand without a second thought and threw it back on the gear shift, then held the back of Adam’s neck. This time, Adam flinched.
Ronan took his hand away. “Should I have asked?”
There was an apology in the question, though Adam took Ronan for the kind of man who did not apologize unnecessarily.
“It’s fine.”
Ronan watched him for a moment. Adam could see the gears turning behind Ronan’s eyes, and, not for the first time since this mess started, realized that Ronan Lynch was so much smarter than anyone gave him credit for. Adam wanted to push Ronan’s face away. To give his accusing eyes something new to scrutinize.
“Should I stop?” Ronan asked.
Adam craved that feeling though, as shocking as it was to him. He shook his head, then said, sharply, “No.”
Ronan nodded and placed his hand back on Adam’s neck. Adam briefly pondered the fact that their first conversation took place not too long before this moment.
Adam looked through the windshield. There was something ambiguous about the setting. They were driving in the middle of a black road through a forest where the trees seemed to clear a path for them. When they drove sufficiently far away from the trailer, Ronan offered a decision and gave a warning: they could pull over or they could keep driving, but a stressful conversation was happening one way or the other. Adam knew he should pull over. Instead, he tightened his hands around the wheel and braced himself.
“So,” Ronan forced. Ronan ripped off the bandaid and took skin with it. “You’re in a coma.”
Adam brought a hand to the left side of his head. Memory is often altered with injury, Adam knew. He remembered the pounding. The sting. His face was wet from blood or tears or rain. It must have been blood. He tasted it. Besides that, and the fear, and the resignation, Adam struggled to recall it all. There were gaps in his memory. Moments of darkness.
A thumb swiped along the hair at the base of Adam’s neck and he sucked in a breath. Ronan turned to Adam, deciding that this was a conversation that required eye contact. Adam expected to feel spotlighted, but the feeling never came. Adam hadn’t spent a great amount of time looking into the eyes of Ronan Lynch before now. He couldn’t remember their color. Now, they were startling. Icy blue, not like soft frost, but freezing. Blue like the lips of the dead, like what Adam’s may soon be. There was that feeling again. Looking into the eyes of Ronan Lynch was a full sensory experience, something to hold on too in the shifting chaos of dreamland.
“Gansey managed to find you,” Ronan said. “I went to visit.”
Adam had spoken to Gansey only a handful of times. He’d spoken to Ronan even less — before now, their longest conversation had consisted of Ronan’s angry, unknowable glare and an incredulous what? from Adam. In response, Ronan had spared Adam only a halfhearted snarl and turned away. The thought that Ronan would visit Adam, probably more than his own parents did, was paradoxical.
“Wait, seriously?” Adam blanched. “Why?”
Ronan shrugged. “It’s my job or something.”
Adam narrowed his eyes. Adam left a question unspoken, but he was sure Ronan could sense it: How many people have you watched die? What battlefields have scarred you?
“You can’t save me,” Adam said carefully. “You can’t rouse someone from a coma by sheer force of will. Why are you trying so hard?”
“Why the fuck shouldn’t I?” Ronan spat. He looked apoplectic, the way Blue often looked when Adam went on his usual self-deprecating benders. He wondered if Blue would like Ronan. She would never like a Raven Boy, surely, but Ronan was hardly a Raven Boy. Ronan Lynch ate Raven Boys whole.
Adam shifted gears. “You said I could die here. What did you mean by that?”
“I meant exactly what I said. The only thing keeping you alive right now is you and life support, and who knows when that will get cut off.”
A couple of days at most, Adam thought. Just sitting in that hospital was going to put his parents in enough debt to fill a dragon’s hoard.
Ronan continued. “If you die in here, you will cut whatever forsaken line or nerve or whatever the fuck that is keeping you tethered to your actual body. Make sense?”
Adam let out half a laugh and shook his head. It made no sense. None at all. There was no physical or mental string tethering whatever made Adam himself to his body, no psychic rope holding the balloon to the ground. Apparently, even Ronan didn’t know what that tether looked like, if it existed at all.
Adam sighed and rubbed his thumb on the wheel of the Camaro. There was the ghost impression of texture, of stuccoed leather, but it wasn’t entirely there. Now that Adam was aware that he was dreaming, all the sensations seemed nonphysical, as if everything he felt was only the memory of something he knew before. The feeling under his fingers was not really there. When he thought about that, the feeling disappeared. It frustrated him.
There was something oppressive about being trapped in a dream, hidden from all the physical pleasures of the real world. There was something freeing about being trapped in a dream, too. Here, he was safe. He was safe from the pressure. The real world kinds of pressures. Safe from his own expectations. Safe from Robert Parrish, the real Robert Parrish. Adam was asleep, but as long as he steered clear of his nightmares, he felt awake. Sometimes, Adam would stay up late at night despite knowing how early he would have to rise, as if he could extend the day if his eyes never closed. Sleeping was the interim between then and now, but Adam wanted more time. Dreams, though. Dreams were an adjacent plane. A parallel day. Time without the consequence. He had all the time in the world here, even as his body fails in a hospital bed somewhere.
“So, we should be driving far away from all the nightmares, right?”
“Ah, no.” Adam raised an eyebrow. Ronan sighed. “It’s about fear, I think.”
“You think ?” Adam blanched. “Do you know anything?” It sounded angrier than he had meant it to. Ronan glowered at him.
“Listen, Socrates, nobody dreams the same shit, alright? It’s new fucking territory every time,” Ronan said.
“You’re Socrates,” Adam said.
Ronan stopped, looking incredulous. “What?”
“You’d be Socrates, because I’m claiming you don’t know anything.”
Ronan quirked a sharp eyebrow. “Bullshit,” he argued. “Socrates didn’t know anything. That was his whole thing. If anybody’s Socrates, it’s you.”
“No. Socrates knew many things. He asserted that he did not know everything, and that a wise man would admit to knowing nothing. Therefore, by asserting you know nothing, you are Socrates in this scenario.”
Ronan stared at Adam. His mouth opened and shut like he was searching for an argument, but he landed on a resolution. “Fuck.”
Surprising himself, Adam laughed. The corners of Ronan’s mouth rose.
“Did you just admit that I’m wise?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You did.”
“I would never. I’ve seen you in Latin and you can’t conjugate shit.”
“That’s intelligence, not wisdom. Your wisdom modifier is sorely lacking.”
Adam shrieked a laugh again. “There is no way you play Dungeons & Dragons .”
“Fuck off . How did we get so off topic?”
Suddenly, it made sense. Ronan was best friends with possibly the nerdiest, most blissfully airheaded boy in Aglionby, whose head was constantly in some European forest searching for a legendary king. If Ronan had never played Dungeons & Dragons , Adam would be surprised. Nonetheless, there was something wonderful about the image of Ronan Lynch, the living embodiment of a bloody ice pick, fighting monsters with his best friend. Adam had always wanted to play. The thought made Adam swallow. He would likely never get to.
Ronan watched the cheer fade from Adam’s face and huffed. He eyed Adam’s doublewide at the end of the dirt road.
“Dreams are … sentient. At the end of the day, this entire dreamscape is of your own design and every nightmare is under your command. You can run, but you can’t escape them, because these dreams are a part of you.”
“So, I have to face them.”
When Adam turned to look at Ronan again, he was nodding slowly. “Nightmares are honest through deception. They want to show you something. It’s up to you to learn from them.”
Adam let out a breathy laugh. Ronan turned to face Adam and his glower morphed into confusion. It was a funny look on him. The tension had drifted to his hips, still there, but he could breathe again.
“You took me away from the nightmares just to bring me back for round two.”
“Take an orange slice and some Gatorade if you’re so tired,” Ronan said, meeting Adam’s energy like he had since he entered the car. “Let’s see some hustle, Parrish.”
They were silent for a while, but it was not deafening. Outside the Camaro, Adam heard birds chirping happily in all their unique sounds. He heard the breeze through the trees and the yellow brush. It would have been peaceful if he could not see the trailer, if he was somewhere he did not recognize, somewhere new. Adam breathed.
That horrible EDM blared from the radio again. Adam jerked to turn the music down.
“Why does it keep doing that?” Adam shouted over the music. It stopped abruptly, mid-bass drop. When Adam looked to Ronan, Ronan was gone.