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To Adam, time is a fragmented, precious thing. Each second is accounted for and weighed and allocated and rolled longingly between his fingers before he lets it go. The time he spends sleeping is about all he really has free; the only space when all other obligations are at bay, when all he needs to do is lie still and breathe and rest before the cascade of exhaustion catches up to him.
Tonight, he is too tired to sleep, mind alive and empty, body worn to the bone and then down through cracks into itching marrow.
He gets up without looking at the clock, afraid to know the time beyond ‘night’, and fumbles for clothes without turning a light on. His shoes are old enough that the canvas crumples under his heels as he toes them on. Even though muscle memory should lead him through the laces, he’s squinting through the dark and his hazy eyes put him off, force him to try again. There is nothing in the world but tiny standby lights, faint electric humming and the dull press of his fingers working around each other. He leaves his little apartment knowing only that it is dark out, and he doesn’t need to be anywhere until sunrise.
Time will only become real again if he lets it.
Henrietta is not yet asleep, and two blocks away from the church there are people walking, driving, loitering in pairs that feel watchful and aggressive even before they glance in Adam’s direction. He doesn’t put his head down, but he doesn’t look at them either, eyes sliding to the side even as he sets his shoulders back. The night wraps cold around his neck, and Adam keeps his pride balanced carefully between dignity and conceit. His head is too full and too empty to focus on where his body is.
His legs take him to Monmouth, and he lets them, knowing the path and the want and the shame as he treads through the unkempt drive to his friends’ home. The BWM is not in the lot, but the Camaro is. Gansey and Ronan both freely talk about their insomnia, and Adam’s seen the evidence, the productive little cardboard town, the destructive cuts and bruises and shattered glass, knows that even if Ronan’s out street racing his demons, at least Gansey might be up and willing to talk. Or, not talk, but sit near him and exist in companionate, exhausted silence.
Adam makes it inside and up to the apartment door before he starts second-guessing whether he should knock. He’s starved for company, but being here is an admission he doesn’t want to make, and it’s a pitiful thing, that he’d let loneliness creep so far out of his breast. Gansey might be asleep inside anyway, and Adam wouldn’t want to wake him. This is maybe the moment he has longed for a cell phone the most.
He hesitates on the landing for a long time, doubt throbbing in his head like every other ache, and he doesn’t want to turn away. Maybe this is a night to let someone be kind to him.
In the end, Adam goes back outside and lowers himself to sit on Monmouth’s front step. It’s cooler out, and reluctance to skulk home alone is a weight in his stomach. His thoughts drift, and he lets them, running his hands up the back of his neck and over his skull, something like soothing, something like he’s checking for cracks.
Lately, his head has been a cluttered, restless place. He’s been dreaming, but not like Ronan dreams; Adam gets lucid nightmares, harmless and upsetting, feels teeth and fists and grating voices lurking around the backs of his eyes. He is very tired of inhabiting his body, though maybe by now he should be used to everything he owns not quite working as it should.
Ronan’s headlights find him still sitting on the step, and Adam flinches as he realises he’d missed the BMW’s return completely. Ronan himself follows a moment later, and he doesn’t smell like he’s been drinking but he looks about as rough as Adam feels. He stays by his car, gazing across the lot at Adam, who feels too slow to throw on any semblance of an animate expression. He never really needs to pretend with Ronan, though. The pause between them is undemanding.
“Are you fighting with Dick?” Ronan asks him.
It hadn’t even occurred to Adam that he could be fighting with Gansey. He shakes his head, and after a second says, “No,” belated and redundant.
Ronan considers him for a minute longer. He’s scuffed up, knuckles beginning to look worn with use, the whole stiff arc of his body saying he’s coming down from a very tense kind of high. But he’s burned all the sarcasm off his tongue; the look he gives Adam is neither pitying or judgemental. Adam feels a pulse of gratitude that it was Ronan who found him.
“Where do you want to be?” Ronan asks.
Adam gives another insufficient shrug, and then forces himself to try harder. “Not at home,” he says. “Probably not here, either.”
“So get in my car,” Ronan tells him.
Adam gets in his car.
It’s warmer in the BMW than Adam expects, though maybe he just hadn’t realised how cold he’d gotten on Monmouth’s step. There’s no doubt that the car has just finished working hard, and no music starts up with the engine, leaving the silence of focus, and Ronan pulls out of the lot without saying another word. He is making everything blessedly simple; on a day when Adam has more words, he’ll need to find some to thank him for this.
Adam keeps his head tilted away from the dash clock as they drive. Henrietta slides past, a stranger’s hometown, poor and sad and spacious in the dark. It’s probably not even too late for him to go home and get enough sleep that he’ll feel alright in the morning, but some part of him has been scraped so raw that he just can’t until it’s been replenished, at least a little.
He can have his doubts about Gansey and his quest, the myth of it and the voracious bite it takes out of Adam’s time, but it is feeding a part of him he might neglect on his own, something he suffers without.
Ronan seems content not to talk, scabbed knuckles loose on the steering wheel and the dim light cushioning his darkening bruises. Occasionally he’ll look at Adam, and Adam will look back, and Ronan’s lips will twitch up in some softened version of his lizard smile. This is probably the side of Adam he likes the most, the side that’s not saving face or rising to a challenge, the side that can say what he needs and get it. Adam isn’t sure what he thinks about himself right now. He does know he likes this obliging Ronan, but that’s something to say another day.
Sometime after the last streetlight has been swallowed by the rural night, Adam thinks to ask, “Do we have a destination?”
“Sure do,” Ronan replies breezily. Outside, the road is fields and fences and distant, unlit houses, all made anonymous by the dark. Adam doesn’t know how long they’ve been driving, or where they might be. Relief from thought lightens his bones.
They stop seemingly nowhere, BMW’s quiet engine clicking off and leaving nothing but the faint rustle of underbrush. Adam hadn’t seen anything of interest before the headlights shut off, so he looks to Ronan, in case they have different definitions of ‘destination’. “Is this it?”
“It’s a one-minute walk from here,” Ronan tells him. “You up for that?”
Adam follows Ronan out of the car and around to the boot. Inside is a jumble of maps and ropes and expensive electric devices that neither Gansey nor Ronan have ever cared enough about to bring out of the car. Ronan picks up a pair of torches – proper exploring equipment, with floodlight beams – and locks the car after, an action Adam suspects he wouldn’t bother with if the BMW hadn’t once been his father’s.
They tread into the trees together, and there’s not much of a trail, but Adam doesn’t care. Night chitters around him, Ronan is tall and assuringly solid beside him, and he is not at home or on Monmouth’s front step. Good enough for him.
One minute later, and they reach a little informational sign, a dip in the ground, and the raised mouth of a cave. Adam tries angling his flashlight to see further in, but the stone curves and traps the light too early. “Where is this?” Adam asks. “Have we been here before?”
“You haven’t,” Ronan says. “I went through it a while back. Gansey’s crossed it off his cave map, as historically insignificant. This is not an ancient Welsh cave.”
“Uh huh,” Adam says. He checks the gate on the front, and finds it’s unlocked; Ronan follows as they carefully step in, both of them forced to duck under the low ceiling, Adam’s eyes and flashlight both intent on the ground in front of them. It’s a terrible idea, but Adam can’t think of anything he’d rather do, or anywhere he’d rather be, and he presses forward.
It doesn’t take long before the air thickens, before their steps begin to echo. Adam’s flashlight is the proper, industrial type, but it still doesn’t reach further than showing Adam the space he’s moving through. If Adam had wanted quiet, he’s getting it now; the world is reduced to scuffed steps and soft breaths and cautious, intermittent drips.
They’re probably underequipped, but knowing Ronan has already explored the space makes Adam feel safe enough in the lead, and the ground stays mostly flat, give or take a metre. When the walls become slick limestone, Adam asks, “Are we looking for something, or are we just being in a cave?”
“Cave, obviously.”
“Cool.” Ronan is sticking well within the bounds of what Adam can handle. Possibly, if Adam was a different person, Ronan would have taken him racing instead, or drinking, or fighting. They’re both well used to finding themselves too taut and tangled to cope; Ronan’s just the one with more practice unwinding himself. Adam tends to keep pulling tighter and hope that one day the knot of him will lessen.
Spelunking doesn’t feel like the most practical coping mechanism, but it’s doing the trick for today.
They reach a chamber with a ceiling high enough that it might be the cave’s cathedral. Adam shines a light up the wall, seeing layers and layers of slippery white stone and hanging stalactites. “This is beautiful,” he murmurs. Trailing half a dozen steps behind, Ronan makes a noncommittal noise, as though appreciating nature is somehow beneath him.
Their flashlights flicker in unison; “Ley lines?” Adam asks, before the lights die and they are dropped into darkness. The synchronicity of it makes it supernatural, which is somehow less alarming than an electrical fault would be and the only thing staving off panic because Adam is pretty sure he’s had this nightmare before. He fumbles a step in Ronan’s direction, feeling blindly out, and manages to make contact with what is probably Ronan’s chest, or neck, or arm. A second later, and Ronan gets a proper hold on him, fingers wrapping firm around Adam’s wrist.
They scoot closer together, the darkness around them absolute, the tiniest of sounds amplified by the dark. The drip of water doesn’t seem so far away now, and they’ve both seen such horrors, it seems possible that anything might be beside them, crawling, lurking, unbearable creatures. Adam blinks, and sees nothing different. He could be in one of his dreams. Ronan squeezes his wrist.
The dark lingers, but nothing comes for them. In that long and silent pause, Adam waits, back pressed against Ronan’s chest. He’s been holding his breath since the torches failed, but he can’t wait so long, heartbeat wild, pulse spiking. He exhales. Ronan’s fingers shift minutely against his skin, and still, nothing in the dark reaches out.
Their flashlights sputter back on. Whatever current had gripped the line passes, and Adam feels the tension drop out of Ronan’s shoulders, the two of them easing apart again. The cave is just a cave; a drop falls from a stalactite to the ground, and Adam scrapes his free hand over the back of his skull.
Ronan makes the immediate offer, “We can leave.”
Adam’s heart is still racing. It feels like an absent piece of him has come awake, and granted him a clarity he hasn’t had in days. “It’s fine,” he says, voice calmer than his pulse, “We can keep going.”
Ronan eyes him, a dubious check for bravado, but when Adam manages to hold his composure he shrugs in acquiescence. “Your call, Parrish,” he says. He doesn’t release Adam’s wrist as they start to move on.
It’s slower walking together, but there’s no rush, just careful footsteps in the dark. They duck through little tunnels, following the flattest forward path, tentative exploration, even in a place that has already been explored. Adam thinks he might be feeling better. “So what did Gansey make of this place?”
Ronan looks at him sideways. “I didn’t say Gansey’s been here.” He doesn’t add whether or not he had any other company with him, but Adam thinks he must have, a brother or a father. On a different day, Adam might feel jealous, that the two of them could have grown up in the same town and had such a different view of it. Today he just nods, content enough that Ronan is sharing this with him.
In a narrow little cavern, the path ahead tightens impassibly, stalactite teeth hanging too close to the ground and the space beneath them warningly dark. Adam thinks he can hear a waterfall, the heavy rush somewhere far beyond his torch’s beam. They’re pretty far in, knowing they’re going to have to retread the same ground to get back out.
The rock underfoot is not limestone, and Adam takes a second to sit on his haunches and rest. He’s still feeling sharp, and he’s still feeling tired, a weight that never left but is at least now augmented. There’s nothing to do but turn back around and go home, but he wants to put that off for just a minute more.
“You know you can’t live here?” Ronan asks him, with deadpan sincerity. “Firstly because I know you’re not throwing away all that time you spent on that World Hist essay, and second because you will make it a huge pain for Gansey to come and visit you here every day, because you know he would.”
Adam cocks his head. “Are you saying you wouldn’t visit me?”
“Hey, if you want to be a cave-person, I’ll assume you want to be left alone.” Ronan stands over him, their two torches the only light in the world, the weight of the earth crushing overhead. Out of sight, the waterfall is raging.
When Ronan puts out a hand, Adam takes it, lets himself get pulled back up to his feet, lets Ronan lead this time. It doesn’t feel nearly so long going out as it had coming in, though that might be because the sense of discovery is gone, or possibly because they don’t get stranded in pitch-darkness this time. Adam does a fair job keeping up, but Ronan keeps stopping for him anyway, looking back for him with poorly disguised concern that Adam is kind enough to not comment on.
Outside, the night is unchanged. The BMW has cooled while it waited, and Adam reads the dash clock once the engine’s back on. It’s flirting with four am; he has to be getting up in so few hours that it’s barely going to be worth getting back into bed. Not that he thinks he would have gotten more sleep if he’d stayed at home.
He’s had worse nights.