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Ronan wakes up on the floor of Adam’s dorm room, cold and uncomfortable, with Adam gazing down curiously at him. Aglionby beds are small; Adam’s was clearly not large enough for Adam, Ronan, and the large inflatable dolphin Ronan apparently conjured during the night.
“You have to tell me if you meant for that to happen,” Adam says. “I need to know if that’s your quirk playing up, or if your subconscious is trying to warn me about your fetish.”
“Quirk,” Ronan replies, kicking the pool toy away. “If the other one becomes true, I’ll let you know.”
Adam sits up properly, stifling a yawn. The clock beside him says Ronan needs to go and get ready for class, and at any other school he’d be dragging his heels. Here he’s downright eager. “Think we’ll have to fight each other today?” Adam asks him, with a lazy hint of a smirk.
Ronan hopes no and yes at the same time, the thought of it powerfully confusing. “Whoever you fight,” he says, “I hope you really thrash ‘em.”
Adam grins.
Across the hall, in the room that Ronan is supposed to sleep in, Noah is still half-submerged in his bed. The alarm beside him is playing something jaunty and Spanish that he’s humming along to. He greets Ronan with waggling eyebrows and a deeply suggestive, “How was your night?”
Ronan ignores him. “Get your ass out of bed, Czerny. I’m not helping you if you get stuck again.”
Noah makes a face, but rolls out of the bedframe, his body becoming more assuringly opaque once he’s untangled. “You look too happy today.”
“This is the first day where my teachers are encouraging me to wail on someone,” Ronan tells him. “Noah. This may be the greatest day of my life.”
Noah makes another face, this one more dramatically concerned. “Easy for you to say. You love hitting people. What about my underrepresented minority, of people who don’t like getting hit?”
“Okay, first, that is not a minority, the majority of people are pussies who are not up for a good scrap.” Ronan pauses in dressing to hold up two sarcastic fingers. “Second, your entire deal is becoming untouchable. If someone comes at you, fucking switch it on.”
“Sneak attacks,” Noah argues. “Sucker punches – the worst of all punches, insult and injury.”
“Noah, if someone comes at you from behind, then I swear on my honour that I will kick their cowardly ass so god-damned hard.”
Ronan often wishes his quirk was Kicking.
Every student enrolled in Aglionby lives in the dorms, for safety reasons and the locals’ peace of mind. Ronan and Noah are too slow for Adam to wait for, but they catch up with Gansey halfway across the lawn. “Lynch, Czerny,” he greets them brightly, the deep bags under his eyes speaking to a chronic lack of sleep that doesn’t seem to affect his mood at all. “Looking forward to class?”
“Looking forward to smashing you and Cheng,” Ronan says, smacking a fist into his palm.
“And Sargent,” Noah adds politely.
Gansey lets out a ‘ha!’ that is packed with both disbelief and good sportsmanship. “I think we’ll be giving you a run for your money.”
Ronan considers this. Gansey’s quirk is like his, in that it doesn’t really give him a combat advantage; unlike him, Gansey gets regular exercise, and has biceps befitting the captain of the rowing team. He is probably better at punching, with those beautifully defined muscles. Ronan considers Gansey’s arms for a long moment, until Noah coughs, and they have to move on.
The rest of their class is already assembled in the gym, and Adam falls in beside them when they arrive. He bumps shoulders with Ronan, and refuses to acknowledge Noah when Noah starts wiggling his eyebrows again.
Greenmantle is the one presiding over the class, which Ronan is pleased by, and which clearly concerns Adam; of all the teachers, he is the one most likely to let a match go on well past first blood. Something about children destroying each other seems to delight him. No one’s sure what his power is, as so far he’s refused to show it, getting by on smarm and a surfeit of confidence. Rumor has it that Greenmantle’s actual quirk is the ability to turn any liquid into sparkling water. Specifically, Perrier.
“Alright,” Greenmantle tells them. “We did one-on-ones last week, and today we’re up to three-on-three. You pick your teams, and I pick the matches, and no one kill anyone, unless it’s Gansey. Clear?”
“Clear,” answers a handful of the more diligent students, Gansey included.
“Should we be worried about that?” Adam asks.
Ronan shrugs. “He’ll be fine.”
“He’s not getting too used to it?
Ronan considers again. “He’ll be fine?”
It’s an unspoken agreement that he, Adam and Noah will be a team, and they group up as instructed, Ronan practically vibrating with excitement. This is the most enthusiastic he has been about education in his entire life. He is going to get graded on how well he can fight his classmates, and he is going to get to see Adam fight his classmates, which is always unbearably attractive. Ronan thinks he might have had this dream before, only in the dream it was all slow-motion.
Then the matches are assigned, and ruin it.
“Oh god,” Ronan groans, “We’re up against The Infinite Hell Cycle.”
Adam does not pretend to know what he’s talking about. “The what?”
Ronan takes him by the shoulders and looks gravely into his eyes. “Cheng, Sargent and Gansey. They’re an anti-synergy. They’re vinegar and bleach and then more bleach. They may destroy us, but in the process, they will destroy themselves.”
“Rude,” says Henry, who was standing much closer than Ronan had realized. He and Adam jump; Noah just blinks at Henry, slow.
“How can it be that bad?” Noah asks, head cocked. “Blue and Gansey’s powers are pretty low-key.”
Adam studies Henry, who gazes back, innocent and unassuming. “What is your actual quirk?”
“Oh,” Henry says, “When I feel a strong emotion, I make bees.”
“Bees?” Noah repeats.
Adam asks, “What counts as a strong emotion?”
Henry shrugs. “Anything really; happy, sad, scared… bees just appear!”
Adam and Noah glance at each other, and take a conscientious step back. Henry’s smile flickers; a slight buzz is heard from near his shoulder.
“Can you… can you control the bees?” Adam asks.
“Oh, no,” Henry says. “I just make them.”
Adam looks at Ronan, with an expression that says what. Ronan looks at Adam with an expression that says he is the actual worst and also we are going to fight a swarm of bees. It’s a complicated expression that utilizes a lot of Ronan’s eyebrows.
Henry retreats to find Blue and Gansey and prepare; Ronan forces Adam and Noah to huddle up, shoulder-to-shoulder with him. “I know this isn’t that serious,” he tells them, “but it is, and I need you both to put everything you’ve got into crushing them. Not singling you out Noah, except I am. Don’t back out.”
Noah tries to look offended, which isn’t much more than a pout from him. Adam looks faintly amused, and Ronan turns a severe glare on him too. “We got it,” Adam says, “Your balls are on the line. Can’t let you suffer indignity at Gansey’s hands and all that.”
“Exactly,” Ronan agrees fiercely. “Hell Cycle or not, this should be no contest. Their quirks all look like shit.”
“Your quirk looks like narcolepsy,” Noah points out.
“Well, it’s fucking not.”
On the surface, Gansey, Blue and Henry are the more intimidating team. They’re a little shinier, better dressed, and Blue looks exactly as pleased by school-mandated violence as Ronan does. Her quirk is to amplify the powers of everyone else around her; where Henry would usually produce a couple of bees with nervous excitement, Blue ups the magnitude to a few dozen. It’s inevitable that one reaches Gansey, who is not preternaturally allergic, but very, very allergic all the same. He collapses; a second later, and his quirk revives him. Henry says, “Sorry,” with a panic that produces a small swarm of drones and the thud of Gansey going down once more.
“Oh,” Adam says, very softly. “I see the problem.”
In a few minutes, there is a very dense cloud of bees. The rest of the class is pressed far, far back against the wall. Noah is translucent, and sweating, hovering close to Adam’s side. Ronan is torn between the competing feelings of I warned you and dear fucking god.
Eventually Blue and Gansey hustle out of Henry’s range, and the bee situation stops escalating. Ronan rubs the back of his neck, bravado dimming in the face of non-punchable opponents. “I could go and get a bunch of Raid or something,” he suggests half-heartedly, unwilling to leave his body lying unattended while he goes to his pocket dimension for bug spray.
Adam is thinking hard. His quirk is the kind that is very hard to explain, and can usually reveal previously-unknown aspects to solve problems as they come up. His power gathers around him, scenting the air with loam and mist, summoning a breeze from nowhere that stirs the swarm. His fingertips glow, hair ruffled, expression focused. He is, Ronan thinks, unbearably hot.
But his amorphous Power of Cabeswater does not immediately manifest into a solution. The bees hum a little louder; somewhere in their midst, Henry is working hard to try and commune with them, with little success. Ronan wracks his brain, trying to think of anything he could dream up to win.
Noah says, “I could open a window.”
Ronan and Adam look at him. Noah is ghost-pale, see-through, and beyond harm. “Yeah,” Ronan says, audibly disappointed. “Do that.”
Noah steps around and through bees to get to the larger window on the gym’s back wall. When it’s open Adam’s enigmatic Ancient Forest power summons a breeze strong enough to sweep the bees outside, into the midst of an extremely distressed soccer game. Noah gives Adam an enthusiastic thumbs up, but Ronan’s shoulders slump with the anti-climax.
Once the gym is clear, Ronan strides up to Henry and, without very much effort, pushes him over. Blue and Gansey are both bee-stung and resigned, and forfeit with little fanfare. It’s about the hollowest victory Ronan has ever won, but they still won and he’s determined to savour at least a little of it.
“I’m sorry you didn’t really get to hit anyone,” Adam tells him once they’re seated on the sidelines. The following match is Kavinsky versus Tad, and is the kind of violence Ronan sorely wishes he was involved in.
Ronan shrugs. He is also quite sorry that he didn’t get to see Adam hit anyone, but there will be other fights and hopefully better balanced ones. Gansey, Blue and Henry are banned from ever, ever working in proximity to each other again, so there’s hope for the future.
Adam nudges him with a knee, and Noah looks between the two of them significantly, and Greenmantle takes a very, very long time to call the match. School is fun.