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Adam keeps his dream things in the trunk of a rusted-over truck, parked a half-mile walk in the wrong direction for anything else. Inside are the things he couldn’t bear to bury or burn: the first of his experiments, the things that seemed to come from his heart more than his head, fanciful and fragile, impossible to destroy.
The trunk has been overflowing for years; without time to find someplace new to keep his treasures, Adam gets to weigh up wonders against each other, to decide if he wants to keep the miniscule CRT television or a terracotta statuette that may be alive and that he's afraid to get rid of. If he prefers the noise-cancelling headphones to the tiny clay model of himself, sitting on the hood of a tiny clay truck. He is not quite sure what most of it means, but it all feels important.
He tries not to visit it too much, and tries not to linger when he’s there. Adam’s second-greatest fear is discovery, of all these little pieces of him found and turned over and examined. Of himself, found and examined. Trying to explain the what of it, the dreams and the forest, is hard to even attempt. He has made no headway at all into the how.
Hence the truck, and his rules for himself, only going when he has to and never staying long. It should be easy. They’re basically useless things. The television only plays episodes of SNL that he's already seen.
Sometimes, though, Adam crawls out there in the middle of the night, before he’s even slept and dreamt and made something new, and he runs his hands over all these impossible objects. Something in him pulls tighter every day, and when it is too taut he needs to touch all these weird little miracles and know I made this, to say it over and over in his head. Sometimes it is very hard not to linger. Sometimes it is very hard not to imagine himself dreaming up a working truck, cramming it full of everything he owns, and driving far away. But Adam has an unfortunate sense of integrity; he’s committed to the slow route.
Adam’s greatest fear is that one day he’ll wake up empty-handed. He hasn’t let himself become reliant on his dream creations; it’s the spark he’s addicted to. He doesn’t know what he’d be without it.
It is harder to keep a secret than Adam thought it would be.
It feels like it should be the easiest thing, to simply not say something. Adam grew up distant from the local boys, too busy with work, and then distant from the Aglionby boys, since it’s so plain to all parties that they are not alike. People are always looking past him to Gansey and Ronan, and Adam supposes he should be glad. It’s so easy to hide when no one even wants to find him, but there is a little ache in his heart from lack of recognition.
He can’t show his family, because they’d never leave him be again, and he can’t show the Aglionby boys, even though he burns to. He can’t show his friends, even though he could cry with frustration that he can’t prove he’s like them, special like them, that they are the only three people in Henrietta who seem to have souls.
Gansey and Ronan seem to sense something in him though. They fall in with him so easily. Gansey is magnificent, with his quest and his money and all his innate power. He seems sincerely delighted by Adam, that Adam is good with his hands and knows how things work and isn’t a skeptic, is willing to believe in Glendower right from the start.
Ronan is different. He’s different in a way that Adam is jealous of, standing out even more than Gansey, like he’s part of a different species, last of his kind. Adam is only alone with him when Gansey is busy, and they tend to find themselves sharing a silence, either outside Aglionby or Monmouth or on the roof of Ronan’s car, after he’s driven them both to nowhere at all. Adam doesn’t usually share much of anything with anyone, but Ronan Lynch is a real-life cryptid and getting close enough for that kind of understanding is undeniably nice.
As soon as Adam was in, he was in, and Gansey laid his soul bare. But every inch of Ronan is engraved with secrets and Adam knows it’s too early to start trying to decrypt him. He certainly doesn’t want Ronan figuring him out in revenge.
The first real dream was when he was about fifteen.
Adam remembers waking up in his room in the double-wide with his hand wrapped around the thing he wanted most in the world that day: a chain for his bike. The old one had broken, and he didn't know how it was going to be replaced, and the world had been made that much worse for it.
He had dreamed of an old and alien forest, a place that wasn't quite hospitable and wasn't quite threatening. In the grass he'd seen the glint of the chain, picked it up, rubbed the dew of the cool metal. And then, from nothing, he woke with it in his hands.
He had lain very still in the terse silence of the night, chain stretched between his fingers, scared to breathe. He turned it over and over, trying to spot some tell-tale imperfection, waiting for it to turn to dust in his hands. But it was perfectly flawed, scratched like the old one had been, a little greasy, impossibly solid.
In the morning he put it on his bike, and told his mother he’d found it abandoned.
After that, he had been single-minded. Practice, iterate, destroy the failures, try to learn.
It’s much harder to make something deliberately. He has to fall asleep with a purpose, and he needs to hold onto that purpose through the barrier of sleep, through the drifting, idle state that comes before, through the tricks and distractions of the forest itself.
Adam doesn’t know why it’s always the same forest, and he doesn’t know why it likes to distort his creations. If he tries to make an Aglionby blazer, he gets one where the crest holds the bloodied wings off a real raven, or one too large in the shoulders to ever suit him, or one with the lining swapped out for a thin layer of soil.
It’s hard, but never discouraging. Every thing he makes is a thing he made, and every time the blazer is more complete. Adam is patient, and devastatingly tenacious, and this is not the kind of task that can defeat him.
Life has been unfair to him; here, finally, is something that works in his favour.
The first trip to Cabeswater staggers him. It’s a moment of absolute mysticism, to be standing in this place from his head. He has crouched among this moss and these stones, plucked his prizes from these thorns and that bracken, has breathed this misted air. And now he is here and awake and with company, and Adam’s sense of reality suffers a very bad blow.
He tries to hide it from Gansey and the others, tries to keep his face calm even though it feels like his heart is shouting. This is his place, and he doesn’t understand it, but it must mean something. He’s prophetic; he’s a magician; he’s the rightful heir to this place. His claim on Glendower itches with legitimacy.
But he can’t read the Latin on the stone, not with Ronan’s ease. He can’t hear the trees, even though Gansey does. The woods greet him, the same way they greet Blue, but any nuance is lost in the translation and Adam doesn’t know how to beg a why from a forest.
It all leaves him feeling hollow. This miracle connection is amounting to nothing, and the moment where it could all fall into place is passing. The trees have nothing to say to him, except for the smallest acknowledgement, and Adam feels adrift.
He goes out to the edge of the trees to catch his breath. There is an old oak with a gnarled trunk that Adam has leaned on while dreaming, and he finds it again now with a dull throb of the surreal. He doesn’t expect anyone to follow him, but it’s barely a minute before Ronan saunters up beside him, looking relaxed and untroubled and much less rattled by the talking trees than Adam think he should be.
“Alright, Parrish?” Ronan asks. It’s not a challenge for Adam to be alright, but Ronan manages to avoid sounding concerned all the same.
Adam struggles to find the words for the calamity happening in his mind. There’s no way to even try, so he settles for the smallest scrap of it he can take from the whole. “It just – feels familiar.”
Ronan looks at him sideways and nods, still at ease. “Yeah,” he says, “I get that.”
Adam isn’t sure what to do with that, but Ronan doesn’t leave, and eventually his feelings shrink enough that he can work around them. He’ll deal with them later, when he’s alone. There’s not a non-awkward way to thank Ronan for being there, so Adam doesn’t try, but they share a look, he thinks, right before they leave.
This day has been a lot.
Adam makes things that help.
Toothpaste, if he’s run out. A perfect copy of his left sneaker, after he found a hole in the heel. Tinned food, at his worst. He still wants to do things in a way he can be proud of, and he still wants to do it himself. Relying on his tenuous magic seems like a sure path to disaster, so he only makes what he can't buy and relies on his fragile wages as much as he can. It’s not like he could really have luxury anyway, not while he still lives with his parents, not while he’s still afraid of discovery. He just makes his life a little easier.
Cash is always tempting, though. Adam has never brought bills out intentionally, but he’s had hungry dreams sometimes, when he wakes up clutching a fistful of money with Ronan’s face where the president should be. It would be a shortcut, it would be easy, it would be a quick fix for all his problems, and it makes his gut revolt.
There is a less practical reason as well; it wouldn’t be enough to stop him on its own, but there is something crude about the thought of going to his enchanted forest to snag hundred dollar bills. It’s one thing to pry his necessities free from thorns and hungry vines, but right now, he wants to be above doing the same for money.
At his heart, he’d like to stop stealing from Cabeswater. He’s got his plan, and he knows he’s going to get to that place, piece by piece. He wants to stand on his own, in a way anyone can see, and dream without intent.
But he wants to keep the spark, too. He likes being that little bit special, proud and different. It’s a feeling he tries to tamp down.
The deal with Cabeswater is partially an apology.
And then Ronan reveals that he brings things out of his dreams. He says it like a challenge, and he says it like it’s nothing, and Adam gets a flash of how he felt in Cabeswater once again. Nothing is really his.
The dreams feel different on Ronan somehow. Ronan creates innocent miracles and fantastical monsters, Ronan’s dreams are bigger and wondrous and whimsical. Adam’s blazers and toothpaste feel ridiculously mundane. Worse, they seem base and greedy; Ronan has magic and he uses it to conjure marvels. Adam has magic, and he uses it to supplement his groceries.
The revelation stuns him enough that he doesn’t feel like choking out, “Me too,” in the moment. His secret burns him after, the stupidity of it, that he didn’t speak up, that he thought he was special, that he thought – and he’d never admitted this to himself – he was better than Ronan and Gansey, in whatever way, because they were hunting for magic and he already had it.
Adam looks at Ronan, and hates him, and hates himself.
By necessity, most of Adam’s dreams are dismantled, mangled, taken out to a concrete lot where kids play with fireworks and no one will notice one more scorch mark. The ones that won’t burn get buried, in an unremarkable, unusable plot as far away from his truck as he can get.
With the experiments, it was easy. With the random things exhaustion brings, it’s a little harder – dream objects do not always come in form that make Euclidean sense, and do not always smash the way he thinks they should. But it’s the nightmares that are the challenge.
Things that Adam’s overtired, overstressed mind has produced: a box that just ticks, louder and faster the closer he brings it to his ear. A large, curved rock, pitted with holes, that he doesn’t like to touch. A jar made of black glass that rocks from side to side on its own and chitters. Adam used half a roll of duct tape over the latch.
Every anxiety dream and every real nightmare give him something he doesn’t want to touch, something he’s scared to break.
One thing Adam does want to ask Ronan is what he does with his horrors; they’ve been friends for long enough that Adam knows Ronan must have some, and probably outdoes him once again, making loathsome, monstrous things.
His question is answered when he helps to bury one.
It’s odd work, burying the manifestation of someone else’s unsettled mind. None of the others know what they’re dealing with, but Adam can’t resist looking at Ronan. Ronan is uncharacteristically quiet, eyes on the greasy bird-man, working hard to dig a big enough grave to get it out of sight. He and Gansey are both bloody from a struggle, the monster’s claws are dripping, and Adam doesn’t have to ask about things that are so easy to see.
At least his bad dreams don’t try and tear him apart. Though maybe now he knows it’s a possibility, they’ll start.
Kavinsky drops a pile of leather bands in front of Ronan, shades glinting, smile glinting, everything about him a knife-sharp reminder that a person can be a weapon. Adam thinks that the bands are a joke, or a misguided attempt at courtship, or an insult in the language that only Ronan and Kavinsky seem to speak, but then he notices. The bands are identical. He feels his heart catch.
It’s easier, almost, to accept that Kavinsky shares the same gift as him. Nothing about Kavinsky has ever been threatening as Ronan, when every scrap of Kavinsky’s talents is misapplied. If Ronan is irresistible, Kavinsky inspires resistance. He can’t hold Gansey’s attention longer than he can hold Gansey’s ire. Kavinsky is a human in the worst way, and accelerating.
The leather bands sit on the table, indifferent to the furore they have created.
Ronan’s expression in that moment is a complicated thing, but it lacks recognition. He picks one up, and Kavinsky watches, all savage teeth and pride. No one so much as glances at Adam. This is when Adam learns that Kavinsky knows about Ronan, and not about him, and that Ronan knows about neither.
The bands have Ronan’s tooth marks embossed in the leather.
Adam begins to think that keeping his secret any longer may be a bad idea.
Things Ronan has that Adam does not: money, a home to go back to, multiple pairs of shoes, fire in his veins, love for his father. His self-loathing materialised and out for blood. Joseph Kavinsky’s attention, interest, threat. A title that is leading people to Henrietta to hunt for him. Miracles. Danger.
Adam has been the wariest of them from the start. He sees the man dressed all in grey with eyes that are too bright and slide over things too quickly, and Adam has heard things, the pastor assaulted, men found dead in the woods. The man in grey doesn’t spare him a second glance, but Adam knows that every angle of Ronan draws eyes in.
Ronan is not observant. He doesn’t notice the man in grey, and he doesn’t notice how often Kavinsky plants himself directly in his path. He doesn’t seem to have thought about what the night horrors might mean, but he notices them at least, since he keeps showing up with scabbed and bloody furrows.
Ronan is not a person Adam ever expected to feel protective of, but he does, and it’s a feeling he can weigh in his hands like any other. He’d thought his magic was lesser than Ronan’s, sick and miserably, but at least he’s kept his head above water. To Adam, one of two people who knows how to look, it’s obvious that Ronan is drowning. If he doesn’t save him, Kavinsky will.
Adam decides that he does not need to be a whirlwind and pick up all the debris that entangles. Competency can warm him instead.
It is one of the harder things he’s ever done, inviting Ronan out to his truck. It’s reminiscent of applying for Aglionby; here is Adam, as vulnerable as he could ever be, laying himself out and closing his eyes to hope.
“I need to show you something,” Adam says, and Ronan knows enough to follow. He’s grim, but that’s his default lately; Adam can see it as clear as his tattoo, that there’s an itch under his skin he’s going to bleed himself out trying to scratch.
The truck’s metal is warm under midday sun. There’s no one but the two of them, standing in a field, Adam’s fingertips feeling out the trunk’s latch like he’s never opened it before. “No one else knows,” Adam says, hearing the nerves in his own voice, remembering the easy bravado Ronan had made his own revelation with. “I know you won’t tell, but. Don’t.”
He’s certainly got Ronan’s interest. Adam pops the trunk, and resigns himself to the future.
Inside there is a crown of wrought iron, tarnished but heavy. A root twisted into a hideous knot, with something sweet-smelling at its centre. There is a plastic jar that Adam warns Ronan not to open, that Ronan opens, that is full of a dark and viscous substance that shines like an oilslick and sticks like glitter. Ronan spends a minute failing to wipe the substance off his skin.
Neither of them say anything. Ronan’s eyes gleam with understanding, but his mouth is a complicated shape. His hands move from object to object, careful and appreciative, rubbing slick glitter off on too many things, not that Adam would complain.
“These are the accidents,” Adam says, when Ronan seems to have finished his appraisal and just started watching SNL. “Whenever I'm not trying to get anything in particular, I get stuff like this.”
Ronan considers this, and the trunk, and Adam as a whole. His face is unreadable, lips a mathematical symbol. Eventually, he speaks. “I can’t believe you’re still fucking poor.”
“I – I only correct what’s unfair,” Adam argues, not quite equipped to argue the point right then. “I just take things I need. I’m not – I’m not cheating.”
“You make it sound like you can get specifics,” Ronan says, not quite accusatory, but pointed all the same.
“I had to practice,” Adam says. The confusion on Ronan’s face doesn’t lessen, and this is what Adam had been expecting; that Ronan Lynch has never worked at anything a day in his life, and his incredible, unbelievable dream magic is no exception. His irritation shows; Ronan cracks a grin.
They establish that Adam doesn’t know what a Greywaren is, and that his father isn’t one for sure. Adam explains how to focus on an object so it can be pulled from a dream intact; Ronan keeps looking back into the truck, at all of Adam’s creations, keeps touching the edges and playing the songs and turning them over until they catch the afternoon light and gleam. It feels like a compliment, and it feels like praise for some deeply integral part of Adam that he had thought no one would ever see, let alone enjoy.
There is a lightness flowing through Adam that doesn’t dissipate when he closes the trunk, or when he makes the walk back home, Ronan at his side. He had been afraid of giving something up; instead he feels richer. Someone else knows a part of his soul, and accepts it, and thinks it makes beautiful creations, and Adam has wanted a lot of things but he hadn’t realized how badly he’d wanted that.
Cabeswater is with Adam when he’s asleep and when he’s awake. Even knowing it’s not his, it’s hard not to think of it that way; it’s always there, whispering in his ears, offering up its treasure. No one else has the same relationship with it as he does.
But he’s aware of Ronan now. The Greywaren is woven through Cabeswater as surely as Cabeswater is woven through him, and Adam starts to feel it, constantly, the flicker of Ronan’s presence.
It’s the sensation of brushing past someone in a dream – incorporeal, unseeable, a moment of connection, a glimpse of a figure or a tattoo or the seams of space. It’s the knowledge, baseless but absolute, that he is not alone. Cabeswater loves Adam, but it is not an open place; in his dreams, Adam feels the wind on his skin and the dew on the leaves and sees the footprints that Ronan has left pressed deep into the moss.
He expects it to feel like a violation, an invasion of this place that could have been his, but it doesn’t. Cabeswater is too big to belong simply to him, and if he has to share, why not with Ronan?
Adam doesn’t ask him about the connection when they’re face to face. He already knows from the way Ronan doesn't look at him, and sometimes from the way that he does.
Patience is not a virtue that Ronan Lynch possesses.
The way that Adam knows how to dream is to sleep, with a focus seared into the back of his eyeballs and with a mantra clenched between his teeth. The way Ronan knows how to dream is to sleep, and trip across something he likes. Focus for Ronan is not so much about bringing out things he wants, since he doesn’t want anything, and if he did, he could buy it. Instead it is understanding and control, both of which are elusive for Ronan but soldered into Adam’s spine.
It’s a hard thing to teach, and it’s a hard thing for one easily-frustrated person to impress upon another. Adam chooses his approach carefully; instead of anything resembling a lesson, instead of the iterations he pushed himself through, he goes the simplest route.
They lie on the floorboards of Monmouth in dust-flecked afternoons, warm and drowsy, talking about anything other than what they’re trying to do. Holding a focus while being relaxed enough to sleep is an art; Adam dozes on and off, manages a handful of gummy bears and a cold soda, cheap and easy.
Ronan brings out an early 1900s alarm clock, and then a single tartan slipper, and then a pillow, which is what he says he was aiming for. “This floor is hard as shit,” he says, cramming it under his neck. He has already donated Gansey’s pillow to Adam.
“Congratulations,” Adam tells Ronan. “It’ll keep getting easier now.”
Ronan smiles, bright and pleased, and then he grins, unstoppable tempest. He’s hard not to look at. Adam is glad for him, and glad for their magic, and glad that for all the things that could have skewed horrendously off-kilter but didn’t. They are here now, side by side and sun-warmed and drifting.
Gansey thinks that Adam is just as wonderful as Ronan, and does a good job not looking hurt by not being told sooner. Adam knows he loves them both jealously. Of course they told Gansey; of course they did not tell Kavinsky.
Adam has never been so known, and it’s new and sometimes difficult and sometimes presumptuous, but mostly a comfort; to have someone understand his soul and love it all the same is a feeling he cannot adjust to. Cabeswater whispers in his heart, and Gansey adores him, and when Gansey is off being young and presidential, Ronan takes him out. They explore the brief delights of Henrietta, and when those are exhausted, they find new ones on their own, new places to lie, somewhere between sleep and reality.
Adam’s dreams supplement his groceries, and he keeps his head down, and the spark in his breast still burns, and there is no question that he is anything but a miracle. Ronan says he’ll get used to it; Adam cannot imagine a world where he takes any of this for granted.