Work Text:
The package sits for three days on the porch, because Opal isn’t around to eat it. Ronan isn’t around to eat either because he sleeps in the long barn and dreams in the long barn and waits in the long barn, and even though dream food isn’t the same, he can’t bring himself to make the trip to a grocery store.
Summer came and went, and with it Adam, off to college in a new jersey and a new car, dragging Ronan’s heart after it like cans on a bumper, declaring the happy inhabitants ‘Just Married!’ Gansey and Blue and Henry left too, but that was earlier, and with a lot less heartache because Ronan can mark on a calendar the day they get back (if he owned one). Autumn ripped through the Barns with a new determination. The leaves yellowed, oranged, then browned and dropped, shrivelled up, rotting in clumps by the driveway. Ronan was worried at first, it seemed like everything was dying at once, or like it was mad at him, packed up and leaving like the rest. Like maybe those trees would have spoken to him, too, but too little too late. White blankets the fields now, dream cows unbothered and real ones huddled inside. Ronan tells himself it’s why he won’t go back inside the house, because he doesn’t want to walk through the snow, but it’s only the start of winter, not even a foot deep.
It takes Sunday coming around again for Ronan to return to the house. It’s colder inside than out, dark and dry and silent. He stinks, a lot, and the pipes groan in the walls for an entire minute before rust tinged water sputters over him from the shower head. The suit hangs over the door to Matthew’s room, because he kept waking up in the night and thinking it was a person standing there watching him in the dark, and he puts it on without looking in the mirror, because he knows he looks the same as every Sunday before.
It’s only small, a plain white envelope with no return address. The addressing label is printed out and taped on with masking tape, nondescript and unidentifiable, and Ronan is angry for a moment at the idea of a postal worker driving the few minutes up the winding road, stopping and getting out and walking right up to his front door. They probably knocked, invading his private oasis just yards from his sleeping body. He kicks at it, waits for it to make a noise or blow up or disperse Anthrax in a deadly white cloud. It doesn’t.
“What the fuck?” He says to no one, and his voice is raw from disuse.
It gets tossed on the passenger seat as he slides in, priorities now shifted to getting as much heat going as possible. The engine turns over and roars to life and this is it, this is what he’s missing, and a song starts, loud and and angry, where it was cut off mid-note last Sunday, and Ronan can feel his pulse in his arms. His ears burn and his eyes twitch at the volume but its the first thing he’s heard in a week, so he lets the bass pump through the doors and up through his feet and in the back of his skull. It stops eventually, and when he’s rooting around in the footwell of the passenger seat for his stupid iPod, the envelope is still there, waiting.
It’s a book. Thin, maybe 80 pages, frayed and dogeared a little on the edges, so it’s been read before. He pulls it out with two fingers and drops it like he’s been burned as soon as he sees the cover. Anger flows through him again, and he punches the stereo off, ears buzzing in the enclosed silence of the car, only marred by his own quick, harsh breaths. Is this some kind of sick joke? It looks like a mirror, the hand and face covered in blood, coloured black in the way he looked being unmade. His first thought is Adam, he was there the second time, standing outside exactly where he sits now, and the memory of death, or rather, the opposite of life, leaking out of every orifice makes his stomach drop. The list of people who know both his name and current address is small, Adam, Gansey, Blue, Henry. His brothers, the Fox Way women. He flips it as far away from him as possible, he’s not interested in what they think he should read. The sun doesn’t filter through the trees when he drives under their archway in the way that he loves, too many leaves missing. The strings of Irish instruments carry him all the way to the church.
Nothing comes after that. No follow up letter, no second package, not even a text of inquiry. He forgets about it for weeks, now back in the house because he’s worried that one day he’ll leave and get snowed out, even though it melted as soon as it came, but one day the silence gets too much, and when he starts to miss even the sound of hooves tapping along the floor, he shoulders his way down the hall and out the front door and to his car and gets in. The book is still there, waiting, big black letters spelling Crush in a way that stabs his heart. He quickly flips the front page over, tired of looking at himself laid bare in black and white and the small words ‘Volume 99 of the Yale Series of Younger Poets’ stare up at him. He groans. He can’t help it, it rips out of him unprovoked. Poetry .
He skips the foreword, he doesn’t care about someone else’s opinion, and starts to read them chronologically, because he doesn’t know how else to do it. The paper echoes in the silence, it scrapes against itself as he flips the pages, and the sound is so familiar his blood boils. Then, his heart stops. The first line of the first poem stares up at him, bold black ink on the page, unmoving.
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.
He feels sick. He reads to the end.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, pressed by light.
Tell me how we’ll never get used to it.
Is this supposed to help? Is he supposed to read these words, constructed with longing and love, and feel known ? Feel less alone? Relieved that someone else knows what it’s like to have their insides twisted up with guilt and lust and pain and loneliness? It doesn’t fucking help. What good are his feelings in someone else's words, stolen and written for him. He’s two seconds from throwing the book out the window, putting the car in drive and running it over and over and over until it’s nothing but pulp. But the words will still be there. In the dirt, in the bookstores, in the mind and the heart of the author. They were still written, still felt, it’s just him. He can’t control whether they exist or not, only if they are in his head. He keeps reading.
The first poem was only short , but his chest heaves with stuttered breaths by the end of it. He reads it three times before remembering that there are more, hungrily rips to the next page, terror and impatience warring in his body. It doesn’t take him long to understand the themes of the poems, and he feels like he’s back in fucking English lessons, ignoring Sylvia Plath’s emotional bullshit to stare at the back of Adam’s head. The words jump out at him of their own volition, dreams, trees, cars, death, love, violence but he’s halfway through the third poem before it hits him like a punch in the face. A laugh, strangled and manic, rips out of his chest, burning his throat, and he shuts his jaw before the sob brewing in his lungs can follow it, and he hopes he never finds out who sent him the book, because he’s going to kill them.
But it also helps, in a weird roundabout way. Like somehow one of his friends sending him a book of poetry written about a girl is the most unforgivable fundamental misunderstanding of everything about Ronan, like just because it’s a book of gay poetry all is miraculously forgiven. It may as well be, because his heart pounds in his chest like he’s found gold. Maybe this is what he was born into, destined for, pain and heartache but overwhelming soul-wrenching love, and maybe so are all the other men just like him, and maybe there’s nothing he can do about it, and nothing he did to cause it.
But then the poem takes a turn, and Ronan, eyes greedily absorbing every word, barrels right into it.
We groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars as the roads around us
grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through a glass already laced with frost,
but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out of lullabies.
But damn if there isn’t anything sexier than a slender boy with a handgun, a fast car, and a bottle of pills.
It knocks the breath out of him, and he can’t finish the next section of the poem. The driver’s side door opens without him realising his hands have moved, and he throws himself sideways out of it into the night. He thinks about his friends, faces blurred together in his distress, melted together into one self-righteous being, reading through the pages, reminded of Ronan, thinking they know his most fucking intimate thoughts. He feels raw, psychoanalysed, stumbling wildly away from the car, door hanging open where he leaves it behind him. The book is clutched in his fist, knuckles white and pulling at the pages, bending the cover. It rips off and falls in the dirt behind him, and he doesn’t notice. He makes it to one of the back fields before collapsing on the ground, knees failing out from under his weight and jamming in the dirt. He doesn’t cry, because he’s not sad, but he’s not angry either, not relieved, not happy; some ugly, toxic mix of them all, so numb that it comes right back around into excruciating. His chest hurts, as if someone has shoved a hand in and scooped him out like a fucking Halloween pumpkin rotting in the November sun, raw and empty and cavernous, collapsing in on itself.
It slaps him in the face, a brutal realisation, so stark that he’s flung backwards on the grass, chest heaving, rapid breaths making white clouds in the cold above his face. His arms and legs feel pinned to the ground, made of stone and trying to sink back into the earth from whence they came.
He’s lonely. He’s so fucking lonely, and it’s all his fault.
He was the one that wanted to move into the Barns by himself, he watched his entire world drive away in opposite directions, stood on the porch and waved them off as they went. And the worst part is, he doesn’t want to leave. This is his home and his life and he doesn’t want to leave it. He wants everyone to come back, drive up that winding driveway and never leave him again; but even he knows how selfish that is. Gansey spent the better part of a year stitching him back together again, he can learn to be a fucking adult and take care of himself and not self destruct the minute he’s left alone. The black sky sprawls out above him, spotted with white stars that burn his eyes if he looks to long into their brightness, and the wind picks up around him, rustling the grass and chilling him right through his clothes, and he thinks that, this whole time he’s been waiting for things to stop happening to him, as if God and the universe have decided he is their plaything, and that maybe things just happen, whether he cares or not, and when he’s worn himself entirely out, too exhausted to even keep his eyes open, he falls asleep.
That night, he dreams of a car. Hollowed out and charred, it burns bright in a field, orange flames licking through the interior, melting the seats and the plastic on the doors, until there’s nothing but a metal shell. He reaches toward it, glass crunching under his shoes. His fingers disappear into the fire, like breaking the surface of still water, only it doesn’t feel any different, not hot or cold, just air rushing through his fingers with destructive power. He reaches further, flames parting to welcome him in, sleeve somehow remaining in one piece, and grips the door handle. It shouldn’t be possible, but this is his dream, his head, and it’s the most logical thing of all.
When he wakes up, he’s still in the dirt, still clutching the door handle, and the fire still blazes. The grass around the wheels is still green, dewy with the morning cold, untouched by the flames, and so is Ronan. It burns like it did in the dream, contained, perpetual, but harmless to all except Ronan’s fragile psyche. He didn’t mean to pull it out, he never does, but now it’s here, and everything it was in the dream, grief, guilt, is here too. Once he comes back to his body, he pulls himself to his feet, aching from a night spent on the hard ground, using the glassless window to brace himself. The book lies a few feet away from where he collapsed in panic, dirty and ripped and bent but entirely legible, so he picks that up too.
There’s a lightness to his chest now, one that only comes after a breakdown; a clarity of the morning. He opens the door, sits on the mangled remains of the driver's seat, ignoring the way the springs stab his back and the underside of his legs, opens the book and keeps reading. The flames still flicker around him, brushing his arms and legs on their mission to reduce the car to ash, and they close him in like a curtain on all sides, a pocket of the earth just for him, violent and hidden and hateful. His body doesn’t react so violently this time, he dragged himself away from the cliff’s edge some time during the night, free to enjoy the view from a safe distance, so he reads more calmly now, less starved. The words still prick his soul with each new line, each reference to death and love still stabs through him, but it gets familiar after a while.
In the end, it only takes water to put it out, pumped up from the ground into a rusted old bucket Ronan finds in one of the sheds. He has to make five trips to get it all, but once it’s out it doesn’t reignite. He puts it off for hours, because he knows what will be left, but he doesn’t want someone to see the flames in the distance and call the fire department on him. He stands, half turned away, as the thick, noxious smoke rises from where the final bucket has extinguished the last patch of orange. He braces himself for it, white car burned black and gaping, knife covered in blood, run through his heart and displayed for the world to see, but when the smoke clears it’s not there. The doors are mostly intact, some patches of paint stubbornly clinging on long after the rest has burnt away, but it’s not white. Ronan circles the car, because it’s still familiar, and when the passenger side door comes into view, he knows it. He knows it because he passes it every time he goes from the house to the long barn, only this copy has wheels.
He drives to the college Friday morning, and doesn’t get there until Friday night. He spends the whole ride with the windows down and his electronic music blasting and his eyes water but it’s the wind, it’s just the wind. He can’t call Adam and tell him that he’s coming because he doesn’t remember where his phone is, and Adam doesn’t have one anyway. They talk through email, because email is free, and doesn’t leave room for silences. He stomps through the campus, weaving through drunken students under orange lamp lights, cuts through the grass from the carpark to Adam’s dorm. He remembers the building’s name from watching Adam apply for a room online, half naked on his couch, feet in Ronan’s lap. He bangs on the door that the desk lady gave him with the side of his fist, over and over and over, then pauses mid swing when the door is nearly ripped off its hinges. Adam stands there with a scowl, mouth already open to curse out whoever has decided to obnoxiously bother him, dressed in a too tight t-shirt and grey sweatpants, and Ronan can’t take it.
He leaps onto Adam, wraps him up in his arms, as tight to his chest as possible, chin tucked over Adam’s shoulder and eyes squeezed shut. Adam doesn’t tense up, wraps his arms around Ronan’s back in reply just as fast, spreads his hands out across the leather and pulls him in closer, but Ronan can’t see his face to see how he really feels. Maybe Adam’s mad that he didn’t tell him before hand, maybe he doesn’t want to be disturbed, encroached upon or interrupted, maybe he has essays to write and exams to study for, but Ronan doesn’t care. He doesn’t care. He’s tired and sore and wrecked and he wants to be with his fucking boyfriend. He’s tired of wasting away alone in his fucking dream home because he’s too stubborn to admit that you can want two things at once. Adam can be mad, because Ronan needs this.
“What are you doing here?” Adam asks, right into Ronan’s neck, breath hot and wet.
His heart pounds and he remembers a line, seared into his brain and in his bones,
Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure
I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.
“I miss you,” active, not passive, he misses him everyday, it’s all he does everyday; misses him. “And I love you.”
Adam’s reply is written all over his face when they pull apart, and how could Ronan have ever thought he would be anything less than overjoyed to see him. He takes a step back further into his room, tugging Ronan with him with how they are still entwined, until they reach his shitty single bed covered in the sheets Ronan recognises from his old room at St. Agnes, and Ronan collapses straight into them like he’s missed them as much as Adam himself. They smell almost the same, like Adam and the detergent he uses, but no longer like attic dust and motor oil, and Ronan realises suddenly, neither does Adam. He shoves his face into the side of Adam’s thigh, squished as far as he can be against the wall to make room for Adam who sits leaning against the headboard, because he can’t think about that. He can’t think about how Adam has changed, can’t look at the length of his hair, how his skin has paled out of the Virginia sun. His heart burns in his chest because here Adam finally is, real and beautiful and in his arms and he can’t look at him.
“Ronan.” Adam says, like he’s scolding a guilty child, but there's love in his voice and Ronan can feel the energy twitching through his body under the hand resting on his thigh. “What’s wrong?”
He thinks about the book still tucked in the driver’s side door pocket where he left it in his rush to find Adam, resilient and faithful despite the beating Ronan has given it the past few days. If that dude can lay his soul bare like that, cut himself open and bleed like that, show the world his deepest, darkest thoughts like that, then Ronan can lay in front of his boyfriend and tell him how he really feels.
“I miss you so bad, Adam. Fuck, I miss everyone. It’s so lonely at the Barns. I love it, it’s my home, but it’s so…” He chokes off into the cotton of Adam’s pants, and for all that it wasn’t much, it’s the most he’s spoken in weeks.
Adam just nods, like he gets it, and how can he get it, here in his ivory tower of dickheads, networking and partying and making lifelong fucking memories, but then Ronan notices the roommates empty bed, and the fact that Adam’s in, alone, on a Friday night, and he can’t remember if Adam has mentioned a single new friend in any of his emails.
“I’m glad you’re here, I really am,” Adam says, like he really means it, and Ronan holds onto it like a lifeline. He can feel Adam watching him, running his hand over Ronan’s shaved head so it makes a scraping sound in the quiet room that echoes in Ronan’s skull. Then he tugs on Ronan’s sleeve, tilts his chin with a warm palm, until Ronan opens his aching eyes into Adam’s bright, smiling face.
“C’mon, let’s go for a walk.”
They end up at some grocery store, the buzzing rooftop sign bearing the big, glowing letters of a chain Ronan’s never seen before. Adam walks in like he’s been there a million times, and he probably has, because this is Adam’s life now, and there’s nothing Ronan can do but follow him in.
Adam looks gaunt under the fluorescent lighting, vibrant in a way that just looks wrong, marks and blemished that normally blend seamlessly into brown skin suddenly stark and obvious. Ronan thinks he probably looks the same, sickly pale, and when he looks down at his hands, the contrast of his black sleeve makes them seem translucent. He follows Adam’s beeline to the chilled section, watches his long fingers wrap around the plastic neck of a juice bottle and tries not to shiver from more than just the cold.
“What, Red Bull not good enough for you anymore?” Ronan scoffs. He has trees full of the shit at home, and watching Adam decide to spend money on someone else’s overpriced organic concoction does something to his stomach.
Adam just rolls his eyes and turns back in the direction of the checkout. It’s been hours since Ronan last ate, he grabs a bottle without really looking; thick, cloudy and purple, and follows Adam through the store once again.
Adam buys his juice with crumpled up bills from deep in his pockets like he doesn’t care, and maybe he doesn’t anymore, he’s already here, what’s a few dollars on pulp-free orange juice. Ronan swipes his card when prompted, silent and turned away. He watches Adam instead, waiting past the till, just out of range of the door sensor, long limbed and straight backed, the picture of confidence wasted on a near empty grocery store. Adam just stares back at him, bottle raised to his lips, wide eyed. He lowers it slowly, screws the cap back on with perfect precision even though he isn’t looking. For a moment Ronan thinks something is wrong, maybe Noah has returned, materialised behind him because Adam certainly looks like he’s seen a ghost, but then it’s gone with a slight shake of his head, and he’s reaching out a hand for Ronan to take, smiling in the way that melts Ronan’s insides.
It’s properly dark now, empty car park lit only by the white lamps as otherworldly as the fluorescents they just escaped. They only make it a few steps around the corner, fingers twisted together and shoulders bumping, mouths trading the flavours of oranges and berries, when Ronan sees it, glowing like a ghost of a memory. He stills, pulling Adam to a stop next to him, stares at the lonesome shopping cart left in the middle of the lot by someone who clearly couldn't be bothered to take it all the way back. Adam just gives him an exasperated look, head tilted to the side, but his lips betray his eyes and pull into a smile.
“C'mon Parrish,” Ronan says, chest light and head spinning from the beautiful coincidence of it all. Because, really, not everything has to be a high stakes, world ending adventure, sometimes he can just push his boyfriend in a shopping cart as hard as he can through a dimly lit parking lot, and sometimes that’s the most important thing he can possibly do with his time on Earth.
He grabs the cart nearest to him, pulls it over to Adam, hands twisting on the handle like the throttle of a motorcycle. He grins, wide and sinister, just like all those months ago, only this time there is no BMW to crash into, just wide open asphalt and nowhere else to be .
“Oh, no,” Adam tells him with a disbelieving laugh, hands up in front of himself. “I’m not doing that again. It’s your turn, you get in.”
Adam doesn’t push him right away, just leans back with all his weight and swings Ronan around in a circle, round and round and round until Ronan’s head is spinning and his stomach rolls and he has to shut his eyes against the centrifugal force of it. Adam slows down, stumbling and clearly dizzy himself, laughing loud and shameless into the cold air. Then he takes it at a run, just like Ronan, but they’re both still whirling inside their skulls, and the cart makes a wide arc in the lot instead of a neat line, and Ronan doesn’t cup his face like he remembers Adam doing, he remembers everything about that day, because he’d love nothing more than a permanent reminder of this moment. But when Adam jumps on the back he overshoots, tipping sideways, arms flailing out and smacking the back of Ronan’s head before they both crash to the ground with the clanging of thin metal. Ronan skids a few feet on his side, but that’s what his leather jacket is designed to do, so he gets up unharmed. Adam lies on his back where he fell, head resting back against the ground, perfect white teeth glinting under the lamp like the stars above Ronan’s farm.
And it’s just like how it used to be, back before Ronan’s world nearly ended, when he took for granted seeing his best friends everyday. Only this time he can lean down and pull Adam up by a hand and not feel like his skin is on fire with his touch, because he knows it now, he’s painfully familiar with Adam’s skin on his own, and he can kiss him, so he does, over and over until he has to stop for air. And maybe this is what he was missing all along, what it took a breakdown in a field and a burning car to realise he already had. His friends are still alive, and he’s a grown adult with a car and a license and he can make the time and effort to see them, because one day they won’t be, and what’s the point of waiting around for everything to fix itself when nothing is really broken to begin with.
He wraps his arms around Adam’s waist, pulling him in flush against his stomach. They’re still in the middle of a desolate parking lot, a few blocks from the college, next to a battered and overturned shopping cart, in a state Ronan’s never been to before and doesn’t particularly care about, but it’s the most heavenly place in the world. Adam kisses him once more, a light brush of lips on lips, and pulls back far enough to catch Ronan’s eyes.
“You know,” Adam says, soft, like he’s embarrassed but has decided he doesn’t want to be, “I was wondering when you would come visit. I didn’t wanna ask in case you didn’t want to. But I wanted you to.”
And it breaks his fucking heart. Because while Ronan was sulking in the dark about being abandoned, the love of his life was wishing he’d gather his broken pride up off the floor and just come and say hello. And when they make it back to the campus, night sky black and starless above the ring of light from the city, instead of going straight inside, back to Adam’s room and under his covers where they’ll have to squish together so neither of them will fall out, Ronan pulls Adam to his car, to the door where the book sits, because he has one poem left, and this one he wants Adam to hear.
We were in the gold room where everyone
finally gets what they want, so I said What do you
want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me . Here I am
leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome
burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
my silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.