Chapter Text
“Gansey. Gansey!”
Gansey suddenly startled, looking away from the all too bright screen of his computer, testing his slippery vision by blinking shut his eyes and widening them again. There were practically little animated bubbles fizzing and popping around him; he was never one to get drunk, but sometimes, it was necessary. His eyes focused on the elegant length looming over him, thrifted designer coat still on, with snow speckling the shoulders. He did a subconscious check of other established comforting familiarities: freckles peppered in the shapes of constellations (Leo, Cepheus, Scorpio, and Draco, respectively. He counted them all as he always did), eyes the color of frozen asphalt, fine eyebrows permanently knitted, the ever present crease in-between them. A deep sigh released itself from his chest, a loose smile cracking open his mouth. “Adam,” he said dreamily, “thank god it’s you.”
A snicker choked out from behind them, Gansey’s roommate, Noah, making himself known. He hadn’t been helpful at all throughout the evening, besides supplying the alcohol, but Gansey didn’t expect him to be. Gansey had been long used to Noah’s catastrophically casual state of existence, floating along, only stopping to giggle or sigh. How he managed to get into Harvard, Gansey didn’t know, but he had become too endeared to him to question too much.
They both ignored him. Adam looked back down to Gansey, “You weren’t answering your phone, so I wanted to come by to make sure you were alright." Confusion struck Gansey. He laughed as he asked, “And why would you need to do a silly thing like that?” It ended with a hiccup rather than a question mark. He was a living, breathing cliché. Adam’s eyebrows found a way to come even closer together. “Because of Blue. You blogged about it.”
Gansey’s heart found its way into his stomach, drowning itself deep in acid.
Blue.
His brain launched him back three hours, back to when they were still dating.
Richard Campbell Gansey the Third had been aching. It was a dull, gnawing pain that had made itself known since he was able to have cognitive thoughts. The desperation for relief of this was somehow a worse twist of the knife. It was with tremendous, simultaneous sadness and fondness he recalled his childhood; one hyperfixation after the other, never satisfied sitting still, his little mind unable to accept the gravity of reality.
The ADHD diagnosis didn’t help his parents’ perception of him either. A lingering disappointment stained their expressions and their voices whenever as a small child, Gansey begged them to listen. They were much more willing to rattle off explanations for their erratic child’s behavior than pay attention to the roots of the behavior. The expectations for his teenage years were covered in dirt and bugs with how low they were.
How could he have been expected to be successful? Little Dick the Third—with glasses that always found ways to shatter, and hands too big for his skinny arms, and worms wriggling from his pockets, and nervousness leaking from his ears, and an uncontrolled yearning that was never listened to—could not possibly live up to Dick One and Two, and he knew it. Oh, he knew it. There was nothing quite like a trust fund and an oppressively grand lineage to inspire.
So, contacts replaced glasses, and his body grew handsomely into itself from rowing crew, and his pockets only carried his wallet, and he plugged up his ears, and perfectly honed his politician smile. That’s what he was always meant to be anyways: president or lawyer or any other career that required pearly white grins.
And the aching still burned holes inside him, and he wished more than anything the scars would surface. Instead, he only swallowed himself further. The innocent hobbies turned into full-blown obsessive hyperfixations, restless nights became insomnia induced weeks without sleep, and the plugged up nervousness rotted his brain into debilitating anxiety. Yet, he steamrolled himself through it all, smile always glistening.
But the aching still stayed. He played his part exceptionally well, and the aching still stayed. There had to be more than this for him. And he thought Blue, his brilliant, eccentric, absolutely one-of-a-kind girlfriend of two months would understand.
He couldn’t even remember what he’d said to make her so upset. And he knew that even if he could remember, he wouldn’t have been able to figure out why it upset her. He disgusted himself.
“Dating you is like dating the entirety of wall street, Gansey! Black suits and mistresses and wives dating pool boys and the endless exhaustion of… of fakeness! And I thought you would let it go, I genuinely thought you were more than that. But, Gansey, I cannot emphasize enough how draining it is being around someone like you. You’re just gonna go through life with that stupid mask thinking you need it, when actually, you're privileged enough to have never needed it the first place. You worry people won’t like you because of your old Virginian money, and I promise you that isn’t true. It’ll be because you’re a self-obsessed asshole.”
And then she left.
He really was a living, breathing cliché.
Gansey groaned, thick and guttural as his throat closed up again. He shut his eyes once more and let his head fall into his hands. “Oh, come on, Gans,” Adam sighed. He sat on the desk and laid a long, gentle hand on Gansey’s shoulder. “I tried warning you that kind of girl would never put up with your kind of bullshit.” And Adam was right. How could he not be? Practicality and cold reasoning surged through him instead of blood. The freckled hand on his shoulder was solid and capable. Gansey felt a sudden urge to touch it. Noah laughed again.
Adam was relentlessly solid and capable, always had been.
Gansey met Adam last school year—kind of.
Three weeks into freshman year, Gansey’s fickle sense of control completely fractured. Frigid Cambridge cracked him open in a way sickly sweet, sticky Virginia would never be capable of. He found himself in a wing of Harvard he hadn’t seen before or since, a dark corridor with oppressive, heavy wooden walls and floorboards that wailed with every step. He cried for the first time in eight years.
And then, as if lead by the sly, coy hand of fate, a pair of frozen asphalt eyes saw him, and witnessed him.
“Do you want some company?” An elegant, homesick inducing accent asked. Gansey looked up and was suddenly transported back to Latin class in his senior year of high school.
Gansey’s academic pursuits were consistently exceeding… all except for Latin. But where his tongue clumsily tripped over the language, one particularly strange, gifted boy made the words slip from his mouth as effortlessly as if it were his mother tongue, beautiful accent bleeding into each sentence. They had no other classes together, but the boy had made a deep, lifelong impression on Gansey. He could not help but stare at him from afar, notice the way the bones in his hands jutted out, recognize the patterns speckled on his high, carved in cheeks. His appearance was unearthly, bizarre, as if he did not belong in the classroom of an elite private school, like he had somehow found his way into modern times from a painting from the 19th century, or a photograph from World War 2. But above all, Gansey noticed, he was very, very lovely. It would’ve been more effort to not look at him than it was to focus the attention he should’ve reserved for class on the odd way he existed. They had never spoken to each other, Gansey too self conscious to make the effort, the boy (in Gansey’s mind) too transcended to bring himself back down to the plasticity of Aglionby Academy’s reality.
But suddenly, here they were, as if there was no other place for them to be, against any odds. Perfectly stage-managed, fate placed them together.
Gansey nodded, and they sat together in peaceful silence, Gansey having the profound realization that in that moment, he was not alone. It did not matter if they spoke: he wasn’t alone. From then on, the two were inseparable. Gansey never asked if Adam remembered him from high school. It didn’t matter. Magnificently capable, strange Adam could’ve chosen anyone, and yet he stuck with Gansey. It was a gift he intended to treasure. There was no reason to think of the past.
Well, at least not the distant past.
“Adam,” he sniffed, “I need you.”
Noah snickered. Adam Blinked. Gansey cleared his throat. “I need your help,” he specified. Adam’s mouth twitched in his almost-smile way. “I’m here for you,” he said, hand retreating from Gansey’s shoulder. It rested back on the table top, and Gansey stared at it intently. “What’s up?” Adam asked, not particularly forceful. Gansey just looked back to his screen, wincing slightly at its brightness. Adam leaned over to see what he was looking at, though Gansey’s attention shifted to the way Adam’s throat became visible as he stretched his neck. “What’s all this?” Adam asked. “Do you remember that little game we programmed together once?” Gansey replied. Adam’s cheek dimpled, “The one about you-know-who?”
Gansey smiled too, he couldn’t help himself when his past endeavors resurfaced. Adam knew all about them. A few months back, they had coded a simple program based on all Gansey’s past fixations; it wasn’t so much a game as it was an algorithm to see which one was the most important to him, setting them up against each other and voting on which one mattered more to him. His long love of Welsh history won, though botanical studies was a close second. This wasn’t the point at the moment, though.
“I need the algorithm from it,” he said, earnest. Adam had always been smarter than him, even if he wasn’t inebriated he would never be able to remember the exact code. Adam studied the screen further, and Gansey studied the way it was so clear how the cogs in Adam’s head turned, how his entire demeanor shifted as he processed information. Suddenly, his face wrinkled: click, he connected the dots.
“Gansey, what is this?” He said, voice strained with exhaustion. A dull thud sounded from behind them, followed by a giggle. Gansey felt a sudden longing to be silly and stupid with Noah instead of doing anything he was in the middle of doing.
“I thought it’d be funny,” he said simply, looking back to the screen again.
In front of them was the beginnings of a code similar to the one he and Adam had made months back. The difference was, instead of Gansey’s obsessive coping mechanisms, it was name after name of fellow male Harvard students, each name more pompous and ridiculous than the last. Blue’s face came to mind as he read them: she’d think it was funny, comparing men of Harvard and voting on who was the more pompous and ridiculous looking of the two. Adam wasn’t laughing though. “Gans, this has got to be some of the most convoluted self-depreciation I’ve seen from you in a long, long time.”
This was a genuinely shocking, hurtful statement. “What could you possibly mean by that?” Gansey asked plainly. Adam guffawed and motioned to the computer as if the answer could possibly be obvious to Gansey, who just cocked his head and widened his eyes in confusion. Adam’s eyes slanted, the corner of his mouth twisted into a small smirk as he leaned in closer to Gansey’s face. It was all very cunty and sexy and Gansey was so, so drunk.
“Mocking men who are cut from the same expensive, Italian linen as you won’t convince her to take you back,” Adam said. Gansey considered this for a moment. Well, yeah. Of course, Adam was right, this was admittedly very pathetic of him… however, “Is it not very funny, though?” He asked, voice sounding like a child begging for approval. Adam held his gaze for a moment, Gansey’s breath haltering in anticipation. He broke it with a scoff, shaking his head, yielding. He sighed and looked back at the names, smiling wry and tired and conceding.
“They’re a different breed of bastard, aren’t they? Maybe they deserve the hazing— overlooking your personal motivation,” Adam said, sneering, and Gansey laughed.
It was rare Adam would willingly avoid any opportunity to disrupt the pride of the overly privileged. Maybe that’s why they were such good friends.
Gansey sighed dreamily and cradled his cheek in his hand. “So,” he began, “the algorithm?” Adam’s smirk grew wider. He stood in one graceful motion, and grabbed a dry erase marker from the very specifically— ‘Gans-ally’ —organized collection of writing utensils covering every inch of his desk. He yanked the cap off, took two long, brisk steps over to the window, and began to work. His brilliant mind calculated and recalculated long streams of beautifully scrawled math on the window, reconfiguring the code needed.
Noah laughed for real, and Gansey laughed with him.