Work Text:
It’s Gansey. I’m at the hospital , the text said. Meet me there?
Adam looked at Ronan’s phone, feeling his heart climbing up into his throat. Surely if Gansey was able to text, it couldn’t be that bad, but the message hadn’t come from his phone. Instead, it hailed from a local Henrietta area code. Doubts flickered up in Adam’s mind at first, but even though Ronan’s cell number had been scrubbed off a stall at Nino’s, no one ever dared to text him. Even if they did, to invoke Gansey’s name in the process was risky business. The doubt withered away in Adam’s certainty it wasn’t a terrible prank, but a myriad of possibilities flashed through his mind in its place.
Adam had a keen understanding of what could still be accomplished, even when things hurt. They were already more than halfway back to Adam’s house, and it was late. He’d stayed at Monmouth until the last possible minute before his curfew. Ronan glanced over at him when he slowed for a red light, every line of his sharp face taut with questions he couldn’t bring himself to say out loud. Adam spent a minute too long trying to name what he saw in the crease of Ronan’s brow, the fierce line of his mouth, that he hadn’t realized one of those unasked questions was directed at him.
“Parrish,” Ronan finally said.
The BMW idled, a beast ready to bolt, while the opposing green light took its sweet time to shift yellow.
Adam looked at his watch. He’d make it home just in time if they kept going.
I’m at the hospital .
Why? Accident? Bee sting? Adam’s ribs constricted with the conflict of it. When he closed his eyes, behind his lids was a flash of the Camaro in a ditch, the shadow of his father in the window, the ghost of bruises he didn’t have yet. His heartbeat thundered in his ears. Hadn’t his mind already been made up when he saw the text come through?
“Let’s go.” He swallowed. “To Gansey.”
Something in Ronan’s face shifted, and instead of going forward when the light changed, he checked his mirrors and flipped neatly around the curb with the Beemer’s wheels screeching on the pavement, not in protest, but what seemed to be delight. Ronan and this car were the single beast, and they responded to one another. The horses kicked in under the hood, and they were racing for the hospital. Adam wrapped his fingers tightly around the edge of the console, because there was no part of this evening that didn’t doom one of them to something unpleasant. Probably all of them. Only an hour before, he’d been sitting with his knee pressed up against Blue’s. He’d looked at her through the lens of one of Gansey’s treasures. A treasure used to see a treasure. Why couldn’t it ever be simple?
There was only one hospital in Henrietta; not quite in the town proper, but crouched waiting to be of use off the next exit. Adam always remained vaguely aware of its existence because there was always a possibility he’d need it. It took 12 minutes to get there if you followed the speed limit; Ronan would get them in there in about 8, if his math was right. Adam wanted to ask questions, wanted to distract himself to make that time go by even faster, but all he sent back was, we’re on our way . Ronan reached over to turn his radio up very loud, and Adam’s head started to throb with the ache of it, but he didn’t protest. Instead, he watched as bruised knuckles got steadily whiter where Ronan gripped the wheel. This was probably a Ronan Lynch Gansey saw much more than Adam was privy too, and he couldn’t tell if he was allowed to see it now because Ronan trusted him or because he simply couldn’t contain it.
The bright lights of the emergency room’s covered vestibule flooded into the BMW, casting them in an eerie glow. Ronan looked considering about parking illegally in the fire lane, but then opted to park illegally in the handicapped space. Adam opened his mouth, but nothing came out, and Ronan huffed, backing into another spot instead.
Adam reached for the handle, but paused when he noticed Ronan hadn’t budged an inch since he put the car in park. It was still running, humming. With it, Adam wasn’t allowed to figure out if the fine tremble of Ronan’s arms was fear or the engine.
“Lynch?”
“I know.”
Those two words said fuck and I need a minute and Gansey all at once. Thinking about Ronan afraid made all the monsters in the world real. Robert Parrish, Barrington Whelk. He pointedly looked ahead, at the doors to the hospital, as if they would swallow him in once he walked through them. Unconsciously, Adam looked down at Ronan’s arms, the flashes of scarred skin beneath the leather bracelets and a feeling of dread that wasn’t entirely his pressed in on him so quickly he had to look away again. If Ronan noticed at all, he didn’t say anything. Adam forced himself to breathe in slowly through his nose, pushing down that feeling while his eyes scanned the parking lot.
That’s when he saw the Pig, parked perfectly straight in the lines and in the same condition Adam last saw it. That meant that Gansey had driven it here, he hadn’t crashed. Somehow how that made it a little easier to handle. There were plenty of other reasons, but it wasn’t the Pig stalling and getting run off the road. He touched Ronan’s leg, and Ronan’s head snapped to the side. All Adam did was point to the Camaro. What would it change about Ronan’s fear of going inside the hospital? Maybe nothing.
Ronan opened his door.
It was only a broken thumb.
All that panic, all of the urgency, and now they stood at the reception counter while a nurse with a tired but friendly smile told them that Mr. Richard Gansey had a broken thumb, and that they were just finishing up with him. Ronan looked as if he’d punch something, dark as a stormcloud, which meant he was relieved. Adam felt the closest thing he knew to despair, because as much as he cared about Gansey, he should have gone home. He weighed out the possibilities in his mind. Gansey’s broken thumb, in exchange for whatever mood his dad would be in by the time Ronan got him home. Adam pinched the bridge of his nose as they stood at the edges of the waiting room, looking at his watch again to gauge just how late he’d be and what it would cost. Neither he nor Ronan sat down in one of the many available chairs, nor did they go back out to the car.
They waited.
Minutes could have passed, hours. It all looked the same under these lights. Irreversible. No amount of lost time in this place would take them back to 9:52 two miles from his trailer. Ronan picked up a car magazine, but he flipped through it too erratically to really be taking it in. Adam watched the makes and models flicker by with the same distracted, crushing feeling he had looked at the cars in the parking lot.
“Oh, thank God you both are here.”
Like the sight of the Pig, Gansey’s voice unwound a little thing in Adam’s chest. Ronan tossed the magazine into a chair, and Adam sighed as he tucked it back into one of the racks. He opened his mouth to say something, but they stuck in his throat as soon as he saw Gansey, his hand wrapped, flanked by two police officers.
“Friends of yours?” one of them asked Gansey, eying Ronan with disdain.
Ronan snarled back, and Adam thought quite possibly he’d just put a face to one of the names on the tickets taped to Ronan’s bedroom door.
“Yes, sir,” Gansey chirped pleasantly, his politician voice. “Brothers, really. I can’t thank you enough for your time.”
The second officer waved him off. “If you have any more information on his whereabouts, give the station a call, son.”
Adam shifted uncomfortably while Gansey paused at the counter to take care of the visit. “We’ll wait outside,” he said. He didn’t want to watch Gansey pay for the splint on his thumb in cash or worse, a credit card. It was so easy for him to be hurt and put back together, and even with a broken thumb, he looked flawless and untouchable under the flourescent lights. Ronan needed no more than that to go stalking out the doors, and Adam followed him.
Ronan moved just out of the reach of the building’s lights, the shadows between the parking lot overheads perceived as much safer territory for him to start pacing. Adam sat down on the curb nearby, painfully still in comparison. Was there anything he could say about tonight to make up for how late he was. Somehow, he didn’t think his dad would care about one of his rich friends going to the hospital for a broken thumb, of all things. Ronan’s anger was contagious; Adam could feel it prickling across his skin, needling to infect him. The only thing that staved it off was the cops. He recalled the officer’s words if you have any more information on his whereabouts . Who? Adam rubbed his forearm, the scabs from the dolly dragging incident all but gone now. A sneaking suspicion haunted him like the presence of Noah’s breath on the back of his neck.
Footsteps approached and Adam looked up. The Gansey who paused before them now was not the one they’d left to pay the bill. Adam stood up immediately and Ronan stopped pacing. Gansey looked undone, at once fretful and raw, the Gansey that hid himself in the corners of miniature Henrietta when he couldn’t sleep at night. Adam just now noticed he was wearing his glasses, his eyes seemingly more naked behind them than when there was nothing on Gansey’s face at all. Adam likened it to looking in the mirror some mornings, only the bruises were deeper than skin. Something had been taken from him, an intrinsic something, like a rib or a lung, or scraped a sample off of Gansey’s restarted heart. To Adam’s surprise, he saw something else in the tight set of Gansey’s mouth.
Fury.
“He took my phone.”
Ronan had opened his mouth, probably to cuss Gansey out for this whole debacle, but shut it immediately.
“He took my journal. Barrington Whelk .” He spat out the name as if it were vile, and Adam felt the acid under his skin more potently than Ronan’s venom a moment ago. “On the side of the road. I thought he was going to help me, and he—he put a gun to my goddamn head.” He pressed two fingers of his left hand to his forehead, and Adam went cold. He could see it all too clearly, the man who’d killed Noah, could have done the same thing to Gansey and they wouldn’t have known about it until he and Whelk both went missing from class the next day. Adam didn’t know what to do with the things he was feeling in his chest right now.
“Tell me you punched that son of a bitch,” Ronan growled, with all the promise that if he got his hands on Whelk now, he’d do more than just punch him.
Gansey looked down at his hand. It was so much more than a broken thumb. “I…didn’t think about how much it would hurt.”
Ronan was a body electric, Adam could feel it. As he sparked with pride and rage, all of that looked like it was leeching out of Gansey, leaving him tired and washed out.
“We should go to Jane. Her family will know what to do.”
Ronan hissed. “We know where he’s going, let’s just go after him.”
“And do what?” Adam said quietly. “Give him someone else to try and kill? Gansey’s right. I think there’s too much at stake for them to turn us away this time.”
Gansey looked at Adam, and in once glance he knew Gansey had seen the risk Adam had taken. He turned to where the cars were parked and started walking. He didn’t want Gansey’s pity because his coach had already become a bruised and rotting pumpkin. He wanted what they all wanted, to avenge Noah, to find Glendower, to have that favor, to take back what had been stolen from Gansey. Adam had to accept that he’d made his choice long before this moment.
“Are you coming or not?” he asked on his way to the BMW.
Adam already knew the answer.