Chapter Text
‘Did you know,’ says Gansey, his wire glasses slipping down his nose, ‘that there’s a Scandinavian water spirit called ‘The Neck’?’
‘Why would I ever know that?’ Ronan, for the last ten minutes, has been trying, (and failing), to find a working battery to fit into a Gameboy. It’s a faded blue colour, a relic of a younger, dumber time, and Noah has been bothering him to make it work for days now. Adam watches as Ronan fiddles with something; a plastic device displaying the charge of the battery pressed against its metal prongs. Ronan presses battery after battery into the thing, and with each one, the screen’s indicator plunges into the range of ‘empty’. Adam knows the feeling.
Gansey continues speaking as if he’s been given enthusiastic encouragement.
‘Nixe,’ he continues, ‘that’s the Germanic word for them, but they’re in all kinds of European folklore, mostly Scandinavian. Nekker, näke, nøkken… They appear differently in different countries, but they were essentially male water spirits. Liked to play music, ‘sit around in rivers and lure you to your death’ type of things.’
‘So boy mermaids,’ says Ronan, throwing away another battery with a huff. which Adam quietly picks up off the floor, ‘not so inspired.’
‘Not at all. They lived in rivers and lakes, not the sea. They were shapeshifters as well, only recognizable, or at least in Swedish folklore, by their long, greenish-black hair. No tail, either!’
Adam watches as glasses-Gansey, his preferred type of Gandey, punctuates his sentence with a quirk of his hands, and for a second Adam is roped into his excitement. No tail, indeed!
‘Is this a buildup to a story about the forbidden love between Glendower and a Scandinavian river bachelor?’
Ronan rewards Adam’s comment with the hint of a smile on his thin mouth. He drops another empty battery on the floor.
‘I can’t be interested in things that aren’t Glendower?’
Adam raises an eyebrow, rolling the battery between his thumb and forefinger.
‘You’re lucky I like you, Parrish,’ Gansey replies with a smile, and then in a heartbeat he’s rifling in a drawer and thumbing through loose sheets of paper like a man possessed. Adam remains in his sunken position on the couch, curious despite himself. Once Gansey finally finds what he was looking for with a triumphant click of his tongue, he sits down next to Adam, holding a few black and white printouts of what is obviously the Neck.
‘I thought you’d like it,’ says Gansey, with a familiar shy tone that has recently accompanied every moment where he tries to offer Adam something. Adam tries not to feel like he’s being crept around, like a bomb just waiting for permission to go off. He knows it’s Gansey trying to be less insisting. It’s Gansey trying to hear him, (in his own noisy way).
Ronan pokes his head surreptitiously over the top of the couch to peek at the papers.
‘He, being the Neck, played the fiddle. He played these wonderfully beautiful and melancholy songs,’ Gansey sighs happily, as if it’s the most romantic thing he’s ever heard, ‘I’m not entirely sure what constitutes a song sounding ‘yearning’, but it seems rather interesting. Oh! And if he didn’t end up drowning you, there was a chance he’d teach you how to play in the same way.’
Adam peers at the printout, past where the ink has bled a little, and where the quality is more grainy than a wheat field. The Neck stares back at him, crouched on a river rock, his long toenails digging into the moss. His bony ribs glint with water, and long dark hair traipses down, down, down over the hint of scales on his shoulders and into the water. The Neck’s teeth pull into a sneer, or perhaps a smile, as he holds his fiddle to his ear. He looks a little like Ronan.
‘Cool,’ says Adam.
‘How come you didn’t find a cryptid for me ?’ Ronan grumbles..
‘You’ve already got one!’ says Noah with a smile in his voice, pointing to Chainsaw. He had solidified into existence at some indefinite point in the last few minutes, and he leans one smudgy arm on the back of the sofa.
‘Folklore,’ Gansey corrects. Ronan practically is one himself, thinks Adam.
‘You’d better start learning the fiddle,’ Ronan tells Chainsaw, and she screeches back at him.
‘Oh, did you fix it?’
Ronan blinks, looking to the Gameboy on the floor next to him, surrounded by a dozen batteries that slowly roll around the floor.
‘It wasn’t broken, Czerny, it just needs new batteries.’
‘Mm,’ Noah replies, loose smile and loose white hair, ‘so it’s fixed?’
Adam tries not to smirk at the frustrated noise that escapes Ronan’s lips.
‘I’ll just dream you one that doesn’t need batteries,’ he finally says.
‘But I want this one.’
Ronan sighs even harder, running a hand over his buzzed head. Adam looks away, back at the black and white printouts on his lap.
‘Parrish,’ says Ronan, ‘C’mon.’
‘Excuse me?’ Ronan’s face, once Adam turns to look at him, is cleanly scrubbed of any emotion.
‘Come get some fucking batteries with me.’
‘You think Gansey’s goin’ crazy?’
Ronan turns imperceptibly towards Adam, hands a little tighter on the wheel.
‘Why the fuck would you say that?’
Adam is silent for a moment, using his teeth to pull at a loose tab of skin next to his nail. Ronan’s eyes leave the road fully, watching as the skin stretches, and finally breaks.
‘Lookin’ for Glendower is like… like breathin’, to him. What’s he doing lookin’ up sad fiddling doppelgängers for me?’
Ronan turns back to the road.
‘Feels guilty?’ he offers, with a shrug of his shoulders. An uncomfortable warmth curdles in Adam’s stomach, some leftover jealousy or shame that hasn’t quite crawled out yet.
‘Don’t care about that anymore,’ he murmurs, staring resolutely out the passenger window. Ronan scoffs, and when he speaks his voice is gruff and quiet, as if it takes effort just to get the words out.
‘You care a little bit,’ he says.
Adam doesn’t look at him, trying to put his words together in a way that won’t sting. He doesn’t want to fight. He doesn’t wanna fight.
‘I don’t care in the way y’think I do,’ he finally says. Ronan grunts, the perfect concocted balance between disbelieving and approving, so that Adam has no clue what to do with it.
‘Fine,’ says Ronan, ‘and maybe he just thinks you should learn to fiddle.’
‘Don’t have time.’
‘Psh. It’d look great on your college papers.’
‘If I ever put ‘plays the fiddle’ on my college papers, y’all can just shoot me right there ‘n then.’
Ronan turns to look at him, and his eyes are the fondest shade of blue as he barks out a laugh.
They’re mostly quiet for the rest of the drive, and they’re quiet as Ronan pulls into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven and turns off the engine. Adam’s Sprite t-shirt, (Blue thinks he should branch out aesthetically), sits sticky against his back. The heat of the day has begun to slink back under the horizon, but the memory of it still drenches Adam; his face is slightly pearly with sweat, and the veins on his hands are warm and prominent. Still, it’s Saturday, and the thing about Saturday heat is that it tends to feel more lazy than oppressive.
Inside, Ronan tosses a pack of batteries into the shitty shopping basket, eyes flitting around for the chip aisle.
‘Blue hates those, y’know,’ says Adam, as Ronan picks up an absurdly priced packet of truffle oil flavored chips. Ronan’s returned smirk is full of a resounding: I know.
‘Asshole.’
Ronan rolls his eyes and tosses in a packet of plain salted chips.
‘Good boy,’ Adam teases, and Ronan’s eyes suddenly seem very sharp under the fluorescent lights of the store.
They leave with more than they’d meant to get, but equal to what Adam had expected. (Ronan really did like his chips.) On the drive back, Ronan’s phone pings from the glovebox, and Adam fishes it out and reads the message like he always does.
‘Gansey wants us to pick up Blue,’ he says.
‘What am I, a bloody chauffeur?’
‘It’s lucky you ain’t, ‘cause your customer service blows.’
‘You blow,’ says Ronan.
‘Hm, not recently,’ Adam replies, and despite the complete idiocy of the joke, despite the almost too easy setup, Ronan scoffs out a satisfying laugh and flips him the finger. It feels strange to be joking like this, as if Gansey hasn’t become more jittering nerves than Gansey, as if Noah isn’t more smudgy and vacant than ever, as Persephone isn’t still gone, lifeless. Dead.
Everything is changing, though not all necessarily all sour. Adam has Ronan’s makeshift bed of sheets and a limp pillow on the floor of St. Agnes to prove it.
‘You guys stink,’ says Blue as she climbs into the backseat. She’d forgone pants or leggings in the interest of not getting heatstroke, and she shuffles her Frankenstein’s monster of a skirt self consciously over her legs once she’s settled.
‘As if you smell any better, maggot,’ says Ronan, nose scrunched up his face a little to make room for his sneer.
Adam smiles at her, and she smiles back. The connection feels a little stronger than the last, which had felt stronger than the one before that. It’s better. They’re better.
Blue looks away to the bag of batteries and junk on the seat next to her and moves to peer into it.
‘Oi, fuck out of it, sticky fingers.’
Blue rolls her eyes.
‘He bought the chips I hate, didn't he?’
Adam shrugs.
In a quieter voice, Blue says, ‘Bet he bought what you like, though.’
Adam tries very hard not to turn as red as the offending can of Coke that he knows is sitting inside the plastic bag.
‘You know,’ she continues, louder, ‘just because you’re a bad boy who doesn’t give a shit doesn’t mean you can’t try and be a little bit sustainable.’
Ronan doesn’t look back at her but raises an eyebrow, his face a complicated brew of emotions. Adam spots fondness, but it is quickly ushered away.
‘Seriously, I’ll buy you a tote bag so you stop using so much plastic.’
‘I’m not using a tote bag, you loser.’
‘Fine,’ says Blue petulantly, crossing her brown arms and letting out a huff of air, ‘Adam will use the tote bag for you, seeing as you make him go with you every time you want so much as a protein bar.’
‘Drop dead,’ Ronan replies lightly, and Blue’s laugh chimes out behind them. Even though it’s a feeble defence against the sticky dread that hangs right outside the window, the sound of it makes Adam feel clearer than the summer sky.
Adam hadn’t expected to be reminded of Gansey’s river spirit again, so he’s surprised when a leather-bound journal slides onto his desk a few minutes before class starts. Gansey is missing his wire-frame glasses but makes up for it with an earnest smile as he looks down at Adam.
‘I have enough school supplies,’ says Adam, voice tight and metallic.
Gansey blanches, but recovers quickly, face rearranging into pleasant politician Gansey. Adam hates it. He misses Gansey’s glasses.
‘No, it’s… It’s just the only empty one I had, I wanted you to have-’ Gansey flips the journal open, and inside are pages and pages of little clippings, Gansey’s handsome prose, and pictures of a familiar long-haired creature that look suspiciously hand-drawn.
‘I know it’s rather strange,’ Gansey admits, rubbing a finger along the strong bridge of his nose, ‘and I know you aren’t particularly interested in the Neck, he just… reminded me of you. Or, reminded me for you? Gosh, just take the damn thing.’
Adam has never been so touched by something that he isn’t remotely interested in. Maybe that’s the point, that it’s something sprawling and indefinite and a little pointless; something that a normal (if eccentric) person could give to a normal friend because he wants to, not out of some pursuit of heroism.
Adam finds himself all of a sudden obsessed with Scandinavian river bachelors.
‘Thanks,’ says Adam quietly, and he knows that his voice must be saturated in emotion because politician Gansey slowly slides away, and Gansey is in front of him, eyes bright and a little shy, his ever-restless fingers tapping away against his Aglionby trousers.
‘This is a real weird gift, y’know?’
Gansey chuckles in response, ‘You don’t mind?’
‘Nah. I like weird.’
Gansey positively beams.
‘So do I,’ he says, and for the rest of the class, Adam thinks about how he can do more than put thorns in palms, and scry into the dark and nearly lose himself. He can also do simpler and more satisfying things, like make Richard Gansey III smile.
By the lunch break, Gansey has gone back to erratic flipping through one of his own notebooks, a spot of ink on the line of his jaw below his mouth. Noah steps out of the quiet and concentrates very hard to be able to rub the offending smudge away. Adam watches vacantly, debating whether to undo a third button and risk Ronan calling him a slag, or stay as he is and slowly cook to death in his Aglionby uniform. Frustratingly, even with his tie loosened and spots of ink on his face, Gansey looks like he’s just stepped out of an Abercrombie ad, dishevelled in the most natural way that always comes entirely unnaturally to Adam. He sighs and undoes a third button.
‘Looking sexy, Parrish,’ says Ronan as he slumps against the tree beside Adam’s right side, shirt entirely unbuttoned, his white tank underneath a little damp with sweat. It pisses Adam off, but a little less than usual.
‘Mm,’ says Adam, very cleverly. He runs an absent hand through the grass, fingers gathering small bunches of grass that bend and slip away like the tide. His fingers scrape a at the dirt beneath, and not for the first time, he marvels at the sensation of knowing that there is more. More than just dirt and pebbles and layers of earth cast there over hundreds, thousands of years. It never gets old - that feeling of pressing his fingers against the dirt and knowing he is checking a pulse, like fingers on a wrist.
‘Can I say something and not have you get all pissy about it?’
Adam blinks, turning towards Ronan in a way that he knows is a little too fast, too bird-like.
‘Believe it or not, I don’t actually like fightin’ with you.’
Ronan rolls his eyes in a wordless, Could’ve fooled me.
‘How come you never play your recorder?’ Ronan says instead.
Adam blushes right down to his neck, and he’s sure that Ronan watches in amusement as he turns pink even past his three unbuttoned buttons.
‘Right, yeah I’m pissed,’ he says miserably, refusing to look Ronan in the eye, ‘s’not like I go through your stuff.’
‘You go through my stuff at the Barns all the time,’ says Ronan, one hand spinning the leather bands on his wrist back and forth, ‘Besides, I didn’t fucking mean to see it, it was in your drawers when I needed a clean shirt the other week.’
Adam flicks his eyes over to Gansey, but he’s still lost behind an expensive-looking leather-bound journal. He catches Noah’s eye though, who coughs in an effort not to laugh.
‘So,’ Ronan prompts, a little gruffly, ‘You any good?’
‘It’s a recorder, Lynch. You cap out on the skill level after learning Mary Had a Little Lamb .’
‘Tetchy. What if I was really into the recorder? You’d have just hurt my feelings.’
‘You don’t have-’ he cuts off abruptly. He knows Ronan has feelings, knows it hungrily and in the same way he knows the grass beneath him is alive. He does up one of his buttons, and Ronan watches him in the quiet, perceptive way that Adam doesn’t quite know what to do with. ‘You don’t have any interest in the recorder,’ he finally says.
‘But you do?’
‘Look,’ says Adam, ‘can you just leave off about it?’
Ronan scoffs and folds his arms against his chest, his sharp face turning acrid.
‘God fucking forbid I extend an olive branch,’ he says, and they both know immediately that it was the wrong thing to say; wrong in a way that the heat of the day and the ever-present tension of Other Things make it so easy to snap at the slightest scent of blood.
‘Don’t need your branches,’ Adam says, voice all sharp edges and snark, ‘got enough from Cabeswater.’
‘Smartass.’
Adam hears Noah giggle at that, and his embarrassment rises, both at the childish scene he and Ronan are undoubtedly making, and at the knowledge that their friends are undoubtedly watching.
‘I left my textbook in my locker,’ he says in the snarkiest tone he can muster, and Ronan watches him leave with a huff. Before Adam is fully out of earshot, he hears Gansey murmur something to Ronan, disappointed and indistinct.
No one really looks at him as he walks through the halls, passing his locker and opening the door to the library. The isolation makes it easier to sink further into his foul mood, like the way the initial anxiety of being caught in the rain gives way to a savage enjoyment of the downpour once you know you can’t escape it.
He plants himself at a desk, hovering for a second as he realizes that he has nothing to do; all his school books are in his locker.
Instead, he pulls out the journal Gansey’d made for him and opens it to the first page, which has the printout Gandey had shown him at Monmouth pasted onto the page. He smiles; Gansey has added the clumsy outline of a Coca-Cola t-shirt onto the Neck in black ink.
As he reads Gansey’s notes, (which are complete with the odd citation and reference to larger works), Adam thinks about being able to play with such prowess, pain maybe, that those who listen become spellbound; drawing out emotion from people like a well that can drag water from its depths long after you think it had run dry. Adam imagines being able to play so gruesomely sweet that people would drown for him.
He turns more pages and eats up their contents, past Gansey’s notes on the differences in portrayal between countries, past the notes about dancing plagues and feet enchanted to step until they bleed.
The Neck does not have a human soul, Gansey has written, perhaps that’s why he plays with so much anguish. He will never find redemption!!! (Christianity was very relevant in the public consciousness, as I’m sure you can imagine.)
Adam snaps the journal shut, head spinning a little. Whether Gansey had put this together with the intention of poking some faraway, dusty part of him, or if it was just him sinking too far into the words, Adam didn’t know. But as he tucks the journal back into his bag, the word ‘redemption’ rings in his head again and again like church bells.
Ding! Not everyone gets to find redemption.
Ding! It’s so easy to lead people to drown.
Ding! What does it feel like to have a soul?
Ding! What do I need to atone for, anyway?
‘Nothing,’ says Noah quietly from behind him, and the shock of it sends a tiny electric wave through his chest, ‘I don’t think that’s why Gansey gave that book to you.’
‘I’ll never get used to that, y’know?’
‘Hm, me neither,’ Noah confesses, ‘but you hear me, yeah?’
Adam turns to Noah, takes in his deep-set, earnest eyes and the way one arm is folded against his abdomen, as if he needs to be held and tethered so badly that he has to do it himself. Adam thinks about holding out a hand for him.
‘You’re very good, Adam Parrish,’ says Noah, and his voice is so easy and honest that Adam can’t bear to disagree.
Noah’s smile turns vacant, and as he disappears, Adam wonders when he’ll next see him again. He hopes it’s soon, but something in his gut, maybe Cabeswater or maybe his own intuition, tells him it might not be as soon as he hopes.
Fuck, it’s hot. So hot that Adam thinks his nails are probably melting off his hands, so hot that his bare chest is probably getting sunburned, even though he’s laying on his creaky single bed above St. Agnes. He lays in silence, which he prefers. It’s too hot for music; music would only drown him.
Of course, when he hears the telltale sound of boots clunking their way up the stairs to his apartment, he can’t quite bring himself to feel put out. He opens the door before Ronan knocks, a little smug at the sight before him: Ronan with one fist in the air and his lips hanging open in faint surprise.
He composes himself quickly, quirking his mouth into a hesitant smile. He has a can of Coke clutched by his side, the condensation of it slicked onto his fingers.
‘I’m not thirsty,’ says Adam, looking at it.
‘Who says it’s for you, thick head?’
Adam rolls his eyes and steps away from the door so that Ronan can come through. He does so, with an intentional brush against Adam’s side as he passes him. Adam hadn’t thought he could feel any warmer today, but he was wrong.
Ronan moves to sit on the edge of Adam’s bed, and Adam suddenly remembers that he’s a little bit shirtless, scrambling to find something clean off the floor. He knows that Ronan is watching as he pulls an oil-stained shirt off the floor and slips it on, and tries to make it look as casual as possible. (Ronan doesn’t play games.)
Ronan cracks open the soda and tips his head back to take a gulp, neck bare and blue eyes locked with Adam’s as he drinks. (He doesn’t play games, but sometimes it sure feels like he does.)
‘Want some?’ Ronan asks him, with a post-swallow rustiness. Adam takes the soda from him and presses his lips to the same spot Ronan’s had touched. He doesn’t quite have the bravery to look him in the eyes as he drinks.
They say nothing for a few moments, both of their throats sticky-sweet from the soda.
‘Fucking hot up here, Parrish,’ Ronan finally says.
‘Hell’s above a church, who’d’ve thought?’
Ronan gives him a toothy smile. He doesn’t ask if Adam is upset: if he’s mad at him and why. He doesn’t ask, but Adam answers him anyway.
‘M’sorry for snapping at you before,’ he says, his accent slowing out the words and making them feel quieter, safer, ‘was embarrassed.’
‘I know, Parrish.’
‘You weren’t tryin’ to embarrass me, huh?’
‘Nope.’
‘Okay then,’ says Adam, and he’s surprised by how easily it is okay, ‘my dad gave it to me.’
Ronan doesn’t react to this, simply stares back at him as if the silent eye contact between them is a tether so holy that he’s afraid to break it.
‘Was my uh… fifth birthday? He was happy about something, I’spose, and brought me back one of those three buck recorders for my birthday,’ a pause, Adam rolls the can between his palms, ‘he didn’t like the sound of me playin’ it, though.’
‘Do you still play it?’
Adam moves to find the recorder amongst his t-shirts; a faded red thing that has the remnants of vividness. It’s light and cheap in his hand.
‘I can’t,’ he says simply, ‘I don’t even wanna touch it, not really.’
‘You liked playing it, though?’
‘I just said I-’
‘No,’ Ronan interrupts, gently, ‘when you did play it, when it was okay for you to play it, did you like it?’
Adam doesn’t know why he feels so guilty to admit it, but the word burns as he forces it from his mouth.
‘Yeah.’
‘You ever think about learning to play something else, then?’
Adam tilts his head in question, ‘Like what?’
‘I play a pretty mean guitar,’ says Ronan, canines flashing, ‘I could show you some moves. If you want.’
Adam feels a twinge in his stomach, imagining Ronan with the hard points of his fingers pressed against the neck of a guitar, head bowed in concentration as he forms out a chord. Adam tries to see Ronan playing an acoustic guitar, and even stranger, music that is quiet and woody instead of silver metal. He’s surprised to find that it doesn’t seem so strange after all.
‘I can’t afford a guitar,’ he says, finally.
‘I’ll dream you one,’ says Ronan, ‘I’ll even make it a crappy looking one so you don’t feel so fucking guilty about it.’
Adam rolls his eyes, but there’s a smile on his face, probably because it’s too hot to make the effort to hide it.
‘Why’re you so obsessed with me playin’?’
Ronan mumbles something like, ‘I dunno,’ and turns his head away from Adam, seemingly searching for something to do with his hands. He finds the journal from Gansey half-hidden under Adam’s covers and turns with a quirked eyebrow. Adam indicates his head, a wordless Go ahead.
‘Gansey made this for you?’
‘Yup. Think the old fella likes me,’ says Adam, and the two of them grin at each other, mirror images of fondness for their silly, earnest, glasses-wearing Gansey.
‘Soft bastard,’ Ronan comments, ‘except, I feel like he’s trying to hint at some puke-fest of a cosplay convention he wants to go to.’
Adam mock shudders, passing the Coke back to Ronan.
‘Can we bring you along as a plague riddled European peasant?’ Ronan can barely contain his snort, and the victory of it is hot in Adam’s chest.
‘Sounds like a fuckin’ hoot, I get to spend the whole day yelling Olde English obscenities and chucking silver crosses at you.’
‘Iron, actually,’ says Adam, without even meaning to.
‘Hm?’
‘They uh- the Scandinavian ones at least, the people held ‘em off with iron. Gansey wrote it down in the journal.’
‘Fuck, you’re a good little student, Parrish.’
And oh, if that doesn’t turn Adam pink right down to his bones. There’s no clever response waiting to escape from his lips, and he doesn’t have the Coke to take a nervous drag from, so he just laughs - a hot breath of it - and scratches at his jeans. Ronan watches the moment build, and lets it pass.
‘Wanna come throw bricks off the overpass?’
Adam scoffs.
‘You don’t wanna throw bricks off the overpass,’ he says.
Ronan shrugs a shoulder, smiles a lazy summer afternoon smile, and wipes the remnants of afternoon soda from his mouth.
‘Nah,’ says Ronan, ‘but I do want to get out of your literal oven of an apartment. Jesus, Parrish, ten more minutes and you’re gonna be well-done.’
They don’t throw bricks off the overpass, but the ice cream sundae they share, (one glass, two spoons), is much more fun, really.