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“The thing I don’t get, is me and you,” Blue says.
Ronan looks up at her, perched carefully on the edge of Gansey’s bed, and bares his teeth. “You can try and get rid of me if you like,” he says, and she huffs.
“I don’t,” she starts, before cutting herself off, “How can we share this,” she presses her fingers into the mark on her wrist, “when we barely even like each other?”
“It’s a package deal. And Gansey and Adam and Noah were all mine first.”
Blue tries to convince herself that she only imagined the snarl at the end.
--
She knows without being told that she should keep her mark hidden. For most people it’s a source of speculation and excitement. Who doesn’t want to find the person they’re going to share their life with?
But whoever shares her mark is marked for death. And she’s not ready to deal with that.
She tries not to look at the marks of the other kids at school. Some of them are impossible to miss: the heart on the cheek of the girl who sits in front of her, the crescent moon the guy in her sports class never covers on his forearm. Flowers, crowns, every imaginable sort of shape. Displayed proudly, a secret confided, accidentally stumbled upon.
There was a year where she proclaimed loudly, to anyone who'd listen, that the whole thing was a load of bullshit, the result of some need to ascribe meaning to meaningless birthmarks.
But even then she was careful.
(Harper saw hers, once. “I don’t know why you hide it, that looks wicked,” he’d said with a grin. She’d simply shrugged.)
--
“You don’t hate me.”
He glances over at her, then flicks his eyes towards where Adam and Gansey are fussing over the Pig. “You’d know if I hated you.”
“But you don’t like me, either,” she challenges.
“I don’t like anyone,” he counters.
“You like Gansey.”
“I don’t like Gansey. He’s just, Gansey.”
“Adam.”
“Is Adam.”
“You definitely like Noah.”
“Oh, come on. No one could dislike Noah, it’d be like disliking Matthew.”
She laughs, and for a moment his smile seems less hostile. The noise gets Gansey and Adam’s attention, and they seem pleased, if slightly unsettled, to see them getting along. The grin Ronan flashes them does little to calm their nerves. Blue rolls her eyes.
“You don’t like me either,” he points out, after the others have once again buried their heads beneath the hood, and she goes quiet.
“But I trust you,” she says at last.
“I trust you, too,” he replies, “For what it’s worth.”
--
Ronan discovered Gansey’s mark at the same time as the rest of the school.
When Richard Gansey III, future captain of the swim team, bared his chest in the locker room and showed everyone the raven sitting right over his heart.
(How many of them had seen the bird nested on Ronan’s back? How many of them made the connection between that bird and the one borne by Aglionby’s newest golden boy? The answer was always too many. It was a good month for bruised knuckles and split lips.
He buried Gansey’s mark with celtic knots from his father.)
He was glad of the mark, even when he resented it. He liked that there was something that said he was Gansey’s and that Gansey was his. That he got to dig beneath the politician's smile and lay claim to everything he discovered there.
--
“Anyone here?” Blue calls out as she lets herself into Monmouth.
“Oh good, it’s you.” Ronan says, greeting her with the barest glance, before returning his attention to, Blue can’t see exactly what, on the kitchen floor.
“Oh, good?” Blue repeats back.
“I need someone small,” he says, “How do you feel about rats?” and his smile is razor sharp.
"No," she says immediately.
"Don't tell me you're afraid of a little rat?" He sounds amused, and there’s no way in hell Blue’s going to admit that last time there was a rat at 300 Fox Way she stayed as far away as possible until Orla got rid of it.
"I'm not afraid," she says, squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin, "I just don't want to deal with your rodent problem."
“I don’t fit between the cupboards and the fridge. And if we don’t catch it, it’ll start snacking on Gansey’s books, and then we’ll have to deal with a moody Gansey,” he says with an exaggerated sigh.
“Get a cat.”
“I have a bird,” and Chainsaw lets out a soft kerah in confirmation, “and she brought the fucking thing in here in the first place,” she squawks in indignation.
“Still. No.”
He catches her eye, meets her stare for stare, “There’s nothing wrong with being scared.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” she says, because she’s not going to be scared in front of Ronan, and slips into the space between the end of the bench and the fridge.
She can see the rat. It’s small, it’s kind of cute, it doesn’t look that different to a mouse. She could reach it if she just reached out and…
It starts towards her and she screams. Ronan laughs. “Shut up,” she growls, and her hand does not shake as she reaches out for the creature, and she does not shudder as she scoops it up onto her palm.
She clambers up and out as quickly as she can, and dumps the rat in the container Ronan holds in his outstretched hands.
He smirks at her, she glares back.
--
Noah is the first person she decides to show it to, curled up together on the foot of Gansey’s bed.
She picks at a loose thread on her jumper, and he grins at her, flushed and pleased to be chosen.
She rolls up her sleeve, eyes carefully tracking his reaction. There’s no way for her to miss the way he freezes.
“You know who has the matching mark,” she says. It’s Gansey. She’s been sure of that since April.
(There was a time when she thought, hoped, feared it was Adam. His mark sits just behind his ear, and while his hair is carefully arranged to hide most of it, the bits of it she’s seen… But it’s not like she could ask for a closer look without revealing her own.)
He glances up to her face, pulls down the collar of his shirt, and shows her his mark, dark against his pale skin.
--
“What are you doing?” she asks, claiming a piece of Monmouth’s floor.
“They’re doing AP Calc,” Ronan answers without looking up from the drawings spreading across his page.
She groans, “Really? Calculus isn’t bad enough on it’s own?”
“Hello Jane,” Gansey says, “And APs -”
“And now,” Ronan says to Blue, completely ignoring Gansey, “he’s going to lecture us about the importance of APs and college, and applications. If you’re lucky, he’ll start talking about extracurriculars.”
“No he’s not, because he knows better,” she replies.
“I wasn’t,” Gansey starts, and then he lets out a sigh, “I think there might be yoghurt in the fridge, if you want.”
Adam looks up and offers Blue a small smile, “Sorry, we’ve got a test tomorrow. Ronan does too, but,” he shrugs. She glances over at Ronan and he shrugs too. “So feel free to study whatever.”
“Or not study,” Ronan adds.
“I vote not studying,” Noah says, materialising.
“Noah!" Ronan says, while Blue shivers, and Gansey frowns at her, and Adam watches, "Dude, you've been gone all day."
"More reason not to study now." The lights flicker overhead, and he looks at her sheepishly, "I didn't mean to do that."
"It's okay," Blue assures him, and he moves into the space beside her.
“If you have to study, I can still stay,” he says as he settles, and helps her unpack her books from her bags, pausing to read over an essay.
Ronan looks at them, at Noah curling up against Blue's side, at Gansey and Adam leaning over the textbook, and slams his book shut.
“I’m going for a drive,” he announces.
For a second it looks like Adam’s going to say something. Something like, wait, or I’ll come with you, or don’t bother coming back. He leaves before he has to find out which.
--
He hated Adam at first. He hates Blue at first.
He hated Adam for taking Gansey. Blue for taking Adam. (For being one of the million things he could blame for breaking Adam. For taking Gansey.)
(For taking Noah. Who he’d always thought of as his. Who he’d never had to worry about losing, not to Gansey, not to Parrish. Not until she showed up and he was hers, and then he was dead, and then he was decaying.)
He spent a lot of time hating Adam.
It’s harder to hate Blue for stealing them with a smile when Latin teachers keep trying to steal them away with bullets. When Cabeswater and Robert Parrish keep trying to break Adam down and remake him for themselves.
When she keeps Noah from disappearing. And her family keeps Adam from losing himself entirely. And she. She makes Gansey happy.
But he's always been a jealous creature, and he hates that they're as bound to her as they are to him.
--
Blue is waiting for Noah take his turn at the pool table when his cue clatters to the ground. Ronan jerks up from where he was lazing on the couch, startling Chainsaw into the air.
“He’s gone again,” Blue says, resigned.
“He’s disappearing more often,” Ronan says.
Blue nods. “I wish there was a way to stabilise him, without leaving him stuck in Cabeswater.”
Ronan flops back onto the couch, and for a moment he’s quiet. “I think something I’ve been trying to do might help with that.”
“Really?” Blue asks, bright and hopeful.
“If it ever works.”
“How can it not work? Don’t you just dream it, and it exists?”
“No,” he replies, his voice short and terse.
Blue hesitates before asking, “What are you trying to do?”
“Make something that’ll replicate the magic of Cabeswater,” he pauses, “It wasn’t for, it was for my mother, so she can leave. But theoretically it could help Noah too.”
“Oh,” she says, then, “It’d be nice, to have them back again.”
“Whatever, Sargent.”
And she feels a flush of pleasure at him referring to her as if she was one of them.
“You should come by my house. If anyone knows about Cabeswater, and harnessing the power of the ley lines, it’s probably the women of 300 Fox Way.”
“Like I’d voluntarily subject myself to that. I like my balls where they are.”
“If you want to avoid being castrated, just stay clear of Calla,” she replies lightly, and he lets out a surprised laugh. “Or I could ask around for you.”
There’s a pause. “Yeah, alright,” he says at last. “I can take you out to the Barns and show what I’ve got so far.
“Yeah, alright,” she says.
--
“And then, after he sent it back for a third time, he decided to lecture me about sourcing local, organic produce. Because the girl serving your food is really in charge of ordering stuff for the kitchen.”
Adam lets out a rueful laugh, and navigates his trolley into the next aisle.
“Whoever said the customer is always right, never had to deal with the customer,” he says sympathetically. It’s nice to be able to complain about work stuff to someone who’s not a self employed psychic, or Gansey, who does not get it, not even a little bit. “I had this one guy, who insisted that it his radiator snapped,” he pauses, “Hey, can you grab a can of tomatoes?” and Blue nods, before he continues, “And his radiator was fine, but -”
He cuts off suddenly, and Blue looks back at him in alarm.
“Adam?” her voice is tentative and unsure, and then she sees what he’s looking at.
She grabs the can quickly off the shelf, and shoves her sleeve back up over her wrist.
“I’ve never seen your mark before,” he says, his voice dry.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter now, since it’s Noah,” she says quietly.
“Noah?” he frowns, “It’s. Why do you think it’s Noah?”
“Because he showed me his mark?”
“Okay,” Adam says, and pushes his hair back from his ear, “It’s just that mine kind of looks the same too.”
--
Blue Sargeant has lost count of how many times she's been told that she will kill her true love.
Fingers pressed to the mark on her wrist, cards laid out, runes cast, tea leaves scrutinised.
Every single psychic eventually coming to the same blunt and inexplicably specific conclusion:
If Blue were to kiss her true love, they would die.
But if Noah’s her true love, she’s not sure where that leaves her.
“I don’t think I am,” he’d said after she told him, and he looked a little sad as he did. But he faded before she could ask what he meant.
Now, staring at Adam’s mark, she thinks she has some idea.
But she’s still not sure what to make of it all.
--
“So, the three of you all have the same mark?” Gansey asks. His voice is wooden, his eyes not quite meeting any of theirs. There’s a cold empty feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Ronan just rolls his eyes. “You do know what Parrish’s mark is, don’t you Gansey?”
“No.” It’s not. He’s not jealous. Not of the way Noah and Adam and Blue are standing together, and the way they fit. Of the way they apparently belong.
“It’s on his fucking face.”
“It’s covered by his hair. And it’s not polite to just look,” he says pointedly.
“Just because you don’t like everyone knowing yours, except Parrish, apparently,” he says, and sighs, “Stop moping and take off your fucking shirt.”
“What?”
“I’d take off mine, but there’s still a tattoo in the way.”
“Uh, what?” Blue says, and Adam looks like he’d like to be anywhere else. Noah, however, looks satisfied and unsurprised.
“You know,” Ronan says, pointing a finger in Noah’s direction, “you couldn’t have just said something?”
“You could’ve said something to Adam,” Noah points out.
Ronan simply shrugs his reply, and does not look at Adam.
“Ronan, what the hell is going on?” Gansey asks, and wonders if there’s any chance that things will start making sense any time soon.
“Blue, you should show him your mark,” Noah suggests. And she does, after shooting a baffled look in Noah’s direction.
“Oh,” Gansey says, fingers lightly brushing across it, a small thrill racing down his spine, “It’s a raven.”
“Yeah,” Ronan says, “Just like yours. Just like mine.”
--
“I’m going to do something that’s possibly stupid and potentially dangerous,” Blue tells Ronan.
He raises an eyebrow. “Do you want me to pass on any final messages?”
“I want you to come with me.”
“Are you gonna get killed or arrested?”
She grins, and he wonders how he’s never noticed quite how many teeth she has, “That’s why I’m bringing you.”
Glittering and deadly in the moonlight, it’s easy to see how she managed to steal her way into their hearts.
Glittering and deadly in the moonlight, it's very easy to imagine that he loves her too.