Chapter Text
Gansey broke off, his knowledge of perished linguistic oddities exhausted. “God, I’m tired.”
“So sleep.”
Gansey gave him a look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid to think that sleep was just a thing that could be so easily acquired.
Ronan said, “So let’s drive to the Barns.”
Gansey gave him another look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid as to think that Gansey would agree to something so illegal on so little sleep.
Ronan said, “So let’s go get some orange juice.”
Gansey considered. He looked to where his keys sat on the desk beside his mint plant. The clock beside it, a repellently ugly vintage number Gansey had found lying by a bin at the dump, said 3:32.
Gansey said, “Okay.”
They went and got some orange juice.
the dream thieves - maggie stiefvater
~
Ronan Lynch’s pockets are always rattling.
It’s never loose change. Instead it’s keys. Three flavors of chapstick. Two EpiPens—one pulled from a dream and one from the hospital. A pocket knife emblazoned with the likeness of the Virgin Mary wearing a red bikini and licking a stripe up the length of some sort of handgun. A button, white and pearlized, he sincerely means to give to Blue. A hot wheels Red Baron. A buzzing electric wasp repellant that he never allows to die. Three clothespins in the hopes that he and Gansey and Parrish can do their Christ, something stinks! skit the next time they bump into K in town.
Adam thinks it’s Gansey who needs to have his pieces around him all the time, but it isn’t. It’s Ronan who likes things. Heavy pockets, light heart. His dad was probably referring to having money when he said that, but kid Ronan didn’t know any better. Now he’s got trinkets and shit. A room full of dream-born ones, and a pocketful of real stuff to keep him grounded or whatever.
Anyway. The point is that Ronan’s every step rattles like he’s the closet and the skeletons inside, and it’s making the clerk behind the counter of the gas station convenience store look at him like he’s swinging his naked schlong around in front of the Pedialyte. Gansey, at his shoulder, looks all the quieter juxtaposed against it, under these buzzing, flinching fluorescents, thumb on his lip, squinting at the frosted fridge door even through his wire frames to read the label on a plastic bottle of orange juice. This particular Gansey is a wonder; the shorts he wears are too short, exposing a good amount of skinny thigh, and his salmon-colored AQUINNAH crewneck is too large, making him look like SpongeBob or one of those marshmallow snowmen Ronan remembers building at kindergarten holiday parties. Cinnamon candy buttons and pretzel stick limbs. The shadows under his beer-brown eyes are the clumsy pencil smudges of a fond artist’s thumb. His hair stands in headstrong tufts and cowlicks. It is Gansey at his best; it is the rarest Gansey of all. It is Ronan’s Gansey, when Gansey feels particularly philanthropical. Tonight’s display is not philanthropical, however. It is born of exhaustion, maybe. Detachment.
Ronan, with a derisive huff, resolves to make an appointment at the optometrist for him. God forbid Ronan himself were to squint someday; may Monmouth survive the earth-shaking Gansey would rend in his effort to eliminate the cause. When Gansey squints, however. When Gansey cannot see. Gansey treats that like Tuesday; coming and going.
Ronan glares down at the top of Gansey’s head once more. Short fucker. Mayor of fucking Munchkinland. Like Rizzo the Rat in the muppet version of Oz, which is, coincidentally, the only version of that movie Ronan has seen. Matthew likes it.
“Choose your fucking juice, man,” Ronan says.
“Patience,” says Gansey, “is a virtue. Ronan? Do I want orange-mango or just plain orange?”
“You,” Ronan says, grabbing the door by the sticky handle and swinging it open, “are a fruitcake yourself, Gansey-Boy. Your snacks should live up to your example.”
“Mm?”
“You’re having orange mango.”
“I look that dire?” Gansey says.
“Go find those potato chips that taste like pickles.”
“I look that dire?”
Ronan shoots Gansey an unimpressed look. Gansey offers two surrendering palms, then lurches into the waist-high maze of grease-saturated snacks. Ronan watches him for a moment, leaning over to read the technicolor labels as he is, before turning to grab a bag of strawberry fruit snacks and some Bugles.
He waits at the counter for Gansey, who comes, pickle chips in hand. He is chewing his cheek, staring through space rather than into it, and yet he gives the clerk his worst, most Gansey 3 smile and says, “Hi, good evening.” Ronan wants to shake him. To grab his face by the chin and squeeze. To bruise him; a promise inked in black and blue. Gansey is real and here. Ronan has a jangling pocket full of lifelines to prove it.
“Your fruit snacks?” drawls the clerk, hand extended to take them, and Ronan whips his gaze off Gansey to snarl at her.
“Down, doggy,” says Gansey.
“Woof,” says Ronan. He lobs the crap onto the counter, looking at Gansey again.
“Who’s paying,” says the clerk.
Ronan shoves his hand in Gansey’s pocket and frees his wallet; Gansey is busy staring hard at the little plastic tower of cigarette cartons and hardly reacts until the drawer of the register smacks shut, and even then, all he does is startle. They leave together, shoulder to shoulder, the clerk popping her bubblegum at their backs.
Night is unchanged. Without speaking, they sit on the concrete block at the front of the handicapped parking spot. A four a.m. crescent moon is snagged on the otherwise seamless spread of black velvet and sequin stars. Between them and Nino’s pizza purgatory on the other side of the street lies a barren one-lane; a single stop light blinks at a neat and steady pace, green yellow red all at once, staining the old-rain-damp pavement. Gansey very slowly opens his juice. Ronan very slowly opens his own and they sip at the same time, elbows knocking. Gansey makes a twisted face as he swallows; Ronan takes the orange-mango out of his hand and trades it for his (mangoless orange). Gansey makes a face at that one too; he’s always got mint-mouth. Still, he dutifully drinks, so Ronan sips the mango and tries to look at Gansey only peripherally.
They open the snacks and arrange them in a circle on the pavement. Every so often, he holds one up to Gansey’s mouth, and Gansey shakes his head just a little, and Ronan huffs derisively, flares his nostrils, and reminds himself that a gummified strawberry is nothing more. Anyway. Anyway.
This Gansey is making Ronan miserable. This Gansey is so fucking careworn it makes Ronan think of the days Gansey pulls out that horrible brown and green and navy fair isle sweater he snagged from a Goodwill, a junior’s thing from J. Crew or some shit that fits him just right, it’s itchy like hell and pilled from top to bottom and Gansey wears it every time he is sick, every time he is sleepless, every time he is sad, like a fucking. Comfort blanket. Ronan hates the sweater. He fucking hates it.
“Do you think you could sleep?” Ronan says.
Gansey chews his pickle chip consideringly. “No,” he says. It is funny, because he looks like he’s five deep breaths from knock-knock-knocking on catatonia’s door. He’s moving at half-speed, which is something Gansey has certainly never done before. Every blink is a conundrum; will Ronan see iris again? “No. Could you?”
“If you could, then I could,” says Ronan, and he can hear the edge in his voice. It sounds like teetering over a precipice, arms windmilling. It sounds terrified.
“I’d say dream of me,” Gansey says, a hollow humor in the lilt of his tone, “but then you’d never want to sleep again, huh?”
“Don’t say that shit,” Ronan says, heart falling into his ass.
“Sorry,” Gansey says. “Good Lord. Sorry. I’m just… feeling sorry for myself.”
“Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. You bastard.”
“Oh come on,” Gansey says. His voice is so smooth that Ronan wonders what heel-sucking rip current of emotion he’s hiding behind it. “Come on.”
“Come on, what?” Ronan says. Gansey doesn’t look at him, and he feels urgent. “No. Come on, what?”
“It was just—” Gansey drops his cheek onto his kneecap, tilting his glasses awry, squishing an eye shut. “A joke. Ronan. Don’t take me seriously,” he says, as if Ronan could ever not.
“You,” Ronan says, dropping his fruit snacks onto the pavement, heart hammering on the walls of his ears, “would be the beautifulest fucking dream I’ve ever had.”
The look on Gansey’s crumpled face is the visual equivalent, Ronan thinks, of a stutter.
“Shut up,” Ronan says. “Shut up, Dick, I swear to fucking—Gansey. Gansey.” He says it like rolling a gobstopper over his tongue, like sampling every new flavor. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Ronan,” he says, strangled.
“I am so scared of you,” Ronan says. “Did you know that? I’m so fucking scared of you.” Gansey must have put his chips down because he has a double-handful of the front of Ronan’s shirt, knuckles grazing his ribcage through the thin cotton. “I am going to destroy you some day. Don’t—I know that look. Don’t say something about going down together, don’t do it, don’t you dare. That’s my nightmare, Gansey. Gansey, that is my fucking nightmare, for you and I to go together.”
Gansey is looking up at him like he cannot believe him. “Good Lord almighty, Ronan,” he says. And then, scooting to the polar end of the paved blockage with a sound not unlike someone suckerpunched, “Drink your juice.”
“What, what,” Ronan says, following him, ducking, trying to meet his eye. “Don’t do this, you Drew Barrymore ass.”
“Is that all I am to you?” Gansey says. He is now picking the label off his juice bottle; Ronan takes it the moment it’s freed, neatly folds it, and stows it in his pocket. Gansey will want it later for his Henrietta, but if he holds it now, he will tear it to shreds. “A casualty waiting to happen?”
“That’s not all,” Ronan says, and Gansey scoffs. “That’s not all, Gansey. Look at me. Look at me, you ignoramus.” Then Gansey does, hair loose on his forehead and eyes too dark behind his lenses, and Ronan says, “Okay, look away. Go, turn around again, I can’t do anything when you look at me like that, I can’t think around you.”
“Sorry,” Gansey says, and Ronan says, “No,” so Gansey says, “Sorry?”
“I wish,” Ronan says, “I could just. Show you. Oh my God. Gansey.”
“Show me,” Gansey repeats.
“I cannot create coherent thought,” Ronan says, “while looking at you, my brain is like.” He mimes an airplane plummeting from cruising altitude using one flattened palm.
“Why,” Gansey says.
Ronan looks from Gansey’s right eye to the left one, then scoffs. He can taste his heartmeat like a mouthful of mealy, overripe peach. “Fuck you.”
“F—you, Ronan, you, use your words. Please. Try.”
“I am trying.”
“Try harder.”
“Fuck you. Dick. Richard. Ricky Gervais.”
Gansey gives a single shout of laughter. “Ronan,” he says.
“Yeah,” says Ronan.
“I have to tell you something,” Gansey says, “and you cannot get angry at me. You just have to listen to me.”
Ronan looks down at Gansey and says nothing.
Gansey is staring into the carless night ahead of them, two hands locked around the throat of his juice bottle. “I had this little—orange cake thing, once,” he says. “It was so good that I have never forgotten it. It was this big—” he holds up a circle made with his thumb and forefinger, “—and shaped like the fruit. Painted to look like it, even. And it had marmalade inside.” Richard Gansey is perhaps the only person alive who can sincerely say the word marmalade and sound like neither a hick nor a pretentious bastard. “And if I die—”
“Fuck you.”
“What did I say.”
Ronan stays quiet, fire behind his eyes.
“Ronan,” Gansey says. He holds his juice bottle up, watching the liquid slosh. “If I die, I want orange cakes at my funeral. Wake. Whichever.”
“Don’t fucking say that shit to me,” Ronan says, a cool numbness seeping in curls through his chest as he tapes a cut-out of Gansey’s face over that of his father lying limp and bloodsoaked at the Barns, Gansey in a dark wooden coffin; Helen and Missus Gansey crying, Dick 2 staring into empty space like listening intently for an especially miserabilist ghost. “Don’t talk about you being dead. Don’t do that.”
Gansey’s knuckle swipes across Ronan’s cheek, then it’s the heel of his palm, his other hand holding Ronan’s head still. Ronan looks to the sky, breath shuddering, and Gansey says, “Crybaby.”
Ronan knocks their knees together. For Gansey, he is a crybaby. For Gansey, he is mostly everything. “Why did you say that to me,” Ronan says.
“I just have a bad feeling,” Gansey says. Wonder or pain, wondering or in pain. “Maybe Glendower will change his mind. Maybe Orla will find Monmouth and we’ll have to commit double murder-suicide to escape her wiles. Maybe a wasp will corner me in a dark alley in the middle of the night and when I refuse to hand over my wallet, he’ll give me a permanent sort of shakedown.” A moment of quiet. “Do you ever just have a bad feeling, Ronan?”
Ronan gives Gansey a little laugh, as a gift.
“Yeah,” Gansey says, lips quirking for a moment. Ronan knows well that beer makes his dreams come easier, but he would need a cocktail of everclear and absinthe to dream up that fleeting dimple-pressed thing.
“I am going to tell you something now,” Ronan says, and Gansey still looks at him, still this wan version of Gansey, this shadow-thing, this fingerprint clone without any of the Ganseyisms, the build-a-bear stuffing, this is already the fucking wake and Ronan is viewing the body. “Wake up.”
Gansey does that thing where he blinks hard, politely confused.
Ronan huffs. “Screw you. Gansey. Wake up.”
“What do you mean by that,” he says.
“I mean,” says Ronan, “wake up.”
“I never went to sleep,” says Gansey.
“Aw,” Ronan says. “Gansey. Feinted idiocy doesn’t suit you, babe.”
Gansey stares at him for a moment, then looks away, breath hitching in a cyclical wave-crush sort of way. “I can’t.”
Ronan doesn’t know what to say to that; he can count the times he has heard Gansey use those words in relation to himself on one hand. He roughly shoves Gansey’s fringe off his forehead. Gansey tilts just slightly into the touch, eyes scrunching shut like it was a blow. Like he expects Ronan to hurt. “Well,” Ronan says. He cannot bring himself to pull away. It’s like earning the trust of a stupid cat; the cat will come back, oh God will it ever, but Ronan wants to deserve it. The cat. “I’ve got nothing, dude.”
“That’s okay, dude,” Gansey says. “Can I have a fruit snack now.”
Ronan digs into the narrow packet with two fingers and fishes one out. Gansey takes it with his teeth and chews slowly. They’re stale. Ronan’s thumb brushes the spot between Gansey’s brows, a slow drag of skin on skin. He cannot help watching the way Gansey’s face pulls as his jaw works; a railroad handcar. With Ronan’s hands on it.
“Gansey,” Ronan says.
“I am going to need you to tell me, very factually,” Gansey says, brows drawn and lips puckered, using the afflicted whiskey-warm accent that could only mean he’s imitating his father, “your intentions with my son, Mister Lynch.”
“Dick,” Ronan says, affecting his speaking-with-Ganseys attitude in turn. Something is flailing in his stomach. When Gansey jokes, really jokes, Ronan feels high. “Dick, Mister Gansey, sir, I intend to corrupt your son beyond the point of return. I intend to find a beer he likes, no matter how many years and six-packs it takes. I intend to teach him how to use Pandora radio. I intend to convince him Eggo waffles are a healthy breakfast option as compared to not eating at all. I intend,” one of Gansey’s eyes peeks open, a hungry fucking pit, and the air leaves Ronan’s lungs in a huff like he was punched between the shoulders, “to kiss him, if he’ll let me.”
Gansey is quiet for a moment, breathing very evenly. “On the mouth?” he says.
Ronan gives a weak laugh. “Yeah. On the mouth, man.”
“That won’t… fix—”
“I’m not trying to,” says Ronan. “Good God, Gansey. There’s nothing in this world strong or smart enough to fix your demented ass. Be miserable if you want to. I, on the other hand, want to kiss you.”
“You want to,” Gansey says. “You really—?”
“Yeah,” says Ronan.
“Oh,” Gansey says. He nods slowly. “Hm.”
“What?” says Ronan. “What? You’re killing me, Dick. You’re fucking actually killing me, you are actively removing the organs from my body one by one and I am hurtling towards permanent brain death, unplug the vents—”
“It’s just,” Gansey says, looking at Ronan’s mouth, “that I have spent a good long time wondering if I was going to end up taking this to the grave.”
“Taking what.”
“Being all in love with my best friend like an—an idiot.”
And so Ronan pitches forward, one hand on either side of Gansey’s jaw, and kisses him as promised: right on the mouth. The first moment, the touchdown, is frantic and afraid. Unmoving. Chapstick-tacky. And then Gansey slumps like the sun has come up, he drapes a palm over the back of Ronan’s neck and realigns their noses and Ronan all but smacks his arms around Gansey, getting a good tight hold on him, a collected load of laundry or something, all these many discordant pieces that make up one Gansey 3, Ronan takes them all up and he presses his mouth to them. Mint breath on Ronan’s tongue, Suave-shampoo-hair pressed to Ronan’s forehead, pretty Gansey hand toying the lobe of Ronan’s right ear. It is quiet. It is not fervid so much as it is earnest. It is not a surprise so much as it has been hinted at forever. And now it is here, huffing against Ronan’s neck while Ronan presses his lips to that incomprehensible fucking dimple the very corner of Gansey’s jaw makes when he clenches his teeth.
“Hi,” Ronan says, hiding in Gansey’s collarbones for a second. “Good fucking God almighty, Dick.”
“I cannot fathom,” Gansey says, sounding shaken, so Ronan tugs on his hair, just a little. Gansey gulps audibly, neat fingernails skimming the curve of Ronan’s skull. “At the gas station, Ronan?”
Ronan feels a grin crawl across his lips, one corner to the other. “Woof,” he says again. Gansey has got his hands on Ronan’s face all disbelieving-like, thumbs in the dips below Ronan’s eyes, breath on Ronan’s lips. “Your fingers are cold.”
“Warm me, then,” Gansey says with a hiccuping laugh. “Ronan, what in the good fuck.”
Ronan, who must hear Gansey curse more than the others do but never hears him curse like that, laughs helplessly, falling forwards, and Gansey takes advantage—pulls Ronan closer, holds his head in the dip of his shoulders, all but fucking cradles him, “Good God,” Ronan chokes. “Gansey. I love you, man.”
“I have never been so happy not to sleep,” says Gansey. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner, you blockhead.”
“Why didn’t you tell—”
“I invited you to live with me,” Gansey says over him. “You see all of me. Everything I keep secret, everything I keep far from Aglionby, from the rest of town, from my family. You have got it all, Ronan.”
And the thing is, Gansey’s right: Ronan does have so much more than the Aglionby legend, the gimmick of Glendower Gansey. He has the miniature Henrietta. Emailed links to articles on indoor mint-growing. Texted images of Homer Simpson in various stages of blank-eyed depression which always make Ronan laugh despite his undying desire to chew his phone and spit the shrapnel at passing rodents. The empty side of Gansey’s big bed when Gansey doesn’t want to watch cooking shows alone. God, all the Guy Fieri they’ve experienced together. All the Barefoot Contessa. And this: mint-mouthed orange juice and pickle chips outside a rancid gas station convenience store, the Pig a few painted spaces away, the closest thing to a spectator. Quiet Gansey and paralyzed Gansey and Gansey in the depths of studious mania, wringing his hands or raking tremulous fingers through his hair, anemic Gansey swaying or feverous Gansey glaring at blue skies through bloodshot eyes like their purpose is an exercise in Tantalusian temptation. Gansey running for a piss. Gansey using too much laundry soap. Gansey with his glasses all fingerprint-smudged, Gansey in boxers sipping lemon water first thing in the morning like Helen told him to, Gansey smelling like lake having just returned from rowing practice, sunburnt nose and hair curling as it dries.
“Me too, Gansey,” Ronan says. “You got me. Alright? So stop fucking talking about the—the orange cakes. I’m not making you fucking orange cakes.”
“Alright, Ronan,” Gansey says, cheek on the curve of Ronan’s shoulder. “Hey. Can we stay for a minute? I don’t want to go home yet.”
“Yeah,” Ronan says, quiet. He tightens his grip on Gansey, shifting his weight. His pocket of bullshit clinks together. All this. All this which Ronan carries, all this to keep Gansey alive. Glendower’s chosen bastard. An EpiPen won’t hold up much against old-ass magic, Ronan knows it. He knows it, he’s not stupid. It’s just.
He hopes. He has to. He’s not living without Gansey. He’s not finding fucking orange cakes.
“Drink your juice,” Ronan says. Ahead of them, the stop light blinks. Green, yellow, red. The sky starts to lighten lavender around the edges—an aged vignette. Gansey drinks his juice.