Chapter Text
Adam wakes up early on Sunday mornings. It’s not that preparation for St. Agnes’s mass is noisy in any audible sense, but it’s noisy in a metaphysical sense. All of those people soon to arrive with all of their wishes and prayers and the lives they’re thinking about getting back to living when it’s over. Opening himself up to Cabeswater has opened him up to so much more than he expected. Sometimes it’s a blessing. Sometimes.
He stays in bed for ten minutes, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Ronan down there in one of those pews with the brother he hates and the brother he loves. Ronan’s religion seems impossible to Adam. Not the idea of faith itself, but that Ronan, a boy made so squarely of the possible that he turned the impossible on its head time and time again, would go in for so much possibility he couldn’t touch. The thought is replaced by a sort of extra sensory tingle just over his skin that he’s learned to read as nudgings to check his mystical voicemail. He stretches, drags himself up off his mattress, and goes to the bathroom to lay tinfoil in the sink.
Scrying has become easier with practice and it now takes little time for him to be pulled into the scene playing out in the pulse around him. This morning the first thing that comes into focus is a body on the ground. This vision is brighter and in higher contrast than most. It’s a perfect late autumn afternoon with a deep blue sky burning overhead. As everything sharpens he can make out white feathers and claws against the rust colored mountain grass. It’s one of Ronan’s night horrors. The tip of a sword comes into focus just over it, but it’s clean, clearly not used to put the thing down.
Adam follows the sword up to a hand crowned by familiar leather bracelets and then Ronan is there in full, standing over his horror defensively. His face is hard, angrier even than it had been when he’d punched Adam’s father, and the tips of his tattoo that peek forward out of the collar of his t-shirt seem sharper than usual, venomous. His skin is streaked with gray dust and Adam can tell that he’s been crying too, which puts Adam on edge. He remembers Persephone telling him to look outside of himself, but he can’t quite shake this image of Ronan the Sword or make sense of what this might mean to Cabeswater. He just stands there, staring at Ronan as the wind whips around both of them and the horror putrifies at their feet.
“This is it,” Ronan says to him.
“It is,” Adam replies, wishing he knew what he was seeing, hoping to Ronan’s god that it’s not what he thinks it is. He’s afraid to turn around. Afraid to find Gansey there behind him, also in the dirt, as he’d seen him in the vision tree. Afraid of stepping too close to Ronan and his sword. Afraid of staying too far away to be protected by it.
His fear is made useless as Ronan strides toward him purposefully and grabs Adam’s arm with his free hand. Adam knows suddenly what’s about to happen. It’s as if they’d made this pact ahead of time and his stomach tightens as Ronan leans in and kisses him on the mouth.
Adam doesn’t mean to kiss him back, doesn’t ever mean to get this involved with the visions, but it’s impossible for him to resist it. Somehow whatever sorrow or anger or frustration has managed to pry tears from Ronan’s eyes isn’t present in his touch. It’s as if he’s negotiating a treaty between himself and Adam’s body. It’s restrained. It’s almost gentle. Adam thinks about Gansey’s tales of knights going off to battle and the favors they’d take with them. He knows then, both in and out of the vision, that he would follow Ronan anywhere, and that it was different than the way he would follow Gansey anywhere. He hasn’t worked out how different, but there will be time for that, surely.
Ronan pulls away and gives him a grim, crooked smile. “Magician,” he says, and it sounds like he meant to say something much more intimate.
Adam nods and clasps Ronan’s forearms with his hands, willing him any strength he can find, pulling it up from the ley line through his feet and his veins and trying to push it outward. Willing that they’ll all make it out alive. If anyone can bring them out of this impossible situation it’s Ronan. There’s another strong gust of wind and dust gets in his eyes. He can feel the particles of it stinging against his cheek. He screws his eyes shut and turns his head, breaking the vision.
When the wind stops he opens them again. He’s looking at the cracked linoleum on the bathroom floor and everything around him is warm and sticky with the end of summer. A bead of sweat rolls down his shoulder and it feels like a finger trailing its way lightly over his skin. He gingerly touches his lips with a trembling hand, acutely aware that he’d just had his first kiss. It can’t count, it wasn’t real. But it felt real.
Adam slowly and carefully pulls the tinfoil out of the sink, pressing each rectangular strip of it flat together and placing them in the small cupboard underneath for later use. Then he pulls the plug in the bottom of the basin and watches the water swirl away, taking with it parts of himself that were no longer true.