Work Text:
Me
i was late but i arrived
i'm sorry but i'd rather be getting high than watching my family die
exaggerate and you and i
oh i think i did something terrible to your body, don't you mind
Ronan’s stuck.
Gansey finds him out behind the Barn, beer in one hand, standing against a wall. If he was the type to smoke cigarettes, Gansey thinks, Ronan would be; he’d be chain-smoking against this wall, too-big black suit smelling of cigarettes and hay and alcohol and that little bit of Ronan-ness that makes Gansey’s stomach flicker.
He’s not literally stuck, though. Gansey knows Ronan enough to know what his current body language means. He could, theoretically, put his other foot on the ground and lean forward and walk into the Barns, where his whole family is waiting for him.
Well. Technically his whole family would be waiting for him.
Realistically —
“Declan sent you?”
“Yes,” Gansey says, stepping over a bit of uneven ground, careful not to get any stray mud or manure on his loafers. They’d been a present from his mother a year ago for some cousin’s wedding, and now they were pinching his pinky toes in a way that was only made more unpleasant by his walk all the way around the Barns on his way to find Ronan.
Ronan takes a sip of beer in lieu of responding.
“Why’re you out here?” Gansey says, knowing full well the answer.
Ronan shrugs. “Your shoes are stupid.”
“They’re Mrs. Gansey’s finest work,” Gansey answers. “Better than any of her other presents to me. Seeing as neither me nor Helen are exactly — what she wanted us to be.”
Ronan snorts, holds out the beer bottle. “Want some?”
“How in the world did you get that?”
“I have my ways,” Ronan says. He closes his eyes. “Do I have to go in?”
“It is your father’s funeral.”
Ronan deflates onto the ground.
Gansey picks his way over to sit next to him. Ronan hands him the beer bottle. Gansey takes a sip, intricately aware of the fact that his lips are touching something that Ronan’s had just been touching and even more intricately aware of the fact that these were not things you think about someone whose father had just died.
“I can’t do it,” Ronan says, taking the bottle back and not noticing the way Gansey’s fingers brushed his. “I can’t fucking do this. There’s people in there who — they’ll get the wrong idea. About him. And Declan’s stupid fucking — I can’t — he hasn’t said anything to me in three days that wasn’t related to organizing this fucking — thing. Which I woulndn’t mind, normally, except that I fucking — need someone to — and Mom hasn’t moved in — days, and Matthew —”
His voice catches on his brother’s name, and Gansey takes the beer bottle out of his hands. Ronan shoves his face into his hands and pulls his knees up to his chest. Gansey moves to put an arm around him.
It feels alright, touching him like this. Allowed.
Ronan’s hair is just below his chin, soft and wavy, and the freckles on his nose catch in the late afternoon sun, and Gansey feels his heart ache with — something. Sadness. Care. Frustration.
“This shouldn’t be fucking happening,” Ronan mutters into his jacket sleeves.
“It shouldn’t,” Gansey says. He’s always hated Niall. He’s always known it would come to this, somehow. “It shouldn’t, but it has. The longer you sit out here, the longer this whole thing will take. Get it over with, and we can go – we can go sit at Monmouth and throw things out a window, or something.”
Ronan hasn’t slept in three days. When he lifts his head up to look at the cloudless sky, it shows.
“I miss him,” he says, and it’s so small and simple and un-Ronan-like that it breaks Gansey’s already-splintered heart one more time.
“I know,” Gansey says, and he does. He also knows death; sometimes, he misses himself, too. “I know.”
Ronan looks at him, and it’s Ronan like Gansey’s only seen him a handful of times: tender and raw and beautiful. Anger not gone completely, but shoved somewhere just slightly to the left of him. Heart splayed open on his face. Ronan could not ever help but to be his entire self, and right now it was intertwined with Gansey’s self in a way that Gansey knew could never be separated.
Ronan kisses him.
Gansey lets himself be swallowed up by the kiss for three terrible and wonderful seconds before pulling away, hand still on the back of Ronan’s neck, head still turned upside down with longing.
“I think — you are —”
“I know,” Ronan says, swallowing. He closes his eyes. “I know.”
“Ronan —” he says, and it comes out slightly too desperate.
“That’s where you are,” says Matthew from behind them, walking towards them with all his ten-year-old might. “Declan says —”
“I already know what Declan’s gonna fucking say,” growls Ronan, eyes still closed. “I’m coming. Gimme a sec.”
“Kay,” says Matthew, cheeks red from crying and suit slightly too small at the ankles. “Just — I think Declan needs you. And Mom. And me. But like, Declan said to just say that me ‘n’ Mom need you.” Ronan opens his mouth. “I’m going. See you in a second. Hi, Gansey,” he adds as he stumbles away.
They wait for several tense seconds, and then —
“Your shoes are still fucking stupid,” Ronan says, wiping his eyes on his suit jacket sleeves.
Gansey unlaces them. “They pinch, anyways.”
Ronan gives Gansey the first laugh he’s heard from him in a week.
“Now you just look stupid.”
Gansey laces his shoes back up, stands up, offers Ronan his hand. Doesn’t think about where it was a minute ago. Doesn’t think about the hand that holds his back as he lifts Ronan off the ground.
They walk silently towards the funeral together.
Ronan only lets go in order to open the door.
Gansey boils with feeling for just one second, just to sterilize himself, and then swallows once, twice. He follows Ronan in.
He knows this will end badly. He thinks maybe that’s the only reason Ronan’s doing it at all. He wonders if this is all he will ever be: self-destruction in the face of something bigger.
He wonders if he will ever be real.
You
and you're a liar
at least all of your friends are
and so am I
just typically drowned in my car
it's my party
and I'll cry to the end
you must try harder
than kissing all of my friends, you
Ronan never thinks about kissing Gansey.
Ronan never thinks about the one time he did, head so fuzzy that he barely could contain any his stupid impulses, heart so cracked open that he could barely contain any of its spilled-out feelings.
Ronan never thinks about Gansey's lips, soft as they were thin, so ready to open underneath his mouth. Never thinks about Gansey’s hands, the way they went up automatically to curl around the back of his neck and under his hair. Never thinks about Gansey’s shaky breath as he pulled away, or the way that he makes that same sound sometimes when they get just a little too close.
Ronan never thinks about doing it again, the way he could so easily just lean in when they’re at a stoplight during one of their late-night drives, red framing Gansey’s face so that he looks almost devilish. The way he could shove everyone out of the way and grab Gansey’s face after they win a rowing competition. The way he could just — turn over in bed, those nights that neither one can sleep and they end up in the same bed, pretending so many things — slip them both into something new.
Ronan also never lies.
They get by, year after year, and Ronan always tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, even to himself. The two of them stay close — closer than he wants — not nearly as close as he needs — and he catches Gansey wanting, so often, and he catches himself wanting, and he thinks about how wanting and being found wanting are so close — and he thinks about how he shouldn’t be nearly that poetic, but something about Gansey brings it out in him —
The years go by, and there’s still an unfinished tension that neither of them do anything about, and Ronan still drinks, and Gansey still looks blindingly handsome at the worst times, and they still live together, and Ronan still pushes one too many boundaries, and there’s still a laundry list in Ronan’s brain of reasons why he can’t kiss Gansey, and then a whole list of reasons why he shouldn’t even have that list in the first place, and then a whole wall around both of those lists so that he can pretend he never thinks about them.
And then, eventually, there’s Adam. Thoughtful, quiet, practical, intelligent Adam, who Ronan clocks from the first time he sees him as just a little bit chaotic in just the right places. Just ruthless enough to get what he needs and just repressed enough to pretend as though he doesn’t have anything he wants.
And sure, Adam has the same look in his eyes sometimes when he looks at Gansey that Ronan has spent years pretending he doesn’t also have. But mostly, Adam has this look in his eyes like he’s going to win — win at what, Ronan doesn’t have any idea — and it makes him, eventually, in the end, once they get past some amount of unpleasantness — fall for Adam so deeply and quickly and intentionally that he forgets there was a time before Adam.
Falling for Adam is both nothing and everything like falling for Gansey.
It’s still forbidden — but less — and it’s still intoxicating — but sideways — and he still would do everything for him — but he’s got some exceptions — and it’s wild and wonderful and then Adam is sitting on his bed and he decided that nothing in the world is going to stop him from kissing Adam.
It’s his second-ever kiss. It’s nothing and everything like his first.
He wishes, so badly, that it could just be Adam pressed up against his heart like a foot on the gas pedal.
He knows, though, that it’s not. That he will always burn for Gansey.
He watches, also, as the years go by and half his friends also fall for Gansey; first it’s Noah, blushing visibility whenever Gansey brushes his arm and bringing him flowers and asking ironically if he’ll go to dances with him. Then it’s Adam, lighting up whenever they team up to solve a clue or parse out a riddle, never letting Gansey win just like that, knowing deep down that this strange perseverance that Adam had around Gansey was in part due to the way that Adam was, clearly, in love with him.
And then it’s Blue.
Watching Gansey fall for Blue — watching him blush over the things Blue does that annoy him, that push him, that are strange and off-putting — watching him stay up with her, rearrange ley lines with her, show off about Glendower with her — watching him rescue her and admire that she did not want rescuing all at once — it’s almost too much.
Ronan lets himself get angry about many things. This is not one of them, despite how much he chokes on the anger sometimes.
It’s not real anger — mostly, it is sadness. A feeling more unfamiliar to him than anger, enough that with time he can always translate it into anger — but either way, there’s not much he can do about it aside from swallow it.
He watches Henry Cheng fall for Gansey, too, watches with his heart in his throat as Gansey falls in love back with all his friends, watches Gansey absorb love like a dysfunctional sponge and spit it back at people, watches as Gansey places the nebulous love he has for his friends so highly that only a love of Glendower can ever come close.
He watches as Gansey kisses Blue — once, with sadness and resolve and longing all so mixed up it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins — and then again and again after, to make up for so much lost time. He watches as Gansey kisses Cheng, a kiss in the shape of a question mark, at a late-night toga party that Ronan has been dragged to against his will. He watches as Gansey kisses Adam at a different bonfire two weeks later, a spin-the-bottle kiss turned into something just a little bit more. He watches and waits and aches.
Hoping he will.
Hoping he won’t.
Hoping that maybe, this longing that he’s been building up and suppressing and building back up again for four years won’t rear its ugly head in the very slight event that Gansey does, indeed, kiss him.
Ronan never again thinks about kissing Gansey — except that he does, every day of his stupid life, even after Adam, even after Blue, even after Henry, even after all of it, even after he shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t — never thinks about it, never, never, never —
Even when they go on a nostalgic just-them late-night drive after Gansey’s first year of college, and Ronan drives, and Gansey sits in the passenger seat, face lit up by every green and red and yellow light, and tells Ronan all the things he didn’t — couldn’t — tell him about in the daylight about his year. Even when Ronan is split open by Gansey’s vulnerability, just like he always is, how Gansey is real and earnest at his core. Even when Gansey is the worst liar in the whole world and still Ronan is able to ignore what’s on his surface just because it would be too much. Even when Gansey pushes into him and leans too much during sharp turns and says, voice cracking, that Ronan looks —
Even when they get to a stoplight and Gansey grabs the back of Ronan’s neck, and whispers into his ear, beautiful, so low that Ronan can barely hear him, and Ronan faces him, and their faces are so close, so close, and Ronan thinks, years belated, oh, and all he has to do is look up, and Gansey’s pulling his face in, and something in him feels like he’s just been snapped open, finally, and suddenly he can’t think at all anymore, and —
They almost get rear-ended.
It’s worth it, for the look on Gansey’s face as he pulls away, shaky breath on his lips, hand still on the back of Ronan’s neck.
I ran this past Adam, Gansey says, half-whispering, just to be sure. Ronan looks back at him as he steps on the gas, just in time to catch Gansey run a finger over his own lower lip and then — so sure of himself and casual that Ronan almost misses how tentative it is — runs his thumb over Ronan’s bottom lip as well.
Ronan’s breath catches in his lungs.
Finally, he thinks, as they park a minute and stumble back into the Barns, kissing along the way, hands on hands and waists and necks and arms and thighs, his longing twisting and melting into something smoother and sweeter.
Wanting and having.
Being wanted and being needed, all at once.
Gansey and Ronan, Ronan and Gansey. Together at last.
He cannot tell whether this should have happened years ago or if it can only happen now. He cannot tell if they, too, are making up for lost time or if this is exactly how it was always going to play out. He cannot tell if he believes in fate or if he believes in only Gansey’s hand on the back of his neck.
He thinks about time rolling back on itself like a wheel.
He thinks, maybe, that Gansey and destiny are one and the same.
He thinks, mostly, that he is finally kissing Gansey. And maybe — mostly — that’s all that matters.