Work Text:
He has in him a bone deep knowledge that he would do anything for Gansey. Only sometimes he gets caught up in the syntax of the thing, wants to believe that it means simply that he'd do anything to help him, anything he asked; but is wary of the fact that he might do anything for him in a different way, anything to have him and make him his and no-one else's. He wants that, wants Gansey as his own, wants more than he ought to, wants so much he sometimes feels sick with it.
He hates Gansey on sight, when he first joins Aglionby. Gansey looks like a magazine or a movie star or a shot to the head. He is every Anglionby boy who calls Ronan a freak while adjusting their sunglasses and vaulting into a convertible. He is the emblem of everything Ronan never wanted to be and never could be either. He doesn't hate the rest of them but straight away he is damn sure he feels hatred for Gansey.
He sees Gansey in hallways and stairwells and feels something coil and twist inside him. He feels the anger climb up like rising heat and has to force himself to look away. He still sees Gansey in his mind's eye though, when he looks away, sees the way he moves through the sunlight, a silhouette in easy movement, and he channels his resentment at that into an urge to punch something.
He keeps watching Gansey without meaning to and he starts to see the cracks. Gansey drives an old Camaro, a classic, in a shade of virulent orange almost the colour of tomato soup; and he doesn't take up his rightful place with the kids who slap him on the back and smile too wide with too-white teeth. Even though he comes back from Crew team practice as the laughing centre of the group, he eats his lunch with old books in leather bindings instead of with the flock of boys who would be his followers.
The first time Gansey speaks to him, Ronan spits out a retort vicious and venomous.
“I hear you're good at Latin,” Gansey says.
“Yeah, wanna make something of it?” Ronan replies. Gansey is so close he can see the colour in his eyes like a bomb going off, brown flecked with amber gold blooming as though to engulf a rim of rich leaf green at the edge of his pupils.
“Actually, I wanted to ask your help,” Gansey says. There isn't a hint of a joke or a taunt about it and somehow Ronan finds his aggression diffused. (He never understands how Gansey does that but it isn't long before it becomes familiar.)
Gansey has a book full of clippings and copied pages, handwritten charts and annotated topographical maps going back to the earliest cartographers. It ripples and gapes open a little with how full it is, almost like a regular book after it's been dropped in water – though Gansey, he can tell, would never allow something like that to befall this book.
The book feels like it ought to contain something more than just words and paper, weighty and portentous as though into it has been decanted a human soul, only Ronan doesn't realise right away that the soul that's in it is Gansey's.
Gansey shows the book to Ronan because he can see somehow that Ronan will understand. Ronan who he can tell from his outward appearance is as detached from the elite social culture of Aglionby as Gansey feels. He sees that the Ronan who walks the halls of Aglionby has a clear missing piece, as though half of him is shrouded in a secret. Gansey doesn't have a lot of secrets but he does have something he rarely expects people to understand. He is immediately sure that Ronan will understand.
The mystery of Glendower, Gansey's puzzle quest, speaks to Ronan like the hidden magic of his own existence and his own incomplete knowledge of his father's dreams(, his dreams). He looks up at Gansey as Gansey speaks about Glendower, turning journal pages, and sees that Gansey is looking straight at him, realises that they're both smiling.
Ronan isn't used to having friends, certainly has never felt a need for them, never felt that life beyond the Barns had any texture to it or any claim on his interest or his soul. But he smiles at Dick Gansey and he feels something deep roar to life inside of him, shutters rattling cacophonously open and shut in the breeze, the wind in his hair leaning out of the window of a fast car, finding that part of himself had been empty before only because he starts to feel what it might be like to be whole.
It's the same when Gansey says he's bought an old manufacturing building downtown, want to come? And Ronan goes and sees the shuddering shell of Monmouth, filled up with rubble and old junk and, when he walks inside, it feels like a castle and a base and the only place other than the Barns that is real to him.
Those first months are the best, helping Monmouth shed its flecked paint skin, pulling down the ruined plywood additions to its exoskeleton and making it a place for them to be, burning junk and finding treasure. He spends hot June days shaded inside until near sundown where they light the pyre and then he drives home through the late evening air, desperate to tell Niall what he's found.
Only then, there comes the day when Niall Lynch is dead and stretched out before him, mangled and beaten and everything comes tumbling down. He loses Niall, he loses the Barns, his mother, everything. Even the new world he was building with Gansey feels bitter and like an inadmissible and sacrilegious replacement. It's like he's replaced the heart of himself with some profane substitute. And he is angry and bitter and wants to push Gansey away for all that Gansey is all he has now. Gansey is the only thing he has. Gansey and Monmouth and the quest.
He wants to hate the things he has left, resent them for the fact that they aren't the things he's lost. He wants to turn away and burn it all to the ground but then he thinks of the vast blank emptiness of Aglionby and Henrietta without Gansey and the fire dampens down and only smoulders deep instead.
Gansey doesn't ask anything of him, doesn't seem to expect anything less than Ronan's anger and resentment; he keeps his distance when he thinks Ronan needs it but stays close enough that Ronan knows he's there, keeps offering distractions and diversions until Ronan starts occasionally to accept.
Ronan kisses with his mouth open, rides with the windows down, throws a punch like it's all he has, lives life like his only goal is to find an easy way out. He becomes harder, sharper and colder after Niall's death. He stops talking to almost anyone but Gansey, recoils into himself. His skin blooms with a tattoo which grows and shifts in a profusion of black ink and which he never speaks about to anyone. His eyes get hollow and he drinks alone and Gansey finds he isn't the only inhabitant of Monmouth who can't sleep. They spend nights sitting up together, Gansey building a strange sprawling model of the town and Ronan saying nothing while he drinks what seems an endless stockpile of beer.
Gansey doesn't ask about the drinking or the street-racing or the cutting class; and Ronan would be grateful for it, if he wasn't so deep in it all that he was unable to recognise the restraint it must cost Gansey to keep himself from asking.
Ronan emerges from his grief as a new thing, the old Ronan barely surfacing at all but in the occasional way he smiles at Gansey. Even the smile is harder now though, steel-edged and dangerous.
He emerges less as a friend to Gansey than as a guardian and protector of the one good thing he has left. He doesn't have anything left to live for as himself anymore but he has Gansey and he has Gansey's quest. He pours all that's left of him, the parts that weren't entirely burnt up and broken, into that.
He fits himself to Gansey like a shadow, disappearing only occasionally when it's so dark that no-one could tell the difference between the shadow and the night.
It doesn't change when it stops being just him and Gansey. It doesn't change how it always feels to Ronan as though they're the only two people in the universe who are really alive. There's Adam and there's Noah and then there's Blue but, to Ronan, it's only Gansey who is really there.
He gets angry, at first, about Adam, throws himself into reckless things to try to take the sting out of it. Gansey sees this for what it is and comes to him alone, does something Ronan would normally never allow and pulls him close into an embrace. He doesn't say that Ronan is the most important thing to him, doesn't say sweet, meaningless things, because that isn't what Ronan needs to hear. All he says is that this doesn't change anything.
Ronan pushes him away after a minute, saying “Get off me, man,” and storms upstairs to his room, fearing his own heartbeat, the rush of Gansey's chest pressed to his, the way he smelt faintly of gasoline and the interior of the Pig. He's a little drunk and a little dizzy and aware of how deep Gansey is beneath his skin and how that wants to twist darkly into something else deep in the pit of his stomach and his brain.
He spends more nights out when he starts thinking about that and it's a little less desperate and dark than in those first months after his father died because it's easier to drink to drown your self-disgust than it is to drown your grief.
He races Kavinsky; and he dives deeper into the oblivion of his dreams, begins to surface with living chimeric things. He finds power in himself and realises he can't think of anything he wants to do with it alone. No matter how many circuits he does of Henrietta, restlessly waiting to race to somewhere beyond himself, he can't shake the fact that he only ever wants to come back to Gansey. And he can't help the fact that, when Kavinsky calls him Gansey's lap dog, he only feels a sort of savage pride at it. Being Gansey's is the only thing that makes sense to him, the only place he feels right anymore.
It isn't perfect and it isn't easy but being with Gansey feels like the best thing in the world to him. He dreams and he races and he drinks to escape what haunts him but, after all that, Gansey is the only place left that feels like home.
And, he surprises himself, when the day comes, when Gansey kisses him and all it feels is right.