Work Text:
i know a place,
its somewhere i go when i need to remember your face.
we get married in our heads,
something to do while we try to recall how we met.
When Ronan got home from church, Adam was nowhere to be found. A combination of his fiancés' agnostic-adjacent disposition and general disapproval of the catholic church meant that he rarely attended Sunday mass with the brothers' Lynch. Still, he was more often than not on the front porch to greet him when they finished up.
Declan and Matthew sometimes followed him back from the service in Declan’s boring, steely Volvo, opting to make sandwiches or grill burgers rather than eat out. But Ronan had been promised a particularly warm welcome after Adam’s three-day business trip had morphed into The Two Week Trip From Hell. The thought of bursting through the front door to Adam cooking in the kitchen or lounging in the living room, or god, cleaning off in the shower had compelled him to fend off any attempt of his brother’s cock-blocking by insisting they stop at Nino’s before they headed back to DC.
The BMW navigated the driveway with practised ease born from repeating an action daily, and so when Ronan reversed his car into the shady spot next to Adam’s, he almost didn’t notice that the Lotus Adam affectionally called his “Baby” wasn’t nestled in its usual space. His instinct was to open his car door only a little, careful not to hit Adam’s passenger side door. Arguments had risen and fallen around the carelessness with which Ronan operated heavy machinery, and years of Adam huffing at him for scraping his paint job had conditioned his arm to only open 45 degrees.
The Lotus was forest green and old. Despite its age, they’d paid a lot of money for it. After a particularly long work week in DC, Ronan had visited Adam and stolen him away to a dealership a block away from his office building. They’d spotted it from the street as they’d approached: a 1973 refurbished Lotus. Ronan, he’d remembered hearing Adam insist, it has hidden headlamps, and the deal had been done. No matter that the piece of shit broke down even more than the Hondayota, Adam wanted it and Adam paid for it, so Ronan wasn’t about to say shit about it.
Car door open, it took him longer than he’d care to admit before the empty space processed in his brain. In pure protest, he swung his car door all the way open before his feet crunched the gravel driveway. He looked around almost comically, head swinging around and around as if the car would materialise out of nowhere. When it didn’t, he half-sat back in his seat and gruffly called his fiancé.
His phone was still connected to the BMW’s Bluetooth, so the cavernous entry to the Barns was filled with the annoying shrill of his phone, ringing, and ringing, and pausing long enough to give him hope before the ringing continued.
Nine times out of ten when Ronan called Adam, he answered. Even when he was at work, or they were fighting, or when Gansey had just coughed up the price of Adam’s engagement ring after folding like a little bitch. Why the hell would you spend that much on a rock, Lynch?
When his phone rang to voicemail for the third time, Ronan was more annoyed than worried.
He turned his car off animatedly: snatching his phone off the seat beside him, roughly pulling the key out of the ignition, and yanking the parking brake up like he did in Blue’s car just to make her bristle. The slam of his door was satisfying to him, if only because he was feeling a little salty at Adam not answering him, and door's slamming were often what got Adam annoyed.
When he got inside the house he was feeling a little better. His tie was the first to go, his shirt buttons the next to be undone. His shoes had already long since been discarded by Adam’s work shoes; the only evidence that Adam had returned home from his trip at least momentarily before leaving again. He checked his phone again and left a voicemail he’d probably have to apologise for later.
“I was promised the blowjob of my life, Parrish,” he hissed into the receiver. “You owe me. I’ve been a lonely maiden all week.”
He threw his church clothes in the laundry room and scoured the house for Adam’s suitcase. Sure enough it was carefully parked next to the dresser in their bedroom, his scarf neatly folded and placed delicately on top. He opened it up and placed all the carefully folded clean clothes onto the bed to put away later, and shoved all of the dirty linens in their hamper. The meticulous way in which Adam packed his suitcases was a funny glimpse into his head. Everything was separated and folded into tight, neat bundles with his toiletries in a sensible bag and all of his chargers curled up into precise coils. Ronan would never stop loving that man.
He put his church clothes in with Adam’s laundry and set it to the spin cycle that Adam had made him use ever since he’d flooded half the mud room with soap suds and murky water. It’s kind of adorable that you can’t even do laundry, Adam had teased, but his face had been unserious and open.
Ronan picked his way through the house, shoving cushions back onto the couch, straitening up the placemats on the dining table, washing a few straggling dishes he hadn’t gotten to that morning. He even lit one of Matthew’s homemade candles in the kitchen. His youngest brother getting into artisanal candle making wasn’t on his bingo card but he’d tried to take it in stride, nonetheless. Even Declan had grudgingly accepted it.
It was almost two o’clock when the front door jostled open and startled Ronan out of sleep. He’d managed to chuck the washed clothes into the dryer before he’d passed the fuck out on the living room couch, and the kink in his neck from sleeping oddly was already forming.
His feet were already underneath him before he was fully conscious, and because he hadn’t seen Adam in almost two weeks he ignored whatever irritation he’d had sitting in him since the discovery of the empty parking spot.
He rounded the corner of the living room and swung himself off it like a yo-yo towards the entrance, but it wasn’t Adam standing there, tugging off his coat and run-around shoes. It was Declan, two hands firmly gripped in front of him like he was attending a business meeting. The look that painted his face was almost enough to make Ronan understand what might have happened, but his heart stuttered onward like it refused to acknowledge the possibility of its implication.
“Ronan,” he stated, factual and real. It didn’t feel real when Declan, in a very un-Declan-like move, gripped his arm gently and guided him to the couch. It didn’t feel real when he calmly explained what he and Matthew had witnessed on their drive back to DC:
Forest-lined highway as far as the eye could see. Midday sun mixing with Henriettan heat to produce distorted lines of light in the far distance. A green car sitting in a ditch. A car with hidden headlights. The driver’s side door propped open, shifter in neutral, handbrake off. One, long slash across the dash from a switchblade or a very sharp set of keys.
A haphazard path of footsteps and broken branches that stretched into the underbrush, past a meandering creek, and through a formation of rocks that looked suspiciously like tiny soldiers lined up for war. The trail ending in a circle of blue cap mushrooms, unbroken and pointing out the very place where Ronan Lynch’s fiancé had disappeared.
They both sat on the couch for a very long time.
Declan had a comforting hand on his shoulder and a face that was carefully blank. Matthew had wandered in at some point, perhaps he’d always been there. Ronan had always reacted to loss with action. He drank himself half to death when his dad died, he raced bad people and became a bad person. When his mother got sick for the first time, he’d punched a brick wall so hard he’d needed reconstructive surgery to pop the ligaments back into place.
Adam was gone, but Ronan wasn’t acting.
Not gone, but missing. Missing is different than gone. He tries to get his heart to understand it the way that his brain does, but he fears it’s a lost cause.
Without thinking, his feet got him off the couch and carried him to the mud room, where he’d just done the laundry. His heart shattered into small, dagger-shaped pieces, and dislodging itself it’s the inner lining of his stomach, drudging up his throat, splintering into his lungs. His hands shook as he ripped the door of the dryer open to pull the clothes out, and he was distantly aware that Declan was behind him trying to say something, and that Matthew was muttering his name through a tear-stained face.
All he could think about is how he had just scrubbed the last remaining smell of Adam from every item of clothing that might’ve had a chance at still smelling like rain and wood and ink and love and Adam. He easily found his church clothes and threw them as far away from himself as he possibly could, because all he wanted was Adam, but when he lifted one of his favourite shirts from the pile it only smelt like their laundry detergent and warm linen.
Declan was saying his name but all he could think about is how he wanted to smell Adam again. He wanted it so bad he managed to force himself off the floor and upstairs to their bedroom. Every detail made his head feel heavier. The photos of them littering every spare surface, the rug Adam had found in a thrift store in DC, the throw blanket that Aurora and Adam had crotched for him as a team effort. He ripped Adam’s pillow off the bed and shoves it to his face, but Adam hadn’t been home in two weeks, and Ronan had been holding that very same pillow every night he was gone. It didn’t bring him the comfort he craved.
The clothes he’d taken from the suitcase earlier that day were his next victim. He tore apart Adam’s meticulous packing, grabbing each item of clothing and dropping them just as fast. All of them had been washed already. All of them smelt like generic laundry powder. He wanted Adam.
He sat with the remnants of Adam’s suitcase around him, all of that meticulous work shattered by Ronan’s grief, and he let his brain catch up to his heart.
It was exactly two o’clock when Ronan woke up.
At first the setting confused him. Daylight splitting lines across the living room in negative and positive reliefs from the blinds Niall had fastened there when they were young and summers were hot. The whole room smelt like Matthew’s horrid candle, except for the distinct smell of sweat that was certainly coming from Ronan himself.
His heart was beating out of his chest, and the dream that had felt so complicated and so real mere seconds before was already slipping from his fingers and leaving behind an empty impression; an outline of something that wasn’t real but felt real enough at the time to carve out his heart.
Nothing ever made him crave his phone more than a bad dream.
It was sticking into his back, half swallowed by the couch cushions, and its only notification was from Adam almost an hour prior. I listened to that voicemail in front of your mother. I hope you're happy now.
His mother? The only time that Adam visited Aurora was when Ronan drove him over or asked him to as a favour when he couldn’t swing it. Truths from his dream were blending with facts he was aware of.
Adam was driving his car, but it wasn’t to his death. Adam was visiting his mother, not an early grave. Adam was alive. Adam. Adam. Adam.
“Do you think this milk’s okay?”
Ronan had never been so simultaneously conflicted between screaming at someone or shoving his tongue down their throat.
His fiancé was in front of him, a carton of milk in one hand and a spatula in the other. He was also wearing Ronan’s formal church shirt that had obviously come straight out of the dryer, given that it was creased to all hell and vaguely stiff looking. He looked like sin incarnate standing there donning the clothes Ronan had just worn to holy service, no pants on and buttons only done up halfway up his chest.
“Ronan?” Adam asked, because Ronan had only been staring at him while his milk question hung in the air. “It’s only two days after.”
“It’s probably fucking fine,” he breathed, because fuck, the last few minutes had been a clusterfuck of polar opposites. “It’s all cow piss at the end of the day.”
Adam’s face, which had previously held its signature scrunch at having a problem to solve, turned as sour as the milk in his hand probably was. “You’re a farmer. I know you know that milk is not cow piss.”
“Are you a farmer?” he teased, because he liked when Adam stopped thinking and started getting pissy. “How would you know? City slicker.”
They both knew that Adam was the opposite of a city slicker. Trailer park raised, manual labour worked, Cambridge bound. Every part of Adam’s life was a well-oiled machine with the express purpose of covering up how little he knew of the uppercut life he wished to infiltrate. But such topics had already been splayed open and picked apart by the both of them over many years and many nights, and so the teasing doesn’t reopen those calluses but instead glided right over them with practised ease.
“I’d rather be a city slicker than a factually incorrect farmer,” Adam added. “I’m just picturing all the sunk cost of being a farmer who can’t farm.”
Ronan, who had suddenly become aware of how little they had touched in two weeks, suddenly wanted Adam to drop whatever the hell he was doing that was more important than kissing him and hurry up and fucking kiss him. “C’mere.”
But Adam had his thinking face on again, and the cartoon of milk lifted up next to his face. “I worry about you when I’m gone. The fridge is almost empty, have you been eating enough?”
“Oh my god,” Ronan sighed, reaching out his arms in the universal sign of come here right now and putting on a real show of hating that Adam was using his thinking face to be concerned for Ronan’s wellbeing. “Get on top of me before I explode.”
The milk cartoon placed neatly on the coffee table and the spatula similarly discarded, Adam found his way to the couch, and then on top of Ronan. Years of touches never being free had made Adam precious with the ones he allowed himself. When they’d first started dating, young and inexperienced and both broken in slightly different ways, Adam had calculated every brush of fingers, every gentle kiss, every warm and easy hug.
Ronan had noticed this, because although he was a high school dropout he had always been an expert in Adam Parrish. So gentle brushes were no longer gentle, but solid grips on shoulders or crushing hugs with no reasonable purpose. Each was initiated by Ronan, and slowly Adam’s boyish klutziness started overtaking his careful consideration.
When Adam dropped on top of Ronan it was limbs flying outwards and chins jutting awkwardly. He’d probably have red marks up and down his stomach from Adam’s bony ass limbs, but Ronan couldn’t bring himself to care about a blemish brought about from love and carelessness, especially when the latter was so hard won.
Deaf ear to Ronan’s chest, Adam was in the perfect position to hear Ronan whisper that he looked hot in Ronan’s freshly laundered clothes. “Speaking of freshly laundered, I believe I require compensation for that.”
Adam snorted against Ronan’s chest. “Compensation? For doing a basic household task?”
“For not flooding the mud room,” because he hadn’t and that was always a win in Ronan’s head. “I missed you.”
They kissed for the first time in two weeks. Ronan always thought it’d feel different. Every time Adam left for work and Ronan got lonely, he’d picture how he’d have to relearn Adam’s lips. The bow of his top lip, the shape of his mouth when it pressed against his own, the movement of his tongue as they lazily fought a thankless battle. Every single time he was surprised that Adam didn’t taste or feel or kiss any different. Why would he? But still, every single time that they effortlessly reconnected he couldn’t help but feel a deep happiness that he got to have this. Adam.
“I missed you too,” Adam murmured against his lips. “I’m sorry I was gone so long. I hated it too.”
Ronan put on a show of rolling his eyes and stretching his arms out behind him. “As if. Barely even noticed.”
“Right,” Adam smiled up at him, golden. “And that’s why you called me every night for two weeks. Cause you didn’t miss me.”
“Nope,” he agreed, suddenly remembering his fake wake-up. “I had a nightmare.”
There were a few phrases that held the future in their syllables like a promise. My mom called today, coming from Adam’s lips meant a long, bad week was oncoming. We’re out of boysenberries, whilst less urgent meant the end of spring and the beginning of a cold, long winter and more sadly the end of Adam baking him berry-filled pies every other day.
I had a nightmare, was a wildcard. Sometimes it was more on par with an Alice Call. Words that brought weeks of restless nights and an edge too sharp for even Ronan to skate for too long before he was inevitably cut. Sometimes it was a Boysenberry phrase. Sad, but replaced easily with other things; peach pies and apple turnovers.
“Call or Boysenberry?” Adam asked, hands already moved to circle the base of Ronan’s neck, ready to fight some imaginary situation that had lived only in Ronan’s head.
“Can I say both?” Ronan asked, a question with a question. He knew he could say both, but it was part of the routine to ask anyway.
Adam’s fingers were warm on his nape. “You can say both.”
“Both then,” he was trying to pick apart his brain enough to let Adam glimpse inside it. “It just happened.”
With his thumbs running lazy circles on tattooed skin, Adam hummed. “About me?”
His nod must have been interpretable to Adam, because he continued on with no further questioning. One of his hands removed itself from Ronan’s neck and ran spindly down his arm until it could grip his hand and bring it up between them. They pressed together like a high-five. “How many fingers?”
His throat was too full to make a joke out of it. “Just yours or mine as well?”
His thinking face again. “Both.”
“Ten,” he answered, and he knew how the rest of this exercise went. “It’s the 21st of November. I’m a middle child. I have a bottle of 35 year Glen Mckenna on the wine rack that I’m saving for a special occasion. I’m getting married this summer.”
His hand was being pressed to warm lips and held tightly. Nothing bad could happen when his greatest fear was losing something he currently had an iron grip on.
Adam smiled at him. “Good. You’re doing good.”
The words washed over him and made him feel sickly and honey-sweet. Still, he’d picked up Adam’s habit of needing all the answers before he could be satisfied with a solution. “Your car?”
Adam caught on seamlessly. “Out front. Beautiful as ever.”
“Declan and Matthew?”
A shake of a head. “Not here. Driving back to DC last I spoke to Matthew. Probably there already.”
“Adam?”
A smile. A kiss to the soft skin of his neck. “Right here. Not going anywhere for a whole, blissful week.”
And suddenly it was clear that this dream was a Boysenberry, because it’s rough outline fell out of his periferary the second the subject changed. “A week? Seriously?”
“I took some personal days,” he replied, but Ronan was busy trying not to throw Adam off the couch with the pure amount of joy that was cursing through his body. “Plus, they owe me for keeping me back two weeks in fucking Kentucky. I’m all yours, Mr. Lynch.”
“Mine,” he punctuated with a hard kiss to Adam’s collarbone; a brush of rough teeth. The reaching gesture stretched his neck out in a mildly painful way that he couldn’t bring himself to care about. “We’re not leaving this couch. Ever.”
A blissful smile. “I’m okay with that.”
They didn’t stay nestled like that forever. Ronan had a distinct feeling settle in his gut that felt a little like understanding and a little like complete bafflement. He was simultaneously high and low; equal parts satisfied and itching. Words were never his strength but he often tried them out in front of Adam, because shame was a thing that didn’t really persist when stupid concepts like love and trust reared their ugly heads.
But words didn’t come to him while they were on that couch. He couldn’t really figure out why, just that it was happening. He could feel every inch of Adam strung clumsily over him and it felt like two tea cups nestled in a cupboard, or two jigsaw pieces from separate puzzles fitting together through pure coincidence. Usually, those thoughts would embarrass him for a few seconds before he blurted them out and Adam laughed or smiled or, even better, agreed.
Instead, what came out of Ronan’s mouth was not what he’d intended to say. “What possessed you to go see my mother?”
He didn’t even know why he’d said it. Rough, a little sour, maybe a touch too forceful. The harsh syllables of pos-sessed; their cruel implication. The distance that the words ‘mother’ and ‘my’ created, as if she wasn’t going to be Adam’s in a few short months.
Languid limbs stiffened and Adam’s head lifted from Ronan’s chest with the disposition of a criminal approaching execution. “Am I not allowed to?”
The thing that confused Ronan the most, is that if he were asked this question two seconds ago he wouldn’t have hesitated to tell him that no, of course you’re allowed to and follow it up with a kiss to the sensitive arch of Adam’s freckled ear in apology. Something in Adam's instant recoil made him hesitate.
“What’d you talk about?” Ronan asked, forcing himself to chill the fuck out and run his hand down the back of Adam’s neck until some of its stiffness leeched out.
“Oh nothing much,” Adam answered, but he was using the voice he sometimes occupied with Declan. A kind of voice that was simultaneously taking the high road and digging into someone’s ribs. “My trip. Matthew’s blooming candle business. Life. Oh and one more thing. Why didn’t you tell her we’re getting married?”
That was the itch, the hidden annoyance, the phone pressing into his back while he was trying to sleep. He knew there was something he was supposed to do. “Fuck.”
But the second he felt he’d been caught in something that would surely be one of their largest fights yet, Adam started laughing. Not a small huff, or a gaggle of forced breaths. Not a genuine laugh cut off in shame, or even a giggly kind of fit. It was unrestrained, bodily laughter that seemed to bloom from Adam’s chest and burst out of his throat like it wasn’t voluntary in the slightest. His freckled hands grasped the back of Ronan’s head and pushed the laugh into his mouth as he sloppily kissed him, and suddenly nothing mattered except that he was a nestled tea cup and a coincidental puzzle piece and that he was Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish was kissing him.
Hitting the floor was unexpected but in hindsight incredibly likely. Adam’s hands were still at the back of his head but not really much of a cushion for the amount of gravity that had just pulled him to the hardwood floor.
“Fuck,” Ronan hissed again, a dumb repetition. “What’s your damage?”
Those hands, the ones Ronan had grown so accustomed to loving, slid from the back of his skull to cup his face gingerly. The laughter had died out but was still floating around them and lodging itself into the cracks in the walls and the fabrics of the couch cushions.
“You, Ronan Lynch, are an emotionally stunted man-child,” Adam informed him, face incredibly close. Ronan’s chest opened up. “And I can’t believe I’m marrying you.”
He almost couldn’t believe it either.