Archive of Our Own ^beta

"By the way," Ronan says, "I invited someone to fireworks."

He picked his timing with patience and strategy and a bit of dickishness. Finding out after an event has already started that he's going to entertaining more people than he accounted for is one of those things that can send Gansey into a well-bred tizzy, which is almost reason enough for Ronan to go inviting people to shit all the time except for how that'd involve, you know, people.

But fucking with Gansey isn't his only priority today, or even his main one. Hence: patience and strategy. Gansey is preoccupied wrestling with the cooler, which Noah is actively loading drinks into even as Gansey drags it further down the patio. Henry had, just one moment before, squirted lighter fluid all over the grill, because he's even shorter on patience and strategy than Ronan is, so he's currently ducking low and yelping about singeing his perfect face. Blue is three margaritas in and judging them all even more heavily than she normally does, with everyone else making themselves more compelling targets for her disdain than Ronan is at the moment. He's waited for the perfect level of chaos where everyone will hear him without really listening to him or, God forbid, asking follow up questions.

That's how it should've fucking worked, anyway, if life didn't have a boner for screwing him over.

"Oh, is Hennessy in town?" Gansey goes out of his way to grin positive reinforcement at Ronan for his willingly socializing. He therefore deserves the wave of half-melted ice that sloshes over the side of the cooler and drenches the shoes he is, for some reason, wearing on the patio of a beach house at the peak of summer.

"Weird," Noah chimes in. He dodged the freezing cold water in time to stay dry, and then immediately ruined it by dropping two entire six packs into the cooler at the same time and provoking a second flood. He's going to have to round up two of every animal if he keeps this up. "I would've thought she didn't celebrate the Fourth of July. 'Cause, you know. America."

"She would if she knew that you were expecting her not to," Henry says as he pats exaggeratedly at his sleeves, reminding them all how cool he is for almost setting himself on fire. "She has a contrary spirit."

"Yeah, because that's the only reason she would put aside her overwhelming patriotism for long enough to enjoy explosions and alcohol." Blue rolls her eyes and shoots back the rest of Margarita No. 4. Ronan hates her, because he hates all of them right now, but dammit, he can't help but respect her.

"It's not Hennessy, assholes," he growls. "I know other people."

"Yeah, but we're all here already."

Gansey defends Ronan, because he's conscious and awake, and because Ronan isn't being the most visibly immature person in the room. "We all know that's not true."

"Yes it fucking is," Ronan snaps at him.

"Then...who did you invite to fireworks?" Noah asks, puzzled.

"It's a fucking mystery. I was going to give you a prize if you guessed it right, I forgot you're all losers."

Noah remains upbeat as he tosses Ronan a beer. "Better luck next time!" he chirps, like he wasn't the one who just supposedly lost.

Henry and Blue refuse to let it go. "It's gotta be Matthew, right?" Henry muses, as though Ronan can't hear them talking three feet away from his face.

Blue shakes her head. "I think he would have said Matthew, if that was it. Ronan doesn't really treat his brothers like 'someone's."

"Then I think we are truly out of people Ronan knows and would be willing to invite somewhere." Henry points at him with all the drama of the detective revealing which of the partygoers is the murderer. "Did you hire someone off of Craigslist?"

"The payoff of annoying us with that wouldn't be enough to overcome his own annoyance at having a rando here," Blue answers for Ronan, which would have pissed him off less if it hadn't been exactly what he was about to say.

"The payoff for annoying Declan would be," Henry argues. "Perhaps tonight is a trial run."

"If you think Ronan does trial runs for anything, I don't trust your decision-making enough to leave you in charge of the grill."

"You wound me, Ms. Sargent," Henry mourns, and then drops an entire package of frozen hamburgers on the grill, styrofoam packaging and all.

Everyone else finally fucking lets go of the topic after that. Ronan sulks, unable to forget it himself. Unable to stop himself from looking around every few minutes and noticing.

Adam is late.

Not technically, because in order for him to be technically late he'd need to have a set time to show up, and Ronan hadn't given him one. He texted the address, and a warning that traffic and parking always fucking suck getting out there, which he figured was pretty obvious way of saying if you wait until the show starts you're never going to make it. Adam is smart enough to figure that out.

Right, because Adam never fucks up basic communication. He has a perfect track record of understanding exactly what Ronan means.

Blue wanders by. Ronan steals her latest margarita.

Maybe Adam is ditching him. Wouldn't that be fucking perfect? Instead of having Gansey interrogate him about how they know each other, he can have Gansey shooting him puppy dog eyes all night because Ronan got stood up.

The sun finishes setting. The grill produces burgers that are distinguishable from charcoal briquettes. The sky gets dark enough for fireworks. Ronan realizes that Adam isn't showing up.

Why the fuck would he, anyway? They knew each other for two months over a decade ago and hated each other by the end of it. It's not weird that Adam doesn't want to subject himself to hours of Ronan's company. It's weird that Ronan asked, weird that he cared if Adam was lonely or not, weird that he thought he'd be an improvement on loneliness.

"Good fucking riddance," Ronan mutters.

The doorbell rings, barely audible over Henry and Noah jump-screaming along with Party in the USA. Ronan, sprawled out staring up at the as-yet-un-fireworked sky, doesn't hear it himself. He just turns his head sideways and furrows his brows, you're being even nuttier than usual, Dick, when Gansey, sitting closest to the house, squirms enough to almost knock Blue off his lap. "The door's open!"

There's no response to that Ronan can hear, and Gansey squirms some more, his yuppie senses tingling at him to go get the door even though this isn't his party or his house. Blue frowns at him and he settles back into his seat on the patio chaise, obedient boyfriend outranking proper host in Gansey's hierarchy of behavior, at least when he's drunk enough to take the edge off his anxiety.

"Hello?" a voice says from off to the side of the patio, destroying the one solitary moment of quiet in between songs on Cheng's playlist. "Is Ronan here?"

Ronan shoots up fast enough he can feel Sargent's margarita try to make a break for it. Gansey unintentionally buys him time to get his shit together, babbling away, "oh, you must be the mystery guest! Come on in, the gate's unlocked -- er, it should be -- Blue, could you let me up -- "

"It's fine, I've got it," because Adam Parrish didn't let minor obstacles like locked gates or inconvenient romances or pity invites from ex-boyfriends stop him. He's got the gate swinging open in less time than it takes Ronan to feel steady sitting motionless on his lawn chair, and that's before they make eye contact and Ronan has to start finding equilibrium all over again from step one.

Fuck.

Henry comes over to take the wine bottle Adam is carrying and to introduce himself, in that order. Gansey finds his feet and shakes Adam's hand. "I hope you found the place okay. Parking wasn't too bad, was it?"

"It was," Adam says. "But I took my motorcycle. I don't think I'd have been able to park a car anywhere within a mile of here."

Ronan's face burns. Adam had driven away from Declan's house last night in a boring little sedan, suburban camouflage so effective that Ronan hadn't noticed it until he was leaving. He'd never pictured Adam on a motorcycle. Shit.

Gansey continues on, oblivious to Ronan's mental breakdown, which is at least how Ronan prefers things. Or it is until he hears what Gansey is saying.

"Ronan didn't mention, how do the two of you know each other?"

"I work with his brother," Adam supplies. "Declan."

Motorcycle-related panic disappears in a snap, leaves Ronan with a flat, dead feeling: Oh. That's how we're playing it.

It isn't that he wants to get into the full story. He could have started the introductions instead of throwing the burden at Adam's feet, this is Adam, he's the first guy I ever fucked, or even earlier, I invited my ex to fireworks and spared himself the inquisition. But he hadn't wanted to dredge all of that up in front of his friends, and it turns out Adam doesn't want to either.

Ronan wanders over to the drinks cooler while Gansey shows Adam around the house that, again, isn't his. Blue saunters over as he digs through all of Noah's fucking White Claw for an actual goddamn beer.

"You hang out with your brother's coworkers now?" she asks.

"Shut up."

"I will, because I don't care about you." She takes a sip for dramatic effect. "You realize Gansey's not going to let it go that easily."

"Sounds like your problem."

"How is it my problem that he's going to bug you?"

"Every time he pisses me off, I'm gonna piss you off twice as much."

"Uh-huh, so business as usual, then."

Ronan scowls at her, which means she won and they both know it. She saunters off, gloating without words or eye contact.

He's still crouched near the cooler when Adam finds him, having apparently escaped Gansey's unrelenting hospitality. "Thanks for inviting me," he says, perfectly polite. "Your friends are..."

"Fucking weirdos?" Ronan offers.

"I was going to say 'energetic but nice,' but I thought that made them sound like a bunch of puppies."

"Slightly less likely to hump your leg."

Adam turns his head to the side, half hiding his half of a smile.

Ronan's stomach lurches. He can blame the poor lighting on the porch, and Adam facing away from him, and the fact that he's already slightly drunk, but for a moment -- he's back in Virginia, the first time he saw Adam, after trashing his car's engine driving it straight up a mountain on something that was in no way a road because the alternative was to sit in the car going nowhere and thinking about how he was now officially an orphan, praying for it to hang on long enough to get to a garage, setting eyes on the mechanic and feeling like everything just stopped.

And then he blinks, and he doesn't see the boy that he knew for two months a lifetime ago, just some guy that works with his brother.

He looks back at the cooler and finds an escape hatch there. He normally pays no attention to what wine his brother likes, but he'd seen this bottle less than twenty-four hours ago. "Regifting? Declan's gonna be so disappointed."

"Declan shouldn't just assume people drink."

"That was for toasting my baby niece with," Ronan says for the sake of argument. "You want her to go untoasted?"

Adam lifts the bottle out of the ice and hands it to him. "If it's that important to you, go ahead."

So instead of a beer, Ronan has an entire bottle of mostly unchilled white wine with him when the fireworks start shortly after. He takes Gansey's spot on the chaise and sips straight from the bottle. There no pressure to make small talk during the fireworks, or to stop his emotions from swinging on a mad pendulum, lust to anger to hate to longing to bitterness every time Adam's voice chimes into the conversation. He just sips his way through the show and pretends to have passed out when it's over, gets to dodge an interrogation from Gansey and avoid bidding anyone goodnight and ignore one last time the question that had been in Adam's eyes all night, should I not have come tonight after all?

-

There's no one else at Declan's house when Ronan lets himself in, which means no one to lose their temper with him for not sitting still.

He paces, but that gets old, so he escalates to moving all of Declan's belongings around, just to be a little shit. Then that gets boring. He switches to shadowboxing, interspersed with jumps for the door every time he thinks he hears a sound. His phone chimes a dozen times, but none of them are Declan, just Gansey continuing what he clearly thinks is a subtle intelligence gathering operation but might as well be SO WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH YOU AND ADAM, HUH texted to him over and over. He turns his phone off.

Finally, finally, there's the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. He throws himself into the recliner like he's been chilling there the whole time, kicks his feet on top of the coffee table and almost knocks over the open carton of milk that he snagged from the fridge.

Eva is first through the door. She runs right up to Ronan and jumps around by his ankles until he lifts her up. "Too TIGHT, Uncle Ronan," she chides him. He obediently loosens his grip.

Declan is next into the house, carrying a pack animal's worth of bags. Jordan follows after him, and with her --

She's tiny, is the first thing that Ronan notices about the baby, although she isn't really. This is the size babies are when they're only a day old. She was a totally healthy and normal weight when she was born, not that he's going to let Declan know that he remembered all the details he'd been told, or that he'd Googled all of them to check that she was healthy and not that the doctors just didn't know what the fuck they were doing.

He's standing up and hovering by Jordan and the baby before he realizes he's even moved.

"You sure they didn't swap the babies around out on you?" he asks to save face. "Doesn't look like either of you. She has nobody's nose."

Jordan's grins, completely exhausted but cheery at the same time; a soldier who just went through a war, sure, but on the winning side. "Oh, we just grabbed the cutest one in the nursery and ran like mad."

"Must have been slim pickings. She looks like an alien." He tries to think at what point the pictures of Eva started to look like a human baby, and not a scrunched up little muppet, but he has no damn clue.

"You should have seen her when she was covered in bloody slime."

Eva wiggles to be put down, so he sets her on the ground. She runs for the kitchen, cheerfully rattling off to Declan all the things she wants for lunch. Jordan offers Isabella to Ronan like she isn't the most precious and fragile thing in the entire world. Ronan swallows hard and takes her very carefully.

"This is your uncle, Isabella," Jordan says. "This is Ronan."

He thought she was asleep, but she scrunches up her face at that, a grumpy little I didn't ask for no stupid uncle.

"Too bad," he tells her, "you're stuck with me anyway." At least, since he's staring at the baby, he doesn't have to see the expression on Jordan's face.

" -- and I want a yogurt, and an applesauce," Eva says. "And the baby can have an applesauce."

"Well, Isabella can't have applesauce," Declan replies. "She needs to have milk."

Eva switches tracks at the drop of a hat. "How come she gets to have milk?"

"She's a baby, that's what babies eat."

"Why can't I have milk?"

"You eat big girl food now," Declan says.

"You can have milk, too, if you want," Jordan tells Eva, preventing an argument with the deft diplomacy of someone who's had a small child for two years and had a Lynch for several years on top of that. Although by that criteria, what's Declan's excuse for being so useless at diplomacy, except that he's useless at everything.

"Right. Different kind of milk." Completely useless. Declan opens the fridge and stares blankly into it as though completely defeated by the absence of milk. Ronan snorts a laugh, at which point Declan finally looks at the living room and notices the carton on the coffee table.

"Ronan -- "

He shushes Declan. "You're going to wake up the baby."

"Yes, and she's going to wake me up plenty of times. Turnabout's fair play," but he does lower his voice.

"Uncle Ronan, this is YOUR seat," Eva hollers from the dining table, loud enough the baby blinks up at him. He looks to Jordan for backup.

"Here, go help wrangle that one and I'll take the one that can't talk back."

"Are you making fun of your baby for not being able to talk yet?" Ronan demands as he passes her back.

"No, just enjoying it while it lasts."

"Uncle Ronan!" Eva summons again, so he goes and sits where she tells him to. Jordan takes a seat in the living room that lets her see all of them, and then immediately shuts her eyes in exhaustion. Declan bites his tongue when he notices Ronan's reorganizational efforts and starts setting the kitchen back in order with a sigh. Eva holds out her half-eaten applesauce to share with Ronan.

-

"Is there some reason that you keep showing up at my door unannounced?" Declan asks, on the fifth day that Ronan shows up at his door unannounced. His hair is sticking out in all directions like Ronan has never seen from him, and his eyes are open too wide, an expression Ronan recognizes from deep personal experience means I'm afraid if I shut them they won't open again. Ronan wonders if, in his sleep deprivation, it took five days for it to occur to Declan to question his brother's constant presence, or if he'd been deliberately not asking but five days of sleep deprivation wore down his filter.

"If you regret giving me a key that's your fault," Ronan says instead of answering. "You can't take it back now."

"I'm not saying I'm going to take away your key, although I'll point out, the intention was never that you'd let yourself in while everyone was asleep."

Jordan, passing by with a load of laundry, puts the basket down and places a hand over Declan's mouth.

"If you ban a willing babysitter from visiting us, I am going to leave you," she tells him.

"I said I wasn't going to take away his key," Declan grumbles.

"Yes, and you and Ronan never goad each other into saying things you weren't planning to say, is that it?"

Declan did, somewhere along the way, learn do not to argue with that expression from your wife deeply enough to retain the knowledge even while sleep deprived.

Jordan smiles at Ronan. "You're good to watch the girls in here? Declan'll be doing dishes if anything happens."

"Oh I will, will I?" Declan asks. "And where are you going to be?"

"Taking a shower. You can take the second shower."

Declan leans into Jordan, murmurs something into her ear quiet enough Ronan can't hear. It's a casual moment of domestic intimacy, not showy or remarkable, just a part of their lives.

Ronan looks away.

On the wall across the room is a set of photos from their wedding day. Two photos, two pairs of siblings. Jordan radiant in a bridal gown, Hennessy paying the barest lip service to formal wear. Declan, formal and boring, and Matthew, draped over his shoulders in a boa constrictor's hug, looking like a kid in a costume, Fisher-Price My First Tuxedo Playset.

The knot in his chest tightens. He stomps over to the chunk of the living room that's surrounded by baby fencing and drops to a seat on the carpet.

"Look, Uncle Ronan," Eva says, holding up a stuffed animal for inspection. He dutifully examines it. "Uncle Ronan, where's Adum?"

He glares at her. "Salt in the wound, kid."

"What's a wound?"

"A boo-boo."

"Salt goes on food, Uncle Ronan," she tells him, metaphorically and literally snotty. "Not on boo-boos."

"Do you want me to play dolls with you or not?" It's the emptiest threat that Ronan has ever made, but Eva's not going to understand how badly she's got him wrapped around her finger for at least another year or two; her eyes get all wide and dewy, please? and he takes the toy when she offers it to him.

-

It's a week of Ronan treating Declan's house like he lives there when someone knocks on the door, rapping on the wood a determined inch away from the doorbell. Ronan is playing dead with a triumphant Eva sprawled on top of him giggling, and Jordan's having a fully deserved nap in the bedroom, so Declan shuffles his Afternoon of the Living Dead ass over to the door to answer.

"Parrish," Declan says. Ronan's eyes fly open before he remembers, play dead, except Eva already ruined that, kicking him in the gut as she scrambled up off of him. He manages to turn an undignified grunt of pain into a short and wheezy shit while she runs to the edge of the play area and peers at the door. "Hello. What brings you by? Oh," he interrupts himself before Adam can even answer. "Sorry, please, come inside."

"Oh, no, I'm just dropping these off," Adam starts, "you don't have to -- "

"ADUM!" Eva bellows.

"Well, now you've got to say hello to her," Declan says. "Or there'll be hell to pay."

"I -- if it's no trouble," Adam hedges.

"Please. We have coffee and children inside."

"Uh. Just coffee, thanks."

Ronan is in full view of the entryway, and even the quickest escape would mean dashing through a minefield of toys and leaping over the wall of baby jail, so he does the dignified thing and sits up to nod a wordless greeting as Adam slides in the door. Adam jerks his head up and down once, a touch of panic peeking out from his eyes. Eva waves a hand at him wildly, as though her hollering wouldn't be enough to get his attention but that might do the trick.

Declan has already turned his back on all of them, having reminded himself that there exists coffee in the world that he isn't currently drinking. He does at least bring a second mug with him when he reemerges from the kitchen. A second, but not a third; Ronan considers stealing one of them to make a point about being left out, but Declan has a death grip on his cup, and Adam's tense posture and skittish expression are just begging for an excuse to bolt back out the door. Ronan's not going to help him chicken out.

Adam is holding a box, about a foot in every dimension; from the way he shifts it under one arm to free up a hand for the coffee mug, it isn't heavy. "Really, I just came by to drop this off," but he doesn't put it down. He's clinging to it with a determination that Ronan hasn't seen since two seconds ago, watching Declan clutch at his caffeine.

"Don't let us keep you if you have somewhere to be," Declan says. "But there's no need to rush off on our account, it's nice seeing another human being. I'm starting to understand why people in old novels got so excited about having visitors over for a cup of tea."

Neither Declan nor Adam react to the way that sentence ended. It isn't worth notice, really. Just Niall's accent flowing out from one of his sons, the way it does every now and then, a totally fucking normal occurrence that totally fucks Ronan up every time it happens. Especially from Declan. Especially now, from Declan, who's older now than their father had been when he'd had two children.

Eva, bored with this conversation as any right-thinking person should be, fusses to be let out of the cage of her play area. Ronan grabs her and plonks her on his lap instead, which she takes as an acceptable substitute for a good five seconds before fussing again.

By the time Ronan zones back in, Adam's awkwardly shifting his grip on the box. " -- just some onesies, I heard that you can never have too many of those with an infant. The other one -- is for Eva."

The hesitation there is small. Ronan might not have caught it, except he recognizes it, horribly, and the carefully neutral face that didn't manage to cover up the tension in the rest of his body. It's pure Adam Parrish saying what he wants when he thinks that he'll get shot down. It took Ronan half the summer to figure out that was what that expression was, because it would happen when he was saying shit that Ronan wouldn't have argued with in a million years, we could hang out tomorrow or do you want to come upstairs or I could blow you, if you want. It didn't make sense to him until it shifted into I'm busy and I need to pack and just leave if you're going to be like that, Ronan, I don't have time for this shit.

"Eva?" Declan asks, like he's forgotten the name of his firstborn in all of the excitement of being a new dad all over again. Which is, it turns out, the point Adam is getting at.

"I hope that's all right. I just thought she might feel left out, with all of the fuss about the baby."

"Jesus." Declan blinks at him. "Did you take classes on being a good neighbor?"

Adam blinks back at him. "I don't live near you."

"Oh, you know what I mean."

"That's an assumption," Adam mutters under his breath, but Declan's already turned to the play area, picking Eva up and wincing as she cries FIN-ally at full volume, in her best irritated Uncle Ronan impression.

He's pretty sure teaching her that is going to bite him in the ass, but not enough to make him regret it.

"Do you remember Adam?" Declan asks Eva, but she's already making grabby gimme hands at him and saying "Adum!"

Adam ignores this obvious plea to be held, clutches the box in front of him like a shield against adorable nieces.

"Adam brought you a present, Eva," Declan explains.

She perks up. "Happy day cake?"

"Sometimes we get presents when it's not our birthday. On very special days," he adds, firmly drawing a line, like that's going to do shit to protect him from getting asked for birthday cake once a week for the next year.

Adams hands over a gift bag, a basic green thing with no adornment. It's just as well he didn't splurge for a fancier wrapping; Eva immediately tears the plain white tissue paper out of it and sticks her hand in, squealing in delight as she pulls out a stuffed animal shaped like that goddamn fucking cartoon snowman that's haunted Ronan's life for the last year and a half.

"What do we say to Adam?" Declan prompts her.

"Olaf!"

"What else do we say to Adam?"

"Thank you, Adum!" That done, she turns her attention to Declan. "Put me down, daddy."

"And what do we say when we want something?"

"Please mommy?" Eva guesses.

"Am I mommy, Eva?"

"Please mommy daddy?"

Declan accepts this attempt, but smiles wryly at Adam. "We're trying to break her from associating acts of service solely with motherhood, but for now she instinctively directs all requests to Jordan first. Even when Jordan isn't in the room. I think I'm failing her as a feminist."

"Ah," Parrish says, because what the fuck else do you say to that?

Eva saves them from needing to make any more conversation, which Declan most of all should be grateful for. She twirls around the room with her new toy, like some kind of disgustingly adorable Disney commercial, and then skips over to the side of the room where Isabella is sleeping in her baby sling with an offensively misleading attitude of pure sainthood. Oh, me? I always sleep this peacefully, you must be thinking of some other shrieking demon baby that refuses to be put down at nap time.

"Look, baby," Eva tells her. "Our stuffie." She places the toy extremely gently on top of her sister -- even in just one week, she's had a lot of explanations from adults about being careful with the baby. Perching on her tiptoes, she leans forward and even more gently kisses Isabella on the forehead.

"It's infant safe," Adam says swiftly, eyes darting back toward Declan, panic back in his eyes in full force, "I checked." Declan doesn't hear him. Declan isn't paying any damn attention to Adam Parrish or the toy or anything except the completely unprompted display of sibling devotion unfolding in front of him. Who's thinking about fucking safety rankings right now? Fucking only children, that's who. Ronan could explain that to Adam, if he didn't feel the way that Declan looked.

-

Izzy wakes up before Adam finishes his compulsory cup of coffee, stirring peacefully because she's still trying to con him into thinking she's a little cherub.

"Good morning," Declan says, like the baby just showed up to a fucking business appointment. He lowers his voice as he crouches down next to the baby sling, enough that Ronan can't hear what he's saying to mock him for it. He gently lifts Isabella up and holds her up to her shoulder.

Adam darts a glance at the front door but doesn't make up his mind fast enough.

"Do you want to hold her?" Declan offers.

Adam, wide-eyed, looks from him to the baby to the door again, and then to Ronan, who glares at him until he says "if you think it's safe."

"Of course, here, hold her like this," and Declan shows Adam where to put his hands, how to cradle her head. She whines once, a brief noise that provokes wariness from all involved. "She might want a pacifier," Declan suggests, and then frown. "Let me grab a clean one, I'll be right back."

Adam stares at Ronan as soon as Declan is gone and mouths what now?

"What 'what now'," Ronan demands. "You hold her, that's what."

"I am holding her," Adam hisses, quiet despite Ronan's volume.

"So now you keep doing it, unless you want to drop her."

Adam starts to respond, but before he can get any words out the baby fusses again. He retreats back into fear, apparently willing to look to the man he'd just been about to insult for help.

Ronan rolls his eyes, because seriously, it's not that scary. She's a whole week old now.

Adam makes a face at him and tries bouncing Isabella up and down once, watching her apprehensively as he does so. She scrunches her face up in a not very positive expression, but doesn't actually cry.

Declan returns. Adam pawns her back off on him, the coward.

"Getting cranky, Isabella?" Declan asks, like she's going to pluck out the pacifier he just gave her and say, as a matter of fact, Father, I am, perhaps you could change my diaper at your earliest convenience?

"'Isabella' is kind of...formal, for a baby," Adam says. "Does she have a nickname?"

"We're at an impasse on that one," Declan replies as he walks over to open the fridge. "I'm not sold on 'Izzy,' but Jordan points out that 'Bella' sounds..."

He trails off, distracted by the contents of the fridge.

Adam shoots a questioning glance to Ronan, little help interpreting your brother?

Ronan shrugs back at him: Beats me.

"Bella sounds like what?" Adam prompts.

"Hm? Oh. Jordan says people will think we named her after," Declan waves his hand, still useless at words. "Books. With the Mormon vampires."

"And obviously you only approve of normal, sane cults like Catholicism," Ronan says.

"You were raised in that cult too, Michael," Declan shoots back.

Adam powers through the last of his coffee and says something about needing to go, now that Declan is too busy trying to feed Isabella to argue with him. Ronan grabs his keys and wallet off the table and walks out with him.

To his relief, Adam drove the sedan today, so he won't have to see him on a motorcycle. Except it wasn't as though they hadn't spent a huge chunk of the time they'd known each other in cars, like there aren't a thousand memories that might as well belong to that boring sedan: Dropping Adam off at his apartment even when Adam could've walked to put off saying goodbye to him. Driving around because they had nothing better to do, or not anything they could agree on, Ronan even more antisocial than Adam was, Adam never wanting to spend any money he didn't have to. Taking advantage of having each other so close, just enough privacy to make them feel bold. They'd had their first kiss in a car. They'd had their last kiss in a car, not that Ronan knew at the time that that's what it was.

So he's clearly in a great place to start a conversation, and Adam isn't going to start one, he's just going to drive away, and Ronan might as well have stayed inside, except then Adam does say something.

"Why 'Michael'?" he asks. "I thought your middle name was Niall."

That's worse than the fucking motorcycle would have been, a jarring shriek of pain in his ears like nails on a chalkboard. That sore spot has done a lot of scabbing over since Ronan was a kid, but the dissonance of hearing his father's name casually thrown out by his ex-boyfriend makes it feel fresh and new. Not that Adam knew that was what the name meant. He hadn't known even when the wound had been fresh, when Ronan was dropping by his apartment at random hours of the day and night to avoid being alone with that wound.

"It's my Confirmation name," he says. "Michael the Archangel. Patron saint of death."

Adam hms. "Hopefully the baby ends up with a nickname that's less wannabe edgy."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "Her name's Izzy," he declares. "Or it will be."

"How can you tell?"

"Once Eva settles on a nickname, they're not going to be able to reason with her to change it, she's a fucking baby. And once she's calling her something, everyone else is going to follow."

"Uh-huh," Adam says, zeroing in on the gap in Ronan's explanation. "And Eva's going to settle on Izzy because..."

"Because I'm training her to say it whenever Declan isn't around."

Adam shakes his head. "In that case, he'll just have to be glad that the name she learns from you is 'Izzy' and not, oh say, 'fucking baby.'"

"She's smart enough to know the difference."

Adam gives him a who are you kidding look that makes Ronan, for the first time, wonder if maybe he should say the word fuck slightly less often in front of his two-year-old niece.

-

"Why the fuck are you sending me physical mail?" Hennessy demands. Ronan hates phone calls with anyone, but at least she gets right to the point. No wasted time on any hello, how are you doing bullshit. "Is it poisoned? Are you trying to bring back anthrax scares, because that's so old it doesn't count as retro, it's simply decrepit and covered with mold."

"Mold doesn't grow on anthrax," Ronan says with the confidence of a man who knows exactly what anthrax is, despite not being such a man.

"No, but it grows fabulously on glowering hopeless boys who have refused to adapt their maladaptations at any point in the last twenty years. It's got to be malice that's got you shipping packages across the country, right?" Hennessy asks, excited for the malice. "Anyone else in your circle of sad sacks, I'd chalk it up to throwing some pity business to the floundering United States Postal Service, but I won't insult you by suggesting you're capable of charity toward public institutions. I have other ways of insulting you. What the hell am I going to find in this package, anyway?"

"If you fucking opened it you'd know already and I wouldn't be dying of boredom."

"Haven't ruled out a parcel bomb yet," she informs him brightly.

"You can't fit a bomb in a manila envelope."

She snorts. "You can't." Getting that last insult in is enough to tip the scales for her. He hears the paper rip as she opens the envelope, and then he doesn't hear anything for several long, tense seconds.

"Wow, you shouldn't have," she says, voice flat. "You literally should not have. I get enough baby photos from my sister."

"Liar," Ronan says. "You didn't accept the invite to the shared photo album."

"The point at which you are able to tell who is or isn't accessing a digital photo album is a sign that something horrendous is occurring. You know that, right? You understand this very simple fact that things have gone very wrong in your life if you're at this point?"

"What's wrong is Eva's two years old and she's never met her aunt."

"Do not project your guilt onto me, Lynch," Hennessy warns. "I don't have Catholic childhood hangover, I'm not addicted to the stuff and I sure as hell can't absolve you."

Ronan stifles a sigh. Hennessy's family issues aren't identical to his, but they've got enough in common that he can guess at where hers are taking her.

They have enough in common that he can tell when to keep pushing and when to back off, so he asks, "Not even after you've looked at the last photo?" he asks.

She flips through the stack of photos loudly enough that she has to be doing it on purpose to irritate him, and then gasps in exaggerated delight.

"Boy king drunk?"

"Boy king high." Ronan had dug through a shoebox of old photographs for an embarrassing picture of Gansey, or, a more than average embarrassing picture of Gansey. Every picture of Gansey is embarrassing. The bad ones are bad and the good ones are earnest, which is worse. He's already sacrificed the absolute most terrible ones to Hennessy's schadenfreude over the years. She'd never hung out with Gansey that often, even before she moved away, but he always made enough of an impression for her to maintain an interest in the bizarre spectacle of his life.

"Dumbass ate a brownie at Cheng's without even asking what was in it," he adds, like he's giving the provenance for an artwork to increase its value to collectors.

Hennessy snorts in amusement, accepting his offering. "All right, Lynch, you're in the clear. From me, I'm sure the devil's still got you in his books, but who wants to go to heaven anyway. Bet the only booze they've got up there is kombucha."

-

"Have you made up your mind about sailing?" Gansey asks him, because who else in his life would ever construct a sentence like that.

Ronan hasn't made up his mind. On the one hand, it's a prime opportunity to get more photos of Gansey to use as future Hennessy bribes, and it's time spent in Gansey's company, which is, whatever, incentive in its own right.

On the other hand: sailing.

"I do not want to get lost at sea, Dick," Ronan tells him. "I refuse to die on a desert island."

"That isn't a going concern for this outing."

"Not for you. You'd write messages in bottles and invent shit out of coconuts and have a fucking blast. Me, I'd just lay down and let the seagulls pick my bones clean."

"Yes, that's exactly how I would behave if I washed up on the fictional shores of Gilligan's Island," Gansey agrees dryly. "We'll be in spitting distance of the shore the whole time."

"Then what's the point?"

"Sea breezes and camaraderie."

Ronan makes a gagging noise. All of that healthy sun-kissed togetherness is right up Gansey's alley. It might not be completely disgusting, though. Ronan pictures it, Gansey doing all the work while getting heckled by Ronan and Blue and whoever else is enough of a sucker to get dragged into this.

For one moment, the image of Adam's evil little smirk flashes across his mind, the one that he gets right before he says something really cutting and hilarious. Ronan tells himself to shake it off. There's no way he can invite Adam out again so soon without turning Gansey's curiosity up to the boiling point. Adam probably has plans, anyway. Because that's what Ronan's noticed about this new incarnation of Adam, his busy social life.

"You're making the desert island sound better by comparison," he keeps the argument going, despite his distraction.

"If you're worried about seasickness, you could just say so," Gansey tells him, making the not completely unfounded assumption that Ronan's reluctance is a cover for shame. It isn't this time, but that doesn't mean it never is. "No one will judge. Blue usually takes a Dramamine, I was going to bring extra in case Parrish needs one too."

The delightfully bitchy Adam in his mind's eye crumbles into ash. Another memory fills in for it: Adam, with his hands clenched at his sides, get out of my way, Lynch.

"Sounds like there's more than enough people already," Ronan snaps at Gansey.

"I assure you, there's plenty of room for four people on the boat." Four people, and is that intentional or just bad fucking luck? Gansey and his girlfriend, Ronan and the guy Ronan brought to fireworks -- that has to be on purpose, it stinks of Gansey's clumsy meddling.

Just in case there was any chance Ronan would give him the benefit of the doubt, Gansey goes charging on ahead. "Or is your concern for the particular people involved, rather than the absolute number," he starts. "You didn't explain how you met Adam -- "

"And I'm not going to," Ronan says, knowing the creature clawing at his guts is jealousy but not knowing if it's jealousy of Gansey, or jealousy over Gansey, or maybe just outrage that Adam and Gansey would dare to exist when Ronan isn't around. "Drop it."

Gansey knows damn well that that tone of voice means I will get up and walk out if you keep going. Drop it he does, reluctantly, without hiding his dissatisfaction with the situation. Too bad: he's not going to get a better explanation than that, not when half the time he bitches at Ronan about his justified anger. There's no way he'd be on Ronan's side here. Ronan doesn't want him to be.

He figures that's more than enough of an answer for anyone involved, and then he gets a text the next afternoon: Are you actually going to leave me to hang out on a sailboat with people I don't know on my own?

It's from an unknown number. There's one other text in the conversation, Ronan sending the information about the fireworks. He hadn't saved Adam's phone number after that. He hadn't had Adam's phone number before, either. He always met Adam when he clocked off work, or swung by his apartment when he couldn't sleep. He'd figured that he was going to have to get used to phone calls and text messages after Adam moved to Boston, and the idea of it annoyed him, so he put off getting his number for as long as possible, like the concept of long distance was something that could recognize and suffer from spite.

And then, of course, there'd be no reason to get his number at all.

He pecks out a response: Why not thought youd be all for yachts

Gansey is YOUR friend, right? You didn't just gatecrash his Fourth of July and he was too polite to kick you out?

Nope that's it exactly

I'd be more likely to believe that if he hadn't already shown me a slideshow of the two of you throughout the ages

I didn't say it was THIS fourth of July

Then my point stands that you know him and should know he is not, despite appearances, a yacht guy
We're on a hundred year old sailboat he refurbished himself
I'm pretty sure I'm going to die today

And that's your sales pitch for getting me to come too

Adam starts typing and then stops.

Just a statement of fact, is the response, when it finally comes through. It doesn't leave Ronan a good direction to go in, anything to argue with or prod at.

He figures that's it, that's the conversation over and done with, he doesn't need to communicate with anyone else today, and then a new text pops up from SGT. PYGMY.

Are you seriously texting Adam? And responding to his texts? In the same month that you get them?

Shut up

Not if you make me go sailing with my boyfriend and his new man crush by myself
Then I owe you nothing and will rat you out

He thinks about Blue telling Gansey that Ronan is capable of texting, but only with Adam. A drop of sweat breaks out on his skin for every conversation Gansey will insist they have about that fact.

Fine
Stall for time
Im not going on a boat without beer

That's all I ever wanted from you <3

He can't be angry at her for wanting booze. Fortunately can find a reason to be angry with anyone when he wants to, and Sargent isn't an exception. He reminds himself that she's blackmailing him into being shipwrecked on an island with his ex and easily summons up the will to photograph himself flipping her off.

You know there's an emoji for that, she responds, you're willingly choosing to take a selfie.

-

Blue gets exactly what she wanted: Ronan brings beer.

Blue is the only one to get exactly what they want out of the situation. Ronan certainly doesn't; the sight of Gansey and Adam chumming around the boat like old pals plants an ugly feeling in his chest that digs in deeper the more he tries to yank it out, so he stops trying. That, of course, ruins Gansey's day -- in between bestest friending with Ronan's ex and doing all of the actual work of sailing because fuck if any of the rest of them know how, he has to keep taking breaks to shoot little disappointed faces at Ronan every time he says something too sharp to even loosely be excused as a joke. As for Adam -- Ronan doesn't pay close enough attention to get any read off of him, but he assumes that he's managing to ruin the day for Adam anyway. It's a reasonable bet in most circumstances, that Ronan is ruining things.

He slinks off down to the cabin on the pretense of getting another drink. No one tries to stop him. He hangs out for a few minutes basking in solitude, in being out of the sun, in not having to say the wrong thing.

Someone climbs down the stairs to the cabin behind him.

Ronan doesn't give him the chance to start. "I'm not going to apologize."

"Wasn't going to ask you to."

Ronan turns around to glare at Adam. "You're not Gansey."

"No," Adam agrees. "And I'm not going to apologize for that, either."

"Fuck off," Ronan says, but once again, like everything else today, it comes out too heavy.

If Adam's offended, he doesn't show it. He just gazes at Ronan for a moment, considering him.

"Barring someone getting murdered and tossed out to sea," he says, "all of us now aboard are going to be stuck on board until we get back to the marina."

"No shit. I know how boats work."

"So if you had a problem with that," Adam continues, "such as not wanting me to be here, or not wanting to be here yourself, that's the kind of thing you could have brought up before we left."

Ronan's not having this conversation. "But if you weren't here, who'd help Gansey stop Sargent and I from murdering each other?"

"Neither of you can restrain yourself for one afternoon?"

"The ocean's right there. You said it yourself, it's begging for a body to get tossed into it."

"Yeah, I wasn't going to interfere in any fights anyway," Adam says, "but that really settles it. If Gansey wants you two to not murder each other that's his problem."

"Some lackey you turned out to be. He'll be so disappointed in you."

The joke doesn't land, probably because it wasn't a joke.

"Ronan." Fuck, it backfired worse than Ronan thought; he's not going to get yelled at, he's going to get conversed with. "You could have just said you didn't want to go sailing with me when I texted you."

"You could have told me you were talking to Gansey."

"You introduced us," Adam snaps, and that's horribly familiar -- not just Adam getting annoyed with him, or even Adam getting pissed off with him. It's the specific kind of angry, what do you mean 'you can't leave,' I TOLD you I was leaving. Anger that started as confusion, because they had set up the rules, and then Ronan had changed them without letting Adam know.

Jesus Fucking Christ, he never did learn, did he?

"Yeah," he says, forcing that word to be light and easy and have zero buried rage in it. "But just so you could make fun of what a dork he is."

Adam narrows his eyes, analyzing what Ronan is up to now. He doesn't trust that Ronan is honestly dropping it, and Ronan can't blame him.

"Look, I'm being a shit today." He huffs, put out all over again that he has to use words. "I fell asleep on Declan's couch last night and the girls woke me up a thousand times. Just ignore me, it's what everyone else does."

"It's impossible to ignore you," Adam replies. "I'm not saying no one's tried, but I doubt any have succeeded." Ronan snorts a laugh, and Adam produces the smallest and shortest-lived excuse for a smile anyone's ever seen. "But I can give you some space. Gansey's probably going to come looking for one of us anyway. I've never seen a man so resistant to alone time with his own girlfriend."

"Probably figures he's next on her list for ocean burial if she can't get to me."

Adam gives him another one of those so tiny he might as well not have bothered smiles and heads up to the deck.

Ronan lingers below deck, drinks half a beer and, since no one's around, takes one of the Dramamine that Gansey had helpfully left out. Only then does he emerge from the cabin.

Gansey has an arm around Adam's shoulders, gesturing toward the wide expanse of the Atlantic and talking animatedly about...who fucking knows. Half the world is in that direction, it could be anything that's got him excited.

Ronan shuts his eyes like the light is too bright and shakes his head. He did introduce them. This was the whole point. He brought Adam around, because Gansey loses his shit whenever he gets to add a new person to his life, and because Adam -- didn't have anyone. Right. Fuck. That was the point.

He exhales and feels something relax, a bit, something he can't put a name to. Maybe it's the fucking Dramamine kicking in.

Blue wanders over and takes advantage of his contemplative state to take a swipe at the beer can in his hand. This is the exact reason why Ronan doesn't do introspection.

He fends her off. "Hey, you gotta be careful with me. Parrish says he's not going to stop me if I try to throw you overboard."

"Like I need his help."

At that point, what else can Ronan do? He picks up Blue, which is a stupidly easy thing to do. You'd think if God was going to make someone so throwable, size-wise, He'd also give them the sense to be less throwable, attitude-wise. Not that God overloaded Ronan with self-preservation instincts, either.

Blue refuses to be alarmed by this turn of events. She doesn't even struggle to break free. She just tells him, matter of fact, "I will bite you."

"You can fucking try." He swings her closer to the edge of the boat.

"And I'll take your beer down with me."

That is reason enough for him to concede, but then Gansey notices what's happening and starts clutching his pearls and making aghast noises. Bluff called, Ronan has no choice but to throw all his chips in with his losing hand. He chucks Blue overboard and watches sadly as his beer follows suit.

Gansey does a really a plus job chewing him out, after, which is too damn bad. He's wasting his material. Ronan is barely listening, looking past him to where Adam is watching, an inscrutable look on his face. He said he wasn't going to intervene in a fight. Is he regretting that? Is he judging Ronan for actually going through with it? Is he trying to make Ronan feel stressed out and crazy -- and just as Ronan decides that is what's happening, that he gets to be pissed now, the expression breaks. His mask cracks enough to let a smile shine through as he grabs a line to pull Blue back aboard.

-

Eva remembers the strangest damn things. She forgets obvious shit a moment after she hears it, sometimes, only to ask Ronan a question about it days later, after he's gone and forgotten what she's talking about.

It figures that Adam would be one of those things she decided to ambush him with. She'll randomly ask about him, sometimes right when Ronan first shows up, sometimes not until he's leaving, thinking he's gotten away with it for the day.

She springs it on a Wednesday that's shit enough already. Sure, it had started fine, watching Declan pour himself a cup of coffee, doctor it with milk and sugar, carefully pour the entire thing down the sink, and then stare mournfully into the empty mug not understanding where his coffee had gone -- Ronan had laughed at him, because it was what he deserved, and because it was amusing, and because he can't exactly go and let Declan know how much more likable he is as a complete shitshow than as the uptight killjoy who constantly tells everyone they're screwing up.

So it's funny, and then it occurs to him, totally obvious in hindsight, that Declan must have been a hot fucking mess like this the first time, after Eva was born, and Ronan just...missed it.

It takes some of the humor out of it.

Declan clears out, and then Eva starts fussing, and the baby has been fussing all day, so Ronan's not exactly his best and most patient self when she starts in about Adam.

"But why not Adum?" she asks.

"Because," he says, shorter than he'd like to be. "He's just not here, okay?"

"We could call him," Eva suggests. "Like MattMatt."

"Adam's probably at work. He doesn't want to Skype us."

Ronan stands his ground for a frankly unprecedented five minutes of Eva whining and pleading before he caves.

He sends Adam a message, If Eva doesn't get to see you she's going to cry and I'm going to snap and castrate Declan, and then he spends a few minutes explaining that Adam might not see his phone and several more minutes bribing her with television, which should have been his first move, honestly.

His phone's sitting face up, so he does actually see the message when it comes in. He debates whether to tell Eva about it, but just his luck, she notices it the second that he decides not to.

Yeah but he's already had two kids, Adam says, does he really need his testicles

Dude shut up about my brother's balls

You introduced the topic of conversation

Just because the kid wants to Skype with you

How do you imagine that working, exactly?

Ronan assumes that Adam is refusing, and even though it's what he expected, he's pissed. It's for Eva. She's just a little kid. He could make some fucking time for her.

A new message slides in after the last one: If you tell me you know how Skype works I'm going to call bullshit. Do you think Eva knows how? Are you relying on a toddler for tech support?

He stares at that very valid point that had not occurred to him, and then his text app disappears, the screen taken up with a big alert that he's getting an incoming Skype call. He grabs Eva up and drops her in his lap, not very careful but she whoops so at least she thought it was fun

"When you see Adam, you say 'bullshit', okay?"

He picks up the call before she can reply, so what actually happens is Adam's face appears on his screen, a bit skeptical, and Eva chirps "Okay!" at Ronan and then hollers "buuuullshiiiiiit!" at the phone.

"Hi, Eva," Adam says.

"What, no lecture about profanity?"

"Today I'm living vicariously through her."

"Have a lot of phone calls where you wish you could yell bullshit?"

"Not more than seventy percent of the time."

Eva, as it turns out, doesn't really get the concept of staying still so the camera can see her, a fact that Ronan feels immense pride in her for. He isn't very good at keeping her in frame, either, and wouldn't be willing to play the camera phone's evil little games even if he were. The result on Adam's end probably looks like some deranged and poorly funded puppet show as Eva wanders around the play area, picking up various toys to wave at him, shouting their names and imagined biographies in the general direction of the camera. Judging by Adam's face, 'deranged and poorly funded' makes for a pretty good puppet show. Somehow the phone never manages to fully turn away from Ronan, so he can see Adam's expression through the whole thing. He smiles and nods at appropriate moments and never quite bursts out laughing, but there are a few close calls.

Eventually, Eva toddles off to the other end of the play area and stays there, playing 'stack letter blocks on each other with total disregard for alphabetical order or structural integrity' while humming to herself under her breath.

"Looks like she's done with you," Ronan tells him, the camera still pointed more or less toward the corner that Eva's abandoned them for.

"I'll try not to take it personally." Adam looks off camera for a moment and Ronan remembers that he's at work. He's probably multitasking. He should just get off the phone and go do whatever it is that's more important than they are. Instead he fidgets for a second and then stops, abruptly, like he's remembered that Ronan can see him even though he can't see Ronan. "Is Izzy there?"

"No, she's in the nursery. Asleep. Finally."

"Oh," Adam says.

"I could send you a photo if you care so much." There were a few added to the shared album recently where she was wearing one of the onesies Adam bought her. It shouldn't be hard to find a good one.

"No, it's fine. That's probably -- weird for you, to send someone photos of a baby that's not even yours."

"Right," Ronan says. "Forgot how fucking important it is to be normal."

Adam frowns. For a second he thinks Adam is going to accept the invitation to pick a fight with him -- but all he says is, "I should get back to work. Tell Eva I said goodbye," and the call's over before he can see if Eva will say it back.

-

Ronan does, actually, know how to call someone on Skype.

Granted, that someone is Matthew, and only because Matthew did all the work of setting up the app for him, rigging it so Ronan had to do a minimum of swiping to call him. He didn't know how to call anyone besides Matthew with it, but it's the principle of the thing, and anyway, there's not a whole hell of a lot of people he wants to call, and fewer still he's willing to sit in place so they can stare at his face the whole time.

After Ronan moved away, that was how he caught up with family news -- he'd Skype Matthew, and Matthew would tell him anything he needed to know, and a thousand other things as well. There were a handful of times that Declan arranged to have business near enough to Ronan that he could drop by and yell at him, but on those occasions he mostly got across a lot of anger and disapproval and not a lot of facts, so that left Matthew as the informative one, weird as that was.

It wasn't that Ronan really wanted up-to-the-minute details of Declan's life in the extreme depth that Matthew was capable of going into, not when it was all engagement talk, which turned into wedding talk, and then pregnancy talk, and then baby talk, but Matthew didn't really do conversation in an orderly and linear fashion. Ronan couldn't just hear about Matthew's life and then hang up the call.

"She's starting to say sounds," Matthew enthused about baby Eva one call. "She said 'ma ma' the other day when I was Skyping them. I know that sounds like 'mama,' like 'mom,' but she was looking right at me! I think she might have been trying to say 'Matt Matt'. That's a cute baby name, right? Like a name for a baby to call you, not a name for a baby. I think I want to be Uncle MattMatt. Do you think she'd call me Uncle MattMatt?"

"That kid's got Declan for a dad," Ronan said, not giving the issue much consideration. "She's got bigger problems than what to call you."

Matthew frowned at him. "Come on, Ronan, can you just be mature for a second?"

"Why? I'm not the one that reproduced." The eternal fucking weirdness of that fact struck him all over again: Declan had a kid. Because their teenage years proved what a fucking fantastic parental figure Declan was. "Seriously, what was he thinking?"

"He was thinking he wanted to have a family," Matthew said, genuine hurt in his voice that prickled at Ronan's conscience, which in turn pissed him off.

"Yeah, I want to fly, I'm not going to jump off a skyscraper and give it a go. Even Declan's not so delusionally full of himself to think he can actually do a good job at this."

"Ronan, you're being a dick." Matthew cut him off before he could sputter out a defense, not that he ever managed a good one when it was his little brother who was disappointed in him. "It was really hard for them to have Eva, and it's really important to them, so it you can't be happy for Declan can you just -- shut the fuck up?"

"What," Ronan talked, mostly to cover up his shock at Matthew swearing at him. "Declan just goes telling you about how hard his life is now?"

"Jordan told me, because I'm her friend. She's actually really cool if you ever bothered to get to know her." Matthew huffed. "I'm going to go, just -- bye, Ronan," and for once in their lives Matthew hung up on Ronan without talking his ear off first.

He sulked instead. He was the dick, right, it was all his fault somehow. Not like Declan had gotten married to prove that he was sane and normal when he knew he damn well wasn't, and then gone and had a kid on top of that. Hennessy understood. Hennessy saw how fucking messed up all this was. She'd peaced the fuck out of town the second there was an ultrasound, rather than stick around and watch the oncoming disaster, which was exactly what it was going to be. There was no way a family fucked up enough to produce Ronan and a family fucked up enough to produce Hennessy could somehow combine to be anything that any child deserved.

Ronan wasn't the asshole. Ronan wasn't the one pretending like second chances were anything but lies. Ronan wasn't the one importing new family members into a ghost house and letting it have a go at devouring them too. Ronan wasn't the one acting like it was possible to be happy. He knew better, which was why Declan and Matthew and Jordan were all having a grand old time talking nonsense with a baby while he sat on the floor of a dark room in a silent house that he lived in alone, staring at the wall, wondering how it had turned into four o'clock in the morning.

He swore and forced himself to his feet.

The drive was fucking miserable, just how penance ought to be. He stopped once, at a truck stop diner that looked suitably disgusting, but he was too nauseous to get anything down but some greasy fries and a bad cup of coffee. The caffeine helped him keep his eyes open, at least, but didn't do much about the dull ache behind them, or the dry scraping sensation when he blinked. To top it all off, he got lost at the end, hunting for a house he'd never been to in a suburban rat's nest of nightmare streets he'd never set foot in of his own free will, except here he was, no coercion or duress, marching up the pathway to pound on the door.

No one answered.

He collapsed on the doorstep like a puppet with his strings cut. There wasn't much else to do. He didn't realize he'd drifted off until he was roused, stirring at the sound of a voice saying, "Oi, love, there's been a delivery for you."

"I didn't order anything -- " and Ronan blinked awake in time to see Declan's eyes go wide with shock.

Jordan was the one who managed to invite him in. "Been a while, Ronan," she said, like they'd run into each other at the farmer's market, or wherever it was wholesome suburban parents went to run into lunatic inlaws. "Would you like to come inside?"

He nodded at her, dumbly.

"Then you'll want to scoot out of the way long enough for me to open the door," she added, cheerily. It was a hell of a scramble before Ronan could get back to his feet, his body punishing him for acting out a sulky teenage rebellion when he hadn't been anything close to a teenager in years.

Most of the afternoon was a blur in retrospect. He couldn't remember later what they'd talked about, except that it was a lot of nothing, and it was mostly Jordan keeping the conversation going. At some point Eva got put down for a nap. At some point she woke up and was brought into the living room. At some point Declan left the room, but he doesn't remember why, or why Jordan thought it was a good idea to follow him a minute later and leave Ronan alone with the baby, or why he decided to go sit next to her in her little baby chair. She wasn't doing anything, just staring at him, huge brown eyes squinting in a judgmental glower that had stopped having any effect on him years ago, or so he thought.

"I fucked up, okay?" he whispered at her furiously. "Is that what you want to hear?"

The baby was not swayed by this statement.

"I know I fucked up, shit. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not going to grovel."

She sucked on her pacifier once, unimpressed.

"I'm fixing it now, aren't I? I'm not going to fuck up anymore, dammit."

"Are you teaching my baby to swear?"

Ronan jolted upright, but when he whirled around Jordan just looked amused, leaning on the door frame and watching her hooligan brother-in-law curse at her daughter.

"Someone has to," he snapped.

She raised one eyebrows, letting the implied I know posturing Lynch bullshit when I see it, mister sink in. Just as he started to sweat, she said, "Then it's a good thing you've come around, isn't it?"

-

Ronan doesn't catch on to what's happening right away. When he hears that Adam couldn't make it to board games at Noah's because of work, he has no follow up questions because, yeah, workaholic, that tracks. When Adam bails on the open mic night Gansey discovered at some hipster-ass coffee shop, well, that's self-explanatory, isn't it; Ronan spends the whole thing horrified at himself for not having the strength of will to say no way in hell to Gansey's pleading eyes.

It's only the third time that Adam is conspicuously absent from an event that Ronan spots a pattern.

In his defense, he's now spent time with Adam four times -- five, if you count Skype, which ordinarily Ronan wouldn't but he does now for the sake of argument. Five times he and Adam have managed to exist in the same space without a problem -- well, without any real problems. There was no reason to think that Adam was avoiding him, but obviously Adam had decided he wasn't allowed to hang out with Ronan's friends, even though Ronan did introduce them, and even though Ronan said it was fine, because Ronan had also been a total shit about it, and that was the part of Ronan that Adam trusted and believed would carry the day. The part that was a total shit and broke his own promises. Not the part of him that made the promises, wanting to be able to live up to them.

He steps outside and calls Adam. "Get your ass to the bar now."

"Invitations are usually questions," Adam tells him, but at least he picked up.

"You answered the question wrong, so now you don't get a say in it."

"I don't get a say in how I spend my own evening?"

"No, you don't."

"I can't tell if you're going to be a bad influence on Eva, or if she's already a bad influence on you," Adam muses. "It really feels like I'm talking to a two-year-old right now."

"Get the fuck over yourself."

"If you want to use curse words to sound more like an adult, you shouldn't have taught the toddler to swear."

"Did you change your mind about Gansey?"

"What?"

"Do you hate him now?"

"No," Adam answers, flustered.

"Then you should try hanging out with him when he asks you to. He's a goddamn greenhouse flower, if you reject him any more he's going to drop all his petals."

Adam doesn't say anything right away, because he's an asshole and wants to deliberately provoke as much anxiety as he can, probably.

"Text me the address again?" he asks after a moment. It's nice to know that someone in his life is still susceptible to guilt. It's not like he's not telling the truth, anyway, which Gansey goes and proves by perking right up and beaming when Adam finally does show, halfway through trivia.

"Parrish!" He stands up from their booth and waves, enthusiastic enough to put the drink in his hand in serious peril, even though Adam is already heading toward them.

"Hi, Gansey," Adam returns the greeting as though it had been normal and not at all pathetic. Ronan gives him a pointed see what I mean look.

"Noah's not here tonight?" Adam asks, his own pointed not everyone has to come to every event, Lynch.

"Noah doesn't believe in trivia night," Blue explains. "He says it's basically school and that bums him out too much to drink."

"Never mind traitors and cowards who aren't here," Cheng says. "Adam has arrived just in time to help us with this question."

Adam frowns as he slides into a seat at the booth. "Is that allowed? I wasn't here when you made the team."

Gansey waves the concern away. "Oh, pish posh." Ronan snorts. Adam's face takes on a I'm not laughing at you, no, really, what would possibly make you think that expression. Blue gulps the rest of her cocktail like that will make her forget she regularly has sex with a man who says pish posh when he's drunk. "Of course you're on our team, it's all perfectly above board."

Adam shakes his head sadly, as though he deeply regrets what he has to do and not that he's doing it specifically to fuck with Gansey and enjoying every second of it. "The integrity of this bar trivia is really important to me."

"The people at the next booth just Googled the answer," Blue says. "I literally heard the words 'hey Google.'"

"I don't see why their behavior should affect my own standards," Adam replies, unruffled.

Gansey, either because of his beer goggles or his rose-tinted glasses, can't see through the act. "You're a man of principle, Parrish, I can't fault you for it."

"I can," Blue says ominously, a mercenary gleam in her eyes, "if it means we lose."

"Isn't playing the game its own reward?"

"No. I want my damn drink coupon. I've earned it."

"You literally haven't," Ronan points out. "You earn it by winning the game, which you haven't done yet."

"You know how many of these I've let him drag me to?" Blue jerks a thumb in Gansey's general direction. "I should get a prize every time I set foot in this bar."

"You think you're entitled to prizes just for showing up? Not very egalitarian of you."

"I'm not going to sit here and be lectured about privilege by Ronan Lynch." She stands up. "I'm going to the bar, Adam, do you want anything?"

"Oh, he gets a free drink from you?" Ronan says, just to be a shit. "He's not even playing trivia."

"I am playing," Adam disagrees. "I'm tracking how many questions I get right in my head."

"I was going to start him his own tab, but now I'm just going to tell the bartender to put it on yours, Ronan." Blue swans off. Henry sighs dreamily, watching her go, but at least he refrains from saying what a woman this time, so Ronan decides he doesn't need to have a glass of ice water dumped over his head.

"I'll pay you back," Adam says to him, not low enough to be a whisper, but still pointedly at Ronan and not to the booth as a whole. Ronan racks his brains, trying to figure if forcing Adam to join them really merits a declaration of vengeance or if there's something else he's forgetting. Then it clicks that Adam wants to reimburse him for the price of...whatever drink Blue ends up getting him. She hadn't taken his order. Apparently she's going to decide for him what he wants and make it his problem if he doesn't like it. Sometimes, Cheng's intense devotion to another man's girlfriend almost makes sense.

"You want to pay me back," Ronan tells him, equally low, "don't make Gansey beg for your company next time."

"Gansey didn't," Adam says.

"I didn't what?" Gansey butts in, tipsy enough to ignore social cues.

"Didn't send Declan a congratulations on the birth of his daughter," Ronan shifts the conversation rather than dwell on the utter lack of emphasis in either of those words, the deliberate ambiguity, that begging hadn't occurred or that it hadn't been Gansey doing the begging. "Isn't that against rich asshole law?"

"I'll be more than happy to congratulate him when I meet the daughter in question."

"You can only be happy for someone if it personally affects you?" Ronan scoffs. "Rude."

"Not as rude as your forbidding me from meeting your nieces."

Adam looks at Ronan over the drink he's just accepted from Blue. It's bright red. He puts it on the table and does not pick it up again. "You aren't letting them meet the girls?"

"Not them," Ronan says, "just Gansey."

"Gansey's the only one who cares," Blue says.

"Exactly. Penalty for caring."

"Hold up." Cheng raises a hand up in front of Ronan's face, physically barring him from the conversation. "You said the girls," he says to Adam. "That is a personal connection, right there. Have you met the young Miss Hennessy-Lynches?"

"Once or twice," Adam says, after only a brief pause to blink at the intensity of Cheng's sudden shift in attitude. He hasn't built up a tolerance to that yet. "I swung by Declan's house the other day before work. Is there some reason that you couldn't do that," he addresses Gansey, "if you're so determined to congratulate him in person?"

"I'm not going to sneak my way to an introduction like a thief in the night," Gansey sniffs. "Ronan will be prevailed upon to see reason sooner or later."

"Ah. So you'll be the one at Isabella's college graduation with an 'it's a girl' balloon?"

The next round of trivia starts, containing nothing as interesting as Adam making fun of both Gansey and Ronan with the same remark. There's history and geography questions where Gansey makes audible little 'ooh!' noises about knowing every answer, pop culture where Cheng supposedly earns his keep, a random assortment of topics where Blue lords it over them that she has a bizarre scattershot of knowledge on account of having been raised by a circus. Every once in a while, there'll be a question that stumps all of them and that, per Ronan's rules, they have to answer with HORNY GOAT WEED. Only this time, whenever that happens, Adam makes a mysterious little 'do I know the answer or not, I'll never tell' smirk and sips a glass of water.

"You don't get to brag you know the answer if you don't prove it," Ronan tells him.

"I'm not bragging," Adam says, braggingly.

Trivia ends, as do even the most horrible of human experiences. They close out their tabs, Blue grumbling about not having a free drink ticket, and Gansey excitedly insisting that Adam come back next week.

"None of us are paying any mind to Lynch's slander. We all believe you'd be a valuable addition to the team."

Adam looks at Ronan and then down at his tab, doing a very good impression of someone calculating what tip to leave. "Sure. Same time?"

"Half an hour earlier, Mr. Parrish, or else leave the scruples at home," Cheng tells him. "The lady deserves her drink tickets."

"So the responsibility for the win is on my shoulders?" Adam asks.

"Yup!" At least Cheng is consistent with the complete lack of shame.

"There's no pressure," Gansey reassures him. "The point is simply to enjoy each other's company."

It's a nice night outside. Ronan feels a little bad for it, having a bunch of drunk assholes go strolling through it, but if it wasn't them, it'd just be someone else. Blue points Cheng and Gansey's tipsy asses toward the nearest subway station and shoos them along. Adam fiddles with his phone.

"Need a ride?" Ronan asks.

Adam looks a bit startled, like he'd thought Ronan left with the rest of the group. "I'm ordering an Uber."

"So, you do need a ride," he translates. "It's just a question who you get it from, me or some weirdo from the internet who's going to chop you into little pieces."

"You're not going my way, Ronan."

"You don't know where I'm going," he retorts.

Adam starts to argue and then considers it. "I guess I don't," he admits. "I was thinking of Declan's."

"I have my own place. I'm not totally helpless."

"Oh, I believe you. But I would also believe that place is 'inside Declan's crawl space, without his knowledge, the better to inconvenience him.'"

Ronan snorts.

Adam smiles, not one of the taunting little smirks he shot them while he hoarded correct answers, or the polite expression he'd shot the overworked bar staff, or the cheerful grin he'd plastered on to say good night as everyone else headed off.

It is, frankly, bleak and pathetic, but so are most things that are honest.

"It was nice to see the girls," Adam offers tentatively. "I meant to say thanks for that the other night, on the phone. I appreciated getting to see Eva."

God, if that wasn't tragic enough to knock any hint of wincing sympathy clean out of Ronan. "So ask Declan if you can babysit again," he says, rolling his eyes. "Fuck knows he's always making me do it."

"You're his brother, I'd expect him to have that kind of trust in you." An outrageous fucking lie, given he'd spent half of Izzy's birthday telling Ronan he was unfit for the job and everyone knew it. "It's different for someone he barely knows to ask that of him."

"You already babysat Eva once."

"Mm-hm, and I'm sure that watching two children isn't any harder than watching one."

"Yeah? Then you're all set."

"I would be if that wasn't sarcasm. You know he only called because it was an emergency."

"You're squandering an opportunity that Gansey would kill for."

"Go tell Gansey to babysit, then."

"Fuck no," Ronan says out of sheer habit. "He's not allowed to be responsible for any human being under the age of fifty."

The corner of Adam's mouth quirks, a smile considering whether or not it's fit to be seen. "Not even himself?"

"Of course not. Have you seen what a shit job he does at that?"

The smile vanishes before fully taking form. "I hadn't noticed," he says. "Glass houses."

Was Adam this pathetic when they'd been together? The answer is probably yes, the more Ronan thinks about it, but he'd been better at hiding it. Weird to think that he got worse at that as he got older. Or maybe Ronan got more perceptive, which might explain things if it wasn't a sentence that would make anyone who knew him piss themselves laughing. No, it had to be that Adam just sucked at hiding his deep inner pitifulness all of a sudden, because the only other explanation was that he wasn't trying to hide it from Ronan anymore.

"The expression is 'people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones,' not 'people in glass houses aren't allowed to notice basic facts like when someone's an idiot'," Ronan condescends to him. "If you can't tell that Gansey's a loser, that's not about whether you have your shit together. That just means you've got one brain cell."

"And that's exactly who would make a perfect babysitter, someone with a single brain cell."

"Hey, Declan watches the girls all the time and he's down to a tenth of a brain cell. And that's on a good day."

"Oh, I'm ten times smarter than someone suffering from chronic sleep deprivation," Adam says, voice icy with offense, "thanks, that makes me feel better," but that little suggestion of a smile is back.

-

Some experiences get etched onto the soul on a level deeper than mere memory. Deep, immutable truths, like heartbreak, or loss, or how fucking impossible it is to get Adam Parrish to do anything that he doesn't want to do, or that he wants to but that wasn't his idea in the first place, or that he wants to but doesn't have complete control over -- Ronan knows in his bones, the way that old soldiers know when a storm is coming, that it's going to be days of haranguing before Adam is willing to offer to babysit, and he's braced for it.

But maybe he'd saved up enough goddamn stamps in his bullying Adam Parrish into admitting you have a point punch card to get this one for free, because it's less than a week after trivia night that he arrives at the house just as Jordan's leaving out. "Oh, Declan's coworker's coming over to help sit with the kids," she tells him, like that isn't groundbreaking news akin to man walks on the moon. "You've got the evening off if you want it."

"What, and not get spit up on by babies? What would I even do with myself?"

"Foot massage, loud music, oil on canvas, one glass of wine, and a quick pump and dump to get the wine out of your system before morning?" Jordan suggests. "Just some ideas as someone also taking the evening off."

"Can't believe you'd tell me what to do with my own breast milk," he grumbles.

"I think that falls under 'what are sisters-in-law for?' If not then I give up, no idea what this is all about." Jordan waves a hand at the space between the two of them.

Ronan snorts. "Go, abandon your children already."

"Will do," she chimes back as she gets into the car. "Have a nice evening, don't let the girls witness you and Declan being all you and Declan!" She honks once before driving off.

Declan's rummaging around in the kitchen when Ronan lets himself inside, making a mess out of making coffee. He rubs his eyes when he looks over. The resemblance to Eva stubbornly insisting that she's not tired and she doesn't need to go to bed is overpowering.

"My friend Adam is coming over," he tells Ronan.

"Hi to you too." Ronan pushes past him and takes over coffee-making.

"I just meant you don't have to be here."

"Your wife abandoned you so everyone should abandon you, is that it?"

"She's taking an evening for herself, not abandoning me. I had my turn yesterday. I had a steak dinner that I didn't have to cook and went to the revival theater."

"Wow. Thrilling."

"I didn't have to change a diaper or talk anyone down from a temper tantrum or watch a single second of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. It was a fantastic night."

"Can't believe I'm saying this, but I thought you were less boring than that."

"The simple fact of being away from my children is magical," Declan says. "Also, being away from my children is godawful."

Ronan squints at him. "Is this the sleep deprivation making you insane or are you just going insane anyway?"

"It's anyone's guess at this point. What were we talking about before you started insulting me?"

"I don't know, probably fucking 'goo goo gah gah.' My first words were 'you're an idiot, Declan.'"

"Your first word that wasn't 'mama' or 'dada' was 'kitty'," Declan says.

"Was not."

"Mm-hm, the cat that lived out in the barn had just had a litter. You struggled with the hard c sound, come to think of it. Mostly what you said was 'titty.'"

"Lies," Ronan gasps. "Homophobic lies." Eva toddles over toward Ronan, leaving a trail of naked dolls in her wake. "Your father is a liar," he tells her.

"Ronan," Declan says, a growl rising in his voice.

His first instinct is to spit on that warning -- push on ahead, badmouth Declan to his daughter, insult him about things that are true and painful and deeper than just you're boring,, while Eva watches with her impressionable mind that remembers things long after the adults have written them off.

Ronan swallows it down.

"He said you couldn't show me how to count to ten," he says, the first innocuous thing he can think of.

Eva beams up at him, "can too!" She jumps in excitement as she chants "ONE two three FOUR seven'n'eight, nine, TEN!"

Ronan steps over the gate to the play area rather than fuck around with opening it. He sits down where he can only see Declan in the corner of his eye, smiling down at his coffee.

"Bet you can't do it twice," Ronan challenges her, shoots back nuh-uh when she tells him ya-huh, and listens endless strings of numbers, although never five or six, for some fucking reason.

He scowls at the knock on the door when it comes, reflexively at first because visitors are the devil, and then because annoyed is better than anxious.

"That'll be Parrish," Declan tells him unnecessarily. "He offered to help watch the girls today."

"Oh, now you tell me, after I've been here for an hour."

"Honestly, I thought I had told you." He frowns. "Did I not mention it?"

"Don't you think I would remember that?" Ronan responds, because questions, like accusations, aren't lies.

Declan, now believing that he has wronged his beloved younger brother, handles his culpability by ignoring said younger brother. "Adam! Thanks for coming over, it's good to see you again. How are you?"

"Fine," Adam says. "The office hasn't been the same without you."

"Because it's been better?" Ronan butts in.

"Actually, no," he says. "I guess it does sound like the kind of thing people say to a coworker they don't like, though. Not my intention."

"You know what else people say?" He nudges Eva. "Remember what we practiced?"

"Ronan," Declan starts, for the second time today.

"Cookie please!" Eva shouts.

Ronan blinks in fake innocence at Declan's surprise. "What, did you think I'd teach her to say something naughty?"

Declan barks a laugh, clearly without meaning to. "You know what? You're watching her for the next hour, if you want her to be on a sugar high, fine." He smirks at Ronan and then spots Adam. "That is to say -- "

"Please, don't let me be the reason that the adorable child doesn't get a cookie," Adam tells him. "I don't need that on my conscience."

"All right. One cookie," Declan tells Eva, who chimes thankoooo and kisses Ronan on the cheek before running to the edge of the play area closest to the kitchen. "That shouldn't make her too excitable, she had a nutritious snack earlier. Plenty of protein."

"I believe you," Adam says. "I've seen the binder."

Declan plucks Eva up and props her up against his hip. He hands her the cookie, which she eats with an expression of enormous concentration. Declan whispers something in her ear but come on, dude, get a clue. She's one hundred percent about that cookie, she's not listening to anything her boring old dad is saying.

That's what Ronan thinks, anyway.

"Are you two good to watch both of them?" Declan asks, as Eva continues to disperse crumbs across his entire outfit.

"Yeah, we've got it," Adam says, like he was just freaking out over how much harder and scarier two children are then one and how could he possibly manage such a feat.

"Thanks," Declan says. "Again. I've got a mountain of chores to do while Jordan's out and there's just no getting anything done when the girls are underfoot."

"We're going to sit here and be entertained by the kids while you do housework," Ronan says. "Lay off the thank you."

Declan ignores him and kisses Eva on the cheek. She giggles.

"Do you remember what to say?" he asks her. Ronan's eyes narrow in immediate suspicion as she nods. "Really? Okay."

"Uncle Ronan loves kitties!" Evan hollers.

"Liar!"

Declan sets Eva down and flips Ronan off behind her back. "I'm just going to be upstairs," he tells Adam as he leaves. "Yell if you need anything."

"You don't hate cats anymore?" Adam asks once he's gone and Eva has gotten deeply invested in petting a toy garbage truck. He's also asking what the hell was that about, but Ronan doesn't understand what the actual question is. He blinks at Adam, uncomprehending. "You told me once that cats are all furry little bastards."

Ronan -- has no memory of saying that. He doesn't think that Adam is lying, or misremembering. It's worse than that, disorienting and destabilizing. Adam remembers something about their time together that Ronan has forgotten.

"Obviously I meant that," he gestures wordlessly, that phrase, you know, "as a compliment."

Adam squints at him, trying to figure out his game. "Sorry, are you worried about Eva learning the word 'bastard'?"

"Not that word." It's Adam's turn to not be able to follow what the other is talking about, apparently. Ronan drags Eva close enough he can cover her ears and then mouths f-u-r-r-y.

Adam laughs loudly before pressing a hand to his mouth and forcing amusement down. "God, Ronan, never -- " he bites his lip, cutting himself off, and then shrugs and says it anyway. "Never change."

What the fuck is he supposed to say that?

"Bastard," he mutters. Jokes, like questions, aren't lies.

-

For the first hour or so things go -- okay, Ronan didn't have a plan, he'd just come over here to see his nieces, for Christ's sake, there's no plan to go according to. But he'd wanted to see his nieces, and also maybe wanted Adam to spend time with people for reasons other than work or someone I barely know had an emergency on my birthday, and for a while that goes fine. Izzy blinks at them adorably from her baby sling, and Eva tells Adam what to do, which is fucking hilarious and also terrifying if Ronan thinks about Eva ever meeting Blue and getting a role model for this bossing men around shit, and Adam plays along with Eva's incessant demands without hesitation. Declan pokes his hand in to check on them every now and then until Ronan chases him off, we've GOT this, God, go take a nap like you've been whining about wanting to do forever and flips him off for good measure. Eva tries to copy him, but fortunately for Declan and unfortunately for Ronan, she can't really manage the gesture and mostly ends up waving the back of her hand at him.

So Declan is nowhere to be found when Izzy has her meltdown.

"Izzy CRY," Eva observes, like Ronan might not have noticed the ear splitting wails coming from the tiny person he is currently holding. He tries rocking her a bit. The wailing upgrades to shrieking.

"Yes, she is," Adam tells her. "That's okay. People do that sometimes, especially babies." He did that when when Eva had hit her head, Ronan suddenly remembers, talking to her all reasonable and understanding about her pain. He also remembers Adam snapping get over it, Lynch when Ronan had been in pain. Not that Ronan had cried, not in front of Adam. Maybe that was the difference. Maybe it was that Adam was older, or the girls were so much younger.

Despite his sympathetic explanations about how perfectly natural crying babies are, Adam's nerves start to look a little frayed as Izzy's screaming continues through a new diaper, a fresh pacifier, sustained rocking, soothing music, and an attempted feeding (she pushed the bottle away like it insulted her).

"I give up, you hold her," Ronan demands, foisting the baby off on Adam. "Let's see if you can do any better."

Adam accepts the challenge first and only belatedly realizes that he's accepted a human child along with it. He stares down at Izzy's tear stained face, screaming up at him for a change, and then narrows his eyes and glares at Ronan.

"She's had enough of my shit," he says. "Maybe you and Declan are right. Maybe she can tell I'm not responsible enough for this."

"Oh, you're responsible all right," Adam mutters darkly. He steps carefully over to the couch and sits down, so that Izzy will have a soft surface to fall on when he inevitably drops her because he doesn't deserve to be around anything so precious, probably. He lifts her up to her shoulder, and she presses her face against his shirt, which does at least muffle the noise a little. Ronan feels the first twinge of empathy he's felt for her since the crying fit started. Adam has good shoulders for hiding your face from the world.

Eva clambers her way up onto the couch next to Adam and pats Izzy on the head. It's an awkward motion that looks like a robot's first attempt to pet a feral cat, but it is at least slow and gentle enough not to make the situation worse. Ronan doesn't know if he'd ever been so careful with Matthew, when he was a toddler, but he suspects not.

"Izzy cry, but that's okay!" Eva chirps at her sister. "It's okay, Izzy, cry."

Adam rubs Izzy's back in slow circles. Eva's talking continues, morphs into something that could very charitably be described as singing. Izzy hiccups miserably and screams some more and hiccups again and finally, finally falls silent.

Adam freezes, eyes wide with panic like now something's wrong. "What did I do?" he whispers to Ronan.

"Fuck if I know," Ronan whispers back. "Keep doing it."

"Thanks, very helpful." Adam glares at him and doesn't move from that exact position until it's time to put Izzy to bed for the night.

-

It's the middle of the night when Ronan calls Hennessy, because he has the kind of insomnia where he's itching to do something, and the least disastrous option is to talk to someone, and everyone around him keeps getting pulled further and further into real adulthood so that she's the only middle of the night person that he has.

He regrets that fact almost immediately.

"So," she answers the phone. "Adam."

There's no real point in playing dumb. She's known about Adam since before Ronan learned better than to try to outdrink her. But it's not in him to admit defeat, even if that's the exact fucking attitude that had him pouring out a years-old heartbreak to her in a shuttered bar at four in the morning in the first place. "Book of Genesis? I thought you didn't have time for stupid Catholic bullshit."

"Everything with you is bullshit."

"Then why even pick up?" he snarls at her, except they both know the answer to that. They'd spoken to each other at first because it was someone to talk to around Declan and Jordan who wasn't Declan and Jordan, and they'd become friends because it freaked out their siblings too much to resist playing into that. He doesn't know how that become friendship for its own sake, but it must have, or they wouldn't still be in touch, not after Ronan put a few hundred miles between them rather than suffer the watch the impending disaster of someone named 'Lynch' trying to start over, not after Hennessy put a few thousand more in the way when the alternative was to watch someone with her face become a mother. She picks up when he calls because neither of them are willing to let go of that one other person who gets it.

"I've got Gansey's social media on my screen, and this is dire."

"Yeah, all of Dick's pics are fucking dire."

"You are dire, Lynch," she scolds him. "You're staring at your ex so hard you didn't notice your picture getting taken. Where the hell did he even come from, I wonder? It's got to be Gansey's fault, I tell myself. There's no way that Ronan wasted a perfectly good grudge by willingly inviting his ex-boyfriend back into his life. There has to be a story that makes this a tragic irony. It can't just be the colossal stupidity of Lynch seeing the opportunity to make an idiot out of himself in front of his brother and all of his friends, Hennessy, calm yourself, that can't be the situation. I'm sure if you ask Gansey there will be some more reasonable explanation."

"You asked Gansey about Adam?"

"And you claim to be his best friend. I didn't have to ask. I liked the photo and Gansey messaged to tell me all about how you started bringing Declan's coworker around to things, all on your own."

"What the fuck, Gansey," Ronan mutters.

"At this point I simply marvel at his restraint in not printing and mailing out a regularly scheduled newsletter with updates about your wellbeing. That boy is beyond unhinged about you. Can't decide which he likes best, bragging every time you learn a new trick or fretting every time you show the slightest hint of wilting."

"Make up your mind, am I a poodle or a house plant?"

"Gansey's the one that can't hold it in his head for more than a minute that you're a human adult. I know better, which means the question I have to ask myself is whether you're a moron or whether you're deliberately self-destructing."

"Neither," Ronan grits out. "I'm fine."

"And you sound it," Hennessy tells him.

"I'm fine."

"Are you? Because the boy ripped your heart out, and now you're using your nieces to play happy families with him."

That's a mistake, and he's not above exploiting it. "They're your nieces, too."

"Stow it," she snaps. "This is about how you are incapable of human relationships."

"Really? Because it sounds like you trying to tell me not to make a new friend."

"He's not a new friend, he's an old asshole who already broke your heart once."

"He was kind of shitty and selfish when he was nineteen," Ronan says before he can think better of it. "That doesn't mean he's a monster, it means he was nineteen."

"Mm-hm," she croons, a mockery of agreement. "All of that was a long time ago, things are different now. You've both grown up. I bet he's changed."

Ronan clenches his teeth. He wasn't going to say all of that now, to Hennessy, but -- he was thinking it, and she knows it. "I didn't ask for your advice."

"Oh, do we wait for permission before we elbow our way into each other's affairs? I must have missed that with the thousand times you guilted me about Eva."

"So, you don't actually give a shit if I get my heart broken again," Ronan says. "You're just getting revenge, is that it? Message received, forget I called."

-

The sting of Hennessy's words is slow to fade, because the woman knows what she's doing when she wants to piss him off. The next time that he sees Adam and Eva together he's going to hear it again, using your nieces to play happy families with him, and he's going to take his anger out on Adam, and Adam's going to trust in the worst version of Ronan again and decide he's not allowed to babysit after all. Ronan doesn't want that. He doesn't know what he does want, where Adam is involved, but he knows that's not it.

He sticks to visiting the girls during business hours, when there's little chance Adam will drop by, because Ronan is really fucking sick of the worst version of himself getting to make all the decisions. The rest of him might not be the best version of anybody, but it's someone who might be turning into a decent guy, and it deserves to have a say.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't see Adam around. Adam has stopped flatly turning down invitations, which has to be a step up from 'sitting alone on his birthday waiting for someone to need a favor.' He shows up to trivia on time and disproves all Ronan's accusations about exaggerating the first week. He drives out to meet them way outside of town for some stupid meteor shower that's got Gansey all worked up. He goes to the godawful one-man show that Cheng drags them all to and actually sticks it out through the entire thing, which is more than Ronan managed. He does, reportedly, watch Eva one Saturday morning that Ronan spends sleeping off a week's worth of insomnia.

He shows up for drinks one night and arrives at the bar in time to catch Ronan climbing out of the backseat of a stranger's car.

"You took an Uber?" Adam asks, refusing to accept the truth that his own eyes have seen.

"It's a Lyft."

"Oh, that's entirely different. So it's only Uber drivers that dismember their passengers?"

"Obviously. With Lyft they bury the corpses out in the desert."

"That's not very fuel efficient."

"They don't care about that. They only love two things, driving and murder."

Adam shakes his head and starts for the bar's entrance. "And you love driving to an even creepier degree than that, yet you still let someone else chauffeur you tonight."

"Sargent's gonna make me do birthday shots with her. I'm gonna be lucky if I can still stand up at the end of the night."

Every trace of humor drops off of Adam's face.

"It's Blue's birthday?"

"Yeah?"

Adam stops walking. "No one told me."

He shrugs. "Okay, now you know."

"Not helpful, Ronan. I didn't get her anything."

"Neither did I."

"That's different," Adam says. "She's your friend."

"You hear how wild that logic is, right?" Ronan argues. "People don't give birthday gifts to their friends?" Adam's mouth flattens out into an unhappy line that refuses to either argue back or accept defeat. "You don't want to give her a gift. You just think you need one to cover the price of admission. Too bad, you don't, because she's your friend too."

Adam shakes his head and takes a step back. "I'll be a few minutes. Go in without me." He gets back into his car before Ronan can answer, although he doesn't drive off right away. He looks something up on his phone, and it ought to be funny, that he failed at storming off. It isn't.

Ronan glares at him for another minute. Here's what he wants where Adam's involved: one, he wants to never again see him make that expression because of something Ronan's said to him, and two, he wants to strangle him. Fucking Parrish. It's not like he forgot how stubborn Adam was, because Adam is stubborn was the whole story of their break up, or at least the start of it, the bit before and Ronan was too much of an asshole about that for 'long distance' to ever be on the table. If he had somehow forgotten, he would have remembered when Adam forced his way into redundant babysitting for an entire day, or when Adam refused to let Ronan hog all of the blame for their teenage stupidity, or when Adam sat through the entire fucking one-man show that had to have been Cheng trolling all of them because there was no way anyone on earth thought that shit was any good.

Ronan bites the inside of his cheek, punishment for useless staring, and enters the bar.

Blue promptly hands him one of the shot glasses in front of her. "Cheers. You're drinking Jager tonight." So much for Blue being his friend.

The two of them have gotten off to a strong start by the time Adam returns.

"Happy birthday," he says, as he hands her a gift bag that's the exact right size and shape for a bottle of liquor. Sure enough, when she pulls the contents out far enough to examine them, it's tequila. Ronan doesn't recognize the label, but it looks more expensive than the tequila shots Blue's downing, and a hell of a step up from fucking Jagermeister.

"Aw, you didn't have to," Blue says, like Ronan hadn't tried to tell him that exact fucking thing.

Gansey, who is already the drunkest despite having less to drink than anyone but Adam, props his chin on Blue's shoulder and blinks at the gift bag. "It's rather coals to Newcastle, isn't it?"

Adam's ears go red as Blue shoos Gansey off her shoulder. "Well, maybe they have so much coal in Newcastle because they like coal. Have you considered that?"

"You hate coal," he points out.

"But I love tequila. Do not discourage people from giving me tequila, Gansey." Her expression softens as she turns back to Adam. "Thanks, Adam."

He nods acceptance and takes a seat, now that he's earned it by completely the requirements that only he cared about.

Ronan bites his cheek again and waves the bartender down for another shot.

-

Learning from the negative consequences of his own behavior is not Ronan's strong suit, but ten minutes after dragging his Jager hangover to a house with two small children in it, he is seriously contemplating a life of sobriety.

"You're quiet today," Jordan observes, bouncing a fussy Isabella as she starts up the coffee maker, moving around the kitchen a lot more gracefully with only one arm free than Declan had the other day while entirely unencumbered.

"Makes one of us," Ronan mutters, and flinches when Eva shouting something in the next room.

"Do you want to go have a lie down? There's a futon mattress in the nursery if our bed'd be too weird."

"That'd be pretty lazy uncle-ing."

"I think 'uncle' is supposed to be a pretty lazy job all around," Jordan muses. "But then I never had one."

"Then I'm the expert, and I say it's not lazy."

"You didn't have one either."

"I am one." Ronan condescends pretty well for a man wearing the previous night's bar hopping outfit. "That makes me the expert by default."

"By all means, then," Jordan concedes gracefully, a trick Ronan doesn't understand no matter how many times he sees it done. "Is there anything in the uncle code against aspirin and water, or is the hangover also a part of the job description?"

Ronan grimaces but doesn't refuse the glass she sets out in front of him. "Where's Declan hiding? Dad isn't supposed to be a lazy job, either."

"He's on a work call."

"I thought he was on paternity leave."

"And yet," Jordan says.

"Mommy!" Eva calls from the play area. "I wanna go outside!"

"In a minute, sweetie, I'm making coffee," Jordan calls back, and then adjusts her voice back down to a speaking next to an adult sitting next to me tone. "He said it shouldn't be long but it's already been an hour. Bet you anything it'll be another hour before he's done."

"MOMMY, is the coffee DONE YET?"

"Almost, just sit tight for a sec." She pours coffee into a travel mug, gestures at Ronan, do you want one? He nods and she fishes another mug out of the cabinet.

"Mommmmmmy, how long does COFFEE take?"

"Not much longer, Izzy," Jordan answers, and then sets the coffee pot back on the counter so abruptly it startles Ronan. "Oh, no," she whispers.

He picks up the second coffee and sniffs. It seems fine, nothing that would provoke that horrified reaction. Then he blinks. "Wait, did you just -- "

"I'm a twin!" Jordan moans. She locks eyes with Ronan, and oh, damn, whatever he'd thought about how much better she was than Declan at clinging to sanity through all the sleep deprivation and stress, nope, she's totally fucking losing it too. "I'm an identical bloody twin, I spent my entire life getting called the wrong name. I promised myself I wouldn't do that to my kids."

"Wow, and you only made it, what, five weeks?" Ronan shakes his head in disappointment. This is clearly a big deal to her. He might as well support her in her moment of need by validating what a huge fuck up it is.

"Go, just -- " She shoves at his shoulder. "Take Eva outside and let me have a second."

"Okay, but which Eva, that one?" He jerks his thumb toward the play area. "Or that one?" He nods at Izzy.

"Out. Now."

Ronan decides to put his uncle duties ahead of any further mockery. He grabs Eva out of the living room, swings her outside and throws her onto the lawn.

Jordan slinks back out at some point while Ronan is in the middle of a thrilling game of 'I throw shit across the yard and you go bring it back to me.' She's put massive sunglasses on, like she's the one with the hangover, and she drinks half of Ronan's coffee by the time he collapses to a seat on the deck.

"Fucker."

"Not lately," she says instead of chastising him for his language. She totally thinks it's funny.

Declan joins them in time for Ronan to steal his coffee instead of having to go inside for a new cup.

"Douchebag taking business calls brings the coffee," Ronan tells him. "I don't make the rules."

"Right, you didn't make that up, it's a universal edict we've all known for years."

"Call go all right?" Jordan asks.

"Boss needed some of my notes explained to him," Declan tells her. "The Peter principle at its finest."

"It took you three hours to explain some notes?" Ronan rounds up the time estimate as punishment for Declan using buzzwords. "How shitty is your handwriting?"

"My notes are typed." He turns his attention back to Jordan, who is at least faking interest. "It's fine, I'd rather do that then have everything be on fire when I get back. And it was kind of nice, having a conversation with an adult."

"We're sitting right here," Ronan protests.

Declan flicks his eyes over to him. "Sorry, Jordan."

Ronan makes a noise of outrage.

Jordan leans over and boops him on the nose, so flagrant an offense he can't even react.

"You'd only be insulted if he called you an adult, too," she tells him, and fucks off back to the house before he can come up with anything to say to that. She does toss back a comment to Declan about putting Izzy down for a nap, and bringing him more coffee, but she's clearly just leaving to get the last word.

There is one silver lining, which is that an irritating little thought has been poking at Ronan's brain, and he'd rather bring it up to Declan with no one else around. Well, Eva is still there, spinning in circles, falling on her butt, giggling, and then scrambling up to spin again, but he doesn't mind embarrassing himself in front of her.

"Why don't you talk to people more, if you're that fucking desperate for it?"

Declan, who's been absorbed watching Eva, blinks a few times and looks at Ronan like he doesn't understand the question. "For one thing, I have a toddler and a newborn. That takes up a fair amount of my time. It's a little harder than it used to be to go out on the town."

"You could have your friends come to you," Ronan points out. "Or whatever you have instead of friends. Non-obnoxious coworkers."

"You think I should host a dinner party," Declan states. "You think I should host a dinner party?"

Ronan huffs. "I think you should do whatever makes you not pathetic, if that's even possible," but it's a lazy insult, and they both know it. He pushes himself up to go toss Eva around the yard. Whatever, it had been a stupid idea anyway.

-

Declan doesn't throw a dinner party, but he mentions in passing one day that Adam is going to babysit for them again. Ronan debates just showing up, casually, but he doesn't trust Declan not to have told Adam that he'd told Ronan he'd be there -- Declan's capacity for secrecy and subterfuge has gotten so shit in the last six weeks. Ronan barely recognizes him anymore.

So he gives up on stealth and just asks Adam about it.

"Yeah, Friday night," he says. "They're going to have the girls down before I get there, I'm really just going to be watching tv and hoping there aren't any emergencies."

"Wow," Ronan says. "You sure you can handle that much responsibility?"

"I better, that'd be such a low bar not to clear."

"If you do need help." Ronan shrugs, as though he isn't concerned either way. "You could call me. Unless you'd rather call Declan and ruin his date night, that'd be my move."

"So if I need help, I should call you, and then you'll call Declan and ruin his night for me?" Adam summarizes.

"Or whatever," Ronan says dismissively.

"You might as well just tag along, at that point."

That is, of course, what Ronan was fishing for the whole time, but there's no reason to go admitting that. "Are you trying to draft me into your babysitter army?"

"It'd be one less phone call you have to suffer through," Adam points out. "Just a thought," which it isn't at all, it's set in stone as far as Ronan is concerned.

The conversation leaves him optimistic about how the night is actually going to go. It's a weird feeling for him. It doesn't last long enough for him to get used to it. He's only been at the house for a few minutes when Eva wakes up screaming.

Ronan sits with her, and sits with her, and sits with her. She does fall asleep eventually. It takes hugs and hand holding and storytelling and little songs and adjusting the night light and a hundred false alarms and promises that everything's going to be fine, but she finally, finally falls asleep.

He's trudging down the hallway, ready to fall the fuck asleep himself, when he hears fussing from the nursery.

Dread crawls up his spine. He freezes in the hallway, not even breathing, like awakened baby is a monster he needs to hide from in a horror movie. It's not his proudest moment.

The door to Izzy's room is open a crack, like the last person to enter had shut it so softly behind them that it didn't take. He steps forward quietly, still on edge about another meltdown. He peers through the crack in the door, for all the good that does; his eyes are screwed up from the dark of Eva's room to the light of the hallway to the dark of Izzy's room. He can't see shit.

"No, you don't want your pacifier either?" Adam is speaking in a low, soothing voice, as he slowly takes form in Ronan's vision, sitting on the floor by the crib. "You're just upset? Yeah, it's scary when you're small, isn't it. You can't control anything around you."

Okay, he's doing his whole baby life coach thing. Ronan doesn't really get it, but so far Izzy isn't full on crying, just making little unhappy noises, and that's good enough for him. Adam's got this handled for now, Ronan can just fall down the stairs and pass out on the couch.

"Between the two of us," Adam says, lowering his voice further and leaning in, like he really is letting the baby in on some big secret. Ronan finds himself leaning forward to listen and gets annoyed about it. He gets more annoyed when Izzy actually hiccups once and then goes silent, like that worked, she's being quiet so she can get let in on the conspiracy. "The people around you all care about you. We can't control everything either, but we're going to do our best to keep you safe." There's a noise from the crib, a small whine. "I know, talk is cheap, right? But I think you're going to be happy. Everyone in this house, we don't want to hurt you. We want you to be happy."

Ronan stands in the hallway, outside the nursery, and breathes through the dull heavy ache that's crushing him.

Adam never mentioned his family. Not during their one summer, not during this summer. He'd never talked about them, and Ronan had never asked, because he needed that from Adam. He needed Adam to be a place where families didn't exist, didn't matter, because everywhere else in his life it was the only thing that mattered, the big house with empty bedrooms like gouged open wounds, ghosts around every corner. He'd been desperate for the slightest breaks he could steal from his grief, gasping out a few desperate breaths here and there before he was pulled back under by the weight of it.

He'd never asked about Adam's family, but somewhere in his brain he'd been noticing details, and turning them over, maybe, because he finds that he already knows. Not the whole story, not the details, but more than Adam would want him to know: that Adam hadn't had anyone who would wait through his tears to tell him they cared about him and didn't want to hurt him.

Ronan jerks himself away from the door and hurries back down the hall, cursing the loud thud of his boots on the floor. He knows like it's already happened that Adam will be fucking pissed if he looks to the doorway and catches Ronan watching this moment.

The door to Eva's room thumps into his back. He fumbles with the doorknob and swings the door open, only lets out his held breath when it's safely shut behind him. The biggest disaster that Ronan can imagine happening in this house is, for once, not waking up a sleeping child and provoking a crying fit. It isn't even Adam being pissed at him. The worst outcome was the one he'd barely escaped giving into, walking forward instead of backward and wrapping himself around Adam -- who'd only think it was pity for something he'd demand that Ronan find a way to unknow, who'd be in no mood to hear that wasn't it, that the truth that had sprang out of hiding and beaten Ronan around the head wasn't about Adam's past but their future, leaving him reeling with one tiny word: we.

Goddammit, he liked that Adam cared about his nieces, because he wanted to share them with Adam, like he wanted to share his friends with Adam, and his time with Adam, and his life with Adam.

"What the shit am I supposed to do now?" he hisses, and the apocalyptic soundtrack of Eva snapping awake for once hits like gospel music, soaring choruses of hallelujahs, anything better than this.

-

Hennessy picks up the phone, but from the tone of her voice, doing so took the last of her energy. "Lynch. You're still alive."

"I am," he says, shifting. A few hours ago, talking Eva through a meltdown, he'd been ready to fall asleep mid-sentence. Now he can't sit still. "Are you?"

She makes a noise that isn't a word. "'M not the one begging to get mauled again, am I?"

It isn't impossible to fight with Hennessy when she's like this, Ronan knows, but it sucks worse than any other fight with her. "What are you on right now?" he asks.

"Red wine and self-doubt."

"I thought red wine gave you migraines."

"If I get one, it's tomorrow Hennessy's problem, and she'll deserve it."

"No, she won't."

"Course she will. She deserves everything that happens to her and more. She only exists because she murders today Hennessy."

"Let me guess," Ronan says. "Today Hennessy deserves whatever she gets because she murdered yesterday Hennessy."

"You can learn!" Bright is worse than morose, the way Hennessy is doing it. Fortunately or not, it doesn't last. "Course you can. You're as much of a badly-adjusted bastard as I am, but look at you! You still forgive people and move on."

"Watch your fucking mouth," he says.

"You do," she insists. "You forgave Adam. You're going to take him back, aren't you?"

Ronan sighs. He had maybe thought that calling Hennessy would help him sort out what was going on in his own head, but he'd figured that be because they'd have a fucking argument about it. This isn't the same at all. "Dunno. Depends what he wants."

"God, you're even putting what he wants ahead of what you want. How the fuck do you do that, Ronan?"

"I'm not, I don't know, being a saint or whatever the fuck you're getting at." He shifts, uncomfortable no matter how he positions his body. "I just -- I thought I wanted him to be miserable. And then he was miserable. And I hated it." He shakes his head. "You don't really care about whether I get back together with my ex."

"I do a little," Hennessy admits. "I was heinous about it the other day, but I do care if you get put through the whole 'broken heart, dashed dreams, death of hope" song and dance again. You'd be so insufferable."

"Hennessy," Ronan says, because she's fully capable of spinning this out for hours without getting to the point. "You know Jordan didn't have kids specifically to trigger your mommy issues."

"Right, like Declan didn't get married specifically to trigger your abandonment issues," she shoots back. "It still did. But look at you! You got over it! You, boy disaster Ronan Lynch, and not even a minute of therapy to help you get there. God, that's for the best, imagine the poor therapist who'd have you on their client sheet. But nope, you just decided to move on and then you did it, how the fuck does that work?"

It ought to be a rhetorical question, but she doesn't ask it like one, she asks like she really deeply wants to know the answer. Which is too bad, because while he thinks there maybe is an answer to that, it only exists like a dream after he's already woken up; all of the details that feel clear and solid when he isn't looking at them vanish when he tries to make out what they are.

"I didn't decide to move on," he says. "I just...did something different one day. So something different happened. I don't know, I have no fucking clue what I'm saying."

"At least you're honest," she says, darkly humorous. There's a faint splash of wine being poured, or wine being spilled. "Why did you call, anyway?"

Ronan shrugs. It doesn't feel very important anymore. "I couldn't sleep."

"Bloody hell, microwave some milk then. Don't subject yourself to the company of pathetic losers."

"Hot milk is gross. I'd rather have the pathetic losers."

"Yeah, you would," she says softly. "Loser."

-

Once upon a time, Ronan fell in love.

The strangest thing about falling in love, it turned out, wasn't how fast it could happen, or how scary and vulnerable and exhilarating it felt, or how it turned every I into we?, the possibility of someone else erasing his solace, so gently he hardly missed it.

The strangest thing was that, for the first time in a very long time, Ronan could imagine what the future looked like: It looked like Adam Parrish. It looked like lunches at the mechanic's shop, and nights stargazing on the hood of a car way outside of town, and messy kisses in a narrow bed, and belongings moved out of an attic apartment and into a house, a shared house, their house. It was a beautiful life that Ronan built out of a lie of the present.

Once upon a time, he decided that Adam was his future without asking Adam if he wanted that. He doesn't know if he's moved on from being that person, or how, or why, or what the fuck that even means. He just knows that watching that future fall apart the first time hurt bad enough that even he knows better than to make the same mistake again.

-

Ronan gets to trivia that week a half an hour early, driving everyone sitting around him at the bar nuts with his constant fidgeting. He has too much energy, and for no reason, it turns out, because Adam doesn't arrive until a good ten minutes after the game starts.

"Sorry, work's been busy this week," he explains. "Someone went galavanting off to raise a child and left the rest of us to deal with his shit." He shoots a grin at Ronan.

Cheng hushes him and then talks over the trivia host himself. "Sit down, be smart, and look cute. We put down that we were a party of five, so none of your games this time."

"None of my games, so, you don't want me to play?" Adam asks.

"That's not the kind of cute that I meant for you to be. I was referring only to your stunning physical appearance." Ronan very quietly has a heart attack. If Cheng makes a move on Adam tonight of all fucking nights, swear to fucking God -- "Not that," Cheng waves his hand in Adam's general direction, dismissive, "rather unfortunate facsimile of a personality you've cobbled together."

Ronan's pulse drops back down to a reasonable rate.

"Oh, that changes my mind," Adam replies. "Now I desperately want to help you earn drink coupons."

They miss out on drink coupons in the end, placing fourth even with Adam's participation. The questions suck this week, and everyone's a little off. Ronan wonders if his energy is fucking everyone else up. Ronan wonders if he's just imagining it that Adam seems distracted.

"It is trivia, after all," Gansey consoles Blue. "By definition, it isn't of great importance."

"Says you. I want to win."

"You should learn one thing about sports then, shouldn't you?" Ronan jabs at her.

"No. I want to win with what I know."

Ronan pats her head exactly like he would do to Eva, except for the part where Eva's never jabbed him in the side with a fork. She flees the scene of the crime before he can get revenge, too, throwing out some bullshit excuse about missing their train and herding Gansey and Cheng out with her.

Ronan hangs back while Adam closes his tab, offers a nonchalant "need a ride?" as they leave the bar together.

Adam appraises him, probably running the math on what Ronan's blood alcohol level is and not actually reading all of the secrets that are burned across his soul. "Sure," he replies, equally casual sounding.

The car is quiet while they drive. Adam gives him directions, and Ronan follows them and nods and hopes that's enough. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. He's had weeks now of relearning how to talk to Adam, but it's different like this, sitting in the small enclosed space of a car, a summer night unfurled out ahead of them.

The memory of that first night is all around him, Adam driving them to the Barns, Ronan's brain sputtering and threatening to give up the ghost as he begged it to think of just one thing he could say, something clever or smart or just right, that would lead to -- he wasn't even sure what yet, only that he wanted it. Every time he had managed to force some words out, he'd immediately become convinced Adam was going to pull over the car on the side of the road, you screwed up, get out, get lost, except he never had. Ronan must stumbled over some magic words that night, fuck if he knows which ones, that convinced Adam to say yes when he asked for a kiss -- except, no, wait, it wasn't anything he'd said, was it? Adam had already decided that he wanted to make out with Ronan, so he went and made it happen. It's obvious now, and should have been obvious long before.

Ronan exhales, half a laugh, and shakes his head.

Adam hms, half a question, and turns to face Ronan.

Ronan shakes his head, can't explain, and Adam shrugs acceptance.

Adam's place isn't what Ronan expects. He'd pictured the shitty old apartment in Virginia but done right, a luxury unit in a shiny new building, all of the independence of the original with none of the shame. Instead it's a squat little house tucked away from the road by an overgrown lawn, on a block with no sidewalks and scant streetlights. It's a nice looking place, Ronan likes it instinctively, except for the confusion. He resents the confusion. He didn't just drive Adam to some other guy's house, did he?

"This is you?" he asks, to be sure.

"Yeah. It's a rental. I thought I'd try something different this time." Adam makes a face. "I'm not sure how I feel about it yet."

Ronan nods uselessly, for lack of any better ideas how to proceed.

"So are we talking in the car," Adam asks, "or do you want to come inside?"

"Inside, shit." Ronan shakes his head, laughing at himself for thinking, again, that Adam wasn't ahead of him. Thanks for catching up, Lynch, we now join the conversation already in progress.

The inside of the house fits more for what he'd expect for Adam, if not what he'd want for him. There's a hook that Adam hangs his keys when he enters, but it's a plain stainless steel thing, no personality. There's enough furniture in the living room to seat four people, but only if two of them were okay with folding chairs. The walls are a yellow that has flickering hints of personality, but then it is a rental, it's not like Adam picked the wall color for himself. A few bits of framed art break up the monotony of the room, but not by much.

"I've only been here a few months," Adam says, slightly exasperated like he can hear Ronan's thoughts. Even Ronan's silent judgment tends to be pretty damn loud. "Half my stuff's still in storage in New York."

"Excuses." Ronan throws himself onto the couch, takes up an obnoxious amount of space thanks to a lifetime of being obnoxious. "So. We're talking."

"You start. It was your idea."

"You invited me in."

Adam casts his eyes up toward the ceiling, an expression of annoyance that Ronan fundamentally associates with Declan. He shakes the thought off. "Fine. Question: do you want a glass of water? Or I could make some coffee, I have decaf."

Decaf coffee, a cardinal sin, and no offer of beer or wine. Nothing that would require Ronan to stick around for an hour or two afterward to sober up.

"Water," he says, so he'll at least have something to do with his hands.

Adam disappears into the kitchen and returns with a glass, puts it on the coffee table in front of the couch rather than hand it off to Ronan. He leans against the wall opposite Ronan, watching him over crossed arms.

Ronan takes a sip to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth again. Goddamn teenage nerves.

"You've been hanging out with Gansey and everyone," he starts.

Adam raises an eyebrow. So he managed to surprise Adam, at least.

"Yes, I know," Adam says. "I was there."

"And you've been helping with the girls. And just -- whatever else either of us says, that shit's okay, right? You should keep doing that."

"Ronan, I do not need you to arrange social engagements for me."

Ronan decides against pointing out that Adam's not exactly arranging them for himself. "I'm setting a baseline, okay? Or are you going to say that I've never said something stupid in the heat of the moment that made you pull back into your hermit shell?"

Adam glances away: point, Ronan, but he doesn't fucking care about points.

"Sorry, that came out stupid, too. I'm trying not to screw up here, okay?"

"Just say it, Ronan. I already know."

"How?" tumbles out of his mouth before he can realize what a stupid question it was. How could Adam know, besides the fact that Ronan is obvious, and Adam is brilliant, and Ronan himself once taught Adam how to read all of his tells.

But Adam doesn't go with any of those answers.

"You bought me a birthday cake."

"That wasn't -- " Ronan stumbles over an entirely new argument he didn't think he'd have to deal with. "When I told you to come to fireworks, I just meant..." friends is too light and too heavy a word. "Platonically," he settles on. An uncomfortable heat creeps up his face, but there's less than no point to any of this if he's not honest about it, so he adds, "I think I meant it platonically."

"I know. I thought it was, too."

Ronan frowns. "What does that mean?"

Adam grimaces. So this isn't going how he expected, either. "You didn't give Blue anything for her birthday."

"I gave her my dignity on a platter and the courtesy of not vomiting licorice-flavored crap all over her shoes."

Adam just watches him wordless.

Ronan breaks eye contact first. "It was a cupcake, Parrish, it wasn't a declaration of undying devotion."

"No, but it was the same thing you got me when we were together. I know it's not much on its own," he admits abruptly, stomping on any counter-argument. "But when I asked myself what had changed, when it changed...it made a pretty convincing case that nothing had changed."

"You've known the whole time," Ronan says, realization dawning and bringing outrage along with it.

"No. Not really," Adam concedes. "I wondered sometimes. I wasn't sure until you asked to drive me home tonight."

"You wondered," Ronan asks, eyes narrowing, "or you wanted?"

"You still haven't said it, Ronan."

"Don't need to, do I?"

Adam bites his lip and stares down at the floor.

"I'd like to hear it," he says, to, what, sneer at Ronan, rub it in his face, drag this out -- and then he adds, in a small voice, "I have to know where I'm standing."

Ronan forces down a host of emotions. Breathes in and out.

When he can speak again, he says, "I want to get back together."

Adam's chest rises and falls sharply before he nods. "Okay."

"Okay," Ronan repeats, dumbfounded. "That's it?"

He's treated to the rare sight of Adam Parrish flustered. Figures it would happen when he's in no mood to appreciate it. "I just mean -- okay, you said it, thank you."

"Thank you? How about this for thank you, I answered your question, you answer mine."

"I want it, too," Adam says without looking at him. "I want to get back together."

It isn't very satisfying, as triumphs go. But then, Ronan is worked up for a fight, at this point, and he's pretty damn sure this isn't a win yet.

"Since when?"

"Not the whole time. I think..." Adam speaks slowly, collecting his thoughts. "You called me. You and Eva, on Skype. And you sounded happy, and I thought, you're going to make an idiot out of yourself over this, Adam. I was trying too hard not to say something wrong and I screwed it up, I don't remember how. Just that you got mad at me. And I knew I was in more trouble than just making a fool of myself."

Ronan holds his breath the whole time Adam speaks, because wants to shout, and he wants to cry, and he doesn't want to throw up but he thinks that might sneak its way into the picture given half of a chance.

"That was weeks ago, Parrish," he forces out.

Adam shrugs.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Ronan has been antsy the last few days, knowing what he wanted and knowing that he owed it to Adam to tell him the truth, and Adam -- didn't feel the same sense of obligation, apparently.

"It wasn't my place to say anything," Adam answers, like that's perfectly obvious.

"How are your feelings not your place?"

"I broke up with you."

"A hundred years ago."

"I had the last word with what happened to us, last time," Adam repeats. "I chose for us to be this way. If the situation was going to change it had to be because you wanted it to."

"Fuck that, it's bullshit and you know it. You just think that what you want doesn't matter."

"Don't," Adam snaps.

"No? Am I wrong? Tell me what you want, then."

"I already did."

"Say it again," Ronan challenges him.

"I want you," Adam spits the words. "I want to be with you again, and I want to make things right, I want to make it up to you that I hurt you, I want to make it up to myself. I want to date you, and make out with you, and babysit your nieces together and hang out with your friends but actually get to look at you and talk to you without worrying every second I'm doing something I'm not allowed to do. I want to remember all the things that made me fall for you in the first place and find out all the ways you've changed, I want all of that, and it doesn't mean I'm going to get any of it, okay?"

"It might fucking help if you mentioned that you wanted any of it," Ronan starts, but Adam shakes his head, mouth compressed into a small flat line.

"Ronan, I don't know if I can do any of that."

"Of course you fucking can, that's what I'm saying."

"You're the one that told me I was a loser on my birthday," Adam says. "You can't pretend now that you don't know how isolated I am. You set me up on little play dates with your friends, and your nieces, and I'm grateful for that, but it's also -- I know, the whole time, that it's because of you."

"So you want to be with me but spending time with me, and my friends, and my family, that's a bad thing?"

"I was struggling," Adam says. "And now I'm not, because of you, but I can't -- let you help me because, because you care about. Me."

Ronan stays silent for a minute, letting the words sit where Adam dropped them.

"Wow," he says eventually. "Full points for finishing the whole thing, I guess, even after you realized in the middle how stupid it sounded."

"Shut up." Adam hides his face in his hands.

"No, seriously, that's the kind of commitment to something that could really make a guy trust and rely on you as his boyfriend, if trusting and relying on someone weren't apparently terrible things that no one should want from a boyfriend -- "

"Just -- " Adam flails at him. "It makes sense in my head, okay? Stop making fun of me for five seconds, I'm trying to think."

"Tell you what, if you sit on the couch I won't make fun of you for a whole minute."

Adam glares at him between his fingers. "And what are you going to do, instead?"

Ronan shrugs. "Might put my arm around your shoulders."

Adam lingers by the wall for another moment before crossing the room, hands dropping to his sides, shoulder slumping, collapsing onto the couch.

Ronan circles his arm closer to Adam without making contact.

"It all makes sense in my head," Adam mourns, eyes fixed resolutely ahead. "Really. It's very persuasive when I don't have to say it out loud to someone else."

Ronan scoffs. "Martyrs always believe in their bullshit causes."

Adam toys with the idea of smiling. "Oh? And what's my cause."

"Far as I can tell, it's that you shouldn't get to be happy, even though that would make me happy, because one time you made me unhappy. It's maybe the most bullshit cause I've ever heard of."

"Somehow I doubt that, Michael."

"Fucking asshole." Ronan wraps his arm around Adam, pulling him in close in something that's mostly an embrace. It's a little bit of a rebuke. Judging by the startled laughter it provokes, Adam doesn't mind.

"Hey," Adam turns his head enough to look Ronan in the eye. "Can I try this again?"

"Which part?"

He thinks, probably looking for the last moment he sounded at all reasonable. "Let's say, everything since we got into the house."

"Do I have to stand up?"

"No." Adam rests a hand on Ronan's knee to keep him on the couch, not like he was in a big rush to stand up. Or maybe Adam just wanted to do that.

"Okay then, yeah," Ronan says. "Take two."

"Okay." Adam clears his throat. "Ronan, can -- shit, never mind, I feel stupid doing this."

"It was your idea!"

"I changed my mind."

"You can't undo a redo, what the fuck, Parrish!"

Adam twists away from him, but Ronan's still got an arm around him, perfectly in place to pin him down against the arm of the couch, so really, it would just be a wasted opportunity not to do so.

Adam grins up at him. "Hey Ronan," he says. "I want you to kiss me."

"Is that the do over?" Ronan asks. "Or is this continuing with the shitty first attempt?"

"Does it matter?"

"You're trying to distract me from the fact you're copping out."

"True. Does it matter?"

"This one time, I'll allow it."

Adam smirks at him, gloating. "Sell out."

"Cheat." Ronan kisses him before he can argue his way out of that.

-

This time, when Adam responds to a Gansey invitation with sorry, I have plans, maybe next time, Ronan does nothing to change his mind.

"Wait, he doesn't send you a dozen follow up texts about why you can't make it to something?" Adam asks, something between amazed and annoyed.

"I'm mysterious," Ronan says loftily. "It's part of my charm."

Adam snorts. "You broadcast every thought and feeling you have on your face, you're not a mysterious." Adam kisses his cheek. "But you are charming," which is honestly a lot more than Ronan thought he'd get out of Adam without pushing it. He wonders when Adam got so sappy. He wonders when he did.

-

Things are -- weird, for a while.

Good weird, weird that Ronan wouldn't sell for the world, weird like all of the things that resonate with his soul are weird, but -- still, weird.

There's making out, for one thing. It's not weird on its own, not like Adam tries to shove his tongue down Ronan's throat or like Ronan tries to eat Adam's face or anything. The weird part is, Ronan's pretty sure that is how they used to make out. Their one summer together, he'd been high out of his mind on how fucking amazing Adam is, and knew without a doubt they were great at kissing, and sex, and communicating, and a whole shit ton of things that, looking back at it, he can now see they were laughably bad at. Which is, whatever, not a big deal. So he'd been a shitty kisser with his first boyfriend, who cares, but -- it's a little odd, to realize how bad they'd been at everything, and to realize that he'd liked it all in spite of that. It's a little odd, to know they'd sucked back then, and that they'd gotten better without each other, and that they're something different, now.

There's the whole post-anxiety crash, for another thing. Ronan spends three days thrilled out of his mind that this is happening, this actually worked out, holy shit, and then he spends four days snappy and paranoid that obviously it isn't happening and it could never work out. He accuses Adam of just going along with what Ronan wants out of guilt, and they spend two days not talking except for Adam sending him curt text messages that he knows are intended to piss him off more. He wakes up from an honest to God nightmare, sweating and shaking and out of breath like he hasn't in months, and drives over to Adam's place as soon as it gets light. Adam lets him in when he knocks softly on the front door, wraps his arms around him and pulls him down until Ronan's face is cradled against his neck, holds him there so long that he's late for work.

Then there's the fact that Adam got a tattoo at some point. Ronan's pretty sure the combined confusion and lust that discovery awakens is never going to fully clear up. And he'd been so worried about the motorcycle.

-

Adam, the immature fucking coward, declares nose goes on telling their friends that they're dating. Ronan never in a million years would have expected him to pull that shit; there was no way in hell he could've won the contest. He covers by insisting he deliberately lost in protest of how stupid the whole idea is, but Adam doesn't believe him for some reason. After a long pointless debate about Ronan's ethics, Adam settles on the basic statement that in either case, deliberately or not, Ronan lost and has to tell their friends.

Ronan figures he can streamline the process by telling Cheng and letting his inability to not gossip do the rest of the work for him.

Ronan figured wrong.

"Oh! This is a bonding moment, Lynch," Cheng gushes at the start of the worst goddamn conversation of Ronan's life. At least Cheng has no scruples about drinking heavily in the middle of the weekday, but even several shots don't make it any easier to swallow the fact that Cheng now thinks they are the kind of friends who talk about their relationships and sex lives together, or the news that Gansey and Sargent have apparently been doing...unspeakable things with Cheng. The only good part of the day is that Adam takes pity on him enough to pick him up from the bar afterwards. He takes his payment for that the next morning, forcing him to listen as he plays back the endless series of voicemails Ronan left him begging for a ride because I can't get murdered by an Uber driver yet, I wanna suck your dick again before I die, or, or go to jail, I'mma kill Cheng if he tells me any more about Gansey's --

So there's really no way that telling Declan and Jordan will be worse. Ronan would've figured once that adding Declan to anything automatically made it a thousand times worse. Now, he doesn't even worry enough about it to think about how it's going to happen.

And how it happens is: Adam offers to babysit so Declan and Jordan can have date night again, and Ronan comes over to keep him company again, except this time Adam snuggles up against Ronan's chest while they half-watch a movie and half keep an ear out for any sounds from upstairs. There aren't any, as though the girls are apologizing for last time. It's peaceful enough that Adam falls asleep on him, and Ronan loses track of time, staring down at Adam's face in his lap, carding his fingers through his hair, listening to the soft white noise of the tv and the baby monitors.

He feels peaceful, and meditative, and maybe like someone who actually does make good life decisions. The sound of keys turning the lock and the front door swinging open only disturb him enough to blink and turn his face over, half curious.

Declan and Jordan are hilariously overdressed for the evening they'd described to him, dinner at a chain restaurant and then a walk through a traveling exhibit at the museum of art; Declan's wearing a tie that's as neatly tied now as it would have been at nine the morning, and Jordan's in heels and full face of makeup. They stare at him like he makes as odd a picture as they do, which is when he remembers, right, boyfriend asleep across his lap.

"Hey, Parrish." He tugs lightly on his hair. "Wake up, the adults are home."

Adam lodges a complaint, some noise in his throat that's all consonants, and blinks his eyes open and sits up without waiting for a rebuttal. "Hi," he says. It's nice to know even Adam Parrish takes a second to find a perfect matter of fact delivery after being caught sleeping on the job while his boyfriend played with his hair. "Did you have a good night?"

"If you don't count the unappetizing appetizers and the oversaturation of Impressionist paintings, then yes." Declan's playing reasonable mature professional, the way he must sound at his job, which is somehow both more and less boring sounding than Ronan always assumed. "Everything go all right here? Did the girls give you any trouble?"

"Izzy woke up a little bit ago and took a bottle, I marked the time in the binder. Other than that it's been a quiet night."

"Oh for fuck's sake," Ronan snaps, hitting his limit of stoic adult manners. "We're dating."

Adam and Declan both give him disgruntled looks, like they're miffed that he ruined the game. He never realized until it was right in front of him that they both had that expression on tap.

"Sorry about that," Declan says.

"I think that's meant to be 'congratulations'," Jordan says, "But I'd love to hear you explain this one."

"Yes, I would too." Adam has a new, much stronger irritated expression, directed at Ronan's brother this time instead of at Ronan. He likes this look a lot better. "Since it isn't your fault and isn't a bad thing."

Declan sighs and rubs his forehead. "That came out wrong. I just meant that I should've helped, when Ronan was fishing for a set up with you. It didn't occur to me that was something you had a capacity to be interested in."

"Wow," Adam says, deadpan. "That's the most clinical way anyone has ever told me I read as straight."

"What do you mean, I was fishing for a set up?" Ronan demands.

"You wanted me to host a dinner party with my colleagues," Declan says in exasperation. "What could that possibly have been about except getting to see Adam again?"

Ronan should have left the Declan mocking to Adam and Jordan. From the expression on Adam's face, it's going to be a long time before he hears the end of this one.

-

They'd arrived in separate cars that night, Adam having worked late. Ronan lets Adam leave before him; the greedy creature in him that always wants more, as much as we can get, all of it, everything tonight lets itself be quieted with the knowledge they have plans tomorrow. He can afford to miss out on the brief walk down the driveway together, and it's worth it, maybe, for an opportunity he hadn't known he wanted to say something he hadn't realized he was going to say.

"Hey." He follows Declan to the kitchen, where he's tugging his tie loose and pouring a glass of water. Declan drinks shit that isn't coffee? Must be a fucking miracle.

"Hi. Sorry if that was too awkward back there."

"Whatever." He clears his throat while Declan opens the fridge and peers inside. "I wanted to say sorry. Actually."

"For the boots on the carpet? Okay, but the fact you're currently wearing the boots in question is going to undercut the sentiment."

Ronan inhales slowly. "I'm sorry I missed your wedding."

The refrigerator door very slowly swings shut.

"You..." Declan fades off.

Ronan crosses his arms and looks out the windows instead of at his brother. Probably that undercuts the sentiment, but it's just going to have to be good enough. "I was fucked up, and I missed Mom and Dad, and I didn't get how you could just not be fucked up, so I decided to be a total asshat about it. I'm sorry, and I'm sorry I did meet Eva sooner. I fucking -- I wish I had."

"Ronan -- "

"For the love of Christ," Ronan demands, turning back to Declan to glare at him. "I've had so many emotional conversations lately, can we just not talk about this? Ever?"

Declan watches him for a moment and shrugs an acceptance. "I'm going to tell Jordan this happened after you're gone, just so I have independent verification tomorrow that this really happened and wasn't a hallucination."

"Fine."

"And I might rub it in your face when you get married that I'm less of an asshat than you are."

"Fucking debatable," Ronan mutters. Declan raises an eyebrow. "Except for how we're not debating it because we're never talking about it, shit, can we be done now?"

The baby monitor crackles to life with what promises to be the beginning of a total crying fit. Jordan's voice drifts down from the top of the stairs, "this one's on you, love."

Declan sighs and heads toward the stairs. "We'll talk tomorrow."

"Not about this, we won't." Ronan slides out the door, thanking his nieces for getting him the last word.

-

"Wow," Adam says, voice flat. "You said you wanted this, but you weren't prepared for how hard it would be, were you?"

Ronan drops down to a seat next to him on the picnic blanket. "That's what she said."

"Lynch, there is a child around," Gansey admonishes him, as though the child in question weren't lurching away from him as fast as her awkward little legs would take her, while he stared uselessly and dithered about what to do. "Or there would be, if she hadn't decided that she loathed my very presence."

"Seriously, Eva's a toddler, not an alien life form." Adam keeps his eyes fixed on the great toddler escape, undoubtedly preparing to leap into action if something bad happens. "You don't have to be all weird around her."

"Gansey's weird around everyone."

"I thought at the very least she'd be susceptible to bribes." Gansey gloomily drops a handful of Hershey's kisses onto the blanket. "I overestimated my abilities in this arena."

"That's what she said?" Cheng offers. Blue gives him a meh hand gesture. "Well, it's not my fault Lynch jumped on the obvious one before I could get there."

"Are we calling Adam 'the obvious one' now?" Blue asks, and snickers when both Adam and Ronan make annoyed faces at her.

"Head's up!" yells one of the insufferable strangers that they ran into twenty minutes ago that Noah has already sworn eternal loyalty to through the bonds of brotherhood that is ultimate frisbee, or whatever the fuck that whole situation is. Ronan is ignoring it because he wants to maintain some shreds of respect and affection for Noah. "Yo, look out, littlest dude!"

Ronan can't actually see Eva, where he's sitting; he only reacts because Adam, looking over his shoulder, tenses up and shifts as though to leap to his feet -- and then stops, puzzled.

"Huh," he says under his breath. "Right. Sister."

Ronan frowns. They left Izzy at home with Jordan and Declan; just because Ronan had gotten all soft and insane about letting Gansey meet his nieces didn't mean he was stupid enough to overwhelm him with both of them at once. He turns to follow Adam's eyeline -- and freezes, because there, tossing a frisbee to the side with one hand and scooping Eva up towards her with the other, is Hennessy.

"Oi, watch where you dickwag, dickwags!" she shouts at the frisbee players.

"Hey, be careful around the littlest dude," one of them calls back.

"Oh, do something worthwhile for a change and go blow each other." Hennessy stalks off away from them, shooting a two fingered salute behind her. Eva, not recognizing the gesture, waves enthusiastically at them over her shoulder. Noah falls down laughing.

"Hennessy!" Gansey greets her. "I hadn't heard that you were back in town."

"Yeah, well, got bored, didn't I? Thought I'd see what all the fuss is about here." She plops down to a seat beside the picnic blanket, dropping her hold on Eva and stretching her legs out ahead of her as though all she's got in mind is to bask in the sun.

Eva, rather than running off again, stares up at her with a sudden shyness Ronan's never seen before. Admittedly, Hennessy looks cool as anything, is clearly trying to be intimidating and imposing with her massive shades and dark lipstick and completely outrageous no one would wear this to a park on a casual morning out leather pants and heels -- but Ronan recognizes armor when he sees it.

"Eva," he says, "this is your aunt, Hennessy."

"Hi," she says quietly.

"Hey kiddo." Hennessy tilts her head one inch in Eva's direction. It's enough to earn her Eva's undying devotion for the rest of the outing, to Gansey's confused and poorly hidden jealousy (I have CHOCOLATE, Ronan overhears him whine to Blue, don't children love chocolate?)

"Wasn't expecting you today," he says to Hennessy, when he gets a chance -- she spends most of the outing presiding over everything, observing without engaging. He has to wait until Noah's coaxed everyone else to either play hacky sack with him and his new throwback stoner friends or to stand around and mock.

She examines the nails on her right hand like there's nothing interesting at all about her having traveled across the country to crash a picnic featuring her estranged niece. "Jordan told me where you all'd be at. You better help me handle her after this, she's going to be insufferable."

"You think so?"

She pouts. "No. It's not really her thing. She can be bloody impossible when she wants to be, though."

"And sometimes you can be not impossible."

"Yeah, well." She waggles her fingers, a brief wave to no one. "Figured I'd try something different, didn't I? Seemed like it was working for you."

Ronan looks across the grass. There's Eva, repeatedly chucking the hacky sack at people, accepting it as they hand it back to her and explain how she's supposed to play, and then chucking it at people again while giggling madly. There's Adam, next to her, watching with a suppressed smirk on his face and a careful set to his hands that says he's still prepared to run in the second something goes wrong. And there's Gansey, saying he thinks he's really getting the hang of it even as he misses once again, and Blue not even pretending she isn't laughing her ass off at him, and Cheng gazing at her with open admiration, and Noah discussing the deep philosophy of life and ultimate frisbee with some guys they'll never see again.

"Yeah," Ronan says. "Seems like it's working out."