Work Text:
Corinthian stuck his head out the window, tongue lolling out. He panted roughly from the passenger seat as he watched Adam and Elizabeth (that’s an unworthy name for her. The little Warrior, little Queen. He’d call her Sanctus, Divinia and Caelestis and pray at her feet better than he ever prayed to God) make their way up the dirt road. The vixen’s white tipped tail bobs down the road like a beacon in the rapidly falling darkness.
“Will you fucking quit it? Put your fucking tongue back in your mouth” Ronan snarled, his hand snapping out to smack his hindquarter. Corinthian panted louder on principle.
Virginia is fucking hot when you’re a 200 pound black wolf out of a horror story.
And Ronan turned off the air conditioning because he’s a dick.
The trailer fades away as they drive back to the main road, but Corinthian keeps his predator sharp eyes on Adam and Elizabeth as they approach their trailer.
Adam started up the steps, but Elizabeth stops short, cowering against the stairs. Ronan shifts in his seat, chewing on his bracelet. He tastes metal and dirt ground in to the leather, it explodes over his tongue and brings him down to earth for a moment. Back to his body and the rules that he knows he can’t break in this Real World. This isn’t his Dream, this isn’t Cabeswater and he can’t drive swords into monsters and protect his friends. He isn’t King here. His teeth ache in his gums, his nails dig into his leg and he can’t tell if he’s growling or Corinthian is.
To be fair, he never really can.
His soul has always been all teeth and hunger. Isn’t the wolf always starving in the fairytales? Starved for love, starved for company, starved for blood. Always starving.
Ronan was never surprised by Corinthian’s shape. He’s been starving since he found Niall in the driveway with Emer nothing but a smear of gold in the dirt.
He snaps from his mind as Elizabeth lets out a piercing fox-scream, a horrible, grating sound that pierces the night like a blade. He snaps his head up so fast he feels his brain rattle as the car slams to a stop. Glancing in the rear view, he sees Elizabeth pinned on the ground under Robert Parrish’s ugly mutt. The fox is squirming and screeching as she tries to wriggle away from the bone breaking, flesh shearing teeth.
Adam’s on the ground and he’s not fucking moving. He’s laid out in the driveway and Ronan is a child again, helpless and cold.
Corinthian is huge and looming, a thread away from snapping.
Ronan slams his arm into Corinthian as he swings the car around, tearing back down the road to the trailer. It knocks the wind from both of them as they’re thrown back in tor hair seats. He pins Corinthian in place just long enough for the car to pull up beside them before letting him go. The great black beast jumps out of the open window and crosses the yard like a fucking bullet out of a gun.
Gansey’s voice echoes in his head as he flies out of the car.
“Cry ‘Havoc’, and let loose the dogs of war”.
Ronan grabs Robert Parrish and throws him aside before going for Adam. He hits the ground hard, knees ringing painfully as he turns him over. Ronan’s fucking bones ache with the need to drive his fist through Robert’s skull. He can picture the way blood and viscera would spill out across his skin, the way bones crack and fracture. He can smell copper and iron and Virginia night air.
Instead he holds Adam tight to him and watches. Ronan thinks, distant and cold, that he might not come back from this.
But Ronan is starved for Adam and if he can’t feed his want of him, then he can feed Corinthian’s belly-cramping want for violence. To rip and tear and destroy and see if that blood can wipe out the burning ocean in the empty hollow where their heart should have been.
Corinthian’s teeth are white as snow in the dark. Ronan can hear the dog’s screams of pain as Corinthian rips out chucks of muscle and sinew with nightmare-creature jaws. All he can see are Corinthian’s teeth flashing in the blackness as Corinthian fades into the night air like some hell beast from his dreams. Corinthian roars deep in his chest, so deep that Ronan can feel them reverberating in his own chest like the thrumming base beat in the BMW. He hears war drums and heartbeats echoing in his skull.
Ronan can taste blood on his tongue, feel flesh parting around his teeth and smiles, knife sharp and manic as Robert Parrish screams in the ground, curled up in a ball. Mrs. Parrish is screaming bloody fucking murder from the trailer, but Adam is silent in his arms. There’s blood on the side of his face and Ronan wants to scream himself.
He doesn’t.
He sits there holding Adam (beautiful, shattered, wild, unknowable Adam Parrish) until Corinthian has had his fill. The wolf stalks over to them, stopping briefly to take Elizabeth up by her scruff. Carefully, he lays the fox across Adam’s legs while Ronan calls Gansey, then 911 and picks up when Gansey calls back.
Corinthian watches, which is nothing new to him. The wolf has been watching Adam and Elizabeth since Gansey first brought them into their little pack. He watches the slow flutter of Adam’s honey colored eyelashes as he stirs, and the crimson blood stains on Elizabeth’s auburn pelt. He watches the careful way Adam strokes down her back, how her spine arches up into his hand and files it away for later when he can think about those elegant fingers petting down his own spine the way he runs his fingers across the wires and metal of an engine. Picture Elizabeth arching into Ronan’s blood stained marble hands with a pleased trill instead of her sorrowful whimpers.
There are only a few stars in the sky, and the moon is a black void above them, but he can see how Adam glows like some will o’the whisp, some fae-like creature from Niall’s stories. Ethereal and ephemeral and Corinthian is fucking starved for them all over again.
Ronan’s voice is quiet and defensive on the phone, but Corinthian watches Adam watch him. The boy who spits apologies like poison and swallows gratitude like razor blades whispers “thank you” into the dark. Maybe it’s easier for Adam to not see Corinthian, but Corinthian is already memorizing the shape Adam’s lips make when he strings those words together.
He nods roughly, ears flicking back to hear the sirens wailing up the road. The sound crashes over their little bubble of silence where they’re the only things that exist.
Slowly, Adam closes his eyes again, going limp against Ronan. Corinthian waits and want to howl in grief and rage and want as Elizabeth stumbles off her boy and crashes into his side, off kilter and keening.
Like he’s touching something precious, Corinthian lays down, curling around her. He, for a moment, dreams of being a shield so that nothing will ever touch her again. But he lets it go, lest the idea drive him insane.
Ronan hangs up on Gansey after the third burst of tears to see Corinthian curl around Elizabeth. His finger twitch, and he tucks them in his pockets to keep from doing something he’ll never come back from.
(Something that haunts his dreams as much as bee stings and epipens, something that leaves him waking and shaking with bloodied fingers bitten raw by his soul. The dream he can never see come to life, not unless he can watch his last piece of sanity go up in smoke and ash as he looses them forever)
When the chaos breaks over them, the police (the dumb fucks that they are) take him and Corinthian aside for questioning as Gansey and Rhiannon flit between him and Adam like mother hens. Gansey is speaking with one of the officers as Ronan watches Adam get loaded into the ambulance.
“Ronan”
Ronan feels his hairs stand in end. He ignores and freezes all at once as he looks down at his feet. The small (so fucking small. Fucking fragile. Beautiful, but fragile as St. Agnes’s stained glass windows) fox stares up at him. Unable to speak, he kneels down to see her.
Her eyes, like Adam’s hands, are something inescapable for Ronan. He can sense Corinthian move aside to keep his eyes on Adam, which is the first bit of tact the overgrown lump of fur has shown in years. “Yeah?” he asks. His voice cracks like dry leaves under a boot.
Her eyes are like pools of whiskey, alluring and one drink away from becoming a deadly addiction. He’s already drowning and knows this is one addiction he’ll never be able to kick.
Her paw, small and delicate, with its black sock and filed down claws touches his knee. It’s covered, no contact with his skin, but he imagines he can feel the hidden galaxies that make up Elizabeth and Adam swirling across his denim covered knee.
He can’t fucking breathe. Every fibre of him aches with his hungry, all consuming want as he stares at her. She stares back, warm and soothing as a drink of whiskey after a hard day. She leans in closer and whispers like she’s gifting him a secret.
“Thank you” she offers.
That’s not a secret. It’s a fucking blessing.
Ronan feels that he’s been flayed bare tonight and if he gives anything else, that fire in his chest is going to light this whole fucking city on fire. So, he simply nods roughly, and stands again. The two make their way over to the ambulance and she allows Corinthian to pick her up and place her on Adam’s stretcher.
They all pack into their cars, Gansey and Rhiannon off to 300 Fox Way to tell Blue and Bonifacio, the ambulance to the hospital and the police to the station. The pats on the back and the ‘you’re a good friend, son’, ringing discordantly in their ears. Like a note out of place, it rankles them with its wrongness.
Ronan and Corinthian drive to the Barns in silence.
There’s no denial they could say that wouldn’t be a lie.