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Ronan soon learns that Adam was not hyperbolizing the razor-like quality of the shells surrounding the beach. He wishes he was still wearing his boots, but he’s not sure if the bleeding blisters would have been better or worse than the ribbon thin slices being cut into his socks and the soles of his feet. Either way, the salt water would have been lapping at the tissue and veins beneath his skin, wearing its way in one way or another. That was one of the first things Ronan had learned when he followed Gansey to sea. The sea will have what it wants, and if it wants your heart, it will find a way in, by tongue or by lung or any other part of a man left without defenses.
By the time Ronan makes it to shore the adrenaline of the kiss is starting to leave him. He’s slept, but he hasn’t rested, and he hasn’t eaten. He thinks he may have hit his head on something when he fell into the water, if the way it keeps throbbing is any indication. It’s all making it very hard to keep his eyes open. Once he’s on the sand proper he doesn’t need his eyes anymore to follow the sound of the fire to its warmth, so he closes them and thankfully misses the look on Gansey’s face when he finally realizes he's no longer alone. If the tremor and shock in his voice are any indication, Ronan will not want to have seen the fear there, mixed with joy as it may be. He can handle many unpleasant things, but fear in Gansey is not something he’s ever learned to bear.
Ronan drops to his knees and lets Gansey come to him. Gansey’s hands are warm on his shoulders as he manhandles him down into the sand and drapes something over him. Ronan curls into it, gripping the hem and the cold brass buttons. He opens his eyes again and sees that it's Gansey's jacket.
Gansey puts his hand to Ronan’s forehead, muttering to himself. “Ronan,” he says louder, as if he’s convincing himself. “What miracle is this?”
“No miracle,” Ronan says through gritted teeth, trying to get their chattering under control. “S’pure stubborn cussedness. I told you I’d never try to leave you again, even though you insist on making being near you as difficult as possible.”
Gansey laughs. It comes out sounding startled. “I never doubted you for a moment. But where did you come from? You haven’t been in the water this whole time, have you?” He slides a hand down Ronan’s leg, checking for injuries.
Ronan kicks him away. He sits up and strips out of his wet shirt, dropping it into the sand and shrugging on Gansey’s blessedly dry jacket. It’s tight in the shoulders and it won't button across his chest, but it’s the most welcome piece of clothing he’s ever worn. “No, I was on an island due west of here. I was pulled from the water.”
“The mermaids,” Gansey says, voice quiet in its awe. “I saw one too. Oh, Ronan, she was amazing. Just as beautiful as the stories say. To have seen one up close, it's—”
“Yes.” Ronan cuts him off, too tired for discoveries. “They’re damned pretty. Most importantly, they’re better swimmers than I am.”
“Our dog was a better swimmer than you,” Ganey says, and Ronan sinks into the comfort of familiar territory. “Mine didn’t seem particularly altruistic. How did you get one of them to drag you all the way here?”
“I traded a dream for it.”
Gansey nods as if this makes perfect sense. Ronan knows Gansey is thinking of the bauble itself, something flashy and possibly precious that was the product of Ronan’s feverish imagination or his desperation. The two of them have been quietly dealing with these things since they were boys together in England.
Ronan’s not sure that’s what he means, though. He thinks of the curve of Adam’s lips and the pearl sitting in his pocket. He can feel it digging into this thigh, large and obvious. The physicality of Ronan’s dreams, of his own magic, pale when compared to the near-mythical boy whose very presence in the world is tugging at Ronan’s gut and his mind. He has a thousand questions he knows will never be answered, not even with twelve lifetimes at sea, not even with Gansey’s uncanny ability to ferret out things and truths.
Still, the pearl exists. That wasn’t a dream. Hope is a thing he can choose to believe in if he wishes.
“Have you seen any others?” Gansey asks.
Ronan shakes his head. “He—, they said the others were lost, along with any hope of us trying to communicate with another ship, as far as I can tell.”
Gansey gives him an appraising look and Ronan can see that he has a thousand questions of his own rolling around behind his eyes. He doesn’t follow up on what he’s thinking. “I have you,” he says instead. “We’ll be fine.”
He holds his fist out between them and Ronan reaches up one shaky hand to clasp over it. Then he slides his fingers off and makes a fist of his own which Gansey wraps his hand around. Another thing they’ve done since they were boys. Checking in, making sure the other is still there for everything that is to come. Sometimes Ronan worries that one day one of them will start the gesture, just for it to remain uncompleted. He thinks it now, sat as he is in a hopeless situation with his best friend beside him. He shrugs it off.
“You know I can’t just dream us a ship, right? It doesn’t work that way. And even if I could, the two of us could not man it alone.”
“I was thinking something smaller. Maybe a hot air balloon.”
Ronan looks up at him to see if he’s joking. He might be. “I would punch you if I could move.”
“We’ll figure it out.” Gansey sighs, his own exhaustion pulling at the edge of his voice. Even still, it’s a voice that brooks no arguments from the universe. Ronan knows then, with absolute certainty, that they will make it off the island and do it together. Gansey continues. “The weather is fair. I’ve been walking the island for the better part of the day and have yet to come across any large animals. We should be fine. And God, I’m sorry. I’m not thinking. You must be starving. I’ve got a couple turtles cooking in their shells and a few coconuts, that should hold us until morning.”
Ronan lets Gansey pull him to his feet. He hobbles over to the fire after him, feeling time weighing down on him as if it too might cut. He’s more exhausted than he’s ever felt in his life. When he’s finally allowed to pass out he doesn’t dream.
* * *
At least, he doesn’t remember dreaming. But he wakes to a grey morning, red just streaking the horizon, hands gripping a length of silver silk cloth billowing in the breeze. Ronan’s never seen a hot air balloon in person, but he thinks this must be a part of one. Gansey’s will made manifest through him once again. Still, enough fabric for a ball gown will not get them to any other shore on their own. He rolls himself up into the slick warmth of it until he’s no longer lying in the sand and goes back to sleep.
* * *
This time when Ronan dreams he dreams of land. He dreams of his father’s grave and his brothers standing at the edge of the open pit, looking down and tossing clutches of bright blue gentians into the darkness. When Ronan creeps close to the edge he does not see the casket. He does not see anything. The pit is deep with no end and a black that is not so much dark as absent. As if mere death wasn't enough for his father. As if a nothingness had swallowed his father whole. A sound like the roaring of waves comes out of it and neither of his brothers seem to notice.
There's a raven perched on a nearby marble cross, stately and ominous. She cries out to him and then launches herself up and straight into his chest. She goes through him like smoke. His battered heart absorbs the most of her.
* * *
When he wakes again the sun is beating down on him, hot and merciless. Ronan shifts in his silk cocoon and something heavy and soft wriggles in his hands, then bites at his finger.
“Fuck,” he says, and tries to shake his arms loose. Once he’s managed to free himself and sit up, the raven tumbles out of his arms and into the shimmering pool of silk in his lap. She rolls to her feet and shakes herself out before looking up at him. Ronan feels like she’s judging him for something, though he’s too exasperated to try and decipher what.
Gansey comes up the shore. He holds up his hand in greeting and stops about ten feet from Ronan. There’s an amused tilt to his lips that Ronan does not like. “I see you’ve made a friend.”
“It’s not like I meant to.” Ronan spits it out in frustration before he realizes that Gansey hadn’t meant literally.
“Wait,” Gansey says. Ronan can see glee creeping into his eyes. “You didn’t.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Ronan says again, too weary to make his voice as caustic as he’d like.
Gansey drops to his knees in the sand and holds a hand out toward the bird. She hops away from him, flapping her wings. “Not very friendly. Definitely something of yours.”
Ronan scowls.
“You’ve never dreamt a living thing before.”
“You’ve never dreamt anything at all.”
Gansey runs his fingers over his lips in thought. “You genius,” he says finally. “You may get us off this island yet. We just need something to write on. And with. Oh, thank God.” He jumps up and darts off into the woods.
Ronan tries to shoo the bird off the silk and away from his lap, but she won’t budge. She’s staring at him again, as if waiting for something. “I don’t know what you want,” he tells her. “I don’t even know what I want.”
He looks out over the water, searching for a ripple or shadow against the horizon. Nothing. Nothing as far as his cursedly perfect vision can see.
Gansey comes back with a large leaf. He shows Ronan where he’s used something sharp to etch the words marooned and seeker, the fact of them and the partial name of the ship they’ve lost. He then rolls it and ties it with a long piece of grass. He tries to shove it at the raven, who pulls her beak back in contempt.
“What are you doing?” Ronan asks. “She’s not a pigeon.”
“Ravens carry messages in myths,” Gansey says, as if that explains anything or makes it any more plausible.
“We’re not in a myth.” Ronan brings his hands up and presses the heels of his palms into the sides of his head, trying to balance the pressure inside of it with the pressure outside. “We’re in the real world, where I know you don’t like to live. And this raven, who is just as out of place as we are on this damned bit of dirt, is not going to start acting like a pigeon just because you want it to.”
“What if you want it to?”
Ronan wants to snap at Gansey, but it’s not as stupid a question as he’d like to pretend it is. The bird came from his dreams. Sure, she’s the first living thing he’s dreamt, but the vast majority of things he dreams up do just as he wants them to, or expects them to at least. He sighs and takes the leaf roll from Gansey and holds it up in front of her.
At first she just stares at him, as if testing his will, but when he shoves it toward her again she clamps down on it to take it from him and flutters up onto his shoulder. She’s a solid thing, heavy like the spectre of his father’s death that she was born from. She cocks her head and waits, listening.
“Find the closest ship,” he tells her. Then he shrugs and she launches herself up, claws digging into the sleeve of Gansey’s jacket with the force of take off.
They watch her until she disappears into the bright azure blue of the cloudless sky. The expanse of space between them and the horizon seems impossible. Ronan feels wrung out and empty. Two out of three dream things sent off into the sea in just as many days. He wants to get up and ball up the fabric he’s still nestled in, to rend it to shreds with his hands and toss it out to the water too. It might as well have everything. It might as well have him. He wonders again just why he’s been spared, only this time there’s no gaunt and elegant miracle there to ask.
Instead of moving he balls his hands into fists and rests them on his thighs. “Watch, she’s going to bring back pirates.”
“We’ll reason with them, then,” Gansey says, as if he is suggesting they go for a ride after breakfast.
“I’m sorry,” Ronan says. “You seem to think I said ‘reasonable human beings’, when in fact what I actually said was ‘pirates’.”
Gansey claps a hand on Ronan’s shoulder. “We’ve dealt with worse. Come on, I need help carrying this deer if you want to eat today.”
Ronan wonders why Gansey isn’t just fishing, but he thinks he might know. He’s not brave enough yet to bring it up.
* * *
It’s three days before they turn their eyes to the horizon and see anything but blue blue blue. At near mid-day a black shadow of a hull breaches the solemn line where the water meets the sky. An hour later Ronan’s raven is back and perched on his shoulder, still heavy. He’s relieved. He was beginning to think they’d both hallucinated her.
He’s less relieved when the ship comes into view and puts down anchor several hundred yards from the sandbar where he’d spotted his first glimpse of Gansey’s fire. Ronan can just make out the white flags flying above the sails. One has an hourglass on it and the other has a red devil. He shivers, remembering other devils from his past.
“I fucking told you,” he says. “Pirates.”
“Just stay calm.” Gansey sits on the ground to put his boots back on, and when he stands he looks almost as regal as usual, in spite of the state of his clothing.
Ronan can only imagine he cuts a slightly less promising figure with his missing socks, loosened trouser cuffs, and the too small jacket over his bare chest. He considers removing it, because he’ll be no good in a fight with his arms pinned in like this, but he can also think of few less savory things than meeting his death half-naked on a forgotten strip of beach.
The boat that rows to shore has two men on it, both short with wild black hair. They get out and pull it to the sand, eyeing Ronan and Gansey hungrily, summing them up. Gansey steps forward and holds out his hand to greet them as a gentleman, because Gansey doesn’t know any other way to do it. Gansey and Ronan have had very different lives. Both of the men stare at the hand until Gansey awkwardly clasps the back of his neck and then drops it to his side. Ronan crosses his arms and steps in front of Gansey. A stitch in his shoulder pops and the bird ruffles her feathers, puffing out in a similar show of intimidation.
“Curious creature you got there,” one of the men says.
“Evaded the pot like nothing else,” the other says. “Shame, would’ve loved some chicken stew.”
Ronan bares his teeth. It is not a smile. “Be grateful you didn’t. I have to eat anything that eats her, and I am very hungry.”
There’s quiet for a moment, no sound but the waves and the breeze. Then the thicker of the men throws his head back and laughs. “Captain said any man who could tame a wildling such as that would have a streak in him. He wants to meet you. Came because he was curious.”
Gansey reaches out and touches Ronan’s elbow. Ronan looks back at him and they have a silent conversation about what to do. Ronan grimaces, indicating that he doesn’t think they should trust these men. Gansey squints and tilts his head, saying that they have no other choice. Ronan knows Gansey is probably right. Gansey is usually right. That doesn’t make him feel better about it.
“Well,” the other man says, impatient. “Let’s go, we haven’t got all day.”
Gansey nods. Ronan nods back at him. Gansey steps forward. Ronan runs back across the sand to bundle up their silk and then joins Gansey in the small boat with his arms full of dream stuff and his heart full of dread.
When they’re hauled on board they’re met with the cruel and curious stares of about fifteen men. They’re all gathered near the main mast. Some of them have their hands resting on the hilts of sabers. One of them has his gun drawn. So much for reason, Ronan thinks, and stays near the edge in case he needs to toss himself back over.
Gansey steps forward like he owns the ship and looks around him. “Where is your captain? I wish to have words with him.”
The crowd of men parts and a tall, nondescript looking man in weathered grey shirt and pants steps forward. “That is fortunate,” he says. “For I wish to have words with the man who would have the audacity to send death as a messenger when what he really needs is for someone to save his life.”
The captain looks past Gansey and right at Ronan. Ronan spares a sidelong glance at the raven before lifting his chin, defiant. “You fly the flags of torment and time. I think I’m not the one between us who brings death.”
“I think both of us know that death cannot be tamed into doing one man’s bidding,” the Gray Captain says.
“Right,” Ronan replies. “You really have to work for it.”
The Gray Captain moves closer to them. He’s the most impeccable looking pirate Ronan has ever seen. Aside from his clothing, his beard is neatly trimmed at mid-length with silver flecks threaded through the brown of it, and there are no ties in his hair or chains around his neck or belt. He moves silently and stops right in front of Ronan, looking him up and down.
“You remind me of a man I once knew.”
“You remind me of no one.”
“Ronan!” Gansey says, trying to head trouble off at the pass.
Something flickers in the man’s eyes. His mouth twitches. For a moment Ronan is sure they’re going to be killed, because they have nothing to barter for their lives with. Men with nothing are not worth a pirate’s time. And oh, he’ll fight, but there’s no way the two of them can take on almost twenty armed men on an unfamiliar ship.
Instead of ordering their death though, The Gray Captain says, “Give these men the clerk’s room. Then raise the anchor and tilt the sails. The wind is still favorable and we have a distance to clear before nightfall.” Then, to Ronan, “Where was your ship The Seeker headed?”
“Hispaniola,” Gansey says.
“A port with plenty of ships in and out, ripe for the hunt. Very well.”
“But Captain,” one of the men says. “What about the—”
The Gray Captain raises a fist in the air to silence the question. “There will be time. For now you will do as I say.” He gives Ronan one last once over before he turns on his heel and disappears back into the group of men.
Gansey and Ronan share a wary look before someone steps forward to show them to their new room.
* * *
Ronan wakes in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. He’s side by side with Gansey in the dark, his chest pressed into Gansey’s back on the thin mattress. It’s been a long time since he’s shared a bed with anyone. It makes him feel trapped. He takes several deep breaths and rolls onto his other side. Something hard digs into his thigh. The pearl.
He sits up gingerly, trying not to wake Gansey, and pulls on one of the large under shirts the pirates had offered them. The door gives a low warning creak as he opens it and he freezes a moment, but no one comes for him and Gansey doesn’t move. He closes it slowly behind him and makes his way to the deck.
Once in the night air, he tucks himself into the shadow between the outer railing and the stairs to the upper deck. He inhales deeply and lets the night fill him up. Then he pulls the pearl from his pocket and holds it up before him. The moon is waning, so its reflection of the light is not as bright as it had been the night before, and the pearl is much dimmer now than it had been in Adam’s hands. Ronan gives this lack of light a meaning that probably isn’t there and a weighty anxiousness settles over him.
Contrary to popular belief, Ronan does have feelings that aren’t anger and hate. He does know what love is. He doesn’t show it the way most people do. He may not even feel it the way most people might. But it’s there all the same. There’s a warm pang in his core for Gansey and his younger brother, for the woman his mother used to be and the stubborn male influences he lost when his father died and his older brother became his enemy.
He knows of the flare and the heat. Really, he seems to fall in love with Gansey all over again every day, praying to the guileless, naive wonder of his best friend in the same way his brother prays to God against those dark wood pews back in his father’s country. Back home. Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, the Lynch brothers both say. Sed libera nos a malo.
There’s all of that, and then there’s this. There’s this flood of warmth like water running through every part of him, joining rivers of muscle and catching the air in his lungs. He feels like he’s drowning. He’s never welcomed it more in his life. The reasonable side of him says it’s misplaced gratitude, that being pulled back from the edge of a very real death has heightened his desire to thank the creature that saved him. The passionate side of him, the one with cold wind burning across his cheeks and the stutter in his inhalations, reveals it to be desire instead. But how can a man desire something he hardly knows? How can his heart feel so suddenly twisted, like it’s trying to dive into the depths without him?
Adam had said he wasn’t a siren, that those were different from mermaids, but what would Ronan know of the truth of that? Perhaps Adam’s touch is a slow acting poison. Perhaps like an electric eel he’s shot something into Ronan that will make him easy to track and call back. Perhaps he means to make a meal of Ronan, bones and all.
Ronan doesn’t think that he would mind.
He tosses the pearl back and forth between his hands before closing one fist around it and holding it out over the churning water below. The only way to test any of this and see where his feelings really lie is to see Adam again, so maybe he would be better off simply dropping this beacon into the sea and making it impossible to look back. Would he spend the rest of his life regretting what might have been? What does he even think will be? Adam was made for the sea and Ronan was made to merely be carried along above it.
But there was a longing in Adam, a hunger that Ronan immediately recognized because he’s seen it so many times in his own face. Ronan opens his mouth and places the pearl on his tongue. He seals his lips over it and rolls it around, feeling the smoothness of it, remembering the salty press of Adam’s tongue against his. He could swallow the pearl right now. He could accept whatever consequences come from loving a thing you don’t understand. What has Ronan ever loved that he really understood?
He spits the pearl into his hand and wipes it against the shirt before slipping it back into his pocket. No matter what he decides, he has to see Gansey through this first. He needs to see his best friend installed back on land where he belongs, searching for the scholars and legends and old world kings of his dreams.
“Adam,” Ronan says to the stars above him, because he realizes he hasn’t said it yet. He feels the shape and weight of it on his tongue, smooth like the pearl, warm like want. “Adam, Adam, Adam.” Like the first man, the first man to ensnare him so completely. He wonders if God was this in love with his first impossible creature.
In the water below there’s a flurry of movement and Ronan looks down sharply, trying to catch whatever is doing it. For a split second he thinks he might see pale flesh glinting off the dark of the water, but when he focuses there’s nothing there.
Having you here it’s, it’s impossible, Adam had said. If there’s one thing that has never stopped Ronan Lynch, it’s the impossible.