Work Text:
Based on this post.
"You ready to go?"
Ronan startles upright, ripping his headphones off. Chainsaw careens from the bed in a hurricane of dark feathers and reproachful 'kerah's'.
"What the hell, Parrish?"
Adam rolls his eyes and slouches the rest of the way into Ronan's bedroom, gaze lingering on his childlike bare feet. Something uncharacteristically soft and strummed is drifting from his abandoned iPod.
"You weren't answering the door. And nothing was locked because the people who live here are oblivious, irresponsible, or dead," Adam says drily, perching on Ronan's desk. He ghosts his hands absently over littered dream objects and crumpled papers but doesn't touch, rarely touches without permission.
"I could've been naked. I could've been dreaming," Ronan says pointedly.
Adam shrugs, feigning disinterest, but his cheeks are flushed pink.
"I took the risk. I'm hungry, are we going?"
Adam's hands have found a leather bound book tucked into a pile of magazines and loose, scribbled over hand outs. He's avoiding Ronan's eyes, trying to occupy his hands by turning and turning the book. He flips the cover open.
Ronan stands abruptly.
"Adam," he says, voice like cut glass.
Adam looks up immediately at the mention of his first name, looking absurdly boyish and hopeful.
"I didn't say you could touch my shit. I don't need the smell of motor oil to linger," Ronan sneers, stepping forward and opening his hand for the sketchbook.
Adam's eyes go dark and his shoulders snap back into armour. He goes to close the book but his eyes flicker down as he does, and he pauses. Frowning, he tilts the book on its side.
"Is this…?"
"Don't. Wait, Parrish don't -" Ronan steps closer, panic shredding his voice.
"These are mine, aren't they? I mean. It's me." Adam fixes him with a burning look, challenging Ronan to break his own rules and lie outright.
Ronan's chest is tight and his hands feel dirty now, like he should've asked permission, like he's been stealing from Adam by putting him down on paper.
"Don't flatter yourself," Ronan tries, hoping he'll drop the subject if he's cruel and dismissive enough.
Adam scoffs at him, but his hands are white knuckled on the sketchbook.
"Liar," he whispers.
"I didn't-" Ronan stops and breathes shakily, wishing his foot were on a gas pedal and his eyes were shut tight. "Yes."
"Yes what?"
"Yes they're your hands," Ronan hisses, reaching out to snatch the book away. "I needed drawing practice and you were-"
"I was?" Adam stands, eyes levelling out to meet Ronan's darting gaze.
"You have nice hands," Ronan grits, like the words are being ripped from his mouth, wisdom teeth feelings finally coming out.
Adam stops short. He's so used to Ronan's not quite lies, patchwork silences where his honesty isn't allowed to leak out. His head ducks.
"They're good," he says, because it's true, and Ronan deserves that.
"They're more than- they're photo real. Beautiful," Adam says, flinching at the drawl in his own voice, honey cradling inadequate words. Ronan laughs cruelly, tossing the book to the corner, effectively dropping the conversation.
"Whatever."
When Adam looks crestfallen, and an awkward hush fills the rift between them like a plug, Ronan huffs and makes a show of retrieving the book.
"Look, I draw to practice visualizing. If I can visualize it, I can dream it, if I can dream it, I can have it," Ronan explains, choppy and acidic, shoving past him into the main room. His speeding tickets flutter, and so does something in Adam, a part breaking loose in his chest and straining against his ribcage.
"So why were you drawing me?"
Ronan stops. Adam watches his head fall towards his chest.
There's a beat of silence, sinking and horrible, rejection already stinging in Adam like the flinch before a slap.
And then Ronan spins around, as beautiful as a forest fire, eyes wide and terrified, and he's kissing Adam. Pushing him back and back until he's up against the doorframe and pushing still further, mouth bruising and hands shaking.
Pressing so close that Adam feels the pulse in his wrist, can almost hear the roar of his thoughts as his hands come up to cradle Adam's face.
He pulls back after a moment, and his hands come down to circle both of Adam's wrists.
Ronan stays there, lingering in his space, and then steps completely away, licking his lips and frowning at the floor.
"I'm sorry," he says woodenly, like he's never considered the meaning of the word before. Adam almost laughs at him, but he knows how he'd take it, so he re-closes the gap between them instead.
"Yeah right," he whispers against his lips.
Ronan kisses him back gratefully, licking into his mouth with the fervour of an artist who's learning his subject.
Adam lets himself ride his half baked maybes and confusing mesh of attraction and caring all the way to Ronan's hips and cheekbones and broad shoulders. He lets fresh certainty tug at his bones like puppet strings, feels Ronan's warm skin under his hands and imagines him dreaming this, praying for it, moaning for it.
Adam makes a choked noise, and pulls him closer by the nape of his neck. Ronan breaks away again though, nosing along Adam's cheekbone, breath stuttering across dusted freckles.
"I couldn't dream you properly," he says quietly, achingly, like it's been eating away at him.
Adam doesn't know how to take that, but it feels monumental somehow, whispered into the skin of his cheek and soft enough to erase an entire bookcase in the library of what he thought he knew about Ronan. He kisses at Ronan's hairline and feels his shoulders jolt at the touch.
"You're really very good," Adam says again, and Ronan pulls away, smiling in a way that looks desperately like Matthew Lynch. His hands slide back to Adam's like they're magnetized.
"They're just shitty sketches. I prefer the real thing," he says, squeezing at Adam's palms.
Adam swallows thickly. "We're going to be late. Can we not-"
"Yeah, no, of course not." Ronan interrupts, unlacing their fingers. Adam chokes on a laugh.
"I was just going to say, can we not take my shitcan car. I'm doing this thing where I treat myself to nice things," Adam says, cupping Ronan's cheek pointedly.
He looks stunned, reaching up to hold the hand on his face and smiling in that disbelieving way again.
"Okay. Yeah. Not like I want to be in your crap-mobile more than I have to be, anyway."
Adam smirks, indulgent, and lowers their hands so he can pull Ronan behind him.
"No racing though, we're late," he insists, and Ronan hums, delighted.
"Seems like I've gotta new high, now, anyway," Ronan teases, but the words are too unmistakably kind to be funny. Adam laughs anyway, marvelling at how weird it isn't.
When he gets back to St. Agnes that night, flushed and bone-tired, there's another little black sketchbook laid out on his pillow. Only this time it's sketches of his own face - laughing, sleeping, brow furrowed, mouth slack, a hand supporting his jaw, vines curled loosely around the crown of his head.
There isn't a single blank page, and the dates scribbled in the corners go back over a year.
In the coming months, Adam keeps the book on his bedside cardboard box with other precious things, tucking photos and new drawings into the folds every night, and feeling phantom hands at his wrists.