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"Something else is coming," Adam tells Ronan. "I don't know what yet."
It's a Sunday, the first Sunday after they find Maura and Artemus underground, and after attending church with his brothers as usual Ronan stops by Adam's tiny apartment to find him agitated and distracted. The deck of tarot cards--once Persephone's, now his--is in his hands, but he's not dealing any, just shuffling them restlessly as he sits cross-legged on his bed.
Ronan leans against the wall next to the bed, folding his arms. "Okay. So what do you know?"
"It's not like the problems Cabeswater's had before--when it was getting drained by dreamers, or how it's been having me fix things along the line," Adam says. "This is something new. Possibly it has something to do with the third sleeper, but I can't tell if it's that it's been woken somehow, or it's going to be, or what."
The third sleeper. The one that's not supposed to be woken. The thought of it makes Ronan's skin crawl, and because he's Ronan he reacts to that with a disdainful curl of his lip. "Can we do anything about it? Are we supposed to do anything about it?"
"I don't know. I can't--shit--" Adam fumbles in his anxious shuffling and sends cards scattering all over the bed and the floor. He ducks his head and starts gathering them up, but Ronan steps forward and puts his hands over Adam's, leaning down so they're at eye level when Adam looks up. Adam looks startled for a moment, his eye wide, and Ronan squeezes his hands, grounding him.
"I don't know," Adam says more calmly, eyes still fixed on Ronan's. "I can't get Cabeswater to give me a straight answer, at least not one I can understand. I think--I think it might be scared."
An ancient magical forest whose secrets and capabilities they still don't fully understand scared. That's not unsettling at all.
Ronan lets go of Adam's hands (not letting himself dwell on the way holding them felt, not letting himself count all the times he's watched those hands work or dreamt them on his skin) and moves to sit next to him, carelessly brushing tarot cards out of his way. Their shoulders and knees bump against each other.
"All right," Ronan says. "Doesn't seem like there's much we can do until Cabeswater gives you something clearer to work with. Or until the third sleeper shows itself, if it is awake. And then we try to deal with it."
He thinks Adam can tell, without his making it explicit, that we means just the two of them (and maybe the Gray Man, who it still galls Ronan a bit to ally himself with, however useful he's been). This is the way it is now. The Greywaren and the Magician, doing their best to shield their friends not only from the dark things the ley line brings to Henrietta, but from the dark things that have to be done to deal with them.
It's not pretty, but there's a kind of fierce thrill to it, the excitement of being part of a secret coupled with the sheer exhilaration Ronan feels at knowing what he is.
***
The first time Gansey brings Adam to Monmouth, it's ostensibly just to meet up with Ronan and then go out for pizza. Underneath that, it's a test of both Adam's reaction to Gansey's little warehouse kingdom, and Ronan's reaction to Adam.
He spends a few minutes excitedly showing off, showing Adam his miniature Henrietta and the maps he has laid out on the floor. Then he hears the door to Ronan's room close and looks up to find the other boy eying Adam warily, sizing up this interloper into their kingdom.
"Ronan, you know Adam Parrish, right? I invited him along." Gansey says it casually, while feeling anything but. The two of them have been Gansey-and-Ronan so long, and in the brief time he's known Adam it already feels like the start of Gansey-and-Adam, and he doesn't yet know what impact that's going to have, if there's a possibility of Gansey-Ronan-Adam or if Ronan's sharp edges will come up against Adam's defensive borders and leave Gansey stuck in the middle.
Ronan's eyes flick over Adam quickly before he says, "You're that scholarship kid who's at the top of almost every class."
He says that scholarship kid the way he might say that brown-haired boy, just a descriptor, nothing particularly mean about it, but Gansey still winces internally.
Adam's jaw tightens a little, but he looks back at Ronan calmly. "Every class except Latin," he says, and then, "You're Ronan Lynch," which is all the descriptor Ronan needs.
They eye each other a moment longer before Ronan shrugs and turns to Gansey, looking as if whether or not Adam comes with them to Nino's is of the least possible concern to him. "So are you driving, or am I?"
There's a period of adjustment, a time of false starts and awkward silences in which Ronan does a bad job of hiding his resentment at having to share Gansey and Adam is clearly more comfortable when Gansey acts as a buffer between him and Ronan and Noah hovers uncertainly on the edges of the group. During this time, everyone carefully avoids mentioning Niall Lynch's death or what they still think of as Ronan's suicide attempt, just as carefully avoids mentioning the bruises Adam sometimes shows up at school with or the fact that he's working three jobs while the others have never had to work a day in their lives, no one realizes that they can't remember when Noah started hanging out with them or moved into Monmouth, and they all throw themselves into Gansey's search for Glendower because if nothing else, it's a good way to avoid thinking about the rest.
Gansey can pinpoint the first time he notices a change between Ronan and Adam, even if he doesn't know Ronan's exact motivation for taking the first step. It's a Saturday afternoon, overcast but not yet raining, and Gansey's working on his miniature town when voices from outside reach him through one of the windows. Glancing out, he sees Ronan and Adam in the yard below. Ronan has one foot on the edge of a big hand truck, some relic of the days when Monmouth was a working factory. He pushes it back and forth a bit, his grip on the handle keeping it from rolling too far.
"Hop on," he says to Adam, as if this is the sort of thing they do all the time. "I'll give you a ride."
Adam eyes the hand truck dubiously. The metal parts of it are rusty and the wooden parts look half-rotten and splintery. "That doesn't seem very safe," he replies.
'"That doesn't seem very safe'," Ronan mimics in a bad impression of Adam's Henrietta accent. "Come on, Parrish, don't be a wuss."
Adam hesitates a moment longer, during which Gansey imagines he's weighing 'spontaneous friendly gesture from Ronan Lynch' against 'possible tetanus and putting physical safety in Ronan Lynch's hands'. Then he shrugs and sits down in the hand truck, drawing his knees up and bracing himself with his hands.
"Okay," he says with a kind of grim resignation, and then Ronan pushes off, gaining speed fast, and Adam says "Wait, wait, not so fast," and Ronan just grins and runs faster and Adam yells "Shit, shit, Ronan--" and he's white-knuckled, leaning back on the hand truck as if to try and slow them down, but he's laughing, his expression exhilarated and more awake than Gansey's seen him in weeks.
***
Ronan thinks about death and killing more than he's strictly comfortable with these days.
He's back at the Barns, alone, trying again to wake his father's dream animals and thinking about death as he does so. He doesn't know if they'll have to try and kill the third sleeper or if they even could, but it would be naive to deny it as a possibility.
Adam didn't kill Whelk, but he let Cabeswater do it. Ronan didn't--couldn't--kill Kavinsky, but he thought about it. He thinks he probably could have killed Greenmantle and gladly taken on whatever consequences that would have brought down on his soul, but not the ones it would have brought down on his friends. And so instead, he and Adam had come up with a plan full of deaths that were imagined but so horrible it still makes Ronan a little sick to think of them, to remember that he dreamed those things, that Adam asked him to.
It's like the act of killing is something they're circling around, or it's circling them, getting closer and closer without crossing that final line. And even as he and Adam get closer to it, they try to keep it away from Gansey, try to keep him clean. Because Ronan's the Greywaren, and Adam is the Magician, but Gansey's...Gansey.
When Ronan thinks Gansey's name, there's a part of his mind that whispers brother like an echo, and another, equally strong part that whispers king. Ronan knows he'd kill for Gansey if he had to, if it was the only way to protect him or do what needed to be done for the quest. But Gansey also makes him want to be better, to do better things and find ways to rise above the darkness that clings to him so tenaciously.
That's part of why he's out here, he supposes, pouring all the power of the Greywaren into trying to wake a dream cow. It's for Matthew, it's for his mother, it's for Ronan himself, but it's also for Gansey. If he can do this, if he can someday bring Gansey back here and show him the Barns awake and alive again because of Ronan...That wouldn't make everything that's happened better, but it would be a start.
***
As long and as well as they've known each other, Gansey can only remember a handle of times he's seen Ronan grieve. Other emotions--anger, joy, amusement, devotion--he wears on his sleeve, but sorrow he keeps close even among those he loves and trusts.
The most recent time, and the worst, happens not that long after Ronan moves into Monmouth. Not when Gansey first hears about Niall's death and Aurora's puzzling condition, or at the funeral, or when Ronan tells him about how Niall's will exiles his sons from the Barns and Gansey says "Come live in Monmouth" without a second's hesitation. It's after all that. They move Ronan's stuff into his new room and Gansey does his best to smooth things over with Declan, and a few nights later Gansey wakes up to find Ronan perched on the edge of his bed, silhouetted by the moonlight coming through the windows with his shoulders hunched and his hands clenched into fists where they rest on the mattress.
"Ronan?" Gansey prompts, sitting up. He doesn't ask are you okay or is something wrong, because he knows perfectly well that Ronan's not okay and everything's wrong.
Ronan doesn't look at him, doesn't move, just says "I want to go home," in this raw, broken voice that hits Gansey like a fist in the gut.
Gansey kicks his way out from his covers and kneels on the end of the bed and puts a hand on the back of Ronan's neck. He gets just a flash of the terrible, desolate look on Ronan's face before Ronan barrels into him, pressing his forehead against Gansey's shoulder. Gansey puts his arms around Ronan and rubs the back of his head.
"I know, I know," he says over and over, because there's nothing else to say, no way he can make this right.
He holds Ronan for a long time that night, neither of them sleeping, and the next day Ronan's carefully hidden any trace of vulnerability and gone back to being a well-honed blade of a boy.
***
Gansey's been talking to someone on his phone in the kitchen/bathroom/laundry again, and he puts the phone away quickly as soon as Ronan comes in again, and Ronan still doesn't know for sure who he's been talking to but he has a nagging feeling he can probably guess.
He retrieved the orange juice from the fridge, takes a long sip straight from the bottle and offers it to Gansey, and then, after Gansey lowers the bottle and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, Ronan says "So what's going on with you and Blue?"
Gansey freezes like he's been caught doing something he shouldn't, but he doesn't insult Ronan's powers of observation by saying that nothing's going on with him and Blue. "It's complicated," he finally says.
Ronan snorts. "Like anything in our lives these days isn't?" He slides down to sit next to Gansey on the floor. "Okay, so?"
"Well, there's the fact that neither of us want to hurt Adam," Gansey says, and Ronan flicks his eyes to the side and doesn't say anything about how he think--hopes--Adam might be on his way to getting over Blue. "And the fact that I keep managing to say or do the wrong thing and get her pissed at me. And then of course there's the kissing thing--"
"The kissing thing?" Ronan interrupts with his eyebrows raised.
"Oh, right, you don't--Christ, we've all got so many secrets these days." Gansey rubs the bridge of his nose tiredly, then says, "It's a psychic thing. Supposedly if Blue ever kisses the love of her life he'll die."
Ronan's eyebrows shoot up even further, more at the love of her life part than the prophesied death part, which he thinks Gansey can tell because he hastens to add, "So she's just never kissed anyone. That was a problem with her and Adam too, I think."
"Sensible," Ronan says, and doesn't add that it's a damn good thing, because if Blue kissed either Adam or Gansey and they died, she and Ronan would have problems.
"So, needless to say, that would make things tricky between us even without all the rest," Gansey finishes.
"Needless to say," Ronan agrees. "Sucks."
Gansey makes a noise of agreement, then asks, "What's going on with you and Adam?"
Now Ronan's the one who feels caught out, although it would be stupid to think that if he's picked up on how far gone Gansey is for Blue, Gansey wouldn't pick up on the same thing with him and Adam.
"I don't know," he says after a long moment.
Gansey looks at him speculatively. "I know we've never really talked about it, but you I don't have any kind of problem with it, right? With you being..."
He trails off, and Ronan gives him an arch look. "With me being what? The Greywaren? Irish?"
Gansey sighs. "Gay, queer, into guys...I just don't know what to call it since I've never heard you call it anything."
"Yeah, I know," Ronan says, relenting. "And for fuck's sake, of course I know you don't have a problem with it, you think I'd still be living here if I didn't?"
"Okay," Gansey says. "Good. So, you and Adam...?"
Ronan sighs and shrugs. "I don't know. Sometimes I see him looking at me and I think maybe...and then I think maybe it's just wishful thinking. And...if I say anything to him, however he reacts, good or bad, it's going to change things. What we have right now--it's good, right? Even with Adam and Blue and you and Blue, we're all friends and it's good."
"But maybe it could be better," Gansey argues, and Ronan shakes his head.
"I can't take that chance. If it went wrong--I can't be the one who wrecks us, man, I just can't."
Gansey puts his hand on Ronan's wrist, squeezing gently. "Sucks," he says after a second, with a weak smile.
Ronan leans his shoulder against Gansey's, saying nothing, and they sit like that for a long time.