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"The person you dream with is special." Ronan's mother tells him.
She is tinkering with something on the stove. It smells like chicken soup but is bright red and has spiky, shiny pieces of something bobbing in and out, which she busily mashes with a big wooden spoon. She's let Ronan sit on the counter, a rare treat, and he's busily kicking his legs back and forth as he watches her wrestle with the Dream-Vegetables his dad got her. She doesn't often let him sit this close to the stove, or drag dirt all over her shiny counters, but today she's made an exception.
"What's dreaming with dad like?" Ronan asks. He's holding a brilliantly orange patch of beach, His Boy, but it feels a lot like dirt and not very much like a boy at all.
"I don't know, I forget. It must be lovely, though. Everything about your dad is lovely." She sighs happily as a bit of red sizzles off onto her pale blue blouse. She's always sighing happily around his dad and at his dad's name and at his pictures. It makes Ronan more than a bit sick. "They're just dreams, though, honey." She says. "They're not what's special. The person is. The dreams are just dreams."
Ronan doesn't believe her.
"Oh, Ronan." she tsks. "where'd you get this dirty? Don't drag dirt into the house again, please." She tsks at him again, off the counter and into the bathroom, and she makes him throw The Boy out.
When Ronan drops the boy in the garden, He falls to the ground limply, just like real sand. But He's not real sand, He can't be. He's not dirt; He's Ronan's boy.
*
The trees were growing in reverse, and He was there, sitting in a pear tree. Ronan gave a shout and waved. The Boy waved back. The branch he was sitting on, at first tall and mighty but crooked dangerously under his weight, straightened out, its bark filled out with sap, growing shorter and thinner until there was real danger of it breaking under the Boy's weight. He jumped off, and ran to Ronan.
When He touched a pear, it crumbled into dust, and even though the trees went backwards the fruit went forward, and at the end there was a seed surrounded by rotting green pears, looking a-little-a-lot like his mom's guacamole.
When ronan picked one up, it straightened, filled out with juice. When he tried handing it to Him, it crumbled again. It was the first time Ronan thought they might be anything but the same.
He wasn't as vibrant, today. He was yellow, but splotchy and faded in the sun, and when Ronan touched him his finger came away dusty. He didn't want to play today, so they sat in silence and Ronan ate pears while He watched a grapevine untangle itself from a palm tree and become a sprout, then shoot up again, a long tall tree that crouched under the weight of purple fruit that turned green and shrank, and shrank, and shrank.
*
The first time Ronan managed to bring Him out, properly Him with a capitalized H and responsive to Ronan's words, He was a dusty, boneless boy that folded on himself in impossible angles, all knees and wobbly fingers. They were boxing, that night, fighting to an audience of cats and mice and Ronan didn't want to hurt him but his hits kept landing true no matter what he did. The Boy gave back as good as he got, though, and Ronan woke up with the taste of real blood in his mouth and a thin layer of dust covering his face. Ronan could not reconcile the sharp, strong headed boy he'd been fighting with the hollow creature he'd brought home, and so he dreamt himself a boy of his own, one who felt like adrenaline and punches. Ronan liked fighting with him, liked the excitement and the warmth of a hundredth-of-a-second contact of skin to skin.
But He also felt like Wrong.
Ronan marched both of Them to his father, who had said, "Ronan, not again", but smiled a private, toothy smile at Ronan as if secretly proud.
Ronan never saw them again.
*
They were sitting at a beach. The sky was empty, a stiflingly dark blanket stretched above their heads, leaning on the mountains for support; it was a blanket fort for giants, ready to crush Ronan. The sea was full of stars.
Ronan and the Boy were trying to fish one out: a big purple one, bloated with water but still burning.
Ronan knew that the stars were big, hollow balls of gas, but in that moment he’d also known, in the unshakable way that was dream logic, that they were living, magical beings, and that this one needed their help. They all needed their help.
They were arguing about which star it was.
"It's gotta be Mars." The Boy said hotly. He was knee-deep in the water, and even as the waves bit at his shorts, he remained dirty and dusty, as if he hadn't washed in weeks. Ronan thought of sand castles at the beach, slowly crumbling as the sea peeled layer after layer of sand. He didn't want the Boy to crumble.
"It can't be Mars." Ronan argued back. "Mars is red."
"Well, it's red, ain't it?" The boy said, and suddenly the star was blood-red and burning-hot to the touch.
"What'd you do that for?" Ronan yelled, losing his grip on it. The star fell back into the sea with a sizzle, releasing a big puff of smoke, comically large compared to the size of maybe-Mars. Both of them coughed as they turned to stare at it.
"Maybe it's not Mars after all." The boy said. Without asking, he took Ronan’s palm in one of his hands and examined it. Satisfied that Ronan hadn’t suffered any injuries, he released it. Ronan, not expecting that, let it fall limply to his side with a splash. (The water had been waist-deep at that point. Ronan hadn’t realized they’d wandered so far off-shore.)
"Can we call it Adam?"
"Adam?" Ronan repeated.
"After me. Because I found it. So Adam. Planet Adam."
"Star Adam." Ronan corrects.
Adam, even though he was only a vaguely human blob of blues and purples, smiled brilliantly. Ronan felt the smile more than saw it, but it made him warm all over. The sea sizzled again, warm where it bit at his skin, above his midsection. "Star Adam. Now we need to find a star -"
The water crashed over them then, plunging them deep underwater, where it was impossible to speak and remained so until they forgot themselves again.
*
Throughout his life, Ronan had met a lot of Adams.
It was a common name, and Ronan had never managed to get a last name or even good look at his face. And for all Ronan knew, He could have lived on the other side of the world, on an entirely different continent, where Ronan didn’t speak the language and would have no way of ever reaching him aside from dreams.
It was incredibly frustrating. He would go to sleep repeating to himself, “just ask for a last name. Phone number. Address.” And then once he’d fallen asleep, he completely forgot all about it.
Ronan didn’t know whether it was Magic Rules or an innate inability to lucidly dream - but he seemed to have no trouble carrying over his will into Cabeswater whenever he wanted to take something out.
*
"What was it like when you met mom?" Asked Ronan, older but not yet an adolescent. "For real, I mean. Like, awake."
"She didn't like me." Neil chuckled, setting down the toy boat he'd promised to fix for Ronan. Ronan could immediately tell it wasn't the same one.
"And then you made her like you?" Ronan, wide eyed, couldn't possibly conceive of a universe in which his mother's world didn't spin around his father.
"Then I made myself a better one." Neil messed with the copy of Ronan's boat. It was bright yellow and glowed softly, whereas Ronan's was a faded, peeling orange. "She isn't 'real', your mom." His fingers, long and sharp, pierced the air as he curled them into air quotes. "I took her out of one of my dreams. A softer version of my real 'soulmate', if you will." His lip curled in contempt. Ronan was suddenly overcome with fear, of this version of his father.
"We're lucky, Ronan. You and me. We don't have to settle for one version; you could shape them however you want, have every model. Always have a re-do."
"I go to sleep with my wife and dream with the woman she's replacing."
*
The dance was raven themed. Ronan thought that might have been his fault.
Stuffed into an even tackier, festive version of his school uniform, with his Sunday shoes and a tophat with a disgusting taxidermied raven, that beat its wings in protest when Ronan tore it off his head, before hurling it at the nearest trashcan, Ronan felt oppressively upper class. Like a gentleman in a period drama with thousands of pounds in yearly allowance and his own mansion.
In one corner, three ravens were being scolded for spiking the punch.
Adam, like everyone else, was wearing a raven, His took the form of a mask. Of course the dreams won’t let Ronan see his face, even now.
He was kicking the floor with the heel of his boots when Ronan approached him, trying to scuff the perfect waxing on the linoleum.
They stand and watch silently as a teacher, with small useless wings that try to flap against his enormous body, tries to chase off one of the punch-spikers with a broom. The punch spiker, comfortably nestled against the ceiling, his raven wings beating every-so-often to keep him just out of the broom's reach, laughed at him.
"Let's dance?" Adam asks suddenly, offering Ronan a hand. Ronan laughs, but obliges.
They do an awkward rendition of the waltz from Beauty and The Beast, and then The Forest Waltz from Sleeping Beauty. Adam, apparently, cannot conceive of a fancy dance that isn't a waltz, performed by cartoon characters.
"Well, I wasn't raised by the queen." Adam says, when Ronan voices this exact thought. "Disney's actually a pretty good teacher."
Ronan, once again, is reminded of how different they are. He tightens his grip around Adam's waist. The raven Adam's wearing flutters his wings.
"I'll show you how to foxtrot." He says, and feels Adam's smile.
*
"Why do you always wear this shirt?" Ronan asked in his room, a freshly dreamt up Adam sitting next to him on the bed, their thighs touching.
Ronan knew Adam must have had something under his clothes. But he never really managed to imagine what it was that should have been there.
"I can't take it off. There's nothing there."
"What do you mean there's nothing there?"
In response, Adam lifted his shirt. There was a gaping hole, there; not a hole, but an absence. Holes are for when something was whole and then a part went missing. Adam's body had never had this part in the first place.
"But I - I took you out. All of you."
"no, you didn't." Adam says, not unkindly. "Dream logic, remember?"
Ronan chews his lip silently.
"Are you always yourself in dreams? Are you always all of yourself?"
*
Adam isn't dust today. The grains aren't quite as fine. If anything, he reminds Ronan of sea-sand, the form he took so often when they were kids, yellow and warm. Adam lays on his back, propped on one elbow, as they build sandcastle after sandcastle out of it. Ronan tries not to think about how they're basically messing up his entrails, but Adam just laughs.
*
Today Adam is big and menacing. He wears his size like it's a coat that's too large, like he borrowed it and found that it didn't quite fit. But he could one day grow into it, and Ronan sees that possibility. That bighugeterrible Adam that could be.
That Adam he folded up by the long, lanky arms and stored him away with the cows.
After that, Ronan started hiding Them in the barns. He doesn't know what they eat and what they do in their spare time. When he comes to visit the barns, it's to make sure they don't wander off, but mostly they are self-sustained.
He doesn't like thinking about them.
*
After they meet Blue Sargeant, Adam is withdrawn. The Adams Ronan dreams for himself are possessive, reassuring. They're like puppies, obey his every word and eager to please. Ronan hates them.
Adam doesn't notice his withdrawal, or doesn't comment if he does. Most of their dreams take place in some form of that shitty plebian pizza place Gansey decided to drag them to that fateful night.
Ronan is mostly blue in those dreams, a color he doesn't like and never would have chosen for himself. It's probably Adam's doing, somehow. Like he's trying to fix him.
Pouring him into the mold of that crazy girl he likes so much.
As he kisses Adam on a bed that he doesn't know in a room that reeks of Sargent - drawings and cut up magazines and yellowing wreaths and secondhand books in beat up plastic sleeves - Ronan thinks, okay, this is payback. For the puppy Adams and the ones wearing down a hole into the floors of the barns. Somehow the thought is not a comfort.
*
"Ronan, what... What's all this?" Adam sounded shaken. Sick, like he was about to throw up. His hands left Ronan’s forearm, as his squinted eyes scanned the wide expanse of the creatures Ronan his inside his barn.
The souvenirs of Ronan's dreams, that were also Adam’s dreams, that were also Adams.
Adam was bright. Ronan knew he was already putting two and two together, watched as his clever fingers curled up into fists before being forcibly smoothed out by his need to look composed.
Finally, Adam said:
"You."
And Ronan said, "Me.” It had been equal parts accusal and wonder, so he felt brave enough to continue: “What clued you in?"
"The big one." Adam says. "The one with the cows. He’s… it’s not something you would have made for yourself. No one would want him."
Ronan wants to object, wants to say that he would. But that's not true.
He wants Adam. Not Adam’s trauma. Not the version of Adam that is really Adam's father in a suit, that is Adam's wrongness, that is like scraping off the charred bottom of a pancake and only serving that up on a plate.
"You're right." Ronan said. "I wouldn't."
"Then why?" Adam asked. His fingers were digging into his thigh in a way that looked painful, as if that was all he could do not to turn and run. Or punch Ronan.
Ronan didn't know what to say. How to explain the violent ways they would burst out of him. Saying he didn't want them would be a lie. Saying he wanted to keep them would also be one.
“Have you ever had a really weird sex dream?” He said instead. Adam laughed with the suddenness of it.
They stood silently next to each other for a few moments, the echoes of the laugh still reverberating in the air. Ronan could feel Adam thinking about him.
“Just so you know,” he said finally, “the cowboy’s the only reason I'm not running away screaming right now.”
*
In the end, they led them out into Cabeswater, paired off like the animals on Noah’s ark.
Once the last one disappeared into the forest, Adam turned to look at Ronan. He didn't touch him, but he chose to stand just this side of too close to be polite.
“I’m gonna need a while.”
Ronan nodded.
“But God knows I wouldn't want to have all of my fantasies out in the open.”
Ronan nodded again.
“I can't believe I'm saying this, but really I just want to go home now.” He reached out, quickly, almost business-like, to squeeze Ronan's hand. “But I'll see you tonight, I guess.”
The following morning, Ronan woke up to a blissfully empty bed.