Work Text:
Ronan felt kinetic.
He couldn’t sleep.
He paced the floor of his room, over and over again, his headphones on and yelling angrily in his ears. He felt wild and caged, and he didn’t know what to do with himself or with his current mood. Moonlight streaked across his floor, silver and quiet, and he wanted to be outside and on the streets and away from this damned room and away from himself, but Gansey had meaningfully taken the keys to the BMW and so Ronan was stuck in his room.
He wondered how many times he could listen to the same song before going insane.
He knew that Chainsaw sensed that he was anxious, and it worried her as well. She glared at him from where she was perched on his windowsill. Sighing, he walked over to her and gently rubbed her head.
“At least you can fly away,” he muttered.
The raven huffed an indignant reply and flapped her wings noisily. Ronan rolled his eyes.
“Oh, shut it, will you? You’ll wake the old man,” he snapped, but he rubbed her head again to calm her down.
He wished he could calm himself down, as well. He should sleep, he knew, but sleep would never come easy when he was like this. The best he could hope for was a lucid nightmare that would sit bitterly in his throat the next morning.
Ronan petted Chainsaw once more, and then got up to pace again. He changed the song, and then changed it again. He scrolled through his contacts list, and his finger hovered above one name, a sudden, fierce longing piercing him.
But he couldn’t. It was late. They had Latin nouns to learn for tomorrow. It was late.
Still. The want made him dizzy.
It was late.
Sighing, he finally stopped the music and flopped himself down on the bed. He stared at the shadows the moon made on the walls. His heart thudded with the memory of lost adrenaline and a could-be adventure.
It was late. He wanted so badly.
He closed his eyes. Maybe he could fall asleep, if he tried hard enough. He listened to the silence, and then the silence broke so suddenly that he almost didn’t realize what had happened.
His phone was ringing, the sound muted by the earphones that were still plugged in, so that it was just a noisy hum and a frenzied buzz against his mattress. Ronan’s eyes flew open, and he stared at the screen, but he couldnt calm himself even to read the nonsense of the letters written on it.
His chest was a wreck as he reached for the phone. Muscle memory. In his mind, there were the one million memories of dark, infinite nights on the streets, the smell of gasoline and burning leather and the feel of hatred and desire making him light on his feet. And then there was that 4th of July and fireworks and death, and he had to take a deep breath before he answered.
“Ronan?”
Adam’s voice was low and sleepy, and Ronan closed his eyes again. This was a different kind of a memory. A softer, kinder one.
Something inside him fit back together.
“Parrish,” he said. “It’s late.”
This was better. This was more dangerous. This was Adam.
“Yeah. I can’t sleep. I can’t remember the exceptions for the fourth declension. I can’t- I don’t know. Can you come get me? We could drive somewhere. I don’t know.”
Gansey had taken his keys, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get them back. He smiled into the darkness. “Yeah, Parrish,” he said. “Yeah, I can come.”
Adam exhaled into the phone. “Oh. Good. Good, I was worried you would be sleeping. Okay. I’ll wait downstairs.”
In the end, getting the keys from where Gansey had left them naively lying next to his discarded cargo pants was stupidly easy, and still Ronan felt bad about it. However, it wasn’t like he was going to race. He was just- he didn’t know what he was doing, but he was fairly certain Gansey hadn’t said anything against it.
Adam, as promised, was waiting for him on the side of the road beside the church. He was sitting on the curb, his legs curled tightly to his chest, his head resting on his knees. He was wearing a shirt and the jacket he usually wore to work, and a pair of pajama pants. He looked soft and young and mortal under the streetlights, and Ronan’s heart stopped.
Adam got in the car.
“Parrish,” Ronan said, quietly. He didn’t know why he spoke quietly, but something about the night called it from him.
“Where are we going?” Adam asked, in the same voice.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Wherever.”
Ronan nodded and started the car, and then he began reciting the exceptions to the fourth declension they were supposed to memorize. Adam leaned his head back against the headrest, and started mouthing them along with Ronan.
The road in front of them was dark and infinite, and Ronan truly felt like they could go anywhere.
Ronan drove.
This was different from racing, and not because he wasn’t driving as fast. He wasn’t driving slowly now, either, but that wasn’t what made his heart race. There was something else, something about the silent closeness of Adam beside him, of the smallness and stillness of the world at night.
The streets were the same, but no longer did they seem so sharp and hostile, no longer were they a battlefield for his nostalgia and shame. Now, they were inviting and they were his, and as he drove, away and away and away, from the church and Monmouth and Henrietta, he felt like his nerves where finally settling.
They were silent for a long time, but Ronan didn’t mind. It wasn't the kind of silence that demanded; it was a slower, kinder silence that did not mind.
Adam had opened his eyes, and was staring out the window, his chin tilted as he regarded the sky. Suddenly, he said, “Wait. Stop here.”
Ronan did. They were close to Cabeswater, but on the opposite side of where they usually entered it. Here, there was a large field and everything seemed to grow hungrier, frenzied. Ronan doubted they would be able to find their way to Cabeswater from here, in the darkness, and he was about to say so, but Adam was already getting out of the car, so he followed.
“Why here?” he asked.
Adam shrugged. Again, his head was tilted back, back, back. Here, in the middle of the knee-high grass in the field and with the mountain and the stars cupping him gently from above, he looked like he was part of this field, of the flowers and the trees.
“The stars,” he said, simply.
Ronan realized, belatedly, that he had been too busy looking at Adam to look at the stars. He walked over and stood beside him, tipping his head up. The stars swelled above him, bright and alive, and he felt time slow around them.
After a while, they slowly slid down to the ground, and soon they were lying down on the soft grass, the BMW a dark shadow next to them, the sky infinite above them, Adam incredibly alive next to Ronan.
“Sometimes,” Adam murmured, “on nights like these, leaving Henrietta doesn’t seem so pressing to me.” His voice was both incredibly close and incredibly far away.
Ronan turned to him, slightly. There was so little space between them that he thought that if he breathed out wrong, he would overstep some kind of balance, and so he kept himself still. “All I know is,” he said, “Henrietta would miss you.”
Adam laughed, a slow, soft rumble. “Yeah, well. Despite everything, I’ll miss it too.”
Suddenly, Ronan wasn’t sure they were talking about Henrietta.
“Do you ever wonder what it will be like when we graduate? When we find Glendower? Things are changing, Ronan.”
“I don’t think about that,” Ronan said, and closed his eyes. “The future is a dangerous place for someone like me.”
“Oh, please. Cut the bullshit, yeah? You are Ronan Lynch. You have a seven hundred dollar tattoo on your back and a raven as a pet. Nothing is a danger to you.”
Ronan smiled, but it was a sad kind of smile, because he knew that this was not true. He was a creature of war, and therefore he was at war with many things. There was the future and the present and the past, and everything in between. There was what he had but did not want, and then there was what he wanted but could not have.
Then there was Adam.
Ronan Lynch was not a coward, but he was very afraid.
Finally, when the silence stretched for too long, he asked, “And you? Do you ever wonder?”
“I wonder all the time. It is the only thing I have, this future. It’s what I work for and it’s what I kill myself for at Aglionby,” Adam said, and he didn’t sound regretful or sad. He sounded hopeful. But then he paused. “Perhaps you are right, though. Tonight is not a night for the future.”
It was true. Tonight was a night for now , and now was the two of them under a gentle sky and endless stars, and nothing else.
It was enough.
After a long while, they made their way back home, but even as he drove back into the silent town, Ronan could taste the wind on his breath and feel the stars in his eyes, and he felt happy and free and like he could do anything, but also like he would be okay with doing nothing at all.
Adam was curled in his seat now, his long feet tucked under him. He looked graceful and tired and beautiful, and Ronan’s heart ached, ached, ached.
When they stopped at St. Agnes, Adam disentangled himself and stretched. Then he turned to Ronan and smiled; it was a small, private smile, and Ronan couldn’t look away.
“Thanks, Ronan,” he said.
Ronan nodded. He didn’t know what to say, or rather how to explain what he wanted to say. He was high on the memory of tonight, of Adam so close to him, of their voices carried off by the night.
Adam smiled again, like he understood, and then there was a pause in which Ronan exhaled and Adam inhaled, and suddenly he was leaning in and pressing a quick, breathless peck to Ronan’s lips. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and Ronan caught the words with his mouth.
Then, Adam pulled away and smiled again and then he was out of the car in a heartbeat.
Ronan sat in his car and watched as Adam walked into the church, and then waited for the light in his room to turn on. When it did, he sat for another few minutes, trying to persuade himself that he was awake.
When Ronan arrived back at Monmouth, Gansey was awake and sitting on his bed. He eyed him through his wire frames.
“You’re home late,” he said, but his voice was amused.
“I wasn’t racing.”
“I know,” Gansey said, and laughed, and Ronan wondered if his face was still flushed.
He scowled and rubbed at his cheek self-consciously. “Go to sleep, old man,” he said, and then he went to his room and shut the door and laid down on his bed and replayed everything that had happened that night over and over again, and then he thought of Adam’s smile and then he thought of the future and then he thought that maybe it wasn’t that scary after all.