Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Your alarm wakes you, insistent and merciless, and you dredge yourself up from sleep at its call. Your fingers fumble for the buttons, and find thin stems instead, a hopeful sprout blocking the controls. You have to sit up to dislodge the plant properly, disentangle it from the clock’s casing and just hope it didn’t manage to muddle the insides. How it was surviving at all on plastic and radio is beyond you; you just drop the sprout in the trash and finally shut off the blaring alarm.

St Agnes is angled to catch the light in the morning, and the plants love it, stretching themselves up to the sun. The ones growing over the window cast a green tint over the room, make your borrowed space a wilder thing, less a rented attic and more like the pictures Blue keeps showing you of her dream apartments. You still glare at them. You only slept four hours and they still managed to infiltrate. You don’t have time to keep taking them out every day.

 They’re crawling up through the drain of your bathroom sink, but at least the shower’s clear today, and you ration out the time you spend under the hot spray even as your body tries to relax into it. There are plants peeking in the window here, too, all soft round leaves and hopeful new growth, all determined to be near you. You waste a moment staring at them, trying to work out what they want, but the plants don’t care to tell you. You pry them off the sill with wet fingers and wash them away.

You wouldn’t mind them so much if it wasn’t St Agnes and they weren’t so persistent that they were growing through the cracks in the skirting. It feels like your fault, that these sprouts are defying natural law to stay near, and you wouldn’t care to explain it to the office lady if she ever came to see the state of the room. So you dress in a rush and spend your spare seconds pulling them up by the roots, working them loose from the walls and the floor and the windows. You free one from a power outlet and pray that they aren’t ruining the wires.

Someone knocks on the door, and you check that all the sprouts are safely out of sight before you answer it. Blue’s waiting for you, wearing something woollen and so overpoweringly chartreuse that your eyes take a minute to adjust. “Hey,” she says, sounding casual in a very forced kind of way. Her smile is real, though, bright as her sweater, and something in you pulls tight at the sight of it. “Do you have time before your shift?”

“A little,” you tell her, and let her in. The light in the room bounces off her, overpoweringly fresh and green, and you fail not to stare at the backs of her calves. “Just getting rid of plants again.”

She sees the pile in your waste bin and looks almost sad for their loss. “They came back again?”

“There are still some in the sink.” It’s not quite a request, and it’s really not an offer, but she forges on to help you anyway. If she notices your laundry drying over the shower railing, she does you the favour of not mentioning it, and instead starts working on uprooting the cluster of plants in your drain. You go to help, but she seems to have decided this is a task she is going to complete, and you end up watching instead, the careful way she pulls the growths loose, keeping all their roots intact as though they’re worth replanting. She smells like her home, tea and earth and family, and something greedy in your chest is taut with longing.

The space you keep between her and you is a calculated thing, carefully balanced so you’re not so distant as to be rude, and not so close that there’s any risk of you touching. You want to ask her out, and you want to not be rejected, and you want to know what her hand would feel like in yours, the warmth of her palm against your skin. But you don't; it wouldn't be fair to her. 

Of course there's a reason it wouldn't be fair to her, and that reason knocks once before letting itself in. Even though St Agnes is his more than yours, Ronan never seems quite at place in your little room. He hasn’t learned how to duck for the sloped ceiling like you have, and he’s certainly not short enough to avoid it like Blue. He calls, “You decent, Parrish?” and you ease your way out of the bathroom to meet him. He’s still rubbing his head, surveying your things like they’re of any interest, oddly uneasy even though this room is only yours. With a jerk of his head, he indicates the tangle of plants in your hand, asks, “What are those?”

“Freeloaders,” you tell him. You drop onto your bed, and it’s only after you’re settled that he moves to sit beside you. “Did you want something?”

“Do I have to want anything to see you?” he asks. There are new scabs on his knuckles, and for an inescapable moment you long to run your fingers over them, feel his rough skin and old pain. You are over-aware of him on your bed, of his shoulder an inch away from yours, of the stilted way he’s holding himself that only grants the illusion of carelessness. Your heart is an awful, selfish thing. You can’t give it Blue for want of Ronan, and you can never give it Ronan for want of Blue. At least your misery is a fair compromise for them.

You’re still watching Ronan when Blue comes out from the bathroom, and you see the transformation instantly, his eyes narrowing and lips curving down as he closes off. It’s a wary kind of electricity, not quite aggression but something else you can’t place.

Blue looks about as pleased to see him. “Ronan,” she greets, dropping the last of the sprouts. 

“You two hang out a lot?” he asks, acrid. You will him not to be awful.

“Just dropping by on my way to work,” Blue says, already bristling. “Not that you’d know anything about that.” She’s angling herself towards you, but so is Ronan, and you wonder if they each want you to make the other leave. Gansey would know what to say, but there are a hundred thousand reasons why you aren’t Gansey. If you were Gansey then they wouldn’t be fighting at all, and you wouldn’t be sick with guilt over loving them.

Ronan rolls his eyes at her, a regal gesture loaded with the excess she’s accusing him of. It’s restrained, for him. Blue still puffs herself up that little bit more and a wretched pang shoots through you. The vines still in your hand twitch, alive by the same magic that brought them to you in the first place, and now they're curling up around your fingers. They squeeze once, and you stare at the soft green threads. 

“I'm going,” Blue declares, and you can't read her expression. Regretful, maybe, or something like it. It bounces from you to Ronan and back again, and you ache. “I'll see you later, Adam.”

In the silence after her departure, Ronan tries to scoff, but the sound comes out with a strange edge, almost apologetic. You don’t want to guess at it on four hours sleep, so you stretch back on your bed, holding your hand up to the sun. The roots are splayed over your palm, tracing your veins, curled protectively over your fingers. Misery lies deep in your gut and you study the stems instead, losing yourself in the pattern the shoots are making over your skin.

Up close, you can see little thorns. You never noticed them before; they don’t seem to hurt you. “They’re fucking weird,” Ronan tells you.

“Yeah,” you say, “I know.”

He tries to tear the plant off you, and tiny barbs nick the skin on his thumb. You pull the plant loose without any pain at all.

The next day, you get up before the sun and you’re forced to leave the day’s new weeds rooted in your skirting. Grass clogs the drain in your shower, and you rip up just enough of it to let the water siphon away. There might be more than there were yesterday, but there is no corner of your brain empty enough to run that kind of calculation. They still are is the important part, and you need to forget that when you get to work.

By the time you get to Aglionby, you’ve gained a throbbing bruise and a foul mood. You made a mistake you shouldn’t have – a mistake that someone who’d gotten more sleep wouldn’t have made, the kind of mistake that you can usually avoid through sheer willpower and skill regardless – and the foreman chastised you, like you deserved. Shame and failure roil together in your gut, a nauseating mixture.

You wait outside for Gansey and Ronan to arrive, even though you’re early and they’re partial to being late. It’s a cool morning, and you lean your head back against the hard brickwork of Borden House, eye the begonia bush beside you. It rustles with the breeze, but its leaves are just leaves, no hidden whispers carried through its greenery.

Slowly, you put a hand out to cup a flower. It stretches itself to better fit your palm, and then the wind retreats and the whole plant bends away from you again. You just feel stupid for trying.

“Adam!” Gansey calls your name like he’s won a prize just by seeing you. He strides across the green to you in imperial steps, and in just a dozen metres three different people have called out greetings. He gives them easy waves in return, and you watch the confidence resting in his shoulders with another ugly pang. “Ronan wanted to drive himself today, so I suspect we’ll never see him again. How are you? How was work?”

“Fine,” you say. You always say ‘fine’ and it means either that things went well enough there’s nothing worth talking about, or something went wrong and you’d rather not talk. Gansey always insists on asking anyway. You can see the dark shadows of a long night under his eyes, and glance at his hands. “You’ve still got paper stuck to you.”

He tuts and peels scraps of paper off him, rolling the remnants of glue off his nails. “Couldn’t sleep. It’s my own fault, I read the most fascinating thing last night, someone thinks the carbon dating was performed incorrectly on a number of primary sources we’ve all been taking as reliable. The implications are staggering.”

Gansey is clearly staggered by them, at least, as he explains them to you one by one and you do your best to listen and find space in your crowded head for more facts about Glendower. It’s increasingly difficult to cram it in alongside calculus and chemistry and how much you have to spend on groceries, but you manage. You even summon the energy to nod in the appropriate places.

People keep waving to Gansey, even though he is somewhere deep in Wales and no longer able to wave back. He wouldn’t have your problems; the moment people around him become imperfectly aligned, he coaxes them back into place. You lose jealous seconds wondering what it’s like to be so good at people, until jealousy curdles in you as sourly as everything else.

You try to wrap yourself attentively in the details of carbon dating as apology. You don’t notice the green starting to fill up with Aglionby boys, and you don’t notice when one walks up too close behind you. Gansey pauses at the approach, well-bred manners taming even his most fierce passion.

“Gansey. Parrish,” Tad Carruthers says, somewhere between jeering and jovial and startling you with how close he got without your noticing. You suddenly feel boxed in, between Gansey and the wall and the broad-shouldered figure of a boy who always got enough to eat. “Good weekend?”

You’re not quite sure why he’s talking to either of you, until Gansey replies, “Fine, thank you, and yourself?” in his smooth, polished voice and you realise it’s just chatter, the kind you don’t get included in on your own. A part of you despises Tad for eating into the only free time you’ll have to discuss Glendower today; the larger part of you is both too tired to be rude and too tired to care and lets Gansey and Tad talk over you while you sink back against the wall.

The memory of your manager’s anger is still lurking in the back of your head, playing on repeat, and you lose yourself to an awful loop of thoughts, that you’ll have to be careful not to make any more mistakes, that the cushion of your reputation has been ruined and you can’t afford to be fired, and you’ll have to be so careful from now on –

You didn’t bother pretending to listen to Tad and Gansey, but they burst out laughing now, some shared, inane joke, and Tad jostles you. “Isn’t that right, Parrish?” he asks, grinding his elbow into your arm, and he says it like it’s a joke you should be in on, and it’s a joke that you’re the subject of, and it might be ‘friendly camaraderie’ but you are still trapped between him and the wall and you hate it.

As fast as he touched you, Tad recoils, rubbing his arm like you’ve stung him. You stare, pressed back against the wall in response to the speed of his movement, even as he takes one step back and you try to tell your racing heart that you’re okay. “Tad?” Gansey asks over you, concerned by the strangeness of it.

Tad’s looking at you, and then the moment passes; reality filters back through and he’s laughing weakly, shrugging like nothing happened and he doesn’t know why he recoiled so harshly. “I’ll see you both around,” he says, and disappears into the crowd across the green. You watch him go and you watch the way he’s clutching his arm.

You wonder if you wanted that to happen.

“Curious,” Gansey says. He spends a moment distracted, and you brush a hand over your sleeve. Sticking up through the tiny holes in the fabric are a hundred little hairs – no, not hairs. Barbs. Like on a stinging nettle. You stroke your hand over your own arm, feel them bend painlessly under your fingers, and the nausea you’ve been keeping down all morning starts threatening to rise.

You sorely want to be on your own, to be able to undress and study your own skin, see what’s actually on you, what’s become of you, but the bell goes and Gansey gets up to leave for class and there is nowhere you can be fast enough. Something else you have to wait for. Your fingers curl into fists and press hard against your knees.

“Oh,” Gansey says, sudden enough to surprise you, and then yells, “Ronan,” across the lawn. Ronan’s sloping indolently in, jacket slung over his shoulder, and he’s just on time enough to avoid trouble, an achievement Gansey laboured hard to instil in of him. Your heart gives a painful stutter at the sight of him, because you want, because you shouldn’t. You should just want Blue. That would be the right thing, the normal thing. It feels like an awful secret and it sits black at the bottom of your heart with all your others.

Beside you, the begonia bush leans to press its blossoms into your palms. Frail twigs wrap around your left hand, and then judder, become spiky and strange around your fingers. You stare, unsettled, as the wood warps itself into vicious thorns. Whatever Cabeswater is trying to say is being expressed in a language you don’t yet speak.

“Are you coming, Adam?” Gansey asks, and it only takes you a moment to extricate your fingers from the bush and follow after them. Thoughts of Tad and thorns join the memory of your foreman, and all of them rattle terrible and unsteady in your brain.

The next day, you wake with the rancid aftertaste of nightmares and a cocoon of foliage around you. The thick, glossy leaves crowding your bed belong to plants much larger than the ones that have been invading your room so far. For a moment, you’re afraid that they’re constricting and won’t let you go, but they fall easily away as you sit up.

Honestly, you don’t know what to make of them. There wasn’t time yesterday to visit Cabeswater, but you’ll make some today. Greenery is dense in your windows, colouring the sunlight, and they’re still bristling up your drains, spaced out just enough to let the water pour through them. You brush your teeth over a particularly enterprising fern, and you check under the ivy straying down your mirror to see if there’s anything wrong with you.

As soon as the moment had passed, the barbs on you had disappeared, sunk away to nothing, and you hadn’t found a trace of anything else that could have stung Tad. You’re not so stupid as to think you imagined it. If anything, the missing evidence is worse; it leaves you without a lead, blind in the face of the dangerous and supernatural.

Work is a tense, diligent exercise in re-establishing your competence. School is a blur of classes that you need to bend yourself to whether or not they contain Ronan, and even when exhaustion makes the barest traces of attention a challenge. Gansey fetches you faculty lounge coffee in all your breaks, and the flagrant privilege might be scalding but the caffeine is so desperately needed.

“We’re going to Nino’s,” Gansey tells you when he can sense you’re awake enough to listen. You think Blue, and crave the trickle of comfort that even a busy waitress can provide, snippets of conversation just long enough to mean something. But you catch  Ronan’s expression souring into a sneer, and grind your forehead into your palm. Blue and Ronan, Ronan and Blue. You need to learn why Cabeswater is trying to outsource to your apartment, and you need to do that before the night shift and your Latin assignment and whatever sleep as you can salvage.

“Have a nice time,” you tell him, and your throat closes around tell Blue I say hi. Ronan’s watching you with the awful, restless look he gets before he breaks something, but he doesn’t say a word.

They probably would have gone with you, if you’d wanted them there, but there is something terribly intimate about needing to talk to a forest about the plants it’s putting in your bed, so you go alone. For the entire drive up, you worry over what you might find – hours of work, stones too heavy for you to lift on your own, birds or beasts or bones – and when you run out of things to fear, you find new ones. You imagine Ronan at Nino’s, glaring at Blue, and your chest aches fierce and inescapable. If only you weren’t so greedy.

You expect to find something as you wade into Cabeswater. You expect forbidding woods and impatient trees, rough branches and demands you’ve been neglecting. Instead, the forest welcomes you. The air is sweet around you, sun gentle on the back of your neck, and all the flowers stretch out towards you as you find your way to the copse containing the glimmering pool. Everything is light and honey, and the woods feel so infinitely fond of you.

You don’t understand. You kneel at the water’s edge, and there are no fish today because you need the little pond’s surface to be clear. In a place like this, you can’t imagine scrying holds any risk, and you lean forward over the water. You stare into your own eyes until the blue of them has no meaning, until you’re somewhere beyond, a spark embedded in a bolt of lightning. You reach out as far as you can, trying to find what you’re needed for, trying to sense your purpose.

Instead all you find is more love, unsettling and all-encompassing. There’s no problem, no chore waiting for you. Cabeswater is happy to see you, to have you kneeling in its heart, safe among the trees. You don’t have the language to ask why it’s sending you plants, sending you barbs, what it thinks it’s doing with you. As far as you can tell, Cabeswater doesn’t think it’s doing anything with you.

You pull back from the pond, spending a minute to let your eyes clear and your thoughts settle. No answer feels worse than a bad one; again, you’re stuck with the trailing thread of your experience and no hint that there’s a reason for any of it.

Cabeswater holds summer soft around you, and keeps time still while you think. The temptation to fall asleep beneath its boughs is staggering; but the real world is waiting, the cluttered list of responsibilities in your head, Blue and Ronan and all the aches they bring.

You have to unbraid grass from around your ankles before the woods let you go.

Chapter Text

You’d thought Monmouth could be an escape. It’s as close as Henrietta gets to being industrialised, the ground floor now wasted, concrete potential with only the most enterprising of weeds poking up through the cracks. But, it’s Car Day: Gansey and Ronan in rolled-up sleeves, clearing out the accumulated trash from their cars and tenderly hosing down the sides. Noah’s helping, which is to say, Noah is making sure everything and everyone gets covered in suds. You’d only biked to save gas, but now you’re glad the Hondayota doesn’t have to sit in a line with their gleaming beasts.

Car Day means outdoors, and outdoors means you prop yourself up in the shade while the scrubby grass reaches for you. Even brown and half-withered, Monmouth’s weeds tie themselves around your fingers, splintered grass rings like you’d made as a child. You’re really not sure if it’s a comfort, but it’s non-threatening enough to leave alone.

Blue turns up as the afternoon’s starting to fade, harried and with dog hair clinging to her leggings. She drops down beside you with a little huff of exhaustion and rolls her shoulders against Monmouth’s brickwork like she’s working out the accumulated kinks of a long day’s labour. You fail not to stare at the elegant curve of her neck. She fails not to stare at the plants twined around your fingers, and her concern is touchingly genuine when she asks, “Is that alright?”

“It’s fine,” you say, though it might not be. You have no way of knowing, and the earth feels like it’s falling away under you when you think about it for too long. Without any leads, it’s all you can do not to think, and to focus on things that feel real, like work and school and the empty ache in your stomach. “How were the dogs?”

“Boisterous,” she tells you, and you wonder if she borrowed that word from Gansey. Gansey likes to apply it to Ronan when you think words like unruly and deliberately disruptive might fit. Ronan has been holding himself in check more lately though, you think, glancing over at him in time to see him lob a dripping sponge directly into Noah’s face. It’s still petty mischief in place of criminal misconduct, but it’s enough to make Gansey puff up like a proud parent. Enough to make you think there’s hope for him yet.

Blue follows your line of sight and snorts. “Are you thinking someone needs to walk him?”

It’s just banter, and you should be able to engage, make some offhand comment - someone ought to, he’d bite the other dogs - but you don’t think you’ve got it in you. You stare sullenly between Blue’s expectant expression and the now-sopping figure of Ronan and the familiar taste of guilt slides down your tongue. Fear had been eclipsing it, an almost pleasant change, but it’s back again now. Guilt just for wanting, for knowing how they look at you and letting your awful indecision hold your head down. It’s an impossible choice – the fierce marvel of Blue, or the unchained lightning of Ronan Lynch? You would forever wonder about the other.

“Adam,” Blue says sharply. You surface into the world again, and find the grass beneath your palms has burst up, green veins suddenly showing through the summer fatigue. It’s grown in an instant, drawn on water and energy that the soil doesn’t have to coil all the way up to your elbows. Guilt tags out to fear again, and this time when you try to pull yourself loose, the plant curls tighter, unwilling to let you go.

“Something wrong with Parrish?” Ronan’s come to see, or Ronan’s come to help, which is worse. His lips pull back to a grimace as he sees you trapped against the earth, and even after thorns tore through his thumbs last time, his immediate response is to reach for the plants, to tear them off you.

You’d warn him away, but your words are slower than Blue’s hands swatting at him. “Stop it,” she snaps. “Can’t you see the plants are doing something? Ripping them off won’t help us understand.”

“Sorry, I didn’t realise the weeds were the important things here,” he shoots back. His expression is lurking one notch below feral, still restrained but barely. He lays his hand over your right arm, feeling how tightly the grasses have bound themselves around you, his calloused fingertips cruelly gentle against your skin. Blue is on your other side, refusing to budge, obviously planning to help coax you free of the greenery’s grip.

Your heart is an overworked kickdrum in your chest, a miserable cacophony that rattles through your head. “It’s happened before,” you say, trying to calm them, “And the plants just… let me go.” Your palms are sweating into the ground, the first moisture this dirt has seen in weeks. The tendrils are making good progress towards your shoulders, and panic is on the tip of your tongue. You try to remember the love you’d felt on the line, fondness overflowing, tell yourself that Cabeswater doesn’t mean to hurt you, doesn’t mean to scare you. “Maybe if we’re just a little patient…”

You’d expect Ronan to understand that Cabeswater doesn’t quite think the same way you do, but he still looks on the edge of a fight. He takes his hand off your arm, rubs it fiercely against his jeans, glares at the sparse, dehydrated grass beneath you.

“Adam? Christ.” Gansey has finally noticed that you’re at risk of becoming a permanent fixture in his carpark. He looks between Blue and Ronan hunched defensively on either side of you, takes in your barely restrained panic, and asks, “What would help?”

You try to think, but you can’t recall having to do anything the last time the plants took hold of you. Another spike of fear, and the grasses, now impossibly large and blisteringly green, inch towards your collarbone. You wonder if they’re going to strangle you as they pulse around your arms. Ronan rips a handful of grass from the ground beneath him, and you’re not sure if it’s a threat for the weeds binding you but his looming, restless aggression is helping as much as Blue’s protective fury. “If I could just – focus.” 

“Give him some space,” Gansey orders immediately, and however reluctant they might be, they back off. Blue and Ronan are both undeniably Gansey’s people; they don’t feel the need to bare their teeth when he’s mediating between them. It’s something else you shouldn’t begrudge him, but probably will anyway. His easy manners often seem like a class-restricted skill.

 Without them so close, it’s easier to think of Caberswater, of how much it likes you. It wouldn’t be trying to hurt you. Just a little, the tendrils wrapped around your arms seem to lessen. Carefully, you get your feet under you and push up, and the weeds fall away as you stand. The green core rushes out of them as they drop, and then they’re just overgrown and dead on the side of the lot. You heave out a sigh, relieved and exhausted, the crushing weight of your terror pushed a single, significant inch back.

“Are you alright?” Ronan asks. He puts out a hand to steady you, but withdraws it a second later, glancing at his skin surprised. You rub your arm where he had touched, but there are no barbs on you this time. The pink tint to Ronan’s skin could be sun more easily than any effect of yours.

Gansey’s already launched into a rushed speech about how fine everything is, for his own mental fortitude as much as yours. “It’s not an entirely alien phenomena, not on a ley line – I mean, aberrant plant growth is the entire basis of Cabeswater – our concern is really just the effect on you…”

He talks about his research, and while Gansey doesn’t actually know of anything quite like what’s happening to you, he’s using his very best ‘don’t panic, this is under control’ voice and it is a wonder of social engineering, dauntingly effective. Gansey is the kind of person you want in an emergency, a born fire marshal. Even if he’s out of his depth, the serious way he assures you that you’ll all ‘get to the bottom of things’ should be a comfort.

You’re distracted by Ronan scratching at an angry red rash that’s cropped up on his arm. It couldn’t be you. You wouldn’t have wanted that to happen.

Blue’s house is in walking distance, so when Ronan offers to drive you home, there’s no doubt that it’s a closed invitation. “I’ll ask everyone if they know about the plants,” she promises you. “Even if you say they’re harmless, I mean – you don’t want to have them acting like that.”

You think of how you woke after your nightmare, the woods wrapped around you, green and lively and sheltering. But, of course, they’ve been climbing you like you’re a trellis, fierce and stinging. Of course you don’t want that. You tell her, “Thanks,” not quite transmitting your gratitude for her worrying on your behalf, not quite encompassing how little you deserve her right now. She smiles, assured, and it’s the best note you can have directly before sliding into Ronan’s BMW.

He tears out of Monmouth at a speed that would be fun if you were in a better mood. You’re not in a rush to get back to St Agnes for once, homework beyond daunting and sleep unattainable with so many fears shaking you apart from the inside, but he gets you home in record time anyway. You stare at your window through the BMW’s windshield and will yourself to move. You didn’t pull out all the shoots before you left, and you don’t want to see them now. You don’t want to sit alone and wonder what’s happening to you.

But sitting alone with Ronan is a worse decision. He shuts off the car’s engine, and suddenly the empty parking lot is pronounced isolation. His face is a thunderhead, and you’re waiting for the storm to break. You know what’s happening when he looks at you sideways from under his lashes, and the thought of dealing with this now is impossible, tension cracking your decision making skills into a thousand worthless pieces.

But stress is the most familiar feeling in the world, a choke chain you’ve worn as far back as you can remember. You can survive this, endure it. You let guilt eat a hole in your gut, and you let Ronan Lynch reach over the gearshift to take your hand. There’s nothing to enjoy about it, just room to despise your own weakness for refusing.

There’s a weird creak, like bending rubber, and a moment later you think you smell a hint of rot, decaying meat with a hideously sweet undertone. Ronan wrinkles his nose, and then you’re staring because his fair skin has flared up, blistering red all the way up the arm touching yours. He recoils from you and everything else, and you can’t think what’s happening except that you can’t improve it. You scramble to get the car open and almost fall out of it in your haste to stop poisoning the space.

From outside, you can see the source of the creaking noise – new creepers have wound their way up the BMW’s wheels. Ronan hauls himself out of the car, and his new rash looks furiously painful. His free hand claws at it while he stares at you. You tug plants loose from his front wheels as a way to avoid eye contact.

He says, “Tell Cabeswater to leave my car alone,” with the decisive kind of tone of someone who is picking their battle for the day.

“You tell it,” you mutter back, unwinding weeds from his hubcaps. He makes an awful, dismissive kind of sound, and as soon as you’re clear of the wheels, he guides his car away. You don’t know if he’s choosing not to talk about the rash, or if he hasn’t realised at all. You’re not sure yet yourself, but your gut has a feeling, a terrifying chasm of possibility. Right now, on top of everything else, speculation feels like an exercise you wouldn’t survive.

At school, Tad Carruthers slaps you on the back and spends the rest of the hour scratching at the red, stinging reaction that’s exploded over his palm. You draw back into your reputation of being aloof and untouchable, a way to solve the immediate problem, but fear of yourself shakes you like an earthquake.

You think it’s in your skin.

You don’t make any more mistakes at work, but you still flinch when the foreman passes. Fear for your job and venomous regret over your error are a noxious cocktail in your gut. The men on either side of you start complaining of nausea and light-headedness, to the point where Henrietta tough-it-out locals need to go and sit with their heads between their legs.

No one blames you. Why would anyone blame you? You’re the only one who knows that you’re becoming something else.

It takes Blue three days to align her schedule with yours and drop by. She knocks three times, with decreasing patience, as you work your way to the door; as soon as you open it, she sees why. “Christ,” she gasps, staring past you into your room. The sprouts from before are long gone, replaced by plants big enough to be real bushes, shrubbery crowding all the walls of your apartment. It wasn’t a large space to start with, and now it’s full, Cabeswater’s expansive greenery clustered all around you. The smell of lush soil and growth floods the space, impossible and inescapable.

You hate it, because you should hate it, because you don’t have room for all these plants and yourself, because you didn’t ask for them to be here. But a part of you likes being able to lie down among the leaves.

Blue walks in nervously, and no matter how she moves she’s crowded up against the cool, gentle leaves of the plants. She goes to sit on your bed, the only empty square of space left in the room, though the leaves and tendrils still press up against the side. She looks a little afraid, and she looks very badly impressed. Yours is the kind of miracle that it’s easier to marvel at from the outside.

You take a seat beside her. Around you, the plants whisper, and you can’t make out the words but you trust the tone. They aren’t quite growing thick enough to cover the walls and the window, you can’t forget you’re still just in your room and not free in the forest, but they’re still growing. “So,” you say, aware of time running down before your next shift. “Did you want something?”

“Oh – yeah. I talked to my family.” Blue starts rummaging through her bag, and you catch glimpses of knitting needles and wool and brown recycle-paper sketchbooks. She produces a little bag of loose-leaf tea, and a thick pair of gardening gloves. “They just said talk to Cabeswater because it’s a misunderstanding, and I told them you already did but they couldn’t think of anything else. So, they sent tea instead.”

“And the gloves?” you ask.

“To help you clear them out,” she says. “Or me. I could help you now?”

“I don’t think there’s any point,” you tell her, staring at the welcoming forest of your room. “They’ll grow back. They don’t mean to hurt me. The only problem is –“ is that lately you’ve been a wreck of nerves and barbs, stinging-nettle skin and unpredictable toxicity. But you’re still not sure, and you’re afraid to voice it until you are. “St Agnes probably wouldn’t approve,” you finish lamely.

“Right,” she says. You sit side by side in silence for a moment, though it’s not really silence with the gentle rustling of your bedroom forest. Sometimes you think you hear insect hum or snippets of birdsongs, but that’s only because you think you should hear those sounds woven through the leaves. You can’t deny that right now, with sunlight still attempting to pierce the canopy and scattering light around the walls, that it’s pleasant. Peaceful. Pretty, even.

Blue glances at you sideways, and you know she’s thinking the same thing. Suddenly her presence here seems to mean something else, and you catch her fingers curling and uncurling, anticipatory, the way she’s teasing her bottom lip between her teeth. There’s something like sympathy in her eyes, something like kindness and the want to make it better. You’re always so aware of the space between you, and you know she’s closing it now, she’s moving toward you in tentative inches. It’s time for you to move back, to make a clear rejection.

You don’t move. Your heart is lodged somewhere in your windpipe, and you’re not sure you can breathe around it. If you could just accept this, everything could be easier. If you could just date Blue, one girl like you’re supposed to want, then you could pretend like you never wanted anything else. You like Blue. You want to kiss her. Maybe in time you’ll forget the voice at the back of your head that hisses Ronan too.

She cups your cheek and whispers, “Adam,” and the sound is as soft as her skin on yours. She’s so pretty it hurts you, and you wish you could be happy like this, you wish this was all you wanted. You try to bend yourself to fit, like you’re meant to, and you cover her hand with your own. She smiles, pleased, encouraging, and you feel like you’re lying when you try to smile back. It’s not right, like this. You keep trying anyway.

The correct thing would be to kiss her. The guilt and loathing roiling in your gut won’t let you, so you do the second best thing which is waiting for her to kiss you and doing nothing to stop her. You gasp against her lips, just a little, overwhelmed by the press of them against yours. She tastes like chapstick, kisses like she hasn’t done it before but is very determined to do a good job. You try to focus on the part of you that wants this, and not all the parts that want it very differently.

There’s a sticky-sweet smell in the air. Your hands are clenched and shaking, pressed hard against your thighs, but you’re trying not to let it show, even as you feel yourself starting to splinter. Blue pulls away first, a little dazed, a pink tint to her cheeks. “You taste like honey,” she says like she doesn’t believe it, and rubs the back of her hand over her mouth. “Or like nectar.”

You’re not sure if you’re meant to apologise, but she leans in to kiss you again. Under the sweetness in the air, the smell of rot is rising again. The plants surrounding you are rummaging, and there’s a different tone through their murmurs. Less gentle. Broad leaves are changing shapes, slimming, twisting, becoming species you don’t recognise.

Blue looks even more dazed the next time she pulls back from you, dizzy and drugged. She wipes her lips a dozen times, swaying even though she’s sitting down. “I think,” she says, and her words are slurred, “my mouth is burning.”

You think it’s in your skin and panic hurtles through you. The reaction of the room is instantaneous, creepers curling around your ankles, every shifting tree bursting up a little bigger. Blue’s eyes are unfocused, and she starts to curl over, gripping her sides like she’s in pain. “You should go,” you tell her, staring at the frenzy of growth around you. “Blue, you need to go, come on.”

You take her arm to help her up, but she recoils, and when you pull away you see a red, stinging mark in the exact shape of your hand. It’s like she’s allergic to you, and she stares at it, uncomprehending. “Adam,” she says, and she’s terrified, curling in on herself. You can see the pain in her white fingertips. Her lips are still glistening from the kiss. You can’t think for the fear crushing your thoughts. “I feel…”

You don’t get to hear what she feels, because her eyes flutter shut in slow motion and she doesn’t open them again. She slumps backwards onto the bed, and the skin of your hands is incendiary, you can’t touch her, can’t help. All around, the woods are closing in. Your fingers are too slow and too clumsy, but you force them to work your phone anyway. Gansey would come, but Gansey would carry the sight of this too-heavy on his shoulders for the rest of his life. You call Ronan, and tell him “Blue’s sick,” though that’s not quite true. “I need you to drive.” The awful fracture of your voice is a convincing argument for speed.

Ronan arrives in seven minutes, and they were seven minutes you spent trying to tear vines from your legs as quickly as they regrow, not letting them root you in place. You’re bloodless, unharmed. Blue’s breathing has been slowing. You think you’ve been having a heart attack the entire time.

“What the fuck?” Ronan demands, but it’s not the kind of question that can be answered and he knows better than to wait for one. He storms through the growth, trampling tendrils and creepers, the room’s original floorboards buried under a mass of roots and moss. He hauls her up easily, carefully, feels the weak sigh of her breath and carries her out.

“We need to get her to the hospital,” you beg, following the path he’s made through your plants. Already new ones are blossoming up to fill the gap. “It’s – it’s allergies or poison or something, I don’t know what.”

Outside your room, the open space is staggering, and air free of greenery sweeps into your lungs. You don’t feel any lighter for it. Ronan slides Blue into the backseat, you climb in on the passenger side, and then the BMW is blessedly moving, on path to a solution. You crane around in your seat to watch the awful red colour burning through Blue’s cheeks.

“Fucking hell, Adam,” Ronan says, and you can hear the quaver he’s trying to hide. “What the fuck did you do to her?”

“I don’t know,” you say, something sick in you turning over. You don’t have time to throw up right now, and that’s the only thing holding it back.

Ronan drives with furious intent, practice paying off, and the distance between you and the hospital closes as fast as you could hope for. He carries her inside, and you stumble along after, pulling the last of the vines off your wrists and hoping they stay gone this time. They accept Blue in an instant, staff taking her from Ronan and through an official set of words, shouting words like ‘stabilize’ that have you biting down hard on your tongue.

“What did she take?” the admitting nurse asks. There’s no doubt that she took something – she came in with Ronan, who always looks suspect, and with you, and you still have vines trailing off your sneakers.

“We don’t know,” you answer, and your voice is ragged with stress. “Something – herbal and weird. We don’t know.”

You’re allowed to stay in the waiting room. Someone calls Maura. Ronan texts Gansey, and then puts his phone on the seat between you. It buzzes every five seconds, and neither of you touch it. “He’ll be on his way,” Ronan tells you, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “Christ though, Parrish. Is there anything wrong with you?”

You look down at the smooth skin of your palms, remember the red print of your hand on Blue’s arm. “No,” you tell him. There is something desperately wrong with you. You haven’t quite stopped shaking yet, and no one’s come out to say anything to either of you, there’s no way to tell if Blue’s alright, if her condition is dangerous, if you’ve killed her. You taste bile and destruction.

“Calm down,” Ronan tells you uselessly, “They’ll be able to fix it.” He coughs once, then again, and you stare at him, notice the flush over his pale cheeks. Someone else coughs. You think you can smell moss, or mist, or Cabeswater, and a new wave of anxiety heaps itself over the old one. It should be over. You can’t believe it’s not over.

The waiting room holds half a dozen other people, all of whom are starting to look peaky, starting to cough or choke. The waiting room also holds a large pot plant, some kind of yucca, something that should be harmless and still and not slowly unfurling before your eyes. It’s reaching out for you, all its leaves shaking, twitching, and the noxious smell hits you once again. It’s the same as it was when Blue kissed you, and you thought it was over but it’s not and you can’t let this happen again.

Ronan watches you rush to your feet, and asks, “What the fuck are you doing?” as you struggle to lift the heavy pot. The leaves wind around your arms, clinging immediately, and you grit your teeth as that sweet, rotting scent rolls over you again. One of the other patients gags. Ronan looks awful, face pale, cheeks burning, and it’s all because of you.

“I have to go,” you tell him, hauling the not-quite-a-yucca out with you. “This is me, I have to – can you stay, until Maura gets here, can you make sure…?”

He works it out. His expression transforms into something entirely unknown to you, but he says, “Yeah, I’ll stay. Adam –”

You don’t wait to hear it. The admitting nurse is hacking into her elbow, and there’s no one else to stop you from heaving the plant out into the parking lot. You wrestle it around the side of the building into an alcove where it can sit and revert, or at least not poison an entire room of people, and you sag down beside it. It hasn’t let you go yet, still pushing itself to stretch and grow and wrap you up. Every wretched beat of your heart seems to encourage it to shudder larger and sweep you up more. It feels so gentle around you.

You feel like an absolute monster.  

Chapter Text

Your home is now a toxic garden. By the time you return to your room, it has transformed itself completely, and now it’s a struggle to even get the door open. The floors groan with the weight of all the plants it holds now, the walls strain to keep them all in. You can only recognise a few: hemlock, nightshade, oleander, all incredibly poisonous. You wonder which kind you’ve been channelling.

Nothing hurts you. You pass thorns that should catch and barbs that should sting on your way to bed, and you breathe in the most noxious medley of spores that has ever been assembled, and you are totally unharmed. Cabeswater’s magic, protecting you; Cabeswater’s magic, putting you in danger in the first place. You can’t think why it’s done this to you, why it would possibly want you to poison your friends. You almost killed Blue.

Your phone buzzes against your hip and you scramble for it, catch sight of Ronan’s name on the screen, and ask, “Is she alright?” as soon as the call connects.

“Yeah,” Ronan replies. There’s a lot of background chatter, the distant bustle of a hospital, but he speaks over it. “They said it was something like tremetol poisoning, like from snakeroot. But they caught it; she should be fine. Maura’s pissed, obviously, and Gansey almost lost his fucking mind, but they’ll get over it.”

Your heart resumes beating, and you drag a hand over your face. “That’s – fuck. Thank god.”

“Yeah,” Ronan says again. There’s a moment of silence as you both consider what could have happened, how close it had been. You shiver, queasy, and then Ronan starts talking again. “Blue wants to talk to you.”

You press the heels of your palms against your eyes. “Okay,” you say, and every word is an effort. You need to do this. “Can you pass the phone to her?”

There’s a short series of awkward crackling sounds that aren’t nearly long enough for you to brace yourself and then Blue’s voice, worn and worried, asks, “Adam?”

“I’m so sorry,” you tell her miserably. “I’m so, so sorry, Blue. I didn’t know – shit. Are you okay?”

“Apparently,” she says. You can hear the bitter sting to her tone, but it eases with her next exhale. “I’m a bit freaked out, you know? But, I’m not going to die. I don’t think I’m going to kiss anyone ever again though. For safety.” There’s a murmur in the background that sounds like Maura, and Blue snorts derisively in response. You wait, and when she speaks again she just sounds exhausted. “What about you? Are you still covered in plants?”

“Toxic ones, now,” you say, eyeing your garden. They rustle fondly back at you. “I’m, uh. I don’t know. Not going to touch anyone again.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she tells you. “Not touching people sounds like a good start.”

You squeeze your eyes closed. “I’m so sorry,” you tell her again.

Her expression could be anything, and her silence could mean anything, and you stare at a hole in your jeans as you wonder. She says, “Yeah,” and then there’s an odd crunching noise, followed by footsteps.

“So,” Ronan says, voice abrupt and sudden after Blue’s sleepy tones. “Everyone’s a little bit terrified of you. Adam Parrish, chemical weapon. Harbinger of biological warfare. What are you doing now?”

“Staying at home.” Where you can’t hurt anyone. Where you and your venom are contained.

“Good idea. We’ll come fix you when Blue’s better,” Ronan tells you, and hangs up.

You’re left alone in your room, the hollow murmur of the plants echoing around you. All of them could kill a person, and you’re beginning to feel numb to the horror of it. It’s all you can do to keep it to yourself, to not let others near, to make sure you don’t trigger more of whatever draws the poison out of you.

Sleep feels like a luxury you don’t deserve, but you can’t stop yourself from indulging. Your thoughts chase each other in awful circles around your head, fear and self-loathing and guilt colliding in a wicked centrifuge until you’re too tired to keep up anymore. The canopy of fatal plants sways gently overhead, falls away behind your fluttering eyelids and your bed swallows you whole.

In the morning, you wake to a cocoon of venomous plant leaves and a dozen texts from Ronan. The cocoon falls apart when you push at it with the smallest bit of pressure; the texts are updates on Blue’s condition. The fact that they came from Ronan’s phone is a gesture you can appreciate, and you scroll down the list, feeling a little burst of reassurance with every mention of improvement and stability. It seems like she’d gotten to the hospital fast enough, that she’s going to recover, and gratitude makes you weak.

You don’t know what to do with yourself, though. Ronan had called you a chemical weapon and the words stick in your mind. Something about you has been weaponised; whenever something happens that you don’t want, worse things pile up around it. If you’d known how to turn Blue down, then maybe she wouldn’t have been poisoned; if Ronan hadn’t tried to touch you, you wouldn’t have given him that rash; if you hadn’t gotten trapped against the ground at Monmouth, they wouldn’t have fought over you and made it worse.

It seems that your future is going to be an ongoing catastrophe, an avalanche of disasters where every unfortunate event triggers a domino collapse of everything else that could go wrong. It would make you unlovable, untouchable, a bitter, lonesome creature. You consider this future.

You reject it.

Calling Gansey should be a simple thing, but after what you did to Blue, you’re afraid that he’ll recognise you as culpable and respond accordingly. But you underestimate him; he picks up and says, “Adam,” like waves breaking on shore, relief for you metered out like relief for Blue. “It’s good to hear from you. Ronan said you were fine, but after everything that’s happened…”

“I’m in no danger,” you tell him dryly. Your lungs are full of chemicals that are deadly when measured out in micrograms, and strangling vines still tie themselves around your fingers in a familiar, fond kind of way. “I just called to ask if you knew any more about this, before I go up to Cabeswater. Plants on the ley line, I mean.”

“I did look,” he says, and pauses like he’s worrying his lip with his teeth. You don’t think he would have had much time for research between your chained calamities, so you wait for whatever’s turning over in his head to finish. “I’m not sure it is the plants. I think they might be a symptom.”

“Of what? Magic?”

“Something like that. The way Ronan described what happened in the waiting room – it sounds like a reaction. But…” he makes a frustrated sound, the answer circling around him but still elusive. “Certainly, Cabeswater must be to blame.”

You hum with agreement, and an oleander flower presses itself into your fingers. You wonder if there even is a way to clear them out of your room safely. “You’re still at the hospital?”

“So is Ronan,” Gansey says. You think it’s kind of Ronan to stay. “And a large chunk of Blue’s family, but they’re blaming this on me and my ‘ley line folly’, so they’re not speaking to me currently. I think Blue may be in a different argument with every one of her family members about what happened; it’s keeping her lively.”

“I wish I hadn’t kissed her.” The words slip out before you can stop them, and then you feel compelled to backtrack, before Gansey misunderstands. “Like that, I mean. I wish it hadn’t happened like that, and she hadn’t been poisoned, obviously. I did want to…” You stop yourself, bite down on your tongue, grind the phone into the side of your head. Your feelings are pathetically unimportant right now.

Gansey is quiet for a very long moment, and when he speaks his voice is even-tempered, carefully tailored. “You know,” he says, in the low tone of a co-conspirator, “They both love you.”

You check the door to your room is locked three times before you leave. The walk to your car is terrifying, as two members of the congregation have dropped by the church and they wave to you as they pass. You wave, and leave them an insultingly wide berth, but they seem to survive exposure to you just fine.

The drive to Cabeswater is a little slow, since you’re trying to ensure your driving is beyond faultless and there’s no possible reason you could get pulled over. You keep the windows rolled up too, on the off-chance there’s something contagious on you. Your phone goes off three times on the trip up; one is a ‘Blue is fine’ update from Gansey, the last is a ‘Blue’s mother brought in those healthful teas, they’re going to finish what you started’ message from Ronan, one is a picture from Blue, a steeped mug of something murky in front of her and a very pronounced grimace on her face.

You can see the exhaustion on her, but her eyes are bright, and assuming she survives the tea, you can believe that she’s going to pull through. You can see the crowd of aunts and cousins and friends behind her in the photo, and wish for a selfish second that you could be there with her too, but right now you can’t be near anyone. You keep driving.

It’s an overcast day, and the fields around Henrietta stretch out under the grey sky, browned by the summer heat and dulled by the bleak light. After the exotic forest of your room, the scrub by the roadside feels even more mundane. Even the edges of Cabeswater aren’t so impossible; the woods open up to you, plants familiar and safe, the air around them clear and uncomplicated.

There’s a fresh, sweet drift of mist through the ferns, and you follow the same path along through the woods, blank incomprehension flickering through you. As before, the boughs bend to you; there’s no hint of danger, no hint of vicious thorns or dripping toxins or anything that Cabeswater has been giving you. The grass is dewy underfoot, the whisper of the trees is as welcoming as it ever is, Cabeswater pleased to greet its magician. It’s even more jarring than it was last time, to see the passivity of the plants again after what’s been filling your room. You think symptom and shiver, unsettled.

The friendly Virginian foliage curls loosely around you when you kneel by the little pond once again. Your reflection is a tired, gaunt thing, and you breathe deep as you try to look beyond it. There’s an alarm set on your phone for half an hour that you can only hope will be enough to wake you in the worst case, but you still can’t help but feel it won’t come to that; there are glossy leaves resting on your shoulders, there’s vines winding so gently to circle your deaf ear, there’s an overwhelming feel of protection. Cabeswater wouldn’t let you get lost here. It might be a dangerous assumption, but without anyone else to help, you have to believe in it.

You stare at the reflection of the grey sky until you lose focus, and the sweeping pattern of the clouds seems to stretch out beyond the pool. You can’t tell the sky from its reflection, and then you’re somewhere else, surrounded by the energy of the line. It crackles against your ears, and you can hear it through your left one as well, the surging power, the familiarity, the fondness. You can’t speak to Cabeswater, but you know what it’s saying even without your cards – it’s pleased to see you.

Again, you search for a problem, for the source of the noxious creepers, for Cabeswater’s chores or displeasure or even a mercurial shift. You gaze deep into the boundless well of energy that the forest holds, and try to read the ripples. There’s nothing. Not a drop of maliciousness, not an ounce of discontent. Cabeswater loves you.

You think you could scream.

Cabeswater can tell what you’re asking, though, and you can sense it probing at your wretched feelings. It ripples with incomprehension to mirror yours; it doesn’t understand why you’re so angry with it, it doesn’t know what you’re looking for. Very, very distantly, you think you can sense plants closing in around your body again.

You don’t have the language for this, but you try to exude the question every way you know how, ask the lightning licking up your cheeks why it’s hurting your friends, why it turned you into something terrible. Every inch of you is straining to know, and the woods must be able to read it off you. But it just echoes its confusion back at you. It loves you. It has been protecting you. It doesn’t understand why you’re so upset.

From very far away, you smell decay, the same strain that’s drifted up whenever you’ve become toxic. So deep into Cabeswater, you think you can feel your skin shifting, invisibly changing to hold terrible chemicals. Through the lens of your magic you’re burning, weaponised, untouchable. There’s no one to hurt, there’s nothing around to hurt you, and your furious, terrified heartbeat rattles in your chest.

Cabeswater wants to protect you.

 The revelation staggers you, and you burst out with, “No,” in speech and in your mind, a rejection violent enough to send a spike through the energy around you. “No, no, that is not what I want.”

Cabeswater doesn’t understand and you breathe deep, try to regain your clarity on your connection. It’s a struggle to find the words to communicate, when you can’t even use words and when your blind horror is threatening to overwhelm everything else. How do you transmit to a forest that its idea of protection has been destroying you?

You fight to calm yourself, and then you try to transmit the message on every channel open to you, that Cabeswater can’t just decide to turn you toxic, that it can’t transform you on its own, that it can’t take the decision out of your hands like that. It doesn’t own you. You can reject its protection. You repeat the thought, insistent, trying to push through the murky indecision of the woods around you, and it’s impossible to tell how much it understands. It can read your fury, though. It only meant to look after you.

There’s an unnatural siren blaring somewhere very far away, and you manage to recognise it as your alarm. You slide back into your own mind, blink the blankness out of your eyes and look around. Even when you’d begun to scry, the woods had started to take you, and you’d felt their grip tightening the whole time you’d been on the line; now there’s no sign that the grass beneath you had ever been more than grass, sitting tamely between your knees. Cabeswater’s love trembles through the air, and there’s not a hint of rot.

You stretch yourself back against the ground and empty yourself in an exhale. Your head aches with the effort of communication, but now you can weave your fingers against the grass without it weaving back. You hold a hand over your head to examine it, the skin browned and freckled and not even a little incendiary. Safe.

You can’t afford time off work, so you go, breath held and body tense, ready to sprint for the door at the first sign of chemical contagion. Even knowing that the turbulent anxiety ruling you is the cause, you can’t help yourself but fear the effect you might have. But aside from sweaty palms making you drop your tools, your shifts go uneventfully. Even as a fearful wreck, you manage to keep all your anxiety locked inside, and nothing poisonous seeps from you into the world.

School is even more nerve-wracking, but Ronan and Gansey have made it their mission to preserve your personal space – Gansey with smooth redirection, Ronan with a terrifying glare and a predatory stance – and while you still spend the first week back making sure you get the seat by the door for every class, you do not create any biohazards. It’s relief like you’ve never felt before, and even though you don’t trust yourself enough to touch anyone, it’s more normalcy than you could have hoped for.

Especially when Tad Carruthers jostles you too hard, and you think, very deliberately, that it would be nice if he was encouraged to leave. Only after you’ve decided to want it does he begin to look very faintly nauseous. Gansey pretends not to see, and Ronan gives you a magnificent smile.

It’s a month before Blue knocks on your door again. You were waiting for Ronan, and the sight of her in an overwhelming cerulean tunic is an unexpected delight.

“I’m rebelling,” she informs you as soon as you open the door. “On the condition that your room is going to behave itself.” She peers around you to see the state of things. Several ferns line your windowsill in pots that they don’t need, and a dozen other plants are scattered around the space, sitting tame and meek. St Agnes’ floor and walls sit pleasantly unburdened, and Blue nods in prim approval as she lets herself in. “What did you do with the toxic ones?”

“I drove them out of town and burned them.” It was a shame, but there wasn’t anything else to be done with them. The pot plants were an apology and the offer of a compromise – they can stay near so long as they stay confined. You follow Blue as she surveys the little plants, more aware of the space between you and her than you’ve ever been. The fact that you are no longer a weapon doesn’t erase what you were. “Is it alright, that you’re rebelling?”

“Oh, probably.” She sticks her head into your bathroom to marvel at the plants staying clear of your drains. “I mean, I was expressly forbidden from getting near you again, but I think Persephone’s been arguing your case. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I wanted to come and see you and ‘forbidden’ doesn’t mean anything in my house, besides.” She sticks her chin up, defiant of her absent mother with a fearless air that makes you smile.

“Well,” you say, “It’s nice to see you.” There are quite a few other things you’d like to say – more apologies, inappropriate comments on how nice her legs look in crocheted tights, that you’re sorry to have forever incurred the wrath of Maura Sargent – but none of them make it past your lips.

“You know,” she says, slowly, purposefully, “I wish you’d just said you didn’t want to kiss me.”

Your stomach lurches. “I did,” you tell her, and if you haven’t quite found the words for yourself yet, then you know you don’t have them for Blue. But, possibly, you owe it to her to try, to do your best to explain how something you wanted had gone so violently wrong that she’d almost died from it. “I wanted to kiss you. I just… also want Ronan.”

The words hang in the air, painfully exposed. Your fingers curl closed, and it seems impossible that your little ferns can stay quiet against the rush of awful nausea that’s taking you over, but they do. You don’t need protecting right now; you need a conversation, no matter how little you want to have it.

Blue doesn’t look very surprised. Just a flicker of it, and then something much more like acceptance sweeps over her. “Yeah,” she sighs, and you don’t know what ‘yeah’ means like that and you are very afraid to analyse it. “I had thought I was competing with him for you, but that wasn’t it, was it? We were making it worse.”

You’re not sure what the right thing to say is.

There’s a bang on the door and you remember belatedly that you were waiting for Ronan. He lets himself in without waiting for you, and stops in the doorway when he sees you have company. His eyes flicker between you and Blue, expression unreadable. “You both look grim,” he declares, propping himself against the doorframe. “What are you talking about?”

“You,” Blue tells him. There’s a hint of a challenge in her voice, but that might just be habit. She appraises him briefly, before looking back to you and saying, “You know, I think a lot more fondly of Ronan since he drove me to the hospital. He got me snacks from the vending machine, too.”

“Is that so?” you ask blankly. She’s staring at him, chin up, demanding.

After a second, he snorts. “Yeah, fuck. I mean, she almost died kissing you, Parrish. I’ve got to respect that kind of commitment.” His smile is something strange and savage, and Blue echoes it back at him.

It is supernaturally easy, after that. Gansey discovers that when you’re in a good mood the air can get heavy with the scent of mint, and he begins a campaign against Ronan to keep you in a good mood. The world around you is a little fresher, and nausea and headaches seem to ease when you’re near. Possibly an apology from Cabeswater; possibly just an extension of you.

The plants in your room grow out of hand every now and then, because you let them, and they flood the space with flowers, throw green and gold light against the walls and ceiling. It’s a comforting place to spend time in; it’s better when Ronan and Blue stretch out on your bed beside you, their bare hands in yours a daring gesture, kisses from both of them making the air even sweeter.