Chapter Text
It was Henry who had quietly and competently taken care of them all. He cajoled, joked, and bullied them into the two cars, swiftly evaluated Ronan’s utterly wasted state and insisted Adam take the BMW keys. Adam mindlessly followed the Fisker through the black wet turns of the Henrietta night. He barely registered the intensely emotional phone call Ronan made to Declan and Matthew. Ronan’s relief was a little too raw for handling. It was Henry who took them to the nondescript home clinic of a private physician who knew without question all services were to be discreetly billed on the Cheng account and no discussion of the strange set of injuries was to ever leave the confines of his office. It was Henry’s self-deprecating humor that kept them all from falling over the edge. Just that simply, he had earned his place among Gansey’s court.
Wounds treated, quest accomplished, they all stood in the driveway more afraid than ever to part and more certain than ever they would never really be parted.
Blue pierced the silence first. “I should get home, I guess. My mom will be worried.”
Gansey added an elaborate sigh. “I’d better see to my family as well. It will be unpleasant.”
Ronan was little more than a hollow-eyed zombie. Adam, not much better than Ronan, still offered, “Do you need us?”
They were Gansey’s magicians still, even stripped of their power and worn to the ground. The unquestioning solidarity grounded Gansey, who summoned a smile that reflected itself through them all.
“I’ll be all right. See you tomorrow.” He offered a fist bump to Adam and Ronan. Each returned it solidly.
Tomorrow – an ordinary school day bereft of kings or demons or a holy crusade – it seemed impossible.
Henry offered an arm to Blue. “Allow me to escort you home, noble lady.” Blue nodded, charmed by his absurdity. “I will return you to your orange chariot, Richardman. Do you two also desire chauffer services?”
Adam looked at Ronan, who only looked at the nothing where his mother used to be. Adam offered Henry his true smile, none of his careful masks in place, and clapped a friendly hand on Henry’s shoulder. “We’re good. I’ll see you at school tomorrow, Henry. Thanks.”
Henry felt as though a glacier had calved. He nodded, then ushered Blue and Gansey into the Fisker.
Alone in the ordinary Virginia night, Adam turned to Ronan. He looked to be barely alive.
“Matthew okay?”
Ronan was quiet for a long time, then nodded, just once. He swallowed heavily. His grief was a physical thing, crushing him from the inside out.
“Where to?” Adam asked, jangling the BMW keys.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ronan replied, too exhausted to even come up with an expletive to punctuate the statement.
Adam wished he had somewhere of his own not horrible to bring Ronan. The image of Ronan waking covered in the gore of Aurora’s death was still too fresh to make the Barns a possibility. Monmouth would be huge and dark and empty without Gansey tonight, a disturbing reminder of how this day had almost ended. Alas, St. Agnes it would be. There was absolutely no way he was leaving Ronan alone tonight.
Ronan stirred enough in the church parking lot to put his hand out for the keys, though he did not make any move to get out of the passenger seat.
“C’mon,” Adam said, keeping the keys as he got out of the car.
Ronan did not move. “C’mon what?” he asked flatly.
“C’mon up. You need to sleep.”
Finally, Ronan leveled his viper’s glare at Adam. “I don’t need a fucking babysitter.”
Abruptly, Adam’s patience sputtered and died. He slammed the driver’s side door and ripped open the passenger door. Ronan continued to glare malevolently.
“Get out.”
“Make me.”
“It’s been a real shitty couple of days. There are gonna be some more shitty ones coming. I’m tired and so are you. Get your stubborn ass upstairs,” Adam snapped, Henrietta accent utterly undisguised. The silence stretched under the ferocity of will churning between them. Shockingly, Ronan broke first.
“What if I dream?” Ronan asked quietly, something truly terrible crossing his expression.
“I’ll wake you.”
Ronan snorted scornfully. “You sleep like the dead, Parrish.”
“Not if I’m with you.”
Ronan arched a brow. The ghost of a smile softened the sharp line of his mouth.
“Taking advantage of emotional distress to get me in bed? Sneaky.”
Adam rolled his eyes, but the tips of his ears flushed a little. “I’ll take the floor. Let’s go, asshole.”
To Adam’s surprise, Ronan capitulated. Adam carefully extracted Orphan Girl from the backseat and carried her up with them.
Adam concocted a little nest of sweaters and a blanket for Orphan Girl, who curled up in it and immediately went to sleep. Clean and clothed in a couple scraps of Adam’s threadbare wardrobe, Ronan lay in Adam’s bed, staring into the relentless dark. The void that had been Cabeswater and the void that had been Aurora Lynch pressed in so close he could barely breathe. He was so tired, but sleep had never seemed so far away.
“Adam,” he whispered, certain he was already asleep. The answer was immediate.
“Yeah?”
“Just come over here. The splinters in that floor are fucking deadly.”
Unexpectedly, Adam complied without protest. Knees and arms and elbows were awkwardly shifted until they were at last squeezed into the narrow bed together. The dark was considerably less oppressive.
“This is, without a doubt, the shittiest mattress I’ve ever slept on,” Ronan quipped.
“The splinters haven’t gone anywhere,” Adam replied dryly.
“I’ll suffer,” Ronan replied, nuzzling his face deeper behind Adam’s ear.
“Shut up and go to sleep, Lynch.”
They slept and they did not dream.
The dawn found Adam struggling to extract an arm to silence the pathetic bleating of the alarm clock. A tiny groan of exhaustion escaped him. Ronan’s bleary blue gaze arrested him. In these first moments of waking, it was the simplest, rightest thing in the world to kiss the unusually softened line of Ronan’s mouth. Ronan’s response was sleepy and tender, though he gripped the back of Adam’s shirt in a tight fist. Knuckles pressed against Adam’s spine. Adam pulled back to flop partially onto the deadly splintered floor.
“School,” he sighed.
Ronan groaned in protest. “I’m quitting,” he replied petulantly.
“Fine for you, but I’m not.”
Ronan only grunted.
“You better get up too.”
“Why? I don’t even have my prison garb here.”
“My car’s still at the Barns. I don’t care if you go to school, but if you don’t drop me off, you and Orphan Girl are stuck here all day.”
Ronan grimaced. “In these clothes?”
Adam was already brushing his teeth.
Ronan levered himself off the mattress. The thing was really unspeakable. He was going to have to sneak in here and switch it out while Adam was at school during the day. “Fine. I’ll drop you off. But we’re stopping for food, so hurry your ass up. I’m fucking starving.”
Ronan did not enter the bounds of Aglionby’s parking lot, bringing the BMW to a stop across the street instead. Adam felt something in him stutter. The drudgery of the school day seemed an inadequate reason to leave Ronan in the company of no one but a bird and a dream child to navigate his looming grief. Ronan seemed to sense his hesitation.
“Do you need me to pick you up after school?”
“I can get a ride,” Adam replied automatically, unused to admitting to needing anything he couldn’t provide for himself.
Sharply tuned into Ronan’s frequency, he could feel the sag of Ronan’s energy after this statement. Adam could picture the weight of Aurora’s death dragging Ronan into an alcohol-fueled despair as the day progressed, which he would have no need to mitigate without this meager appointment in the afternoon.
Softly, carefully, Adam stroked the pinky of Ronan’s right hand, resting on the gear shift, with his own. “But if you want to,” he added, “I’d like it.” This felt a little dangerous, like riding the edge of a whirlpool, pretending it was possible not to be sucked into the center.
Ronan’s pinky snagged Adam’s, holding Adam’s entire being firmly in place with only that small point of possession. There was something bright, alive, in his electric blue eyes Adam was much more interested in studying than anything in his academic curriculum.
“I want to,” Ronan said quietly.
“Okay,” said Adam. He got out of the car and entered the august confines of Aglionby Academy. He forced himself not to look back.