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His interest in you starts out purely practical. The Lynches tend to stick to what’s theirs and the Barns is a kingdom, a universe in a glass bubble, convinced there’s nothing better beyond. Ronan is fifty percent isolated and fifty percent isolationist and he seems to mind neither, content to live in the world his father made. He’s curious about your world too though, about Monmouth and Glendower and the magic past his rolling pastures and deeper into Virginia forests. The friendship you make with him is fast and fireproof, a planetary alignment with inescapable gravity.
So, you draw the attention of Declan Lynch. The first time you meet him, he’s just returned from a ‘business trip’ and he’s not his father’s shadow so much as his father’s ghost, a wraith lurking around the edges. The Barns does not get visitors, and he didn’t expect to see you sitting in the kitchen with Ronan and Aurora; Declan manages to snap a smile on, but it’s a second too late and too brittle to cover his bruises.
“You must be Richard,” he says, and already you get the sense that you’ve been investigated. His knuckles are split, and in the shadow of his collar you think you can see the suggestion of something spattered darkly over his shirt.
“Just Gansey,” you correct him. You put out a hand, and he hesitates, polite habit fighting the blood drying over his knuckles. The smile he gives you is too thin, the excuse is perfunctory, and even once he’s left the room you get the guilty sense that you are an intruder in a very intimate space.
Ronan tells you, “Ignore him, he’s always like that,” but you can’t shake the feeling that Declan isn’t. You think his quick, polished smile says he spends a lot of time being someone very different. But Ronan sees his brother in the Barns, has endless access to the truth of him and the truth has rendered all the secrets unremarkable.
You don’t ask Ronan how often Declan goes on business trips, or how Niall can walk around unmarred, with an easy smile. Ronan tells you freely how much of a liar Declan is, but you’re a Gansey; you grew up in politics. Lies and ugly necessities have intersected in every part of the world you’ve seen.
You are never quite welcome at the Barns, because no one who’s not a Lynch is really meant to be at the Barns, but Ronan doesn’t stop making irreverent invitations. Declan watches the way you talk to his brother, and Declan is careful to shuffle things out of sight when you enter rooms, and it’s Declan, not Aurora or Niall or always even Ronan, that properly seems to listen to what you have to say.
And you watch the way Declan’s hands tighten at the sound of a car in the drive, the tension in his shoulders when he greets any stranger at the door, the scabs on his knuckles replaced frequently enough they never quite heal, the dull look deep in his eyes whenever he gets back from a business trip. The worst is when he’s been gone a week, returns with a flighty, incorporeal Niall, and winces when anything catches on his torn fingernails. The question sits heavy on your tongue for as long as he’s in the room with you – the exact amount of time it takes to gingerly make a cup of coffee – but you manage to swallow it down. He wouldn’t give you the truth, besides.
Instead, you ask, “Jetlagged?” when his hands shake, imagining you’re Helen or your mother or someone else who knows how to make things easy for people. Your desperate curiosity about what he clawed away from poisons your tone with insincerity.
“It was a long flight,” he answers. He eyes you up, less suspicious than usual, and a trace of real amusement curls his lips. Ronan makes a disgusted sound in the back of his throat, but you’re looking at how Declan leaves with two trembling hands wrapped around his mug like it’s a lifeline, and it takes a moment before you can refocus in the right place.
The next time you go to the Barns, you pass Aurora in the drive and she tells you that Matthew and Ronan are having a water fight behind the house. She doesn’t mention Declan, and she has to think when you ask if he’s even home.
You find him in a downstairs sitting room and realise too late that it’s a bad time; Declan is the only Lynch who ever seems to really feel the stress of the wider world, and the bags under his eyes are bruised purple, his fingers drum a restless rhythm over his legs, and the way he watches out the window is the rawest, most crystalline anxiety you have ever seen.
He schools his expression for you too late, and all you can think is that he is not a Lynch. Lynches are carefree fire, offhand wonder and sunlight through stained glass; Declan is sturdy, practical, future-minded, and under it all, a wreck composed of all the stress no one but him was willing to pick up. It’s unthinkable, in the circles you’re from, that an eldest son could be an afterthought, but there’s no denying how poorly the Barns suit Declan.
It has also occurred to you, more than once, that you’re not much of a Gansey either. The distant, warlike laughter of Ronan and Matthew drifts in from the yard; you take the seat opposite Declan, stare at him through the dust studding the morning light.
You’re not comfortable with lies, and he’s not comfortable with the truth, and you’re still searching for a suitable topic when he speaks up. “You’re good for Ronan.”
“Am I?” It’s not what you were expecting to hear – you’ve never seen evidence of anything bad for Ronan.
It is hard to remember that Declan is only a few years older than you when he turns his exhausted gaze on you. “To have a real friend. To spend more time outside of here.”
“The Barns are lovely,” you say neutrally.
Something black flickers across Declan’s expression, but he doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t mind you sitting with him, until Matthew eventually charges into the house and notices you, and he doesn’t mind you when you come back. Ronan objects, because Ronan is Ronan, but your time begins to split as you sit in the kitchen with Declan and say safe, benign things about places he’s been, and leave space for everything going unsaid in-between.
When Niall dies, when Aurora stops, when Ronan begins steadily trying to destroy himself, you see the shift in Declan. Any chance left to improve his standing in his parent’s eyes has expired, an invisible deadline he tripped over, and now his status is set. Being no one’s favourite will define him for the rest of his life.
You don’t see much of him in the first month after, because the estate has come crashing down onto his shoulders with hefty inevitability, and he has to move himself and Matthew into the dorms while you attempt to stop Ronan careening out of control. It is months before he can make time to see you, and you get to see how the aftermath has settled over him; there’s a certain freedom surrounding him, the kind that breathes with knowing he can do no worse. And there’s a shadow that will never let him go.
He stops by Monmouth at times when Ronan’s sure to be out, because he still has stitches from the last time they saw each other. “He has to keep going to school,” Declan tells you, and a reflective part of you thinks that it’s not the kind of thing that should fall to you, but it’s not the kind of thing that should have fallen to Declan either. “The shaved head and the tattoo, it’s – whatever. But if he gets expelled, then that’s it for him.”
You assume ‘it’ to be a place in the world that Declan could respect. “I’ll make sure he passes,” you promise, hoping it’s a promise you’ll be able to keep by willpower alone. Declan nods, and if you thought he used to look tired after trips, that was before you’d seen him like this, drawn and alone, not really a Lynch and not yet really anything else. He looks so tired. You ask, “How are you holding up?”
He blinks, like it’s not a question anyone has asked him, and the pause before he answers betrays the honesty in it. “It’s difficult,” he says, slowly, and it’s the strangest thing to realise he is not lying, that you have been to the Barns and you’ve taken in Ronan and whatever you are to Declan is more than nothing. “But it’s not entirely – I mean, I wasn’t planning for it. I didn’t want this. I just knew that sooner or later…”
There is a sour taste down the back of your throat, and Declan looks away. Torn nails, a bruise black as cancer over his cheekbone, blood drying under his nose, that awful heartstring twitch at the sound of wheels over gravel. There is a question rotting under your tongue, and you keep it there, put a hand on his shoulder and feel stress and tension and steel willpower not to crumble.
You don’t save Ronan as well as you’d like. You don’t save him, and you don’t call Declan as you sit in the hospital waiting room, fingers wrapped white around your phone as you wait for someone to come and tell you he’ll be alright. You know you should call, you know he should know, but you don’t think you can stack this onto his shoulders with everything else. The wait is slowly shredding you from the inside, and you stare at every passing doctor, trying to read it on their faces, he’s fine, he’s going to make it, or I’m so sorry.
You wait until you’re finally let in to see him, and only then can you manage to tap out a text with awful, still fingers. One line, not as much as Declan deserves, the best you can manage.
Ronan says he’s sorry. You cling to his fingers, but can’t look at him for the rest of the night.
Declan comes by at three in the morning, furious and aching. He doesn’t know what to say to his brother. In the hall, in front of you, you can see the hairline fractures slowly, surely splitting him. “I can’t believe he’d do it,” he says, and his tone is hollow space. “I can’t believe – he’s so selfish.”
You nod, numb, agreeing with his emotions more than his words. Your hand finds his shoulder again, and the tremors running through him are borne from more feeling than he should be able to fit in him.
Declan drags a hand over his face. “He can’t do this,” he says. “He doesn’t understand, but it’s more than him. Gansey, if you can’t help him then I’ll need to move him into the dorms with me.”
You think of stitches and bruises and the shattered plaster his fist left in one of your walls. “I can. I’ll watch him – Noah will help. We’ll look after him.” If your voice trembles, if you are both far, far too young for this, you ignore it out of necessity.
Declan’s roommate at Aglionby is even more of a shameless people-pleaser than he is, which means he is out virtually every time you go over, which is – according to your other friends who live in dorms – the luckiest arrangement you could hope for.
If there was ever a boy that you could take home - and you're still not sure that there is - it would be Declan. He has regrown himself in the months since his father’s death, not free from the deep well of disappointment he was born into but close enough now to what he wants to be. He’s got outward confidence and charisma, and a smile made to be served with champagne. What your father would call a 'go-getter'. Ronan despises you seeing him, but Ronan owes you more than this, and you can’t stop yourself from trying to help Declan’s scattered pieces and shifting smile and bitter heart.
You lie on his bed in the dorms while he showers, and you think about all the half-truths and part-truths and truths-by-omission that he has dared to give you. One week ago he turned up with half his face beaten purple, and he told Ronan it was burglars and he didn’t tell you anything at all.
You are meant to be too well-bred to go through people’s things, but you go to his dresser anyway, half-formed rationalisations skipping through your mind. You rummage through the socks in his top drawer, find a roll of boxer’s tape – the same kind Ronan uses – and spare a moment of regret. Maybe if you’d asked him to teach you how to fight, you wouldn’t have broken your thumb. Maybe if you’d asked him to teach you how to fight you could have saved both of you some time.
Behind the tape is the gun. You don’t lift it up from the drawer, because you don’t want to be familiar with it, don’t want to know the weight of it or if that black metal would feel cool to the touch. It should be warm, you think. You regard it like it has just shot someone, and you thumb the edge of the box of bullets behind it, and then you close the drawer.
Even shut away, your eyes don’t stop drifting to the drawer as though the gun is calling to you, magnetic. You’re lying on Declan’s bed by the time he returns, and you study the marks on his broad shoulders, a much smaller nest of barbs than Ronan bears but no less difficult to look at. “Can I ask,” you start, watching him stiffen because no question you ask permission for could be a good one. “Are you continuing your father’s business, or just settling things?”
The words unsaid are it’s been months and it must be lucrative and it must be dangerous. It almost destroyed you, didn’t it? The look Declan gives you is too composed, safely neutral, an expression that should go to someone other than you and one that has you waiting to hear the lie in his answer. “There’s a lot to settle,” he says, and it is not a lie – his expression is just an attempt to mask his smouldering anger. “I want to be free of it. I just have to be careful.”
You nod and don’t say anything else, because you can guess at what he does and the commercialisation of wonders sits very poorly with you. But it’s one of the things you don’t talk about. Matthew is another. Ronan is a thing you talk about on days when Declan has the energy, which is fewer than you’d expect.
He sits on the bed beside you, still warm and wet from the shower, and you think vaguely how unfair it is that Ronan will call Declan a liar because he thinks lies of omission don’t count. Quietly, you tell him, “I think you’ve done very well so far.”
You can’t see his face, but you feel his shoulders stiffen, the stress that wants to eat him alive seeping out his pores. A moment later and he breathes deep, relaxing on the exhale. The look he gives you is not unguarded, and it isn’t a mask, and it’s the best he can do, really. He says, “I’m sure you’re the only one who thinks so,” with a smile that attempts to be wan but looks spun out of sugar glass.
You sit up and clap a hand over his shoulder, feel the heat and the tension in him as he covers your fingers with his. It’s not enough, but it is the best you can do; you have to hope your best means more to him than it does to Ronan. The myth of the Barns shattered months ago and you have nothing but sincerity to offer.
He gets up eventually, because he has a club or a class or a date, and you don’t ask about the gun like you didn’t ask what he tore his nails trying to escape from because he won’t be a liar if you don’t force him to be. You wonder how long it will take him to tidy up the scraps of Niall’s work, and you wonder how much longer after that it will take for him to scrub his father’s shadow off him, and you hope you and he and Ronan can all hold on long enough to see it.