Work Text:
- The Doorway
The thing about Ronan Lynch was that he was not afraid of anything.
This was well known. He would have told you himself. He had raced cars down the interstate at three in the morning. He had jumped off the roof of Monmouth Manufacturing into a pile of mattresses on a dare that nobody had actually made. He had looked nightmares in the face and brought back their teeth. He was eighteen years old, with a shaved head and a tattoo that went from his shoulders to the small of his back, and people crossed the street.
He was telling Gansey something. It didn't matter what. It was June, a week after Gansey, Blue and Adam’s graduation, and the big room at Monmouth was hot and full of light. He was leaning in the doorway of his bedroom with his arms folded, in the middle of a sentence, a good one, sharp, with a fuck in it in exactly the right place.
"—so I told him, that's not a carburetor problem, that's a you problem, and if he wanted to—"
Adam came out of the bathroom/kitchen/laundry behind him.
The doorway was narrow. Adam said, "'Scuse me," absently, drying his hands on his shirt, and turned sideways to get past. As he went, his shoulder dragged across Ronan's chest, and his hand landed for half a second on Ronan's hip, lightly, to steady himself.
That was all. He might have done it to a doorframe.
"—if he wanted," Ronan said. "To. He could."
Gansey looked up from his journal.
"He could," said Ronan. ‘He could do that to me any day and I might eat him alive—' His mouth was still open. There had been a sentence in it. It had been right there. "The— With the thing. Carburetor."
‘Carburetor, Lynch. Get a fucking grip’
"He could what?"
"What?"
"What could he do with the carburetor?"
"Nothing," Ronan snarled. "Forget it. Jesus. I don't know, it's a story, it doesn't have to go anywhere."
Adam had crossed to the window and was looking down at the lot, at his own terrible car. He hadn't noticed. There was a line of sunburn on the back of his neck where his collar ended. Ronan could still feel exactly where the hand had been, all five fingers of it, as if it had been dipped in paint.
Gansey was looking at him over the top of his glasses with gentle concern.
"Are you all right? You've gone a.. very odd color."
"It's hot," said Ronan, and went into his room, and shut the door, and stood behind it with his forehead against the wood.
‘Great’, he thought. ‘That's great. That's really fucking normal.’
On her perch, Chainsaw put her head on one side and made a noise like a laugh.
"Shut up," he told her.
- The Looking
Being looked at didn't bother him. Ronan had spent years making sure of it. You had to be looked at, if you looked like he did. It was the point. People stared, and he stared back, and they stopped.
Adam Parrish didn't stare. That was the problem. Adam studied.
They were on the floor at Monmouth, all of them, around Gansey's cardboard model of Henrietta, eating pizza out of the box. Gansey and Blue were arguing about a map. Noah was lying on his back with a slice balanced on his chest that he wasn't eating. Ronan was against the couch, with one knee up. He was minding his own business. He was being, as he would later point out, perfectly fucking civil.
He felt it start on the left side of his face.
He knew what it was without turning. He always knew. Adam had a way of going quiet in a room and getting interested in something, a bad wire, a hard problem, with those level, dusty-blue eyes, and you could feel it land on you like a hand. He looked at things until he understood how they worked. He was going to be very good at college. He was leaving in August.
He was looking at Ronan like that right now.
Ronan did not turn his head.
He kept his eyes on the cardboard courthouse. He chewed on the leather bands at his wrist. When that wasn't enough, he started picking at his thumbnail, hard, down at the quick, with great attention, like a guy with a real job to do. His heart had begun to do something stupid. He could feel it in his throat. He could feel heat climbing up the back of his neck and into his ears, and there was nothing to do about it. He had no hair to hide them. He had made a tactical error at fifteen and here he was.
What, he thought, furiously, at the side of Adam's head. ‘What. What are you looking at. Quit it. Don't quit it.’
"Lynch."
"What."
"You're bleeding."
He looked down. He had taken the corner of his thumbnail clean off. There was blood on his knuckle.
"Huh," said Ronan.
"Here." Adam had gotten up. He had gotten a napkin. He was crouching, right in front of him, close, with his sunburn and his fine fair eyebrows, and he took Ronan's hand by the wrist and turned it over in both of his to look at it. He looked at it in the same way, careful, curious, as if it were a part he had not seen before.
Adam's hands were warm. They were long and rough and clever, and Ronan had thought about them more than he had thought about God.
"It's not deep," Adam said. "You should quit doing that. Hold this on it."
"Mm," said Ronan. It was the only sound available.
Adam went back to his pizza.
From the floor, flat on his back, Noah turned his pale head and looked at Ronan. Then he smiled, slow and sweet and smudgy. It was a smile that knew things.
Ronan showed him the bleeding thumb. He added a different finger to do it.
- The Pig
There were five of them and the Camaro had been built for people who did not have friends.
"It'll be fine," Gansey had said. "We'll squeeze." He always said that. It was never fine. Blue got the front, because Blue got the front now. That left three in a back seat the size of a church pew for children, and Ronan in the middle because he had gotten in last, on account of a disagreement with Chainsaw about whether she was coming.
So. Noah on his left, cold as a windowpane. On his right, Adam.
Adam's leg was against his.
It was against his from the hip to the knee, the whole length, because there was nowhere else for it to go. Adam was in his work pants. He had his elbow on the door and his chin on his fist and was watching the fields go by, sleepy, at ease, thinking about nothing. Every time the Pig took a curve, which was often, because Gansey drove like a man being chased by a hat, Adam leaned with it. All of him. Warm. Shoulder to knee.
Ronan sat like a person being X-rayed.
He had tried, in the first mile, to move over. There was no over. There was only Noah, who did not give, and who was chilly besides. So he put both hands on his own knees, in fists. He looked straight ahead at the back of Gansey's seat. He had counted the stitches in it. There were forty-one.
‘This is nothing’, he informed himself. ‘This is a leg. You have one. You have two.’
The Pig went over the railroad tracks. Adam's knee knocked his and stayed there.
Ronan turned his face to the left, sharply, toward the far window, so that nobody on his right could see what his face was doing. It was hot enough to fry an egg on.
This left him looking directly at Noah.
Noah was six inches away, looking right back. He had his hands folded in his lap. He looked from Ronan's face, down to the two legs pressed together, and up again. And he smirked. It was a tiny, awful, delighted smirk.
"Don't," Ronan mouthed.
"I didn't say anything," Noah said, out loud, in his soft blurry voice.
"What?" said Adam, turning.
"Nothing," Ronan said, to the window. It came out strangled.
"You okay? You're kind of rigid."
"I'm fine, Parrish."
"I can scoot over,"
"You can't scoot over. There's no over, sit still," Ronan said, all in one breath, and Adam shrugged and settled back, and if anything he was closer than before.
Eleven more miles. Ronan counted the stitches again. There were still forty-one.
On Sunday he sat in the pew at St. Agnes between his brothers, and bowed his head, and was sorry for a number of things. But he found, when he got to it, that he could not make himself be sorry about that one.
Okay, he told God. You saw that. I know you saw that. I'm not going to do anything about it. He thought it over. It was a really long car ride, he added, in his own defense.
- Nino's
Nino’s was loud on a Friday. That was why they went. You could say anything in the back booth and no one would hear it over the jukebox.
Adam had come straight from a double shift. Trailer factory in the morning, garage after. Ronan could tell before he sat down. He moved like something was holding him up by a string. He had grease in the creases of his knuckles and gray under his eyes, and he slid into the booth next to Ronan, on the inside, against the wall, and said, "I'm not hungry, y'all order," in an accent he only let out when he had nothing left to hold it in with.
"You're eating," Ronan said.
"I'm fine."
"I didn't ask. Sargent, tell them to put sausage on it."
Blue, in her apron, wrote it down without looking at Adam, which was a kindness. She knew about Adam and things being bought for him. Ronan knew about it too. He had found ways. He'd learned to be sneaky about it, like slipping medicine to a dog.
Gansey started in on a theory. It was a long one. It had Glendower in it and a river that might have moved. Ronan slouched down and stretched his legs under the table and listened with half an ear. He was content. He would have died before saying so, but he was: the red vinyl, Gansey's voice, the smell of the place, Adam a warm shape at the edge of his eye.
The warm shape tipped.
It happened slowly. Adam's head went back against the booth. Then it rolled, a little, to the left. Then, with the long sigh of a guy putting down something heavy, Adam Parrish leaned over and came to rest with his temple on Ronan's shoulder.
Ronan stopped breathing.
He just stopped. It seemed safest.
Adam was asleep. He was actually asleep, in the back booth at Nino's, with his mouth a little open and his hair, dusty and fine and no color anyone had a name for, against the side of Ronan's neck. He weighed nothing. He weighed about a thousand pounds. He was warm all the way through Ronan's shirt.
Gansey had stopped talking.
Ronan looked up. Gansey was looking at them. His eyebrows had gone up, and his mouth was open to say something kind, some awful, fond, Gansey thing.
Ronan gave him a look.
He put everything he had into it. He had killed conversations with less. It said: If you speak, if you make one sound, if you wake him up, I will take your journal and I will feed it to the bird, page by page, and I'll make you watch.
Gansey closed his mouth. He nodded, gravely. He picked up his iced tea and took an extremely quiet sip.
So Ronan sat there.
He sat for forty minutes. The pizza came and he didn't touch it, because he would have had to move his right arm. He kept his face blank. He had a lot of practice at that. He picked a spot on the far wall, a framed photograph of somebody's Italian grandfather, and stared at it like it owed him money. Inside he was screaming. It was one long, even, continuous scream, like a kettle or a smoke alarm. His whole right side had gone to sleep. His ears were on fire. He did not move a muscle.
Adam breathed in, and out. At some point he turned his face a little further in.
I'm going to die, Ronan thought, quite calmly, looking at the Italian grandfather. Right here. This is it. Tell my brothers I was a dick on purpose.
Blue came by with the check. She looked at the two of them. She looked at Ronan's face, and at the untouched slice in front of him.
She didn't say a word. She took a clean napkin out of her apron and, very gently, tucked it over Adam's shoulder like a blanket.
Then she patted Ronan on the top of the head, twice, and left before he could bite her.
- St. Agnes
Some nights he couldn't be at Monmouth. Some nights he couldn't be anywhere. He got in the BMW and drove until the needle was buried and Henrietta was a smear, and when that stopped working he ended up, without ever really deciding to, at the church.
Adam lived above the office at St. Agnes, in a room with a slanted ceiling that he had to duck under. Adam never asked why he had come. He opened the door, looked at him, said, "It's two in the morning, Lynch," and stood back.
There was one bed. It was a mattress, really. Ronan took the floor. He always did. Adam threw him the other pillow and the blanket off the chair, and turned the light off, and that was all.
The floor was hard. It was fine. He liked it. He lay on his back on Adam Parrish's floorboards with his arms crossed over his chest like a dead knight on a tomb (“because it’s funny, Parrish”), and listened.
Adam fell asleep fast, like a man who had earned it. His breathing went long and even. The whole little room smelled like him: motor oil, laundry soap, the old dust of the church. There were his boots by the door, side by side. There was his one good shirt on a hanger. Everything he owned would fit in a car, and in August he would put it in one, and go.
Ronan looked at the ceiling. It was closer than ceilings usually were.
It was easier here. He didn't know why. He didn't sleep much anywhere, and he couldn't afford to sleep carelessly. But lying on this floor, listening to that breathing, the thing in his chest that was always revving finally throttled down. He thought he could have lain there for a hundred years.
Above him, Adam turned over.
The mattress creaked. An arm came out from under the sheet and slid off the edge of the bed, and hung.
Adam's hand stopped about four inches from Ronan's face.
Ronan looked at it. Fuck, he looked at it.
He didn't have a choice. It was right there. It hung in the bit of streetlight that came through the window, loose, open, palm toward him, the fingers curled a little. He could see the knuckles. He could see the scar across the back of the thumb and the oil that never quite washed out of the lines. It moved, very slightly, with Adam's breath.
He wasn't thinking about holding it.
He was absolutely not. He was lying on the floor of a church, with his arms crossed, like a normal person, and he wasn't thinking about how it would be to reach up, six inches, and fit his own hand into that one. How the fingers might close. They would be warm. They were always warm. God, Adam's hands would be the death of him if reckless driving didn't get him first.
He wasn't thinking that he could tell himself he'd been asleep.
He lay there not thinking about it until the window went gray. His own hands were under his arms, where he could keep an eye on them. He tried to drown the thoughts he was decidedly NOT having by blasting music in his mp3.
Around five, Adam's fingers twitched in a dream. Ronan said, in Latin, under his breath, a word that he would have to mention on Sunday.
+1. The BMW
It was the last week of July, and they were just driving.
Nobody else was along. It was dusk, and the back roads were empty, with the fields going blue on both sides. Ronan had the windows down and the music off, for once, because Adam had asked. He was doing seventy. For him that was a Sunday stroll. Adam had his seat tipped back and one foot up on the dash, which nobody else alive was allowed to do, and for a long time neither of them had said anything.
It was good. It was so good that it had started to hurt, a little, down under the ribs. Ronan kept his eyes on the road.
"Can I tell you something?" Adam said.
"You're gonna."
"The doorway. At Monmouth, back in June. You were telling Gansey about that guy's carburetor."
Ronan's hands tightened on the wheel.
"You never did finish that," Adam said thoughtfully. "I wondered what he could've done with it."
"I don't remember." Ronan swallowed. Hard.
"And then the pizza night. When you took your thumbnail off."
"So?"
"And in the Pig. I offered to scoot. You told me there wasn't any over." He sounded like he was reading down a list. He had turned his head against the seat, and Ronan could feel it, that look, the level one, landing on the side of his face. "And Nino's. I slept forty minutes on you. I had a napkin on me when I woke up. You hadn't eaten anything."
"Sargent did the napkin."
"I know she did." A pause. "I wasn't asleep the whole time at St. Agnes, either."
The car drifted. Ronan put it back between the lines.
His face was burning. His ears. His neck. He could not have gotten a word out for money. He stared through the windshield at the road coming on and thought, Okay. Okay. So he knows. So that's it. He's known the whole fucking time, he's been keeping a list, like it's a wiring diagram, and now he's going to be decent about it. He's going to say something kind and careful, in the good voice, and I'm going to have to drive this car into a tree. I will drive this car into a fucking tree I swear to God-
"I thought I was imagining it," Adam said. "For a while. I don't ever figure things are for me. You know that." His voice had gone quiet, and all the Henrietta had come up in it. "So I had to be sure. I'm sorry. That's how I am. I had to see it five times."
Ronan swallowed again. "And?"
"And I'm sure."
He moved. Ronan saw it from the corner of his eye. Adam took his foot down off the dash, sat up, and leaned across the gearshift. He wasn't in any hurry about it. He was doing it on purpose.
He put his hand on the back of Ronan's neck.
His palm lay flat and warm over the top of the tattoo, just where the hooks of it came up out of his collar. His thumb moved along the base of Ronan's skull, through the stubble, in a slow circle. It went around again.
Every single thing in Ronan Lynch went still.
The revving quit. It just quit, all at once, like somebody had found the key and turned it. He hadn't known how loud it was until it stopped. His shoulders came down. His foot came off the gas, without his say-so, and the BMW began to coast, seventy, sixty, forty, the fields going by slower, the crickets getting louder through the open windows.
He pulled over. He had to. He got it onto the grass and into park, with his hands not quite steady, and then just sat there, with his eyes shut and his head bowed forward into that hand.
"Ronan," Adam said. And then, softer, half a laugh in it, trying the word out: "Ro."
Oh, Ronan thought. Oh, shit.
"That one," he said. His voice was a wreck. He didn't open his eyes. "That one you did on purpose."
"Yeah."
"You asshole."
"Yeah," said Adam. "Look at me."
He looked.
Adam was right there. Dusk in his hair. Sunburn across his nose. He was smiling, the small, real, crooked one that hardly showed. But his eyes were serious, and there was a pulse going fast in his throat. Ronan understood, with a shock that went all the way to his fucking boots, that Adam was scared too. He had counted to five because he was the kind of person who needed to be sure. And then he had reached over anyway.
"Tell me if I've got it wrong," Adam said.
"You haven't got it wrong." It came out too fast, too rough, with no cool in it at all, and he didn't care. "Jesus, Parrish. You've never got anything wrong in your life."
Adam kissed him.
It was careful for about a second. Then Ronan made a sound he would deny until the end of time and got both hands into Adam's shirt, and it wasn't careful. The gearshift was in the way. Neither of them cared. Adam's hand never left the back of his neck. And they touched and kissed and touched and touched-
When they came apart, the first stars were out. Ronan had his forehead on Adam's shoulder and was breathing like he'd run there.
"Your ears are red," Adam observed.
"Fuck off."
"They've been red since June."
"I will leave you in this field."
"No, you won't," said Adam, peacefully, and he was right about that, too.
They sat there a while longer, while it got dark, with the engine ticking as it cooled. Then Ronan put the car in gear. He drove the rest of the way home at thirty-five miles an hour, which he had never done before in his life, so that it would take longer.
He had Adam's hand on the back of his neck the whole way.