Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

At the end of the day, there are a few things that Adam knows are true. He knows, for instance, that it was not luck that landed him at Yale, that it was discipline and hard work and a severe dedication to every extracurricular he could take, as well as a blatant disregard for his health. He knows that he won’t drop out of school, but he also knows that if there’s going to be a year for him to decide to do it, it’ll be in the first five months.

He knows that he’s probably really lucky that he isn’t living in Timothy Dwight or Silliman college, but instead that he’s living in Trumbull, which means that to get to the library he doesn’t even have to cross a street. He barely has to cross a courtyard.

He also knows that around nine at night the library begins to empty of even the most dedicated graduate students, and then it becomes his own private chapel to the god of overwork and over-dedication to the cause, although, since he hasn’t decided if he’s declaring Political Science or Engineering as a major, the cause is still a mystery.

The first time that Adam stepped into the library, he actually thought he had made a wrong turn. New Haven wasn’t so confusing as Boston, for the five minutes he entertained the notion of Harvard (until he was overcome with an urge to punch everyone on his tour with him, and he had to force himself to actually physically restrain Ronan from violence), being built on a grid. But he was still new, and it was still overwhelming, and he was still slightly (slightly being overwhelmingly) intimidated by the grandeur of it all, not to mention the fact that he lived in a building that looked like it probably had witnessed the rise of a European royal family inside it’s walls. So when he walked into the library, hoping to get a head start on being a student by figuring out the inner workings of the place, he thought he had maybe made a wrong turn and walked into a cathedral, instead.

The fact is that Adam had never been inside a cathedral, but as someone who lived a full year of his life in a church, he recognized the splash of Catholicism when he saw it. The soaring architecture, the stained glass, the long corridor that looked like it would lead to a crucifix instead led to a painting of a woman holding an orb and a book, and Adam wondered if that was a saint, and he turned and turned until he saw the sign for library services, despite the fact that there wasn’t a single book in sight.

That had been the first time. Now, knowing the stacks as well as he knew the ones in Aglionby and being on a first name basis with at least four librarians and one very angry archivist, Adam navigates the library like it is a calm port in the stormy sea of hard work. He thinks he’s more focused here, calmer. Sometimes he takes food from the dining hall and sneaks it through the building (although he also thinks that the security guard at the desk knows he’s doing it and doesn’t mind) to eat his lunch in the University Librarian’s courtyard, just to be surrounded by the library.

The semester passed so quickly; Adam can feel the pull of Henrietta in his bones. Not Henrietta, he corrects himself, but the pull of Ronan, the Barns, of Opal, of dreaming cows and leyline, of sticky cool Virginian winters. It’s late now, and there’s early snow falling which makes the city beyond glow with an odd blue light. As much as Adam loves Yale, his classes, the people he’s met who don’t care where he summered or where his family is from or why he can’t hear out of one ear, he’s generally unimpressed with New Haven as anything more than where this moment is his life has settled. The city itself is more than Henrietta, yes. But it doesn’t charm Adam. However, with the snow settling and the light’s glowing and the view from the fourteenth floor make everything quiet and still and blue, he thinks that it really is beautiful.

He’s comfortable, and he thinks he hears something out of his left ear, sees something, but then his phone is ringing with the Murder Squash Song and he’s flinging himself on his bag to answer it, both because he had that on silent this is a library, oh the humiliation, and also, because-

“Hey, asshole. Did you eat?”

Adam’s stomach rumbles so loudly he thinks that Ronan can probably hear it over the phone. He looks at his watch - newly acquired after accepting that Opal needed the one he gave her more than he did - and realizes that he missed dinner. “No,” he replies as he starts shoving things into his messenger bag. He fiddles with the strap that is starting to protest the weight of his books, papers, and the brand-new computer that was part of his scholarship package and contemplates how long it will hold out. “Did you?”

“Opal and I went to Cal’s in Singer’s Falls, got cheeseburgers. It gave her the most rank fucking gas,” Ronan says, and it’s clear that he’s back home at the Barns now, because Adam can hear one of the cats meowing softly in the background.

Adam wrinkles his nose involuntarily. “Thanks, Lynch,” he mutters dryly as he gets the elevator down to the first floor.

“Don’t bitch, you don’t have to smell it. Anyway, she’s in bed now,” Ronan replies. “What are you wearing.”

“I’m in the library elevator, you know.”

“So, jeans and that ugly sweater that Gansey’s mom got you, and no coat,” Ronan guesses, and Adam is disgusted that he’s right. His scholarship has deep pockets but he still resists buying a coat. He didn’t expect it to be cold until January, but December is already nipping at the bottom his his Virginian wardrobe. “You’re going to die of hypofuckingthermia, Parrish.”

The elevator opens and Adam bustles out of the stacks and into the nave, waving as he passes the late night librarians. They know his schedule, and they like him enough that they don’t mind him on the phone. Besides, it’s so late, there’s almost no one else in the library except the odd graduate student avoiding going home. “Shit, when did you become my mother?” Adam asks.

“Your mother doesn’t give a shit about you keeping warm,” Ronan snaps back, and it stings, because it’s true, and because Adam knows that he offended Ronan, but that was unwarranted.

And the sting doesn’t go away. “What do you want, Lynch,” Adam asks, as if he’s fed up with this conversation, even though his heart is thumping stop, stop, stop, because Ronan is calling, because Ronan is right here.

There’s silence. “Jesus Christ,” Ronan growls. “What the hell am I making the effort for?”

There’s a part of Adam that wants to apologize, another part (the part that knew better than to try and soothe Robert Parrish) that insists that apologies don’t work, a third, more frustrating part that feels the old Henrietta exhaustion rise up in him, and the last part that actually speaks for the three previous part. “Look, I’ll call you in the morning,”

“What the fuck ever,” Ronan snaps. “Eat something or don’t, do whatever you fucking want,” he finishes, and hangs up the phone.

Adam is just outside, his hands numb, and he fumbles his phone into his pocket and rubs his face. His nose is frozen. His ears hurt. He thinks about the mountain of work on his desk, about the essays he has to write, about his finals. It’s only a week left to go, and it feels like an eternity. By the time he’s back in his dorm apartment, his suitemates have all left their books in the common room and Adam has to pick his way through to his sad, lonely box of breakfast bars. He opens it and eats one, thinking of Ronan’s last comment, translating it from his anger and into the rare language of Ronan caring, and coming up empty.

Adam recognizes fatigue and is well equipped to deal with it. Tonight he puts an earbud in his good ear, curls up next to the heater, and reads until he falls asleep there.

He considers calling in the morning, but decides against it, pretended it’s not his pride and failing at that lie to himself. He looks at his phone to see if maybe Ronan called, but there isn’t anything there and Adam has to breathe through his mouth to calm himself down. There are a lot of reasons that Ronan doesn’t call every day, ranging from feeding the cows to just not wanting to. This day isn’t any different. They squabble all the time, over things and words harsher and crueler than that.

He manages breakfast and a study session, then lunch before he’s holed himself back up in the top floor of the library, stacks of books around him and his focus on the work in front of him. It’s easy to get lost in it; he thinks about calling Ronan, but then he gets distracted by the sweet temptation of work and study.

And he misses dinner again, looking up at nine to squint owlishly at his phone. The phone was a graduation present from Gansey, and Adam had accepted it because he was getting better at that. Because it came from a genuine place in Gansey, and Adam recognized that place for what it was, instead of thinking it was from that part of his best friend that liked to own exotic things. In any case, he needed a phone now. It was a real tangible line to his family - to Gansey and Blue, traveling the country, to Ronan and Opal. He wouldn’t care if the people in his class, in his dorm, his professors and peers thought that he was weird for not having a phone. But he needed one for the people who mattered.

Still, Blue had to step in and help him choose one, his data plan was abysmal so he mostly stuck to the Yale wifi, and the only luxury it had was unlimited texts.

He sees a few of texts from Gansey - we’re in New Mexico and the sky is so blue, the cold is different, it gets in your lungs followed by i think henry got got stung by a scorpion calling poison control which, okay, Gansey, followed by no it’s a weird cactus it jumped him it’s fine, a text that Adam had to read four times and still was unsure to what exactly it means. He sends a quick question mark back, and goes through to make sure that Ronan hadn’t called.

Still nothing.

It’s late, and the announcement the library will close goes off, so Adam packs his things. One of his favorite librarians, an older lady with a broad smile and a wicked sense of humor spots him. “You’ll get a brain bleed, studying too hard this late at night.”

“I’m trying to get ready for law school, I figure I should be intimately familiar with the library at night,” Adam replies. “This isn’t that much work, anyway,” he adds, although his bag and back groan a little in protest. “Got the short end and the late shift?”

“Is it law school this week? I thought you were going for mechanical engineering. And I like the late shift,” she replies. “Especially when it’s snowing. Even during finals, it’s quiet.”

It’s almost midnight now, and there are still people mulling about. Everyone looks as strung out and unhappy as Adam feels. “I bet you’ll be happy when we all leave.”

She laughs. “No, this place is weird when there aren’t any students. It makes it less easy to rationalize when you see something moving in the stacks.” She seems cheerful, though, it’s a joke. She presses her hand to Adam’s shoulder, a soft touch, something Adam hasn’t really had since he was back at the Barns for Thanksgiving, and he soaked in as much of Ronan’s skin as he could. This is different but it makes him realize how starved for touch he actually is.

He just smiles at her, a little nervously, but it’s a smile just the same. A year ago, he thinks, he might not have managed that. A year ago he was more of a mess. “You’re making it sound like the library is haunted.”

“Are you afraid of ghosts?” she asks, a mischievous smile on her face.

Adam thinks of Noah. It’s always weird to think of Noah, he seems to only manage to think of him like he’s thinking of someone slipping sideways through a room, like when he’s in the middle of doing something, thinks of something he needs to do, but forgets it a moment later. It’s a frustrating thing, because he knows he should miss Noah, but he can never latch onto the memory of him for long enough to miss him. “No,” he tells her. “I think that any ghost who stayed here is probably really lucky.”

“There are worse places on this campus to haunt,” she agrees. “Go home, Adam. Get some sleep. It’s going to do you better than another hour of work.”

He finds himself agreeing, sleepily, and making his way back to his dorm. His roommates had chipped in to buy a pizza (an apizza? Adam doesn’t know, or care) and Damen, who is 300 pounds of Hawaiian surfer with an astonishing gift for romantic poetry and a sharpness about astrophysics tells him to take a slice. He resists, choosing instead review his notes, except that about ten minutes in he can’t tell what he’s looking at anymore, and Damen is slowly pushing a plate of pizza his way. It doesn’t have sausage or avocado on it (Damen always orders his pizza with clams on it, and no one but Damen eats it willingly) and finally Adam finds himself choking a slice down, clams and all.

It’s almost two in the morning when Adam considers calling Ronan again, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. It’s not a good time to call him. Ronan isn’t the heaviest sleeper, and he still has bouts of insomnia, but he wakes up early to feed cows and chickens and Opal. Every morning, at five thirty, Ronan is already up and moving. It’s not fair to call him now.

But here’s Adam, his selfish need to hear Ronan’s voice gutting him. He’s so tired.

He doesn’t call. He doesn’t know what he would say, too tired to be able to figure out how to fix a fight that wasn’t a fight. He says the words out loud, whispering them, as if Ronan can hear them across the country. “Please call,” he says, his accent uncontrolled, vowels dropping like flies. “I miss you, I’m sorry I compared you to my mom, just please call.” He stops talking, and he thinks that this isn’t worth it, except that he knows that his hunger for the way Ronan smells and tastes and feels like will make him rethink that statement in a week. He wonders if this is his own personal addiction. He doesn’t drink because of what it did to his father, drunken and violent and arrogant, but he wonders if maybe he’s more like Robert Parrish than he wants to admit. The strains of addiction are there, except that Ronan is his drink of choice.

He gets up at seven and there are no missed calls, no texts, and he calls Gansey, which is very unfair, because it’s four in the morning in Arizona, which they arrived in the previous day. Gansey, however, is still a terrible insomniac, which means that Blue and Henry do a majority of the driving. “Adam!” he answers, cheerful, sounding robust and hale.

“How’s the Grand Canyon?” Adam asks. He has a map in his room that he uses to track where the trio are, but the truth is he doesn’t need it. Instead if he closes his eyes he can almost feel the phantom tug of Cabeswater, the thorny vines around his wrist that pull him right into Gansey.

Gansey’s voice is crackling a little. “Oh, it’s beautiful, but Blue got mobbed by psychics in Sedona and Henry thinks everything is too red, so I think we’re heading north next. They are,” Gansey says, a note of disdain entering his old man accent, “trying to convince me to go to Disneyland.”

Adam laughs. He is trying to picture Gansey, and Blue, and Henry all wearing Mickey Mouse ears they way he’s seen in ads online. It’s not difficult, because in the mental image in his head Gansey is smiling politely, Blue is staring at Henry, and Henry is grinning like a maniac. “It would be good for you,” he tries.

“Well, don’t tell Henry or Blue, they’ll try to get you to help convince them,” Gansey replies. “Adam, you do realize it’s four in the morning, right?”

“You don’t sleep,” Adam says. “Much.”

There is silence. “Well. Okay. How is Yale? My mother thinks I should consider it next year. We could be roommates.”

“They don’t room sophomores with freshmen, and anyway, you’ll probably end up in another college,” Adam says. “I thought she was advocating Georgetown.”

“I told her I would absolutely not live in D.C., can you imagine the nightmare, and if she considers a presidential bid, then it would be insufferable. I don’t want to talk about this,” Gansey says, uncomfortably, as if he’s just learning how to say what he doesn’t want to discuss.

“You started it,” Adam points out, and Gansey makes a noise like he’s sorry, so Adam drops the line. There’s silence. “Have you spoken to Ronan?”

“Last night,” Gansey says, and Adam feels something that he can’t quite describe happen in his stomach. It feels like someone found a rock, tied it around a string, and slingshoted it around his stomach. He didn’t think about what would happen when it was Ronan ignoring him. “He was very short with me,” Gansey adds, “but, well. Ronan.”

“Yeah. Ronan.” Adam didn’t think he could feel worse than the day that he sacrificed himself to Cabeswater, or the day that he was possessed by the demon and watched Gansey die, but the idea of losing Ronan over nothing, over a mistake, it’s just as bad. The idea of losing Ronan is like losing home, and he didn’t even realize it until now.

Gansey isn’t stupid, and Adam knows it, so when Gansey catches the shift in Adam’s voice he makes a soft noise. “You’ll be home soon. It’s all right. You’ll be fine.”

And Adam realizes that Gansey thinks that Adam just misses him. Which means, too, that Ronan hasn’t talked about it with Gansey.

It’s suddenly too exhausting to discuss any further. He just makes a small noise. “Okay. I should go.”

“Get some sleep,” Gansey agrees.

The next morning Adam hauls back to the library. He finds a desk on the top floor of the stacks, fills it with books, and reminds himself that work is the one constant relationship he can count on to keep the worst part of the world at bay.

He doesn’t call Ronan. He doesn’t have time. He drowns himself in studying, in complex math and ethical quandaries, he tosses himself complicated literature and sticky historical details. He doesn’t call Ronan. He puts an earbud into his good ear and eats breakfast bars for lunch and dinner so he doesn’t have to abandon his desk, drinks cold coffee from his cheap thermos. Around nine in the evening, when the snow is swirling down around the library and he can see the steam from the nearby buildings he sets his head down for a moment. He doesn’t cry.

He opens his eyes when he’s shunted in darkness, the lights of the library suddenly off, and he goes for his phone. “Shit,” he mutters, standing, then sitting back down. 12:01 the LCD reads, and he knows he’s fucked up. He doesn’t know how he missed the blaring announcement the library would close, but then he rubs his right ear and feels the distinct tingle of blood coming back to that side of his head, and he knows it was because it was pressed against the table. “Shit,” he says again and collects his things, and hopes and hopes that security hasn’t armed the building yet, but he doesn’t have hopes for that. He walks towards the elevator, down the corridor of books, and heaves his bag over his shoulder.

It bursts away from him, his books and his laptop scattering across the floor, his notes flying after. The strap he had been worried about for days snapped. A moment of panic fills him as he opens his computer to check, but the screen isn’t cracked, it lights up friendly for a moment. He closes it and picks his things up, putting them back in his back and tying the strap together. It won’t last - he’ll need to get a new one, his brain already calculating the cost - but it’ll do for a moment, anyway.

He rubs his eyes, exhausted, and hauls himself back up, heading out. Only he must have gotten turned around, because now he’s on the other end of the stacks, not near the stairwell and elevator at all. He can see the lights of New Haven all begin to blink out, the light of Yale dim with sleep.

He turns around and walks for almost a full three minutes before he realizes that he can’t find the stairwell in the dark. There’s panic for a moment and he reaches out his fingers to touch the wall when he hears something clatter. Instinctively he reaches for his bag, but it’s there under his fingers. “Hello?” he asks. “Is someone here?”

He hears something, movement, and he reaches for the wall again. This time it’s the sound of someone else moving, and his heart starts to race.

He hears it in his left ear.

But Adam Parrish has always been most proud of being able to master his own fear, so he pulls it back, breathes through his nose, and refuses to run. He moves slowly, trying to see through the darkness. It’s hard - all he can see is the shadows of the shelves (he remembers the librarian who gave him the first tour of the place announcing, proudly, that the shelves were structural, they held up the building) and the windows. He thinks that there’s a light app on his phone, so he reaches for that first.

His phone doesn’t respond, though. The screen doesn’t light up; it remains stubbornly dark. Adam looks around, as if there’s an answer in the gloom, but there’s nothing but silence around him, silence and darkness. He thinks yelling for help won’t work. This doesn’t feel real anymore.

Instead he inches his way around, following the wall. Each floor of the stacks are shaped the same, but the entrance is never in the same place. But in the center, there’s the pillar, the stairs and the elevator. He figures as long as he can find the stairs he can make his way down, and to the security desk at the front of the library.

He hears the movement but doesn’t let whatever it is scare him. He’s faced demons inside of his head, and demons outside, and demons shaped like people - sounds in the dark can’t hurt him. He knows it.

He finally feels the cold metal of where the elevator begins, but then he reels back. The door is gone, he thinks, he knows, suddenly. He can feel the empty, gasping emptiness in front of him and he falls back. Now he’s afraid. Now he’s afraid and he doesn’t quite know why, except that it feels like where the elevator should be there’s nothing.

The second the fear hammers through him is the second he can’t control it anymore. He makes a noise, calls out. “Cabeswater,” he says, as though the forest is there. As though Ronan is there, too, when Cabeswater is in Gansey and Ronan hasn’t perfected the new dream of it yet. It can’t save him. His heart slams a thudding beat in his chest, and he moves back until he feels one of the structural pillars behind him, and he he grips it. “Cabeswater, amabo te-”

He hears a high pitched whine in response, and a clattering, something running towards him, and he starts to run, hands outstretched, trying to find the stairs. He hears something, a scream like a bird. The door swings open and he tumbles, hitting his head on the way down, and then there’s silence as he lays on the cold ground between the floors, arms over his head.

~~~~

Ronan is asleep.

He’s been in hypersomnia for almost two days now; sleeping was coming easier and faster, dreaming more lucid and clearer. This always happened in high school. He would go weeks worried, thinking he would bring something dangerous, thinking about bees and hornets and giant monsters, and then sleep for days at a time, swinging between those two poles with vicious regularity.

This hasn’t happened since high school.

He’s asleep, facedown, his hands under his pillow when suddenly he’s jolted from sleep by Opal. “What the fuck,” he says, and he immediately checks. Nothing back. His dreams were strange and boring and not at all things he would have wanted in the real world. “What the fuck, Opal-”

She looks scared, and suddenly Ronan is wide awake - and so is Chainsaw, screaming her bad mood at Opal and Ronan both. Opal looks like she did, once upon a time, back when she was inside his head; her eyes wide and dark and her whole body shaking. “Adam,” she begins, and Ronan feels something inside of him turn cold and leaden. “vos postulo ut auxilium!” she says, and then she lapses from Latin into the language of the trees, but whatever she says it doesn’t matter because Ronan is already getting dressed.

“How did you talk to him? Did he call?” Opal doesn’t have her own phone, but she steals Ronan’s regularly to play Pokemon Go and Neko Atsume because Henry taught her how to and she’s endlessly fascinated by the repetitiveness and regularity of it. He reaches for his phone - there are no calls, no texts. He’s already calling.

Opal is shaking her head, and blabbering in no language that Ronan can understand when he’s awake or without thinking about it. Adam isn’t answering his phone. “Opal, fuck, English!”

“It was a dream!” she yells, finally.

Later, Ronan will think that if they were normal, he would have taken a breath and gone to sleep. If he were normal, he would have taken her back to her bed and told her it was “just” a nightmare.

But they’re not normal, not even a little. Dreams mean things to them. Opal has deer legs and she can digest anything and Opal can enter and exit Ronan’s dreams on a whim. He’s reaching for jeans and yanking them on. “Go get dressed,” he snaps at her, and she’s skittering down the hall.

The fact is that this isn’t exactly spur of the moment, either. He hadn’t spoken to Adam in days, after their fight. He thought the silence was because Adam was because of their fight and because of Adam’s finals; he called and when that went unanswered he asked Maura to watch Opal the next week so he could go up and get Adam, instead of letting him take the train to DC and picking him up there.

But there isn’t time to go drop Opal off now. She’s wide-eyed and silent as she gets into the car, her mouth around the leather strap of Adam’s watch. Ronan looks at her in the rearview mirror. He’s about to break a shitload of laws to get them from Singers Falls to New Haven in record time, and he has to be fucking smart about it. The rational part of him sounds a lot like Declan. It’s the part of him that says before you do this turn on your radar detector and make sure that Opal and Chainsaw are both strapped in. “Do you want to sleep?” he asks.

She’s perfectly still. “I don’t know if I can find him again,” she admits, finally. “I don’t know how I found him in the first place.”

Ronan considers that. Opal has never said anything about going into Adam’s dreams, or Gansey’s, or Blue’s. He didn’t think she was able. It was simple when it was just the two of them. But Adam always makes things complicated; even though he’ll deny it, Ronan knows he’s still a magician. He shifts gears, turns on the radio, and drives.

He slices time out of the distance between them, he drives like the devil is chasing them. Ronan has always always played tightly with truth; he is unlike Declan and his own father that way. He does not construct the world in lies and pretends them to be true. He doesn’t even lie to himself. So this is the truth, now, and he knows it: he would burn the world down for four living people, and two dead ones, and that’s both the start and end of his loyalty. Every mile that the tires swallow is lined with Adam Parrish’s name, every heartbeat that Ronan leaves on that stretch of highway thumps it out.

He gets to New Haven in record time, sliding into the city just as the sun is pinking the sky up. He thinks of the chickens and the cows and looks over at Opal, who has stayed dark eyed and awake the entire drive up. He hands her the phone. “Call Abraham,” he tells her, “tell him I need him to go take care of shit, I’ll pay double for the emergency.”

Opal takes the phone and does as she’s told, which means that she knows it’s serious. Her face is tiny and grim, and Ronan pulls into one of the parking garages that’s in walking distance of the university.

He hates New Haven strictly on principle, although he thinks even if Adam weren’t here for most of the year he would hate it if he gave it more than a second thought. The pompous architecture screams Aglionby. The Yale campus makes him break out in an anxious rash of boys who remind him of high school. The girls stare at him too long. The fucking castles are too much like a Disney version of Ireland.

Opal hands him his phone back. “I don’t know where he was,” she admits, then. “It was dark, like a cave, only bluer,” she adds, which is unfuckinghelpful. Chainsaw caws awake, displeased by this entire night, and vocal about it.

Ronan gets out of the car and takes Opal’s hand to assist her out, and they walk up past the town green towards Adam’s castle dorm. They’re close, they have to be. Part of him wonders if he overreacted, but another part of him doesn’t give a shit. Another part of him says it’s better to be a crazy overreacting boyfriend. That part of him says that if Parrish was ignoring him they can just fucking fight and get it over with.

A last, tiny, insistent part of him thinks that maybe this is all a bullshit reason to come and see him because the fight and the silence was making Ronan crazy.

Getting into Adam’s residential college is probably supposed to be hard. Ronan would like it to be hard, anyway, because the last thing he needs to think about is how Adam is totally and incomprehensibly poorly invested in his own physical fucking safety, and there’s no Cabeswater to summon if he needs to stab someone in the chest with a thorny vine or smother someone in poison ivy. But it’s not hard, because just as he’s marching up to the gate, Tad fucking Carruthers, fuckboy extraordinaire, is coming down the street in an expensive puffy coat and jeans, clutching a coffee and smiling, as if he and Ronan are friends. He has a girl with him. They look fucking collegial.

Ronan wants to suffocate them both with his bare hands, which is probably why Opal is gripping his right one so hard she’s cutting off circulation. She’s also making a tiny distressed noise, because she hates the cold more than anyone Ronan knows.

“Lynch,” he says, oblivious to the waves of hostility that Ronan is emitting that is currently causing tired undergraduates to give him a berth of about ten feet. “Still hanging out with carrion birds?”

“Let me in,” Ronan growls.

The girl stares at Ronan. “Who is this, Tad?” she asks with the self-preservation instinct of most wildlife that approaches Ronan Lynch, which is to say little at all. It’s humans who know better.

Humans, but not Tad Carruthers. “This,” he announces magnanimously, “is Adam Parrish’s dropout boyfriend.” He says these words as if they should enrage Ronan, but the fact is that nothing that Tad “summers in the Hamptons, winters in Aspen, year round resident of doucheville” Carruthers has said is a lie, and none of that description bothers Ronan. “And his weird little sister.”

“If you don’t let me in, I’m going to break your nose,” Ronan says, “and there isn’t a fucking jury on this planet that would put me away for it.”

“Adam Parrish?” the girl says, her eyes widening. She is already pulling her ID out, waving it in front of the gate. The massive lock clicks open. “I was just about to go see him, he was going to give me his notes.” She stares at Ronan, who pushes past her, done with her usefulness. Opal is dragged along. He hears her say, “Really? Adam is dating him?” with a note of incredulity to her voice that Ronan thinks she must have mined out of his own brain.

He storms into the building, scattering underclassmen in his wake, and gets to Adam’s door, pounding on it. “Parrish!” he yells, and pounds again. A minute later one of Adam’s roommates - a skinny kid with a head too large for his neck and a Minnesota accent that burns - opens the door and squints. “Parrish,” Ronan says, gritting his teeth.

“No, I’m Hendrickson,” the kid says.

Ronan resists throwing a punch, but just barely. “You are a Yale undergraduate,” he snarls, “so you cannot be that fucking stupid.”

Hendrickson blinks, and shakes his head. “Oh,” he says. “I don’t think he’s here,” he adds after that revelation, and steps back. Opal immediately heads for their shared bathroom, and patiently waits until Adam’s enormous brick wall of a roommate steps out. Ronan heads for Adam’s bedroom, the space where he left him three months ago, before any of these idiots arrived. “Who are you?”

Ronan opens the door to Adam’s room. He can hear the brick wall say, “Ah, you’re Opal, then,” and he hears Opal’s chirp reply - she closes the door, like fucking clockwork she needs to pee - and then the brick wall is at Ronan’s back. “I don’t think he came back from the library last night,” he says, and Ronan spins, looks up. The brick looks down at him.

“Opal,” he says, and she comes out of the bathroom a minute later.

Her hands are wet. “They didn’t have a towel,” she says, and Ronan looks at the cluster of boys that are now in various states of undress around him. “Did you find Adam?”

“Library,” he tells her, and she reaches for his hand, but he dries her hands off with his shirt, first. “And get a fucking hand towel,” he yells, because apparently he’s the only nineteen year old on the planet with any fucking sense.

He’s heading out when the brick wall follows him. “Do you need help?” he asks, and Ronan wants to snipe, no, fuck no, Ronan wants to reply with the truth which is that right now he’s panicking, he needs Gansey, fuck, he feels like he’s going to turn a corner and see Adam with his head exploded over the sidewalk, taken out by a tire iron. He thinks it’s not fair for his brain to supply this when Gansey is an entire nation away.

Opal whimpers and Ronan realizes he’s crushing her hand.

“Do you know where he studies?” Ronan asks, finally, the words wrenched out from somewhere deep in his gut. He could search the library, but he doesn’t know where Adam studies. He wonders how there can be something about Adam that he doesn’t know. Adam likes strange corners. In Aglionby, Ronan knew the window seat that Adam favored, hard to reach and oft-neglected in a strange part of the main building. It was quiet up there and fit Adam perfectly, a place he could stuff all his limbs if he tucked his books up under his legs. Curved in that space, Adam was quiet. Ronan loved to look at him, back before, from a spot under the staircase.

But here, at Yale, Adam has new spaces. Ronan doesn’t know them. He can’t make the rounds to find where he’s the most quiet, the most at home.

The brick wall looks thoughtful. “He likes the top floor,” he says. “But you can’t go up there. They won’t let you without an ID.” The brick wall, however, is already whistling. “Yo, Martinez,” he says, and Ronan’s lip curls at yo, “you staying in today?”

A lump on the couch that Ronan had assumed were pillows shifts, and reveals a Latino kid with a nose like a fishhook and a man bun. “Why y’all gotta be so loud,” he whines. “Finals ain’t even started yet,” he says, and Ronan isn’t sure if he likes him for not giving a shit about how he speaks or dislikes him for the same reason.

“I’m taking your ID,” the brick wall says, and reaches into a backpack, pulls out an ID on a chain, and hands it to Ronan. Martinez makes a noise like he acknowledges this, and also he doesn’t care, and pulls the blanket back over his head. “Come on,” he says.

Ronan looks at the ID in his hand. He could dream one but that would take time, and this is neater, faster. “Lynch,” he says, because the brick wall has just broken rules for him, so he deserves that much.

“I know who you are,” the brick wall says. “If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.”

“What the hell,” Ronan replies.

The brick wall laughs. “John Donne,” he explains, as if Ronan doesn’t know. But Ronan does know, because Ronan was the recipient of a classical education, too. “Parrish talks about you a lot. I’m Damen.”

Ronan is not ashamed that the name is only familiar in the vague way that all of Adam’s roommates have familiar names. But Ronan doesn’t care about Adam’s life at Yale, not in a concrete way. He cares that Adam is happy, he cares that Adam is satisfied, he cares that Adam isn’t rotting away. But he couldn’t be bothered with the minutiae, the details.

They leave the courtyard, turn the corner, and Ronan stares up. “What the fuck is wrong with this place,” he asks as they enter a building that looks like some Roman Pope consecrated it five hundred years ago.

Damen shrugs. “White people are weird,” he says, “but there’s power in stones.”

Opal makes another noise and this time Ronan picks her up, carrying her through the nave of the building, up to where he thinks there should be a crucifix and Mother Mary staring down at him.

Damen crosses into the stacks, and suddenly the feeling of church and holiness slips away from them. This isn’t a church anymore, except the kind where Adam and Gansey find the patience and the grace to say their prayers. It’s a cramped tower of books, rows and rows, some shiny or clearly falling apart with use, others dusty and forgotten.

Opal’s arms squeeze Ronan tight, suddenly. “Kerah,” she whimpers, and Ronan presses a hand to the top of her head.

Damen looks at them. “Is she all right?” he asks as he presses the button for the elevator, and Ronan doesn’t want to lie so he doesn’t say anything at all. They go up and up, and the doors open at the top. They step out and Ronan looks around; they’re stacks, just the same, towers of books that block out the light from the stained glass and weird windows.

Opal’s arms tighten again, and she opens her mouth to make a noise but nothing comes out. Ronan turns and at the end of some of the stacks are students, students curled up in strange configurations, which he realizes is over desks. Everyone looks underfed and over-caffeinated. It is barely nine in the morning and it’s packed, and Ronan recognizes Adam’s nerdy fucking brethren.

Ronan does not have the patience for this. He yells out, “Parrish, where the fuck are you?” and he’s greeted by a chorus of terrified noises, including one girl who yelps out, for fuck’s sake, this is a library! and do you know what time it is to someone responding showtime, showtime - Ronan is pretty much sure he’s missing something but he doesn’t care - and someone else who makes a suspicious moan.

But there’s no Adam stomping out from a cubbyhole to hiss about what the fuck is wrong with you, so Ronan looks up at Damen, who just purses his lips and nods. “Not this floor, then,” he says, and down they go.

Ronan’s cry for Adam gets increasingly filthier and angrier every floor they don’t find him on, until they’re on the first and Ronan can feel his heart seizing up. They’re on the first floor again and Opal’s practically catatonic. “Maybe he went to the engineering building, I know one of the professors was really impressed with his work,” Damen suggests, benignly.

Opal shakes her head. “No, no, Kerah, Kerah we can’t leave him here,” she says, which Damen looks confused at, but Ronan feels a chill about. Opal doesn’t usually insist on much, in the grand scheme of things. She’s still perplexed by things like can openers and automatic sliding glass doors. But she’s the reason they’re here, she’s the reason that Ronan even knew something was wrong in the first place.

He sets her down and she clings to his shirt. “Jesus Mary, did Timmy fall down the well again?” he snaps at her, and she kicks him, which he figures he probably deserves, but he lets out a string of cusswords anyway. They’re both exhausted. Damen looks utterly unbothered by this exchange.

But he can’t even consider sleep, not really. He sits down in the middle of the floor, which he knows will get attention but he doesn’t give a shit. Opal is on the brink of a tantrum; Ronan can feel it in his gut and in the space behind his eyes. “Okay, okay, what the fuck is going on.”

“He was here,” she says. “He was here and there’s something else-“ she begins, at this point, to lapse into Latin, and Ronan is surprised he’s keeping up as well as he is. “It’s like Cabeswater,” she explains, “it’s like us, only it’s not, it has him, it has him and I think it wants to keep him.”

Ronan feels a shiver run up his spine. “I need to make a phone call,” he says, suddenly, though really what he wants is to burn the entire building down until it spits Adam back up.

Chapter Text

Adam wakes up in the dark, in pain, and for a terrifying moment he thinks he’s 16 again, that the last two years were a fever dream, and that he’s back on the floor of his parent’s trailer, wedged under the bed and hoping his father is passed out this time.

But then he blinks, and the light around him is blue and fuzzy. It’s silent in an uncomfortable way, colder than it should be, and he remembers. Was that noise before he fell the alarm? If it was, why didn’t a guard come?

He makes his way down the stairs when he realizes it. There’s no sound, none at all. He can’t hear his footsteps echo. He opens his mouth, and he can feel his mouth say hello, he can feel the vibration in his throat, he can feel the words, but he can’t hear them, and this time it’s not a terrifying moment but real honest to god panic. He touches his ear and feels pressure, but no pain, and looks up and then back down the stairs.

Adam is frozen, unsure about what’s happening. Magic, he thinks. Magic like Cabeswater. He remembers, very quickly, briefly, thinking that he should find the leyline here in New Haven, if there was one, and then he remembers how he dismissed the idea as stupid, and now he doesn’t know why. Because he was magic once and wasn’t anymore, maybe. Because he missed it and didn’t want it shoved in his face that he wasn’t, when no one else was, either.

But his fingers remember magic. He keeps heading down the stairs; as long as he can get out, then he can figure it out, how to handle the library, maybe, or how to deal with the magic of it and still get his schoolwork done. Maybe it was midnight, maybe this magical space is better behaved than Cabeswater and it respects the library’s open and closed schedule. He hasn’t heard stories of undergraduates wandering lost like Rip Van Winkle, so he figures it’s a good bet, since Yale is the kind of place that revels in tormenting Freshmen with myths and legends.

His finger skim the wall and he thinks he can feel it, whatever it is, pulsing under the brick and the stone.

He manages to get out of the stacks, but freezes when he sees the nave. Usually, it’s two or three hundred feet of stone, a straight shot out to the courtyard, but now that’s not what he sees at all.

Instead of the nave, he sees a labyrinth; walls have formed where there were no walls before, and pews, winding and twisting, all in the shimmering rose colored marble that makes up the floor. It looks like an architect’s worst nightmare, something Daedalus came up with after eating too much cheese before bed.

Above him, at the nearest wall, is one of the gargoyles.

Yale is covered in gargoyles – it’s their strange anglophile tribute to Oxford extending on into infinity – and not all the ones in the library are really gargoyles, because they’re not little monsters. Some are students. They’re usually in the hallway in front of the University Librarian’s courtyard. This one is passed out, fast asleep over his books, and he is, frankly, Adam’s favorite piece of Yale detail work. He missed him for weeks, and then one day in October he caught sight of him, really saw him, and Adam had laughed.

He reaches up, touches it gently, because there’s an itch for it. He can feel the power thrum in the stone, and even with his heart racing, even deaf and convinced something is behind him, he can feel that stone like he used to feel Cabeswater.

The gargoyle wakes up.

Like the tapestry with Blue’s face, the tiny stone person is facsimile of Adam; high cheekbones and strange eyes. Even colorless Adam can see the tiredness in the small stone figure.

Adam leaps back as the figure rearranges the books on his desk and stretches, and Adam opens his mouth again, he speaks, even though he can’t hear himself. “What’s happening-“ he starts, but the figure just looks at Adam with his own face and disappears into the stone.

A moment later, like liquid, he emerges from another wall, like he’s walking away, and Adam backs up until he’s at the information desk, still at the head of the labyrinth.

He has to think. His head feels like rubber, and he still can’t quite suppress the fear that he’s deaf now, but he can’t focus on it or he’ll die here. He rifles through his bag, tries to find his tarot deck.

The battered cards, Persephone’s gift to him, the promise that he would stabilize the last part of her triangle with Maura and Calla, are one of Adam’s prized possessions. In his first weeks at Yale Hendrickson found them and tried to give him shit over it, but Adam had summoned every single blast of ice he had resting inside the glacier he built at Aglionby and Hendrickson found himself no match for Adam Parrish at his most chilling.

Ronan would have been proud.

But he doesn’t have them. Adam remembers, vaguely, putting them on the bookshelf in his room, over his desk, and he rubs his head. He needs a roadmap, and he can’t think of a simple one.

He turns and looks up at the where the stacks are behind him, and suddenly he considers something.

He heads back into the stacks, careful, every step measured. He thinks now, about how Cabeswater felt at it’s most dangerous, when the forest was fussiest and neediest. He thinks, now, about how it doesn’t feel the same here, but it doesn’t feel any less dangerous. It’s different.

But the books, the books are on the sturdy shelves. Like the trees of Cabeswater, the thick metal holds the building up, like the trees held the sky up. Adam’s Latin is murky now, thick from disuse except to try and translate Opal’s babblings when Ronan wasn’t there to do the heavy lifting, and he figures if he tries he’ll decline his way into offending whatever it is that lives here. The idea of saying ich bin kein Graywaren seems equally stupid. His German is less useful than his Latin.

He heads up to where he remembers the art books kept – huge and only some of them in English – and starts opening and paging through them. The books act like they’re real, except when they don’t, and Adam has to make a snapping motion with his hand to get them to behave. He remembers Persephone telling him about magic, he remembers expelling the demon from inside his head. He is too tired to deal with this. He treats the pages that flutter around his wrists like Aglionby boys, strictly, taking no shit from them.

By a miracle, it works.

Finally he finds them – layouts of tarot cards in one of the art books on fifteenth century popular art, and looks around. He issues an apology to the library gods and tears them out of the book, making a makeshift set of cards.

They should be just paper, but under his fingers they stiffen up, and Adam almost sighs with relief. Magic sings in his blood. This is familiar. He can almost feel it pulsing through him, leyline magic coursing under his skin. He doesn’t know how he lived without it, after knowing what it felt like.

He closes his eyes for a long moment, and then spreads his hands.

And the cards spread underneath them.

Adam breathes easy, then. “What do you want?” he asks, and cards turn over. This magic is more conventional, he thinks, than Cabeswater’s strange wildness. This is Gansey magic to the core of it, for all that Gansey literally houses a leyline in his heart. But this feels more ordinary, this feels less tumultuous. He doesn’t feel as though he’ll die here, at least.

But cards turn in his hands, and he stares at the layout, and his heart thuds in his chest. He can’t hear it but he can feel it, the blossoming of heat in his face, the terror sinking into his gut.

There aren’t a lot of things that Adam knows about magic - well, no. He knows more than the average person. But despite spending a summer with the dubious title of magician and being the only person who could talk to a magical leyline, he feels out of his depth. He wonders if Iolo Goch every felt like he didn’t know anything.

But what he does know is this: when a magical space asserts that what it wants is for you to be it’s curator, caretaker, and stay with it, it’s probably not the best thing in the world. In his exhausted haze he wonders if it’s something about the way he smells. That has to be the explanation for why this strange universe wants him so badly.

He can’t, though. “I need to get out,” he announces, firmly. Cabeswater didn’t take him very seriously, but Cabeswater was an asshole at the best of times. Like father like son, he thinks mercilessly.

The cards don’t move, or rather, he doesn’t even want to touch the cards. He looks up and breathes out. Okay.

To the exit.

~~~~~

Gansey wakes up with a start.

It’s so much of a start that he thinks that someone must have slapped him. He looks over and sees Blue, fast asleep, aggressively curled around his back, her arms around his waist. They’re in a shitty motel - mostly because Blue insists on paying her own way, so they very rarely stay in anything nicer - in Quartzite, Arizona, so actually, they’re probably in the nicest hotel in Quartzite, Arizona, which is less a town and more a battered collection of trailers and mobile homes, bleached colorless in the sun.

He peers through the dark across the room and he thinks he can make out a blob in the dark, so there’s Henry, snoozing in his expensive sleeping bag.

“Noah?” he whispers in the dark, but the darkness doesn’t whisper back. Gansey’s heart thuds out a bass beat, desperate. Something is wrong, he can feel it, it’s like he’s coming out of his skin with it. He slips out of Blue’s grip - she makes a tiny noise and he almost slips back in, because it’s so cute, but it’s a testament to how terribly he’s feeling that he just continues out of bed, groping for his glasses and his phone.

He checks his phone to find three missed calls from Ronan Lynch, and his blood goes frozen. He hustles out of the motel room and goes into the car, and calls him back.

Ronan picks up on the first ring. “It took you fucking long enough, what the hell-”

“What happened?” Gansey demands, his anxiety out of control. He thinks that this is worse than dying.

Ronan sounds like he feels the same way. “Parrish is in some weird magical black hole in the - fuck off! - Yale fucking library,” he snarls, and Gansey can feel something buzzing under his skin. “Opal, for fuck’s sake do I look like I’m in line, fuck you, dreamed that he was trapped, she says it wants to keep him, fuck, Gansey, you need-”

“I’m literally in the middle of nowhere, it will take me at least a day,” Gansey says, but he’s already trying to figure out a way to New Haven. “Can you wait a day?”

“Do I have a choice? Go, just go-” Ronan snaps.

Gansey is digging the nails of one hand into the meat of his palm. “Where are you?”

“I’m at a coffee shop, Opal needed breakfast, but it’s packed with desperate undergraduates and they keep thinking I’m in line, Jesus Mary, I’m going to fucking die here,” he practically wails. “Get here. We need you. Parrish needs you,” he finishes and he hangs up the call.

Gansey turns back into the motel room and turns the lights on. “Get up,” he says, and Henry rolls off the bed, and Blue rises up.

“What time is it?” she demands, because they’re not exactly on a strict schedule.

Gansey starts packing his backpack. “Five,” he tells her, “get up, Adam is in trouble, we have to get to New Haven.”

“Richardman, what,” Henry says from his new place on the floor, trying to squirm out of his sleeping bag like a caterpillar out from a cocoon. “New Haven’s airport is a junkpile, we’ll have to-” he keeps squirming, honestly, it’s a little bit mesmerizing, “-go to Tucson, fly to JFK, take the train.” He squirms a little more, flips on his back, looks up at Gansey. Blue is still squinting at them both. “Or we can go to Tucson and connect in about six places to get to Philly and hope the plane into New Haven has been rubberbanded. Or we could go to Phoenix, connect to Hartford in Chicago.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Blue asks, still squinting, but as Gansey shoos her softly she starts moving.

Henry finally wiggles out onto a suspicious looking stain on the floor. “It’s my superpower,” he says with a flash of shiny teeth. And then: “I’m on the murder stain, aren’t I?”

Gansey dips and lifts him, and nods. “Arrange tickets, Henry. I’ll pack with Blue.”

They are, at this point, an oddly oiled machine. They are three teenagers who are traveling the country in a Camaro that requires no oil and no gas. They stop at gas stations and roadside attractions for food and entertainment and the toilet and no other real reason. They travel, three, four hours a day, inching their way across America, because Henry likes sleep and Gansey likes sights and Blue likes to make scenes in red states. And blue states. And swing states.

“It’s real trouble, isn’t it?” Blue asks, quietly, folding her clothes into her pack. They’re going to have to leave the Camaro, they’re going to have to leave the entirety of their lives.

Gansey nods. “Ronan sounded-” he starts, but realizes he has to quantify this in words that Blue can understand. There are still parts of Ronan that are the exclusive property of Richard Campbell Gansey III, and he’s not ready to give them away yet. “It’s an emergency,” he finishes, securely.

Blue shivers, and Gansey’s hand goes, automatically, to her back, to press there the lightest moment.

They roll out twenty minutes later, tickets out of Phoenix and to Connecticut purchased, Henry sufficiently caffeinated with cheap motel coffee, and Gansey running on adrenaline. It wasn’t until they got into the car for the drive that Gansey really considered the implications. There was a leyline under Yale, maybe, or something that had the same shape and similar form to Cabeswater. Of course, Gansey thinks, driving through the endless expanse of red rocks and dusty earth, it would want Adam. Who could meet Adam Parrish and not want him? He was magical, and pure, in a way that so few people were.

“Get a room,” Blue growls, and Gansey realizes he said most of that aloud. Well.

Well, yes, all right, that was embarrassing.

Blue is suspicious of the airport and the entire enterprise; Gansey can tell. When they get to the airport she immediately starts to fuss. “Henry and I could have stayed,” she says as they’re in line (expedited, VIP, because Henry could not stop himself and purchased first class tickets).

“I wouldn’t just leave you,” Gansey argues, “and what if we need you too?”

“I don’t necessarily think I’m really critical to this,” she argues while they’re in the security line. She’s taking off her shoes like she’s never done it before and emptying her pockets of the thousands of hairpins she carries with her on a daily basis. Henry is pointedly not getting involved in this argument. “Ronan and Adam need you.”

Gansey is starting to feel a slight bit of pressure behind his eyes. “You’re his friend,” he states, like this is obvious, not clarifying which he that Gansey is talking about.

Blue marches through the metal detector like it’s the gateway to the underworld and she’s got a wife on the other side who needs saving. Gansey comes up behind her and she huffs, “I just-”

“Lady Blue, my sweet azure queen, are you afraid of flying?” Henry asks, his lips quirking just slightly in something approximating a frown, and Gansey laughs, about to argue, when he turns to look at Blue.

Her face is roughly the same color as his pinkest Lacoste shirt. She looks utterly shocked by even the idea of this, but at the same time, the way that her hands go, right to her backpack’s straps, to fidget there nervously, make Gansey stare. “Are you?” he asks, suddenly, realizing that this is probably her first time flying outside of that trip with Helen. Which didn’t count.

“No!” she exclaims, and stomps to the Starbucks near the gate.

Henry looks at Gansey, and Gansey looks at Henry, and Henry makes a face. “She’s your true love,” he states, plainly, which means you get the honor of dealing with her. Gansey looks up towards the gate, and then towards the Starbucks, and heads Blue’s way.

She’s scowling at her iced tea like it’s done something deeply personal against her mother. “It’s all right if you are,” Gansey says, because it is. She doesn’t have to be worried about that.

She squints at him. “You and Henry just bought tickets,” she says, “you didn’t even think that I might not want to do this.”

“Don’t you?” Gansey asks, surprised, because of course she would.

She hits him. “Of course I do!” she yells, and the barista makes a noise like ah, young love, “but you still should have asked!”

Gansey’s back stiffens a bit, and he feels maybe more than a little badly. “Yes, all right. I’m sorry. Jane, do you want to go help Adam?”

“Don’t be facetious, Dick,” she replies, and she sounds just like Helen, which makes Gansey shudder just a little.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” he argues, and she goes to buy a coffee. She marches past him, then, coffee in hand, to sit next to Henry.

They board the plane a little bit later, and Blue insists on sitting in the window seat, and Gansey allows Henry sit next to her while he broods.

The brooding, however, doesn’t last very long, because miracle of miracles, Gansey falls asleep. Ever since he, well. Ever since he died, his dreams have been strange, hazy things. He wishes that he could say that he still felt like a normal person, but the fact remains that he doesn’t. He doesn’t feel normal anymore, and generally, this is not a problem. Why should it be? After all, his best friend dreams this into existence, his girlfriend amplifies magical powers, and his - his Adam Parrish - is apparently the favored conductor for magical entities.

But still, the dreams aren’t very welcome, in the grand scheme of things.

He dreams he is a forest.

No.

He dreams he is a tree.

He’s a tree who can speak to other trees. He’s a tree who is connected to other trees, like Blue’s father or Gwenllian’s mother. He’s a tree, old and placid and knowing, and he’s a tree that is dreaming a line to something just as old as he is. In the heart of the Other is a throne, made of stone and gargoyles, and on the throne is Adam Parrish, his eyes covered with a cloth. In one hand is a book. In the other is an orb of light.

Gansey reaches for him, but Gansey is a tree, and Gansey yells for him, but Gansey is still a tree, and Gansey pushes all his senses towards him, and that’s when Gansey feels the entirety of the Other push back. He wants to be here, it says to him in whatever language the Other is speaking in.

Let him go, Gansey tries, and the Other doesn’t laugh at him. It doesn’t feel malevolent. It feels like Cabeswater, questing. But the trees and the stone don’t get along, and when the magic is too probing, the trees open into full bloom, the heart of Gansey swelling to protect the soft, delicate soul inside. The Other seems curious about this. How can one person house an entire forest? So Gansey tries again. This time, with manners. Please let him go.

The stone and gargoyle magic resists. Fill me up like you, it says, give me order like you, it asks, I need him, it finishes, and Gansey doesn’t know what it means.

He’s about to ask when a particularly sharp bump, a sudden jolt of turbulence, wakes him up, and he gasps as if he were underwater instead of just dreaming. Henry looks over, and a moment later Blue peers at them. “We’re almost in Chicago,” Henry says, a little wide-eyed. “Are you okay?”

Gansey waves off the concern. He tries to sleep on the next flight, but he can’t. Instead he feels the worry and the anxiety in his stomach burble away like nausea, and thinks fly faster, fly faster.

~~~~

Despite the fact that Opal is not actually a small child, but rather a dream in the shape of a small child, some things still stick. For instance; she still needs to be fed regularly, and she still needs a full ten hours of sleep or she becomes impossible and hyper. Fortunately, she, unlike Ronan, can sleep anywhere. Hernandez or Cortez or Martinez, whatever his name is, vacated the couch by noon to go take a final or terrorize a hipster cafe or build a better bomb, whatever, and Ronan put Opal in it. She protested for exactly ten minutes - this was her job, they had to find Adam - but being horizontal for ten minutes was too much, and she was snoozing, just her nose visible from under the blanket that Ronan had found in Adam’s room.

“You can put her in Parrish’s bed,” Damen pointed out, and Ronan hadn’t responded.

Now he’s waiting on Gansey, Opal sleeping a restless, interminable sleep. Damen left for a final thirty minutes ago and Ronan is worried, genuinely, compulsively, that Adam is going to miss a final in this bullshit. Ronan may not like academia but he understands the bullshit that surrounds it better than people give him credit for. He knows that if Adam misses a final it might not be the end of the world, but it’ll be a big fucking blow. And he knows that if Adam misses a final it’ll be bad for Adam Parrish.

Ronan wants to burn the entire world to the ground.

The worst of it is that he has the magic of the leyline right there at his fingertips, dreaming magic, real fucking magic beyond anything that Harry fucking Potter could even begin to imagine, and he was stuck, because this wasn’t like Cabeswater at all. Ronan went into that library and felt nothing. Being the Greywaren didn’t mean shit to the books or the stone. This was something that Adam could crack, but Adam was on the other side.

He gets a text from Gansey around three that they’re in Chicago, and then another one around seven that they landed in Hartford. By seven Opal is up again, needing to be fed, like clockwork, and then needing to pee, like clockwork, when Declan calls, like fucking clockwork. Ronan tries to ignore the call, but Opal picks up the phone because for reasons he has yet to understand, she loves Declan.

“Hi,” she starts, and then comes the awkward pauses of a conversation only half eavesdropped on. “No we’re in New Haven.” Pause. “Abraham.” Pause. “Because Adam is trapped in a magical space inside the Yale Library.” Pause. Then she turns to Ronan and holds up the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

“You had to fucking answer, didn’t you?” Ronan says, and takes the phone and sits on the couch. Opal crawls into his lap so that she can listen to this conversation too.

Declan does not, to his credit, sound pissed off. Well, not exactly. He sounds vaguely annoyed, but not really any more than usual. “You should have called,” he starts, which makes Ronan want to yell in reply, but Opal is on his lap and that would require standing up. This is exactly why Ronan hates the phone. He should be able to punch his brother, but his brother is in fucking Washington D.C. “I could have at least come to the Barns.”

“I was in kind of a hurry, asshole,” Ronan replies. “Did dad ever say-” he pauses and looks around. The sheer and utter laughable part is that Ronan actually should have thought of this earlier. For all the supernatural shit that Ronan knows, Declan seems to just know more. Of course, that would involve acknowledging whatever relationship Declan had with their dad in the first place. “Did he ever talk about how to get people out of parallel dimensions? Did he ever dream something for that?”

“You mean the tractor?” Declan asks, mildly.

Ronan stares at Opal for a second. “Wait, seriously?”

“No,” Declan replies, slightly exasperated. “Dad dreamed useless shit that he could sell to people for too much money without giving anyone any real magic.”

Ronan thinks that the top of his head is going to come off. “Fuck you,” he snarls into the phone, and Opal pats his mouth, like language. “If you’re going to be fucking useless-”

“Shut up for a second, and let me think,” Declan replies, and Ronan closes his mouth, which is a testament to how much he wants - needs - Adam to come back. It takes a few minutes, but finally Declan speaks again. “The only thing that dad ever said about whatever it is that has Adam is that in Ireland,” of course, because dad, “it wasn’t that the fair folk were real. That he didn’t think there were really fae, like the stories, you know? But that faerie rings, those were real. That people could pass to and from these places, whatever they were, and that you had to lure them back.”

This is helpful and it isn’t. “Did he say how?”

“He told me this story once,” Declan says, sounding like maybe he’s more irritated about this than usual, “about how he saw mom for the first time and called her out from between the trees with his singing.”

Ronan knew that story too. In retrospect it makes complete sense, but it pretty unhelpful in this situation, because there are no trees, and this isn’t a dream. “Fuck,” he mutters, and Opal pats his mouth again. He pushes her hand away from his mouth.

“Call me when you’re back home,” Declan says, not unkindly. “And if you need to, send Opal to D.C.”

“I’m not fucking doing that,” Ronan says in reply, also not unkindly, and he hangs up.

Opal looks up at him. “Maybe you can dream your way in,” she suggests, in Latin. “Like I do.”

“Did you dream your way in when you slept for the last seven hours?” Ronan asks, and she puts her fingers in his mouth. “Frugging shtop,” he says around her fingers.

“I didn’t dream anything,” Opal replies, still in Latin.

Ronan sees one of Adam’s roommates - Hendrickson - sniffing around. Opal looks over at him, big eyes and all. “What the fuck do you want?” he asks.

Hendrickson seems appropriately afraid of Ronan, because he books it, just as Gansey calls. “I think we’re here,” he says, “is it the one that looks like a castle?”

“They all look like castles,” Ronan replies, and hangs up the phone to come look for them.

Fifteen minutes later, he finds them at one of the other residential colleges; Henry’s hair is the dead giveaway. Gansey looks like he’s riding high on anxiety and deep existential dread. This is Ronan’s least favorite Gansey, because it’s the Gansey that he feels like he needs to protect, when the only solution is out of Ronan’s meager control. Blue looks like she’s annoyed and cold, child of Virginia that she is, and she’s wearing every shirt she owns, which means she looks exactly as Blue like as she can. Henry looks like a preppy asshole.

Gansey spots Opal first, because Opal is slamming over Henry’s knees and right into Gansey, her arms around his waist, which causes Henry to spill over the sidewalk. “Little Lynch, not cool,” Henry wheezes from his vantage point on the ground, and Ronan makes a mental note to give her an extra special Christmas present for that.

“Opal,” Gansey says, because he is not used to small children attaching to him even after more than a year of Opal’s adulation. “Ronan,” he says, frantically. “No news?” he asks.

“We’ve been walking around the building all fucking day,” he replies, “but it might as well just be a fucking library.” He puts a wristband to his mouth. “Maggot,” he says over the wristband. The taste of leather is oddly calming, considering.

“Let’s not stand around,” Blue says, because one of them has some sense.

Opal reaches for both Gansey and Blue’s hands. “I’ll show you,” she says, seriously. She skips over Henry’s legs, and Gansey stops them to help him up.

Henry looks at Opal and then at Ronan. “I’ll...go and find a hotel.”

Gansey looks stricken by this notion, and Ronan feels a snarl of something vile and green whip through his chest. “You should come with us,” Gansey tries, because Gansey is fucking oblivious.

Henry, however, is not. Ronan and Henry have a very strict understanding, and that understanding is that even though Henry’s greatest ambition in his shitty life is to steal Ronan’s best friend and neglect his own, as long as Henry doesn’t show up in Ronan’s life Ronan doesn’t have a reason to break his face when Gansey is busy doing something else. “Richardman,” he says, casually, “you’re going to appreciate it when I find a hotel with a pillow that you can smash your face into when you’ve saved your Parrish princess.”

Blue looks from Ronan to Henry, once, and then again, and she looks like she’s going to start on one of her fucking rants, so Ronan walks away, stalking his way to the library. He is too exhausted and too strung out to deal with self-righteousness today. Blue follows. “Ronan,” she starts.

“Don’t fucking say a word unless you’re going to ask me about Parrish,” Ronan snarls back.

Blue, who normally either has no respect for boundaries or no sensible fear of Ronan, remarkably shuts up. Opal is still hanging on to Gansey, who is saying something to Henry, before he jogs to catch up. “What have you tried?”

“It’s finals so burning the library down is apparently heavily frowned on,” Ronan replies, “and Opal can’t dream her way back in.”

“Have you tried?” Gansey asks, tipping his head a little.

Ronan looks over at Gansey. By this point they’re in front of the library near the shitty fountain, and it’s cold, and Opal is curling up behind Gansey’s hand. “Kerah hasn’t slept since yesterday,” she says, like a little snitch. “I slept all afternoon,” she confirms, still snitching.

Fortunately Gansey is more than used to Ronan’s brand of insomnia. “Maybe you should try dreaming your way in,” he says. “I think I did.”

Everyone, at that point, turns to look at Gansey. “What.” Blue states, baldly.

“On the plane,” Gansey replies. “I mean I didn’t speak to Adam, but I think I dreamed of this...whatever it is. It acts like Cabeswater, but it doesn’t feel like Cabeswater.” He clears his throat. His accent is both grating and soothing, the old man magic of Richard Campbell Gansey III. “Too much stone.”

Ronan grips his own face. “Where the fuck am I going to sleep, Gansey?” he asks.

“Adam’s bed,” Opal volunteers, and Ronan knows that’s a good place, because it probably smells like Adam - hell, it probably reeks considering how fucking sweaty he gets when he’s stressed, like a fucking anxiety faucet - but Ronan doesn’t actually know if he can physically sleep.

Gansey stares up at the library. “All right. Blue and I will take Opal, you go get some sleep, and we’ll...walk around the library. See what happens. If there’s a clue. And you sleep. All right?”

Ronan wants to argue, but Gansey has his best boy explorer face on. He looks at Opal. “No funny business,” he tells her, “you have the brick wall’s number if you need to get back in the room. If you drive Gansey crazy you’ll be sorry.”

Opal frowns in response, and Ronan makes his way back to the dorm, and to the bed; a task made easy by the fact that everyone seems to have vacated for some party. And true to prediction, Adam’s bed smells just like him in a fevered, anxious, unwashed state.

Ronan is a little ashamed of the fact that he’s kind of turned on by that.

The truth, however, is, that between the stress from Adam being missing and not having slept in almost twenty four hours, the second that his head hits the pillow and the smell of Adam surrounds him, Ronan falls asleep.

Chapter Text

He dreams right away.

When Opal told him it was blue, she meant it. It looks like what happens when light reflects off snow at night, blue and cold and glowing through the stained glass. The library, in the dark, at night, in this dream, it’s empty and even more cathedral-like. Ronan can’t explain how, until he sees the empty slots in the walls, where in the real world there should be statues of saints, but there aren’t.

Now they’re filled with gargoyles, and the gargoyles are whispering. Quis es, he hears some of them say, but others are speaking some other language, guttural and not at all like Latin. Some part of his brain says Hebrew, and he wonders when he’s ever heard Hebrew.

He ignores them. “Adam?” he calls, and heads into the depths of the library. The doors don’t open at his touch; he calls again. “Parrish!”

The gargoyles chatter, and suddenly Adam is there. The doors have tiny windows, right at head level, and Adam is pressing his hands against the door. He’s speaking but Ronan can’t hear him, and Ronan’s hands scrabble at the door, but the door doesn’t open.

Adam is clearly trying to open the door too, but after it doesn’t work from either side, he holds up a card. It’s a tarot card, but in the window it’s distorted; still, Ronan can make out the words at the bottom. “Are you fucking kidding me,” he snarls, but Adam just holds up a different one, until he’s held up six in a row, and Ronan slams his hands on the door. “Give him back!” he yells, furious, “give. Him. Back!”

Suddenly a gargoyle, this one with a radio set (what the hell) pops up out of a stone panel (what the hell) and the radio comes on with thick static. He can hear someone speaking on the other side; the voice is familiar even though it’s tinny and hard to make out. I can’t believe that this library is real, he hears, and it’s the fucking maggot. Ronan must feel right at home.

“Oh, fuck you, you fucking underfed pagan hick,” Ronan barks, and there’s a pause.

Ronan? He hears, and suddenly all the gargoyles all go silent, like they’re taking a collective breath. Adam lifts his head, and Ronan presses his hand against the glass in that moment.

If Adam was going to respond in kind, he doesn’t get a chance before the gargoyles all burst into noise again, and even though Ronan can’t make out any individual words, the meaning is clear.

Get out. He ducks his head but it's too late; they're blowing against him, stone and wing and wind, air like fucking stones flying at his head.

He wakes up.

~~~~

Adam begins to think, about halfway through asking questions of this magical thing, that maybe it would be a good idea to sleep. His head is throbbing with pain, and he doesn’t know what time it is, or how long he’s been awake. The light quality never changes, and if Adam can get to a window he can see New Haven in the distance, sparkling in snow and covered in blue light.

But the moon doesn’t move, the lights don’t change, the night doesn’t pink up with the coming dawn. Whatever’s happening out there, in the real world, time has stopped in this one, and that’s reassuring. It means he probably hasn’t missed his finals.

Or maybe he has but he doesn’t have to leave. The notion is oddly calming, even though he can’t hear. He lies does and the floor isn’t comfortable until it is, and Adam thinks it would be a good idea to at least sleep. That if he sleeps, he’ll know how to solve it in the morning. That whatever magic he’s stumbled into will be clearer, less confusing, if he has a clear head.

He feels like he’s falling into something. Why leave at all? He can just be here and read and read. The entire world can go by and he can learn to be a magician again; he can be magical again, from the inside of Yale. He can learn to speak to other magical things if he needs to. He’ll learn to travel in dreams.

His eyes are closed when he hears the first slam.

No, not hears - he still can’t hear anything. No, he feels it, he feels something slamming into the ground, and he opens his eyes to find that the floor has started absorbing him, that he’s halfway into the floor. Panic floods him, and the moment he feels that fear he pulls. The floor cedes him easily, but it sticks, like he’s coming up from tar instead of linoleum.

The next slam reverberates through the library like something is moving towards him, something huge, and Adam is suddenly afraid. The memory of Robert Parrish stampeding through the trailer. The memory of being under the bed, hiding, hoping he’s too drunk to remember that Adam is there. The memory of fear, the noxious taste of it.

There’s another slam but Adam remembers he’s not a child and his father isn’t here. He gets up and walks to the door, and there’s Ronan.

There’s Ronan.

Adam thinks quickly; he knows he likely won’t have much time. The slamming must have been Ronan, maybe he’s too big, magically, this place can’t contain him, or there’s a cord, tethering the two of them together that wakes Adam, or-

-or, or, or, none of that matters. He flips through the cards in his hands, the only thing he has on him, the only way he can communicate. The gargoyles on the other side of the door are watching. Adam holds several up, thinking, at least Ronan can tell Blue, or Maura, or Calla, someone who will know what they mean. Trapped, because it wants to keep me, there’s a maze, it took my hearing, but you slammed into this place, all of that is too complicated. It has a heart like Cabeswater is simpler. It’s like Cabeswater is simplest of all.

The door between them doesn’t budge.

Adam watches as Ronan slams into the door, as he yells, and he would yell back but that’s dramatic, and probably useless. He can’t hear what Ronan is saying anyway, although he can imagine it involves a poetic use of words that feature primarily four letters. The door between them swings open, and Adam falls forward, not realizing how much weight he had been putting on that space. He spills out onto the cold floor, and looks up. The maze is back, where a second ago it wasn’t. The message is clear: please don’t leave.

“I can’t stay here,” Adam says out loud. “I have finals.”

The magic in this place at least seems to understand that, because then there’s a flurry of gargoyles, all of them sinking into the stone and coming back out, dropping books until they form towers taller than Adam. This only takes seconds - gargoyles crowd the walls, burst out pillars, crowd books up from under the floor.

They work until Adam is annoyed, and sitting on a throne of books. “Stop,” he says, “stop!” he yells, the second time. He buries his face in his hands and thinks.

He knows what this place wants. It wants someone to stay, it wants someone to fix it. It’s broken, like Cabeswater was, in a way, only unlike Cabeswater it wasn’t dreamed here. Adam doesn’t know how this place was born into existence. A library placed on a leyline, made beautiful, and then the pressing dreams of hundreds of students, studying, falling asleep, working. The knowledge of the entire world stacked up in one tower of books, maybe. Who knows, maybe some item in the basement, locked away in one of the archive vaults breathed life into this magic.

Maybe a former librarian was a magician too.

Adam thinks and thinks and his brain hurts. Ronan was here. Ronan was here, but suddenly that means that - is Ronan here? Not here like in this dream, because the notion that Ronan traveled the leyline in a dream state intentionally is absurd, Ronan is not that cerebral, he doesn’t think about magic in that way, but here as in here at Yale?

The first thing that Adam feels, uncharitably, is irritation. His boyfriend, he decides, is an asshole. It’s not that college is his, except that college is his, and Ronan can’t just show up whenever he wants. They never discussed this, they never talked about the lines and the places that belong to Adam and the places that Ronan just can’t show up to uninvited.

But that feeling doesn’t last. The next thing that Adam feels is a bone deep relief. If this was over, if Ronan was saying fuck it, it’s too much work, Adam is too much work, he would never just show up here.

The third thing that Adam feels is something more akin to fear, because Ronan knows he’s in here, and Ronan won’t stop until he gets Adam back. Adam is not well versed in magic, but he knows that there are things about it that should not be toyed with, and that things that are shaped like Cabeswater as as dangerous as they are delicate. And Ronan is magic, but he is a bull in a china shop magic, he is magic that is too certain of itself, and that means that he neglects things. He neglects parts of magic that could do serious harm, because he doesn’t always think it can harm him.

Adam sits on his throne and thinks of Cabeswater. It scared him, it scared him into compliance, it scared him to speak to him. This thing, it doesn’t seem to want to scare him. Adam understands fear. He’s been afraid his entire life. He and fear are old friends.

This thing wants him to want to stay.

“Give me my hearing back,” he says out loud, and there’s a pressure in his ear, but it doesn’t return. He opens his hands. “I can’t help you if you don’t give me my hearing back.”

The pressure pops, but only for a second. Like a guarantee. Promise to stay, it seems to say.

But Adam can’t promise that. He stands up and makes his way into the maze.

~~~~

Gansey feels the pressure.

This is not a metaphor. When he arrived at the library, he thought at first that it was just a headache from the trip, from the stress, and from Blue and Ronan sniping. From Opal making those desperate noises. From Henry being exiled to the hotel - at least someone is getting sleep. He had thought that all of those could easily combine into a migraine.

But the longer they’re in the library the weirder it feels, and the less like a migraine it seems. Instead he looks up and thinks he can see things moving in the walls, or on the walls, he looks at the stained glass and it doesn’t look like the figures were still a moment ago. He looks at the busts of the figures of old men in Yale’s illustrious past, and thinks that they must have been having a conversation. Isn’t that what just happened?

Ronan was only asleep an hour before he comes back, his eyes frantic. It’s late and they’re all cranky, and Blue thinks she heard Ronan say something while they were sitting in the hallway out in front of a pretty courtyard. There is a line of statues in that hallway, students doing student things, like studying or sleeping or building a ham radio. It’s both strangely old and uncomfortably new.

Ronan looks rumpled; every stitch of fabric on his body was designed by someone with name brand and a fashion empire and he still looks like he crawled out of a ditch. A girl is eyeing him but without the usual brand of lust that Ronan Lynch usually inspires in the opposite gender. And the same, Gansey rapidly corrects in his own head.

Opal immediately makes a beeline for him, and grips his shirt like she can hold him down with all the strength in her tiny little body. It’s very endearing. “He’s stuck, that’s all I got before it kicked me out. He has tarot cards, but-”

"-but you don't know what they mean," Blue finishes, and Gansey feels her headache like his own. Of course Ronan doesn't read tarot. Of course Ronan wouldn't be able to translate, and of course Ronan wouldn't know his suits apart.

"It's like a fucking joke, making me try and remember that shit," Ronan confirms, checking Opal over for scratches or wounds or god knows what else. “Are you hungry?” he asks her, and she shakes her head and buries her face in his shirt.

“We knew he was stuck in there,” Gansey says, and he feels a throb of blood in his temple.

“We heard you,” Blue says. “You were in there and we heard you talking.”

Ronan looks around. It’s starting to get really late, and Gansey thinks that they can’t possibly solve this tonight. The library closes at midnight; at that point they’ll have to sleep. Or, at least, they’ll have to try. But then Ronan says, “Do you think he can hear us?”

Gansey looks at Ronan and Blue looks at Gansey, and Blue shouts out, without any self-consciousness, “Adam, can you hear me? Your boyfriend is being a dick to Henry!”

Gansey recoils a little because if this is a way for Blue to air out her grievances, it won’t work at all. “Jane,” he starts, but it’s too late.

Ronan is turning on her. Devoid of a real target for his anger, Ronan Lynch has always been perfectly amenable to using whatever target presented itself, be it in the form of an undeserving victim. In this case, Blue invited it, and so Gansey can’t say this fight was blameless. “Cheng is a fucking worm,” he starts.

“Ronan-” Gansey attempts to interrupt, suddenly offended by this particular topic.

But it doesn’t matter, because as far and Blue and Ronan’s clashing tempers are concerned, Gansey might as well not be there. “He’s only spent the last six months with us, he was only there to help Gansey-”

“Oh, yes, he’s so fucking noble, helping Gansey, that’s not self-serving at all-”

“You’re so jealous you can’t even see how good a person he is-”

“You’re such a fucking toerag, I swear to Jesus fuck,” Ronan exclaims, his fury rising on his face. At Aglionby, the set of his shoulders and the narrowing of his eyes would have people diving for cover. “I don’t fucking like him-”

Blue, unfortunately for Gansey, whose headache is multiplying, is not cowed by Ronan’s display. She has nothing to fear from him, after all. “You won’t even give him a chance!” she yells, and people are starting to look. They’re not in the library proper - well, they’re not in a study space - so they’re not interrupting finals, and the look of bemusement from the security guard speaks to the frequency of high-stress bickering. “You’re so superior, you’re a classic raven boy-”

Ronan’s voice drops, just like that, the next words out of his mouth. The second that he stops yelling, Gansey knows he should interfere. Nothing good comes from Ronan refusing to feed another person’s anger, but it’s too late, he’s already swinging his most finely honed weapon. “You’re one to talk, Sargent,” he says, coolly, his chin lifting, “since all you do is collect them. Is that why you look at me like that? Because I’ve never been obsessed with you, and I never will.” Gansey’s jaw drops, and Ronan needles in. The truth is a hammer in his hands, a drill seeking the most tender spots. “I don’t fucking like Cheng. I will never fucking like Cheng, because the only thing that he did was zero in on my best friend and steal him, after making sure to abandon his own friends. Have you seen Ryang or Koh or Broadway anywhere recently?” Blue’s mouth closes, and Ronan snorts. “Thought so. Find a different impossible cause, and fuck off.”

Blue gives him a look, and it's tired, like this is an old battle that Blue is so tired of fighting. It's not a good look for her, Gansey thinks, uncharitable, and he regrets it right away. She looks at Gansey, then, with that same look. He knows she loves them all, so why can't Ronan see it? “That’s not-” Gansey starts, but Ronan is already walking away. “Ronan, wait!” he exclaims, and starts to follow. Ronan is at the door to the stacks by the time Gansey catches him. “Ronan,” he says.

Ronan give him a flat look. “I’m not fucking talking about it, Dick,” he says.

“I can’t live my entire life watching you,” Gansey replies, and suddenly he believes it. He doesn’t know when that happened. He doesn't know when his priorities shifted so suddenly.

Ronan does not look impressed. “What part of I’m not fucking talking about it wasn’t perfectly fucking clear?” he snaps, and slams a hand on the door. It doesn’t move. “This is so fucking absurd, I can’t believe this shit,” he says, and Opal comes trotting up.

Gansey doesn’t know what to say to fix this. He thinks that Blue is partially right - Ronan has to deal with the fact that Gansey is gone, and maybe that’s what he’s doing. And he thinks Ronan is partially right, too. “You don’t have to like Henry,” he finally allows. He didn’t allow that with Adam. He kept pushing them together, and it worked out, but he thinks maybe he got lucky, that time.

This time it’s different.

Ronan picks Opal up. “Oh, I don’t? How fucking generous of you,” he snarls, and Gansey winces. Okay. Maybe he did deserve that one. “Can we stop talking about your fuckbuddy?”

“Can you at least be civil?” Gansey tries, although he doesn’t have much in the way of high hopes. “Jane really does care for him.”

Ronan’s eyes close. “Fuck, man. I do not give a single shit about who or what Sargent likes or doesn’t like. I haven’t punched Cheng in the face, why isn’t that fucking enough?” Opal makes a noise. “Look. You went with him. It’s fucking fine, all right? I don’t know what Sargent decided to make that her fucking cause of the moment, as if we don’t have other shit to deal with.”

Gansey doesn’t want to go into details. About how he feels antsy without two other people, and how he thinks that Blue feels it too, untethered and weird. He thinks that Blue probably didn’t mean to upset him - she probably had other intentions by bringing up Henry. But Gansey also knows she wouldn’t appreciate him bringing it up. “What is this about?”

“This isn’t helping get Adam back,” Ronan replies, and Gansey takes stock of him. Ronan looks gaunt, drawn out, tired. Gansey feels all those things, along with the headache.

“We should talk about this later,” Gansey finally concedes. This isn’t a good time. He should have known that when they started this.

Then someone is clearing his throat, and both Ronan and Gansey look over. Ronan scowls. “What do you want?” he asks the boy standing just a couple of feet away, with a familiarity that suggests he knows him.

“I know where Parrish is,” the boy says, and suddenly Gansey looks at this pale, gangly youth with bad acne and a definite sheen of stress sweat on his forehead a little differently. Potentially sainted child.

Ronan, predictably, responds to this by squaring his shoulders and looking like a pit bull about to attack. “You didn’t fucking think to tell us this before?” he asks, and Gansey immediately reaches over to press his hand on Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan looks like he’s considering shrugging Gansey off, but he doesn’t. “This is Parrish’s roommate,” he says, “Some stupid Norwegian name.”

“It’s Hendrickson,” he tells Gansey, with an exasperation in his voice that Gansey recognizes as a symptom of being too close to Ronan. “Do you want to know or not?”

“I’m going to fucking break you-” Ronan begins.

But Gansey interrupts. “Ronan!” he says, the full power of being a Gansey in his voice, “stop!”

Ronan’s mouth closes and he seethes, while Opal turns to watch this. “We know where Adam is too,” Gansey says, calmly. “But do you know how to uh. Get him out?”

Hendrickson shakes his head. “I, uh. I have visions? God, please don’t think I’m crazy,” he mutters.

“We’re here talking about a library that swallowed my best friend,” Gansey replies, “we’re not going to think you’re crazy. Besides,” he adds, “psychics are sort of...a thing, where we’re from.” He looks up to see Blue, still poking, furiously, at one of the gargoyles. She looks crabby and like she hasn’t slept in years, her hair sticking up in at least twenty-five directions, heavy pit stains from sweat and worry on her shirt. She’s so beautiful.

Focus, Gansey.

Hendrickson, thankfully, seems to have no trouble focusing. “Every time he tries to leave,” he says, “the library puts up a maze. I don’t think he can find his way out.”

“Does it want to hurt him?” Gansey asks, slightly worried now. Ronan makes a noise like this is a stupid line of questioning, but it isn’t. This is the library. This is the natural habitat of an Adam Parrish, and if it wants to hurt him then Adam will have to transfer and Gansey will have to go to whichever Ivy League he goes to. Please, he thinks not Cornell.

As if Parrish would set foot on the Cornell campus.

Hendrickson shakes his head. “No,” he begins, careful. “I don’t think it does, anyway. I think it wants, well. I mean. Holding Parrish’s hand is like touching a livewire. He has power.” Gansey wonders, very briefly, and with some shocking jealousy, why was Adam holding this boy’s hand, before he realizes that Hendrickson and his own feelings are the least of his problems.

Gansey looks over at Ronan, who is holding onto Opal like she’s the security blanket keeping him from reaching over and throttling Hendrickson. “And it wants power?” Gansey says, because he knows the words out of Ronan's mouth are likely to be much more colorful and possibly be accompanied with a fist to the face.

“I think so. I think it’s been alone a long time. Who wouldn’t want something like that in that situation?” he asks, and Gansey thinks of Cabeswater, inside of him, Ronan’s dreamed forest. It loved - loves - Adam Parrish, it favors him and protected him, and now it’s in Gansey. If Gansey didn’t keep the magic of the leyline inside of him, it would have kept Adam safe.

The thought is stupefying, and the guilt is enough to drown any person.

“Do do you know how to rescue him?” Gansey asks, trying to keep from falling back into that pool. Oh, help. Oh, help, Adam.

Hendrickson shakes his head. “He needs something to lead him out of the maze,” he says, “but what, well.”

Ronan marches past them, suddenly, practically flinging himself away from Gansey, back into the bowels of the library. Blue lifts her head, following, and Gansey turns to follow, and remembers himself suddenly. “Ah, yes, thank you,” he says, trying to press as much gratitude as he can into those words. “Lynch,” he speaks up, “where are you going?”

Ronan doesn’t stop, until he enters a cavernous room; it has all the appearance of something that used to be a courtyard. There are windows facing it, with stained glass. It’s very Aglionby, except more English - which is to say it’s not like Aglionby at all, except in the level of pretentiousness. “Lynch,” he says, and slams into Blue, who’s slammed into Ronan, who is still holding Opal.

They’re practically a comedy skit.

“It’s the music library,” he says. “We need, fuck. We need CDs.”

Blue stares at him. “What?” she asks.

“Compact discs,” Gansey explains, “they’re where people used to-”

Blue spins and gives him a look that makes him think he’s said something unbelievably stupid. “Gansey,” she says, “I know what a CD is, are you kidding me? I’m poor, that doesn’t mean I live in a cave.”

Gansey realizes that yes, that was stupid, and he’s not altogether sure why he’s been so tongue tied. “Sorry,” he mumbles, but Blue is already helping Ronan, previous fight either forgotten, or, more likely, banked until they can bicker about it again.

Ronan is looking, until he finds something, and holds it up. “Here,” he says. “This will do.”

It is a copy of Blink 182’s newest album. “I’m utterly puzzled as to why Yale would have a copy of this just sitting around,” Gansey says, and Ronan is already marching his way to the help desk. This new turn has made Ronan move so quickly it’s dizzying. “Ronan, how are you even going to play that thing?” he asks, because why is not a question that he suspects Ronan will answer.

Ronan is leaving the library.

Gansey is left in the library, practically in a cartoon cloud of dust, that’s how fast Ronan moved. Blue is just staring at the trail of people who were forced out of his way lying in his wake. “Doesn’t the BMW have a CD player?”

Gansey stares at the weary security guard, who looks utterly puzzled at what just happened. “Did Ronan just steal a CD from the music library?” he asks. He picks up his phone and starts calling, but naturally, Ronan is ignoring his calls, leaving Gansey and Blue alone to pace in the library.

A few minutes go by before Gansey takes Blue’s wrist, with just a touch. He doesn’t do any more than that. “Jane,” he says, “why did you fight Ronan about Henry?”

Blue looks down a little. “He’s being stupid,” she says, and he realizes she’s not looking down because she’s embarrassed, but probably because he’s angry. “Henry hasn’t done anything to him.”

“But why now?” he asks. He’s not judging, He’s pressing his nose in her spiky hair and she’s putting her arms around his waist.

“Because it happened now. I don’t know,” she admits, and her nose is against Gansey’s chest. No kissing, he thinks, but he’s come well to terms with that. “I hate that Henry isn’t here.”

“Me too,” Gansey replies, quiet, and he’s about to say something else when suddenly there’s a horrible noise, like it’s 2001 and also, Satan’s turned on his speakers as someone - Noah forgive him, he doesn’t know the singer’s name - howls and it’s a long way back from 17, the whispers turn into a scream- and Gansey is putting his hands over his ears.

Someone screams, “Are you out of your mind, it’s finals,” and librarians are all heading down the hall towards a door that Gansey hadn’t realized was there. They open the door.

This is a mistake, because now the old wooden doors, thick and heavy, are no longer in the way to stop Ronan Lynch’s nightmare barrage of noise. Blue claps her hands over her ears, and the movement makes Gansey look up just in time to see-

The statue - a gargoyle, he supposes, except it’s a student, on the wall of the library, just at eye level. It has a transistor radio, and it’s a strange and disjointed thing, his headphones on, holding out his antennae. It’s an uncomfortable reminder that despite the gothic appearance, this library is not even a century old.

It moves.

Actually, it does what everyone else in the hallway is doing, which is it winces, just enough that Gansey is sure it’s real, but not enough that anyone else would have noticed. And then, just like that, it clicks.

“Jane, when you heard Ronan, we were here, right? Around here?” he asks, staring at the little figure. It’s back to not moving.

Blue yells back, “What?”

Gansey takes her hands and puts them on the gargoyle, and suddenly the entire world shifts, like an earthquake. Blue’s too powerful, he thinks, the thrumming of power - of the leyline, or whatever it is that created the liminal space in the library - suddenly energized by Blue’s battery. She’s batting his hands away but Gansey can’t move, he can almost hear Cabeswater, inside of him, unfolding in response, waking up. Quis es it asks, and Gansey can’t hear anything but screaming for a moment.

It’s Blue pushing him away and the sudden silence that makes him realize that he was the one screaming. “Gansey,” she says, sounding panicked, terrified. “Gansey!” she repeats, and he huffs out oxygen, takes his glasses off. He felt like he was coming apart.

The vision isn’t a vision, exactly. He thinks that it must be how a tree senses the world, the roots of it extending out, infiltrating stone and earth, stubborn and unstoppable. But he knows that Adam is there, in the middle, that Adam suddenly got a boost of power, that Adam woke up. He knows that Adam is still lost, because Adam can’t hear anything, although he doesn’t know how he could know that.

Cabeswater flings a rope, carefully fashioned of ivy and moss and tethered to Ronan’s pain, which blares through the music. But this music isn’t Ronan, this music is just music, and so Cabeswater can’t do much more than a single strand of magic.

From this, Gansey knows two things, without fail.

First: Ronan had the right idea, only the execution was poor.

The second thing is that Cabeswater is awake.

Blue doesn’t know any of this. She’s still panicking, because Gansey is still lying on the floor like a corpse, and Jesus Mary he thinks, borrowing the Lynches favorite phrase, knowing he’s scaring her, but he needs a minute, god, please, “Gansey, please, will you-”

“I’m all right,” he assures her, lifting a hand up. “I’m sorry,” he says, and she hits him before she flings her arms around him. “It’s all right, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that without warning you.”

She hits him again but then he’s hugging him. The silence is suddenly deafening. “They got him to stop?”

Opal is the one who speaks up. In typical fashion, Gansey had forgotten she was there in favor of a new mystery, and he suddenly feels guilty about that. “Kerah,” she whimpers, and Gansey reaches for her. She comes willingly into his arms, even though he knows that she’s a little wary of him in a way she’s not wary of Adam or Blue.

“Let’s go find him,” he says, picking her up. She weighs almost nothing in his arms, a little bird creature.

Finding Ronan is not difficult. He’s sitting on the steps of the side entrance of the library, looking furious as a librarian berates him and the security guard watches. He looks fearsome and feral, but Gansey is not fooled. “Did he come out?” Ronan asks.

Gansey shakes his head. “But I think you’re onto something. Ma’am,” he says, and the librarian turns to look at him. This is what Gansey is good at. Placating adults doing their jobs, making everyone satisfied, fixing things.

It takes ten minutes and not a single dime donated to Yale, but then he, Ronan, Blue, and Opal are sitting on the steps of the library. Hendrickson is not forgotten, but the library gives me a headache so he’s off to some corner, promising to give details if any come to him. But the fact is this:

“I know how to get Adam out.”

Chapter Text

The tug in the base of his gut is the first sign that something is changing.

Adam is in the maze, which feels like a labyrinth. He wishes he were Ariadne and had thought in advance to pull a string out from his pocket, but he is no such genius in art of foresight. Every turn feels like a dead end into nothing, a bitter turn into another wall, or a cul-de-sac of stone and stone heads of dead Yale presidents.

But then, suddenly, there’s a tug, and the entire labyrinth is ablaze with magic, vivid and powerful and raw, and if Adam were not so tired or so concerned that he was missing his English final, he would be more awed by it. But Adam is a practical soul made of practical parts, and he knows how to capture magic.

In fact, he does it so well it’s almost automatic. He remembers how the leyline felt, pulsing under his hands, how it felt feeding into Cabeswater, how it felt feeding into Ronan. He twists and drops his bookbag, swinging it down to the ground, and the books collapse in a heap.

Cabeswater was magic bound to nature, crafted by Ronan’s dream of what an Irish forest must look like; the rocks were like faerie rings, they contained and directed the leyline because that was the shape that Cabeswater understood. But this is a library. It flows with books, information and metadata and knowledge piled and contained and crafting magic. The books in Adam’s bag are out before he can think about it, and he piles them up, catches the pulsing magic and feeds it into his own hands, and tugs on whatever it is that is pulling at him.

Real magic touches back, he thinks, and there it is, a fine way out. He presses his hand on the wall, feeding a little of it back into the labyrinth, and it pulses in gratitude that is so utterly and transparently desperate that he almost feels sorry for it. “If you let me out, I can help you more,” he lies.

Because this isn’t an entity born yesterday, it doesn’t believe him.

But he keeps going, the minutes passing; it tries to distract him.

First, a fight; he can hear it in his head, Ronan flinging words and Blue and Blue flinging them back, and then Ronan saying unspeakably nasty things - well, about Henry Cheng, Adam really couldn’t care very much about Henry’s feelings, except, well.

Except that it’s Blue. And that’s Ronan, whose cruelty is so casual and so intrinsic that even Adam feels the sharp edge of Ronan’s tongue sometimes. Ronan lashes out for every reason - because he’s hurt or sad or scared, because he feels anything at all. It isn’t healthy.

Adam reaches into his bag and puts the Fool up on the wall. It pulses there, and the fight recedes.

He makes it around the corner, watched by the old University Librarians, their stone faces transforming into goblins, and this time he pulls all the tarot cards out. This time he realizes he can give something back.

He doesn’t lay them out to find out what this thing wants. It’s done controlling him - he’s the magician, and this is not Cabeswater. He made no deals and no sacrifices. He pushes the magic in his fingers into the cards and they shimmer, and he presses things into the walls.

Death; there’s Gansey, dying, on the leyline, his Cabeswater heart beating, his rebirth more than just symbolic.

The Page of Cups; there’s Blue, infuriating, mysterious.

The High Priestess - it will need Persephone to give it order, although he thinks Persephone would have known better than just putting up her cards, Persephone would have seen into the heart of this thing.

They are not memories that Adam is giving, but rather memories he’s imposing, his magic winding around the library labyrinth walls, and it screams still. Stay, stay, stay.

But the thing is this: Adam realizes he will. But he cannot stay because it catches him. He has to stay on his terms. Adam has forever been beholden to no one, and he will not be beholden to this either, to a life trapped in a library, or a life caught in the excesses of his own academic greed.

He has to choose a major.

Well, that’s a realization to stow away for another day. He pulls out another card and hesitates. He almost doesn’t want to give it over, but finally he does: The Lovers - Blue and Gansey, him and Ronan. How to be in love and how not to be in love. How to be a partnership and how to not hurt each other, and the opposite of it. The trials of young love and the agony of meant to be, and he’s not sure, except he knows that sometimes at night he thinks of Ronan and his heart breaks to think it might not be forever.

He thought, for a while, that’s what love was supposed to feel like. The incandescent pain of knowing that one day you will outgrow each other, that all you are capable of is hurting one another. He thought that Gansey was lucky to be spared such a thing by a curse and true love.

But he realizes now that maybe he doesn’t know what love is supposed to feel like. Maybe it’s supposed to feel like forever.

The fight with Ronan feels stupid now.

The wall swallows that card too, sucking the magic from it greedily, needy and thick. Adam swirls more of whatever power touched this place, but then it’s gone, the stone porous and saturating like Henrietta dirt after a storm. Adam looks up and thinks he must be only a quarter of the through, whatever the extra burst of energy was - Blue? Can’t be - it’s evaporated.

He takes another turn, only this one leads to a dead end, and so he has to double back. Stay he thinks, or the library thinks, insidious and curled in his head. He forces the magic in it to separate from him, forceful. “You are not me,” he says out loud. “You cannot do this,” he reminds it, and it whispers sweet things in his bad ear.

“Stop,” he tells it, “or you can forget another card.”

There’s silence, then, just a slithering of supplication, and the gargoyles all peer over the walls at him, and he realizes that no matter how many walls it puts up, he still has the real power. If it wants magic, it needs him.

And there it is, then. When Cabewater left them to save Gansey, Adam thought he wouldn’t be a magician anymore. He thought he lost that part of him, but that’s not true. The library begs him to help, and he presses his hands against warm stone that turns warmer at his touch.

He smiles.

~~~~~

Ronan doesn’t like this idea.

It’s not the theft of musical instruments that bothers him. That part is actually kind of cool, because he doesn’t often get to engage in petty theft, and Gansey looks practically green at the idea of it. “Damen,” he says, whispering to the back of the brick’s shoulders, which, incidentally, is the only part of the brink that Ronan thinks Gansey can see from this particular angle, “are you sure there isn’t a single music shop in New Haven open?”

The brick, who is being surprisingly cavalier about the fact that they’re currently in the basement of the music building, in the dark, rifling through practice flutes, replies carefully. “I don’t know how they do things in Virginia,” he says, “but here in Connecticut things close at 8pm, and also, it’s almost midnight.”

Ronan is standing on the other side of the room from this display of Ivy League delinquency. Opal is leaning against his legs, her hands tugging his clothes in a way he’s long grown accustomed to, his shirts all slightly worn from her graspy and greedy little hands. Blue is standing guard outside.

Gansey does not seem all that consoled by the fact that Blue is standing guard outside. The brick, despite the fact that he is not a music student, apparently knows someone who knows someone who is sleeping with a graduate teaching assistant who works in the music building and who also leaves her ID in his possession, and who owed the brick a favor. And now Ronan owes the brick a favor too, which he is starting to suspect is how this brick operates.

“Ronan,” Gansey says, “can you please participate in this?”

Ronan steps over Opal to stride over. “It doesn’t fucking matter which one,” he says, “because I don’t play the classical flute. So unless you think that Yale has a secret cache of obscure Irish instruments, this is a fucking useless idea.” He pauses. “Or unless the maggot has some secret skill with a piccolo I don’t know about.”

Gansey turns a color of red that Ronan didn’t know the human body was capable of producing. “Don’t be lewd,” he says.

At the same moment, the brick turns on his heel. “Do you play the bagpipe?” he asks, thoughtfully.

Ronan feels very defensive about this, and he doesn’t want to answer, which is useless because Gansey does it for him. “Yes, why, do you have one?”

“The bagpipe is a lot fucking louder than my car,” Ronan points out, and Gansey scowls. Ronan scowls back. One of them has a lot more experience than the other at this.

The brick turns away from the rack of classical flutes and heads down the hall. “I was down here for a recital once,” he says, “and I thought I saw a bagpipe.”

“I’m not fucking doing this,” Ronan snarls as Gansey follows. His heart is starting to pound in his ears. There has to be another way to get Adam back, this can’t be it, he thinks. He doesn’t want to do this. He can’t do this.

Then the brick - fucking Damen - opens a door and it’s like the obscure musical instrument jail. The three boys stare into the depths of it, and Ronan feels something inside of himself crack. Opal squirms past their legs and she’s wandering through the room, her fingers lighting on instruments as she passes, humming something tuneless and arrhythmic to herself, until her traitorous little fingers land on a perfect little Irish flute. “Kerah,” she says, picking it up, and holding it out to him.

“No,” Ronan replies, and turns, heading up the stairs and past Blue, who looks surprised to see him. It was stupid of him to let it get this far. He should have put a stop to this fifteen minutes ago when this plan got under way; he should have put his fucking foot down the second that Gansey suggested it.

A minute later Gansey and the brick are coming out of the music hall, and Opal is skipping up on their heels. Even from out here, half a block from the library, he can hear the tinny voice of the guard announcing that there are only fifteen minutes until the library closes. “Ronan,” Gansey says, but Ronan is in a blind panic now, he thinks that if he moves fast enough he can outrun the stabbing feeling in his chest. “Ronan,” Gansey says again, and Ronan is thinking, no, he needs, he needs to be fucking left alone, he needs to drown his fucking sorrows, he needs to forget this shit, he needs-

-but he can’t think about what he needs, either. All he can think about are his own fingers, curved around the barrel of a flute, about his father’s hands showings him, about learning the basic reels. All he can think about is the soft Saturday afternoons when his father’s manic energy harnessed around them, and it was him on the flute and his father on the violin and the music around them was a live, breathing thing.

He gave up so much of who he was when his father died, and treasured other parts of himself to retain the memory, for all the fucking good it did him. But music. Sometimes he thinks he sees music the way that Parrish sees money. Like if he uses it, one day it’ll be gone, and he’ll have nothing left to remember that part of his father.

It’s such fucking bullshit.

Opal is suddenly there. She is holding onto his shirt with one tiny hand, and onto the flute with the other. “You have to do it,” she says.

He knows he does. He’s the only one who both knows how and who loves him enough. In the entire world, in the venn diagram that is this shitty situation, Ronan Lynch is the only place where those two infernal points meet. “I can’t,” he lies, and it’s bitter in his mouth.

Opal just looks at him. “You’re lying,” she tells him, point blank. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“I haven’t played the flute since-” he starts, and he’s sitting then, and she’s crawling on top of him. They don’t really have time for this breakdown, but Gansey is ten feet away, and he’s not coming any closer.

But Blue is. She crosses past Gansey, and comes up to Ronan, and she’s holding him, then, as if they didn’t fight at all. They’re so much alike, he thinks, and he presses his face into her shoulder. “Come on,” she says. “We need to get Adam. We can’t leave him in there another night. And then if you want we can break that flute,” Gansey makes a sound like no we have to give it back I’m not comfortable with stealing but Blue ignores him, “and you don’t ever have to do this shit again. If you want, Gansey and I will go, I don’t know. Sit in the other room. No one has to hear this.” She keeps holding him, because maybe when he told her that he didn’t want her he was almost lying - not like Gansey or Adam wanted her, but in a different way, he belongs to her like she belongs to him - and she says, firmly, “but you have to do this, Ronan. You have to get over this.”

Ronan reaches out, and Opal puts the flute firmly in his hand.

They all head back to the hallway, and Ronan sits in front of the gargoyle that Gansey said had moved. People are leaving now, and the librarians are eyeing him with a distaste whenever they pass, but it’s finals and no one really seems to have the energy to deal with the small crowd of people congregating in the hall.

“What do I play?” Ronan asks, his fingers on the holes, working the fingering out. It feels familiar in a way that Ronan isn’t entirely comfortable with.

Damen considers it. “Do you know Free Bird?” he asks.

Gansey looks unimpressed by this. “No,” he argues. “I think it needs to be something that means something to you,” he says. And then he quickly amends, “but not the Murder Squash song, for the love of all that’s holy-”

“Don’t be blasphemous, that can only be played on a bagpipe at four in the morning in front of Aglionby,” Ronan replies, lifting his head.

“Maybe Adam is better off in there,” Blue grumbles, and sits on the bench next to Ronan, her leg touching his. He immediately feels more awake. Fucking battery.

They sit there another minute - it’s only a minute, Ronan reasons - before he decides on something, something that isn’t a practice number or some shit that he heard on the radio. He lifts the flute to his lips, and thinks, and thinks, and then he plays.

When he was eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, he won music competitions. He was good, by all accounts - better than his father, they used to say - with the kind of talent that he’s always had in spades. But Ronan’s secret wasn’t just that he was naturally good at this sort of shit. Ronan’s secret was that he fucking loved music, that it was inside of his head, that his musicianship came with practice and practice and practice, to the point where sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night and head out into one of the Barns, and play himself to sleep.

His father was so proud of him, for reasons that Ronan thought were because he was good, but maybe because now, he thinks that his father was proud that one of his sons was fitting into his dream of what a talented man should be. Declan was just as good a musician, but Declan couldn’t dream. Declan was a failure. Matthew wasn’t anything but sweet and charming, but he was an extension of Ronan, proof that he would follow in his father’s footsteps.

He doesn’t play the song he won with, though.

Instead he plays something that no one else ever heard. He had been working on it to actually play, for people and not just for prizes, before his father died.

Everything inside of him wants to stop, and so he doesn’t. He ducks his head, and at first the music is soft; unsure. Ronan hates the way it sounds, and he thinks, for a second, that no one would want to follow this garbage noise.

But he looks over, fast, and Gansey is staring at him, openly. Damen has a weird look on his face and it’s fucking annoying. And Blue-

Blue is looking at him with this half surprised and half incredulous look on her face. Like maybe she knew the whole time that he had this inside of him, this entire other side of Ronan Lynch, but maybe she had stopped believing that it was actually there. She makes a noise, and he thinks of what Adam’s face would look like.

The music gets stronger with that; he thinks, really, of what Adam would think about it, of the way that he might respond to Ronan playing the flute. It’s easy, then, to close his eyes and keep playing, to let his fingers move the way he knows he’s supposed to move them. He doesn’t hear anything but the music inside of his head, and the music pouring out of him and soaking the old stones.

And then Gansey puts his hand on Ronan’s shoulder, and Blue puts her hand on the stone, and suddenly there’s a link of the three of them against Yale’s old library bricks.

~~~~

Adam feels something latch onto him, and he fights it, almost, but the second it touches him, he thinks he hears music. He thinks he sees Cabeswater, too, when he closes his eyes, the trees in the distance and around him and inside of him. Is this what Gansey feels? Surrounded by green, infected with magic like a parasite?

The library is starting to shift, but the walls can’t keep up with Adam’s movements, they pop up behind him just as he steps by them or flip up as he turns away. He follows the tug, he can almost feel it wrapped around his arms, his hands leading him. I will be your hands, he thinks, and it’s as though Cabeswater is calling the parts of him that belong to the trees home.

~~~~

There’s something happening, Gansey can feel it, like a part of him is connected to Ronan and another part is connected to Adam. It’s invasive and strange, to feel this, to see Adam running (yes, he’s running, that’s him, that’s his slender figure cutting a shape across the maze, his hands in front of him) and to see the tethering lines of Cabeswater unspooling from inside his own breastbone and following the path set out by Ronan’s music.

The library is begging him - he can hear it now, in English and Latin and French and Hebrew, in hundreds of languages as if it only needs to find the one that will speak right to Gansey’s heart (Welsh, he hears the rolling slick vowels of it, he knows it) - to please, please don’t do this, it’s begging Cabeswater, which is older and more powerful, it’s begging Gansey, who values knowledge above all else. It begs with the terrifying wail of a creature that does not want to die but knows, with absolute certainty, that without Adam Parrish it will.

Gansey knows that wail, because he heard it the night that the demon took over Adam’s body, he heard it come out of his own mouth.

But Ronan doesn’t see any of this. The Greywaren, the pillar of magic, of dream and light, plays on.

The library is not very old, but it has all the knowledge of anyone who passed through it’s halls, and all the power of a creature that can dredge up forgotten magic through stones. Begging did not work.

“Damen,” Gansey breathes, and it’s hard, because he knows what will come next. He can’t breathe because the library is funneling air through him, pulling it into the stones. Air, he thinks. “Gargoyle. One with. Air.”

Blue is starting to look afraid, terrified, but she doesn’t let go of the stone and she doesn’t let go of Gansey.

Damen, for what it’s worth, does not look as afraid as Gansey suspects he might be. This is no simple thing that Adam has saddled this young man with - a revelation about his school, friends who have no problem asking him to commit larceny, and Ronan Lynch, who keeps playing the flute like he’s in a trance. They are at bare minutes before the security guard kicks him out.

“There’s a gargoyle at the door that looks like the west wind,” Damen says, “you know - are you okay?” he finally asks, and Gansey can see it, perfectly. The gargoyle at the door, pulling the last of Gansey’s air, and using it to push Adam back in. It will craft a trap around them next time, it will keep Adam in. This is a gambit they can only use once.

He can see Adam now, almost at that door. A whole two seconds, it would take Ronan to sprint to the other side. “Ronan,” he wheezes, “Ronan, go!”

The music stops, and Adam is right at the door, but Ronan is already bolting down the nave. Gansey thinks he should stay right there but Damen hefts him over one shoulder and lifts Blue under one arm like she’s a sack of potatoes (hey! is the protest and Gansey spares half a second to think that after this is over Damen will pay for this one) and takes off after him.

They’re at the door; the security guard does not look happy, and the last students to stick it out studying are staring at them, but there it is, in the little alcove for weather, a gargoyle in the shape of the wind, puffing air. Damen looks around, and Ronan is reaching through-

-it’s like he’s reaching through a rift in the air, but Gansey can see the flickers of reality bend around his hands, scrabbling for something, anything. “Adam,” Ronan says, “Adam, Adam, Adam, fuck, please, please-”

Gansey fights his way out of Damen’s grip, and Damen drops Blue then, too, and Gansey reaches around Ronan’s wrists. The threads of Cabeswater that woke to the call of its magician in distress awaken again. Dumbly, Gansey thinks he can feel Blue’s hand wrapped around his ankle. More pressing, he can feel Damen’s arms around his waist, and they’re standing there, a strange creature made of limbs and torsos and blustering magic.

People are definitely staring, but then-

~~~~~

Adam thinks he’s going to die.

He doesn’t think it because he’s in pain, but as he gets to the door, a gargoyle breathes out air, air like fire and like ice at once, buffeting him back, and the music stops. He thinks it must be music, even though he can’t hear anything.

He can see the door, right there in front of him, but he’s so tired. It would be so simple to go back in and sleep, to forget leaving the library. Maybe that’s a gambit for another day, some lizard part of his brain whispers in a traitorous fog.

He’s reeling back, but then like magic, he can hear, like something popped in his eardrum, only in reverse. And the thing he hears is Ronan’s voice, but the thing he feels is Gansey, those hands have to belong to Gansey, the ones around his wrist.

No, not hands.

The vines etch out from his skin, and it’s clear now. This isn’t Cabeswater in Gansey reaching for him. This is the last sweet sliver of the forest in himself, bursting out. The vines come out of his elbows, wrap around his forearms and his wrists, and the ones that match - the ones in Gansey, powered by Blue, guided by Ronan, they find him.

There’s a tug, and then another one, and Ronan yells almost, almost, almost, Adam, Adam, Adam.

Please he thinks. All he wants is to go home, like he was asleep and he woke up, and in waking he realized that what he wants isn’t in the magic of the library. It’s trapped in his blood, circulating through him, and it’s howling for him, begging him, but the green things call to him and the green things in his own blood call back. Forest and moss and ivy, wrapping around his wrists. Cabeswater, he thinks, but what comes out of his mouth sounds like Ronan.

It’s like emerging from the back of a car with two doors, awkward and difficult, and suddenly he’s on the floor of the library, on top of a pile of people.

“Ronan?” he asks, and Ronan makes a noise, like a wail, and suddenly Adam’s rolled on his back, and Ronan is on top of him. “Ronan, get off, Ronan, I’m okay, Ronan-”

“Okay gentleman - oh, and miss - you’re going to have to leave,” Adam hears, and he peers up, but Ronan is heavy. The security guard is helping someone up, and he can hear Blue’s voice yelping something, and that’s when it hits him.

He can hear.

“Adam!” he hears Gansey exclaim, and then Blue, and then Damen, how the hell did he get here? How many favors is this going to cost him, he thinks, but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care.

He reaches for Ronan, then, and gets pulled up to his feet. The feel of Ronan’s coat against his face is like home, but not as much as the feel of Ronan’s hands against the back of his neck.

~~~~~

Ronan is sitting on a black sculpture that someone says is a fountain, but it’s winter so there’s no water. Instead Ronan brushed off a layer of snow. Opal is making a fuss on the grass behind him, running in circles and screaming, but most of the students are either too stressed or too charmed to care. At least someone at this shitty school is having a good time.

They’re just waiting, now. Ronan thinks he needs to leave soon - the drive back is hellish - but every time he starts to feel the tug of the Barns, the tug of Adam’s face overwhelms him.

Adam is finishing a final now.

He waits another ten minutes, and then there’s Adam, coming around the corner, looking frazzled. “Are Gansey and Blue still around?” he asks, and Ronan is slightly pleased and just a little guilty that he’s pleased that Adam didn’t mention Cheng.

Ronan hops off the fountain. “Yeah,” he says, “they’re leaving for Hartford in an hour. How was it?” he asks, and he comes in closer.

Adam shrugs, casual. “Fine,” he replies. All evidence of them fighting is gone, washed away in the trauma of Adam almost being swallowed by a hungry library. “Are you staying until-”

“-I was thinking until you finish finals,” Ronan finishes, in a hurried rush. He doesn’t usually give this much time away from home. There are things there that need his care. Cows. Barns. Living things that rely on him. There’s a tug that comes right out of the ground.

His hand lands on Adam’s, and Adam’s hand squeezes. The vines that Cabeswater used - that Gansey used - to pull Adam out have etched onto his skin like tattoos. They’re so perfect that they look too real to have been done by any artist, twirling around Adam’s wrists in a green tangle of leaves and stem, up his forearms. Adam doesn’t really like it, or he says he doesn’t, but Ronan doesn’t believe him. “You don’t have to stay,” Adam says. Ronan’s thumb scoots down Adam’s hand until he’s rubbing a spot where there is a leaf against his slender wrist bone.

“The library might eat you again,” Ronan points out, even though that isn’t why he would stay. It’s strange to see Adam so at ease after a test. But then, it’s a new Adam, a college Adam. Ronan doesn’t like that he doesn’t know him, and doesn’t know the places he goes.

Adam shrugs. “Probably not,” he says. “I kind of figured things out in there,” he says.

Ronan’s eyes narrow, but his hand doesn’t let go of Adam’s hand, even as his heart starts to race and his palms start to sweat. Son of a fucking bitch, he thinks. Adam can’t resist magic like Opal can’t resist eating insulation foam. “Don’t you fucking-” he starts.

Adam elbows him. “I’m a magician,” he says, “not an idiot.” He looks up at the library, looming over them.

Ronan pauses. “Hey,” he says, and Adam turns, tilts his head a little, “why were you holding Hendrickson’s hand?” he asks, finishing the statement.

Adam looks horrified a second, and then he doubles over, laughing. The sound fills the space around them, like music, and sinks into the stones, until Ronan is laughing too.