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Ronan shoulders his way through the door of Monmouth and immediately regrets it for the way it makes his jacket pull at the plastic covering on his back. He tries to shrug his jacket off with a roll of his shoulders, but this only succeeds in pulling it in a different direction. He responds by slamming the door behind him.
Gansey looks up from where he’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bed in the middle of the massive space that is Monmouth. His hair is mussed in a way that suggests he hasn’t done much of anything all day but read the books he has sprawled around him. He’s still in a t-shirt and sweatpants, rumpled and bed-headed and looking altogether too human with his wire-rim glasses slightly askew on his nose.
It’s enough to make Ronan want to open the door just so he can slam it all over again. Anything to ease the strange fire in his chest that never seems to burn itself out. But his back feels like it’s freshly sunburned, so he refrains. Instead he lets his jacket slide off his back and onto the floor. He doesn’t bother to pick up. He does ease himself out of his t-shirt and toss it on top of his discarded jacket. Gansey looks like he’s about to comment on the careless placement of his clothes, but is stopped short by the plastic covering Ronan’s back. It’s black and opaque so Ronan figures he probably looks like someone taped him up poorly with strips of a garbage bag, but he’s grimly satisfied by the shocked expression on Gansey’s face.
His lips curl into a sneer. “What’s with the face, Dick?”
Gansey is silent for a moment longer as his face goes through several expressions before settling on resignation.
“Declan’s going to lose his mind,” he says. There’s something else under the resignation in his voice that’s in the neighbourhood of disappointment with an undercurrent of sadness.
“Fuck Declan,” Ronan says.
“Yeah,” Gansey agrees.
They stare at each other for a moment and Gansey looks like he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t. He looks like that a lot these days. Ronan would like to say something to get rid of that look, but he doesn’t lie and anything he could say would be just that. So instead he stomps to the kitchen/bathroom/laundry and pulls a beer from the fridge. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and even though he’s getting used to his own shorn head, he still barely recognizes himself. He twists the cap off his beer and makes his way back out.
Gansey is still parked in the center of his bed and Ronan flops down beside him, landing on one elbow and spilling some of his beer. Gansey makes a pained face.
“Is that necessary?” he asks.
“Yes.” He makes a point of chugging half the beer.
More silence. A few pages rustle, but Ronan knows that Gansey’s not actually reading anything.
“Does it hurt?” Gansey asks eventually.
Ronan shrugs one shoulder, which pulls at the bandage and does, in fact, hurt, but it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. “It’s like a sunburn,” he concedes.
Gansey frowns. “How long do you have to keep it covered?”
“Over night.”
Gansey nods. Ronan finishes his beer.
“I’m getting another one of these,” he says, wagging the empty bottle in Gansey’s face. “You want one?”
Gansey shakes his head.
“You want some orange juice?” Ronan tries.
Gansey’s mouth quirks, tugging up on one side and revealing the dimple there. “Sure,” he says.
The next morning Ronan finds himself in the kitchen/bathroom/laundry struggling to remove the stupid plastic from his back. Some of the tape is hard to reach and pulling at it is unpleasant. He would have thought it would hurt less the next day, but instead it’s more sensitive.
“Fuck,” Ronan mutters when he finally gets the entire thing uncovered. He tries to get a full view of it in the mirror over his shoulder, but the mirror is too small and the tattoo is too big and he has no idea how he’s supposed to clean it properly when he can barely reach around enough to pull some plastic off.
“Holy shit,” Gansey says. He’s standing in the doorway staring at Ronan’s back.
Ronan looks up at him. “It’s not done yet,” he says. “This is just all the line work.”
“So you’re going to have do the whole wrapped in garbage bags thing again is what you’re saying?”
Ronan glares.
“Do you, uh,” Gansey hesitates. “Do you need help with that?”
Ronan doesn’t say anything. Just continues to stare at him.
“You need to clean it, don’t you?”
Ronan nods.
“Was that a ‘yes, you need to clean it,’ or ‘yes, you need help doing that’? Just to clarify.”
“Both,” he growls.
“It’s probably easier if you sit,” Gansey says, entering the bathroom and grabbing the washcloth that Ronan had set out on the counter. “Do I just use soap?” He’s frowning down at the greyish bar of soap they keep by the sink. “That doesn’t look sanitary,” he comments, picking it up.
“It’s soap. It’s self-cleaning. Who cares?”
“Some of us don’t want you to die of sepsis.”
“Whatever.” Ronan doesn’t think sepsis would be the worst way to go.
“Are you going to sit?”
Ronan wants to say something snarky in reply, but he can’t think of anything and he really does need Gansey to clean this up for him, so he flips the toilet lid down with a bang and straddles it so his back is to him. He leans forward to rest his forearms on the water tank and rests his chin on his hands. Gansey upturns their laundry basket and positions it in front of the toilet as a make-shift stool.
“Ready when you are,” Ronan says.
“Let me know if it hurts,” Gansey says.
“It’s gonna hurt, Gansey, just make sure you get all the shiny gunk off.”
“You could pretend you appreciate that I’m doing this.”
Ronan says nothing and Gansey starts rubbing at the edge of the tattoo with the damp cloth. It hurts much more than Ronan was expecting. He’s had plenty of sunburns in his life, but no one’s ever had cause to rub at them with damp fabric. His entire back feels raw. He hisses and ducks his head, pressing his forehead into his arms. Gansey stills.
“Keep going,” Ronan says.
Gansey sighs, but he continues cleaning the tattoo. Ronan shuts his eyes and focuses on the burn. Like getting the tattoo itself, the pain eventually levels out and becomes dull background noise. There, but not intolerable. Almost comforting. He’s just getting used to the insistent burning when Gansey sets a hand on his waist. He flinches slightly at the fingers curling towards his stomach. Gansey pauses again, but he doesn’t move his hand.
“Sorry, did that hurt?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, Gansey, get on with it.”
“You’re very tense.”
“You’re rubbing at an open wound, man.”
“Right.”
Gansey continues to rub the cloth over Ronan’s back. Ronan thinks he’s being even gentler now, but he can’t say for sure because he’s distracted by Gansey’s hand still resting on his waist. As Gansey works his way over Ronan’s back his hand slides up his ribs. He’s close enough that Ronan can feel his breath on his back, brushing over newly dampened skin in a strangely pleasant shiver. Whenever Ronan tenses over a particularly sensitive patch of the tattoo, Gansey’s fingers grip tighter.
Ronan shifts and Gansey’s hand is there to steady him. He keeps his eyes shut and swallows. There’s something clawing at the back of his throat—something that’s been clawing there since before all this shit went down—and Ronan’s usually good at pretending it doesn’t exist, but Gansey’s hand is warm where it presses into his ribs and the other is gentle as it wipes over his back and Ronan’s having more trouble than usual extracting the claws.
He doesn’t know how long they’re like that, with him leaning forward, eyes shut, while Gansey cleans his tattoo, but eventually Gansey wipes the cloth over the entire expanse of his back and says, “Done.”
He keeps his hand on Ronan’s waist and Ronan doesn’t move. He doesn’t say anything. Gansey’s thumb is rubbing in tight circles over his skin and Ronan is holding his breath. He startles a bit when Gansey’s other hand, damp from the cloth he must have discarded somewhere, comes to rest on his other side. That thumb also starts moving in rhythmic circles on his lower back. Ronan bites his tongue to keep from swearing. He lets out a shaky breath and Gansey’s hands slide up to his ribs.
It feels dangerous. A concentration of oxygen near an open flame ready to ignite. Ronan is tense under the effort of holding himself still. He doesn’t want to move and shatter this...whatever this is. Gansey’s throat clicks as he swallows and Ronan feels the tickle of his hair as he leans forward, closer, stopping short presumably to avoid touching all that newly wounded skin. Ronan would regret that the tattoo is preventing Gansey from closing that last inch of distance if it weren’t the thing that got them to this point in the first place.
And just like that Gansey’s hands drop away. He can feel the place where they were resting like a second tattoo. Ronan takes a rough breath in and lifts his head.
“Is this lotion for your back?” Gansey asks, and Ronan will never understand how he’s able to school his voice the way he does, like they weren’t just hovering on the edge of something tempting and ill-advised.
Ronan turns to see Gansey holding the unlabelled jar he left on the counter.
“Yeah,” he says and his voice is wrecked in comparison. He hopes Gansey doesn’t notice.
“Where’d you get it?”
“Who cares?”
“Do you want me to?” he asks. So casual.
“Sure,” Ronan says, trying to match the casual tenor of Gansey’s voice.
Gansey scoops some of the lotion onto his fingers and dabs it gently on Ronan’s back. Ronan flinches under the sudden cold of it and then at the renewed contact of Gansey’s hands on his back. He rubs it in carefully, in short light strokes, never pressing more than he has to. Ronan still hisses under the pressure, the slight friction of his fingers dragging over raw skin. He enjoys it all the same. He's not sure whether it’s the cool after effect of the lotion or the fact of Gansey’s hands on him that's more comforting, but he knows he's not willing to examine it more closely.
Gansey rubs the excess lotion over Ronan’s sides and lets his hands rest at Ronan’s hips again. They’re burning hot after the cooling lotion, two points of fiery contact branding themselves into Ronan’s skin. The tension that had momentarily dissipated is back in full force, thicker and deadlier. Ronan turns to catch Gansey’s eyes and sees that he’s studying the lines of his tattoo.
“It’s really something,” Gansey murmurs.
One of hands moves up his ribs again and Ronan shuts his eyes to better feel the tickle of fingers moving so softly over his skin. When he opens them Gansey is staring at him. Their eyes lock and for a moment they just stare at each other. Gansey licks his lips and Ronan can’t help tracking the movement. He flicks his eyes back up to Gansey’s and there’s a moment, a shocking incendiary moment, where Ronan thinks they’re going to close the distance between them. Gansey twitches towards him and then seems to think better of it. His hands are still on his waist though, still searing themselves into his skin. Ronan is going to ignite. He’s half hard in his jeans and his heart is a galloping herd in his chest.
“Gansey,” he says. The name bursts from him in a gust of held breath being let go. It’s a question and a demand and a plea.
It shatters the air.
Gansey stands up. His hands fall away. He slides his all-American-hero face on and smiles at Ronan.
“Let me know if you need help with that again tomorrow.”
Ronan swallows and nods, no longer trusting his voice. He lets his forehead fall to his arms again and listens as Gansey’s footsteps, soft to begin with, fade away entirely.