The Raven Cycle/The Dreamer Trilogy. Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish. Rated T.
A03 Tags: Post-Greywaren, Canon Compliant
Originally posted to Ao3 06/2023
Language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.
– Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace
Adam woke up.
It was near dawn; the light was grey and flat where it snuck under the blackout curtains. His first, uncharitable thought was that the room was so anonymously tasteful as to be Declan’s, but blackout curtains were very un-Declan like. And the carpet was ugly. It was a hotel. He remembered the patch of grass near the river, the solidity of Ronan’s arms around him, but the rest was a fuzzy smear of movement and colour. But he was safe. He knew he was safe. The feeling had not yet lost its novelty.
Adam sat up slowly, mindful of his aching body and screamingly empty stomach. He was naked under the covers, out of the filthy clothes he’d worn for days while his mind was trapped outside his body.
The bathroom door opened and a cloud of steam emerged, and with it, Ronan. He resolved out of the mist, a beloved and familiar shape in old sweatpants and a hoodie with holes in the ragged cuffs where his thumbs stuck out. When he came closer, Adam saw there was a grease stain on the sleeve that marked it as something of his. Either Ronan had kept it all this time, or he’d dreamed it from memory, and Adam didn’t know how to feel about any of that.
He didn’t know what to say. Where to start.
“Hey,” he tried. His voice was rusty from disuse.
“Hey,” said Ronan. He fiddled with the cuff of the hoodie and approached the king size bed carefully, like he was unsure of his welcome. “You’re awake.”
Ronan nodded to the nightstand. A pile of clothes was folded so neatly Adam knew Ronan had taken them out of a drawer in his dream. Clean boxers, worn soft jeans, his old Coke t-shirt. He pulled on the shirt hastily and slipped the boxers under the covers so he could awkwardly wiggle into them; it was made more difficult by hunger’s clumsiness. Beside the jeans was a Big Gulp cup that radiated cold. Adam picked it up and opened it; the liquid inside was thick but colourless and smelled faintly sweet.
“What is it?”
“Something to put in your stomach. Won’t hurt you, will stay cold. Tastes like root beer float.”
Adam took a tentative sip. It tasted like a memory of a root beer float, drunk on a hot day, sweet and cold enough to cut through oppressive heat. “You hate root beer,” he said.
“It’s not for me now, is it?”
After so much silence, Ronan’s consideration stung, just a little. Adam didn’t want it to, wanted the memory of the sweetmetal sea to erase all those previous hurts. But here in the flesh and bone world–Adam’s world–the hurts remained. “Thanks.”
Adam fingered the edge of the t-shirt as he sipped his drink. The seam was fraying a little from wear. He’d forgotten that. The actual shirt had become a rag at some point, but this dreamed version lived in perfect fidelity.
“I slept on top of the covers,” Ronan offered, apropos of nothing.
“Protecting my virtue?” Adam said dryly.
Ronan scowled. “I didn’t know how you’d feel about it and I wasn’t going to wake you up to ask.”
It was impossible to forget that Ronan was a wild, difficult, dangerous person, and hard to remember that he was also careful, in his own way. It felt like a betrayal of him that Adam should be surprised by it, but he was.
Adam jerked his head to Ronan’s side of the bed in permission, and Ronan came around and sat, leaning against the headboard. The bed was too big for them to touch by accident.
“Fill me in on what I missed?” Adam asked.
Ronan did. There was a lot in there.It was a winding, complicated story, and Adam had to stop him frequently to ask clarifying questions, which made Ronan huff in frustration.
He described waking the ley line, and his whole body turned towards Adam, looking for a reaction. Adam realized that Ronan was nervous.
Adam tapped his dreamed straw on his bottom lip. “Well, knowing that would have made that whole thing with Gansey a lot easier.”
“I’ll fucking keep that in mind for next time.” Ronan was still looking at him.
Adam was too tired to try to piece it together. “What do you want me to say here?”
“You’re not going to react to that?”
Adam shrugged. “I saw you in that place with the sweetmetals. You didn’t look–human.” It had not, strictly, come as a surprise. Ronan was strange and extraordinary. Adam had known that for a long time.
“No,” Ronan agreed. “But I am now.”
“I can see that.” Ronan, in his essential configuration, had not changed. In spite of himself, Adam asked, “Why, though?” That was what he couldn’t quite understand.
“Why do you think?” The way Ronan was looking at him was the answer. Part of the answer.
Adam swallowed, and looked down at the shiny hotel coverlet. Even that movement hurt, now. His human body was frail in a way he’d never felt before, not even when he was in school and working two jobs on five hours’ sleep for months. Even with the dreamed restorative, his stomach cramped painfully. Adam knew his own limits intimately well as a matter of survival; he was going to be out of commission for a couple of weeks at least.
“Weird choice,” he said eventually.
Ronan’s mouth twitched. “It was mine to make.”
Adam flexed his fingers on the coverlet. That, he could understand. Hands, eyes. It occurred to him all at once, and he laughed humourlessly.
“I guess you didn’t need me after all. For the ley line. You could have done it all on your own.” Magician was the scrap of power he’d wrapped around himself when he had nothing else, but maybe it hadn’t been needed after all.
“No.” Ronan was fierce as Adam had ever seen him. “No, I couldn’t.”
From anyone else, Adam would have thought this was trying to spare his feelings. Even another Ronan might have been trying to let Adam down easy. But this Ronan had shown a great deal of disregard for Adam’s feelings of late, and so Adam found it easy to trust him.
Haltingly, Ronan added, “I only knew what I was doing because of you.” He was silent for a long moment, his mouth opening and closing twice on aborted sentences before he finally said, “How to make a choice no one else could make. You did it first. I learned it from you.”
Adam scratched at a scab on the back of his hands. “Oh.” There was so much love in the words, they hurt to hear. It made him want to be cruel about it, until Ronan stopped and went back to ignoring him, so Adam kept his mouth shut until the impulse passed.
Ronan carried on with his story as if he hadn’t quietly devastated Adam. When he got to the part about Matthew and Bryde, the words came to an abrupt halt, and Ronan looked away, his jaw working.
Adam was not any better at giving comfort than he was a year ago. Was Ronan any better at receiving it? He didn’t know. In the sweetmetal sea, he could reach out with his feelings, throw his love and sorrow at Ronan and know it would land true. Here, he had to thread all those unwieldy feelings through the eye of the needle of language. He knew what he might say to the Crying Club, but it was unthinkable to say to Ronan; Ronan demanded honesty. Adam was far better at using words to hide his feelings than to express them. But tears were gathering in the corner of Ronan’s eyes, and Adam thought that for his sake, he could try.
“Fuck,” he said. “I’m sorry.” As far as attempts go, it kind of sucked. Adam took another sip of his root beer float restorative and felt thoroughly inadequate. It was not an unfamiliar feeling.
“Fuck off,” said Ronan, but there was very little heat in it. So that was a medium, then, on receiving. He pressed his knuckle into his eye. “Anyway, apocalypse averted, or whatever.”
“Or whatever,” Adam agreed. “Are you–” he began, but before he could finish the thought, Ronan interrupted him.
“Don’t,” Ronan snapped.
“Wasn’t gonna, you jackass.”
“Smart, Parrish.”
“I get that a lot.”
“I bet, you fucking nerd.”
This groove was familiar, the rhythm of their banter taking the place of real speech. But the meaning wasn’t in the words, it was in the rhythm, the pauses, the recognition. The Morse code of who they were to each other. A way of saying: I’m here. The corner of Ronan’s mouth twitched, and Adam’s around the straw, echoed it.
They sat like that for a long while, Adam sipping his drink and Ronan beside him. The silence grew long around them, but it was a comfortable silence.
When Adam was down to the dregs of the drink, Ronan said, “You scried for me.”
“Yeah? What else was I gonna do? I’m not a dreamer.” The straw made an awful sucking sound as he tried to drink the very last of the drink..
“You could have left me alone.”
“Don’t start with that.” Adam had tried that and failed; he’d been right to try, and right to fail.
“I didn’t choose you, though.” The words burst out of Ronan in a flurry. Adam flinched, just a little. “You did that for me, and then when the Lace had you, it was you or the world, and I chose the world.”
Adam blinked. Ronan looked, of all things, guilty.
The logical, practical part of his brain asserted itself first. “What would choosing me have done if the world had ended anyway?”
“I thought you’d say that.”
It was needlingly pleasurable to be known in such a way. Adam frowned. It was the only pragmatic choice. So why, then, did it hurt to hear?
He rolled it around in his head, trying to unpick the knot of his thoughts. When they floated outside his head, they were much easier to sort through. Compacted into his regular human experience, everything got hopelessly snarled. But Adam knew from magic that intention was not enough; you had to act. And speech was the only act he had left.
“I never wanted you to choose me over the world,” Adam said slowly. “I just wanted you to talk to me.”
It was very plain and boring. He worried Ronan would think he was pedestrian. Ronan knew all this, but saying it out loud was mildly humiliating. Ronan’s face was stormy, and he was silent a long minute. Adam braced for the apocalyptic fight. He was very good at bracing for things.
But when Ronan spoke, his voice was soft. “I know that now.” It was the closest he’d ever heard Ronan come to an apology.
Still, Adam couldn’t help pressing: “You didn’t then?” It was only a little acidic.
Ronan went very still. “I was afraid.”
He’d never heard Ronan say that before. It wasn’t that Ronan liked to pretend he didn’t have emotions, that was Adam’s thing. It was more that he liked to pretend his were so much more complex than could fit into regular words. But Adam had seen and felt them, and for all his shape was alien, the contents of Ronan’s heart had not been so strange after all.
“And now?” The Adam that was overjoyed Ronan was talking to him wanted to swallow back the question and take what he was offered. But the Adam that had, for weeks, jumped every time his phone buzzed, had to ask, and that Adam won.
“I’m not,” Ronan said simply.
Adam sighed out the rest of what he now recognized as anger. “Okay.”
Maybe it would be. After all that, maybe it would be.
Carefully, Adam extended a hand across the gulf between them on the bed. Ronan’s hand came to rest in his as lightly as a sparrow coming home to roost. That touch was as much as he could bear. It was like trying to refill his empty stomach. No matter how much he longed for more, too much at once and he’d make himself sick. Instead, he savoured what he did have, the warm, dry pressure of Ronan’s fingers threaded lightly in his.
Adam opened his eyes without realizing he’d closed them. The light coming in under the drapes was a more insistent yellow. Ronan was still beside him, holding his hand. In his doze, Adam had slumped sideways, tilting toward Ronan but not touching him beyond their joined hands.
“Welcome back,” Ronan said.
Adam tried to respond, but his mouth and brain were sticky with sleep, and all he produced was a garbled noise. Ronan snickered.
“How long was I out?” He felt bleary in a way he hadn’t when he first woke up. And hungry. He straightened up slowly, and his neck howled its disapproval at the weird position he’d been in.
“An hour, maybe? You were snoring.”
Adam made a face and scrubbed his free hand over his cheek. He’d need to start figuring things out soon, but it could wait another half hour. Whatever fucking mess he’d gotten himself into wouldn’t get worse in thirty minutes.
He rolled his shoulders out; Ronan tracked his movements with bright-eyed interest. For just a moment, Adam looked back. It was as long as he could bear. To experience more than the passing suggestion of desire right now would incinerate him.
Adam cleared his throat and plucked his shirt. It had a hole in the collar, same as the old one had. “Why this?” It felt important to know, suddenly.
Rona shrugged; his hand moved faintly in Adam’s. “Easiest to dream.”
“But why, though?” The thought crept in like it always did: Was that the image of him Ronan had fixed in his mind, the version of him from high school in second hand clothes and Henrietta dust?
Ronan looked down at their joined hands. “It’s what you were wearing when you told me you were leaving. For Harvard.”
Adam rolled the fraying edge between his fingers, and thought about the distance between who he was and who he might be. “Well, I am leaving.” Ronan jerked up, and naked fear sprinted across his face. “Harvard,” Adam clarified, and his speech brought it into being. “I’m leaving Harvard.”
“Well, shit.” Ronan looked like he was trying very hard not to look too pleased.
“I’m not coming back to Henrietta,” Adam added immediately. “I need to salvage my academic record so that I can transfer. Might need you to fake a police report for that? And a hospital record.”
Ronan rolled his eyes. “Boring.” After a minute, he asked, “Where are you gonna go?”
Usually, Adam thought about what he was going to say well before he said it. But he just answered Ronan with his thoughts as they occurred to him. “Somewhere on a ley line. Somewhere good. Lower cost of living, if I can swing it.”
They were things he’d avoided thinking them for a long time, out of fear that they’d destroy the life he was trying to craft. And they did, but the destruction only came as a relief.
“For finance?”
“Engineering,” Adam said firmly. He’d been torn between the two, and had made up his mind sometime when he wasn’t looking. “Finance is so boring.” It turned out the best way to make money was to already have it, which was not teaching Adam anything he hadn’t already learned at Aglionby. “Classics minor, maybe.”
Ronan’s smile was wicked. “You could major.”
“Absolutely not.” But Ronan was only teasing him, and Adam returned his smile.
“I could end up at Stanford or something,” Adam warned him. It was bullshit, and they both knew it. But it was important for Adam to say, and they both knew that too. The sweetmetal in Ronan’s skin changed things, but his fundamental personality and preferences were not among them.
Ronan sneered, but it was only a small sneer. “California, Parrish? California sucks. “
“You’ll deal.” It wasn’t an invitation, not yet. But it would be. Eventually.
“Yeah, yeah.” Ronan made a show of grousing, but he didn’t let go of Adam’s hand. After a minute, he added, “What are you going to tell your new Stanford friends about your loser freak high school boyfriend?”
“That he has the worst taste in music I’ve ever heard, gives insane head, and is an incarnation of a supernatural entity,” Adam deadpanned.
Ronan shot up in offense. “First of all, my music taste is impeccable–”
Adam pulled on his hand until he subsided. “Okay, okay, fine. I won’t tell anyone you give insane head, that’s private.”
“That’s right.” When Ronan relaxed, it was just a little closer to Adam’s side.
Maybe there were people out there he could say that to. Probably not the insane head part, not in those words, but the rest of it. The normal stuff about Ronan, and the deeply strange. Jordan and Hennessy and Carmen Farooq-Lane existed; there had to be more people like them. Maybe some of them even went to college. Maybe he’d like some of them; maybe some of them would even like him.
That was the thought that was hardest to get his head around. Not Ronan’s other shape, or almost dying while scrying, or the near-apocalypse; all that was pretty standard. But the idea that anyone might like Adam Parrish enough all on his own– that took some getting used to. He knew already it would take years’ worth of getting used to.
“Stanford’s gonna love you,” Ronan said.
“I’m not going to Stanford.” He wasn’t above winding Ronan up, but thinking about that much distance for too long made his heart hurt, and it was currently bruised enough.
“Or wherever.” Ronan waved his free hand, like the difference didn’t matter to him. “They’ll love you wherever you go.”
The joking had burned off; it was just sincerity left. If he breathed too hard on the moment, Adam was going to ruin it. He was not very good at tenderness.
Ronan, with slow and telegraphed movements, lifted their joined hands to his mouth and brushed his lips over one of the almost-healed scabs on Adam’s knuckles. Through strength of will, Adam didn’t jerk his hand away. It was never fighting that made him want to run. It was this: the curve of Ronan’s mouth no longer cruel, the dark sweep of his eyelashes and the way he glanced up at Adam through them.
For the first time, it didn’t feel like something that was going to destroy him.
“You sure about that?” It was a little unsteady, cracked and speckled with hope.
Ronan smiled, and he was every inch the Greywaren, resplendent and powerful and strange. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”