The Raven Cycle/The Dreamer Trilogy. Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish. Rated E.
A03 Tags: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse; Daddy Issues; Daddy Kink; Choking; Breathplay; Under-Negotiated Kink
Originally posted to Ao3 07/2023
Ronan was staring at the gravel.
The blue dark cut him nearly to a silhouette, with the yellow porch light splashing over his cheekbones. Adam knew there was a part of him that was always staring at that gravel, but now his whole body was bent to the task, his shoulders hunched up and his knuckles turning white on the porch railing.
Adam had heard the door to the office slam, and knew what it meant. He’d said from the start it was a bad idea. When the New Fenian had offered Ronan his bag of memories, Adam had recoiled on instinct. It had put him in the unfortunate position of agreeing with Declan, and for two days, the Lynch family hurricane had raged across the Barns. But the New Fenian said it was Ronan’s choice. The man with his father’s face offered him something, and thought there was a world in which Ronan might refuse him.
So when the door slammed, Adam came downstairs.
Ronan darted for the car—there were three cars there, but the BMW would always be the car— and popped the trunk, shifting things around until he found what he was looking for, drew it out, and shut the trunk again with a resounding slam.
It was a tire iron.
Adam knew what was going to happen before it happened. It was like watching the past. He did not look away as the tire iron came down: three shattering blows that broke the tail lights and dented the trunk.
He ducked inside, stole Declan’s keys off the console and slipped back outside before anyone noticed. Adam was good at going unnoticed.
Outside, Ronan’s heaving breath plumed in the cold air. The tire iron hung loose in his hand. Adam touched his wrist and Ronan jerked and turned to look at him, coming back from whatever far away place he’d gone to.
Adam handed him the keys wordlessly, and gave him somewhere to go.
Ronan took the keys and flung himself into Declan’s car. Adam followed. They blasted through the security system in a high speed blur of bad feelings and unspoken questions.
“Are you going to say I told you so?” Ronan asked, when they’d made it to the highway.
“I’m not that much of an asshole.”
“Yeah you are.”
Adam made a noncommittal noise. “Fine. But I don’t want to be the fight you’re looking to have.”
Ronan sneered, but it wasn’t at him. Sick rage and fear poured off him in waves, shaping the mean curve of his mouth where Adam could see it. Ronan drove like he had in high school, high speed and tight turns to outrun something just outside his field of vision. But Adam could be patient.
He didn’t have to wait long. Ronan said, “Are you gonna ask?”
“Do you want me to?”
Ronan said nothing, but his knuckles on the steering wheel went white. The intermittent streetlights smeared outside the window. They blew past the turnoff they took to get to Lindenmere. So even Ronan’s refuge was not a refuge tonight.
It was on a dark stretch of road ten minutes later that Ronan said, “They wanted to kill me. Dad and Mor. They were going to.”
Despite himself, Adam drew in a sharp breath. He thought he’d hit rock bottom with his ability to be surprised by Lynch family bullshit. But Niall was the ghost that would not stop haunting his son. “Why?”
Ronan licked his lips. “For what I am. I was too strange to love as a child, apparently.” His voice was completely flat. “Something dangerous waiting to happen.”
Adam thought about himself as a child, how love was always a word in a foreign language, and he wondered what might have happened to him if Ronan and Blue and Gansey hadn’t decided he was worth the effort.
‘They spared me because of Declan,” Ronan added.
“Fuck.” Adam’s fingers flexed and released on the centre console. It had been a long time since it felt like his hands were moving of their own volition, but perfect self control was beyond him.
He was the kind of angry that obliterated all thought, the kind of angry he’d never really been able to be on his own behalf. But thinking about Ronan, young and vulnerable and treated like that–he understood the tire iron. He understood a lot of things with a sudden blistering, visceral clarity usually reserved for religious conversions and hit and runs. For the first time, he appreciated Ronan’s extraordinary restraint in only punching Robert Parrish.
“Yeah,” Ronan said dully. “He decided he liked me, so they kept me for him.”
“I guess I owe Declan my life now,” Adam said, instead of all of the violent, terrible, angry things he wanted to say.
Ronan barked out a laugh. “Fuck off, Parrish.”
“No,” said Adam. Just one syllable, clipped and stern. Ronan turned sharply to look at him before dragging his eyes back to the road. The air crackled like radio static, the signal just out of reach.
“Fine, if you want to be dramatic about it,” Ronan said.
“You know me, always histrionic about something.”
Ronan snorted. “Histrionic. They teach you that one at Harvard?”
“Oh come on, you can do better than that.” Watching Ronan’s half hearted barbs was like watching a wounded cougar snapping in a trap: pathetic and a little disturbing.
“Thought you didn’t want to fight,” Ronan said mulishly.
“I don’t, but if you do, you’re going to have to put some effort into it.”
That startled a laugh out of Ronan, ugly and jagged, but a laugh all the same. “Jackass.”
They took the turnoff for Henrietta. Why, Adam couldn’t guess. It was a Sunday night in January; only the gas station and the 24 Hour Mini Mart were open. Usually when Ronan wanted a drive, he stuck to the back roads.
“You wanna go throw beer bottles off the overpass or something?” Adam had never really seen the appeal of smashing shit; it was always something he knew he’d never be able to fit back in its box once he took it out. But now with this sick frothing rage inside of him, it made sense in a way it hadn’t before
“That’s hick shit, Parrish,” Ronan sneered.
Ronan had never met a beer bottle he didn’t want to smash to bits. Still, that phrase, hick shit, it was like pressing on a broken rib. The word squirted sprinted unbidden across Adam’s consciousness.
Robert Parrish didn’t think enough of his son to want to kill him on purpose. The feeling wasn’t envy, but it was close.
“Oh fuck you too,” Adam snapped. “Not dramatically self-destructive enough for you?” The anger twisted out of his hands, shifting rapidly out of its righteous shape and into something too-familiar and venomous. He dug his fingernails into his palm.
He knew what it was to be dangerous.
An apology welled up, but his pride held it back. For about thirty seconds, he stewed in concentrated misery, trying to form his mouth around the words. “That was offside,” he managed eventually.
‘Yeah,” Ronan grunted. The car was tense and silent for a breath, and then Ronan added, “I started it.”
Just like that, the sticky pride in Adam’s mouth dissolved. “You did.”
“Anyway, it’s more fun when we line the beer bottles up on the porch railing for the shotgun.”
Adam rolled his eyes. “Now that is pure redneck bullshit.”
“You’re just bitter because you’re a bad shot. Is that like the one thing you can’t do? Genius at everything else but can’t hit a beer bottle at twenty paces.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
The night slid by. Slowly, downtown Henrietta emerged out of the dark, its storefronts shuttered and silent. Ronan pulled in to Nino’s; the lights were still on, but the neon sign was off. Staff moved around inside, putting chairs on tables and cleaning up, locked in to a separate world of everyday tasks. Ronan made a disgusted noise and reversed recklessly out of the parking lot.
He drove them down the residential streets, twenty over the speed limit. It took Adam a while to recognize the houses in the dark and at speed. They blew past 300 Fox Way without slowing down. Adam just caught the porch light in the corner of his eye, and then it was gone.
The grocery store was next, its massive parking lot deserted and cavernous. A couple of grocery carts had escaped the end of shift lockup. Usually, that would be too good an opportunity for Ronan to pass up, but he didn’t even slow down.
Ronan did a few desultory donuts in the parking lot and cursed at the Volvo’s steering. Real cars never handled quite as smoothly as dream ones.
“This town sucks,” he said.
“You’re only just figuring that out?” asked Adam, before he could stop himself.
Ronan shot him a look, and didn’t say anything, which meant yes. He’d lost a home inside himself, Adam realized. He’d been losing pieces of it for a long time. Adam had never had one, and so the loss was foreign to him. But not its result.
“Where do you want to go?”
Ronan shrugged one shoulder and pulled back onto the road. “Not back there.” He didn’t say home.
“Well, yeah. I figured we’d get a motel or something.”
In the rearview, Ronan looked grateful. Adam remembered the night he’d been unable to go back home; there was part of him that had never left, that was hitting that railing over and over and over again. It was far easier for Ronan to run away from home than it had ever been for Adam. Jealousy surged up again, but Adam strangled the thought mercilessly.
He’d managed it, in the end. Because of his friends. Because of Ronan. Because of himself.
They ended up at St. Agnes; it was where they’d always been heading. Ronan killed the engine; the car was abruptly silent. The window of the upstairs apartment was illuminated. Adam wondered if the new tenant had the same bad habit of tripping on the uneven floor between the bathroom and the bedroom that he’d had. If someone else had a mattress on the floor up there and the first second to breathe they’d maybe ever had.
He hoped so.
Ronan stated up at that square of light. Adam knew he’d done this many time before when Adam had lived there. He’d seen the memories in the sweetmetal sea, and he had the vertiginous feeling now of recalling something even as he was watching it happen again beside him. It had comforted Ronan to look up and know Adam was safe, with a locking door between him and the world. If he had known at the time, Adam would have been both creeped out and furiously pleased. Now, he just found it charming.
Ronan’s face was flat planes of light and shadow under the harsh blue-white streetlight. He looked older. Some things aged you faster than others.
“How have you not killed him? Ronan asked softly. It seemed like the kind of question that should be snarled, but Ronan was at his most dangerous when he was quiet. “Your dad. How have you not done it?”
Adam drummed his fingers on the door. There were a lot of things he could say to that. He chose the most honest one. “I didn’t kill him.”
Ronan’s smile was so, so cruel. Adam loved him painfully. “Are there any Latin teachers that need getting rid of?”
“Not that I can think of.” Part of Adam’s brain was trying to scrounge one up. Adam didn’t listen to that part. “Not here anyway. I guess we could drive up to Boston or wherever to pay a visit to Boudicca if you wanted,” he said instead.
Provoking a war with an enemy they’d only just escaped was foolhardy, even for Lynches. But he would, if Ronan wanted. There was very little Adam would not do for Ronan. He’d been trying not to know that about himself for a while now. It was a relief to admit it.
Ronan tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel. “Maybe later. When Declan’s better.”
So things between them really were mended.
Adam nodded. “You just let me know.”
“You’ll be my first call, Parrish.”
Adam did not smile; it wasn’t a smiling emotion. But his lips did curve in vicious pride. In the rearview, Ronan saw. Ronan always saw. Adam didn’t say it won’t make anything better. He wasn’t going to condescend to Ronan like that. Anything that made you feel less powerless helped; the question was just what you traded to get there.
But Ronan knew all that, as well as Adam did.
“I knew how I’d do it,” Ronan said eventually. “If he ever tried to come after you, or anything.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“You’re glad I didn’t kill your piece of shit dad?” Ronan was visibly offended.
“Not really for his sake. More for yours.” Mostly because Ronan killing his father would have made Adam’s already-complicated feelings about Ronan catch fire, and neither of them would have survived the conflagration.
“What, worried about my immortal soul?” That was an interesting question for someone like Ronan to ask in the parking lot of his church.
Adam snorted. “No. Worried about you messing up the details and getting arrested for it. He’s not worth going to prison for.”
Ronan bristled. “I’m offended you think I couldn’t pull off one murder.”
“Not without help. And we both know Gansey’s not the type.”
“Well, I have you.”
Adam reached over and tangled his fingers with Ronan’s. “You do.”
Ronan rolled his head against the headrest. His eyelashes fluttered against his cheek. When he spoke again, his voice was small and quiet. “How do you live with it?”
“I don’t know,” Adam admitted. “I think in some ways, I didn’t survive it.” It was the part of the story no one ever liked to hear: that something in Adam really had died in that trailer park. It made Blue and Gansey uncomfortable, he knew. They wanted the part where Adam triumphed, got out, found healing and love and all that. Adam wanted that for himself too, but he could never un-know the taste of his own blood in his mouth. And sometimes not saying that felt like lying.
But Ronan had not survived his father’s murder either. With Ronan, he didn’t have to lie. Ronan squeezed his fingers. Adam squeezed back. Whatever in them had not survived, at least this was left.
“It’s fucked up,” Adam said.
“Yeah.”
There was not much else to say about it, not really. They couldn’t change it. They just had to live with it.
Adam raised their joined hands to his lips and brushed his lips across Ronan’s knuckles. Above them, the light in the church went out. The parking lot was empty and silent; it felt like they were the only people left in the world.
Ronan’s stuttered exhale was loud in the car. Adam kissed Ronan’s knuckles again, letting the wet, secret inner surface of his lip drag faintly across his skin.
“Fuck,” said Ronan softly, and gripped Adam’s face, and kissed him.
Ronan’s kisses, lately, had been almost tentative. Like Adam might change his mind, and he wanted to give him the chance. But Adam had already decided; he’d decided when he came back. He liked it when Ronan treated him like something to handle carefully, because no one ever had before.
This was not that, at all. It was Ronan kissing Adam like he knew nothing on earth could break him, tongue and teeth and wet, open wanting. Adam realized he’d been starving for it. He surged forward to meet Ronan, but was jerked to a sudden stop by his seatbelt.
Ronan broke the kiss to laugh at him. Adam cursed under his breath and fumbled to unbuckle himself with desire-shaky fingers, but before he could, Ronan tilted his head to indicate the backseat.
Adam released the seatbelt at last. “Here? Really?” The car was getting cold, and the church was a dark and silent witness.
Ronan’s eyes were molten; his smile was full of teeth. “Where else?”
“Freak,” Adam muttered admiringly, and threw the door open.
Ronan was on him before Adam was fully in the car. The cramped backseat was a relief. There was nowhere else to be but close together. Ronan’s teeth in his lower lip, his cold fingers slipping under Adam’s shirt, the sort of easy wanting Adam never thought might be possible for someone like him.
Adam pushed him until they were horizontal, Ronan pinned under him, their legs tangled automatically together. Nothing would ever feel like this, looming over Ronan, who had abandoned every armored posture, every barbed smile. Like this, it didn’t matter if he took off his clothes; he was already naked. Adam had never quite mastered the same trick, but Ronan never seemed to mind. He pulled Adam close anyway.
Some days, it felt like more than Adam deserved. He tried to make up for it by making it as good as he could for Ronan. He was getting pretty skilled at it by now: he knew how to touch him, how to kiss along his jaw and grind honey-slow against him. Ronan was an open book, and Adam was a quick study.
In the back of the car like this, Adam knew all the steps. It was a time for fierce kisses and quick handjobs, for kissing Ronan senseless and coming fast, panting into each other’s mouths.
The Volvo’s backseat was unfamiliar territory, the pitch of the seat steeper than the BMW. His hand slipped; the heel of his hand rested against Ronan’s windpipe. He shifted against Ronan, trying to keep from falling off the seat, and put too much pressure on Ronan’s neck.
Ronan let out a full-throated moan. Adam froze. It wasn’t revulsion that tore through him, but desire. His hand, rough and clumsy, was pressed to Ronan’s fragile neck, full of blood and nerves and tendons other very breakable human parts.
Adam was not very good with fragile things.
He made to move away, but Ronan encircled him, his legs around Adam’s waist, his fingers around Adam’s wrist..
Adam’s pulse pounded furiously. Under him, Ronan arched his neck, vulnerable and inviting. “Do it,” he whispered. “Do the thing you wanna do.”
Carefully, Adam cupped Ronan’s throat, rubbing his thumb along the ridge there. The phrase Adam’s apple flared across his mind in a blur of temptation. Ronan’s eyes fluttered shut.
“Do it, Adam,” Ronan breathed.
Adam did. He squeezed. Ronan made a helpless noise in the back of his throat that made Adam’s dick painfully hard. He’d thought about this, of course he had, and he’d always hoped that disgust would kick in and he’d jump away from it, from the sensation or the memory or both. But he liked it, more that he’d like’d anything before, feeling Ronan under him try and fail to breathe; like there were two gods in that parking lot.
He released his hand and Ronan sucked in a lungful of air. “Fuck,” he murmured, and pulled Adam down for a messy, biting kiss, his blunt fingernails digging into Adam’s forearms. Adam reared back as far as he could in the cramped space. Ronan’s face fell, but brightened again just as swiftly when Adam shrugged out of his jacket. Ronan grabbed for him, one hand lunging for his shoulder and the other gripping Adam’s wrist and pulling it to his throat.
“Come on, come o–” The end of the word was lost as Adam squeezed. Terrible heat shuddered through him.
Possession, Adam thought.
“Kiss me when you do it,” Ronan said when Adam released him. He was ragged and wanting.
Adam did, biting at Ronan’s lower lip and squeezing with a bruising grip.
“Fuck, that’s so hot,” Ronan said when he could speak again.
“You’re kind of a freak,” Adam said. Ronan opened his mouth to reply but Adam cut him off again. His eyes rolled back in his head. Adam could feel every inch of his body pressed to Ronan’s: violently, painfully alive.
When Adam released him, Ronan said, “You love it.” Ronan squeezed Adam’s dick, and Adam jerked into the touch.
“Yeah. Fuck yeah, I do.” He turned Ronan’s head forcefully and kissed his cheek, the corner of his open mouth.
“Got my dick hard when you did it the first time.“
A hysterical laugh bubbled out of Adam. “When I tried to kill you.”
He pulled back, but he couldn’t make himself release Ronan. It was like being back on that terrible October day, only the problem now was Adam himself, what he wanted. He liked the tender arch of Ronan’s throat under his hand. As much as he feared the loss of his autonomy, the spectre of what he might do of his own free will was always more frightening.
Adam could never forget that he was the son of a violent man.
“Yeah. Fuck yeah,” Ronan murmured, rolling his hips in a lazy grind that illustrated the truth of his words.
Adam’s hand was trembling. It felt like it was happening somewhere else. He was still so hard. Ronan raised one hand and traced Adam’s eyebrow, the curve of his upper lip. He leaned up into Adam’s grip to kiss him sweetly, his shallow breath leaving him in a puff of air against Adam’s mouth.
“Better than being unmade or leaking nightwash or being beaten to death with a tire iron. Fucking obliterate me, Adam. I wanna die choking on your dick, your–” Adam squeezed. Because he wanted to. “--fuck, your fingers,” Ronan finished on the inhale.
The tire iron snagged in his mind, the shape of it almost comprehensible. It rolled through him like distant thunder.
Adam held himself still and careful, and then he asked, “Better me than your Dad, is that it?”
Ronan went rigid. The thunder crashed; the storm arrived.
“Yeah,” he said, and that one exhale was more vulnerable than the breath Adam had kept from him up until now.
“You sick fuck,” Adam whispered reverently. He kissed Ronan, hard, messily, violently. He kissed Ronan like he was angry with him, though he wasn’t. Ronan gasped under him, like he was struggling, though he wasn’t. Adam jerked Ronan’s jeans open and got a hand around his cock, making him arch and whine, even as the hand on his throat kept him pinned down.
“Do it. Say the thing you wanna say,” Adam said, twisting his hand viciously over the head of Ronan’s cock.
“You want me to say it?” Ronan breathed.
“Yeah,” Adam admitted. Heat shot down his spine, tinged with fear.
“Prove it.” Ronan’s voice was half a dare, half a plea. “Tell me what you want me to say.”
Adam increased the pressure on his throat again, and Ronan’s eyes rolled back in his head. “Daddy,” Adam whispered to Ronan’s skin. “Call me Daddy.” It was like asking to be called cyanide or nuclear bomb, and in than moment, Adam wanted it more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life.
He released the pressure, and Ronan gasped, hips jerking up into Adam’s grip. His cock leaked over Adam’s fist as Adam stroked him hard and fast.
“Daddy, please,” Ronan breathed against Adam’s hearing ear. It should have felt stupid. Corny porn bullshit. It was like those 1-800 psychic lines on TV; making it tawdry was the only way to make it bearable.
“Is this what you wanted?” Adam murmured. His drawl was coming out. A great many things were coming out, and he didn’t bite them back.
“Yes, Daddy.” On his next inhale, Ronan groaned until Adam cut it off.
“You’re mine, and I’m going to do whatever I want to you.” His fingers tightened and held; Ronan jerked, eyes closed and mouth open and wanting. He kissed the tender skin of Ronan’s eyelids.
Ronan shuddered in his grasp, begging with his whole body. “Yes, Daddy. Please,” he said on his next breath.
Adam tightened his hand on Ronan’s throat again. His own hand, of his own volition. He knew exactly how fragile Ronan’s body was. Exactly how much he could take. He compresed Ronan’s carotid in time to his own heartbeat, shaping his body with Adam’s own.
“This is what you were made for,” Adam said. He let Ronan breathe in, and released the hand on his cock to hook two fingers into his mouth before cutting off his air again. Adam kissed his brow as Ronan sucked sloppily at his fingers. He eased the pressure; Ronan sucked in a ragged inhale around his knuckles. Before he could get to the bottom of his breath, Adam squeezed again.
“You were made for me, you’re Daddy’s.” Ronan shifted under him, getting a hand around himself. Adam shoved another finger in his mouth. He drooled around Adam’s knuckles, spit running down his chin as he stripped his cock with furious movements.
“I could choke you out like this and you’d be happy, wouldn’t you? You’d love it. If I hurt you like that.”
Ronan’s eyes were a devastation, the blue gone black in the half-light. He nodded, the movement restricted by the fingers in his mouth, by the cramped space, by Adam’s hand around his neck.
Adam brushed his lips over Ronan’s cheek; it was damp and salty, with sweat or spit or tears, he couldn’t say. “But I won’t,” he whispered. “Because you’re mine to keep.”
Ronan tensed under him, shuddered, and came, the sound muffled by Adam’s fingers but the feeling of it unmistakeable as his body bowed and sticky heat spread between them.
He pulled Adam’s fingers out of his mouth and kissed him. It was too wet; it was perfect. His hands shook a little as he unbuckled Adam’s jeans and got a hand around his leaking cock.
The feeling was the opposite of scrying. Adam was shatteringly present, every inch of skin alive to the texture of his clothing, the leather seats under them, and Ronan’s grip around him, tight and perfect.
“Do it, Daddy,” Ronan whispered. “Use me to come.”
The last thread of Adam’s self-control snapped. He did what he most wanted to do; he buried his face to Ronan’s neck and came, his lips pressed to Ronan’s beloved and thundering pulse, his body shaking, everything shaking, white-hot and nearly unbearable.
Adam returned to the present moment slowly. It took him a moment to remember how his limbs worked. Ronan shifted under him, poking at his ribs until Adam moved off him and allowed him to sit up.
In the brutal plenitude of post-nut clarity, shame cratered through Adam. He would have bolted, if he’d had anywhere to bolt. Instead, he flinched away from Ronan and pressed himself to the side of the car. His underwear was sticky with come. Everything that had felt electric was now burned out, gone dark.
“Hey.,” Ronan sounded a little dazed.
“Hi,” Adam managed.
“You’re a fucking freak, you know that?” Ronan said. Then he leaned against Adam’s shoulder and murmured, “Wonderfully and fearfully made.”
This was Ronan’s most miraculous quality. It wasn’t what he created; it was what he transformed. Himself, Adam—every demon ate honey from his hand and came away sweet.
Adam kissed him, hard and graceless. He couldn’t really speak, but he kissed Ronan with his heart in his mouth. Ronan kissed him back so sweetly and brushed his thumb under Adam’s eye. It was damp, though he couldn’t remember crying. Ronan raised Adam’s hand to his lips and kissed the centre of his palm, where it had been pressed to his throat.
He had always loved Adam’s hands.
*
Three days later, they returned to the Barns. The corpse of the BMW was still in the driveway. Declan was waiting for them on the porch, looking wan but pissed off.
“It’s our house, you know,” Declan said. “We could have just made them leave.”
“Yeah, but did you?” Ronan still challenged Declan on reflex. Adam hung back, two steps behind Ronan–out of the immediate blast radius, but on hand to provide backup as needed.
But instead of rising to Ronan’s sneer, Declan looked down at the worn porch steps. His face did something complicated and rueful. “I thought you might want to do it.”
Ronan thought about it for a second. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “But I’m still going to leave.”
Declan was neither surprised nor triumphant. “Where to?”
Ronan glanced at Adam. “I don’t know yet.”
Declan turned to go back inside, but stopped with his hand on the door and turned back to Ronan. “You can always come back. You know that, right?” He looked as serious as Adam had ever seen him. “I’ll bar them, if you want.”
“She’s your mom,” Ronan scoffed.
Declan shrugged. “In a sense.”
Declan had chosen Ronan; Declan would always choose Ronan. It was, in Adam’s mind, his most redeeming quality.
Ronan blew out his smokers breath. “Okay.”
Declan nodded once, and went back inside. Ronan returned to Adam, looking down at the Beemer.
“I think I can fix it,” Adam said. The car was covered in scratches, both taillights were smashed, and the trunk didn’t close properly, but with some elbow grease and dream parts, it could be made new.
“I know you can.” Ronan turned around so he looked out over the fields of his childhood home. “But it can wait.”
The low winter sun struggled through the clouds, washing the fields in a milky white light. It was like looking at a memory.
There was a future where they’d be back here. But it was a long time away.
“What do you want to do?” Adam asked. The part of his mind that was always running logistics had three days’ worth of plans to present, but he sensed it was not the time.
Ronan pushed up the sleeves of his hoodie. The snakeskin scintillated as he drummed his fingers on his thigh. “I don’t even know how to know.”
Adam knew that feeling. There was a time when what do you want? was the most unanswerable question in the universe. “Then what do you dream of?” he asked instead.
Ronan took his hand. ”I don’t know.” He looked away from the fields, and towards Adam. “Living, I guess.”
“Yeah,” said Adam, and twined their fingers together. “Me too.”