Archive of Our Own ^beta

Not like this. Not like this. Gansey’s mantra.

Not like this, Gansey thinks, when he is locked in the spare bedroom with a towel shoved under the door crack while Ronan and Adam chase a wasp around Monmouth’s loosely-named living room with an electric gnat-killing racquet and Ronan’s Adidas slides, cursing litanies and creeds and Keats, jumping and stomping and making a fucking ruckus, filling the space to bursting, echoing like the voice of God, FUCK PARRISH WOULD YOU GET OUT OF MY WAY-ay. LYNCH IF YOU DON’T WATCH YOURSELF I AM GOING TO BURN YOUR EYEBROWS OFF WHILE YOU SLEEP-eep. The ceiling lights swing with their galloping enormity. Gansey grinds his teeth, left out. It is the first time Adam and Ronan have gotten along properly, it should be a celebration, and yet Gansey thinks Not like this.

Not like this when Niall will die and Ronan finally will move into his room at Monmouth, the one the pair of them will spend hours sanding down and painting, wiping filing cabinets, tearing curtain rods off the walls to smack each other with, to rip the once-pretty now-moth-eaten linens to shreds, Not like this because Oh God oh God Ronan is not something Gansey likes to say but it is something that grows comfortable in the cavern his mouth makes when he gapes and gripes and wishes on every star that croaked it to create his very human body that Ronan would want to be alive just a little bit, just enough to stop trying so hard to be roadkill or mincemeat or the ephemeral heavenly purple cut of dry Virginia heat lightning.

Not like this the last time Adam’s father will hit him and Adam will move out, duffle bag over his shoulder and plastic Transformer in hand because a piece of Adam forever and forever will remain a goddamned child by no fault of his own, poor bastard, poor Adam, kid Adam with his tantrums and his mixed-up messed-up right and wrong, stick-shift Adam with his raw bones and dry elbows like no one even taught him to use lotion right, could no one teach Adam to love himself and is this why everything Adamish is inherently fucked? and Gansey calls him and Adam answers except for when Gansey is on his deaf side and that is such a blow that Gansey paints litanies across his eyelids all spread in neat typography or else ancient hieroglyphs in the shape of his horror and his heart: Not like this.

Past present future in one. Cyclical occurrence. All that has happened has happened and all that will happen has happened, too. Reality is knit using needles laced with skeins of Gansey’s conditioned-leather voice saying Oh For The Love Of God Not Like This.

They are funny together, Gansey-Ronan-Adam. Like three ears, three slices of bread for a sandwich, three socks in a set. Not inherently unusable, but somehow redundant, somehow fucked up. Unsettling. In the right context, a superpower. In the wrong context, a mutation, or a water-swollen blue-lipped piss-smelling body labeled DOA.

It was February 2011 the first time Gansey went to D.C. without Ronan. He came home and found Ronan had cut one of his most purple polo shirts into ribbons and left it waiting in a pile like snakes on the living-bed-room floor.

Gansey—highway-hypnotized and starving with burning eyes behind his glasses lenses and some sort of furiously uncomfortable incarnation of his selfhood rattling within the stupid boundaries of his stupid Gansey body—blinked. He dropped his suitcase with a thud and rattle, then clumsily grappled the dial of Ronan’s stereo to lower PJ Harvey’s red-rose seductive wail and murmur, then yanked Ronan off the floor by his elbow and kissed him until he was so dizzy with it he had to sit down with his legs crossed and knuckle his eyes like a kid still half-asleep after falling off the cloud-draped edifice of dreamland into the shocking frigidity of frothy reality below. One thumb on his lower lip in shock, he shook his head like trying to knock trapped water from his ear canals.

“What,” Ronan said, “the fuck.”

Then he knelt on the floor before Gansey and half-clambered into Gansey’s lap and said “Okay?” like a dare and Gansey said “Jesus Mary Lord holy fuck and shit,” while reeling his arms around Ronan’s waist, so Ronan grinned like a snake unhinging its jaw, and that was all she wrote, they haven’t stopped necking since. Love borne of a challenge. Love from hate, and hate from love, or else both of those from a pair of borrowed craft scissors.

Adam is different, comes later, and chooses Ronan first.

Gansey steams alone in his room, popping his jaw, certain he’s given himself TMJ clenching around the strange and terrible gasoline sensation catching in his gut, rising up his throat all Fourth of July fireworks. Adam and Ronan went to egg Kavinsky’s Mitsu after Ronan got out of Easter mass and came back with their pinkies linked, trying to trip each other around every step, the soles of their shoes squeaking on Monmouth’s dusty, scratched-up wooden floors.

Gansey, body sore and hair hanging sodden in his eyes after crew practice, had been waiting for them at the kitchen table, kicking his feet and hoovering bad cheese flavored party mix out of a two-gallon plastic bin which he cradled in his lap, comfortable and content.

Then he saw them shoving each other and scuffling their way into Ronan’s room. Ronan closed the door behind them.

Gansey closed the party mix, mouth tasting of stale morning and lake-bottom. Now he paces and huffs and hates himself and when the bedroom door opens once again with a creak and Adam comes out with bruised lips, Gansey whips away from him, catching his own reflection in the window wall while he rakes his fingers through his hair.

“You’re jealous,” Adam says. “Gansey, are you fuckin jealous of me?”

Gansey says nothing, for once.

“You’re jealous,” Adam says, “you’re jealous. Gansey.” And then he is on Gansey, giddy, grabbing onto Gansey’s face and leaning down to laugh breathlessly into Gansey’s mouth.

Gansey flinches a little, but there is something in the surety of Adam, who is usually as cool as dead wheat writhing all ways in crosswinds. He kisses back and does it good, too. Sucks on Adam’s tongue. Shoves his hands in Adam’s back pockets.

“You’re a crackpot,” Adam says, mouthing at Gansey’s neck, and Gansey breathes shakily, tossing his head back to allow it. “You’re jealous of me. I’ve never wanted you so bad.”

It is never much of a discussion. All three. That’s the understanding, and it’s like a crooked weathervane squeaking pirouettes pulled all ways. They are three fates, three corners, the three points of the sign of the cross.

They go together, but not next to each other. They gotta have a stretch between them, isosceles, a fence, suspension of belief. Otherwise shit’d blow up all over the damn place.

“Teach me to fight,” Gansey says, and Ronan grins all teeth in response.

Ronan loves this Gansey, heat-sweat-streaked and dark on the heights of his brown cheeks, nose peeling from sunburn, glistening like the best and brightest bronze figure in a fancy museum, a memory crawled to life. “Plant your feet,” Ronan says, and he angles Gansey’s shoulders so he can get his hands on him, he taps Gansey’s elbow with the tips of his middle and pointer fingers to prompt him to raise it, he skims the side of his palm against Gansey’s neat diagonal ribcage. He knocks on Gansey’s temple to make Gansey swat at him.

“Stop, stop, just tell me.”

“No,” Ronan says, savagely pleased. Gansey’s smile is crooked like this, like it’s out of practice. Like he hasn’t felt this corporeal for long enough to iron it out. It’s Ronan’s smile on Gansey’s face, and it makes Gansey look like a blood-stained Leyendecker all handsome spring-spent power waiting to shoot, the kiss of knee-pith pink against gravel. “Alright. Now swing.”

Gansey, unattracted to and mildly nauseated by violence, cannot throw the punch properly, not that he really tries. “Alright,” he says, a self-deprecating smile quirking his lips. That, too, is the real Gansey, but it is not the one Ronan means to fight with. “As long as I’ve got the form right.”

“No,” Ronan says, brows sitting low over his eyes. “That’s not enough. Will you just take a fucking swing, Dick? You know I can take it. I’m fucking good at it, too.”

“Ronan,” Gansey huffs. He taps his knuckles against Ronan’s nose, more like a caress.

“I’m not gonna go easy on you just because you won’t hit me,” Ronan says. “Go. Gansey. Do it, already.”

“No,” Gansey says. Briefly, they scrap at each other, Gansey with his elbow against Ronan’s bobbing throat and then Ronan hooking an ankle around Gansey’s to send him to the hardwood, where Gansey rubs at his tailbone, wincing. He glares at Ronan a little, so Ronan sits on Gansey’s hips all cowboy and roughly cups Gansey’s cheek in his hand. He drags a knuckle across Gansey’s smooth brow, then thumbs Gansey’s jaw.

Ronan turns his head profile to show Gansey how he’s clenching his teeth. He taps the corner of his jaw to really be sure he takes the instruction.

He looks back to Gansey then. Caresses his sweet face, trusting eyes and long lashes, they call Ronan the dog but Gansey’s the stupid fox who sanded his canines down and made the dog get all imprinted on him in the first place. With a delicate push, Ronan turns Gansey’s face to an angle. Then he reels his arm back and crashes his fist against Gansey’s cheek.

The nicest thing Ronan has yet to do to Gansey, maybe, is not pull his punch.

Gansey is quiet in the aftermath of skin cracking against skin. Ronan shakes out his knuckles; Gansey rolls his jaw. He tongues the inside of his cheek.

“Lean into it next time,” Ronan says. “It’s physics.”

“Okay,” Gansey says.

“Me next,” says Adam, standing in the open doorway, and the two of them startle. Ronan is immediately chagrined and fucking angry to be flushed. This is worse than if Adam caught them necking or some shit. This is more personal.

“What do you mean, you next?” Gansey says.

Ronan shoves to his feet, leaving Gansey laid out like a fallen boy king with his bruising cheek and his sore jaw and one knee bent up towards the ceiling. “When did you get here?” Ronan sort of snarls it.

“Me next,” Parrish says instead of answering. Grease-streaked from work, he stops before Ronan, then tilts his head to give them his chin, raises one arm to block, one hand prepared to throw, all Fuck The Consequences. “I can take it. Swear I can. Lemme show you.”

And Ronan says, “Jesus Mary,” and Gansey says, “Adam, it’s not about that,” but Adam says “Please,” in this ferocious unbound lost-child way, so Ronan sends a halfhearted hook at Adam’s cheek. Adam takes it bad as a kiss, whirls with it, and uses the spin to come up behind Ronan with an elbow crooked round his neck and the scuffed tip of his peeling-apart Chuck Taylors digging into the bend of Ronan’s knee.

Ronan, with the tired air of someone entertaining a child, hunches and flips Adam unceremoniously over his shoulder. Adam hits the floor on his spine. The silence after the strike is like the shot heard round the world.

Adam huffs something croaky and laugh-adjacent, then scrambles his dentist-blue inhaler out of his pocket and puffs long and lingering and deep. “Fuck me,” he says.

Ronan scrubs his palms over his face and looks at the two of them laid out on the floor around him like collateral i.e. the aftermath of a natural disaster or the choppy remains of shells scattered after high tide swallows then spits then retreats, and he feels a twinge in his chest, like maybe he is going to fuck everything up.

It’s just that he loves them both so bad. And love, he’s learned, is the violentest thing anyone could do.

But then again, he is showing them how to take it.

So, maybe, maybe he’s loving em best of anyone.

Wouldn’t that be a thing.

Declan marches circles around the sprinkler, Matthew slung over his shoulder like a sack filled with whatever variety of potato has the most infectious laugh.

Gansey and Ronan, both of them mud-slicked from head to toe, are sunk into the grass on their elbows, both of them with grass-stained binders on proud display. Aurora, after Matthew begged for the unbelievable music-playing sprinkler system to tear through today’s insufferable heat, tapped Gansey ever gently on the shoulder and said, “I’ll give yours and Ronan’s a wash before you go home, if you want to take your shirt off.”

There is something about Aurora’s careless windliness, her come-and-goliness, her unquestioning flowyness, that makes Gansey want to cry.

He does not plan every move here. He does not list the Ramifications of That Particular Decision, Dick. He lives and he lives and he lives, and he laughs so much it makes him sick. He sings and he dances and he sneezes all over the hay bales and he hugs the cows and loves it all so well that he sometimes wishes he had some sort of claim on it, some bespoken right to be here and feel like this and want so much.

Declan tosses Matthew to the ground without aplomb. The mud squelches. Matthew cackles and says, “Ewwww, that was sick!”

Declan brushes his palms together like dusting them off. “Hopefully to your liking, little prince.”

“Very likey,” Matthew says with two wiggling thumbs up. Matthew is unlike Ronan and Declan not only because he is sunny blond and gloriously chubby and generally joyful, but because he says things like Very Likey and means them sincerely. In that way, he is Lynch to the very core: his sincerity. Even Declan is sincere in his lies; he does them with all of his heart. Ronan is sincere in his awfulness and strangeness and delight; he is them with all of his heart. And Gansey thinks, sometimes, their sincerity is a special gift bestowed upon them by Aurora to temper the frenetic vivacity of Niall, which, if inherited in whole, would likely kill all three brothers Lynch before they saw eighteen.

“I’m going to roll in the mud with the pig,” Ronan says, and he goes to Matthew, and they tussle gladly, laughing truly and rollicking euphorically and playfully growling at each other, gleaming with sun and stinking like muck, burnt pink at their ears and shoulders. The Lynches are Irish and freckle like it, yes, but there is so much else in them that none of them quite know. They guess Lebanon or Morocco, Jordan or Iran, Peru or Greece or the Philippines or all of these and more, each suggestion shrouded in Niall’s mystique as each comes with a fable or three to back it, but those strong profiles, those dark curls, those heavy, downturned eyes, oh, the Lynches in all their beauty are changelings and hodgepodge and a grab-bag of everything that gleams. Gansey thinks it will be good when the world starts to look more Lynchian. If not good, then interesting, at least, and the two are about synonymous to Gansey.

A shadow casts over Gansey where he lies. He follows it upwards and sees Declan, shielding his eyes with his palm. Not smiling, but not frowning, and the two are about synonymous to Declan.

“Hey, D,” Gansey says.

“Hey, D,” Declan says back. “Shall I join you?”

“If you wish,” Gansey says. And it seems Delcan does wish, because he sits, and that awful mucky sucking sounds again. “Atrocious. It’s like something that would come out of a, what am I thinking of? A Nickelodeon fart soundboard.”

“Uncanny. Unpleasant. And many other un words.”

Gansey hums, turning his face into the sun. “I suppose you’re here to foist some knowledge unto me, yes? You can jump right in, we’re past the point of niceties.”

“You act like I don’t like you.”

“You act like you don’t like me.”

Declan huffs. Gansey grins, not looking at him. Declan is funny to mess with. Gansey believes that half on behalf of Ronan and half on behalf of himself.

“Where’s Niall this time?” Gansey asks. “Ronan told me he didn’t know.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“You do.”

“You’re too curious for your own good.”

Gansey continues to grin, merry, merry. “Truths have a habit of dropping themselves into my lap willingly. No, not just willingly. Thrilledly. Is that a word? Blithely. Pretend I said blithely.”

“He’s just gone,” Declan says. “It doesn’t matter where.”

“Business?” Gansey asks. “Or pleasure?” Then Gansey says, “Never mind. Don’t bother answering that,” as the two are about synonymous to Niall.

“If it’s business, he’ll be back sooner,” Declan says. “That’s how I tell the difference.”

“Maybe by July,” Gansey says.

“Ha,” says Declan. “Or August.” What he doesn’t say: And the two are about synonymous to Aurora. “Just enjoy the sun, Richie.” Gansey jabs his elbow into Declan’s ribs. “What’s with the third degree, anyhow? Ronan is more than satisfied with the stories Dad brings back for him. He’s used to this. The absence.”

“I was just wondering,” Gansey says. “I can’t be curious anymore? That’s the recipe for a boring life, and you’d know, being the master chef.”

“You wanted a story, too,” Declan says.

Gansey huffs. “No. Yes. Sue me, Deklo, but the stories are good.”

Declan smiles and turns his face away in the way that means he wants to laugh in private.

“Snacks?” Aurora offers, rising from her picturesque deck chair, all soft limbs and lips pressed into the private grin Declan must have learned at her knee—the one that says they’ve got a secret, and they are hiding it safe.

“Hot dogs! Pigs in a blanket! Corn dogs! Cheetos! And relish, and mustard, and ketchup, and that mayo that’s got the spicy stuff in it, what’s in it, Declan?”

“Sriracha,” Declan says, Aurora’s smile in place on his thin mouth.

Aurora sends her sons and Gansey a pair of thumbs up and heads inside without a word about how Matthew has requested a full meal instead of a snack; the two are about synonymous to Matthew.

Tonight, they will celebrate Beltane Aurora’s way: the maypole, the dancing, ribbons and singing and a bonfire that kisses at the stars. Ronan isn’t a part of it with his mother the way he was before he took this name, but Aurora likes sharing and they all love stories, so a roiling and rip-roaring Beltane they will have.

Declan claps once, then grunts his way to his feet. His hairy knees are at Gansey’s eye level. “Let’s start cleaning up, Lynches.”

“Family dinner!” Matthew crows, flopping into the muck one final splendiferous time.

Family dinner, Gansey thinks.

Ronan is before him, then, offering a hand. “C’mon, old man,” he says. Family dinner. Gansey and family, and it’s the loudest unvoiced shout that the two are about synonymous to Ronan.

It’s June when Ronan finds Niall in a puddle of brain matter and flooded-lifeline all burgundy and somewhat beautiful in a tragic and Biblical patricidal sort of way, and maybe because of the blood on his knees or on his hands or in his hair from having collapsed into the clumps and froth and slick to try to hold the torn-up parts of his father together, he is cuffed as the first suspect.

The week after Ronan slits his wrists—after the holding period and the stitches and the sedatives and the little orange bottles rattling in folded over paper bags from the chain grocery at Mennonites all the way to Monmouth and into Ronan’s bedroom once in which God himself may not even know what happens to them—he watches Girl, Interrupted obsessively, on loop, makes Gansey drive back to the Blockbuster film store every afternoon and re-rent it, and Gansey is so on edge as a result that he flies from his bed at three in the morning and loudly, aggressively cursing and furiously swiping under his eyes, takes the door off the bathroom-kitchen. He carries it under one arm like a demented rugby ball all the way down the stairs and over the front stoop, and he throws it with a grunt of strain onto the pavement of the overgrown and crumbling parking lot beside the twin gaping maws of the trash bins.

“Classy,” Ronan calls from the roosting pit of his bedsheets when Gansey returns, a little breathless, sweating in the suffocating Virginia night.

Gansey puts his fists on his hips, catching his breath. The Ronan in that bed is not his Ronan, oh no, it is a nightmare version or else it is the crooked heart at the center of the Matryoshka doll of Ronans Gansey previously thought was endless. He is sad to find it houses a cancer of sorts.

Immediately he feels atrocious for thinking it. Something made of Ronan cannot be wholly bad because Gansey knows, he knows, Ronan is mostly good. This is the metamorphical burgeoning moment of Ronan’s and maybe part of his brash, heroic fervor has been shedded (shredded, Gansey thinks half-hysterically), but will grow back, it will grow back with time.

Well. Most of Ronan’s arms, too, need to heal, and a little of his chest, but those equate to this new Ronan: bold to the point, jagged, itching, constantly and in all ways uncontrollably weeping.

Gansey goes into Ronan’s room without an invitation. He clambers onto Ronan’s bed and crawls to Ronan’s side, where he lays flat on his back and crosses his arms over his chest, glaring at the ceiling like a pharaoh. Just waiting for the moment everything that glitters is pillaged from him. Living eternally in his tomb. Oh, oh woe is the great Gansey.

“It wasn’t about you, you know,” Ronan says.

Gansey sits sharply up. “Of course it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t, because if this were about me, you’d be entirely intact right now.”

“So now I’m broken,” Ronan snarls.

Gansey looks coolly down at him in the dark. A slip of silver. A white-toothed grimace. Through the open window, cicadas whimper. “Yes,” he says.

Gansey accepts it when Ronan leaps at him, tugging him down into the swill-messy sea of sheets and pillows, sinking punch after punch into his side, pressing his forearm into Gansey’s throat, and Gansey fights back like he’s meant to, he fights back and he flails his legs awkwardly for grip and he shoves Ronan’s face and he knows where he should jerk his knees and he knows where he should stick his elbow, but he does none of it. He takes the beating with his rowing muscles clenched until Ronan starts shouting at him, cursing strings all psalm-like and peculiar and contractions that catch Gansey’s breath in their unfortunate beauty.

“Ronan,” he says. “Ronan.” A wince as Ronan hits a rib he has certainly bruised. Gansey hasn't a chance to name Ronan again before Ronan shoves himself out of the bed and goes stalking into the soupy dark of Monmouth.

Gansey swears, then works his way out of bed in chase. It’s not like Ronan hurt him all that badly; Ronan can hit like a bastard and a beast, but he reserves all that for Declan, these days.

Under the bathroom-kitchen’s exposed bulb, which flickers with strain, Ronan is washed grey-pale, his freckles like burn marks across his face and shoulders. It’s he who was hurt: blood blossoms through the haphazard lacing of bandages and gauze up and down either of his arms.

“Ronan,” Gansey says again.

“Just,” Ronan says. He furiously rubs a tear off his cheek. “Fuck. Will you just.“

“Will I help you?” says Gansey. Ronan grunts, scrubbing under his wet lashes. “Yes, Ronan.” Relief colors Gansey’s tone. “I will help you. Please, take a seat on the kitchen toilet.”

Gansey fetches a root beer from the bathroom fridge and hands the can to Ronan, who rolls it over his forehead, spreading condensation over his brow. The mirror over their sink opens to reveal a wonderland of pill bottles and haphazard rolls of bandages and medical tape that go jumping out at Gansey like trick snakes, rolling across the dusty hardwood, leaving trails as they go. Mason jars of cotton swabs. Mutilated tubes of Neosporin. Ear plugs for the pool. Ace wrist stabilizers that tumble into the sink bowl.

“Unwrap yourself, Tutankhamen,” Gansey says.

“Jesus Mary,” Ronan says. “That’s gauche.”

“I didn’t know you knew that word.”

“Gonna shove my next vocabulary surprise right up your rear.”

“I’m terrified.” Gansey turns to Ronan, supplies in hand, and swears suddenly and spectacularly.

With the bandages unwrapped and the gauze removed, Ronan is a Tim Burton creation. Skinny bone knobs interspersed with streaks of pink and neat rows of black black stitchwork. All of it married in a veil of red.

“Nice,” Ronan says. “Mature.”

Gansey redirects his gaze to Ronan’s deadened, deep-set eyes, apologetic. “Disregard my outburst,” he says. “I was caught off guard. Also, I am so suddenly and deeply miserable that I want to collapse through the floor. Shall we carry on?”

Without waiting for an answer, swallowing around the swell of his throat, Gansey sets about wiping Ronan’s arms, tossing handfuls of ruined gauze and the scentless asswipes bought in bulk, which he is using to clean his hands, into their grocery-store-bag-garbage-receptacle. He quietly commands Ronan to lift his arm so he can work around his elbow, under his wing, securing lengths of bandage with cuts of the cheery blue tape Gansey grabbed near the check-out lane at the pharmacy. He isn’t sure why he was drawn to it. Maybe he thought it might make some of this seem littler. A childish mistake rather than the heartbroken wrench of son chasing father somewhere he really, really shouldn’t.

It’s ridiculous, in practice. Nothing could make this lighter.

Once Ronan is secured, dried, Gansey washes his hands. He washes his hands. He washes his hands and he washes his hands. And he washes his hands, scrubbing his knuckles, under his nails, burgundy stains all over him. On his sleep shirt—a horrid, old thing that boasts BEST FISHES IN ATHENS — IOANNIS’S MARKET with a cartoon rendering of a fish in gaudy lipstick and enormous sunglasses hooked to a fisher’s line from its ass end. Gansey continues to wash his hands, using the old soap bar sitting on the porcelain rim, grinding lemon scent into his cuticles, washes and washes and washes Ronan’s blood off of him.

He catches a flash of Ronan’s eye in the mirror. He looks powered-down. Unawake, even though he breathes, even though he almost imperceptibly taps the tip of each of his fingers against his thumb, lulling.

Gansey has never really asked God for too awfully much in his life. But now—now, he thinks about that chain with the likeness of Saint Jude a snickering Helen gifted him for his last birthday. Patron Saint of lost causes. Gansey imagines it balled in his fist, maybe glowing holy beams of pure heavenly sunshine, maybe floating or pulsating to the tune of Papa Don’t Preach or something, doing miraculous and inexplicable things the way Ronan seems to believe God capable of, and he thinks with all his heart alight, Please.

Ronan doesn’t remember the first thing he ever dreamt, but he remembers when he dreamt up himself.

He didn’t know yet that he was a boy, but he saw it all like two mirrored selves in a movie, one moving the same way as the other, trying their damnedest to catch the other off guard. Sharper, squarer jaw, scruff-lined. Broader shoulders. A muscle tank, sleeves torn off. Still skinny, but carrying weight differently. Still dangerous, but balanced in a way far greater than hips-to-waist. Flat chest. Pants filled differently. Ronan-as-born moved one way; Ronan-as-dreamt moved the same, both of them untrusting and cocking one brow, both of them ready to bite. An arm raised. A kick. Even the swing of their elbows was the same: uneven–the weakness Declan exploits, the one that always gets Ronan off his feet when they wrestle.

Ronan-as-born blinked hard. Wake up, wake up. He opened his eyes. Ronan-as-dreamt was gone. He looked down at himself. He was Ronan-as-dreamt.

He stared. His face crumpled into a sob. He said, aloud for no one but himself and whatever God watches over his dreamland, some voeurystic fuck with a kink for masochism and near-death experiences, “Help me, help me. I’m sorry. It’s so good.”

Then he woke up, frozen stiff and sick and clinging to a rudimentary child’s sketch of a sword held aloft in a hero’s hand. (How Ronan knew it was a hero? He made it so.) The sword, the sword was always attractive to Ronan, brutal and definitive, the most honest of existences, meant for one purpose, lovely when bloody. But this time, he looked at the wielder in the low, purple light of 4 a.m. and haze of noose-terror, and he took the name of that haloed champion for himself.

Ronan has been a boy forever, but he has known it since he was nine. His family has known since he was thirteen, when Declan was already at Aglionby Academy, when Matthew was just old enough to question it twice and then shrug and say he likes brothers just as much as he liked having a sister.

Ronan is now seventeen and hasn’t been anything but Ronan for so long that he hardly thinks about it. He injects T in his ass cheek and he shaves his hairless face like all his other friends, and he nearly dies and has no dad and all of this is well and good, and then he catches his eye in the mirror after stopping for a midnight piss.

He notices he shines such a likeness to Niall that he grabs Gansey’s electric shears right then and there.

Ronan had never minded keeping his hair longer. He has always been boy in a hundred toothier ways than a crew cut could ever color him. But walking past the mirror and seeing a glimpse of his father—all devilish charm and mischief like a brownie, blarney out the ears and bullshit carved into his spinal column like Babel’s crazy tower, only sadder, only drawn like the ghost, the haunting, the memory instead of the man—that is too much. That is too much.

Gansey hears the buzzing and, predictably, comes running.

“Put em down,” he gasps, ricocheting off the lintel. He grabs his shoulder, wincing. “Put em down, Ronan.”

“I’m cutting my hair off,” Ronan says. He clicks off the buzzer and puts it down without drawing his gaze from his own eyes in the mirror. Ronan-as-dreamt. Niall-as-lived. “Daddy dearest, may I please pierce my ear? May I paint my toenails, Daddy? Is this skirt too short for school, Daddy-O?”

“You’re vile,” Gansey says, melting against the doorframe with relief. That he doesn’t try to hide it is generally cowing to Ronan. He draws his gaze from the mirror and turns his back to it, suddenly nauseous. “Repugnant. And generally vulgar.”

“You’re the one who’s friends with me,” Ronan says. “Gansey, I’m cutting my hair off and I’m not looking in the mirror again until it’s gone.”

Gansey points to his own pair of un-bound night boobs where they poke through his sleep shirt. “This? Is it a this thing?”

“No,” Ronan says, rolling his eyes to the ceiling like Help Me I Am Surrounded By Morons of Unfathomable Proportions. “I just have to do it. So are you going to sit there and guide me so I don’t cut my ears off, or do I have to do this blind?”

Gansey blinks. “No,” he says.

“No?” says Ronan.

Gansey stands. He takes up the buzzer himself, flicks it on, and herds Ronan to the toilet. He closes the lid, then sits Ronan down with a nudge. “I’ll just do it,” he says. “No mirrors, no tragedies of the auricular, Van Goghvian variety.”

“Van Goghvian.”

“Tilt your chin,” is all Gansey says, so Ronan does. Then, “Do you want to offer a few parting words?”

“Mary Mother of Christ, Gansey, get on with it,” Ronan says, and he wrenches Gansey’s hand, clippers roaring, to the surface of his skull. They buzz against bone and set Ronan’s teeth chattering. “What, do you need a Viagra first? Do you need me to be sweet with you? Oh, honey, do it gentle, do it how I like it, oh, ohh Gansey just like that, just like that, hnngg.”

Gansey does not dignify this with a response, but he does shoot an unimpressed look down at Ronan over the rims of his round glasses.

Mostly, Gansey just cuts Ronan’s hair off.

It falls in swathes and curls to the toilet lid and floor. Gansey blows pillowy clumps off Ronan’s shoulders, wipes snippets off his cheekbones and nose. He is kind with it, and Ronan wishes he would press harder. He knicks the back of Ronan’s neck, and Ronan wishes he would apologize just because it would mean he didn’t know Ronan as well as he does.

When Gansey is done, they gather the hair in their palms and flush it down the toilet.

“Bye,” Ronan says to it.

“Bye,” Gansey says, sadder than Ronan.

Then they sit on the floor in their boxers, plucking sour gummies from a bag Ronan ripped open with his teeth.

“I’m tired of lying,” Gansey says.

This attracts Ronan’s attention.

Gansey academically retracts a yellow gummy from the bag. “I was made to feel awful as a child for this. Really, I was. And I internalized it. I lied for years, to many people, and I thought it was normal. I thought that was just the way it had to be. Ronan,” Gansey faces him, face shining with sincerity and the layer of vitamin E oil Helen told him to apply before bed, “Ronan. Ronan—”

“Spit it out,” Ronan says, heart jumping.

“The yellow candies are my favorite,” Gansey says. “Not red.”

Ronan flops backwards on the floor and shouts a laugh so big it kicks his legs into the side of the tub.

“It was all about red!” Gansey says. “A bloodthirsty society. Okay. Admittedly, cherry is okay. Strawberry can be delicious. But fruit punch?” Gansey’s face pinches with revulsion. “Fruit punch. That is capital punishment, Ronan, and they offer that to children, and they say Like It. They tell the children they are meant to like it!” Gansey throws his arms out with passion. In the process, he recognizes the candy he still holds, then eats it, savoring. “Yes. Yes, this is right. Yellow Starburst, too. It feels fantastic to get this off my chest.”

“You’re a martyr,” Ronan says. He grabs Gansey’s nearer foot and just holds it. “Gansey.”

“Ubi amor, ibi dolor,” Gansey says, looking at Ronan’s hands.

“Lucemque,” says Ronan.

Gansey, flushing, looks away.

Ronan catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror when he and Gansey give in to the indomitability of night and the promise of training for the new sports season in the morning. It is not Niall. It is not even Declan. It is someone wholly different. It is a bare and newborn and ugly thing, a little crooked, the poorly-hatched creation of a drunken artist.

In a moment of strange compassion, Ronan offers it, the mirror-thing, the bad body double, his name.

The stairs down the back end of the trailer are pockmarked with the perfect circular holes of carpenter bees.

Gansey hums, studying them. Not fresh.

Anyway, Gansey bats his fingers by his ear.

“Hey, Tiger,” he says.

“Ah,” says Adam’s voice. Adam’s head and torso are under the belly of a night-navy ‘99 Subaru Impreza. He rolls out, the wheels of his dinky plastic crawler grinding on the loose paving pebbles. “My jackpot hath arrived.”

Gansey smirks. He hunches forward enough for Adam to reach to knock their knuckles together. The streak of machine grease that transfers to Gansey’s darker brown knuckles from Adam’s lighter brown ones is like a lipstick stain.

“Working hard, I trust,” Gansey says. “Does Parrish know any other way to work? What happened to your shoulder?”

Adam rubs at it, like he thinks it’s oil. “Hm.”

Gansey sighs, suddenly a little sick, and crumples to the dirt where he can drum on Adam’s bent-up kneecaps. Dusty, dusty, dirt and muck, sweat and grease and summer heat, Adam peels and bleeds and sheds skin more than snakes do. Adam, sunning himself, taking advantage of every momentary break he gets, bounces a wrench off his chest, puckering his lips, humming along to the radio.

“Why’d you come?” Adam says after a minute.

“Missed you,” Gansey says with a shrug. “Wanted to see you. Why did you think?”

“Are we looking for the king tonight?” Adam asks.

“What else do we do?” Since Niall or rather since Ronan, the answer is not much, because it is frantic and unbelievable and obsessive, which are all things Ronan is naturally. “You working?”

“Done after I fix this old gal up right.” Adam pats the fender fondly. “The Aldermans bring ‘er in every few months. We’re old friends.”

“Mm,” Gansey says. He cannot stop looking at those holes in the stairs behind him. He hears buzzing. He shuts his eyes, stock still.

“Ronan alone?” Adam asks.

“With Noah,” Gansey says.

“Good,” Adam says, meaning it. Gansey loves, Gansey loves, he loves how he does not need to choose between them two. Never choosing sides again, not after losing Declan. “Gansey?”

Gansey doesn’t feel it, but he does. Something leggy, something crawling. Wings beating, stingers raised at the ready, a battalion advancing, Gansey thinks of wasps when the weather is good.

Wings. By his ear.

Gansey flinches so violently Adam audibly flinches in reply.

“What?” Adam says. “Open your eyes.”

Gansey does. There is, of course, nothing there.

He is quiet. Then, “Thought I heard buzzing.”

“Buzzing.”

“Probably a fly.”

“Or…”

“Why must you make me say it?” Gansey says. “A wasp, you horrible bitch. I thought it was a wasp.”

“Thou art not that Gawain,” Adam marvels. While Gansey attempts a vitriolic glare and lands in his usual realm of ice-coated politeness, Adam brushes his hand over Gansey’s ear. “Nothing there, boy king.”

Gansey leans in and pecks Adam’s lips. “Thanks,” he says. “Parrish.”

“Gansey,” Adam replies, head cocked, sun in his lovely eyes. “Have you ever laid under a piano while someone else played?”

Gansey blinks, surprised. “Yes,” he says. Growing up at functions, yes, he was always underfoot. Running with the other kids, crawling down vents, hiding behind armor suits and statues. Yes, he has laid beneath his share of pianos, giggling, shutting his eyes and sinking slow and warm into the belly of a melody made dull and soft-edged.

“My mom,” Adam says. “We used to have an upright. And I would lay under the bench.”

Gansey stays silent in acknowledgement of the gift Adam has just given him. There is so little good in a Parrish childhood; Gansey would not begrudge him hoarding it.

Adam scoots over on the creeper and pats the space he has opened.

Gansey works himself onto it beside him.

Adam pushes them backwards, gravel grinding, until they are in a cool cavern of steel and grease, a ribcage of pipes, it is so easy to imagine it breathing, there that piston is the beating heart, here the lungs and liver, a maze and miracle of machinery come together into one beast, ferocious in potential, innocuous until the turn of a key.

“Alright?” Adam says.

“Capital,” says Gansey.

Then they are quiet, sharing between them the semi-darkness of the car’s underside, the spine-twinging plastic crawler, the scruff-scratch of Belle and Sebastian wailing about the last bus out of town from Adam’s old radio. Sunlight on their ankles. Skin-warmth from their pressed shoulders. Adam’s root beer breath and skinny hands poking and prodding and greasing and scratching. The high metallic shout of fixing things.

“I thought you were going to be a dickhead,” Adam gasps, hunched over with the breathless toothy bite of intense laughter. He pinches his waist to ease the needle-dig through his guts. “I saw you and Ronan laughing like all the world was your punchline and I thought you had to be the worst two motherfuckers to ever live.”

“And?” Gansey says. He’s probing his shoulder. Ronan popped it back into its socket for him just moments ago.

Adam grins with all his teeth. “Well, I was a little goddamn right, wasn’t I?” He straightens and stretches up high. His spine snaps and crackles like a mouthful of popping candy; he can taste artificial strawberry on the back of his tongue and feel Henrietta summer beating his brow like his dad just knocked his head into the kitchen counter and got him a bag of pick-and-mix from the five and dime so he’d be quiet about it. “Turns out I’m just as mean.”

“You’ve been mean since birth,” Ronan says. The spot where he sits on the pavement is like the deepest darkest incarnation of daylight, the crookedest afternoon gold rush there’s ever been. He blots at his scraped knees with the hem of his muscle tank. “You just needed the right people to take it out on.”

Adam stomps on the end of his skateboard and catches the flung-up tip against his palm. Gansey’s board is somewhere in the creeper; Ronan’s is snapped in half poetically and perhaps tragically where the three of them lie in the middle of Henrietta’s only four-way intersection. It is past six p.m., and cold enough that only Ronan wears cut-off shorts; there will be traffic any second, but for now they linger, pleased at their practiced immortality. Adam thinks about The E-Street Shuffle (Sparks fly on E Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot) (Them schoolboy pops pull out all the stops on a Friday night) (Now those E Street brats in twilight duel flashlight phantoms in full star stream / Down fire trails on silver nights with blonde girls pledged sweet sixteen). The three of them in September-summer are headrush crazy like a Springsteen verse and all the soaring saxophone psalms that Clarence Clemons offered like he was the prophet instead of Bruce’s boys, who were really just kids all along. Adam thinks that is all well and good but that he and Gansey and Ronan are maybe the only three real boy prophets there have ever been on account of they are handsome And hot And magic down to their marrow i.e. they are high to the moon on edibles from like the only dealer at Aglionby who doesn’t lace his shit (as far as they can tell), and they skated down three wild hills, the last of which is a titillating (and wildly damaging to low-sitting cars, unintentionally funding Adam’s tuition) near 80-degree drop.

“Ronan,” Gansey says, and it is only half-admonishing, too lofty with the crush of a near-death-crash to be menacing. Still, there is a way about Gansey saying Ronan’s name. Gansey has no nickname for Ronan, hardly even calls him Lynch the way he has Parrished Adam, but good Lord, the way that name rolls off Gansey’s tongue is like an epithet sweeter and dirtier than any honey, any princess or sweetheart. It’s the sound of a pen clicking open or maybe the scream of a shooting star as it streaks blazing and God-fearing from one end of the sky to the other, or maybe maybe it’s the breath the orchestra takes after tuning, necks craned to the conductor’s pulpit as they lift their bows, before playing that first epic chord. There is a poetry to Gansey’s Ronan, and it’s nowhere to be found in anyone else’s version of that bone-built middle Lynch. To Gansey, Ronan is a golden boy, even mud-streaked or blood-stained or broken-toothed or whatever else this new and mourning Ronan could come up with, beer-breathed, sin-soaked, whatever. To Gansey, Ronan is goo-oo-ood any way, any how. A master loves their dog even when it pisses on the couch. “Ah, Ronan.”

The truth is Adam loves Gansey bad, but hates Gansey worse. It’s a hate borne of Adam’s own fucked up prenotion of what a Gansey is worth and how worthy a Gansey feels. It’s just that Adam can’t quite consolidate that early Gansey, bastard Gansey, with this Gansey, who is so visibly sick with Ronan-shaped worry that even Adam pities him. (How a piece of him likes to pity Gansey. How the rest of him hates to.)

“Again,” Ronan says, and perhaps Adam and Gansey are the same in one way, at least: neither of them can bring themselves to say no to Ronan Lynch.

“We’re lost,” Adam says.

“No we’re not,” Gansey says bravely.

A beat. The trees waving overhead under the cloying touch of a passing breeze. The iron gridlock of cloud-cover is perfect.

“We’re fucking lost,” says Ronan.

“We’re fucking lost,” Gansey says sadly.

“This is just classic,” Ronan snarls. He throws down his backpack and flips the collar of his coat up around his ears. “Lost in the fucking wilderness with Snow White and her broken whatever the fuck.”

Gansey shoves his broken whatever the fuck into his knit hat and then into his bag to muffle its shrill whine. “If you want to get personal, Parrish is the one who lost our map to that squirrel.”

Adam uses two fingers to show Gansey exactly what he thinks of that assessment.

“Oh,” Gansey says, “never mind it. Never mind it! It’s glorious, today.”

“It’s horrendous, today,” says Adam.

But Gansey throws his arms out like the crucified lord and back-flops onto the ground with a thump of breath. He shuts his eyes and spreads his legs so he makes a generally beige-y X against the dying grass.

“You probably just squished a worm,” Adam says. Then he drops down beside Gansey.

Ronan snorts derisively at them. “We going to die here?”

“Wouldn’t be too bad a way to go,” Adam says. Early henbit and late spotted spurge stick cold leaves into his ears. A bird cries overhead. The wind moves over them all gentle and sweet, nymphish. Ronan is always talking about dying these days. Spotted spurge is dying. Birds are dying. Wind is constantly living and dying. “You could come back as some sort of poisonous plant. Carnivorous, even.”

Ronan grunts. It is almost approving. He lays on Adam’s other side and grumpily takes Adam’s hand. He presses Adam’s cracked knuckles to his lips and mutters, “You need a good moisturizer, Parrish.”

“Shut up and get dying,” Adam says.

“I love autumn,” says Gansey.

They let his voice rise up into the canopy, an offering, a compliment to nature or God or whomever. Ronan is always dying; Gansey is always loving.

Adam lingers somewhere between them.

Tonight, they will go back to Monmouth and have Diwali. It is a shitty mirror of Diwali, colored arts-and-crafts sand from the dollar store and tea candles also from the dollar store, but they will open all the windows that can open and surround themselves with wind and maybe play some tinny music through Gansey’s speakers, and Adam will be part in something he never got much of at home:

Light.

Adam squirts the lotion long-distance across the bathroom-kitchen like a water gun or a can of silly string.

“Back off,” Ronan says. “Jesus Mary, Adam, are you fucking stupid?”

“Then sit still,” Adam says. “You are so impossible it is somehow sickening to me. Do you just refuse to let yourself be taken care of?”

“Yes,” Ronan says, lips curled in that way he thinks is so bad and evil. His tattoo bleeds. Adam is not good at playing caretaker because he is a little like Ronan: they both buck care. Adam, because he never had it properly. Ronan, because he’ll never have it from the people he loved it from again.

“You,” says Adam, “are infuriating. Sit still, you fucker.”

Adam holds Ronan with a hand draped across the front of the neck like a collar—has no other option, considering all this raw skin: all looking, no touching. He squirts the lotion bottle from a distance again so he can draw a rudimentary dick with it on Ronan’s shoulder. He snickers to himself as he rubs the lotion in all gentle and he rolls his eyes when Ronan curses at the soreness and he squeezes the base of Ronan’s neck a little after he finishes because Ronan wouldn’t let any of them go to his final detailing appointment with him, and thinking about Ronan wincing at (or worse, enjoying) the harassment of a needle kissing and kissing and kissing him greedy all over is enough to turn Adam’s stomach.

Adam leans over and blows on the angry red skin, hoping to soothe. He is awkward, stooped, his back aching with the strange posture. From here, the swirls and knots and feathers and flying things and cutting things are indiscernible.

“What is it?” Adam asks.

“Badass,” Ronan answers.

“You are such a cunt,” Adam says fondly. He sticks his nose into Ronan’s temple from behind. Ronan reaches and holds Adam’s head there.

“Do you like it?” Ronan asks.

“I sort of want to lick it,” Adam answers.

“You are such a cunt,” Ronan says laughingly. He turns his head and captures Adam’s lips in a kiss. Adam reaches and holds Ronan’s chin there.

Then they part, and Adam washes his hands of it all. Ronan remains shirtless, naked on top, and it makes Adam indescribably happy. Inexplicably. Ronan, undressed. Ronan, real. Ronan, his.

“You’re thinking something freaky, huh,” Ronan says.

“I’m thinking about your ass,” Adam says. He lopes towards Ronan and drapes his hands over Ronan’s collarbones. “I’m writing sonnets to your ass in my brain right now. There’s wherebys and heretos and thuslys in it, it’s very advanced stuff.”

“Is it romantic?”

“Morbidly.”

“Aw, well, that’s the best kind.”

Adam brushes his palm from Ronan’s forehead to the top of his head where it sits like a hat.

Ronan leans into the touch while his lips pull into a frown like he’s pained, like he’s freezing, like Adam is not just a heater but a stove-burner turned full-blast. Good and awful at once.

Perfect for each other, then. Really damn good together.

Gansey brings them all to Georgetown for his birthday weekend.

They quickly learn Gansey is like his mother in one obvious way and a dozen plus eight littler ones. The latter come in the angle of Gansey’s mouth, or his penchant for pastel tones. The former has to do with a loving obsession: Mrs. Gansey’s is her greenhouse.

“I’m not allowed out there,” Gansey says, lingering before the lofty glass double doors. “Too many stingy things.” He mimes it with fingers crooked into pincers.

Adam shoots a sideways look at Ronan, who exhibits four-alarm distress at being left with the Ganseys Senior.

Adam leads Ronan outside at Mrs. Gansey’s heels, nodding thanks to Mr. Gansey for holding the door. Helen caps the group, tip-tapping all stiletto heels and long nails on her phone screen. This is the final stop on the tour of the mansion, and Adam knows it’s all for his sake. Welcome! they say. Welcome! says everything the Ganseys do. They are not snobbish with it; they are instead properly humble, even while alight with pride. Adam cannot help wondering how long the Ganseys have been in America to have abandoned their Gujarat roots and applied such seamless, moneyed accents and classic Kennedy style from the polo cableknits tied like capes over their shoulders to their soft leather loafers revealing cashmere-socked ankles.

Ronan, even in black slacks and a decisively-cut sweater he usually preserves for church, is cataclysmic here. Helen watches where his elbows swing; Adam watches Helen watching; Gansey watches all of them with a single crease between his brows like a migraine is unfolding somewhere in that geode cavern, that lucky old oil well, behind his eyes.

They follow the Ganseys through the neat and plentiful rows of pruned plants, from tulips and roses (which even Adam knows the name to) and onto grand winding vines and purplish leaves like elephant ears and dainty blue petals in pinecone formation, all of it buzzing with life. The perfume of the air is like a breath full of pot; it splits Adam from his head, and he loses time to a strange, limitless moment of selfhood.

He pens it down as connection to the dirt or whatever, dust to dust etc., but in this room, in this Ganseyish house, time just seems circular, or maybe as large as an ink spot: all at once.

Gansey offers his arm to his mother when they reenter the main house. She takes it, but pinches his cheek first, then pretends to tuck her fingers into her pocket like she took some small piece of him and plans to keep it safe and close. Adam feels distinctly like a voyeur, especially as Gansey looks away from his mother, flushed, and says, “I’m not a baby, Ba.”

Adam finds himself inseparable from the feeling all through dinner, when Ronan overtly gestures which fork to use, which spoon, where to put his glass down, and swaps napkins with him when Adam knocks a clumsy spoonful of something red onto his. One day, Adam insists to himself, teeth grit, one day he will know all of this and be so old, and he will be proud and humble like the Ganseys, and no one will ever know of the trailer park, no one will ever know of the machine grease he couldn’t get out from under his nails, no one will ever know of an Adam with callused hands. Life will be terrible and hard and then it will be easy, because that is what Adam is owed, and that is what Adam is earning for himself. Good fuckin silverware, and the knowledge of how to use em right.

The Ganseys offer them wine. Ronan and Gansey take it, so Adam does, and he attempts to muffle his sputter against the lip of his glass when he tastes it—dark and heady with notes of grape juice and gym sock.

The Ganseys laugh tinklingly, leaning towards him with the motion as if to assure him that yes, yes, they are laughing With him, not At him, never At him! He could be one of them!

So Adam gives them a sheepish smile, even as his ears burn with flush, and says, “First taste. Caught me off guard, in all honesty.”

“You don’t need to finish it,” Mrs. Gansey says with a wink as she cuts her funny long broccoli with the side of her fork.

“You don’t need to drink it at all,” Gansey says, but his glass looks easy in his square hand–he didn’t even flinch when he drank–so Adam drinks his, following every sip with a massive bite of whatever pinkish brownish meat this is on his plate. Melty, tender, never stringy meat. Adam has never had a piece of meat like this one.

The birthday cake is absurd.

“Did we order it pink?” asks Mr. Gansey.

Mrs. Gansey thumbs Mr. Gansey’s frown smooth. Another inheritance for their son: a motion Adam’s Gansey has performed upon him a scant sweet handful of times with anointful reverence. “Yes, dear,” she says. “Pink and teal and mushy-pea green. Just how Richard likes it.”

Gansey, if he were Adam, would have his shoulders lingering somewhere around his ears at this point. Gansey, being Gansey, says, “Aw, shucks.”

They light candles and dim the chandelier and sing an out of tune but still somehow movie-perfect rendition of the birthday song, and Gansey is cast all sorts of yellows and ferocious orange behind the flames, shadows hugging his square cheeks and lithe neck. A skeleton skull. A boy. A man. Something else. All three.

There are other desserts too: pastries, flaky tarts, round berries like Christmas baubles, things soaked in liquor and things near black with chocolate and things that have been friend golden. Adam picks at his slice of icing-slathered, unreasonably fluffy sponge, stabbing strawberry slices with his fork. Ronan scrapes the frosting off Adam’s plate; Gansey steals the blueberries off Ronan’s when he isn’t looking. Across the table, behind the rotund topiary of a centerpiece some sadistic assistant chose for this occasion, the Ganseys senior share a plate, two forks, one slice, leaned together at the shoulder, snickering as they trade bites, offering mouthfuls to each other only to snatch them away before the other can close their mouth around them.

The Ganseys, being Catholic-adjacent, loudly celebrate the ringing of midnight when it comes, heralding the son of God. They plant miniature Jesuses in miniature mangers and play Tony Bennett to dance to, lingering late into the morning in the room with the tree and the presents stacked higher than Adam’s waist and the TV longer than Adam’s bed.

When they are excused to themselves for the evening, Adam takes one massive, rib-scraping breath. He traces his finger along the wall as they amble towards Gansey’s bedroom, Gansey leading, Ronan following, Adam taking up dutiful caboose.

Stepping into the room in which Gansey spent most of his childhood, to Adam, is like prying the halves of Gansey’s ribcage apart and sticking his workman’s hands into all the sop and organ pith and saying “What have we here? Hm? And what’s all this?” all the meanwhile skimming his fingers along intestines and weighing Gansey’s kidneys in his palms like Anubis.

The bones of the room must have come pre-decorated. The wallpaper is old-ladyish, but hidden mostly by article cutouts, magazine pages, posters for Blur and Green Day and Bright Eyes and The Smiths, maps, postcards, and all means of foreign money, all mismatched, all tacked up with haphazard pins or scraps of painter’s tape. There are sconces and baseboards and everything is crafted of the finest, darkest wood Adam has ever seen—near black, though unstained. A massive patterned rug dominates the floorspace, though leaning stacks of books of all sorts make an effort to usurp. Beneath the grand windows sits a tired old desk, chipped wood and old eraser shavings and stacks of loose paper and journals and scissors and scraps of twine and pen caps. The bed is crisply made in shades of green. The hamper overflows with old laundry. Rowing oars lean against Gansey’s dresser. A truly ancient TV with dials speckling the front sits on his nightstand where an alarm clock might be, were Gansey slightly more normal. The room beats, a truth in two-syllables.

“Gansey,” Adam says. When Gansey looks at him, he says, “You are just like your mother, man.”

“I’m like my mother?” Gansey points to his chest, Me?. He laughs once, unamused, and shakes his head. “No. I’m not. Not where it counts. For example: She keeps frozen store-brand pakora.” Gansey flops backwards flat onto his bed. “I don’t think she knows how to use a microwave. Or an oven. Or a toaster. Or a coffee pot. The kettle, however. That, she can work out.”

Adam supposes in a twisted way that he is luckier than Gansey in that one sense: his mother cooks her pakora from scratch, slaving at the stovetop no matter what shit she’s spent the day trudging through. Adam’s white father appreciates a housewife; Adam’s Desi mother will be taken advantage of until the day she dies. Adam could never hate his mother, in the end. He’s never hated afraid people for their fear; he might hate her more if she tried to pretend otherwise. Adam could never say his mother isn’t the realest and most truth-weaved woman he’s ever known. She’s never promised him a thing she couldn’t secure.

Adam’s eye is drawn to a photo. He approaches it, unlistening as Gansey and Ronan patter to each other in their ages-old, comfortable way. Adam touches the edge of the print with just his thumb, afraid to smudge it. Captured within: Adam looking up just as Gansey snaps a photo, squinting into brutal sunlight, eyes beer-brown and skin shining with sweat, fondness crooking his mouth into the strangest, realest smile Adam has ever seen on himself.

By Ronan’s scraped-up cheek where he sits beside Adam, talking to an out-of-frame Noah, Adam can place this day in his memory. Early into their friendship. But they were littered around Aglionby’s front lawn, enjoying the liberty of a fire drill, and Gansey had said Adam’s name. Just Adam’s name. But Adam had looked, and Gansey had snapped the photo, and that was the look on Adam’s face when he heard Gansey’s honeyed voice shaping his name so sweet. Adam. Adam.

When Adam tunes back into the conversation, Ronan is professing a dire and incredible need for a piss. Gansey laughs just a little more freely than he might have without having had two to three glasses of birthday skumps, and scoots down onto the floor, where he melts over his knees like he’s changing material states. Adam flops down on Gansey’s freed bed with a heavy sigh, full of food, full of some strange and tangled-up feeling that’s getting awfully snarled up on his rib cage, creeping eerily towards his spine.

“Could fall asleep here,” Adam mumbles, lips tugging awkwardly where they’re smushed against his elbow.

“I can go grab the air mattress,” Gansey says, craning his neck to squint up at Adam where he lays. “Ronan called dibs on the trundle. I don’t know why. For one, he won’t sleep, so he might as well dibs the compost bins in the kitchen. For two—secondly, I meant secondly—it’s not like the trundle is comfortable. I use it to store my boxer-briefs, frankly.”

“I’m not sticking up here with you?” Adam says.

A beat. “Not really room for that,” Gansey says.

Ronan has been to D.C. with Gansey before. They shared his bed. Adam knows, because Ronan told him.

“If there was room for Ronan,” he says, “why isn’t there room for me?”

“For—?”

“You and Ronan shared. Last time. He told me.”

“I was two inches shorter, then.”

Adam trips off the bed and pulls Gansey’s trundle drawer open, shoving Gansey along the floor against the wood face and brass handles. “You’re a dickhead. You always liked him better. I don’t know why you even pretend with me.”

“No,” Gansey says, “alright, get in there.”

“No,” Adam says. “Not if I had to beg for it.”

“I’m afraid of you,” Gansey says, and Adam says, “Now we’re getting somewhere, you inconceivable prick.”

Ronan walks in, then. “Woah,” he says. “Parrish has got his big boy mouth on.” He puckers his lips and makes a truly heinous smooching sound.

“We’re sharing my bed,” Gansey says.

Ronan shrugs. “As long as I’m on an end.”

“I never agreed to that,” Adam says.

“You just asked me why I wasn’t letting you,” Gansey says frustratedly.

“Because you don’t want me there with you, I don’t want to be there either,” Adam says. His face is hot; he doesn’t know why they’re fighting. “You should think of me.”

“I think of you non-stop,” Gansey says rawly.

So Adam pauses. “Okay, well.”

“Fucking unscrutable,” Ronan mutters, then he crawls under Gansey’s sheets, shucking his trousers and socks as he goes. With a little more writhing, he removes his binder, whips it through the air with the panache of a groom with a garter belt, and chucks it across the room.

Adam, not shy but still steaming, changes into his loose sleep shirt in the bathroom. The whole room is a vague shade of salmon pink—just how Richard likes it, after all.

Adam joins the other two where they wait in Gansey’s bed. The sheets have been pulled down, the comforter mussed and untucked. Ronan has his arms wrapped around his pillow, spooning. Gansey lays like a pharaoh. Adam takes the free end of the mattress. There is plenty of room for all of them, considering the girth of the surface area and their general combined lankiness. Despite the space, Gansey has spread to press against both him and Ronan.

Adam reaches up and flicks the nightstand light off.

“I’m going to say something,” Gansey says into the dark, as if he’d been waiting. “Try not to hate me.”

“Jesus Mary,” says Ronan. “Alright, Dick.”

“Coming home, coming here,” Gansey says, “makes me miss the Barns.”

All Ronan says is, “Yeah.”

“I could live, when we were at the Barns. Here, it’s Dick, you’re so tall! Your voice is so deep these days!” Adam is always forgetting Gansey wasn’t born a boy in all the same ways he wasn’t, in all the same ways Ronan wasn’t. Gansey’s parents are never forgetting. “I’m their plaything.”

“And at the Barns,” Adam says, “Matthew took that position.”

“Yeah—well. Yeah.”

Adam snorts. Gansey will wish forever to be a quixotic, ebullient being like Matthew. He won’t admit it, but neither he nor Ronan are stupid enough not to have realized. It is, perhaps, Gansey’s infatuation with the mystical, with magic, which Matthew’s joy is its own form of. Like a dream come true.

Ronan sits sharply upright. When Adam cranes his neck curiously, he sees Ronan roughly palm a tear off his jaw.

“Ronan,” Gansey says. The gentle way he says it nearly makes Adam throw up.

“Shut up,” says Ronan. “Just shut up. You shithead.” But he lets Gansey stick his palm up the back of his shirt and scritch his fingernails over his spine, from his healing tattoo to the waistband of his boxer briefs.

“How do I fix it?” Gansey says. “Do you want to play Smash?”

So they play Smash, which is terrible for Adam because he has had no practice and wonderful for Ronan because he has inconceivable luck despite knowing none of the rules or button combinations for moves; he just presses things, and yet he always wins.

The colors and songs and sound effects lull them to sleep one by one—Gansey, then Adam, who spends his last moments of wakefulness ruthlessly beating Gansey’s helpless grey Kirby into submission. Ronan snorts as he watches; Adam drifts with a smile on his lips.

Gansey wakes them in the morning when he crawls gracelessly out of bed for a piss. He returns with water glasses for all three of them, however, so neither Adam nor Ronan hold it against him.

“Did you sleep?” Gansey asks.

“No,” says Ronan. He knuckles his eyes, a deceptively childish move. “S’okay. I was sugared up from the. The.”

“Poire belle Hélène."

“God bless you.”

“I slept,” says Adam. “Did you?”

“Yes,” says Gansey. “Yes,” and he crawls back into place between them, nougieing them both, “I can’t remember the last time I slept through the night here.”

“Aw,” says Adam. “Putz.”

Georgetown is terrible. Gansey is seventeen. They are all glad to return to Henrietta, accepted back into her bare-tree gullet like the three kings bringing tides of a miracle. Merry fucking Christmas, Richard C. Gansey, boy prince and patron saint of subconscious but nonetheless spectacularly glimmering diamond hunks of pretension and Triple-A on speed dial.

Adam falls sick once every winter. It is always violent and long-lasting. It is his least favorite part of the year, most especially now that he must attend both work and school while sneezing up gobs of green shit and warring with a thorough and invasive laryngitis: without a primary care doctor, Adam can’t get a doctor’s note; without a doctor’s note, Adam cannot have his absences excused; without excused absences, he will not be able to graduate on time; if he does not graduate on time, the dominoes fall and Adam is ever the pauper, Henrietta’s home-stuck bastard left to refill oil tanks and teach the tourists how to use the air pump for their flats, invisible or else time-and-creeper-swallowed and miles away from a different sort of ivy dream.

He probably wouldn’t take the note, anyway. He can’t afford to get behind on work, not for himself and especially not for the three football heads he’s currently helping cheat their way through Modern US Hist and Algebra II/Trig.

He makes it through first period with little stress. Every time he blows his nose, Gansey looks at him with the strangest expression—concern and admiration in one—and Ronan rolls his eyes at the trumpeting, snorking sound, but Adam has warred with worse than a sore throat and a confetti-littering of used tissues following him through the corridors.

Second period is worse. Chemistry must be explosive and brilliant to hold Adam’s attention, and today is a note-taking day. He writes until his pen dies, then writes until the unsteady weakness of his wrist, sore from work, stops him, then listens in the halfway house of consciousness like a curious squatter stranded between where he should be and where he could slip to if only he—

“AHchoo.”

“Sick,” Ronan mutters.

Gansey dangles a real life handkerchief over his shoulder for Adam without turning to him. It dances as he shakes it with intention.

Adam snags it. It’s monogrammed.

He makes an irrepressible sound of disgust. Ronan snickers, then drags Adam’s notes sheet close and begins doodling in the margins: rotund cauldrons exploding, cats with human hands, shoes with heels made of knives, Kermit Thee Frog.

“Look,” Ronan whispers, and his next piece of art, created with side glances and squinting and the length of his pencil held up as a size reference, is an uncanny if rude caricature of their teacher: a Borzoi wearing Lennon spectacles and a bolo tie.

Adam snorts with a laugh so sudden it sends him into a coughing fit. He shoves his face into his elbow, and when it does not end, he shoves to his feet and waves at their doggish prof as he runs from the room.

He bursts into the bathroom in a flurry of noise and phlegm. Two vaping kids glare; smoke pours out of the open doorway. Adam, now coughing with increased violence, sinuses stinging with the scents of bubblegum and mango ice, tucks himself into a stall, pressing on his tight chest, scrambling weak fingers into the depths of his trouser pocket for the plastic comfort of his inhaler.

One puff. He holds, shuddering around coughs, and it isn’t enough.

So Adam unwinds the length of bandages he uses to bind and he coughs like hell hunched between his knees, clutching to his inhaler, waiting for a break between heaves long enough to sneak a glorious puff.

He leaves the bathroom stall snotty and walks into class with tits, praying no one can tell. Then again, Ronan shares this period with him, and he would be remiss to misjudge the reality of Ronan’s unshakable and only sometimes exaggerated lewdness.

As expected, Ronan’s gaze singles on his chest like a sniper’s scope. Ronan mimes jacking off. Adam sticks his far hand in his pocket and pokes his middle finger out where their teacher can’t see. Then he slips into his seat and slips into a snotty fugue. The scratch of Ronan’s pencil pressing stark, deep, near-black lines into his notes sheet as he doodles is the accompaniment to Adam’s near-sleep, broken only by intermittent snorts and sniffles.

Then the bell rings, and Gansey whips around to say, “Parrish, you look like you’ve been blood-let.”

“Parrish, your tits look fantastic today,” says Ronan.

Adam tries to say, “Fuck you both,” but his voice breaks and squeaks around the shape of the words like a Rugrats character.

They both break into laughter, delighted.

Adam shoves to his feet, then has to catch himself on the edge of his desk when his head goes whirling carousel swift. Gansey cuffs his elbow with his neat, warm hand, just holding, still chortling. Adam wishes he could spit poison or something.

Instead, he spends next period with Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue crooning in his head, and when he rejoins Gansey and Ronan for lunch, Gansey greets him by plastering his palm, then the bony back of his hand, across Adam’s forehead.

“Shit,” he diagnoses.

Ronan smacks Gansey’s hand away and tries for himself.

“Shit,” Ronan agrees.

“Go home,” Gansey says.

“I will not,” hacks Adam.

“Go home,” Ronan says.

Adam glares. Ronan doesn’t even bother to glare back; he just looks.

“Can’t,” Adam wheezes, acquiescing. “Dad can’t know.”

Gansey blinks. “Well. I can fix that.”

Gansey smiles and taps his fingers on the desk of the nurse’s office while he talks, legs crossed at the ankle, forearms spread flat down and face up on the wood like surrender, like Gansey’s very good act at openness which is really so hilariously tightly locked it’s like bait for thieves and pickpockets, and Adam melts into the stiff cot while Ronan sits on his ankles at the far end and considers how Gansey should be pickpocketed down to lint but he still does things like talk nurses into letting Adam go home without warning his father because Mister Parrish shouldn’t be needlessly worried in the middle of his work day, and anyway, I have plenty of space and medicine for Adam round my place, and my mother is in town, she would have no problem watching us for the afternoon, really, and by the way my father said such nice things about you at dinner last week, is it true your daughter is finishing her degree in Seoul, how fascinating!

They’re in the Pig with Adam’s bike strapped to the ass of it before Adam can riddle what exactly has happened.

He naps. He wakes coughing and falls out of the front seat when Ronan opens the door despite him leaning against it.

“Ow,” he says, coughing more on the dust his impact raises.

“Do you own a jacket?” Gansey says. “You’re dying, do you have sinusitis? You do this to yourself, Adam, can you learn to wear layers? You’re giving me premature angina.”

Adam mimes a chattering mouth with his hand, shoving to his feet with his other knuckles pressing against the pavement of Monmouth’s grit and grime time-chewed parking lot.

Gansey is right, anyway: the windy morning air raises goosebumps all along Adam’s limbs like a good kiss. He smacks dust off his pants with purpling fingers. Though he feels overheated, his brain cooked, he starts to shiver in earnest.

Meanwhile, Ronan is already in Monmouth, all three of their backpacks in tow. The door swings, waving them on.

“C’mere,” Gansey mutters, and tugs Adam near, hand resting in the dip of Adam’s waist. They walk into the building together, hips rubbing with every step.

Adam beelines for the bathroom, where he spits a mouthful of green gunk into the sink.

“Righteous,” Ronan says.

“Atrocious,” Gansey says. He digs through the medicine cabinet as Adam collapses on the lid of the closed toilet, letting his heavy head droop and eyes close.

“Change,” Gansey says. “I’ll grab you something, change out of your uniform. Aren’t you uncomfortable?”

Ronan sniffs the air. “You stink, Parrish.”

Adam glares between them, chafing.

“Adam,” Gansey says.

“Take your shirt off, you prude.”

Adam Parrish, prude. He removes his shirt out of spite.

“Knew it,” Ronan says.

“Bruises,” Gansey says. “Bruised ribs, proverbial Adam.” He shoves out of the room in a tizzy and returns with a clean, loose shirt. “Stop doing that. I told you, I’ll buy you—”

“I’ll bite you if you finish that sentence,” Adam says. He pulls his head through Gansey’s shirt, desperate to get their eyes off him.

“Will you just.” Ronan struggles with his words for a second.

“What?” Adam says, to be a bitch.

Ronan glowers. He shucks his uniform cardigan, then his tie and shirt. In his high-waisted slacks and a binder, he is just left of a dream boy.

Gansey undresses next, sweater vest and shirt and binder, too. He goes into his room and returns with sweatpants, shorts, crewnecks and t-shirts and sport socks. They all dress quietly, together, in Gansey’s gifts.

“Let us take care of you,” Ronan says as he adjusts the ankle cuff of his sock.

Adam looks at all of them reflected back in the mirror, three morbid fates or three doggish heads or the three grail tests (breath, word, and path; Ronan, Gansey, and Adam).

He doesn’t know how to do this. He doesn’t know how to say yes, or Oh God Please, or Only You, Especially You, You, You.

But he wants it. Them. Badly.

Adam takes a big, shuddering breath.

“Okay,” he says.

Gansey wedges the heel of his vintage Adida into the little gap between the left side of the driver’s seat and the door like he needs it there for leverage. His hands linger caressingly at the bottom of the steering wheel, thumbs angled inwards towards the horn. The radio is broken again, but they keep it on for ambiance; February has turned Henrietta into a slush spill, a 7-11 tragedy before the flavor syrup has entered the picture.

Ronan adjusts his pants.

Gansey laughs delightedly. “You just can’t take it, can you. Manwhore.”

“Can you wear longer shorts? Freak.” Ronan and Gansey are running late to Weight Room. Gansey’s sport shorts hit mid-thigh and ride higher shoved crooked against the leather of the driver’s seat. His legs are dark and hairy, knees bruised from their latest trek through the woods. And Ronan cannot stop looking at them.

“Now, why would I do that?” Gansey’s smile is all razor-teeth, a carnivorous and nightlife thing. Ronan loves it furiously. It makes him want a car crash just to break the weight of tension thickening the feet of space between them. “When I wear these, I get you all flustered. You couldn’t get me to give that up for anything. It’s the best feeling in the world to be wanted by someone who could have anyone they’ve ever wanted, if they’d only try.”

Ronan leans into the back of his seat and swears under his breath, scrunching his eyes shut. He may have prayed the first time he saw Adam, but he cursed the first time he saw Gansey, and the difference between the two dwindles closer to nothing day by day.

“You like me behind the wheel,” Gansey teases. “You like the way I look. You like me real dirty-styles, Ronan Lynch.”

“Don’t get cocky.”

“I like the way you look,” Gansey says. They squeak to a stuttered stop at Henrietta’s only stop light. Gansey thoughtlessly pats the Pig’s dash to comfort it while turning to stare Ronan up and down from freckled ankle to shaved head, muscled arms and lean throat and Gansey reaches to hold Ronan’s thigh with one hand while they sit washed in lurid red light, engine roaring beneath them.

Ronan’s tongue shoves a match from between his teeth down the length of his throat, where it explodes in a brilliant shower of chrysanthemum fireworks.

The light changes. Gansey retrieves his hand. He presses on the gas. They go flying down the dew-slick street. Ronan leaves his guts somewhere in town center, consciousness floating above his body with the tangled and strange reality of loving so violently his best and closest friend in all ways he has found humanly possible. It is a little, he thinks, like tripping acid while floating down a lazy river surrounded by mythical creatures and the shimmer of magic and starlight and sucking down the best strawberry daiquiri ever had by anyone.

Or, he thinks, it is like dreaming his greatest desires to life.

“I feel like I can’t breathe,” Adam says.

Ronan stops kissing him. He releases the back of Adam’s neck and pushes up onto an elbow so Adam has to sit up to avoid cracking their heads together.

Adam buries his face in his hands. He is not shaking, but he is tense like the moment he unclenches his muscles, he will fall apart like puzzle pieces and November and eggshells against the rim of the metal bowl Adam is so constantly nailed against, hit and hit and hit and break Adam break already.

Ronan crawls out from under Adam, leaving Adam to fall clumsily onto Ronan’s pillow. Under the bed, Ronan keeps a long wooden crate of Adam’s CDs safe i.e. where Adam’s father cannot find them. He flicks through Radiohead and Muse and LCD Soundsystem and Hop Along and The Cranberries and Nirvana and XTC until he finds Elliott Smith and sticks Either/Or into one of his many somewhat busted somewhat magical stereo systems. Ronan does not enjoy Elliott Smith, but if Adam is going to have a moment of blooming algal and deep-green misery like the eternal cry of a creature whose species evolved far past the dust it lingers twitching and lonesome in, then he should have the soundtrack to really sell it.

It is somehow blasphemous for Adam to confess like this. Wordlessly, to only Ronan when God and all his cronies knows Adam’s confession would need a pope’s keen ear to absolve him of all the weird bullshit he concocts in that poor punch-addled head of his.

“Stop,” Ronan says, helpless.

Adam breathes out hard, with a huff. Eyes scrunched shut, hands fisted in the sheets.

“You have gotta learn how to handle this,” Ronan says. “Being loved. Hell, being liked, because if you did this in front of Gansey he would kill himself. He would literally just kill himself and you know it.”

“Gansey killing himself is not my concern. Right now.”

“Are you having a panic attack? Mary Joseph, Parrish, unclench your jaw, you’ll break something.”

“I’m not.”

“Look at me,” says Ronan.

Adam is quiet.

“Can you even look at me?” When the socket's not a shock enough / you little child what makes you think you're tough Elliott sings. “Can you stomach that.”

Adam wipes his lips hard against the back of his hand. “No,” he says.

“It’s like looking hard into the white eye of the sun,” Ronan says, “isn’t it. What, I can never kiss you again? Because you’ll lose your mind? You’ll choke on it? You’ll wanna spit me out?”

“Don’t be a cunt,” Adam snarls, and he finally looks at Ronan. It is the jumping, frenetic stare of a cornered animal.

Ronan feels stabbed straight through the heart. That’s what he makes Adam look like. Fuck this.

“You’ll never get it,” Adam says. “You will never in your life get this because you have had everything you have ever wanted. Don’t try to talk right now, Ronan, don’t you dare, because you have had everything, every luxury, and more than anything you have had—this.” Adam throws a skinny arm out and clings to Ronan’s wrist like it’s a hug or something, a cuff, house arrest. “People held you, Ronan.”

“You’ve had Gansey and me for a year,” Ronan says.

“And you’ve had seventeen years to get used to this,” Adam says. His throat bobs with a choked swallow. Nobody broke your heart, says Elliott. You broke your own because you can't finish what you start. “Lemme play catch up.”

“You don’t want to,” Ronan says. He sits on the edge of the mattress, a gargoyle by the twist of stone-brittle bone, all the harrowed angles of him turned into a grimace. Fuck off, evil. Fuck off, Parrish’s ephemerality. “You’d rather run. And you could do it, too. Just up and leave us. Probably wouldn’t even bother you much.”

“That’s what you think of me,” says Adam.

Ronan shrugs. “I’m not blind.”

“Then you’re stupid,” Adam says. His breathing picks up. “You’re—you’re—tell me Gansey doesn’t think that. Tell me you don’t think that, oh Anubis lord of truth and fucking shut your mouth because if you think that’s really what’s in—here—” he hammers on his heart with the fist that doesn’t clutch Ronan’s arm, “—then I’m the one that’s gotta end it, I’m, I’m unforgivable.”

“We like you this way,” Ronan says. “Terrible. Mean. Stop breathing like that.”

It’s desperation in Adam’s eyes. “Just tell me,” he says. “Lie, then. Lie to me about it, Ronan.”

“I would do a lot for you,” he says. “Adam, I won’t lie for you.”

Adam releases Ronan then, shaking good and proper. A spirit in Dante’s windiest circle with its form all shuddering and inconstant with the tremor of torment.

“So I should like hate myself,” Adam says.

“No,” Ronan says. “All you gotta do is learn how to like, fucking let us love you properly. That’s what’s wrong with you. You’re—stuck in a glass suit, you’re coated in a layer of gunk that keeps us out and keeps you from being a person because you’ve convinced yourself it’ll keep you from getting hurt or whatever.” Elliott says, All spit and spite you're up all night and down every day / a tired man with only hours to go just waiting to be taken away. “Adam, I promise you I’m gonna hurt you. I’m gonna hurt you like hell at least six or seven times. Maybe even eight.”

That makes Adam’s gaze go wide and blank.

“Gansey’ll hurt you too,” Ronan says. “He’s gonna hurt you worse because he won’t do it purposely. I’ll do it because it’s fun. He’ll do it because he’s a little stupid in the head.”

Adam’s lips twitch. He hangs onto Ronan’s words.

“So don’t fuck away from us just because you don’t know how to be loved or whatever, because we’ll hurt you too. We’ll make it nice and comfortable for you here. We’ll purple nurple you after we kiss or whatever. I’ll call you trailer trash before I hold your hand. Whatever you want.”

“Jesus, Ronan,” Adam says.

“Let us like you,” Ronan says. “Stop martyring whatever we’ve got going on before we can enjoy it.”

“Joan of Arc,” Adam says.

“I always liked her,” Ronan says. “Adam.”

Adam takes a sharp, deep breath through his nose. He shakes his head a little. His shoulders. He faces Ronan properly. “I am not afraid,” he says. “I was born to do this.”

Ronan smiles slow, from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Oh, Parrish. That’s hot.”

And when Adam kisses him, it’s not a confession, not a concession, not even a prize. It’s not a promise or penance or a farewell.

It’s just Adam.

Ronan holds him in place by either side of his ribcage, lips and lips, Do what I say, says Elliott, and I'll make you okay / and drive them away / the images stuck in your head.

“God,” Ronan says. And then he says, “God,” and it is richer even than the first time.

Then he runs into the rain, arms thrown out. He spins and soaks and splashes and kicks mud and Gansey watches him, and Adam watches him, and they say nothing, but they tilt together at the shoulder and breathe.

It’s Ronan’s favorite rain. The happy-sad sort.

“Something’s starting,” Gansey says. “Can you feel it?”

“Excelsior?” Adam asks.

Gansey looks at him, pretty and sodden with hair plastered to his forehead and an inquisitive flick to his brows. “Yes,” he says, smiling. He kisses Adam twice, one time long and one time short, once for love and once for sport. “Yeehaw,” he adds.

“Ride ‘em, cowboy!” Ronan crows, face open to the open heavens both of them shouting thunderstruck and tempest talk into each other’s mouths like Scylla and a mirror or a bath soak gurgling down down down the drain with epic finality and the promise of an encore and oh, oh, something is starting.

It’s April 24th. Tonight Gansey will head to the corpse road, and then they will all see, they will all see what there is to be found.