And Full As Much Heart.

by unfortunatesideeffects

Summary:

Adam Parrish has spent the last decade of his life at the Aglionby School for Boys, the latter five years as a teacher. At twenty-two, feet restless and mind yearning for more, he takes a position at The Barnes, a sprawling estate in Galway, as lush and green as the woods where he spent his childhood. His pupil is strange and her father, when finally he appears, stranger.

Adam has been poor and obscure all his life; he had hoped, with time, that he might resolve the first of these difficulties at least. What he had not planned for was the possibility of happiness, or its potential costs.
~

No prior reading of Jane Eyre necessary.

This fic is COMPLETE.
Outtakes to be posted in the future.

Chapter 1: Prologue.

Summary:

A wild flight, an unexpected ending.

 

Tonight something had shifted. Adam had felt it in the small hairs on his arms and neck, which had pricked up like a fox’s ears to wake him at the first tread of feet on the stairs. They were heavy feet, weighed down with years of disappointed hopes and failed chances, and more than anything else with the rage that those things had born.

Notes:

Warnings for canon-typical domestic and child abuse in this chapter.

~

This is not a faithful retelling.

First thing: this story is finished! I’m only trying to post it in chapters because I am attempting restraint like a real, adult human being. We’ll see how that goes.

Second: it’s long. Like…75,000 words? I had a good few weeks.

Third: In case you are not familiar with Jane Eyre (you certainly don’t need to be) it has a few key points in common with our Raven boys, just enough that I took them and ran for miles:
- A strange, rich, grumpy man living in self-imposed exile in the country
- An orphan child with a language barrier, acquired under less-than-salubrious circumstances
- A poor, clever, wilful, independent, resourceful (also orphaned, literally or functionally) child who grows up to be a poor, clever, wilful, independent, resourceful and academically accomplished adult
- An expansive but physically isolated location
- A few Big Secrets

I hope you enjoy this. I had a lot of fun writing it. It hasn’t been beta-ed, though I have edited it myself. As often happens to me, I did not write it in a straight, continuous line (do other people write linearly? Please give me tips). What this means is that, because it’s quite long, there is a possibility of continuity errors. I have done my best but if you find one, really, truly, please tell me. I do so want it to make sense.

 

Should I ask the gods of literature to forgive me? Too soon to tell, I suppose.

Thank you for reading.

Adam was running. It was dark and very cold, and his bare feet went thwap-thwap-thwap quickly over the wet leaves, a hectic pace. Behind him was thunder, the dead crunch of branches under heavy feet, thick-wet breathing and, periodically, a bellow, as of a raging animal but modulated into terrible, terrifying words.

“Boy!” the monster roared. Adam trembled. He could not fall, he must not fall. He could not be caught. Other nights he had been. Other nights, he had stayed still, as instructed, stood until knocked down, risen again until he could not stand, curled in upon himself and tried to shield the parts of him that could not be easily repaired, and it had been fine, for a certain value of fine. Which was to say, it had been survivable.

But tonight…tonight something had shifted. He had felt it in the small hairs on his arms and neck, which had pricked up like a fox’s ears to wake him at the first tread of feet on the stairs. They were heavy feet, weighed down with years of disappointed hopes and failed chances, and more than anything else with the rage that those things had born. Adam was used to their sound, the way his father threw his weight casually behind them, not bothering to disguise their leaden progress.

But tonight it was different.

For an eternal minute Adam had lain perfectly still in his narrow bed, heart beating in his throat like a songbird fresh-caught and frantically unaccustomed to its prison. It was hard to listen to his father’s progress over the drumbeat in his ears. He was trying to figure out what had changed.

Softness, his mind suggested, No, stealth. Was that a fractional hesitation before each footfall? A moment of careful placement, a marginally lighter tread? Why? Usually, his father made no attempt to mask his presence; in fact, Adam had seen sometimes a light in his eyes when he opened the door to find Adam cowering, huddled in a corner like an animal – Weakling! His father snarled. Changeling! Waste of space! Stand up like a man when I speak to you! – and knew, instinctively, that his fear was pleasurable in some way. Part of the game.

But now his father’s feet attempted stealth, and Adam felt cold grip his innards and paralyse his lungs.

He hopes to surprise me, Adam thought, To find me asleep. To drag me from my bed. To start when I am still unconscious, before I can protect myself. The thought of this was terrifying. It was not the fact of it as much as the desire it spoke of: a dark, premeditated thing. An intention to wound while Adam was truly defenceless. A will to commit violence unobserved.

Quickly, silently, he slipped from his narrow bed. The floor was frigid beneath his bare feet, and he reached instinctively for his short jacket where it hung on the bedpost. His fingers trembled as he slipped the window latch. There, behind him. The distinctive squeak of the third stair from the landing, and a rumble of curses, quick-bitten back. His hands shook as he pushed up the sash.

His little garret room was perched above a shed, a strange add-on behind the stables, the better to have him on hand to tend ill beasts in the night. It was an odd, narrow room, a half-stop between the first and second floor. This meant that though he usually scaled the old elm tree to reach the ground via his window, the distance was not impossible at a jump. He had done it before. In daylight, in boots and not a night-shirt, but he had done it. Perhaps, if he fell badly, his father would consider a beating unnecessary. Perhaps, if he fell very badly – stumbled, for instance, and hit his head on the stone border of the flowerbed – there would be no point in beating him ever again.

Adam paused, balanced on the sill, trying to see the ground. He did not want to fall very badly. There were bushes beneath the window, he knew. It would hurt. Perhaps he could make it down the tree after all.

He heard soft-heavy footsteps in the corridor, the deep breathing of some forest beast pressed against his door. The latch rattled cautiously, almost delicately upward. Adam jumped.

He did not land too badly, but the branches cut his foot and, trying instinctively to protect it, he slipped. The twist made him gasp, buckled him for a moment at the knee before he could gather his breath back to him and limp out of the flowerbed. He stumbled forwards into moonless dark, past the shadow of the elm and off towards the lawn. It was not until he heard a roar behind him that he realised his first mistake. The grimy pallor of his night shirt and legs stood out like an albatross against the inky green of the lawn. He chanced a glance over his shoulder as his father bellowed from the window, and tried to force himself into a dragging run.

If he could make it to the trees before his father charged down the stairs, he would be safe – at least for now. The woods were dark even under a full moon, and nobody but Adam knew them well. In this moonless black even he would lose his way, but if he could just get out of sight of the house his father might abandon the chase. Even if he didn’t, the trees got thick fast and, drunk and angry and huge, surely his father would not have the patience to push much past the border?

And then he tripped on a stone and his twisted ankle buckled spectacularly beneath him, and Adam was sprawled face-first in the freezing wet grass. Behind him, he heard the gravel path crunch.

“Boy!”

Adam scrabbled for purchase, shoving to get himself up, staggering onwards. He didn’t look back, there was no time. He focussed on the trees ahead, a wall of blacker shadows against the clouded sky.

Please.

He could hear them rustling. His twisted foot dragged in the mud.

Please, Adam thought desperately, Please.

He could hear boots pounding behind him, slipping, cursing, shouting. His father made no effort at cunning now. He was as loud in his fury as a wounded bull, charging towards Adam, gaining on him, gaining on him. Adam could almost feel hot breath on his neck. The trees were nearing now, branches reaching back towards him, almost within grasp, almost –

Squelching, grunting, panting, “You stop right now, boy, I’m going to beat you bloody!” Adam’s fingers touched bark. He narrowly avoided a root.

“Don’t you go in there! Don’t you dare – “

But Adam did dare. He hurled himself forwards into a dark so thick and damp, so fragrant with moss and mist, that it felt like a living thing. A touching thing. Reaching out to him to draw him in as he stumbled forwards.

Nobody else knew these woods. Not the servants at the house or his parents or the folk who worked the farm. Rumours grew like weeds around them. They covered but a spare mile of ground, yet unwary strangers had been known to vanish entire, or be found months later rake thin and a little loopy, wandering the tree line. Strange plants were said to grow in them, and folks swore to sightings of brilliantly coloured birds, or white beasts, alien in the good English countryside.

But Adam…Adam loved them. As a child, barely three years old, he had toddled off in a moment of inattention, his mother shelling peas on the stoop, and not been found (or missed) ‘til five hours hence, grubby and smiling, unidentifiable leaves twined into his sandy hair. The beating he’d got had not been severe, in the greater scheme of things, but, clever even as a mite, he’d found more opportune times for later explorations. Never when he was supposed to be working, never when his parents might note his absence. Don’t muss your clothes, don’t bring anything back. Adam had bided his time, counted his hours, and spent the best of them cradled in the cool green shade of the little forest.

It was, no doubt about it, a strange place. He couldn’t really say he knew it, exactly, for it never seemed to stay exactly the same from one visit to the next. But he knew how it felt, like cool water on a hot day, like a wheat-yellow field stretching on forever beneath a summer sky, like getting lost in a good book, like safety, quiet, peace. He felt at home there, and he felt protected.

He needed that protection now, desperately.

Behind him he could hear branches snapping as his father crashed blindly in after him, and he felt ill at the thought of that destruction, sick to have brought this monstrous sledge hammer of a human being into this precious, peaceful place.

The trees rustled around him and Adam felt himself, not for the first time, the focus of an alien intelligence. It was ancient and unknowable, and he just a fragile, mortal thing crouched at the centre of this great parliament of trees. They spoke in many strange voices, and he felt weak and vulnerable, a hummingbird’s worth of life, a moth’s, set against their great antiquity and strange, all-encompassing presence.

Hide me, Adam thought suddenly, Please hide me. I’ll do anything. Don’t let him find me. Whatever I have is yours. Adam had not believed in God in a long time. He did not know to whom he prayed or begged. He only knew that he was reaching a precipice, a certain end. His foot throbbed and caught on roots and brambles. He hauled himself onwards by catching branches, dragging himself bodily over fallen trunks. But he was very far from invincible. He was just a boy. Shivering, hurt, in nothing but a night-shirt and his well-patched jacket, in the chill of early spring, barefoot in the woods. His father was gaining on him. He could almost feel that thick, alcoholic breath on his nape.

Please, he asked the forest, Please. You’re the only place I’ve ever been safe. Please hide me. I’ll do anything. But there was nothing to do, and he had nothing to give, he knew he had nothing. Nothing but himself, and what was that to a forest? Around him he could feel the trees. He could sense the life in them, the myriad ways they reached out to connect with the earth, the insects, the animals, the very air itself and each other. What were his knobbly fingers compared to great branches and quivering leaves? What were mere human senses to searching roots? I know it’s not much, but I can fix things. I’m good with my hands. And I notice things. I see things other people miss. I can be useful to you, he begged the trees, You can have my hands, you can have my eyes. Just please, please. Keep me safe. Don’t let him find me.

 

Afterwards, nobody could say how it had happened. There’d never been rumour of a ravine in the woods. Far as anyone knew, the stream that ran through Cabeswater was shallow; clear and fast, but easy enough to ford. And yet there he was, when morning dawned, and sure as sure if he’d not broke his neck in the fall he would have drowned, for the water that carried Mr Parrish’s body out of the little forest and into the soft foothills at the edge of the estate was white and fast and deep. Must be rain in the mountains, they said, to turn the brook to rushing, to make a lethal river of a rill.

Adam, shivering and muddy and bare-legged still, his ankle blue-black and dragging, told them what had happened. Which is to say he told them how, from his bedroom window, he’d seen his father, looking ill and shaky, listing across the lawn. Seen him enter the forest and worried for him, in his unsteady state. How he’d rushed down the back stairs but been too late to catch a glimpse of him in the gloom, and had wandered himself, half-frozen and, finally, falling, lost in the dark, until morning, when he’d heard the shepherd calling and come, like the rest of them, to find his father’s sodden body broken on the rocks.

This was the first great lie of Adam’s life, and though it would not be his last, it was the one he felt least conflicted about, in part because he did not carry its burden alone. Not a one amongst the gathered crowd believed his father’s ‘illness’, nor looked at Adam’s bruises and saw naught but boyish misadventures or filial loyalty. But they nodded their heads solemnly and agreed that it was too bad, the loss of Mr Parrish, such a pity for his poor wife, and could some way be found, perchance, to do something for the boy? Poor scrap that he was, but clever, capable. Perhaps some relatives in the country, or the charity school near London. They’d put their heads together. Get up to the house with you for something warm, child, and mind, Cook, have a look at that ankle. It was too bad, really. And such a good lad, too.

Notes:

This is the first thing I've written for this fandom, and the first thing I've written on AO3 in a long time. Not that I was prolific before.

Anyway, I'm not quite sure how it happened.

I think I read waroftheposes’s Pride and Prejudice x Raven Cycle AU and thought, oh, fun, and then, wait, I feel like there’s another story that might fit this pattern… So I just...started, and sooner or later I had 75,000 odd words, with an angsty middle and a happy ending and everything.

And so here we are, because if fleshy dreams and nightmares have a place anywhere in classic Western literature, it’s definitely amongst the Gothic fiction.

I am hoping for comments (because, really, isn't that the point of sharing a story?) and looking forward to seeing how long I can hold out before getting impatient and posting the next chapter. I give myself about four days, tops.

I'm thinking twice-weekly updates; at 24 chapters that means the whole thing should be posted by, what, late October? What do you think?

Chapter 2: I remembered that the real world was wide.

Summary:

A change, a meeting, another change.

 

“There you are,” she said, as though they had arranged to meet and he was late.

“Here I am,” Adam said, warily.

Notes:

Thank you to everyone who read the last chapter; and thank you particularly to those who have returned for another!

Thank you also to those who left kudos, or bookmarked, or subscribed or, best of all, left comments. You all made my day.

Title is from Jane Eyre

In one way, Adam’s life had been a unilateral disaster. In another, he was actually quite lucky. For most children, to lose a parent, be uprooted and packed off to live with strangers might be traumatic; for him, it marked a sharp improvement. His life divided for the first time: before school and after.

It was certainly not a romantic change. To move from the warm, wide green fields of Henrietta to Aglionby’s low panelled hallways and chill grey flags was to travel from light to ponderous gloom, from the warm animal and hay smell of his stables to Aglionby’s omnipresent chill. The rooms where the boys slept were tucked high under the eaves, and so they learnt to commune with the weather, which was to say that they sweat and froze by turns. Years of smoke licked soot up the walls of the long refectory, and the food was reliably bad.

Yet, on the other hand, it was reliable.

And because Adam was a good, if solitary, student, he found that he could rely on other things as well. He could rely on his teachers not to beat him, on the younger children to confide in him, the older to ignore him or even offer grudging respect. As he grew he discovered that the same talents which had so alienated him from his father – a faculty for reading and figures, an ear (albeit only one) for language – endeared him to his teachers. He had to work harder for music, and to learn the knack of sketching a thing from life, but Adam was nothing if not focused. Learn he did. That and much more besides.

He learnt to stand straight and loose, like the other boys, not hunched in and bracing for a blow. He learnt to articulate his ‘t’s and how to wrap a university accent, carefully lifted from his teachers, around his slow country drawl. He studied the classics, drilled into himself words he had never before heard pronounced. He perfected the cool, unruffled confidence of those few boys who had come from better parts of the world than he, before misfortune had tumbled them into Aglionby’s stern embrace. Adam was re-making himself in an image he had chosen. He would shed Henrietta like a snake’s skin and emerge changed and worthy.

For his skills he was granted special responsibilities and commensurate rewards. As a senior pupil he helped with the younger boys, and on graduating was offered a formal position. He stayed at Aglionby ten years in total, five as a pupil and five as a teacher until, one bright morning in May, he received a letter.

Adam had been expecting this letter, in a general way, for the past six months. Change the cards had whispered to him, choices. A new beginning. And Adam had learned, despite his teachers’ pragmatic disdain for whimsey and nonsense of all kinds, to trust the cards.

He had not meant to become a spiritualist. Before the cards, Adam had always had what his mother had used, exhaustedly, when she paid him any mind at all, to call a ‘knack’. She could not fathom where it might have come from. Nobody in her family had had it, and his father certainly did not seem the type. But Adam had always known things. Not big things, or particularly unnerving things, but small, useful things. Known when to sleep by an expectant horse so that he could run for help when the labour turned bad. Known where to find a hole in the chicken coop before a fox could get in. Known when to duck, when he was running full-tilt though his forest. When to slip out of the kitchen before his father’s bulky shoulders filled the doorway. Not big things. Not consistently. Just small, helpful nudges that made his day-to-day life run a little more smoothly.

After his father died, after that night in the forest, something had changed.

It wasn’t obvious at first, because there had been no time. Adam was still limping when old Mr Smythe, the butler, had summoned him and explained that, in light of his quickness and promise, and the unfortunate accident with his father, the master and mistress of the house had decided to send him to school. They would sponsor Adam, he said, at a charity school some three towns away. It was a great opportunity. A chance to improve his station and make good use of his wits. He must apply himself to his studies and honour their favour with diligence and good behaviour. He was, Mr Smythe was certain, very grateful.

Something deep within Adam which he tried, with all the determination of the true survivor, to beat back, rankled at everything about this situation. Charity. Grateful. Favour. Adam knew objectively that all these things were true. He was poor. The charity of others was his best chance at making a life for himself that was bigger than his mother’s, his father’s, than his life might ever have been if it were not for that one, terrible night. It was indeed a great gift. He should, certainly, be grateful. And, objectively, he was. But there was a zealousness within him which he had never yet had the luxury to explore, a sharp and vital core that beat against the pragmatism of poverty and wanted only to do things his way, on his time, as he pleased. It raged inside him, battered itself against the insides of his ribs. Freedom. Independence. To be beholden to no one. For no-one to hold him back.

But Adam was a child and, by necessity, a brutally practical one. He had bowed his head respectfully. Said ‘yes, sir’, and ‘no, sir’ and ‘thank you’ at all the right intervals. He had bundled his meagre possessions into a sack and, before dawn touched the clouds the next day, had been bundled in his turn into a carriage, between the parcels and the morning post, off to Aglionby and change.

His mother had not seemed to mind – or in fact said much of anything at all – and he was not surprised.

It was at Aglionby that Adam discovered just how very much change had occurred.

Adam still had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. But now, sometimes, ahead of time, he knew why. This was, at first, very confusing. He made plausible explanations in his mind: he had overheard his Latin master talking about a problem with that horse. He had seen a slip of paper reminding a classmate of some imminent trouble. But he could not account for everything, and for a while this unsettled him. And yet, if he were anything at all, Adam was adaptable. He wove this new skill in amongst the old ones, gained a reputation for being a lucky bastard, and carried on as usual. It was not until his final year as a student that things changed again.

There had, since that fateful night, been instincts – nudges, knacks – that Adam had not been able to understand at all.

Something would pull him towards the creek which ran through the bottom of Aglionby’s grounds and he would find himself, half-distracted, clearing a mess of sticks which had caught in the rushes. A restless itch would settle in him when he restored the flow, and he’d return to his business feeling calm again. Days, weeks, a month later, while walking to church with the other boys, a niggle in the back of his mind would lead him to a bird’s nest, fresh fallen on the ground and every egg intact, and he would climb to replace it – in this crook, like this – and feel that peace once more.

Sometimes, because he was still a child and not that independent, near-mythical creature to which he aspired – an adult – these instincts remained unresolved. He would wander, during the afternoon’s exercise period, to the boundary fence or Aglionby’s great iron gates, and stare intently into the distance, as though he could bridge it by thought alone. Unsurprisingly, he was considered not only lucky but odd.

And yet, one day, as he stood by the gate looking out at something he could sense, in the far distance, but could not see, a different sort of inkling tickled at his thoughts. He turned his head before he heard the rumble of wheels, and minutes later a cart trundled into view. Its driver pulled up by the side of the road, hopped down, rummaged around in her sack a moment, and approached the gate.

“There you are,” she said, as though they had arranged to meet and he was late. Her voice was almost impossibly small. He had to strain to hear it. She had strange black eyes and a cloud of white hair that fell almost to her knees. Her dress was old-fashioned, but surprisingly clean and neat for a peddler.

“Here I am,” Adam said, warily.

“Well, come on then, I haven’t got all day.” The woman beckoned him closer to the gate. Although he knew, intellectually, that talking to strange travelling women though Aglionby’s illustrious ironwork was not the sort of good behaviour expected of him, Adam felt the familiar nudge and stepped forward.

“There,” the woman said, slapping a small, black, velvet bag, held closed with a drawstring, into his open palms. Inside it he felt hard edges, shifting layers. “Now, I haven’t time to teach you much, but the trick is not to look at them too closely. To begin with, I wouldn’t look at them at all. Just keep your eyes closed and think of the trees. They’ll guide you true.”

She seemed satisfied with this explanation. Adam certainly was not.

“Oh, but don’t think about them too hard,” she added, which was not remotely helpful, “There’s a lot of forest to get lost in, you know. It’s bigger than you think.”

Adam stared at her, closing his hands instinctively around the bag. Whatever was in it, it felt warm against his palms.

“I think that’s enough, now,” said the woman, “Go on. Mr Roach will be looking for his glasses in a minute, and you know how he gets.”

Adam did indeed know. He felt that tug again, pulling him back towards the dormitories.

“Um. Thank you,” he managed.

“Don’t fret about it too much,” she told him, sounding suddenly kind, “Even when you think everything lost, you’ll find you’re almost certainly on the right path. I’ll see you in a while.”

And then she got back up on her cart and rolled away. Adam had not seen her again yet, but he had a sense that, at some point, that would change. He had the impression that her sense of time was not his sense of time; her advice about the cards had been good, after all, but it had not seemed so for quite a while.

And so, though the cards had told him that something was coming, he had not been expecting the letter on that Thursday in particular. But he had been hoping for it.

Adam had never wanted to stay in one place all his life. Freedom, that voice inside him still whispered. The lure of being dependant upon no-one but oneself. He did not yet have those things, but he was closer to them. Aglionby had offered him an opening of doors, an unexpected rush of possibilities. Now, just as it began to press in around him, feeling stale and making his feet itch, this letter arrived promising a new landscape, a new country. New doors, new possibilities. He would still have a master but freedom, Adam had come to realise, did not always come in the forms one expected, and never all at once.

He went to speak to the school superintendent, and then began to pack.

It was the Spring of 1855, in a small town to London’s south. Adam was twenty-two years old.

Notes:

And so it properly begins! The lonesome magician begining to discover his powers; not lonesome for too much longer, though, I think :)

As ever, comments and kudos etcetera make my heart happy, and I am so into talking to people about writing and gothic fiction and all the rest.

 

Next chapter:
A new country, a new home, new (to Adam, if not to us) faces.

Chapter 3: Its gleams of sunshine

Summary:

A chapter of newness: people, places and (perhaps newest of all) the possibility of a home.

When the carriage rumbled through high, iron gates and into the park, Adam did not know what to expect. It took him a while to find out, too, because the gravel drive was long. For some time all he saw were trees and lawns and, beyond them, pastures dotted with red barns and cows. That, he supposed, explained the name.

Galway was, above all things, green. Green and lush, bright with life. Adam unhooked the latch on the little window and breathed deeply, tasting the potential of growing things. It was some twenty minutes before they passed an ornamental lake and drove through a beautifully curated aisle of trees, their branches twining overhead.

If he had expected something specific, the house which sprawled at the end of this avenue would not have been it. Adam was no student of architecture, but he had pored over his share of illustrated history books, and so he knew enough to see that this place was a chimera. The façade was much less grand than the grounds had led him to anticipate. The road divided, left and right along a low stone wall, and his driver took the middle way, direct towards the house. Looking out his window Adam was astonished to find that the ground fell away and the road was in fact a bridge over gently moving, muddy water; in the weeks to come, he would discover that the ornamental lake was in fact part of a series of interconnected ponds and waterways, one of which curved gently around the front of the house like a soft-edged crescent moon. Flowering vines tumbled down the banks, a riot of pale flowers, and their scent filled the cabin in a heady rush.

The carriage wheeled around to stop before wide, shallow steps and, gathering his overcoat and hat, Adam alighted.

It was impossible, from this angle, to examine the whole house at once. It might be impossible at any angle; there was an awful lot of house. The part he could see clearly was evidently old, and surprisingly modest. Its mullioned windows were bordered in white, neat against the red brick, and chimneys and attic dormers dotted the pitched roof. But over and around the edges of walls and gutters, other buildings loomed. Adam spied curlicues and buttresses, a mishmash of brick and grey stone. Somewhere to the left, a tower.

What a disaster, he thought as he studied it, and found himself reluctantly charmed.

The front door opened and a tall, wide, dark woman emerged with a brilliant smile.

“Mr Parrish,” she said, offering him her hand, “I am Mrs Sargent. I am delighted to meet you, I hope your journey was not too unpleasant.” Her accent was unapologetically English, a surprise after four day’s travel amongst heavy Irish brogues.

“Not at all,” Adam told her, shaking her hand. The coachman handed his bags off to a footman, who disappeared with them inside.

“Come in,” she ushered him inside, “We’ll have tea in the garden, and then you can meet your pupil.”

The inside of The Barnes was, if anything, even less expected than the outside. Mrs Sargent led him through a low, wide, wood-panelled corridor and out into a wholly astonishing flood of sunshine. If the façade had been modest, the foyer more than made up for it. A great divided staircase swept up curving walls to either side, leaving a wide open space on the marble tiles below. Adam’s footsteps echoed. Paintings and bronze sculptures clung to the pale green wallpaper or were secreted into sconces, set at intervals between floors. The stairs met above at the first landing, then divided again, curving back on themselves to a third story. Adam tilted his head back beneath the enormous chandelier and felt sunlight on his face, filtering down from a white cupola studded with circular windows.

Mrs Sargent was watching him with a knowing smile, “I know, it’s a little much. The Lynches are all too sentimental to change the outside of the house, but one of the previous masters decided that surprise was an effective way to awe his friends. Most of it is a little more subdued.”

She led him through a corridor, a drawing room, a formal music room, a parlour. Adam felt dizzy with the size of it. He was going to need a map. Pushing open French doors they found themselves on a wide terrace overlooking a manicured hedge maze and, beyond it, the structured chaos of a rose garden in bloom.

“Your room is in the western wing, but the formal gardens here in the east are better in the afternoon.” They sat at one of the small, iron tables, and a maid brought tea things on a tray. “So,” said Mrs Sargent comfortably, “Tell me about your journey. I have relatives in London, you know, but they don’t get to Ireland very often. I’ve been so looking forward to hearing the news.”

Adam did his best.

 

It was past four when Adam met his pupil.

Opal was a fey, sweet, thin, sharp child with unpredictable taste in clothing, toys and vegetables, and a surprisingly wicked sense of humour for a ten-year-old. She spoke in a garbled mess of Latin, English and a language Adam did not recognise, but which Mrs Sargent explained was Eastern European. Adam found himself pleasantly challenged to keep up with her. That his pupil was a little girl had surprised him at first, but the housekeeper explained that, given her linguistic quirks, the priority had been to find a tutor who was fluent enough in Latin and English to teach her anything at all.

“Of course, Mr. Lynch wishes you to focus on her English, particularly. The rest is all very well, but she’ll never be able to leave the estate unless she can speak a decent Queen’s.”

“Of course,” Adam said, “I understand. What of her other studies? I do play a little piano, and sketch, but I’m afraid I’m not really qualified to teach her how to be a young lady.”

Mrs Sargent chuckled, a warm and inherently welcoming sound, “Not to worry, Mr. Parrish. When she’s older she’ll winter with friends in London. They will socialise her very capably. Your job is to make sure they’ll understand her when she goes.”

“I believe I can do that, Mrs Sargent,” he assured her, and she smiled and patted his arm, and asked if he would like a tour of the garden. Opal, watching him with wide black eyes which seemed huge in proportion to her quick little face, snuck her tiny hand into his and managed, at least for a little while, to walk with them at a sedate adult pace. Adam did not know much about small girls, but he suspected they were not supposed to go haring off like a colt to cavort amongst the butterflies. Still, Mrs Sargent seemed unconcerned. Adam found himself again feeling, a little less reluctantly, charmed.

 

It was left entirely to Adam’s good judgement – he hoped – to devise a course of study, and since Opal was quick and clever, and Adam himself bored easily and could not abide waste in any form, he decided that it did not matter that this agile brain was housed in a delicate brown slip of a girl, he would teach her what he knew, and damned if it were ladylike or otherwise.

Opal was resistant to monolingualism, but avid in other areas. She devoured whatever books he could find in Latin – not quite literally, although given her table manners, he would not have been surprised – but would willingly puzzle through English tomes with him for hours on end, provided he could promise a good story. Like him, she adored the clean, precise lines of mathematical equations, and progressed quickly beyond what was standard for boys her age to know.

But her favourite subject by far was one which lay close, too, to Adam’s heart: the history and philosophy of nature. Adam was a rigorous teacher, and regardless of tantrums and entreaties he ruled that mornings were to be spent in the schoolroom. But afternoons were for the living, or more precisely, living things. Regardless of rain, hail or sunshine, no sooner did they rise from the luncheon table than the pair of them were out the door, putting their good enquiring minds to use.

The Barns was a beautiful estate. Henrietta had been beautiful, too, Adam supposed, but he had never been able to appreciate any part of it but the forest. Here, he could appreciate everything.

The house itself was, he now knew, enormous. It was not classically lovely, for it was too homely in some parts, too odd in others. Generations of Lynches had lived here and every one it seemed had added, subtracted, modified, updated. Torn down or built up. Replaced or renewed. It lolled ungovernably amongst its gardens, with more wings than seemed logically possible, and architectural styles enough to make Opal’s history lessons delightfully hands on.

But the house was not what made The Barns The Barns. Stretched around it for miles on every side was all manner of life and greenery. They said the United Kingdom had lost all its wildernesses, but at The Barns one could pretend. In some directions there was grazing land (it was, after all, a working farm), in others, formal gardens. The maze. The rose garden. In yet another direction, the flowerbeds (for viewing), another, the flowerbeds (for plucking). Vegetable gardens, herb gardens, a folly, a lake. And then, cutting a deep black-green swathe at the far end of the western lawn, a forest. This was not like the forest of Adam’s childhood which had, for all its rumoured strangeness – and now, to a man grown and educated in natural philosophy and the new sciences, those rumours often felt distinctly unsatisfactory – had occupied a relatively small, contained space. This forest stretched green tendrils over acres of estate land, but nobody resented it.

Adam’s bedroom window, on the second floor of the westmost wing, looked in this direction. Sometimes, on rare evenings when he could not sleep, Adam would sit at his window and look out over the trees. The circumstances had to be exceptional, because the truth was that for some reason Adam could not stand to look at the forest for very long. It woke something deep and strange inside him, a little bit alien, a little bit dangerous, which he was not yet ready to examine close-up. When he looked into the shadows between those trees he felt a pull, somewhere, low in his gut and at the same time a repulsion. Opal loved the forest. On her afternoons off she could almost always be found in the shade between tree trunks, stroking mossy boughs and whispering in her strange language to the birds. Many times she had tried to persuade Adam to join her, and with one part of his heart he longed to, almost unbearably, yet with the other he resisted just as strongly and could not tell even himself why.

In the garden was where Adam taught his pupil to draw, instructing her on the careful observation and precision necessary to capture living things on paper in all their detailed glory. Side by side they pencilled through every plant in the kitchen garden, collecting Latin names, and moths for the treefrogs who lived in a large, elevated vitrine – an extravagant gift from the mysterious Mr. Lynch, of whom Adam had yet to hear anything substantial – in one corner of the school room. When they came across a gap in Adam’s knowledge, Opal scampered before him to the library, and they would spend hours pawing through the Lynch family’s extensive collection of botanical texts. Someone, Adam thought, had been an avid natural philosopher, for this section of the library was rivalled only by the shelves of printed novels and hand-copied stories at the opposite end of the room. Adam found, inscribed neatly on the first page of a number of the more expensive botanical tomes, A. Lynch, and wondered whether this flowing hand could possibly belong to Opal’s absent father.

Clues about this personage were sparse, and those he had stumbled upon thus far were strange indeed. There were Opal’s frogs, which betrayed both a carelessness for social norms and a carefulness regarding Opal’s specific temperament, and which spoke well for his employer. And there were the rooms – not one, or even two, but many rooms, a whole wing in fact on the floor above his own, full of…well. Rubbish, possibly. Objects, definitely, and a carpet of dust thick enough to swim in.

Adam had only caught glimpses of them when, during his first week in the house, he had taken it upon himself to investigate the place. He had wandered, he supposed, quite aimlessly up the staircase and to the right, and through a half-open door onto a long, uncarpeted hall. The large window at the end was opaque with dust, and he thought for a moment he saw the shadows of trees brush against it from the outside, an impossibility on the third floor. His cheeks had warmed hurriedly when Mrs. Sargent, turning a corner, had come upon him about to stick his head through a half-open door. She had turned quite pale with something like shock, then pink with embarrassment as she rushed to explain that these were old family belongings, not at all the sort of thing for guests or – Adam was aware that educators occupied an awkward position in the household hierarchy – well, the brothers Lynch were quite private about their things, you know, and – Adam took the hint and asked whether he could help her with her burden, and allowed himself to be swept back into the main part of the house. It was only after he had settled back into the library that he thought idly that, for a moment, Mrs. Sargent’s shock might almost have passed for fear.

So the family were collectors, that was certain, and the current Mr. Lynch was no exception. Regular conversations with the gardeners – three gruff old men who had been taken quite by surprise, Adam thought, first by the sudden intrusion of a small, peculiar ten-year-old into their daily lives, and then, more so, by a burgeoning fondness for her – revealed (albeit, Adam though, unintentionally on their parts) that scattered throughout the gardens were flowers, plants and even fruits which they, veterans all, had never seen anywhere but The Barns. Adam thought again of the elegant tail on the A, the looping capital of the L gracing those botanical volumes in the library. So, A. Lynch. Father, traveller, collector of rare plants.

But then again, there were the whispers. The Barns was, in all, a happy estate. Well run, productive. And Mrs Sargent, though ebullient and a little eccentric, ran a tight ship. Her kitchens and linen closets were rich in provender and bedding, and poor in malicious gossip. But there was some gossip, and Adam, though he did exist in that strange limbo space between a servant and a guest, was still not entirely out of the loop. He heard enough to know that the bright sunlight of The Barns had, on more than one occasion, been darkened by some of the stickier vices. The prior Mr Lynch and his wife had died under circumstances which remained mysterious, leaving unpleasant echoes. The eldest and middle sons of the current Lynch generation did not get along. There had been fighting, drinking, bad behaviour. Particulars could not be had, but an undercurrent of unease was palpable whenever conversation turned to the much anticipated, never realised return of the current Master Lynch. Adam did not know what to make of it.

Opal was no help. When Adam first asked her opinion of her father, she looked confused, and would say only that she did not understand. When asked again at a later date what she thought of Mr Lynch she smiled delightedly and launched into a rapid, trilingual riddle of a tale about some very improbable adventures in Paris featuring large birds, a flying contraption, and a very fast horse. Adam smiled indulgently, and then made her go back and meticulously translate the tirade into first Latin, then halting English. He suggested that if she wrote it very neatly she could add it to the fiction section in the library, and her momentary puzzlement was subsumed by enthusiasm for her task.

 

And so the spring, and then the summer, unfolded around them, bright and lush and verdant, and Adam’s days settled into a peaceful rhythm. He liked his work, and the company of Opal and the gardeners, and Mrs Sargent’s easy warmth. Though he was still, in theory, under thumb, it was an absent hand which held him, and he found he did not much mind having a master under circumstances like these. He was not precisely free, but he was content, which was much more unexpected. The months stretched, warmed, began to cool again. Adam felt very close to being alive.

Notes:

I had to make this version of The Barnes older than the one in the book possibly is, and also bigger – but I still wanted it to feel farm-ish and interesting and dream-strange and surprisingly modest at first sight. I based the front part of the house on Groombridge Place (which a lot of people will know from the Kiera Knightly Pride and Prejudice) because, you know, why wouldn’t Ronan live in a farmhouse with a moat? Obviously.

Also, fun fact: Mrs (or, in another time, Ms) Sargent’s first name is Jimi. I know we don’t really get to see much of her in the original, but she does have this slightly invasive warmth and motherliness that makes her a good foil for the rest of these weirdos. Also, I needed to keep the rest of Fox Way for later.

Finally, I have not yet read CDTH or Opal’s short story. Thus, this contains no references to the above, and Opal in particular is characterised based solely on her appearance in The Raven Cycle. I love her. I love Ronan – and Adam – with her. But I’m not sure how canon-compliant my characterisation of her is. She does eat a lot of weird shit, so I feel like I’m at least in the ballpark.

~
Next up: an accident, a mysterious stranger, a much anticipated (I'm sure) meeting.

As always, comments make my day <3

Chapter 4: Conventionality is not morality.

Summary:

An accident, an unexpected arrival, a meeting.

Most importantly of all (let's not kid ourselves): Ronan Lynch.

 

 

To say that Mr. Lynch was not what Adam expected was an understatement.

Notes:

Thank you to everyone who is still reading - the pace picks up a bit from here, I think, because Ronan.

Though the days were still bright, lit with oranges and autumnal gold, the evenings were getting longer. Dusk stole upon Adam when he was not yet expecting it, and on this particular day a fog had rolled in, early, turning everything hazy and grey. Opal had the afternoon off and Adam, wanting something to do and perhaps a little time to himself, offered to take a parcel and some letters to the post office in the village. He set off briskly, enjoying the crisp chill of clean air on his jaw, the rustle of leaves beneath his feet. The lane was winding and narrow, bordered by thick hedges and a low wall, and with the fog thick around him and not a sound to be heard, Adam felt the world might have dropped away completely, leaving him alone and drifting in the mist. His feelings about this were mixed.

All of a sudden, and without a moment’s warning, a rider surged from the fog, rounding the bend at breakneck speed. Adam, who in the muffling cloud had not caught the thunder of approaching hooves in his one good ear, threw himself to the side of the road; the horse, spooking badly, reared and spun and the rider, with a sailor’s storm of cursing, fell heavily to the ground. Above them in the mist a huge black bird circled like an omen, screeches echoing strangely along the lane.

It took Adam a minute to recover from the shock, and then to remove himself carefully from the hedge’s enthusiastic embrace. He dusted himself off, checked for bruises, found that he was more or less intact. In the road, a dark bundle of riding clothes flopped, ungainly, and struggled to rise. The ribald curses of a moment before stuttered into a groan as the man pushed, staggered, listed sharply to one side.

“Sweet fucking Christ, ow.”

Adam approached the dark figure with caution, and not a little antagonism.

“Hurt, are you?” he said, “Maybe next time you’ll think twice before galloping through a fog.”

“Yes, thank you, I do so enjoy being condescended to by mysterious pricks who materialise out of the gloom to smite unwary travellers from their mounts. Come here so I can see you.”

The voice was powerful and obviously used to command, and Adam, though he had tried to break it, was still more in the habit of obedience than rebellion. He stepped closer to the stranger.

Limping though he was, Adam could tell the man was tall – taller even than he was – and strongly built. His face was pale in the twilight, with black hair cropped unfashionably close to his skull like a boxer or a hooligan, though his clothes seemed well cut and contemporary. Everything about him was sharp: his jaw, his cheekbones, the proud curve of his nose. Most of all his eyes, which were pale as glaciers and frostbite, and fixed unerringly on Adam’s face as though intending to bore straight through it and into the brain beyond.

Adam coughed, feeling sudden heat in his throat, “Do you need assistance to stand?” he made to move forward.

“No.”

Adam stood his ground, “As you please.” He could not in good conscience abandon anyone, even this brute, injured, in the middle of the road and with night coming on. He glanced over the man’s shoulder to where his horse, an enormous beast and black as shadows, stood heaving and shivering by the hedge. The man swore and made a grab for him as Adam held out a hand, but Adam sidestepped easily and approached the animal, palm up, gently as a lamb.

For a moment the very evening seemed to hold its breath. Then the great beast lowered its muzzle to sniff at his fingers, and Adam tangled a sure hand in its reigns.

“Well well,” said the stranger, low and sarcastic, “You are unexpected indeed. What are you, then? A sprite? A woodland fairy? A lost spirit?”

Adam snorted, but softly, smoothing his hand over the horse’s nose, “I assure you, sir, I am as much flesh and blood as you.”

“So you say,” the man snapped, “But see how you’ve bewitched my bloody horse! He’s not supposed to bow down to any old tramp on the road.”

Adam looked back at him over his shoulder. The man had turned himself awkwardly to watch, and was teetering on one foot, the other held at an odd and obviously painful angle beside him. Adam smiled coldly and politely, “Forgive me for being so forward, sir. Please do feel free to catch him yourself. I’m sure he’ll wait patiently while you limp about.”

To what was evidently their mutual surprise, the stranger barked out a laugh.

“Oh, I’m fucking sure. Well alright, then, horse whisperer. Bring him here.”

Adam considered exacting some token, at least, of good manners, but it was getting cold and he still hoped to reach the post office before it closed for the night. He brought the horse towards its rider and then stood while the man ran surprisingly gentle fingers over the beast’s neck, deftly reassuring the animal until it waffled companionably at his sleeve and deigned to stand meekly while its rider attempted to mount.

‘Attempt’ being the operative word, for once again the stranger swore viciously, though softer this time, then leaned his forehead against the horse’s flank.

“If I ask a favour of you, sprite, I hope you’ll not demand my firstborn in return.”

“Any child of yours would surely be more trouble than its worth,” Adam told him caustically, and the stranger laughed again, “What do you need from me?”

“Your shoulder, and good horse sense, while I limp to that sty. My ankle is buggered to hell, I can’t stand on it, but I think I can mount from there.”

Adam obliged. The stranger’s arm was a warm, sinuous weight across his shoulders. There was something oddly grounding about it. In this twilight dreamscape of mist and shadows, it was a strange jolt to touch another human being, to feel his strong hand grip the meat of Adam’s upper arm.

Sooner rather than later the man sat once more astride his horse. As he paused for a moment looking down at Adam, the dark bird, which had been circling above them all this time, plummeted suddenly from the mist in a cacophony of wings and talons. Adam flinched back instinctively and heard the stranger laugh, again that sharp bark of surprised mirth. When he looked back the bird had settled, incongruously, on his pommel. Staring up into the stranger’s pale, sharp eyes Adam thought of tales his Irish Latin master had told about the Wild Hunt, the Morrigan, the Raven King. Myths, he thought, and then, Magic.

“And you asked if I were some fairy sprite,” he managed finally, when the moment had stretched too long to be ignored.

“I did,” the stranger told him, “And I remain unconvinced that you are otherwise. Where would a mere man be going, on an evening such as this?”

Here Adam was back on firmer ground. Practical, practiced, ordinary. Dull.

“The post office,” he said, shortly. No magic, here. That was one certainty.

But the man above him looked puzzled, then wary, “The post office? So you haven’t come from the village?”

“No. I came from above,” Adam gestured back up the hill, “From The Barns.”

“The Barns?” if anything, the man looked warier still, and Adam noticed for the first time a glint of something dangerous in those hard eyes, though he thought perhaps it had been there all along. The man leaned forward in his saddle, looming over Adam, “What business have you at the Barns, sprite?”

Perhaps the stranger expected him to cower, but in this he had miscalculated. Adam had had a lifetime’s practice standing straight in the face of physical menace, and his spine remained unbent. “I am tutor there,” he said calmly, and the stranger blinked. Again, for a moment, he looked puzzled. Then light seemed to dawn behind his eyes.

“Bugger me, I’d forgotten. Of course. The tutor. Well, tutor, best be off, hadn’t you? Wouldn’t want to be out too late,” He grinned as he turned his horse uphill, away from Adam, and dug in his heel, “Wild folks ride these lanes at night.”

“Hooligan,” Adam muttered under his breath, and the rider might have heard him because, again, he laughed.

 

“Mr Parrish!” Mrs Sargent accosted him in the hall, “Oh, Mr Parrish, good, you’re back. We’ve had such a ruckus. Mr Lynch has arrived, unannounced as usual, and he had an accident on his way here. He’s been asking after you for an hour – here, give me your hat and things – he’s in the drawing room. Mind you don’t – ” she paused, and Adam, who had handed off his coat and gloves and now stood poised, feet already turned towards the door she had indicated, tried to wait politely. “Well, as you’ll find out for yourself, the master can be quite...abrupt. And worse, you know, when he’s hurting. So just don’t you take him too much to heart, lad, will you? He’s not a bad sort. Just prickly.”

‘Prickly’, as it happened, was an understatement. When Adam stepped into the drawing room and looked up he found himself positively skewered by the palest, coldest eyes he’d ever seen. Adam froze at the doorway.

The stranger glowered up at him from the depths of his chair, “Is that any way to greet the man who pays your wages?”

Adam blinked. Too startled to be anything but frank, he asked, “You are Mr. Lynch?”

“One of them,” the man’s mouth twisted sourly, “But I am the master of this house, and I was under the impression that my newest employee was a man of ‘good breeding’.” He said this last as though it was not a compliment, which was fine with Adam because it was not technically true.

Lynch sat – sprawled, rather – in one of the deep wing-backed chairs which bracketed the hearth. One leg kicked out carelessly in an oddly boneless way; the opposite foot was propped up on a stool, trousers rolled back to the knee. The ankle was blackened with bruising, and swollen badly. Internally, Adam winced.

In the fire’s warm light, Mr Lynch should have looked softer than the wicked-sharp figure who had plunged from the mist and so nearly brained Adam with his horse. He didn’t. If anything, face half hidden in the deep recess of the chair, his pale eyes only glowed colder, sharper, more singularly. He looked like a fairy prince, dangerous and strange, slunk in to sit by a mortal hearth and play at being a man. He looked like he was trying to unstring Adam with his eyes, find out what made him tick deep in his bones.

A flicker of lighter movement caught Adam’s attention, and he tore his gaze away to look further into the room. At the far end, tucked into a pool of yellow lamplight, Opal was swiftly disembowelling an enormous wooden trunk. The rug around her was a sea of pale tissue paper and wads of cotton wool, interspersed with strange treasures: a corn-haired doll, a miniature carriage, a heavy wooden mask with ivory teeth. She barely lifted her head to grin at Adam before returning to her plunder.

Adam shook himself and stepped quickly across the rug. Automatically, he offered his hand. “I apologise, sir. I am Adam Parrish. Please forgive my hesitation, I was not expecting…” Lynch took his hand in a firm grasp and Adam trailed off for a moment, eyes flitting between Lynch and Opal, crouched over her box of marvels. He had thought perhaps that the light had tricked him, but no, the hand in his was firm and smooth. A young man’s hand, to be sure.

Lynch smiled in a wide, thin manner which gave the impression of a mouth overfilled with teeth. He let Adam’s hand fall and settled languidly back into his chair, watching him.

“Settle down, Parrish, I can hear the gears whirring from here. Opal is mine by contract, not by blood. Her sire was a scoundrel and a thief, but a very fine musician for all that. When he was working or had not the funds to feed her – which was often – he used to leave her with a particularly archaic sect of nuns. This, by the by, explains the linguistic shitstorm I hired you to ameliorate.

“Unfortunately for him, though perhaps not for her, he was less adept at thievery than fiddling, and eventually his problems got the better of him. Since I was, at the time, his patron, I handled his affairs. Perhaps I should have left Opal with the good sisters, but my relationship with the church is, shall we say, complex, and I could not stomach it. I transplanted her here in the hopes that good Irish soil might remedy some of her less delightful European defects, a plan of which you are yourself a part.” He levelled Adam with a clear, piercing gaze. Though his lip curled slightly at one corner, Adam could not tell whether mirth or scorn had stirred it, “Tell me, Mr. Parrish,” his name, in Lynch’s mouth, was an unpredictable thing. Adam was not sure he liked it, “Do you think me saintly for saving some wastrel’s bastard from a life of drudgery and poor Latin?”

“It was certainly a very generous thing to do,” Adam said, treading carefully.

“No, it wasn’t,” Lynch snapped. He gave Adam another hard look and then turned his frigid, adamantine gaze to the fire. Leaning forward he propped his chin on one hand, studying the blaze, “It was, at best, whimsical. Dick was right to berate me for it. I had no business acquiring a child or carting her across the ocean. What’s she supposed to do, locked up in this dusty old crypt? There’s nothing for her here.” He rubbed ferociously at his forehead, reddening the skin there. “But I couldn’t leave her behind, either. She’s such a strange little thing. I felt I could not abandon her to those abominably straight-laced crones. Christ. They couldn’t even teach her to speak one language.”

Adam tried to imagine Opal – wild, omnivorous, intelligent Opal – buttoned tightly into orphan’s black and suffering the same cold, gloomy classrooms of his childhood. No one to chase after her through the rose garden, or set her maths problems hard enough to distract her from nibbling her slate. The phantom girl his mind produced was a pale, wasted echo of the bright imp poring over her gifts in the corner.

“I think it was right to bring her here, despite the inconvenience. She loves The Barnes. She’s happy.”

Mr Lynch glanced up at him in surprise. “You sound as though you like her,” he said, and Adam frowned at him, offended at once on both his and Opal’s behalf.

“I do like her. She’s…” fascinating, bizarre, unexpectedly funny, “Clever. And interesting. I think we get along quite well, considering I spend my mornings forcing her to speak a language she clearly despises.”

Just as in the lane, Mr Lynch’s bark of laughter seemed to surprise them both. Opal, who had finished unpacking her box and was content to leave the mess until someone forced her to clean it up, heard this and galloped over at full speed, flinging herself half over the arm of Lynch’s chair to twine her arms around his neck.

“Munera, munera[1]!” she kissed his cheek with more enthusiasm than grace, and Mr Lynch suffered it with about the same enjoyment as a poorly trained puppy at the hand of a grabby child, “Te amo[2].”

“English, Opal,” Adam reminded her, trying to keep his face straight.

“Why?” she looked between them, “I am understood.”

“Vero, es[3],” Lynch agrees easily, to Adam’s surprise, “But we are trying to teach you how to sham normalcy, and it won’t work if you can’t speak like a native. You want to be able to leave The Barns some day, don’t you?”

“Non,” Opal said petulantly, but Adam knew it wasn’t true.

“You ought to show Mr Lynch some of the stories you’ve been translating,” he told her, trying to divert the conversation onto safer ground, “Not everybody can read the originals in Latin, of course, so Opal has been adding to your library.”

Mr Lynch darted a look at him over Opal’s head, and though Adam could not altogether interpret those fierce, pale eyes, he thought he saw a hint of wary curiosity.

 

To say that Mr. Lynch was not what Adam expected was an understatement.

For one thing, he was young. Younger even, possibly, than Adam himself, though he was such a mess of contradictions that Adam found it difficult to say for sure. At times he was more childlike than Opal, inquisitive and petulant by turns, undeterred by social conventions, invasive, luxuriously rude. He flung himself about on the furniture and scowled like a spoilt five-year-old when his bother came to call.

At other times he seemed positively ancient. He was very tall, with an inch or two on Adam’s lanky frame, but sometimes Adam would come upon him suddenly in an empty hallway or by one of the windows in the western rooms which overlooked the forest, and would find him stooped, round shouldered, as if burdened by great age or trouble.

His eyes, which were unusually light and clear, could dance with mirth or rage, then turn in a moment to still, flat mirrors which seemed to repel the gaze, revealing nothing but the viewer’s own insecurities. He had a piercing, hawkish gaze, and Adam was thankful for the many years he had spent under scrutiny – his father’s, watching always for the slightest misstep, later his the curt attention of his teachers, and now Opal, whose luminous dark eyes followed him intently in every room – for it had inured him, to some extent, to the sensation of being stared at. Or so he had believed, at least, until Mr. Lynch’s arrival, whereupon he discovered that perhaps he was not so indifferent to study as he had hoped. Something about Lynch’s sharp, avid regard made his collar feel tight at times, his hands prickle. He disliked it, perhaps; or perhaps he didn’t.

And he was a beautiful man, though in that regard, also, there was a sharpness that seemed so keen sometimes that Adam thought even Lynch himself might be cut. Adam had seen him duck away to avoid a mirror, was bemused by the close-cropped hair and frequently stubbled mornings that seemed to betray some mysterious inner tension between control and disarray. One day, passing an under-frequented drawing room towards the back of the house, Adam saw that the maids were turning over the dust sheets. An enormous portrait dominated the wall above the mantle, a beautiful blonde woman, seated, and a dark man stood by her shoulder. For a moment, Adam thought it was Lynch. But no. The expression was subtly different. The way this man’s mouth ticked up in a fractional smile…Adam had never seen a hint of that cruelty on the current Mr Lynch’s face. The father, then, or some earlier relative. The resemblance was remarkable, and Adam saw in his mind how Lynch would appear with those dark curls, smiling his thin, over-toothful smile delightedly at some new mischief Opal had planned. Perhaps it was lucky he shaved his head like an invalid. The man in the portrait had certainly known how to use those dark good looks to his advantage.

The present Lynch, it was clear, had no such charms. He was blunt and taciturn, and singularly graceless as a patient. He raged at the physician, swore at his lawyer, and when one morning Adam glimpsed a tall, spare young man crossing the hall, the whole household played auditory witness to the cacophony of smashing glass and shouting that chased him out again – albeit quite sedately – not half an hour later. That, Mrs Sargent told Adam, had been the eldest Lynch brother, and apparently the violence of the siblings’ encounter could not wholly be blamed on the pain and inconvenience of a battered ankle. To be perfectly frank, by the close of Mr Lynch’s first week at The Barnes, Adam was largely inclined to dislike him. Though Lynch had clearly won a place in Opal’s heart, Adam was understandably leery of men who threw their weight around, and he had a particular dislike of those who leveraged their position to do so.

Thus, it was with some surprise that Adam came to realise Lynch’s tantrums did not affect the rest of the household at all. Once, when she threw herself across a room towards him unannounced, Adam saw his employer snap his teeth bodily in Opal’s direction; but as this did not faze her (except later, when Adam felt compelled to explain that this was not, in fact, a form of greeting she should adopt henceforth) he could make no serious objection. To his servants, Mr Lynch was – as he had, apparently, always been – distant, brief and cold, yet, ultimately, fair and civil. More civil, in fact, than many a man of his station whom Adam had met before.

And as the weeks progressed, towards Adam himself his employer seemed to show yet another side.

To Adam, Lynch was rarely, technically, polite. But nor was he distant or cold, nor yet vicious or violent. If Adam had been forced to put it into words, he would have said that his employer seemed…curious. Like his raven, Lynch had a strange, still way of being in a room with Adam. Not the indolent stillness of a man at rest but the listening, active stillness of an animal. What qualities Adam possessed to inspire such close attention he could not guess, yet as the days progressed he found himself more and more often summoned of an evening – and later, even without explicit invitation, drawn – to the wide hearth in the drawing room, and the chair opposite its master.

“What is that?” Lynch asked abruptly. They had been sitting in companionable silence for some twenty minutes or more. It was late, and the great house was still around them.

Unspeaking, Adam tilted his page into the firelight. Lynch leant forwards in his chair to peer at it.

“Flowers, Parrish? Unexpected, I’ll admit.”

“It’s for Opal. She hopes to make an account of your most unusual specimens. We’ve been studying a book of etchings of the Ashmolean Museum, and she is convinced that one of the scholars there could identify them, if only we could bring them accurate descriptions.”

“Is she, indeed.” Lynch scowled darkly.

It was a surprisingly strong reaction, Adam thought, to a childish whim, particularly because it had been clear from the first that Mr Lynch truly loved his ward. Adam would find them together in the school room some mornings, curved over a book of engravings or the tank of frogs, dark heads bent inwards, thick as thieves. When they looked up at him their smiles were so alike in wickedness and wildness that Adam wondered more than once whether Lynch could be lying about Opal’s parentage. It would not be the first time a wealthy young man had denied a bastard child. But he was so young, and Opal was almost eleven. Perhaps they had simply been together so long that – unfortunately for everyone else – she had absorbed some of his traits.

“You’re spoiling her,” Lynch growled, now.

“I really don’t think so.”

Adam did not know from whence it had sprung, this candid, intimate way of speaking which had grown between himself and his employer. Perhaps it was their strange first meeting, or their shared affection for his ward. Lynch was hardly an easy conversationalist. But something about his manners – or lack thereof – and the way his sharp eyes, always so focussed on Adam as he spoke, seemed to belie his apparently careless sprawl… It disarmed him, somehow. Made him speak to Lynch as though they were equals, ribbing each other like old friends; or, rather, like new friends, each still feeling the other out.

At least, that was what Adam supposed it was like, to make a new friend. He certainly had not had much personal experience. But he could not deny that he was enjoying it, this delicate, private thing between them which bloomed only at night, once the rest of the household was abed and the two of them were sat on either side of the hearthrug, soft-lit by flames. In that warm twilight he sometimes thought he could feel Lynch’s gaze, like a brush against his cheek. He found he rather liked this fancy.

“Indulging, then.”

“Perhaps.”

“Girl’s got no business trying to show my…collection to anybody.”

“I think it’s commendable in a child, to have such a keen sense of curiosity. She’s very quick, you know.”

Lynch snorted, “Oh, I know it. Damn brat will be the death of me, growing like a weed, asking all those godforsaken questions.”

“If you’d hoped to dissuade her from that, you really ought not to have provided such an inviting schoolroom,” Adam told him, lulled into truthfulness by the quiet, the fire’s warmth, the pleasant exhaustion of a day’s work done well. “If she spent her days numbed from sitting on a wooden bench, and rubbing her hands together just to get sufficient feeling to hold her pencil, I can guarantee she would not wish to waste any additional time on learning.”

“Like you did?” Lynch asked him, razor edged. It was one of those strange, sidelong attacks he threw out sometimes. Adam was never prepared for them, always taken by surprise by the unexpected display of wanton perceptiveness. And then, before Adam could do more than gather his brows together, the other man laughed, suddenly, short and wild. “You are right, of course. I do encourage her. In my defence, there are worse habits I could foster.” His teeth glinted white from the shadows as he grinned, and Adam felt a very different sort of shiver course his spine, though he could not identify its import, “I know them all.”

 

So what did Adam think of his intense, mercurial employer? Honestly, he could not say. But life at The Barnes was certainly less predictable now its master was in residence. That little part of Adam that had been waiting, waiting, content enough but sluggish, still more than half asleep, began to stir and raise its head. Perhaps he could use a little chaos.

 

[1] Gifts, gifts

[2] I love you

[3] Yes, you are

Notes:

Latin is not a language I speak at all. Corrections welcome, otherwise, blame Google translate.

 

A note on animal names (because I named them, even if it's not mentioned explicitly):

 

1) Mr Rochester’s horse, as Jane Eyre fans may know, is called Mesrour, which is actually a bit racist because apparently Victorians used this name – which originally comes from The Book of the Thousand and One Nights – as a kind of shorthand to refer to ‘The Orient’ or Blackness. Not black as in the colour – which is an appropriate name for a horse – but capital B Blackness, as in human beings who are not white, are part of various distinct cultures, etc. So, obviously, I didn’t feel comfortable using that. Misrule, however, sounds a bit similar while actually meaning ‘disruption of peace; disorder’, which seemed like a delightfully Ronan name for a horse. It's also what I actually assumed Rochester's horse was called when I first listened to the audiobook as a kid, because I'd never heard the name 'Mesrour'.

 

2) I always interpreted Chainsaw was an auditory joke because, you know, ravens. Not very melodic. Bonesaw seemed like a solid mid 19th century equivalent, while retaining the slightly horrified audience reaction of the original, in true Ronan style.

 

~
Next chapter: nightmares, predictions, conversations at midnight and otherwise.

 

Please do leave a comment if you enjoy what you've read - it makes my day and also makes me super excited about posting the next chapter, which is such a good way to feel about writing :)

Chapter 5: In the corresponding quarter.

Summary:

Nightmares arise, magic is exposed, and characters - and the delicate threads between them - develop.

 

A soft foot scuffed behind him and Adam jerked upright like a spring-loaded toy.

“No,” said a sleep-rough voice, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Notes:

Warning for descriptions of dreamed domestic violence, probably a bit worse than canon - it's right at the start, so if you just do a word search for 'Adam rose' you're good from there.

Sometimes, Adam dreamed of the night his father had died.

The dream came in many variations. The beginning was always the same; the sensation of waking, every hair on end, was so complete that he was rarely aware that it was a dream, but rather thought that he had truly come awake. This was not a pleasant experience. His body flooded with fear before his mind could identify its cause, and once again he lay frozen in his little bed in the garret, barely able to breathe. It was not until he heard the first footstep that he knew how the dream would go. Sometimes, it played out just as it had, and he woke damp-cheeked and cold, ankle burning with long-dormant pain. Sometimes it was better. He slipped silently from his bed and leapt for the tree, dropped lightly to the ground and was away. Somehow, on those good nights, time and space folded around him, so that he was enveloped by deep tree shadows before his father even knew he was gone.

And then there were the bad nights.

Adam would never know what his father had intended that night. Sometimes he thought that the chill dread of not knowing would never leave him, that he would forever wake still and afraid, listening for the turning of a knob, the delicate snick of a lock. In his mind, he played out every scenario he could imagine. Robert Parrish had been a violent man, a rageous man, a cruelly practical man. He had never beaten Adam so badly that he could not perform his work the next day. He had kept the worst of the bruising from the skin others would see.

In his nightmares, Robert Parrish beat Adam’s head against a wall until his skull split like ripe fruit.

He kicked until dreamed organs pushed up through Adam’s throat, and he spit his heart out onto his father’s boots, followed by his intestines.

In his nightmares Adam died by his father’s hand brutally, strangely, bloodily, again, and again, and again.

When he woke truly, his shirt sticky with sweat, he would wait, still as a rabbit, barely breathing, and listen for a footstep in the hall.

The problem with dreaming of waking was that it always took a while to convince himself, when he did wake, that it was real. Adam stretched his fingers long over his heart and felt the pounding slowly subside. It was a good hour later that he realised he was definitely not going to fall back asleep.

Adam rose, already resenting his subconscious. He had grown used to not being exhausted, and already he was remembering how it would feel tomorrow. Another thing to hate his father for. His room had cooled overnight, and he wrapped himself in his thick winter dressing gown to ward off the chill; it was a deep blue wool, thickly quilted, a wild extravagance he’d bought in his first winter of teaching, once the shock of a steady income had waned. As he shrugged into it Adam felt some measure of his calm return. He was safe, he was alone, he had control over his own belongings and his fate. He slipped his feet into thick stockings and padded out into the hall.

He had no destination in mind. The great house seemed, if anything, even vaster at night, dark and silent as a country, palpably asleep. He traced his fingers over the wallpaper, wandered slowly to the end of one hallway, then another. He wasn’t really surprised to find himself in the grand foyer. All roads within the Lynch house led, eventually, to here. At night the hall below was black as deep water, while the cupola above shone ghostly white, the moon framed perfectly within one round window. Adam sat at the edge of the landing and threaded his legs through the bannisters, dangling his feet into the void. Here, he was level with the massive chandelier. It gleamed in the darkness like some strange and massive sea creature, oddly symmetrical, hovering in the gloom.

He was not sure how long he sat there. The moon had moved, disappearing behind one window’s frame and then, some time later, reappearing in a new one. He counted the crystals on the chandelier. He stared into the darkness below him, eyes finding or inventing patterns in the shadows.

A soft foot scuffed behind him and Adam jerked upright like a spring-loaded toy.

“No,” said a sleep-rough voice, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Mr Lynch had just this morning graduated from crutch to walking cane, and the speed of his limping stride had increased a thousand-fold, to the general resignation of staff, stable-hands, and anyone else who had been enjoying the relative peace of slow movements and a thumping early warning system. But he was not aiming for speed now, and as Adam half-turned, warily, to watch, Lynch approached him on slow, uneven, stockinged feet alone.

“Can’t sleep, Parrish?” Lynch dropped carelessly, gracefully to the floor. His dark red dressing gown pooled around him, black in the moonlight. “Nor could I.”

“What’s your excuse?” Adam asked him, playing along.

Lynch shrugged noncommittally, “Bad dreams. You?”

Adam shrugged back, “The same.”

To his surprise Lynch leaned into him, then, jostling his shoulder just a little. Adam felt heat bleeding off him, despite the double thickness of their dressing gowns and nightshirts, and felt an obscure pang of comfort. Nobody had ever sat up with him before, in the wake of a nightmare. Even if Lynch were here for his own reasons, it was…nice. To not face the dark entirely alone. To feel the warm weight of their arms pressed together. Grounding, calm.

The idea of Mr Lynch being a calm or particularly grounding force would never have occurred to Adam in the daylight. But night made many things possible. Night turned dreams into real things that could wake you, shake you, make you tremble and sweat. Its magic could go either way and, sitting on the landing, feet dangled together into emptiness, Lynch resembled nothing so much as the fey spirit for which he had once mistaken Adam. The moon was full, bright as a stage-light washing down over them from the round window above. It stripped Lynch of any colour he might have hand and instead made pale stone of his skin, hair and features sketched in with soft charcoal and black ink. If it weren’t for his arm, a steady line of warmth against him, Adam would not be certain he was even here. He could be a figment. A trick of the moonlight. A part of the night itself.

“Getting cold, Parrish. You should get back to your bed.”

Adam nodded absently. They stayed where they were.

 

 

Opal was curled catlike in the window seat, basking in the morning sun. Her dark curls were bent over a maths problem and she chewed absently at a discarded page. Adam, who had long since given up on trying to dissuade her from eating things that were, on balance, at least not poisonous, left her to her own devices. He had found a book of engravings of Egypt, large enough that he had cleared one end of the long table to lay it out, and he was bent over a page with a magnifying lens, examining the details of a carving. He wondered if there were any books or journals that might help him to learn hieroglyphics. He had his back to the door, but the syncopated thump of cane and booted feet was as distinctive as his employer’s silhouette. Adam half-turned towards the door as it opened, and Mr Lynch glared back at him.

“I’m paying you to teach her things, not pillage my library.”

Adam gazed at him levelly, “With all due respect, Mr Lynch, I do not believe the two are mutually exclusive.”

“Do you not, indeed.”

“Opal,” Adam spoke over his shoulder, “Come show Mr Lynch what you’re working on.”

Suffused with the kind of enthusiasm Adam’s teachers had mostly discouraged in their cold, ordered classrooms, but which Adam could never bring himself to censure, Opal bounded from the window seat, brandishing her page. Mr Lynch stumbled awkwardly when she flung her arms about his waist, steadying himself against the doorjamb.

“Like a fucking catapult,” he grumbled, “How many times have I told you not to throw yourself at people, imp? Some time, somebody will drop you on your arse, and then you’ll be sorry.” Opal ignored him with a nonchalance Adam hoped some day to emulate, and waved her paper under his nose. “Alright, alright,” he wound his free arm around her shoulders, “Be still, brat, let me look at it.” He studied the page with a frown, and then looked up at Adam and raised an eyebrow. “You give this to a ten-year-old?”

Adam shrugged and leaned back against the table. It was hard to maintain his usual rigid professionalism around Mr Lynch; the man was so ruthlessly disdainful of social conventions, swearing fondly at Opal and grumpy in a diffuse, omnilateral way. It was hard both to take his temper personally and, in the face of such wilful naturalism, be anything but natural in return. Or at least as natural as Adam, who had never been anything in his life but carefully studied, knew how to be.

“She’s equal to it,” he told Lynch. Opal grinned at him wide, over her shoulder, and he levelled her a look that was only half-serious, although they had in fact had this conversation just the other week, “I have to keep her interested or she’ll eat all the paintbrushes.”

“Christ,” Lynch said feelingly, rolling his eyes heavenward, “You’re a menace.” Opal giggled at him and he tightened his arm around her with a sort of careless tenderness that made Adam feel like a voyeur, abruptly conscious of being an outsider.

“Are you two finished with this nonsense or what?”

Adam blinked at his employer, then slid his eyes to his pupil, who was already starting to bounce with poorly contained excitement, “Usually, we work until lunch. What did you have in mind?”

“One of the cows went and got herself knocked up out of season. I’ve had the men bring her down to the near barn, and I just received word it’s started.” He looked down at Opal, “It will be bloody and messy and smell bad, and Mrs Sargent will scold us all because it is not a sight for young ladies. Do you want to go?”

Opal, of course, did. Adam stooped to retrieve the forgotten maths problem as her footsteps thundered away down the corridor.

“You take a keen interest in her passions,” he said carefully, setting the page on Opal’s little escritoire.

Lynch grunted and shrugged. “You know what she’s like. She’d pester me interminably if she found out I’d kept her from it.”

“True,” Adam said. Although, as they were both well aware, it was not the entire truth. They followed Opal outside and to small, decorative barn – some ancestor’s folly which the current Lynch, evidently impatient with useless things unless they were surpassingly strange or beautiful, had turned to good use – which sat oddly at the edge of the flower garden. Adam matched his steps to Mr Lynch’s slow, limping progress the whole way.

 

 

“What game is that?” Opal asks, flinging herself down on the hearth rug beside Adam to peer closely at his cards.

“Don’t eat them,” Adam says automatically. With Opal, he has found it’s generally best to get this out of the way first. “It isn’t a game, precisely. I ask a question in my mind, and then the cards help me to find an answer.”

“How do they know what to say?” she asks him, sensibly.

Adam frowns down at the pile before him and shrugs one shoulder, “To be honest, I don’t really know. They were given to me when I was a boy. I never had the chance to ask how they work.”

“But they tell you things?”

“They do.”

“True things?”

“So far, yes.”

“Can I ask a question?”

Adam glances at her. Again he frowns, slightly. “I’m not certain. I don’t know whether the answers are in the cards, or whether the cards are only a means of getting to the answers, and so I’m not sure whether the skill is transferable. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I don’t think you should, sprog,” says a voice behind them. Adam glances up sharply, feeling a flush rise in his cheeks. Lynch must have ducked in through the side door of the schoolroom, by Adam’s bad ear, and he feels an acute embarrassment to be caught like this, cross-legged on the hearth-rug in his shirtsleeves, his pupil sprawled beside him and his tarot cards spread on the floor. Lynch hardly seems the type who would stand for spiritual nonsense in his house. Besides which, he’s a Catholic. Of course he would not want Opal exposed to this.

“I apologise, Mr Lynch,” he says quickly, beginning to gather up the cards, “It won’t –”

But Lynch, to his surprise, is already levering himself awkwardly down to sit on his other side. “Nonsense, Parrish. Don’t stop now. I only mean that…well. Perhaps it’s best if you do the reading. I don’t think Opal’s old enough to be dabbling in the divinatory arts. Are you any good?”

Adam blinks at him. Every time he thinks he understands Mr Lynch, he says something that sets Adam to wondering again.

“Yes,” he says, automatically, because it’s true, “I’m very good.”

“Well, then,” Lynch says, leaning back against the armchair and favouring Adam with one of his lazier, ever-so-slightly less wolfish smiles, “Get to it.”

“You wish me to read for you?”

“Certainly. Tell me, Parrish, have I a dark, handsome stranger in my future?”

Adam huffs a laugh. “Is that really what you wish to know?”

Ronan’s face changes subtly, but Adam can see that it happening, the moment when he turns inwards and gets quiet. “No,” he says, “But I believe I may have…a choice to make, soon. I’d like to know if they’ve anything to say about that.”

“Alright. I assume you know how to shuffle?”

With an obviously practiced hand, Ronan first shuffles and then cuts the cards into three rough piles. Adam lifts an eyebrow at him. The master of The Barnes is certainly full of surprises this evening. Reaching out, Adam flips the cards, one by one.

The Knight of Swords. His mouth quirks, unbidden, into a smile as Mr Lynch, simultaneously, scowls.

“Always the fucking same,” he grumbles, “Well, I suppose that means you are what you say after all.”

Lynch is right. Direct, impatient, daring; and, conversely, rude, arrogant, and possessed of a vicious streak. The Knight is certainly his card.

Adam turns the next card, and glances quickly at Opal, embarrassed. Lynch huffs out a laugh but appears otherwise unconcerned. A pair of lovers lie entwined in a field of impossible flowers. Adam looks up at the other man to find him already looking back, brows raised enquiringly.

“Well?”

“It’s not hard to decipher, Lynch. Partnerships, duality, a union. In reverse it could mean loss of balance or disharmony, or a one-sided affection, but, see, here it stands upright.” Still, Mr Lynch scowls, and Adam hurries to turn the next card.

He pauses, feeling…something tug inside him, and gazes down, puzzled. The Magician lies upright on the rug, representing willpower, desire, skill. A person who is resourceful and focussed, who has the enviable power to bring things into being. Yet, when it is reversed, it depicts someone manipulative and cunning. Talent wasted, illusions, deceit. In theory, these might be two sides of the same person, and Adam has always felt that such an individual would be difficult, possibly dangerous to know.

Lynch is mercurial and angry, that is clear, but he also has a warmth about him so strong it bleeds out into the very air. He is unfailingly invested in Opal’s happiness, and so gentle with the beasts he has tamed that they seek him out even when he has set them free. Would he really wish to form a partnership with someone like that? Is this the decision he is weighing up? The cards seem to whisper an affirmative, in that way they have of saying more than is legible at the surface. Whatever it is that drives Adam’s gift and allows him to read them truthfully, it believes that Lynch will and should choose to tie himself to this magician.

“This is the person with whom you may unite,” he says, resting a finger against the card, “They are both a foil and a partner. If you’re having trouble with your decision, the cards suggest that an alliance would be the best course.”

“An alliance, Parrish?” Ronan asks. His mouth quirks up in a grin, and mischief dances in his pale eyes, “Two generals shaking hands across a map table? That’s what the lovers suggest to you?”

Adam feels his cheeks pink, “I told you it’s symbolic. It could be a romantic alliance, or it could be familial, platonic, possibly even pertaining to business.”

“And which does your instinct tell you it is?”

“Romantic,” Adam says shortly, ducking his head to gather up the cards, “But they don’t command you. You may do as you wish.” He can feel Lynch’s eyes on him, weighing, measuring, determining his worth.

“Well,” he says, finally, “Perhaps I shall.” Then he levers himself back to his feet with the aid of the chair, Opal and his walking cane. Adam has a secret suspicion that he takes his time about it on purpose so that Opal can ‘help’. Again, he feels a tug of something, a premonition perhaps, some factor he has overlooked. The cards are warm in his hands. He’s missed something, he’s certain. Adam hates missing things.

 

 

Winter had begun to creep into The Barnes by the time Mr Lynch could walk without aid or limp. Amongst the naked trees one glassy morning, over lawns frosted with glimmering ice, Mr Lynch took Adam on a tour of the estate. Adam had not ridden since he left Henrietta, and then rarely with a saddle, but he felt enough confidence in his skill with a horse that he agreed when Lynch suggested they should ride. In the stables, running practiced hands over a bay gelding’s glossy flank, Adam could feel the other man’s eyes on him again, still sizing him up, assessing his merits.

They rode up and down the length of the park, walking their mounts along the fences which divided sweeping lawns from the practical pastures of the farm. The cold was not yet fully upon them, and cows still dotted the green. Lynch pointed out the oldest buildings – some of them listing dangerously to one side, or missing walls, or roofs – the barns for which the property was named.

“Not very inventive, my ancestors,” Lynch told him. He seemed disgruntled by this, or perhaps dryly amused. With him, it was often hard to tell.

“Practical, though. This is good country for cattle.”

“Yes,” Lynch agreed. His eyes, when they roved across the landscape, took on a faraway look, and his breathing grew long and sure. This man who, pacing through the labyrinthine rooms of his manor or dualling with his visitors, was nothing but edges and shadows and teeth, looked peaceful here, on horseback, surrounded by nothing but endless green and distant animals. It was a little unexpected. When they had met, between the crisply tailored black suits and the cropped hair, the sharp way he had with words, Adam had thought Lynch distinctly cosmopolitan. Now he wondered if this was closer to the truth, the man you’d get if you scraped the rest away. He wondered what Lynch would look like in a workman’s shirt and brown wool trousers, a broad hat to keep his neck out of the sun. Good, he thinks. Lynch would look good.

Lost in his reverie, Adam had fallen behind. Noticing it, Lynch wheeled his horse around and, instead of closing the distance between them, shouted at him.

“Parrish! What the hell are you mooning about back there? Hurry up, man. I want to show you the milking sheds.”

Adam was not sure he’d any particular interest in milking sheds. He certainly was not impressed to be shouted and sworn at. But here was the rub, after all. The ever-present itch for freedom which had been lulled by the peace and relative autonomy of his life here before Mr Lynch’s unexpected return has now begun to twitch again. The truth was that Lynch, as his employer, might treat Adam with as much familiarity as he pleased, but Adam was not permitted to return the favour. They were, at root, separated by the same gaping power disparity as any master and his employee, and the burden fell on Adam, always, to maintain it. Still, if he allowed his horse to close the distance rather slower than it might have, nobody would notice.

Lynch noticed. He smiled his sharp smile, all teeth, “Why, Parrish,” he said, “Do my manners displease you?”

Adam bit the inside of his cheek and looked away over the fields, unable, after all, to resist a challenge. “Indeed, Mr. Lynch, I am starting to believe you were raised in one of these barns.”

Lynch grinned his sharp grin. Somewhere deep within Adam, far from consciousness and light, that coil of pregnant discontent twitched, and subtly shifted its direction.

Notes:

First, everyone should have a good dressing gown. I firmly believe this, and so does Sherlock Holmes, so it must be true. Seriously, though, that or a smoking jacket. Indispensable garment.

Thank you so much to everyone who left a comment on the last chapter, the response really made my day. I'm delighted that people are enjoying this fic, and I love that I get to talk to you all about it.

~
Next chapter: dreams, forests, unexpected presents and encounters.

Questions, comments or responses, let 'em at me. Thank you, as ever, for reading.

Chapter 6: Bounded by a propitious sky.

Summary:

Sweet dreams, the strange familiar, and a series of mysterious presents.

Adam knows deeply, in the way of dreams, that this is the same forest. It’s hard to explain in logical terms because it is not logical, but if his forest had been broken up and scattered over a much larger area, the new places are parts that might have sprung up in between.

Notes:

This chapter's a bit short, so I'm thinking I might post the next a bit early to make up for it :)

Anyway, enjoy.

Sometimes, in dreams, Adam walks his forest again.

He knows every branch and hollow, is familiar with every bird. The ground beneath his bare feet is soft and thick with moss. Though Christmas has only recently been and gone and The Barnes lies fallow beneath a thick pall of snow, here, in his woods, a hazy sun shines through the leaves above him, making their green glow.

He loves it here. He feels safe, contented, understood. The trees whisper above his head, and though does not understand the words, he catches their intention. They are welcoming him home, offering him sanctuary, pleased to have him near.

Adam looks down at his hands, and they are just his hands – knobbly knuckles, chapped skin, ungainly, long – but they are also the forest’s hands. These are hands that understand the subtle shift in energies that a broken ring of stones or diverted stream can produce, and feel warmth when the right card lies beneath them.

As if summoned, his cards appear. He shuffles them absently, flipping them between his palms. Death. The seven of cups. The four of wands. Change, choices, beginnings, homecoming. The Knight of swords; that was new. Lynch’s card. Perhaps a hangover from last week’s reading.

Adam frowns. For six months before he found Mrs Sargent’s advertisement, he’d pulled three of those cards over and over. Change. A choice. A new beginning. When he’d received her letter, he’d supposed this chapter closed. Certainly, he had not drawn them again in months. He has consulted the cards less often, though, since Lynch’s arrival. He’s been busy and – he has already admitted it to himself – something like content. No need to go looking for trouble.

And yet, trouble does tend to find him regardless. Adam feels a stone turn beneath his feet and looks down in surprise. There are no stones in his wood. His wood is roots, moss, dark earth. There are pebbles in the creek bed, but not here. The stone by his foot is large and flat-ish, its flecked grey-black surface mottled yellow with lichen. Strange.

Adam looks up and finds more surprises. The trees, so familiar to him in every weather, have changed, though not completely. Here and there he can still see familiar forms: green with moss, thick-trunked, twisty. Now they negotiate space with unfamiliar species’, and much larger specimens. Tall and willowy and lush, grey-green trunks reaching skyward. The ground is still mossy, but there are stones here, covering the ground. He has to watch his feet. The undergrowth is sparse, but as he presses forwards Adam finds larger rocks, then boulders, hunched beneath the trees. He runs a hand over a rockface wonderingly. It feels as real as his forest, real as memory. He picks his way carefully so as not to cut his bare feet.

The other change is that Adam’s ‘forest’ was small. As a child it had felt vast but when he thinks back on it now, he knows it could not have been more than a field across. He had known every malleable inch of it, had wandered every dip and rise. This forest is large; he cannot tell how large, but there are no edges in sight, no sounds of distant voices in fields nearby. He could be anywhere, any wilderness.

But though there are more trees, more parts to this landscape, Adam knows deeply, in the way of dreams, that this is the same forest. It’s hard to explain in logical terms because it is not logical, but if his forest had been broken up and scattered over a much larger area, the new places are parts that might have sprung up in between.

It's not until he looks up, searching for a bird calling over his head, that Adam realises he is not alone.

Mr. Lynch stands in the middle of a clearing. A creek runs at his feet, dividing around the wide flat stone upon which he balances. He is dressed as if he had half prepared for sleep, then wandered into the woods instead: soft white shirt, loose at the collar, with his dark trousers broken over pale bare feet. He has laced his hands behind his skull and stands in a patch of sunlight, eyes closed, face uncharacteristically content, up-turned to the sky. Adam dislodges a pebble and Lynch turns slowly on his heel and opens his eyes.

His face registers absolute and vividly realistic surprise.

“Parrish? What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Adam grumbles, “It’s my forest.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is,” Adam insists, “It’s mine.” He adds nonsensically, “I live here.”

Lynch quirks an eyebrow at him, “You live in a forest?

“Yes.”

“I knew it!” Mr Lynch laughs, and in this place, where Adam has no need of his walls, he smiles back.

“Hold your tongue.”

“Shan’t,” Lynch tells him unrepentantly. Then, “Have you been here long?”

Adam tilts his head back to look at the trees, some old and familiar, some newer but still warm, still reaching out to him. He hears the murmur of their almost-voices in his bad ear.

“All my life. I grew up in this forest. Or parts of it. To be honest, at the time it was more of a wood. It’s grown since my last visit.”

Mr Lynch is looking at him very oddly.

“Grown how?”

He shrugs, “All the old trees are here, but they’re further apart, and there are new things – trees, rocks,” he gestures to the brook that runs, clear and laughing, through this little grassy glade, “Streams. The same, but more.”

“That is very strange indeed, Mr Parrish, because I grew up in this forest, too, and it also has changed.”

“Perhaps our forests have merged, become one.”

A crooked smile pulls at one corner of Mr Lynch’s mouth.

“What is it?” Adam asks.

“Nothing. Only, sometimes, Mr Parrish, I find it quite it is quite hard to credit your unworldliness. I know you to be so, and yet.”

Adam scowls at him – because in a dream, one is allowed to be rude to one’s employer, should they deserve it – feeling stung. “I may not be as…well travelled as you, but I assure you I am not the innocent for which you have mistaken me.”

Lynch tilts his head in that way which always makes him uncannily resemble his raven.

“There are many different types of innocence, Mr. Parrish. Though I see, now, that some have indeed been stolen from you, perhaps you should not be so eager to dispose of the rest.”

The strangeness of this advice, the way it hints at knowledge Adam has no wish to share, unsettles him. He looks away, down the shimmering curve of the stream, to where the water rushes from a crack in a great boulder, impossibly split down the centre. He feels ruffled, warm in an uncomfortable way distinct from the pleasant touch of dappled sun, and somehow irritated. Because Mr Lynch has made an assumption about him? Or because he has gotten it wrong? Or, in one way, right? Lynch’s un-knowing-knowing feels jarring, somehow. It rubs the wrong way against his skin.

“Often,” Adam says, “People say ‘innocence’ when what they mean is a type of acceptable, or socially beneficial, ignorance. I have striven all my life away from ignorance, Mr. Lynch. I do not intend to stop now. There are, I am sure, a great many things in this world that I do not yet know. But I intend to find them out and master them.” He glances back in time to see Lynch swallow.

“Mr Parrish, I believe you are the sort of person who might do anything, with sufficient determination. If you want to know the world, I have no doubt that you will.” He grins suddenly, wolfishly, and the mood breaks, “I can only hope that you will –”

And then Adam wakes up to dawn and an infernal clattering, and when he goes to his window he finds Bonesaw there, on the sill, trying to get in.

Adam lifts the sash, puts on his dressing gown, and takes her with him down to breakfast. He does not see Mr Lynch all day.

 

 

Someone has taken to leaving him gifts. At first, Adam suspects Opal, but as her presents tend more towards natural objects – and, on more than one unfortunate occasion, live ones – he dismisses this quickly. The other candidate is both obvious and perplexing. Adam has never before been employed by a wealthy, enigmatic and eccentric country gentlemen; he cannot be certain that this is not standard practice, but he suspects most rich men do not leave presents lying about for their employees. It puzzles him deeply.

And yet Mr Lynch leaves these gifts so casually that Adam cannot feel upset by them. They’re never things that he needs, per say, and so receiving them does not prick at his pride. But they are…thoughtful, exposing further that unexpected vein of sweetness hitherto applied only to Opal. To find himself added to this exclusive club contributes much to Adam’s confusion. Often, the presents pertain to something one of them has mentioned so briefly in conversation that when he stumbles across the thing days later Adam must pause a moment to decipher its context.

One morning, coming into the schoolroom to set up the lessons of the day, he finds a small glass jar upon his desk. Inside it is a white ointment which smells of The Barnes and, he realises with a start, his dream forest: moss, and mist, green things growing. On its base is a label reading only manibus, in Lynch’s scratchy hand. Adam glances at his raw, winter-cracked knuckles and frowns.

Another day he sits down at the table in the library which he has claimed as his own particular workspace, and discovers a beautifully bound copy of The Histories[1]. This is an unusually unsubtle nod to a rousing and thoroughly enjoyable argument in which he and Ronan have, for some weeks now, been engaged.

And one afternoon, when Ronan has taken Opal off to the back fields in pursuit of some errant goats, Adam sits down at the piano in the informal music room to amuse himself and finds a sheaf of unfamiliar pages on the stand. He opens the folio and discovers passages far too complex for Opal’s learning fingers to fumble through. Perhaps Lynch bought it for himself, but Adam has only ever seen him at the fiddle or, once, the great harp which stands, solemn and dusty, in one corner of the room. In the whole house nobody else, to Adam’s knowledge, has the skill to play this music. Nobody but he. He sets his fingers to the keys and wonders what Lynch is about.

 

[1] By Herodotus, ‘father of lies’. You can see why Ronan would enjoy fighting about this book, I think.

Notes:

Thank you as ever for the lovely comments and the kudos, they make me sooooo happy. And thank you also to the people who subscribe and bookmark. I appreciate you all.

Next chapter is one of my favourites, and I'm going to post it a little early in part to make up for this short one, but also because I just...want to share it, I guess. Is that silly? I'm really enjoying this writing-then-getting-feedback-from-live-humans thing. I'm impatient to see what you all think.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this part (despite its brevity), and I look forward to any comments or questions.

~
Next up: here there be monsters.

Chapter 7: I must keep in good health, and not die.

Summary:

Secrets, blood and midnight meetings.

Notes:

Warning for canon-level violence and horror.

 

Suddenly, with all the terrified conviction of a dream, Adam is certain that there is something on the other side of that door.

Adam feels it in the delicate hairs rising at his nape: a whisper of something wrong, of danger close, propelling him fast out of sleep. For a moment he lies perfectly still in his bed, barely breathing, gathering information to him like a cloak. Nothing in his room. Nothing at his window. No footsteps in the corridor. No voices on the stairs.

Then he hears it.

Rattlllllle-click.

He holds himself so still he doesn’t blink.

Click-shuuuuuuush-click.

A weird sound, soft and dragging, like someone pulling a sack of bones across a rug. He’s never heard it before.

Shuuuuuuuush-shush. Click. Click.

Adam pushes himself slowly vertical, bedclothes pooling at his waist. The sound is muffled. It’s not in the hallway.

A servant, perhaps? But the servants sleep in the south wing. Only two rooms are occupied in this part of the house. His, and –

Lynch.

With the practiced quiet of childhood necessity, Adam is out of bed and at the door, pulling on his dressing gown over his thin nightshirt and belting it tight. He presses his ear against the wood.

There.

The sound again.

The skitter of something over polished boards and then that dragging noise, slow, a muffled rattle. Something about it turns his stomach over and makes his knees feel strange.

It certainly isn’t in the hallway, and though Adam’s lone working ear cannot pinpoint a direction, there’s only one other bedroom within earshot.

Plucking a candle from his nightstand, he eases the door open and slips out.

The corridor is still, a single lamp burning in the sconce by the stairs. Adam lights his candle and, moving soft, makes for the door at the far end of the hall.

All is silent when he reaches it, and embarrassment floods him in a rush – a nightmare, a waking dream. He is being absurd. He turns quickly on his heel and –

Clickclickclickclickclick.

It’s just inside the door. His breath is loud in his ear and he holds it quickly, willing silence. But the breath is still loud in his ear.

Suddenly, with all the terrified conviction of a dream, Adam is certain that there is something on the other side of that door. Something large. Something which is absolutely – and there is no logical way he can know this but that he knows – not Lynch. Lynch is probably sleeping at this very moment, dreaming between his sheets while something click-drags across his rug. A primal shudder runs down Adam’s spine. All he has is his flickering candle. But he knows, he knows, that he must go through the door.

For a terrible moment when his hand closes on the knob it occurs to him that the door might be bolted. But it isn’t. The mechanism turns smoothly and Adam, suddenly reckless or perhaps even brave, flings the door violently open.

On the pale blue silk rug stands –

An oil slick.

A black bird.

An oozing wyrm.

An enormous bat.

A snake with too many teeth.

A scaled, flapping, writhing mass of coiling limbs and gnashing – limbs and –

Lynch.

Jesus Christ. It has teeth in its hands. It has teeth in its fingers. Its fingers are scaled and its wings snap out and back, out and back, drag-clacking across the floor like leather sacks of dry, broken sticks. Its many, many mouths are drooling black ooze onto the priceless silk rug.

“Lynch.” Adam manages. Then, as the beast begins to turn slowly – presumably towards him, but who can tell? Where are its eyes? Where is its face? So many teeth and mouths and not a single face amongst them – louder, “Lynch!”

Adam can see him, now. A still figure on the bed. Limp as the newly dead, Oh god. There’s no blood that he can make out, but the room is dim, there could be. Perhaps he’s too late. Perhaps he waited too long, cowering in his bed, and now –

“Lynch,” he tries again, “Goddamn you Lynch, get up. Get up!”

Adam has to make a choice. The nightmare creature has definitely ‘seen’ him now. Its many skittering feet chitter and rustle across the pile. It is seven feet tall and full of teeth and all he has is a candle and the cord of his dressing gown. If he drops the candle, the whole house could burn. He peers into Lynch’s room. There’s a chair near the door, a walking stick, a vase. The creature is ten feet away. Nine. Adam makes a decision. He blows out the candle and throws it at the beast while he flings himself in the opposite direction, grabbing for the cane. In the gloom he is almost blind, the creature just another shadow amongst shadows, barely backlit against the lamp turned low. When Adam turns, stick in hand, it is nearly upon him. He braces his feet and holds the stick like a club, grits his teeth.

He never did learn to fight.

“Lynch,” he shouts, “Wake the hell up, goddamn you!”

He swings the cane with all his strength.

There is a sick, wet sound like a green stick cracking, and for a moment Adam thinks it is his stick and this will be over sooner even than he’d feared. But then the creature makes an ungodly, horrifying sound like a keen or a gurgle or a cut-throat gasp and he feels something give under his weight. If he experiences any relief, it’s gone too soon to tell. The thing hisses at him and Adam feels something smooth and pointed brush his arm – scales, teeth – there is a rank stench like river-soaked clothes left to moulder. A wave of hot breath assails him, as from many small mouths. He bites back his fear and swings again.

The creature staggers. Adam knows this because his eyes have adjusted to the gloom. For a moment, he thinks it must have been a lucky shot, but then the creature staggers again to one side and growls around to face – Lynch. His white shirt sweat-soaked and open at the collar, feet bare below his black trousers.

“Look at me, you ugly bastard,” he snarls, and swings again. He is holding a brass urn, heavy and ornate, and it connects with a solid crunch. The creature recoils, backing across the room towards the window, and without speaking Adam and Lynch advance in tandem. They keep a space between them, flanking the creature.

Although it has been injured, it is not afraid. It lashes out with many-mouthed limbs, sweeping letters from the sideboard, ink bottles flying, and Adam lands a solid blow with his cane. One wing crumples. Lynch darts forward and swings at it, and it rears back and overturns the little escritoire and chair. Adam parries from the right, Lynch harangues it from the left. There’s nowhere for it to go, but their weapons are not efficient. The beast stabs a pillow, Lynch swears. It sheds scales and gore and teeth when they make contact, but it is learning them, too, just as much as they are learning it. It shies away from their blows, flinching, folding.

And then, suddenly, lunging.

Lynch’s brass urn is certainly the more forceful weapon, but it also puts him at the mercy of his own reach. As he lands a crushing blow on what might be a shoulder, the beast screams and dives forwards, latching onto him with one of its many terrible round mouths. Lynch shouts, curses, blood soaking quickly through his shirt, and Adam darts in without thinking, thrusting hard enough to knock the beast off-balance. There is a mound of dirty linen by the window. The creature shrieks as it trips and overbalances, toppling backwards, clawing at the heavy velvet curtain to slow its fall.

In a moment, Lynch is on it again, heedless of teeth and the roiling mass of arms. He brings the urn down heavily once, again, again. Thin black gore spatters his white shirt, his face, his hands. The creature is convulsing beneath him, mouths gaping, questing, gasping. Adam cannot begin to untangle or describe the horror he feels at this moment. It is inarticulable. Unimaginable. His insides feel hollowed out and frozen over.

There is a last sickening crunch, and the wings judder and collapse. Lynch swears fluently, fluidly, in English, French, Latin, Italian, possibly Greek. The curses gradually lengthen, bleeding into each other thickly like his tongue is slowing down, stopping up. Adam watches, dazed, as Lynch claps a hand over his own mouth and retches for a second, dryly, before dropping the urn into the linen pile with a muffled thud and leaning forward to rest his hands upon his knees. He reaches blindly for the ruined curtain and uses the underside to wipe black fluids from his face and neck and arms and hands.

Into the silence, Adam swallows, and it is unintentionally loud. He sees Lynch go perfectly still.

“Shut the door,” Lynch says, quietly.

Adam blinks for a moment at his back, then does as he says. He returns the stick, its lacquer scratched and dented, to its stand. He does not know, at all, what to do next.

“You weren’t supposed to be here.”

Adam lifts his head slowly. He feels dazed, slow, “What?”

“In this part of the house. We never put guests here. Mrs Sargent gave you the room while I was away because it was more convenient, and in all the fuss – the accident, Declan – she must have forgotten to have you moved. You weren’t supposed to be here. I’m sorry. You should never have had to see that.”

“What…what was it?”

“A nightmare,” Lynch answers immediately; and then, slower, as though trying out the words to find the most convincing iteration, “A monster. A ghost story.”

“That,” says Adam firmly, “Was not a ghost.”

“Oh?” Lynch asks, glancing back over his shoulder and meeting Adam’s eyes for the first time, “Expert, are you?”

“I’m fairly certain ghosts are supposed to be less corporeal.”

Lynch shrugs, and turns to pick his way back through the wreckage and towards Adam. “And have fewer teeth, I’d imagine.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“Are you alright?”

Adam looks down at himself. His dressing gown is spattered with sticky black gore. It’s seeped into the sleeves like ink, and more of it paints his bare feet, his wrists.

“Wash your face and hands, go on. There’s water in the jug.”

Adam looks at his face in the mirror above the wash stand. There is a black smudge above one eyebrow. He pours water into the bowl and wets a clean cloth, scrubbing at his hands and fingernails, splashing his face.

“I think my dressing gown is ruined.” His voice sounds flat in his ear.

“I’ll get you a new one. You’re certain you’re unharmed?”

“I’m certain. Lynch.”

“Parrish?”

Adam feels abandoned by the English language. Poor thing, he thinks, It was not designed for this.

“Parrish,” Lynch says again. He’s closer now. His pale face appears in the mirror over Adam’s shoulder, and Adam lets out a slow, shuddering breath. Lynch puts a hand on his shoulder, gives him a gentle shake and then sooths it away with his thumb. “It’s alright, Parrish. We’re alright. Do you want your explanation now, or would you like to go back to bed first? It must be near three in the morning. Get some sleep and I’ll – I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. You look dead on your feet.”

“Too kind,” Adam says reflexively. Then, “Lynch...” It wavers. More firmly, “Lynch.”

In the mirror, Lynch inclines his head. He presses Adam’s shoulder, and Adam lets the weight of his hand ground him, persuade him that this is real.

“A nightmare?” Adam asks, softly.

“Yes.”

“You mean…literally.”

“Quite literally, yes.”

“I –” Adam passes his hand over his eyes, presses in at the sockets with fingers and thumb, “You’ll explain it in the morning.”

Lynch’s fingers touch his neck, “I promise.”

“Yes.” Adam tells himself, “Yes. Alright. Bed.” It occurs to him that Lynch’s bed is covered in feathers and ichor. There is a monster, felled, at its side.

“What are you going to do?” he asks, already turning around, “You can’t – Jesus Christ, Lynch – are you hurt?”

Adam reaches for him without thinking, just pushing the collar of his shirt aside before the other man winces away from him, “It’s nothing, I’m –” Adam’s hand shines sickly slick in the lamplight. They both stare at it. This time when he shoves roughly into Lynch’s space, he does not resist, “Fuck,” he mutters, craning to try to see his own shoulder, “Bleeding, dammit. How are you at stitches, Parrish?”

“Well, I taught at a boy’s school,” Adam tells him, laying one hand gently on the side of Lynch’s neck to keep him still and feeling the pulse there jump at his fingers. With the other hand he moves the collar gingerly aside again, revealing a ring of bloody punctures. How had he forgotten the bite? It seems hours since he watched the creature strike, red blooming on white linen, “So I can sew my own buttons. But I’m not sure that’s what’s wanted here. Jesus, Lynch. It’s not poisonous, is it?”

Lynch, who is holding himself very still beneath Adam’s hands, pales visibly. “Fucking Christ, I don’t know. I hope not.”

Adam looks up at him. He is trying to think – he is trying not to think – he is trying to think. He rubs his thumb absently over a place where black ichor has splashed the stubbled skin below Lynch’s jaw, and registers the other man’s throat moving as he swallows.

“I need to clean this,” Adam tells him, “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“I don’t think so,” dark eyelashes trace a soft arc as Lynch looks down at him, a glacial scan of his person which pricks gooseflesh up on Adam’s nape, “Are you?” he asks again.

“No,” Adam says, though his breath is still ragged and loud, “I think I’m intact.” He takes another slow breath, resettles his shoulders and wills his mind to come back together, “Water. And spirits of some kind – I assume you have both in this pigsty, somewhere.” He draws away from Lynch to scan the chamber. The short laugh behind him is brittle and sharp-edged.

“Try the last drawer in the dresser. Clean linen on the washstand.”

Adam hears Lynch picking through the room behind him as he gathers his supplies. A rustle of fabric, the faint creak of shifting furniture. When he turns back Lynch is sitting on the edge of his bed, shirt crumpled at his feet. Adam is momentarily distracted by the pale expanse of his bare skin, the dark claw of a tattoo catching at his throat and the darker shadow of hair painting his chest and trailing down from his navel. But Lynch is also cursing, viciously, softly, and craning his head at a painful angle to try to get a look at the bite.

“Stop that,” Adam tells him, flicking his ear as he bends to set the jug and basin on the floor by Lynch’s feet, “Drink this. Perhaps it’ll help you to hold still.”

Lynch takes the bottle from him and tugs the cork free with his teeth. It is only when Adam takes it back that he notices how his own hands are shaking. He stares at them. His rough, boyish knuckles curl around the bottle’s neck, trembling fit to make waves. Black gore still rims his fingernails, though he’d done his best to wipe it off.

Warm fingers close over his; Lynch’s hands cup the bottle, steadying it, pressing heat and reality back into his skin. Adam raises his eyes to find Lynch already looking at him.

“Parrish,” he says softly. And then, out of the blue, enough to make Adam’s breath hitch, “Adam. Are you alright? I can manage myself, if – ”

“No – no, I’m fine. I can do it.” Adam flexes his fingers against the prison of Lynch’s hands, feels them give gently, instantly. One lingering press and they fall away. Adam misses them for a moment.

“Tilt your head,” he tells Lynch softly, and then, when he bends forwards, “No, this way,” turning his jaw away with the lightest touch. Lynch’s pale eyes slide sideways to find his again, and Adam holds them for a second before spreading his fingers around the bite, holding the skin taught. Lynch hisses softly. “Sorry,” Adam warns him, “This will sting.”

He washes the wound as gently as he is able, pats it dry with fresh linen. It bleeds, sluggish but fresh, and Adam hopes it will not fester. He’s seen dog bites before, and they almost always go bad, but no dog had done this. The puncture wounds are round and deep, like impossibly thick needles or the teeth on Opal’s mask, but the incisions are precise, no tearing. Lynch would have to keep it clean, but they can hope.

“How attached are you to this shirt?” Adam asks, and Lynch, who had been drifting in a half-daze, blinks up at him slowly. Adam brushes his skin again, gently, at the join of shoulder and neck, and feels him shudder. This is where the pain comes, Adam thinks, washing in as the last of the fight drains out. “Your shirt?” he repeats, “For bandages. It’s ruined anyway.”

“Oh. Of course.” Lynch sways a little beneath his hand, “Have at.”

Adam folds a wad of fresh handkerchiefs to press against the wound, and winds unstained strips of Lynch’s shirt around his chest and under his arm to hold it in place.

“You’re cold,” he notes, bending to gather the detritus of his makeshift doctoring, “I’ll get you a new shirt.” A hand snags in the pocket of his dressing gown, and he nudges it gently free with his hip, “Patience, Lynch. A minute.”

Only as he is washing his bloody hands in the basin, wondering what to do with the pile of ruddy linens, does Adam truly register the chaos of the room. Somehow, in the whirl of fear, of fighting, fear again when he saw the blood on Lynch’s shoulder, then the familiar relief of dedicating himself to a task, he had overlooked the turmoil around them. Greasy black scales litter the floor, liberally washed with the same thin, glistening black gore that stains the cuffs of his dressing gown and the soles of his bare feet. The delicate writing desk and chair are overturned, and a savage gash has undone one pillow and blanketed the far corner in a drift of white feathers. From where he stands, by the washstand, Adam can’t see the monster; but when he looks over his shoulder in the mirror his eyes find the deep rent in the velvet curtains that had marked its final, clawing descent. He remembers the foul stink of it, the heat of its breath on his skin. He shudders involuntarily. Lynch cannot possibly sleep here, with that thing crumpled in the corner like a sack of old bones and bile and snakeskins. It is intolerable even to contemplate.

Recalling himself to his task, Adam digs in the dresser for a nightshirt and turns back to the bed.

Lynch has not moved except to crumple forwards. His head hangs low, almost between his knees, and his wiry arms are wrapped tight around his body. He rocks, sluggishly, like a child, back and forth, rhythmic and unsettling, painful for Adam to watch.

Adam crosses the room slowly, as though approaching Bonesaw or Misrule. When he reaches the bed he stops, the instinct to reach out warring with his higher judgement. With his head bent forward, Adam can see the vulnerable nape of Lynch’s neck and, for the first time, the spread of ink across his shoulders and spine.

“Lynch,” he says, softly, “Lynch, look at me.”

Lynch shudders like a spooked horse and Adam’s rational mind, what little of it he has left after this nightmare stretch, gives in with a sigh. A terrible tenderness reverberates through him as he reaches out to touch, so carefully, his fingers to the close-cropped scalp. Lynch makes a damp, halting noise low in his throat, and Adam slides his palm more fully over the thin plates of his skull, feels him press faintly back.

“Are you…” but he does not know what to ask.

A wet laugh rumbles up from Lynch’s chest, and he pushes his head more firmly into Adam’s hand, guiding his fingers, cat-like, to find the delicate slope of one ear, the vulnerable nape of his neck.

“I’m alive,” Lynch whispers, “You’re alive. That’s two in the black column that I had not expected.”

Adam’s fingers tense without his say-so on the back of Lynch’s neck, and Lynch catches in a sharp breath.

“You thought the beast would kill you.”

“Well, they’ve tried before.”

“Lynch –”

“Ronan,” Lynch says quietly. His breath brushes warm against Adam’s stomach, and Adam is suddenly aware, in a way he has never been before, of the thinness of his nightshirt.

“What?”

“Ronan. Surely after fighting a monster and patching my wounds, we are intimate enough to be on a first name basis.”

“Ronan.”

“Yes?”

“No, I mean.”

Ronan laughs again. Not quite as wet this time. He turns his head beneath Adam’s hand until his breath touches the unguarded skin of his wrist. Looking down at him, Adam finds those strange, pale eyes already looking back. Carefully, deliberately, watching him throughout, Ronan presses his mouth to Adam’s flesh.

Adam jumps a foot in the air, dropping the shirt and pulling his hands to his sides.

For a moment time ceases. Ronan remains on the bed, head turned still to the side, and their eyes are locked over the intervening space. Then he breaks the tableaux with precise movements: straightens his head, then his shoulders, then his back. Swoops down to collect the fresh shirt and in one smooth movement, wincing only slightly as the wound on his shoulder distorts, stands, pulling on the garment, and steps away from the bed. And from Adam.

“You should go.” Ronan says; except that he is Mr. Lynch again, Master Lynch, cool and distant and polite. Nothing like the Lynch Adam knows. “You’ve done very well, Mr. Parrish. A good man to have in a tight spot.” He is righting furniture, kicking the gory rug into a pile, “Back to bed, now. The men will help me with this in the morning.”

Past Ronan’s shoulder, Adam can see the torn curtain. Knows what lies, ruined and bloody, in its crumpled foothills.

“God, Lynch, you can’t sleep here.”

“Oh, I doubt I’ll do any more sleeping for a while.” His grin is sharp, but it lacks its usual wickedness. Instead, Adam tastes something bitter on his throat. His wrist feels hot. The skin there tingles.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Out, Parrish.”

“Lynch. Ronan –”

“Out! Parrish.”

It’s the first time Lynch has ever raised his voice to Adam. It’s the first time, in a long time, that anybody has. He is surprised, yet not surprised, to find that this time, from this man, the effect is completely unfamiliar.

“As you please,” Adam says. He is not afraid. Instead he feels cold, distant, a perfect match for Mr Ronan fucking Lynch. The door does not slam as he stalks out of the room. Behind him, as his hand leaves the knob, he hears the hollow crash of porcelain vessels hitting the ground. He does not turn back.

Notes:

So...if I were picking favourites, this chapter would be one of mine. Are you supposed to admit that sort of thing? I hope you lot like it, too.

Please tell me what you think - as ever, your comments make my day :)

 

~
Next chapter: truce and explanations.

Chapter 8: And as they grow they will lean towards you.

Summary:

Improbable explanations, potential explosions.

 

“Do you have questions?” Ronan asked, “Or would you like me to begin?”

Adam gave this due consideration, “To be frank, I do not know where I would start. Tell me, and I will ask for clarification as required.”

“Of course you bloody will. Very well. You already know the heart of my secret.”

Notes:

We return to our usual schedule.

In anyone else, Adam might have expected the previous night’s fraught ending to eclipse its earlier promises; but Ronan Lynch was not anyone else, and though there were few things he held truly sacred, promises were one of them. He found Adam late that afternoon, once lessons were done and he and Opal were strolling in the garden, not really talking, just enjoying the first hints of spring’s approaching warmth.

“Sprog,” Ronan greeted Opal, then removed closed fists from his pockets and hid them ostentatiously behind his back, “Left or right?”

Opal’s small face screwed up in a moment of serious contemplation. With the dignity and pomp of a ruler sending troops to war, she extended her hand to his left.

“Wise choice,” Ronan told her, and produced a tiny clockwork bird which hummed gently to life as soon as his fingers opened around it. Adam was no less enraptured than his pupil as it ruffled blue-enamelled feathers and peered up at Opal from one crystal eye. He itched for a closer look. Ronan tipped the bird unceremoniously into Opal’s hand, “Now take your bauble and go play in the woods a while, I must speak with Mr Parrish.”

Ordinarily Opal, like all precocious children, would have been offended by this inference that there were discussions from which her age precluded her. But the gift was a good one and, tossing the small bird skyward with a delighted laugh, she followed its swooping path towards the forest.

The two men stood awkwardly for a minute. Without Opal to make up the third side of their triangle, they now seemed both too close for comfort, and too far for easy conversation.

Lynch, more used than Adam to breaking things for his own convenience, ended the détente.

“Walk with me.”

He set off briskly towards the formal garden, and Adam had to jog a few paces to join him again.

“Do you have questions?” Ronan asked, “Or would you like me to begin?”

Adam gave this due consideration, “To be frank, I do not know where I would start. Tell me, and I will ask for clarification as required.”

“Of course you bloody will. Very well. You already know the heart of my secret.” Adam frowned at him instead of pointing out that this was obviously untrue. Ronan laughed his mirthless laugh, “Then you really were out of sorts last night, Parrish. I told you to your face. You asked what the creature was and I did not dissemble. It was exactly what it seemed to be: a nightmare.”

“Well I know that,” Adam snapped. So much for kept promises, he thought, I’d prefer silence to being run about. “Of course it was a nightmare. It was monstrous. I feel…ill, just thinking about it. I think I’ll remember that night as long as I live. But that doesn’t explain the beast’s existence in the first place.”

“But it does,” Ronan insisted, pausing Adam with a hand on his arm. “Poor dear Parrish,” Adam scowled, sensing mockery to come, “I doubt anybody has ever said this to you before, but just this once you could stand to be more literal. When I say ‘nightmare’ I am not being metaphorical. You are a man of reason and science. You know as well as I that that creature last night had no place in the natural order of things. A beast like that has no cause to exist. In nature, it is impossible, which is why it should be obvious to you that nature did not beget it. Extend the argument, Adam. If not nature…?”

“A nightmare,” Adam repeated. His breath felt caught in his lungs, a weight he could not release, “It came from somewhere outside of the natural world? Super-natural?”

“You might describe it that way, I suppose,” here, Lynch sounded bitter, “Others have certainly termed me unnatural before.”

“You?” Adam asked, feeling slow. There was a key piece here which he was still avoiding. He could sense it in his mind, a truth too impossible to address head-on, “I said nothing about you.”

“Adam,” Lynch said again, and Adam felt a strange weightlessness when he spoke his name. When Lynch said it, it seemed to contain things Adam was not yet able to clearly see; or perhaps it was just the novelty of hearing his given name aloud. He had been boy, and then Parrish, and then Mr Parrish only, for so long.

“A nightmare,” Ronan gazed at him steadfastly, standing just out of arm’s reach. He gave a small, precise nod. “Not a metaphor, but a description.” Another nod. And where do nightmares come from, Adam? “It was your nightmare,” Adam realised, and Lynch let out a breath like a hot air balloon freed from its moorings.

“Now he understands,” he quipped, with a lightness which Adam suspected rang false for both of them.

“But that’s –”

“No,” Ronan interrupted him smoothly, “Obviously, it isn’t. Ask a real question.”

“Alright, how?”

Ronan huffed, frustrated, “That’s the one sodding thing I don’t know. Alright,” he waved impatiently at Adam, “One of many, but I can’t answer you. I don’t bloody understand how it works. Nobody does.”

“Well, then, are there others? Is this…” he couldn’t really credit it, but, “Common?”

“No,” Ronan laughed, turned, and began walking again, back the way they’d come towards the flower gardens and the forest. A dubious look passed over his face, “No,” he repeated slowly, “Well, I don’t believe so. I’ve only met two others like me, and one was my father.”

“Oh,” Adam said. Because that explained…something. Some things, he thought, though at that moment he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. “One of your brothers?”

“No.”

“And,” Adam paused again, biting at his lip. Last night was still a tangled mess of ungovernable, roiling emotions. He couldn’t bear to look closely at it yet. He’d had to bury it somewhere deep in his mind just to close his eyes again when he returned to his room, and his sleep, such as it was, had been fitful. He kept picturing that long, ragged, glistening shape looming over Lynch’s lifeless body on the bed. The drip of black fluids onto pale skin, the ruddy pile of stained linens. The terrible way Lynch had hunched in upon himself, small as a child, and the look on his face as he had turned his head, breath sending sparks shivering up the inside of Adam’s wrist. It was too much. All of it. He couldn’t manage it right now. But he had to ask, “Is it always like that?”

“Like last night? Thank fucking God, no. Usually they’re…benign. Objects, mostly. Well, Mrs Sargent says you’ve seen the third floor of the western wing. They’re hard to get rid of. Impossible to explain, you understand. Things that shouldn’t work the way they do – that bird, for instance, God only knows what it looks like inside – no real clockwork could do that. But for the most part, like any dream, they are only strange. Sometimes,” he darted a tiny smile in Adam’s direction, and nodded his chin at the flowerbed beside him, “They’re even quite beautiful.”

Adam glanced down and stopped, suddenly, because of course. One of Lynch’s impossible flowers bloomed at his feet, a riot of reds and deep bloody purples. Unlikely petals curved in towards a golden heart. Beautiful, and completely alien to nature.

“You dream of flowers?” he asked, unable to contain his smile. Ronan Lynch: brawler, bastard, inveterate horse-racer and scamp, goes to sleep and dreams of impractical, devastating wonders that come real in his waking hands. Because of course he does.

Ronan ducked his shoulders, looking embarrassed, “Fruit, too. I try for practical things, sometimes. It doesn’t always work. My control over what I bring back leaves something to be desired,” his mood darkened again, “As you may have inferred.”

Too many mouths, Adam thought, and shuddered beneath the late afternoon sun, too many teeth.

“How is your shoulder?” he asked, wary of a repeat blow up but unable to help himself.

“I’ve had worse,” Ronan said this as though it should be reassuring. And then, “Adam.” So they really were doing this, the given-name thing, or at least Ronan was. Adam wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Every time Lynch said it, it tugged at the lid of some internal box, and perhaps more than one, threatening to spill contents Adam was not yet ready to see. “I am so sorry you had to witness that. I cannot imagine…you must have thought you were dreaming. You handled it very well. Better than I would have, I think, in your situation.”

Adam laughed at that, “I doubt that very much. I’ve never once seen you back down from a fight, Lynch.”

“Fighting, yes. But nightmares…what should we fear if not those?”

He had a point. “The staff,” Adam said, thinking again of the ruin of Lynch’s room. His mind skittered away from the dark form crumpled at the foot of the curtains, “They know?”

“Some of them. They know enough.”

“And Opal?”

“Oh, she knows, but please don’t tell her about last night. I’d prefer not to give her any new nightmares.”

Adam nodded. Of course.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why?” Lynch asked, suddenly.

“‘Why’ what?”

“Why I shared my great secret with a ten-year-old child.”

Adam felt a little stupid, but he was so used to Opal’s odd intelligence, her wisdom sometimes about strange things far beyond her years, that he honestly had not considered it.

“Go on, then.” He said, “Tell me.”

“Opal knows about my dreams,” Ronan told him, “Because she was born in them.”

Adam was conscious of being very carefully watched as he processed this.

“Opal is a dream creature?” In fact, it did explain certain things, like the bizarre eating habits she was ever less adept at disguising.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Adam asked, because frankly not one in a thousand young men in Lynch’s situation would have adopted the orphaned waif he had first claimed Opal to be, let alone invented her. Certainly, Adam could not imagine Ronan – particularly not the Ronan of the past, of whom Mrs Sargent had so studiously avoided description that the void shape she delineated was quite damning on its own – deciding to become a parent. It must have meant a serious upheaval of his previous lifestyle. And yet, though Ronan was not, perhaps, what would most readily come to mind under the heading ‘father,’ it was abundantly clear that he took his duties seriously.

“The honest answer is that ‘why’ does not come into it,” Ronan said. They were walking by the flower garden, and the scent of blooming roses and lilies – not to mention the strange perfumes of Lynch’s impossible collection – was heady around them. Ronan stopped by the reflecting pool. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes, and Adam took the moment to watch him unobserved: the sharp, spare lines of his face, the opulent contrast of his long black lashes. “I didn’t mean to bring her back,” Ronan said softly, “When I say she was born in my dreams, I mean she lived there, all my life, until I was almost twenty. I did not intend to bring her here, but at the time my mind was less paradisiacal even than it is today,” an unhappy smile bent his mouth, “And she begged to come. It was quite a fucking adjustment, I can tell you. Figuring out the boots alone took –” he blinked suddenly, returning his gaze to Adam – who, nearly caught in his staring, felt his ears flush dangerously as he turned away – then bellowed, abruptly enough to startle a bird out of the garden bed beside them, “OPAL!”

In a moment Adam heard the fast patter of her small feet and Opal, in a movement wholly unsuited to an elegant young lady yet perfectly, endearingly herself, ricocheted out of the forest and towards Ronan. He made no motion to avoid collision, until the last moment when he sidestepped, neatly, and instead swooped down to lift her at the waist and twirl her about him in a wide circle. Opal cackled, birdlike and delighted, and Ronan glowered up at her without heat. “You’re a menace,” he told her, depositing her lightly on the stone bench by the pool, “Take off your shoes and stockings and show Adam what you can really do.”

Adam watched, bemused and then amazed, as Opal, lacking all sense of propriety and self-consciousness – much like her parental figure – hitched up her skirt to unbutton her thick stockings from her drawers and revealed, as she shoved them off with evident delight, not human legs but the spindly, impossible grey-furred limbs of a faun. Her stockings had evidently been padded to resemble human legs; the boots she shucked were internally odd in a way that bent the mind and the laws of physics, and necessarily so because how else could one cram delicate and perfect hooves into a young girl’s narrow-laced footwear?

Opal stood before him, grinning like mad, and for the first time, Adam knew – felt, really, in the gut-deep, true way he had once felt safe in his forest. In the way the tarot cards had told him true that here, this was the advertisement to answer – that he saw her clearly for the first time. Opal was not a little girl. Or rather, she was not only a little girl. Standing poised like a deer, her dark curls in disarray from running, black eyes huge, brown cheeks flushed pink with a mixture of delight and apprehension, she regarded him with a wild and knowing gaze. Adam sensed that his reaction to this revelation would have deep, long-standing consequences for the course of his life. Perhaps deeper, even, than his response to Ronan’s initial confession, for to accept that a man sometimes gave life to nightmares was somehow less awe-inspiring than the realisation that he could also create…this. Inventive, intelligent, wild life. A real flesh-and-blood being, with thoughts, desires, interests and peeves of her own.

“Well, damn,” Adam said, knowing that the illicit word would delight her. It did, “I’d wager you’re even faster with those shoes off.”

It was the right thing to say. Opal flung herself at him, and when she wriggled to be let down she loosed a victory cry like some wild bird – a raven, surely – and took off across the lawn at impossible speed. Adam looked up to find Ronan already gazing at him. He wore a small, fierce, true smile, still sharp but with warmth enough behind it to burn himself on without care, and Adam knew that whatever had gone wrong between them last night – and he still was not entirely sure – he was now forgiven.

“Your mind,” Adam told him seriously, “Is a wonder.”

Ronan ducked his head, ears staining pink.

 

 

Being forgiven – for precisely what Adam was still unsure – did not mean that things returned to the easy, warm camaraderie they had previously enjoyed. Adam had not properly noticed how easy and warm he and Lynch were together until they weren’t. Now, things were stilted often, and many a conversation was ended, or room exited, abruptly. In Lynch’s company Adam now found himself surrounded by a perimeter of space which had previously been breached without his noticing. It should not have bothered him – he, who had been so long alone – and yet he felt cold inside of it, and disliked it intensely.

Opal, of course, had no such compunctions, and crossed personal and spatial boundaries with affection and enthusiasm. Her careless physicality made Lynch’s abrupt standoffishness all the more apparent. Where before they had moved easily around each other, now Adam was forced to watch Lynch from a distance, and note the absence of each casual touch to elbow, shoulder, back or knee as Lynch, ever careless of his power, guided Adam through his small kingdom. He found he missed this contact with a strange, low, unfamiliar intensity which he could not remedy.

Adam had never touched freely or easily. How could he, when he had never learnt how? His childhood had been awash with touch: the brief, hard cuff of the stablemaster, his mother’s pinching hands and his father, ever watchful, ever ready with a heavy hand on his shoulder, the sharp nudge of a boot against cracked ribs. These were the types of touch he understood, and he had learnt well to avoid them. Now that talent bled into his every human interaction, rendered him a tactile mute.

He could identify this new space between his body and Ronan’s, but was helpless to bridge it.

 

 

And yet, despite – perhaps even because of – that seemingly inviolable handspan of clear air, something fresh has begun to bloom between them. That night with the monster, fighting side-by side, and the secret it had forcibly revealed, has changed something vital. Before, it had been Lynch and Opal causing mischief, and Adam standing watch to one side, the voice of reason and responsibility: a witness, not an actor. Now, it’s as though his stint brandishing that cane has opened Lynch’s eyes to another possible Adam Parrish, one not even Adam himself had suspected. He finds himself the object of speculative glances, and more than once catches Lynch and Opal studying him over the edge of a book, as one might examine an underdog racehorse for hidden talents.

“Parrish.”

Adam glances up to see Lynch standing, jittery and eager as a hunting dog, in the doorway.

“What can I do for you, Lynch?”

Ronan glowers at him, but Adam just waits him out; he has long since become immune to such looks. Eventually, predictably, Ronan breaks and rolls his eyes.

“What do you know about Hansoms?”

“…Nothing. Why?”

“Because I’ve got one, and one of the wheels is sticking. Will you look at it?”

In his previous life as a stable boy Adam had, of course, helped to maintain the various carriages belonging to the family at Henrietta, and those belonging to any visitors. In his first years at Aglionby, before his quickness made him more valuable as a teaching assistant, Adam had performed similar chores. Still, they’re not skills he’s had to think about in some time. It wasn’t bad work, but he still remembers the flush of pride when the headmaster had called him in and told him he would no longer be spending his afternoons in the stables. In his mind the smell of axal grease and horses is forever linked to that earlier time, the period before he became the Adam he is now. He’s not sure he wants to muddy the waters.

“I think your stablemaster would not appreciate my interference.”

“He’s conducting business in town,” Ronan says impatiently, oblivious to Adam’s conflict, “And you’re cleverer than he is. It’s an engineering problem. I’ll fetch Opal and meet you down there in fifteen minutes, she’ll be interested.”

And so Adam finds himself bending gingerly, mindful of soiling his trouser knees, to peer up into the undercarriage of a battered Hansom cab.

“Where did you even find this?”

Ronan shrugs, “Bought it from a mate in Dublin.”

“Why?”

And, suddenly, Ronan smiles. It is not his shark smile or his bitter smile or the soft, helplessly amused expression he gets when Opal does something that is very Opal and he smiles almost against his will. This smile is wide and wild and brimming over with anticipatory glee, and Adam, meeting Ronan’s eyes across the footwell, feels something in him lift in response. Ronan, he thinks, recognises it, because the smile changes again, ever so slightly, into something even wider, and hungry at the edges.

“Parrish,” he says steadily, not breaking their gaze for a second, “Have you any idea how fast you can get one of these things to go?”

Adam covers his face with his hand but can’t quite smother his grin.

Predictably it’s a disaster, and Mrs Sargent scolds them ruthlessly as she patches knees and dabs at cuts and tries, in vain, to make Opal sit still so I can look at you, you wicked child. But the thing is, though he tears a cuff and has to watch his bruises changing colour in the looking glass every day for a week, Adam thinks he’ll never forget the wild whoop of Ronan’s laughter, the raw joy in his eyes, or the way he had glanced over at Adam, just moments before the crash, and Adam had felt seen to his bones.

 

 

The Hansom is just one of many such incidents. Adam grows used, on his mornings off, to hearing thunder on the stairs and looking up to find Ronan, or Opal, or both, hanging on the library door, flush-faced and bright eyed, eager to drag him off to some fresh catastrophe-in-progress.

“Adam, what do you know about slingshots?”

“Parrish, you ever set off a firework?”

“Adam, we’re going to build a treehouse.”

“Adam! Ronan’s set the small barn on fire!”

“Parrish, look at this snake, would you –”

“I’ve found a bird’s nest!”

“I think something’s gone wrong with that experiment –”

“How fast can a sika run?”

“Adam –”

“Parrish –”

“Adam –”

And Adam, who has always prided himself on his careful planning skills, his propensity for thought before action, his calculated approach to life in general, finds himself changing, growing, shifting before his very eyes. Something was lost that night between Ronan and he, but Adam begins to think it may spring back even stronger than before, and this time he will be there to meet it. He goes though all the right motions, lays out his books and pens and papers and bends, attentively, to his work; but his ear is always cocked, listening for that first foot- or hoof-fall on the stairs, waiting, waiting, to be swept up and into some new trouble.

His work slows. His wardrobe suffers.

He doesn’t care.

As spring arrives again, sending delicate green feelers out into the warming air, Adam Parrish realises, in a moment as vivid as Revelation, that for the first time in his life he is happy.

“Bugger,” Ronan says succinctly, glaring at what used to be a flowerpot.

Opal and Adam exchange a serious look.

“Try again?” Adam offers.

Blue eyes and black dart to him, twinned in their brilliance and intensity, their single-minded focus on him, Adam Parrish. Ward and warden both are steady in their faith that he will work this out, solve the mystery, that together they will overcome this hiccough and go forth unto mayhem and wonder. That certainty flutters wildly in Adam’s chest and he gets to work.

Notes:

I wish there were time to detail the endless trouble I am sure these three get into. I sort of imagine a farm-themed, 19th century combination of Mythbusters, Top Gear and Bill Nye the Science Guy all rolled into one, probably with more mud and leaves.

 

As always, your comments and kudos keep me going :) Thank you, and please let me know if you've any questions, remarks, etc. I love hearing from you all.

~
Next chapter: A journey planned, a breaking point, a series of tense decisions and revelations.

Chapter 9: If I can't do better, how is it to be helped?

Summary:

An unwelcome missive, tensions rise.

 

As Ronan shoves his chair back and storms out of the breakfast room, Adam watches him leave and thinks he has never been more cognisant of the gulf between their stations.

Notes:

I have to apologise because this is only part of the chapter I intended to post today. I've never been quite happy with the next bit, and I messed around with it a little more as I read it over, then I decided that I didn't want to post it until I'd slept on it and done a final re-read for sense.

Therefore: apologies for how short this is. Rest assured, the next part is brimming over with tension, angst, secrets brought finally to light, and perhas even a little cathartic resolution ;) I just want to be as happy with it as I can be before releasing it into the wild.

So this is just to tide you over: the bulk of this chapter (and it is long) I will post tomorrow.

Sorry again - happy reading.

Of course, equilibrium had a way of inviting change.

The letter said this:

 

Dear Mr Parrish,

 

I hope this finds you well. We have heard good things of you since your departure from Henrietta almost a decade ago.

I am writing now on behalf of your mother. She is quite ill, and though the Family would never turn out a servant from so longstanding a line, I am afraid she is no longer able to perform her duties at The House. She will have to be moved to one of the old cottages on The Estate, and she has asked me to write to you in the hope that you, now you are so comfortably settled, will come to see her into her new home.

You were such a good boy. I have no doubt that you will do your duty by your mother.

 

Kind regards,

Mr Smythe

Henrietta

Kent

 

For the first time in months, Adam dug the little black velvet pouch out of the back of his dresser and spread his cards across the bedsheets.

Bad news. A choice. A maternal figure.

Adam snorted. Maternal figure. No help there.

A journey. Expect delays. And then: the possibility of closure.

Adam loosed a long breath and went to find Ronan Lynch.

“I need an advance,” he said without preamble. He couldn’t couch it prettily, he’d lose his nerve.

“Of course,” Lynch said absently. Adam saw the moment when he backtracked to re-examine the conversation. He leant back from his desk and crossed his arms over his chest, tilting his head to one side, “What do you mean, you need an advance? Got a gambling problem I don’t know about, Parrish?”

“No,” Adam said levelly, “I need it for travel expenses.” Lynch went quite still, “I will also need leave from my teaching duties. I will prepare a syllabus for Opal to complete in my absence. She won’t fall behind.”

“How long?” Lynch demanded.

“I can’t be certain. Not more than a month, I hope.”

“A month?”

Adam eyed him steadily. Ronan glared back, eyes as cool and clear as diamond chips.

“And where will you be travelling to?”

Adam had known it would be like this. That Ronan would press him for details, no matter how obviously he did not wish to give them. Leaving things unsaid was not the Lynch way.

“I’m going home.”

It felt like the wrong word as soon as Adam said it, no matter that it was technically correct. Lynch’s eyes narrowed.

“What do you mean, home? Back to the school? Aren’t you an orphan?”

Because he was used to Ronan’s casual bastardry, Adam ignored this.

“No,” he told him, “I’m not. I’m going back to the house where I was born.”

Lynch waited with obvious impatience, and scowled more deeply as it became clear that Adam did not intend to expand.

“Why are you going back there?” he demanded.

“It’s personal,” Adam said tightly.

“Personal.”

“Yes, Lynch, personal. Not everything in my life revolves around The Barns, or Opal, or you. Will you give me the time, and the advance, or not?” He shocked himself with his vehemence, but once said he could hardly take the words back.

Ronan’s eyes hardened. “Of course I’ll give you what you want,” he said. He sounded cold, but something about the words felt weighted, “No need to get snippy.”

“Thank you,” Adam grit out.

“You are welcome, Mr Parrish. Would you like a bank note, or shall I give you the money direct?”

“The money, if you have it.”

“And when will you be leaving us?”

Adam swallowed. The way he said it made it sound as if Lynch neither expected nor particularly wished for his return.

“I will go within the week.”

“Fine. I’ll have Mr Black draw your advance from the safe. He’ll bring it to you.”

Lynch glared firmly at his papers until it became clear that he would say nothing else, and Adam excused himself to go back to the library, feeling jittery and not knowing why.

 

 

Over the next few days they either avoid each other or, when Opal forces them together, engage in the sort of whispered shouting matches that leave them both flushed and furious and no further than they had been.

Lynch is infuriated by the merest hint of an untruth. Adam vehemently resents the suggestion that he is beholden to share all his secrets at the whim of his employer. As Ronan shoves his chair back and storms out of the breakfast room, Adam watches him leave and thinks he has never been more cognisant of the gulf between their stations. Ronan Lynch, who has had everything his whole life, whose only shames are things he chased down of his own volition, has no way to understand what it is to be Adam Parrish. To have begun in the dirt of Henrietta’s stables, ground down beneath his father’s heel. To have clawed his way by wit and brute stubbornness alone to this: lush gardens and regular mealtimes and work he actually enjoys, and the respect of people he cares for.

Ronan insists that everything is black and white, that omission is kin to dishonesty, and all dishonesty grounds for absolute mistrust. But Adam needs his secrets. He needs to hold Ronan at arm’s length on this one thing, because though they are so very different he thinks, he hopes, that they are also in a very true way friends. He can’t bear to have Ronan look at him and see the Adam he is now overcast with the dust of his beginnings, but Ronan won’t give it up, and so their tension remains insoluble.

Mrs Sargent watches their dispute from afar and shakes her head, but can’t offer any better advice than to tell Adam he must do what he thinks is best. This is so close to useless that Adam almost snaps at her, too, that he’s trying to do just that, and feels guilty about it for the rest of the day.

Notes:

Up tomorrow: late-night arguments. Regrets, dreams and secrets confessed.

See you then - thanks for your patience.

Chapter 10: When you are near me, as now.

Summary:

Midnight conversations, dreams and longings, and doing battle with monsters of the incorporeal variety.

 

“Personal,” Ronan sneers, “Like having a sodding nightmare and almost being murdered in my bed? That kind of personal?”

“Ronan…”

“You’ve never told me one shitting thing about your past, do you know that? Everything I know about you came from bloody letters of introduction.”

Notes:

As promised - part 2.
Sorry for the delay and thank you for your patience :)

It’s very late, and Adam can’t sleep. He’s to leave the day after tomorrow, and already his nerves are wound tighter than a watch spring. He can feel himself retreating, rebuilding walls he hasn’t needed in years, and Opal’s confusion, Mrs Sargent’s concern, Ronan’s impotent, simmering anger are all starting to weigh on him. He can’t explain to them that his withdrawal is impersonal: he’s preparing for a quiet war, and must gather his defences in advance.

He has shoved his pillow around, pulled blankets on and off his mattress, recited Ovid at the canopy over his bed. Eventually he gets up, wrapping himself in the absurdly beautiful midnight blue dressing gown, with its thick winter padding and collar of embroidered silk, which Ronan had ordered from Paris to replace his ruined one (and refused, under pain of any torture, to take back), and pads out into the hall. Some faint instinct guides him down the servant’s staircase and into the airy back parlour which opens on the western terrace. It doesn’t take him long to figure out why.

The glass doors sit ajar. On the terrace outside, picked out by stars, stands Ronan Lynch. He’s still in his day clothes, great black coat thrown around his shoulders like armour, flapping as he paces back and forth. Adam isn’t surprised. Ronan’s general aversion to sleep has made more sense to him since he learnt about the dreams or, more specifically, the nightmares.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks, pushing through the door. The air is cold, and he turns up his collar to protect his neck. Ronan makes an impatient gesture, as though damning him for asking the obvious.

“Does the pacing help?” Adam enquires, “I’ve always wondered.”

Ronan grunts at him, non-committal.

“What are you doing here, Parrish? You don’t want to talk to me.”

“That’s not true.” The truth is that he wishes to talk to Ronan far more often than he allows himself to seek him out. “I simply don’t wish to discuss my travel arrangements.”

Ronan bites back a word; Adam can still tell it’s knife-edged and most likely lewd.

“I’m no good at fucking pretending,” Ronan snarls.

“I’m aware.”

“Well, then, don’t come out here and ask me to fucking pretend, you prick!”

“Why does it matter to you so much?”

“Because you’re hiding it,” Ronan answers immediately.

Adam should have just made something up. He knows that. But somehow the idea of lying to Ronan outright had been unendurable.

“Why are you going?” Ronan asks again. Every time, he says it with a sense of absolute conviction: this time he will get an answer. Every time, Adam’s roiling mix of guilt and frustration flares anew to meet him.

“It’s personal.”

“Personal,” Ronan sneers, “Like having a sodding nightmare and almost being murdered in my bed? That kind of personal?”

“Ronan…”

“You’ve never told me one shitting thing about your past, do you know that? Everything I know about you came from bloody letters of introduction.”

“That’s not true.” Adam feels oddly stung. Before this week he really hadn’t thought it mattered, but Ronan says this as though he’s been thinking about it a long time, and this is hurtful, somehow, to Adam. He has always clung so tightly to the belief that his past is less important than what he is now. Ronan is supposed to value truth, and Adam’s present is the truest thing that’s ever happened to him. “We speak every day. You know all sorts of things about me.” Ronan knows more about him than any other human being on earth. Sometimes, this is very literally terrifying.

“I know nothing about your life before you came to live in my fucking house!”

“And you don’t need to!”

“What are you trying to hide?”

“I don’t owe you this, Lynch!” Adam explodes, “I’m allowed my past, I’m allowed secrets. You don’t fucking own me!”

Ronan stares at him, blindsided. Adam can see at once that he is truly hurt.

“I don’t want to own you, Adam. I want to know you.”

“Well,” Adam tells him, tired all at once, “You can’t.”

Lynch whirls on him, pale eyes hot and furious.

“What use am I to you, Parrish, if you will not let me in? How can I help you if you insist on keeping me at arm’s length? I’ve shared with you my deepest, most closely guarded secret and you remain, as ever, a fucking enigma. Why did you follow me out here? What are you even about, skulking around at night when decent folks are abed?”

“You’re awake,” Adam points out.

Ronan laughs, a brittle bark. “I am not, by any bloody definition of the word, ‘decent’.”

Adam folds his arms and keeps his gaze steady, “So you say, but I’ve seen no evidence of it.”

Laughing again – a wild, harshly-edged sound – Ronan drags his hands over his shaven scalp and twists them viciously together behind his neck. He tilts his head back, looking at the overcast sky and says softly, “It is lucky, Adam Parrish, that you cannot read my mind as clearly as you read those cards of yours. If you knew what I –” he shakes his head and sinks abruptly to sit on the edge of the terrace, bowing forward to rest his elbows on his knees, “No. I really don’t imagine you’d think me decent at all, if you knew what I dream of.”

Adam picks his way forwards and sits carefully beside him on the ledge. That perpetual handspan of empty space feels very wide between them, tonight. “You cannot be expected to control your nightmares,” he offers reasonably.

“I am not talking about nightmares.”

“Well,” Adam says carefully, “You can’t control your dreams, either.”

“I can,” Ronan snaps.

Adam shoots him a sidelong look, “That plant you made? The terrible one that caterwauls when you stroke its leaves? You did that on purpose?[1]”

Ronan huffs something that is, at least, laugh adjacent. “That song is fucking beautiful.”

“No.” Adam tells him firmly. He feels himself relax, infinitesimally. This is familiar ground.

But Ronan has always been prone to swerve just when the road looked straight and clear.

“I dream about you.”

Adam blinks at him, caught off-guard completely, “Me?”

And Ronan gets this look about him, then, that Adam has only seen rarely and from a safe distance. It’s the look he has when his brother calls unannounced, that he had when a horse he’d loved had broken a leg and had to be put down, when a (recently unemployed) lawyer suggested they could hold an auction to ‘clear out the detritus in the western wing’. That look says it’s not just that Ronan Lynch wants to break something, it’s that he’s already decided to. His next steps will be the careful, calculated rending of parts, or a deliberate hurricane designed to inflict all possible damage. Perhaps Adam should move out of the way. Instead, he finds that all he can do is sit very, very still.

“Yes, Parrish, you. God, do I dream of you.”

Adam feels like he is sinking into something, or perhaps coming unstuck. He’s not yet sure what this is but he can feel it in his veins, a glittering premonition of change, before Ronan speaks.

“Do you know what your hands would look like on my skin?”

Ronan’s voice is rough-edged and raw. His hands wring together in vicious, painful shapes in his lap, and Adam feels like he had when that horse had stumbled: nothing but a spectator, helpless in the face of a certain fall. The dam is breached; Ronan speaks as though he’s helpless to stop. The unsteady tangle of fear and longing in his voice is nearly unbearable to Adam, and he almost reaches out, covers Ronan’s fingers with his own. He knows that isn’t what Ronan means.

“Do you know how your bruises would look on my hips?” Ronan asks, softly rhetorical, “Or the sounds I would make with your teeth at my neck? Or when I kissed you, or touched your throat? I do,” Ronan says, “I know because I’ve dreamed about it, every permutation my base history can provide, and fresh visions, too. I have gotten so close – so close to feeling what it would be, to have you over me. And I hate it, Adam,” a moment of vehemence, “I hate that I’ve imagined it all, because I don’t know, for sure. I fucking hate everything I don’t know about you, Parrish. Every person you’ve loved, every place you’ve lived, every book you’ve read…I want to know all of it. I’m fucking ravenous. And now you’re leaving, for God knows how long, or why, and I…I can’t stand for you to go. I can’t stand that you will leave me, a mystery still. I don’t want you to go. I want, I…” he swallows the last words, and their absence hangs in the air between them like a physical thing.

In all this time, he has not looked at Adam. Instead, Lynch’s eyes are fixed straight ahead, cutting across the wide sweep of lawn to sink deep into the forest’s shadows. He seems smaller than usual, somehow, compressed by the weight of his confession. That space between them feels cavernous and cruelly deep, and the night is taut as an un-plucked string. Adam holds his breath.

And yet. The things Ronan describes are not monstrous to him – though the way Ronan says them that makes Adam think Ronan believes they must be so, to Adam, and this belief torments them both. What Adam believes – Adam can’t yet articulate his thoughts on Ronan’s disquisition. He needs time to process the words, the images they conjure, the rough flutter of butterfly wings and heat now waking in his gut. Feeling unsteady, Adam tries to rise. He is overwhelmed, body, mind and spirit. Ronan’s hand shoots out to stop him, catching his sleeve. It’s the first time Ronan has deliberately touched him in weeks, and the shock of it stills Adam instantly.

“No, please,” Ronan whispers, letting his hand drop, “Don’t get up.” He sounds thinned-out, exhausted. He pushes himself jaggedly to his feet and stumbles off across the lawn. Adam moves naturally against this instruction and lopes after him; hearing his step Ronan turns, and, toppling every barrier he’d so recently erected between them, pushes into Adam’s space. He is so close that Adam can’t make out his eyes. The impending storm has blacked out the stars, burying them in shadows, and Ronan looms over him like a great black bird.

Adam holds his ground. “Are you trying to frighten me away?” he asks quietly into the still, storm-charged air between them, “Why?”

“Because you are leaving. Because there is something in your past that is taking you away from me and you won’t even tell me what it is.”

“There isn’t!” Adam snaps, temper flaring sudden and hot, “There isn’t. Good god, Lynch, how can an intelligent man arrive with such bloody-minded certitude at so wrong a conclusion? Have I ever given you the slightest hint I was unhappy here? That I was not content with my position? I tell you again, there is nothing to keep me away. I will come back.” To The Barnes, to Opal. To you, he doesn’t say, I will come home.

“You hadn’t given any such impression,” Ronan snarls, “Until I heard there was a letter for you from England, and next I knew you were knocking on my door asking for money! Adam,” Ronan bends towards him like a reed, hands rising to hover uncertainly about Adam’s face as he searches his eyes. Lynch has such sharp instincts. Adam forgets that sometimes. Ronan doesn’t, can’t possibly know the true shape and character of the danger Adam is preparing himself to walk willingly towards, but he senses that it is there, that there is something waiting in England that could yet do Adam harm. He is wrong about the nature of the risk, but he feels its weight regardless. “If you are in trouble, of any kind. If you need something from me. You must know – you must know – that I’d deny you nothing. Please tell me what it is, and let me help you. I’ll take you as far as London myself. Whatever you need, if it is in my power, I’ll give it.”

“Lynch – ” Adam begins, and stops, overwhelmed by the magnitude – the deliberately un-bordered scope – of Ronan’s offer. He feels as though his chest has become too tight for his lungs when he says, “Ronan. I really don’t need anything from you –” Ronan’s face folds into a scowl and he turns away, “No,” Adam says, reaching blindly for his wrist, “I mean I have everything I need. Ronan,” he curls his fingers gently around the bone, tugs Ronan firmly back around, “I have it. You gave it before I even asked you.”

Ronan won’t look at him. His mouth is curled into a sneer and he holds himself rigid within Adam’s grasp, arm stuck out away from his body, putting as much distance between them as can be had without breaking Adam’s hold.

“Why are you going back to a home you despise?” Ronan demands. That perceptiveness again, honed to a sharp and devastating point. Of course he knows this about Adam without being told. Of course part of his rage is born of confusion, an awareness that Adam is forcing himself, for some unimaginable reason, to return to a place he loathes.

“I have personal business to attend to,” Adam says, and then quickly, before Ronan can jump in, “I have an account to settle. Loose ends to tie up. I’m not going home, Ronan, I’m just…finishing something I started a long time ago.” Gently, he shakes Ronan’s wrist, tugs at it again, willing him to turn and face him, willing him to move back in close. He feels the space between them more keenly than ever, but he is trying to bridge it, hoping against hope that, illiterate as he is in affection of all kinds, he can find a way. To think of leaving things as they are, a sea between them and so much unresolved, is suddenly unendurable. “I couldn’t be going home even if I wanted to, because this is home. The Barnes is my home. I’m not leaving, Ronan. It’s a return journey.”

Slowly, as if unwilling, Ronan turns back towards him, but he keeps his head bent low, staring at their feet.

“Are you sure?” he says, finally, so soft that Adam has to strain to hear it. Ronan asks as though he can hardly bear to be answered. “You might feel differently once you get there.”

“I won’t,” Adam says with absolute certainty, “And in any case, why should I?”

Ronan shrugs. “I’m strange, Opal’s stranger,” Adam might dispute that ranking, some other time, “Our whole bloody life here is one weird shitstorm after another. Aren’t you afraid you’ll wake some morning and find I’ve dreamed up a swarm of lethal bees, or an avalanche, or an army of monsters?”

“Well,” Adam admits, though it is pains him a little, “Sometimes.”

“What if, once you arrive, you find you enjoy the certainty of knowing you won’t be woken by embodied nightmares, or have to spend your day chasing me and Opal around and keeping us from blowing ourselves sky high? That sounds quite…peaceful, probably.”

“I don’t want peaceful, Ronan.”

“Don’t you?”

He squeezes Ronan’s wrist and tries to imbue a single word with all the conviction he holds within himself. To convey all the mornings he has woken from dreaming about his childhood to see the faded canopy over his bed, and thought Oh, yes, I’m here again. Thank god.

“No.” Adam says.

Ronan’s eyes flutter shut. He’s silent for a long moment; Adam thinks he’s steeling himself for something more, though he cannot imagine a risk greater than those Lynch has already taken tonight.

“Why aren’t you ever frightened of me?”

Adam shrugs. This one is easy. “I don’t think you’re very frightening.”

Ronan makes a sharp noise in his throat, “You know what I can do. That should frighten any sane man.”

“I won’t stand out here in the cold with you making jokes about my sanity, Lynch,” Adam tells him, “I’m not afraid of you because I know you would never deliberately do anything to harm me, or anyone you care for.”

“But I could still hurt you,” Ronan points out, “And badly. I could have a nightmare and bring the whole house down. I’m dangerous to know.”

“Every human being has the capacity to hurt others,” Adam says calmly, because with the distance of years Adam has discovered a sense of objectivity in this regard, “And many use it.”

Bluntly, with his hand, Adam describes the line of Ronan’s broad shoulders, traces the shape of one leanly muscled arm with a fingertip, “Do you really think,” he asks quietly, “If I were still myself, and you were just an ordinary man – if you lost your temper, if I angered you – that you could not inflict real damage upon my person?”

Ronan flinches sharply, staring up at him and then quickly back at his boots, “I never would.”

“I know that,” Adam says steadily, “I’m telling you that.”

“You were right, though,” Ronan whispers to the ground, “I can’t always control it. Everyone around me is at risk. I put those I care for in the way of harm.”

Perhaps it’s the strangeness of the night; or Ronan’s earlier, filthy confessions, still burning in the back of Adam’s mind, waiting to be unpacked at a later time; or perhaps it’s the freedom of having done it twice already, bridged the gap, laid his own hand on Ronan Lynch and not been brushed away. Adam finds it easy now to lift his palm and press it, skin to skin, against the back of Ronan’s neck. His fingers curl intimately of their own accord, brushing the black hooks of his tattoo.

“I knew that a month ago, Lynch,” he tells him, “Nothing’s changed.”

Ronan nods absently, gaze still fixed on the grass at his feet. He does not believe me, Adam thinks clearly, He is certain that, in his absence, I will change my mind, and Adam suddenly feels he must do…something. Something significant. Something to break Ronan from this bleak depression and elicit a response that is visceral and true.

What he says is, “I wish I’d stayed that night.”

Ronan glances up at him warily from beneath his lashes, “Which ‘that’ night?”

“The first nightmare,” and then, feeling reckless, heart making a sharp jump in his chest, adds, “The night you kissed my arm.”

Ronan seems to curl in on himself, hanging his head even lower between his hunched shoulders. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he mutters, barely loud enough for Adam to hear.

“Kissed me?”

Ronan scrubs a hand across his scalp. He still won’t look at Adam, yet he’s made no move to put distance between them or to shake off Adam’s grasp, “Yes. No. Perhaps. Shouted at you. I was so fucking afraid of…all of it. Just. All of it. That was a goddamned awful night.”

“I still think I hear it sometimes. The sound it made.” Adam shudders involuntarily and then, when Ronan only presses his lips together and says nothing, realises belatedly that of course for him it isn’t over. It never will be. Every time he sleeps he faces the possibility of new horrors or the return of old ones, and he faces them unaided.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone with that thing,” he says fiercely, “I didn’t want to. I couldn’t stand the thought of you going to sleep with it simply…lying there. I went back to my bed half convinced it had all been a terrible dream, and half that we hadn’t really killed it and I’d wake to find you dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Ronan offers. He sounds small. Adam squeezes gently at the back of his neck. When he brushes his thumb up to the hinge of Ronan’s jaw, carefully, cautiously, he feels the skin quiver beneath his palm.

“Ronan,” he says, very quietly.

“Yes?”

Adam takes his heart in his mouth. “Do you really dream of me?”

Again, he feels Ronan tremble beneath his hand, skin pricking up to gooseflesh. He whispers, “Yes.”

Adam swallows thickly. “What do you dream?”

“Everything,” Ronan answers immediately. Perhaps it’s been on the tip of his tongue all this time, just waiting to tumble out, “Touching you, kissing you, holding you, talking to you, taking you to Rome, to Prague, to your precious bloody Ashmolean Museum. Waking up with you, going to sleep with you, chasing Opal around like a fucking lunatic with you. I dream it all,” and then, softer, a confessional murmur, “I want it all.”

Adam says nothing, just brushes his thumb again in its slow path up and down the side of Ronan’s neck. Ronan sighs surrender and finally presses into the touch. Adam thinks his eyes are closed.

“Fuck, Adam,” he says, “Do you truly want the gory details? Honestly, I know I’ve not been fair. I’ve hounded you for your every thought, and yet I’m hardly forthcoming with my own. But, Adam, I would tell you anything, if you asked me to. Every goddamn awful, vile or beautiful thing I’ve ever done or imagined. I’d make you a gift of my every secret. I think if I told you, you’d –” he swallows roughly, “I believe you’d think ill of me, for many of them, but you’ve only to say the word. I’ll do it if you ask.”

Adam stands very still, watching Ronan’s shoulders heave. His breath clouds between them, and Ronan’s voice has gone very soft.

“Stop fucking looking at me like that, Parrish,” he says quietly, ragged at the edges. Adam feels like they’re both teetering on the edge of a cliff: longing to jump, terrified you’ll fall, “You really don’t know what I am.”

And Adam, amazed that he’d ever believed this was hard, slides his hand around to cradle Ronan’s rough jaw, nudging it up.

“How do you know how I’m looking at you, Lynch?”

Adam still can’t make out Ronan’s eyes clearly in the shadows, but he can feel their weight upon him, heavy and barely contained.

“Like that,” Ronan says thickly, “Just like that.”

Ronan reaches out again, like before, his hands almost touching Adam’s face. Adam can feel the heat of them, the flush rising in his cheeks to match it.

“So?” Adam asks. He sweeps his thumb over the soft skin beneath Ronan’s eye. God, it’s so easy, now, he’ll never be able to stop; the realisation makes him shiver.

Ronan seems to see it, to sense something in it, because, delicately as he might lift a hatchling from its nest, he touches his fingers to Adam’s neck. His thumbs fit smoothly to the hinge of his jaw, as though designed for it, and Adam draws a shaky breath and looks up into the shadows of his eyes.

“You’ll tell me if you want me to stop,” Ronan says.

And Adam huffs, a laugh equal parts relief and disbelief, “Obviously,” he says, and then kisses him. Easy. “I know who you are, Ronan Lynch,” Adam says against his lips, which are soft and dry, and open for him like a safe port in a storm. He feels Ronan’s breath stutter against his chest, the length of his body swaying into Adam’s like a sapling bending helplessly in the breeze, “And the rest I will discover. I am not afraid.”

 

In Ronan’s room, in Ronan’s bed, Adam strokes a long line up Ronan’s bare arm, revelling in the feel of warm skin beneath his fingertips, the way Ronan shivers at his touch. He’s never seen so much bare skin before, nor touched it so languidly, or been able to delight so freely in it.

“Why didn’t you say anything until now? Nothing, and then an avalanche. I thought you meant to bury us.”

Ronan glares up at him balefully. “I did say something – I did something – and you flinched like I’d struck you. I thought…”

Adam starts to shake his head, and then thinks back to the night he learnt how Ronan’s nightmares sometimes followed him home. Again, he feels phantom breath against his wrist, lips against his skin.

“I was surprised,” he admits, “I’d never – I don’t have much experience,” Adam can feel the flush warming his skin.

“I didn’t think kissing required a bloody explanation.”

“I didn’t know what to think. You were injured, and we were both exhausted, and the monster was – and then – you shouted at me, and I assumed it was…I don’t know. Something else. Nothing. A physiological reaction in the aftermath of battle. I tried not to think about it, honestly.”

This is evidently the wrong thing to say. Ronan jerks himself upright and away from Adam’s hand, gathering his limbs into himself protectively.

“I see.”

“Not all of us have the luxury of listening to our feelings,” Adam snaps. He’s surprised by how suddenly the anger comes. The shift between them from perfect understanding to insurmountable difference dazes him sometimes. “Do you think I can afford to mope around, mooning after you like the damsel in a romance novel? I have responsibilities, a livelihood to make, a career to think of. I cannot afford some silly dalliance – with a man, with my employer, no less! – have you even thought of that? Do you know what would become of me if somebody found out?” Or if you tired of me, or we fought and you turned me out, or publicly disgraced me, or married, or, or –

Ronan’s face has gone cold as marble. In the low lamplight his eyes are shadowed, and his expression is utterly unreadable.

“Careless of you, Parrish, to know the risks and yet engage in such a fancy. But you needn’t worry. We haven’t done much to offend your delicate sensibilities. You can return to your bed at any time, and when you decide to seek a new position I will still furnish you with any recommendations or introductions you require. I am a despicable bastard, to be sure, but an honourable one.”

“I already told you I’m not going anywhere,” Adam snaps, “Not for long. Though I might choose to extend my journey if this self-pitying routine continues.”

“Self-pitying!” Ronan snarls. He leans forward furiously into Adam’s space. He is bare to the waist, but he looks magnificent even – perhaps especially – in his nakedness, lean and strong, as dangerous as a young god. Black ink curves low against his neck, angling for a collarbone. “I would not even know where to start. You listen to my intimate fucking confession, reassure me of your interest, take me to bed, and once you are satisfied of my affections condescend to inform me that these feelings are impractical, and our ‘dalliance’ an impediment to your career. I hope I have adequately sated your curiosity with tonight’s activities, for I assure you there will be no repeat performance.”

Adam can see their future now, unfolding before him. Their sharp edges sparking against each other indefinitely, catching fire at the least incentive. They are both prideful, angry, volatile creatures, prone to bite first and then try clumsily to apologise. If this is all they have to look forward to, it will be very, very tiring.

Carefully, he extends a hand and, just as he had some few hours before, places his palm against Ronan’s stubbled cheek.

“Ronan,” he says quietly.

Ronan glares at him ferociously, but again there’s that animal undercurrent to his stillness, watchful and intent. Wariness lurks behind his eyes. Adam slides his hand around to gently grip the back of Ronan’s neck and hold him still when he touches their foreheads together.

“I’m not like you,” he whispers into the space between them, “I’m cautious. I move slowly. Before I came here and met Opal, and Mrs Sargent, and you – god, Ronan, when I met you – I had never been…happy before. I didn’t even know I had never been happy. I had never been warm, or cared for. I had never been more affectionate with anybody than a teacher might be with a particularly promising pupil. I had colleagues amongst the staff at Aglionby, but I did not have friends. ” For someone who had claimed to want his past, past, he is certainly giving away a lot of it tonight. He breathes in slowly, feels Ronan mirror him in the intimate space between their mouths. “I did not even know, until I came here and was made to feel them, that the emotions I had read about in books were literal and real. I’m sorry that I am clumsy with words. I’m sorry I upset you. If you truly want me, you may need to accept that I will probably upset you on many, many occasions to come.

“But I do want you, Ronan. And you must believe me because I don’t know how to lie about this. I only just learnt the truth of it myself.”

There is silence for a long minute. Adam is holding his breath. The weight of it in his chest, of all the things he’s just said, and all the things Ronan might do or say in reply, is excruciating. He has never said anything like this before. He feels raw with it, flayed open.

Ronan groans something like a curse and Adam’s back hits the bed before he even understands he is in motion.

“You’re a fucking prick, do you know that?” Ronan demands. Adam nods resignedly. He does know. “You’re not leaving?”

Adam shakes his head, then nods again, “I am. But I’m coming back. I told you already. I swear it.”

“And this,” Ronan gestures between them, “It’s not…I don’t know how to do anything by halves,” Ronan says, as though this might be a secret Adam does not know. Adam snorts, ungentlemanly, and Ronan pokes him hard in the side, “I’m serious, you arsefucking bastard. This isn’t – God,” his face twists in disgust, “I’m not taking advantage of you, or exercising my ‘rights’ as master, or whatever sick fucking thing men do. I want you as my equal,” Adam stares at him, “I’m serious, fucker. We’ll find Opal another tutor, whatever you think is best. I –”

“No,” Adam says, “No, Ronan, I don’t think…I never meant that I thought that, about you. I was just trying to explain that I…I never let myself imagine this. I couldn’t. I couldn’t let myself want you, not really, without knowing you wanted me, too. It wasn’t worth thinking about. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Oh,” Ronan says, small.

Adam smooths his hands up Ronan’s thighs where they bracket his hips, brings his palms to rest at Ronan’s bare waist, digging in his fingers.

“I want you,” Adam says, feeling like he should be awarded a medal for this. He’s never been so brave in all his life, “You, your dreams, Opal. All of it.”

“The big fucking house probably doesn’t hurt.” Ronan smirks at him.

Rage and shame burn though Adam like a flash fire. He jerks back as far as he can, lying flat on his back and pinned beneath Ronan’s body, which is not very far, and Ronan –

Laughs at him. The complete and utter wanker.

“Relax, Parrish.” Adam makes a furious noise in his throat and shoves at him, and Ronan pins his hands gently beside his head, dipping in to run his nose along the side of Adam’s jaw, pushing kisses along the skin of his throat, “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m an arsehole. Tell me you want me again,” he presses a kiss beneath Adam’s ear, on his cheekbone, at the corner of his mouth, “I liked that.” His mouth moves lower again, down the side of Adam’s neck, over his chest, his ribs, as Ronan shuffles backwards to make room, “Tell me,” he insists again, “It’ll be worthwhile.”

“I want you,” Adam breathes, scratching his fingers over Ronan’s scalp, touching the pulse point racing at his jaw. He does not know what’s coming – not in the future and not now, here, in this bed, in this room – but this much is simple and true, “I want you.”

 

Later – apropos of nothing, and not because he feels beholden but because he…wants to – Adam says, “My mother is ill. I haven’t seen her in nearly ten years.”

Ronan curls his whole, long body around him and lets it alone.

 

 

 

[1] Murderable squash plant

Notes:

You know how they say you have to kill your darlings? This chapter needed a lot of that. It was so dramatic in its first itteration (by which I mean: Ronan was so dramatic). I've re-written it more than any other part of the fic.

I'm still not really sure I've gotten Ronan's confession right - at the start it was furious and a lot more explicit, and I toned it down and down and down (not that I object to explicit descriptions of sex acts Ronan Lynch wants to perform with Adam Parrish, but it was a bit much all at once)...and now I've read it too many times to be anything like objective. I seriously considered holding off on posting the fic for like another month just to give myself a bit more objectivity re: this one section.

Oh well. You guys'll tell me if it's rubbish, right? I may yet go back and give it another go over.

But I hope it's mostly alright, now, and that you enjoy it over-all.

~
Next chapter: uninvited guests, ongoing negotiations, and (let's all be honest about this) the smut I know some of you, at least, have been waiting for.

Chapter 11: Into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.

Summary:

Inconvenient guests, risky decisions, complex navigations.

 

“Come down,” he says, softly, “Opal’s asking for you.” I’m asking for you. I haven’t seen you all day and want you close.

Notes:

Warning for smut. If you like that sort of thing, read on; if you don't, read until "I like a lot of things" and then skip to the next chapter (the last few lines of this one are safe, too, but not essential).

A warning also for...not precisely period-typical homophobia, but rather anticipated difficulties arising from it. More in the endnotes for this chapter.

Apologies for not uploading this yesterday - rl is not always kind to a fic schedule.

More apologies because I have not yet replied to recent comments, for the same reason. I have, however, read and loved them all.

It’s just gone eleven when the carriages arrive. Adam and Opal are in the informal music room, which is on the second story of the old house, at the front. When she hears the commotion Opal springs up from the piano bench and clatters to the window, pressing her nose against the glass. Adam follows more sedately, roughing a hand through her dark curls as he peers down on the scene below. Gentlemen in dark coats and hats are milling about, handing ladies down from carriages, helping them to dodge last night’s puddles. He sees Declan’s tall silhouette, holding court and directing the rabble of footmen and house boys, and thinks, Here comes trouble.

Sure enough, the party still has not found their way inside when Ronan appears like a wrathful god, tight shouldered and evidently fuming. Opal stifles a giggle and Adam tries to give her a quelling look. He only half succeeds.

“What are they here for?” she whispers, as though the company below might hear them.

“I don’t know. I suppose we’ll find out. I hope Mr Declan Lynch warned Mrs Sargent, at the very least. That’s quite a lot of people.”

Opal mashes her nose more firmly against the window, blowing through her mouth to frost the glass and then, horrifyingly, licking it. Adam closes his eyes and prays for…something. Patience, maybe. The ability to keep a straight face.

“Look at all their fluffy dresses. Do you think they can run in those?”

“I doubt it,” Adam tells her honestly, “But not everybody likes to run the way you do.”

Opal looks dubious. She neither understands nor trusts the kinds of people who spend all their days indoors.

“Do you think we’ll have special dinners while they’re here?”

“Yes, you bottomless pit of a girl, I expect we shall.”

“Do you think Ronan will shout at Mr Lynch?”

“Yes,” Adam tells her wryly, feeling the tug of a smile, “I expect he will.”

“Sometimes it’s funny to watch them,” Opal confesses in a whisper.

“God,” Adam laughs, unable to supress it anymore, “You terrible child. You’re so like your father.”

Below them, the last guest mounts the steps. As he turns to go back into the house, Ronan lifts his head and sees them at the window. He pulls a terrible face, like something out of an overblown tragedy, and Opal giggles wildly and pokes out her tongue. Adam shakes his head at both of them, feeling light, and free, and overfull with feeling.

 

 

Ronan pushes open the library door and finds just what he expected: Adam is there, curled deep into that green velvet wingback he favours so much, a heavy book open across his folded knees. The chair is tucked into the window’s curve, and no one has yet drawn the curtains. The dark glass reflects the back of the chair, the very crown of Adam’s bowed head, and the glow of the tall lamp drawn up beside him. Ronan raps his knuckles twice against the doorjamb and Adam looks up.

“What are you doing, hiding up here?”

Adam shrugs blandly, “I assumed my usual chair would be taken.”

The lamplight takes his dust-coloured skin and hair and spins it into dark gold. Damn Declan. Ronan has a houseful of unwanted guests, and his fingertips ache.

“Come down,” he says, softly, “Opal’s asking for you.” I’m asking for you. I haven’t seen you all day and want you close.

Blue eyes, dark in the library’s shadows, consider him levelly. It’s hard to stand still beneath that gaze. Ronan fidgets with his cuff, stops himself, fidgets. So it goes.

“Is that an order?” Adam asks him finally. Ah. This is a test. Adam, feeling out the boundaries after last night, testing for structural changes, hidden doors.

“It’s a fucking request. Do what you’d like, but –” Ronan runs himself to a stop, huffs abruptly, and slips into the room. Adam watches him cautiously as he closes the door with care; he still has one finger marking the page in his book, like he’ll go back to it any fucking minute. Ronan crosses the room quickly, stands still for a moment in front of Adam. He’s so close that the tips of their shoes brush. Ronan softens himself at the knees, leans forward just a little. Lets their knees brush, too.

“Ronan,” Adam says, low. He swallows, and Ronan tracks the movement of his throat, “There are – you have guests.” He doesn’t say someone could walk in here any minute, but Ronan knows what he means. He curls his hand deliberately around Adam’s wrist, tucks one finger, over Adam’s, between the pages of his book.

“Come down just for a bit,” Ronan whispers, and kisses him softly. Adam sways towards him when he pulls back, one of a magnetic pair. “I want to see you.”

A tiny, private smile curves Adam’s mouth up at one end.

“Ok,” he says. Easy as breathing, “Just for a bit.”

Ronan’s chest feels strange and light and fluttery all the way back to the drawing room.

Of course, then Declan fucks it up.

“Where’s Richard?” he says, peering around the room like the man will fucking materialise.

“He and Sargent are wandering the Americas, I think. Something about climbing a pyramid.”

Declan looks sternly disapproving, which is after all the expression he does best.

“That woman is quite impossible.”

“That woman,” Ronan says definitively, “Is fucking fantastic. I have no idea how Dick convinced her to marry him.”

“Well,” says Declan easily, lounging back in his chair and swirling the whiskey in his glass, “He does have rather a lot of money.”

“You will not,” Ronan tells him precisely, “Say fucking shit about Sargent in my house. I will turn all your precious guests out into the cold, Declan. Don’t. Push me.”

“Good god, Ronan, you’re always so dramatic. In any case, I didn’t bring them here for me.”

Ronan feels abruptly cold. Instinctively, he looks first to Opal, still happily ensconced between taffeta skirts on a low couch at the other end of the room, and then, tucked into the window seat behind her, to Adam.

“What is that supposed to mean.”

“It means,” Declan says, conveying clearly that he knows Ronan knows the answer already, and is deeply irritated that they can’t simply skip over this superfluous paragraph of the conversation, “That more than one of these ladies is unattached, and will come into a very good inheritance when she marries.”

“Delightful,” Ronan grits out, “I’m so glad you have choices.”

“They’re obviously not for me, Ronan.”

“You’re the one obsessed with marriage.”

“For god’s sake, Ronan, it can’t do you any good to be rattling around here on your own all the time. It’s almost worse than when you were galivanting around the continent. You need a family. Something to focus on.”

“I have a family,” Ronan snarls. He’s keeping it quiet – his one nod to decorum – but it’s getting increasingly difficult, “And, in case you’ve lost touch with your accountant, I run an estate. Very. Well. That’s plenty to ‘focus on’, thank you.”

Declan glances at Opal. He does not, Ronan thinks, notice Adam in the shadows, but it’s probably only a matter of time. His brother has, after all, known him a long time. Dammit.

“Ronan,” Declan says quietly, “You cannot be serious. The girl is…well, who knows what she is, frankly. You need a real family. You need more than dreams.”

“Why?” Ronan hisses, “What we had not good enough for you, then?”

Declan, in an uncommon show of humanity, bites his lip. He studies the dark liquid in his glass, tipping it to and fro.

“What we had was fine. But I want more than that. And so should you.”

Ronan is about to respond with something cutting and almost certainly ill-advised, but there is a light cough and he looks up to find Miss Ashley Ingram standing before the fireplace.

“The brothers Lynch,” she says, smiling, “I wonder, might I steal you away, Ronan, for a song?”

Ronan wants to say no, of course. But he can sense the tension in Declan’s shoulders and…for fuck’s sake, they’re going to be here all week.

He gets to his feet and offers Miss Ingram his arm, like a fucking adult.

“Only if you will accompany me,” he tells her, pointedly ignoring Declan and his condescending bloody eyebrows.

From the shadows by the window, he imagines he can feel Adam’s gaze upon him as he crosses the room. He tries not to think about it, about standing here in front of all these half-strangers and his psychopomp and a man, this man – the man – he cares for, hearing people go quiet as his voice stretches out, filling the corners of the room with heartbreak and lost love.

 

He can’t go to Adam’s room. He shouldn’t. He can’t. He won’t go, because the house is full of near-strangers and Declan and if he’s found sneaking out of the tutor’s room at four in the morning, they will not understand. Though they will make some other fairly accurate and damning assumptions.

So, he won’t go.

Except.

Except that none of his uninvited guests are actually staying in the westernmost wing. Nobody ever uses the guest rooms here, because putting other people near Ronan when he’s asleep is just asking for screaming and trouble. Not to mention the rooms of dream things gathering dust on the floor above. Wouldn’t want anyone accidentally sleepwalking into the warm embrace of a carnivorous chair, or affectionate song, or that really peculiar – and Ronan does not use this word lightly – and menacing wardrobe with nothing but a huge lever inside of it, which nobody is game to pull in case it does…something.

So the corridor outside is silent and empty, all but one room, and nobody will hear him but –

He shouldn’t. He shouldn’t.

Adam is leaving tomorrow.

He will.

 

 

Adam had slipped out of the drawing room unobserved while the gathered crowed was still clapping and calling for an encore. That beautiful, heartrending song. He could still feel it humming in his finger bones. Just once, as Ronan sang, his eyes had found Adam’s across the room. He must have known that Adam was already looking at him – everybody was – but Adam felt that gaze like fingertips skimming his cheek, and he had had to look away, certain somebody would see and realise all that hung between them.

He’d returned to his room, packed, stripped, gotten into bed, and now lay still, staring up at the canopy. He’s been staring at it for a long time. An hour ago he’d heard the party downstairs disband, voices in the foyer, feet on the stairs. He’d held his breath for breathlessly good reasons as one pair of feet, distinctive in their weight and measure, passed in front of his door, stopped, moved on. He didn’t breathe again until he heard Ronan’s door close.

How was it supposed to work, this messy, emotional, physical tangle of a thing? There were no books about it, no stories, no rules. Romance was not supposed to work this way. Courting was something done in public, then marriage, then kisses, bodies, heat. At least that was what he had supposed. And then there was the other thing. What they were.

He’d looked across that drawing room tonight, his chest aching, overfull. His stomach had twisted into ungainly, half-painful shapes whenever he thought about Ronan looking back at him, speaking to  him, touching him in that room, where other people would see. He still felt the kiss in the library, the almost unbearable intimacy of Ronan’s hand on his, his finger sliding in between the pages of Adam’s book like a filthy promise of very different things. And then the evening ended and he was here, cold and alone and awake and wanting, just four rooms down from the object of his want, and Adam blinks up at the ceiling and thinks: it will always be like this.

He tests that reality in his mind.

Well, not always, always. The Barnes is special. Secluded. When they are alone here things will  probably be much as they always had been. Not much has changed, in so many ways.

But there will always be times like this, too, when fear of witnesses holds them apart. When he will be alone.

And the thing is that Adam likes women. Not that he’s had much chance to confirm it, but he’s sure none the less. He likes women the same way he likes men, which had been a hard thing to come to terms with about himself, but he’d done it quite some time ago. He could make an easier choice.

Only.

There are women, and men, and then there is Ronan Lynch, and Adam has come to suspect that he is something different altogether.

He thinks the name – thinks about the person – and feels his heartbeat slip. It isn’t that he’d doubted it. But Adam is calculating, pragmatic. He always has been before. He’d had to know, for himself, that there was not a simpler way. Thick shame warms him as he thinks it – Ronan is so total in his affections, Adam’s caution feels insidious, traitorous, cruel – but he can’t stop himself. To discover that there is no other way, that it is Ronan himself, and not his body or his type, to whom Adam has become attached, sooths him even as it wakes fresh guilt to match the shame.

He will do better, now he knows.

And knowing the truth of his own feelings will make the hardships – secrets, lying, kissing only behind locked doors – bearable. He rolls onto his side and pulls his knees up to his chest, tucking his chin against them. Four doors down, Ronan is lying in his own bed, curled into its empty chill. Adam hopes he is asleep, dreaming sweetly. He pulls the coverlet up over his head and tries again to sleep.

Not five minutes later there is a tap at his door. Adam startles, badly, having missed the scuff of approaching feet. For a long moment he thinks perhaps sleep has found him after all and this is the dream. His father has finally invaded The Barns and now, two stories up, he has no escape.

“Adam,” comes Ronan’s low voice through the door. Adam breathes raggedly, boneless in his relief, then pushes his bedclothes aside and delicately unlatches the door.

Ronan stands in trousers, shirt, bare feet, his dressing gown thrown over the top for warmth. His eyes are avid, hungry, curious as he peers around Adam into his room: the bare dresser, bare rug, the boots lined up neatly beneath a ladder-backed chair. Only the rumpled bed shows signs of disordered, recent occupancy. Adam stands back wordlessly, and Ronan slips inside and slides the latch home.

“Trouble sleeping?” Ronan asks. Routine.

“Yes. You?”

“Yes,” Ronan says, then breaks tradition and kisses him.

Adam pushes up on his toes, closing the spare inches between them, pressing into Ronan’s warmth. Ronan gasps into his mouth and sinks his fingers into Adam’s hair, reeling him in, holding him close. As if Adam is going anywhere. He shoves his cold hands in under Ronan’s dressing gown and shirt, palms against his back, and Ronan gasps again, sharper, shocked, and then laughs delightedly into his mouth, “Fuck,” he mutters, “Fuck, shhhh,” as if Adam is the one making all this noise, “Don’t make me laugh.”

What a request.

“Are you coming to bed with me?” Adam whispers, soft, into his mouth.

“Yes,” says Ronan instantly, “Yes, I mean, if –”

“I want you to. Come to bed. It’s freezing.” Ronan crowds him backwards until his knees hit the bed and he folds down upon it. He tugs at Ronan’s dressing gown. “Take this off.” Then his trousers, “These, too.”

“I think you like ordering me around,” Ronan whispers.

“I like it better when you do what I say,” and Ronan grins, quick and sharp in the moonlight, and shucks the specified articles. Adam backs across the bed and Ronan follows him, crawling up over his legs until he hovers, poised, above him. Adam reaches out a hand and draws cold fingers down his throat, over his chest, into the deep V of his shirt. Ronan shivers, watching him.

“What do you want?” he whispers. His voice has gone low, rough. Adam feels it in his belly.

“I don’t know, yet,” Adam answers truthfully, unashamed of this, at least, “I’m finding out as I go.”

“You can have anything,” Ronan tells him, a little shaky, “You can do anything you want.”

“Dangerous offer,” Adam quips.

“Yes. I mean it.”

The fabric of Ronan’s shirt is so thin that Adam can see shadows beneath it, the dark hair under his arms, the peak of a nipple when Adam stretches the material taught against his ribs. Ronan is breathing hard, staying perfectly still. Adam flicks the nipple experimentally, through the muslin, and he shudders.

What do I want? Adam thinks. For him to miss me. To want me. To make him come apart. To be worth the strain and the risk. To bring him undone.

“What do you like?” he asks into the warm space between them.

Ronan rolls his eyes and huffs, half a laugh. “A lot of things, Parrish.” When he says it, it sounds expansive, dangerous. Like something Adam wants to do. “I like a lot of things.”

“Tell me. Even just one. Or tell me about your dreams,” he swallows, feeling suddenly hyper aware of the feel of cloth against his naked skin, of Ronan’s knee at his hip, bleeding heat through his nightshirt. “Tell me what I do to you.”

“Jesus Christ.” Ronan bows over him to rest his forehead against Adam’s shoulder, below his good ear. He’s silent for so long that Adam gets nervous. He runs a slow hand up Ronan’s arm, curling his fingers protectively about his shoulder.

“You don’t have to,” Adam says, “Obviously. We can just –” he edges his fingers towards Ronan’s neck, touches his ear, his jaw. Thinks about touching his mouth.

“What if I scare you off?” Ronan mumbles. Adam can feel the words against his skin as he hears them, “What if I say something and you think it’s – or I ask you to do something and you think there’s –” he stops again, and takes a deep, shuddering breath against Adam’s neck, as though fortifying himself for battle. He turns his head slightly and deliberately, and whispers clearly into the quiet, “I don’t want you to think there’s something wrong with me, or that I’m damaged or…disgusting, somehow. You haven’t done this before. I’m afraid if you think about it, you’ll change your mind.”

Adam feels very still inside, listening to Ronan speak. As though he is smoothing out and calming to compensate for the raw wretchedness in Ronan’s voice. He moves his hand carefully over the soft fuzz at Ronan’s nape, sooths the skin above the only eyebrow he can reach.

“Really?” Adam asks, trying this tack first because he is, at heart, a bit of a prick, “You were quite descriptive last night.”

But Ronan will not be teased.

“Adam.” He tangles a hand in Adam’s nightshirt, body held tense above him like jockey waiting for the starting gun.

“I can’t promise what I don’t know,” Adam whispers, “But I know you. The only disgusting things about you are your table manners, sometimes your sense of humour. And I don’t think you’re damaged, not in that way. I don’t think either of us are. There’s nothing wrong with you, Ronan. I can’t tell you that I’ll like everything you tell me, because I don’t know that I will. But I want to know what you want. I want to understand you. I want to give you what I can.”

This seems like an enormous speech. But everything he’s said is true, and Adam feels as if he has perhaps atoned, a little, for his traitorous, shameful pragmatism of an hour ago. Ronan takes a deep, shuddering breath and presses his forehead into Adam’s shoulder.

“Your hands,” he whispers into Adam’s shirt, “I dream about your hands a fucking lot. All over me. Your nails on my back. Leaving bruises, sometimes. I think about them in my mouth, or stroking me off,” he shudders, voice dropped so low it’s barely a breath between them, “In my ass. Do you know about that? It’s one of the ways men fuck. Hurts if it’s done badly. But with you… Fuck. I want your fingers inside me. I want to be as close to you as I can get.”

Adam did not know about that.

He thinks about pressing his fingers into the secret spaces of Ronan’s body and his chest hitches unevenly. He wonders if Ronan feels it, or if he’s too focussed on getting the words out, bridging the space between them. He wonders if Ronan has ever said these things to anyone else. He hopes not. He thinks perhaps not. It doesn’t sound like he’s had much practice. Adam splays his fingers over Ronan’s skull, trailing down over his nape, feeling overfull and with nowhere yet to put it all.

“Kiss me,” he breathes, “God, Lynch. Kiss me.”

Ronan lifts his head and meets his gaze head on. The kiss, when it comes, is almost tentative, slow. He noses sweetly over Adam’s jaw, his cheek, shares breath with him for a moment before softly closing the distance. Adam’s hands come up of their own accord to lace at the back of his neck and he feels something in Ronan relax as he pulls him close. They kiss for a long time, until Adam’s breath is shallow and Ronan’s arms are trembling with the effort of holding himself up. Adam unweaves his fingers and pushes gently against Ronan’s shoulder until he rolls off him and settles on his side, noses almost touching, face to face.

“Mr Lynch,” Adam says softly.

Ronan smiles crookedly, “Parrish.”

Adam moves his hand up Ronan’s shoulder, the fine stuff of his shirt bunching and evening out beneath his palm, over the collar, warming against the smooth skin of his neck and then prickling over stubble, along his jaw, over his cheek. He comes to a stop with his fingers splayed, thumb resting barely at the corner of Ronan’s mouth. Ronan is watching him, holding very still. Adam brushes his thumb back and forth a few times, catching on stubble. He shifts his hand again to run the pad of his thumb across Ronan’s lower lip. Ronan’s eyes flutter shut and he opens his mouth.

Adam has never imagined this. That makes him feel boring, suddenly, a different kind of shame. What other glories await him, that he has never even thought to desire? Ronan, with his wild past and his wonderous, fantastical brain has already thought of a thousand things that Adam, in his poor, small, narrow life, has never even dreamed of. He wants all of those things abruptly, with a desperation and a longing so strong it feels barely containable. Or maybe it’s not sudden. Perhaps it’s been there all along, only now, for the first time, he allows himself to feel it.

He slides his thumb into Ronan’s mouth. He feels the slick of his inner lip, the smooth surface of his teeth and the sharp edge as he pushes over them, deeper, and then shudders as Ronan meets him with his tongue. Ronan’s lips close around his knuckle and Adam groans involuntarily, feeling sparks thunder in his chest, blood rush from his head. At the sound, Ronan grabs for him; a thoughtless, graceless motion, as though he is unable to keep his hands from Adam’s body a moment longer. He laves his tongue over the pad of Adam’s thumb as he fists his hand in his shirt. Adam crushes their mouths together. It’s messy because his thumb is still in the way, and he uses it to tug Ronan’s mouth open again; when Ronan moans, Adam feels it all through his chest. Hands, he decides, should always be involved in kisses. It is a travesty that he has never even thought to want this before.

Ronan’s hand is everywhere, sliding over his back, his shoulder, his arse. His other is trapped between their bodies and he uses it to stroke haphazard lines over Adam’s chest, to press a splayed handprint against his belly. Ronan runs his palm, hard, down Adam’s thigh, breaching the border between nightshirt and bare flesh, and Adam’s breath hitches against his mouth. It tugs the breath from his body to be manhandled like this, gently but easily, his knee pulled up to drape over Ronan’s hip, a comforting squeeze at his ankle before Ronan pushes his palm up again, fingers splayed so that his thumb traces a burning line up the inside of Adam’s thigh, under his shirt. Adam feels it catch in the hair between his legs, and his breath stutters with the closeness of Ronan’s hand to the place he suddenly wants most to be touched.

Ronan pulls away from the kiss, but only to turn his head into Adam’s palm, catching the pads of two fingers against his mouth, and opening eagerly when Adam pushes them in. It’s suddenly unbearable to have only one useable hand, and he uses his knee to roll them again. He feels uncertain for a moment, hovering above Ronan with his fingers in his mouth, and then Ronan runs both hands up his thighs, under his shirt, to grip his hips and pull Adam down against him, and Adam goes.

“Fuck,” he whispers, half wondering, “Ronan.”

Ronan is laid out below him, flushed, sweat-soaked. The thin muslin of his shirt, stuck to his body, is somehow more obscene than his naked flesh would be. Adam can feel him through two layers of fragile cloth, hard, between his thighs. When he presses down Ronan’s eyelashes flutter and he arches back against the bed, groaning around Adam’s fingers. Adam grinds down again, and Ronan’s hands spasm on his hips, pulling him into a hard, sloppy rhythm. Adam tugs uselessly at the shirt trapped between them.

“Ronan,” he whispers, bending to kiss him around his fingers, dragging them spit-slick from Ronan’s mouth and down his throat and further until they’re caught by the V of his shirt, “Ronan, please.” Ronan’s hands leave his body to tangle hard in his hair, and he kisses him, swift, and then releases him with a groan, shoving at Adam, cursing, fighting the sweat-damp fabric that clings to him like another skin. He moves to pull Adam’s shirt off, too.

“No,” Adam says, pushing him back down, a hand splayed over the bare span of his ribs, “I like you like this.”

“Fucker,” Ronan swipes sweat from his eyes with his forearm, grabs the front of Adam’s shirt to haul him down, “Fuck. Adam.”

Adam fits his hand between them and Ronan swears gloriously and profusely into his mouth.

Is this too fast? Adam doesn’t know, he’s never done more than kiss one of the townie girls, and only twice. Even if he had done more, he thinks that this would still be different. Ronan is different; because he’s Ronan, obviously, but also because they know one another. Before last night, Adam had never touched more of Ronan Lynch than anyone might, except to dress a wound. But it had not felt strange to do it, to lay his palm against the bare skin of Ronan’s chest, twine his fingers in the dark hair there, feel a nipple peaking beneath the pad of his thumb. It had been natural to touch him, an obvious extension of everything that had already built between them. If it was fast, to go from kissing to touching to whatever tonight might bring, it did not feel so. It felt inevitable, and as though, looking back on it, they had been approaching this very moment – Ronan’s hands on his ribs, his thighs – for months.

And Adam knows something else, too. He knows that tomorrow he will step up into a carriage that will take him far from The Barns, and Opal, and Ronan, over the sea and back to where he began, to the place he had hoped never to return. And when he goes, he wants to have this to take with him. The thought of it – and he has thought of it, often, in the past twenty four hours, trying to imagine what it would be like, trying not to let himself blush over the images it produced in his mind – is not enough. He wants a memory, verifiable knowledge of the shape of Ronan’s hands against his stomach, the scent of his release on Adam’s skin. He wants it to take with him, to shield him against the inevitable chill of Henrietta, and his mother’s flat stare.

“You, too,” Ronan mutters, “Here,” and shows Adam how to wrap his fingers around the both of them, adding his own rough grip.

It’s so much. It’s not nearly everything Adam wanted to do, but it feels overwhelming enough for now. His most secret skin slides against Ronan’s, against his own long fingers and Ronan’s calloused palm. It’s almost painfully dry, until Ronan swipes his thumb through the wetness at Adam’s tip and Adam chokes, kisses him, learns fast and echoes the gesture. Ronan swears beneath him, tensing and thrashing about, and then Adam, impulsively, closes his teeth around one nipple and Ronan throws his arm across his face to bite back a shout as he spills over their joined hands. Slicker, now, Adam reaches for himself again, and is poised on the edge when Ronan look up at him, digging his fingers into the meat of Adam’s thigh, and breathes, “Adam, God.” And Adam’s release collapses him forwards, breathing like he’s run for miles.

Ronan kisses his nose, his eyebrows, his forehead, his ear, anything he can get to. He coaxes Adam’s face up and mouths along his jaw. Adam opens for him with the same instinct that drives a flower to turn and follow the sun’s path, thoughtless and warm, and Ronan kisses him softly and with great thoroughness.

“Adam,” he breathes, “Adam, Jesus.”

“You’re beautiful,” Adam murmurs, groggy and already half asleep, “Stay here.”

“I’m supposed to be telling you that,” Ronan laughs at him, dragging his fingertips down Adam’s cheek, “I don’t want you to go.”

Adam feels the weight of reality pressing, sudden and inexorable, down upon him again. He shoves it viciously back.

“Don’t talk about it,” he orders, “Just pretend it isn’t happening,” then softer, “Pretend you can stay.”

Ronan twines an arm around his neck, hauling him close, and presses a kiss against his forehead. Then he laughs.

“I can’t believe you kept your shirt on and made me take mine off. Filthy fuck.” He sounds impressed. Adam smiles against his collarbone.

Notes:

Well, I hope that eased a little of the tension. Be gentle with me, it was my first time (and Adam's!).

 

A note on period-typical homophobia in this fic.

 

In fiction, there are two main routes you can take when dealing with oppression: either write it as-is for a given time and place, or invent a world where it doesn't exist. Honestly, I found the thought of writing this fic true to history too hideous to seriously contemplate. For context, in the UK sodomy was punishable by the death penalty until 1861. The death penalty. That's important LGBTIQ+ history to know. But it's also awful to think about, and I felt that to write characters who were trying to deal with that reality would take more attention and careful handling than I was able to give this fic. I mean, if you're lucky enough to live in a society where the legality of your relationships is dictated only by consent, can you imagine what that must be like? To try to have a healthy relationship, to love someone, with that risk hanging over your head? I realy, truly can't, and that makes me incredibly lucky, because those risks certainly are not ancient history everywhere in the world.

However, I also opted not to go in the other direction and make homosexual relationships commonplace and open. This is because altering attitudes and laws to this extent would have had far-reaching consequences for the rest of society, like changing inheritance laws, and the status of women. I basically decided not to do that because I get really into world-building and forget that I'm supposed to be writing a story.

So, in this fic, sodomy is not illegal. It's heavily frowned upon, and there's a lot of pressure to marry someone of the opposite sex and stay in the closet, but same-sex sex won't land you in jail or a mental asylum, or get you murdered by the state (interestingly, marriage wasn't actually defined as being between a man and a woman until 1866 in the UK, meaning that same-sex marriages did occasionally occur). Adam has reasonable anxieties about his future and his career, should anyone discover his proclivities, but he doesn't have to worry about literally being put to death for falling in love with a man. It's not perfect at all, but it was a middle ground I felt equipped to handle.

Also important: FYI/lest those of us who no longer have to live with it ever forget, homosexuality is still illegal, and punishable by an array of horrifying things, in many parts of the world. It's really important that the recent advent of legal same-sex marriage in many places does not lull us into thinking that things are fine now. They aren't, and we all need to take action wherever possible to change things for the better.

/note.

 

As ever, your reading, commenting, kudos-ing, etc. makes me incredibly happy. Thank you to everyone who commented on the last chapter particularly.

Happy reading - let me know what you think.

~
Next chapter: a reluctant journey, an unfortunate reunion, an unresolved mystery.

Chapter 12: It is a long way to Ireland.

Summary:

The solace of the exquisitely ordinary, and a reluctant traveller, duty-bound.

 

“You’ll miss us,” she said, firmly.
“Yes,” he told her honestly, “Every day.”
“Every fucking day,” she corrected sternly.
“Yes. I will.”

When he wakes at dawn Ronan is gone, and the bed around him is rumpled and cold. Adam lies on his back in this, the sole bastion of life in his room, and tries to breathe around the disappointment. Somehow, knowing it was coming had not made it more bearable.

He feels sticky with sweat and something even less comfortable. His shirt is a disaster. How had he not thought about this? He, Adam Parrish, stickler for cleanliness and rules. Last time he had been insulated by the general chaos of Ronan’s room, of Ronan himself, and besides, they hadn’t gone far enough to make much of a mess. He hadn’t thought about the practicalities. What would the maids think when they came for his linens and his laundry? How could he ring for a bath in this state? Once again, the cold facts of what they are doing press in around him. But this time he is more prepared. He knows what he wants. He knows why he’s doing this.

And he is not in it alone. He’s reminded of this five minutes later when a maid knocks at his door to tell him there is a bath in Master Lynch’s room, and would he like to use it. Ronan is already gone when he slips through the door, and again disappointment unfurls in Adam’s chest. But the bath still steams by the fireplace, as though it has been freshly drawn, and the note folded beside it on a stool says simply You know where my laundry basket is. So he’s not the only one thinking about this, after all. Something settles in him, and he feels again the now-familiar shame, this time for assuming that Ronan would not, in his casual, leave it, Parrish way, extend his circle of protection to include them both. He is not very good at this, Adam thinks. He hopes he’ll get better.

Adam sinks into the bath, breathing in the scent of Ronan’s soap and the faint hint of his cologne, and lets his head slide beneath the water.

 

 

Breakfast is a strange kind of torture.

Adam is used to it being just the four of them: Ronan, Opal, Mrs Sargent and himself. But Mrs Sargent has been banished to below stairs, Opal to her nursery, and the table is packed elbow to elbow with last night’s party, speaking over-loud and laughing and making plans that include the master of the house but not children or working women or school teachers. Adam makes up a plate at the sideboard, and when he looks up his eyes slide unerringly to Ronan’s where he sat, distant and dark and cool, at the head of the table. Ronan’s gaze is already upon him, and for a moment, Adam catches in it an echo of his own sadness. Last night, yes, but not this. They will never have this.

Adam ducks his head takes his breakfast to the schoolroom.

 

 

The coach would be here at ten. Opal seemed distracted, though whether this was due to his imminent departure, Ronan’s spiralling mood, or the unaccustomed thrum of people in her home, Adam couldn’t tell. He went through the lessons he had planned out for her in his absence, repeated his mandate on bibliophagia – no – and explained again, when she asked, that yes, he did have to leave, but he would certainly be back. When? He didn’t want to give her a date, in case he was forced to extend his stay. But. Soon, he promised, As soon as I possibly can.

“You’ll miss us,” she said, firmly.

“Yes,” he told her honestly, “Every day.”

“Every fucking day,” she corrected sternly.

“Yes. I will.”

Ronan had been called away, on farm business or Declan business, or the complicated task of entertaining ten surprise guests.

When he goes upstairs for his bag, Adam finds another note, slipped underneath his door.

Come back.

He folds it into the inner pocket of his coat and feels stupid, and sentimental, and relieved.

Adam goes. He hates it, but he has always been better at doing what he should than what he wants.

 

 

And it is, as Ronan (or Opal) would say, fucking awful. Predictably.

Over six days, by coach, rail and ferry, Adam travels first to Dublin, then Liverpool, and on past London. Ronan had offered to write ahead to friends and have him stay with them, but Adam didn’t wish to become snared in London’s messy tangle. He wanted this journey to be as fast, as unemotional, as bloodless as possible. And he had feared, too, that spending time with people who loved and knew Ronan would expose them. He imagined being far from him, being forced to speak about him and Opal, and was convinced that anyone who heard him would know, instantly, what he felt and what they were to one another.

On the morning of the seventh day, Adam alighted from the coach before Henrietta’s wide, wrought-iron gates. The coachman handed down his bag and Adam set off. Henrietta was smaller than The Barnes, more traditional by far. The gravel drive led straight and true to the front of the house, and Adam slipped around the back to the kitchen door, as he’d always done, and rang the bell.

When Cook answered she blinked at him a moment, as short sighted as ever, and he had to introduce himself.

“Adam? Little Adam Parrish! Come in, come in, sit down and let me look at you. My, you’ve grown, a great strapping young thing. And look at your fine suit! Your mam will be so proud.”

“How is she?” Adam ventured, over tea and thick brown toast.

“Well,” Cook said awkwardly, “You know how it is. She’ll be better for seeing you, I’m sure.”

Adam smiled politely, because they both knew well that if his mother had not asked to see him in a decade, it was unlikely to bring her any particular joy now.

“Mr Smythe’s letter said she was to move into one of the old workman’s cottages. I intended to call on him for directions.”

The conversation did not much improve from this point. Laid out beside his life now, at The Barns, Adam felt keenly all the ways that Henrietta was thin and sparse and cold. Was it just that he had a place, now, a role in a household that was genuinely valuable? Where he was genuinely valued, by Opal, by Mrs Sargent, not least of all by Ronan? If he’d stayed, once his father could no longer harm him, might he have found his way to warmth and companionship here, too? Or was it the special magic of The Barnes and the strange family that Ronan Lynch had built around himself there, which allowed Adam, also strange, apart, lonesome in some essential way, to flourish?

Henrietta was still beautiful, formal gardens still lush and green. But it felt small, now, and its loveliness superficial. He itched to leave it as soon as he had arrived. They passed him around from Cook, to housekeeper, to butler, and he smiled politely, and drank more tea, and gave what news he had of London and Ireland and the wider world. When pressed about his situation and The Barnes, he said only that he was tutor to one child, that the grounds were large and beautiful, the family good and wealthy, and that he was content in his work. And they, in turn, asked no further.

It was nearing the luncheon bell when Adam found himself on narrow dirt path, sweeping the edge of one of the further pastures and down towards the very stream that had, so long ago, spat up his father’s body onto its grassy banks. The cottage nestled into its curve was dim and low and small; Adam had to duck his head to enter. Inside it was a front room the width of the cot, with a single door in the far wall leading to, he supposed, a bedroom. The floor was bare, and the furniture the usual strange, old-fashioned assortment of things too functional to throw away, but too uncomfortable or ugly to keep at the main house.

His mother looked like that, too.

Adam did not realise, until he saw her, that he had remembered her in any particular way. But looking down at her thin, pinched face, the taught tangle of her birdlike fingers in her lap, he thought: bigger. Stronger. More aloof. Had she always been this small? Was it only his smallness that had made her seem huge? Not huge like his father, but looming always one step behind him, watching his movements with cool, impassive grey eyes.

I suppose this is what it is to return to a home you’ve long outgrown.

Where, up at the house, their questions had been polite and true to form, hers were listless, barely interrogatory. He repeated the same neat points about his living situation. She said, “So you’re well paid, then?”

He nodded, wearily, feeling weight settle on his shoulders.

“Do you need money, ma’am?”

She snorted.

“Look at this place. Tossed out with the trash like used furniture.”

Adam felt a wash of shame for thinking the same thing, and then the reverse, a stillness, because it was irrational to be ashamed of what was true.

“I’ll help you get settled. We’ll make the best of it.” There were obvious limits to this plan, but he would try. “I can’t stay very long. A week at most. I have to get back to my pupil.”

 

 

It’s been ten days, and his back aches from sleeping on a palette on the floor. I’ve grown soft, Adam thinks.

He doesn’t have a specific destination in mind when, after cleaning up the lunch things as his mother dozes on the couch, he puts on his coat. He knows where his feet will take him, though. He gives the stables a wide berth, not wishing to see the stablemaster – his old master – in his good wool coat with no patches, his sleek black hat. In this place he feels every word his father ever said to him, needling at his skin. Skulking in corners and reading! You ungrateful, jumped-up brat! Look at me when I talk to you! Adam’s gratitude has always flown in the wrong direction: away from his parents, his unseen master and mistress, the thin cot above the stables, and towards forests, school, the Irish countryside.

It’s only when he hears water and looks down to find himself on the edge of a narrow, sluggish brown stream that he realises he’s come too far. Or…something. He climbs back up the slope, wondering how he could have come so far around without noticing, and –

There are the stables. On the other side of a wide, familiar lawn. He turns back to look down a weedy slope, thick with dandelion leaves and other untamed things.

There’s not a tree in sight.

When he gets back to the cottage he feels flushed, feverish.

“Mother, what happened to the forest?”

“The forest?”

“Yes, you know, the little wood, down the hill from the stables. Where the stream runs.” He can’t quite bring himself to say ‘where my father died’.

She looks at him with puzzlement woven in between the perpetual creases of malcontent. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snaps. And she doesn’t.

Neither does anybody else.

The forest where Adam had played and read and sat and walked and thought, where he had run, limping and frozen, and hidden, the forest with whom – with which? With what? – he had so long ago made a pact, is…gone. Vanished. Never has been at all.

The facts of its once-was remain: his father (still dead), his release from Henrietta (still occurred) and his bond (the rustle of leaves when he turns a card, the nudge to move a stone, clear a creek, prune back an overly enthusiastic vine). But the trees he had known like the back of his hand are gone, and no sign of their unruly roots remains.

 

 

In the end, he stays five weeks and change, not accounting for the two weeks of cumulative travel time. On the last night of his journey from The Barnes, with a hot mix of guilt and pragmatism, Adam had stitched the money for his return travel into the lining of his coat. Now, it’s all that he has left.

But it’s alright. It’s enough. It will get him home.

Notes:

I re-read this chapter and felt just exhausted on Adam's behalf (although, world being what it is, perhaps the exhaustion was there already and the chapter just fit?).

I hope you're all taking very good care of yourselves and other people right now, we all need it.

~
Next week: Return, reunion, catastrophe, confession.

Thank you all so much for reading and commenting and kudos-ing this fic. It means so much to me, really truly. I'm sorry I'm behind on answering comments - I'll catch up by the next chapter, I promise! (I have read them all, though, and they were lovely).

Chapter 13: To get back again to you: part I

Summary:

A warm homecoming, an uncertain welcome, a bad shock.

 

“He said I could visit,” Opal tells Mrs Sargent eagerly, “There are cows and…little cows. Dereliquit vitulos aureos. Et agnus.” She looks at Adam for help.
“Calves,” he says, “Lambs – small sheep, infants.”
“La-mbbbb-s,” she rolls the ‘b’ in her mouth, “We’ll see them.” She says it definitively, a small empress directing her court.

Because he had stayed away so much longer than anticipated, nobody is expecting him. Adam arrives unannounced and slips up to his room before anyone sees. He climbs out of his travelling clothes and washes briefly, pulling on fresh things. In the back of his mind is a knot of feeling which began to warm and uncurl as soon as the carriage turned onto the drive and he smelled clear, familiar air, the scent of moss and mist and new growth. When Adam touches on it, he can admit that his clothes matter, the state of his hair matters, his clean face and hands and collar and cuffs matter for the same reason that he has butterflies in his stomach.

Ronan.

Adam wonders where he is. The problem with an estate this size is that, in the middle of a warm afternoon in late spring, he could be anywhere. Ronan is probably out in the fields or in the barns or talking with the gardeners or in his study or in the woods with Opal or in the library with a book or riding or walking or –

Adam goes to find Mrs Sargent, whose schedule is somewhat more predictable. He knocks on the door to the housekeeper’s room and when he steps inside Mrs Sargent beams at him and presses his hands warmly between her own, and Adam feels something in his chest settle squarely back into place.

“Why Mr Parrish, what a start you gave me. You’ve been gone so long we weren’t sure you’d be back for Christmas!” Adam feels the first claw of guilt, but Mrs Sargent lays one firm, brown hand over his own and says, in a way that brooks no argument, “You stayed away no longer than you had to, I’m sure. It’s good to have you back. Your little pupil has been such a scamp, wild thing that she is. And Mr Lynch, I’m afraid, has not been in the best of moods, but you’re well used to that by now.”

Only pure will keeps Adam from pressing her relentlessly. Instead he manages to ask about broader things – the farm, the house, the lives and loves of various servants – because he’s been gone almost two months. A lot can happen in that time. He keeps up a steady flow of precise, targeted questions about everyone except Ronan Lynch, and hopes that doesn’t give anything away.

When it’s time for tea he goes out with Mrs Sargent to take it on the terrace. When Opal bounds up from the garden and sees him sitting at the table, she freezes for a second, and Adam’s heart stops. Then she grins, wide enough to split her face, and only his quick reflexes save the tea things from an inglorious demise. She clings to him, arms tight around his neck and booted hooves dangling feet above the ground and he hugs her tightly, spins her around so she laughs, and finally sets her down again so he can tousle her hair and tell her that he’s sure she’s grown.

“Ronan is on the farm,” she tells him. Adam doesn’t know whether he was being obvious, or if she knows him that well, or if it’s just something she happened to be thinking about at that moment, “Vaccarum[1],” she shrugs, as though that explains it all.

“He’s never at the house much in the spring,” Mrs Sargent explains, “There are workman’s cottages in the far fields, and he often stays there with the men, for convenience.”

Adam tries to look pleasantly interested. His disappointment makes the scones taste stale.

“He said I could visit,” Opal tells Mrs Sargent eagerly, “There are cows and…little cows. Dereliquit vitulos aureos. Et agnus.” She looks at Adam for help.

“Calves,” he says, “Lambs – small sheep, infants.”

“La-mbbbb-s,” she rolls the ‘b’ in her mouth, “We’ll see them.” She says it definitively, a small empress directing her court.

“We’ll have to wait until it’s convenient,” Adam tells her. His heart is trying to escape through his mouth. Convenient. Every part of him thrums with impatience. He wants to see Ronan. He wants it now. “I’m sure they’re very busy with their work. Perhaps we could go on Sunday, after the men come back from church.” That’s three whole days away; surely Ronan will come home before then. It shouldn’t be this excruciating. He’s already waited more than seven weeks.

Of course, this is exactly why it is excruciating. Adam feels it again, the wanting. Had he even known what the word meant, before these past weeks? What a curse. What a revelation. What a wonder.

 

Something big has changed in Adam’s absence; only a month and a half or so, he knows, but it feels much longer. Perhaps it’s only spring, but the house seems louder, brighter, more excitable. Something about it unsettles him. It’s two days before he finds out why.

Ronan has not come back to the house. Adam sinks into the rhythm of The Barnes like a swimmer diving into a well-known lake: it’s different every time, and it’s work, but it’s good work, and he is satisfied. Still, he lies awake longer than he ought, listening and trying not to listen for a familiar tread in the hall. Does he know I’m back? Gossip flies around the estate at breakneck speed. Is he waiting for me?

While he was gone he’d sent a few letters. The first, just a note to say he was there and safe, and to give his contact details. The second, addressed to Ronan but to be passed on to Opal and Mrs Sargent, to say that his one week must turn into two. The third, yet again prolonging his expected date of departure, brief with the weight of things he either could not say or did not wish to: that he missed Ronan like a limb, that he wanted achingly to come home, that just three weeks at Henrietta and he had begun already to recognise the pinch of his mother’s exhaustion around his own mouth, the hunch of his father’s bitter rage in his shoulders. Mrs Sargent had replied with reassurance, and good wishes for his mother’s prospects and his imminent return. Ronan had replied first to acknowledge his arrival, in words which had been brisk but faintly sweet; then, to approve his delay, brisker and a little sharp; and finally just a note that said: received. And Adam had felt the full inadequacy of written language crashing down around him. He’d folded the notes into his breast pocket, hoping to catch that illusive scent of mist and moss and leather, The Barnes, Ronan, home.

And now he is home, and he feels that he is, but still, Ronan is missing. Received. Was he angry when he wrote that? Bitter? Sad? Annoyed? Adam had felt all those things when he read it, and then over again when he thought about why he was reading it, the woman who was sitting placidly in the rocking chair by the window, doing slow piecework in her lap, expecting him to sort out her affairs. She had not asked for his money or time, not directly, but she had expected it with the passive entitlement of someone who believed herself overdue. Mrs Parrish had not had a good life, a nice life, the life she wanted. She felt cheated of the things she had been owed, and expected him to make up the difference.

And Adam had. Not because he felt any particular filial duty, or indeed any real guilt about its absence, but because Adam wanted the same thing now that he had wanted then: freedom, and to be beholden to no person but himself. He would pay this unofficial debt because that would close the account, and then he would be free. Once he understood his place in the design, it was easy, and Adam had moved furniture, settled bills, bought supplies as far as his meagre savings would allow, and then climbed back into the coach with his few belongings and left Henrietta for good, conscience a clean, bright page.

But Ronan’s missive, and his absence, gnaws at him. He can’t sleep.

 

Because Opal wishes to do an experiment involving oil, and water, and possibly matches, Adam is in the kitchen. Because he is in the kitchen, he hears almost the whole story before he has realised what it means, and why he absolutely cannot bear to be listening to this.

He can’t think. When he had seen Miss Ingram the night before he left, he had not sensed anything between them. There had been the duet, a novel-worthy excuse for lingering stares and hidden meanings, but if there’d been anything to see, he hadn’t noticed it.

But perhaps that was because the only person he had noticed Ronan looking at was himself. And of course that night he’d been…distracted. Ronan hadn’t mentioned it in any letter; then again, Ronan hadn’t mentioned much in any letter.

A lot can happen in two months, says a flat, placating voice in his head that sounds a lot like his mother. Would it have been different, if he’d come home as planned? Written more often and more fully? Not stayed away so long?

He turns this new fact in his head, a fresh part he can’t make fit with the whole he knows. A whole which had felt so steady and real and possible when he’d left, and now feels fragile as spun glass in his long hands. Ronan is so all-consuming, so focussed, so loyal. He pictures the man he knows and cannot imagine him for a moment giving in to society’s pressures and committing himself to a loveless marriage.

The answers to this paradox are obvious. Either, a) it is not loveless or, b) Adam does not know him at all. Because when he thinks about ‘b’ his heart aches like it’s gripped in a vice and his head feels too light for his shoulders, he focusses on ‘a’. Is it possible that Ronan could have fallen in love with Miss Ashley Ingram? It certainly seems improbable, but then, Ronan is improbable. And quite impossible, too, for that matter. And it is true that he throws himself bodily into everything. If he does love this woman, know himself to love her, then of course he would not hesitate to marry her sooner rather than later. Adam has known from the beginning that this was a possibility. Ronan is wealthy, landed, from a good family. Adam had always known there was a risk that, someday, either for love or pragmatism, he might have to make a more legitimate, legally consecrated match. But he had not expected it would be so soon. They’ve not even known each other a full year, yet.

Adam’s heart spasms again. He had thought they would have more time. He had thought…

But obviously he had been mistaken. He does make mistakes, sometimes. And he has always survived them thus far.

He will just have to survive this one.

 

[1] cows

Notes:

Just a short one today, with a bit of a cliffhanger at the end (not really on purpose, just can't edit the whole thing today). Sorry! You'll just have to check back in a few days :)

~
Next chapter: imminent upheval, a conversation, a confession.

And, again, I am so, so sorry that I have not, as promised, replied to comments yet. As I'm sure many of you know all too intimately, times are a little uncertain at the moment and things don't always go as planned. I hope everyone reading this is safe and happy and taking care of themselves, their loved ones and their community.

Chapter 14: To get back again to you: part II

Summary:

The second half of the last chapter, which I will not summarise for fear of spoilers.

 

 

“Adam,” Ronan says again. He presses his lips to the knob of Adam’s spine and nuzzles his nose into the hair at his nape, “Will you please fucking look at me, now?”

Adam jerkily shakes his head. Ronan inhales and exhales again, slowly, as though he is trying to control something.

Adam is not surprised that he can’t sleep. And nor is he surprised, when he has pulled on his dressing gown and boots and made his way out into the heart of the hedge maze, to find Ronan there.

Of course Ronan is there. Because it’s midnight and Ronan is always somewhere ridiculous at midnight, and Adam’s stupid feet, or heart, or that thing inside of him that nudges him – in really very unpleasant and untenable directions, as it turns out – now has its compass needle set towards one impossible man. Ronan is sitting on one of the stone benches by the little coy pool at the maze’s core. He glances up as Adam rounds the corner and then does the most unbearable thing Adam can think of, and smiles as if he can’t imagine anything or anyone he wants to see more in that moment or, quite possibly, ever.

Adam’s heart cracks.

“I –” he starts. He takes a deep breath. He must do this. Adam is happy to lie about many things, but he cannot lie about this. It’s better to have it out in the open. It will be better to know for sure, so he can understand the depth and severity of his wounds. Perhaps he will bleed to death. A little dramatic, perhaps, but that actually sounds quite peaceful just at present. “I did not expect to find you here.”

Ronan is still smiling at him. He looks almost shy, now he’s tamped down on the initial reaction, glancing up at Adam though his lashes. “Nor I, you. I only just rode back; I haven’t even been into the house yet.” He says, “Good surprise.”

Adam can’t safely speak to that, so he doesn’t. The first hint of puzzlement flickers over Ronan’s brow.

“Will you sit beside me?” he shifts on the bench to make room, but not so much that they would not be pressed together, “I was just thinking about you, and there you are, appearing out of the mist like an elf. I can’t quite believe you’re really back.” Ronan says this in a way that makes the words sound overfull, as though there aren’t actually syllables in English that could convey the breadth of what he truly means.

“I think…” Adam manages, “I’d rather stand, if you don’t mind.”

“No…” Ronan says slowly, “I don’t mind, I suppose. Of course, you may please yourself.”

Adam shoves his hands deep in his pockets. He’s not sure whether it is colder than he’d expected, or if he only feels colder. Ronan is still watching him. That puzzled frown is growing.

“Adam,” he says slowly, “Has something happened? Gossip moves bloody slowly on the farm. Did…” real uncertainty is starting to seep into his voice. He scrubs a hand over the back of his head and glances quickly at Adam again and then away, “Did something happen while you were gone? I heard so little from you...”

Adam nods slowly. He can answer that. He must.

“I heard about Miss Ingram.”

“Did you?” Ronan looks abruptly disinterested, or maybe bored, “About fucking time, I suppose. Her mother and mine were great friends, you know. We’ve known the family forever.”

Adam nods again. He feels rigid and slow, just outside his body, trying to work it with strings. “Congratulations are in order.”

A shrug, “I’ll pass them on if you like.”

“Thank you. I would appreciate that.”

There’s a long pause. Ronan is fidgeting with his cuffs, and frowning, and glancing every now and then at Adam from beneath his lashes. He’s trying to figure out what’s going on, but somehow, improbably, he hasn’t got there yet. Adam feels a little weak in his limbs. It really meant so little, then. It’s a long time since he’s made a mistake so…vast.

“I suppose you will send Opal to school,” he says dully.

Ronan’s head jerks up and he stares full at Adam, “Why should I do that?”

“Well, I don’t suppose Miss Ingram will want her around. A girl not her own.”

“No,” Ronan says, looking at him hard, “Perhaps not. Though I still do not see why that should influence my child-rearing decisions. For God’s sake, Parrish. Do sit the fuck down. You’re giving me a crick in my neck.”

Adam swallows hard. How can it be so difficult? Does Ronan really think… “Lynch, do you really not see how this will change things? How it will change…everything?”

“I certainly hope it does change some things, but I am fast getting the impression that the things I wish to change may be rather different from the things you wish to alter. For example, you seem suddenly hell-bent on getting rid of Opal, which is pretty fucking odd considering you’re practically attached at the hip.”

“I don’t wish to get rid of her!”

“Well, good!” Ronan throws up his arms, “Neither do I! We’ll keep her here with us and find her an extra tutor to give you some freedom, and everything will be fine!”

“Everything will not be fine, Lynch! Do you not see –” Adam cuts himself off ruthlessly. He scrubs a hand roughly through his hair and pulls at it viciously until Ronan makes to move towards him. “Don’t!” he snaps, and Ronan freezes.

And then he unfreezes and in three quick strides closes the distance between them. Adam shoves at him, feeling helpless and wild, and Ronan grabs his wrists – gently, carefully, so that he knows how easily he could break free – and Adam stills at once, feeling his heart tear straight down the middle. Ronan stares down at him, frown puzzling between his brows, searching Adam’s face like there is some grand fucking mystery afoot and he can’t for the life of him figure it out.

“For God’s sake, Adam!” He snaps finally, “What the hell is going on?”

Adam kisses him.

He surges up onto his toes, and kisses him, and then, when Ronan’s hands go lax and his whole body relaxes towards Adam’s, tears away and claps his hands over his mouth, putting quick feet between them. He can’t breathe. He presses his hand against his mouth and feels Ronan’s lips against his, dry and soft. Reimagines the scent of him – moss and leather and mist – from those fragile, unguarded moments when he had let himself absorb Ronan’s bodily presence in full, back when he had thought it would be his for a long, long while. Everything is different now, knowing it won’t be.

“I’m sorry,” he presses the words into his hands. He has to keep his hands over his mouth or something even worse will escape, something he cannot take back, “I’m sorry. Forgive me. God. I’m sorry.”

“Adam,” Ronan’s voice at his back sounds rusty and raw and tightly controlled. “Adam, what the hell is going on?”

Adam keeps one hand pressed against his mouth and holds the other up to keep Ronan at bay. He peels his fingers carefully from his lips, draws in a slow, deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, clearly this time, “I should not have done that. Forgive me.”

Silence. Then.

“I fucking well will not,” Ronan snaps, “Forgive you for what?”

Adam feels a hand on his shoulder and flinches. It crosses a terrible line, to kiss somebody who is soon to be married to someone else. Who is in love with someone else. But Ronan doesn’t let him go. The grip is gentle. Warm. Familiar. Ronan squeezes his shoulder. He lifts a finger just to touch Adam’s neck, above the collar of his shirt, and Adam shudders.

“Adam,” he says softly, “Adam, please look at me.”

“I can’t,” Adam tells him, just as soft, “Please don’t ask me to.”

“Adam. Adam.”

Adam feels the warmth of a body close at his back. The hand on his shoulder retreats and he thinks, I can’t stand this any longer. He thinks, This must be the moment when something finally breaks. And in a way that is true.

Ronan’s hands come up to the sides of his neck, brush knuckles upwards over the bare skin of his throat, his jaw. His thumbs touch delicately along Adam’s ears and then he sinks his fingers knuckle-deep into his hair, holding his head gently between his palms. Adam lets out a staggered breath as Ronan presses a kiss to the back of his skull, another to the nape of his neck, and lets his arms succumb to gravity and drift down to wrap tight around Adam’s shoulders from behind. He presses the length of his body against Adam’s back, shoulder to knee. He leans his forehead into the crook of Adam’s neck, below his good ear, and Adam feels him take a deep breath and hold it.

“Adam,” Ronan says again. He presses his lips to the knob of Adam’s spine and nuzzles his nose into the hair at his nape, “Will you please fucking look at me, now?”

Adam jerkily shakes his head. Ronan inhales and exhales again, slowly, as though he is trying to control something.

“Did something happen while you were away?” he asks, quietly.

Haltingly, Adam nods.

“Something pertaining to me? To…us?”

Again, Adam nods. Ronan takes another, shuddery breath, releases it shakily, tightens his arms infinitesimally around Adam’s shoulders.

“Do you…not want me anymore?” Ronan asks, haltingly.

Adam shakes his head unthinkingly, instantly, and Ronan exhales unsteadily and squeezes him tightly.

“Alright,” he says, “Alright. Good. So.”

“I need you to tell me the truth,” Adam says falteringly.

Ronan withdraws his nose from Adam’s neck, and Adam can tell he’s irritated or offended or both, though the arms around him stay gentle and close. “I always tell you the truth.”

“Yes. But you don’t always tell me all of it.”

“Neither do you,” Ronan snaps. This isn’t how Adam intended this to go, but he should’ve known it would spiral quickly.

“I know,” he says, “I know. But, Ronan, this is different. Please tell me you can see that?”

“I’ll tell you what I can see when I know what the hell you’re talking about. Parrish,” he leans his head against Adam’s nape, pushing a little, like a cat angling for a caress, “What is it? Please tell me what’s wrong.”

“I heard about Miss Ingram,” Adam repeats, “In the kitchens.”

“Yes,” Ronan mutters into his collar impatiently, “So you said.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He feels Ronan shrug, “It hadn’t occurred to me. I didn’t think you would be particularly interested.”

Adam feels something cold close around his heart. It surprises him, in a distant sort of way, that his voice is so steady. “You thought I would not be interested to know that you intend to be married?”

Ronan’s arms spasm around him. He leans back a little and clears his throat. “Know something I don’t, Parrish?”

“I very much doubt it,” Adam snaps. Suddenly, he cannot bear the weight of Ronan’s body, and he pulls away from him abruptly. “It’s all they’re talking about in the servant’s quarters,” he adds harshly, “Miss Ingram’s engagement, the new carriage you’ve ordered – Opal,” he almost chokes on it, “Opal going to stay with your friends in London.”

The silence stretches long between them. When Ronan finally speaks, his voice is firm, matter of fact. A tone Adam has rarely heard him use.

“Adam,” he says, “Turn around, Christ almighty. I need to say this to your face.”

Adam takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and turns. He can’t meet Ronan’s eyes, flicking instead to the coy pool, the stone benches, the hedge.

“Alright. Jesus fucking Christ. Declan,” Ronan says, with supreme emphasis, “Is getting married. To Miss Ashley Ingram, in case that, too, is unclear. I,” he points a facetious thumb at himself, “Am trying to take my lover on a Grand fucking Tour of Ireland. It was supposed to be a surprise, but I won’t try that again.”

Adam stares at him.

“Someday, we’ll laugh about this, no doubt[1],” Ronan offers wryly, “But I always knew it would get the better of me somehow, sharing a name with that prick.”

“Your brother is engaged to be married to Miss Ingram?” Adam asks. He feels wrung out like a wet rag, blind-sided, whip-lashed.

“Oh for the last time, Parrish –”

“No, I, god. When I heard, I was…god.” Adam makes his way unsteadily to the bench and sits down, leaning his elbows on his knees and covering his mouth again with his hands. Ronan is watching him steadily, from some three paces away. The distance feels calculated. Adam glances at him over his fingers and then quickly away again, staring at the fish floating lazily in the dark water.

“I’m in love with you,” he says abruptly. He removes his hands to say it, and then presses them back over his mouth immediately to keep from adding anything else. It’s been coming such a long time, ever since that night, near five months ago, now, when they’d fought the nightmare together and something had changed. Or, then again, maybe even before that, when they had sat together in the dark, near-strangers still, offering comfort for nightmares they were still too new to share. Sleeping alone, curled on a thin palette before the cold hearth, this truth had gnawed at him like hunger: intrinsic, irritating, opaque. And when he’d heard that it was over, his brief happiness torn down while he wasted hours hauling furniture and bribing newer linens from a housemaid, it had struck him with all the clarity and force of a death-bell. At the corner of his vision he sees Ronan’s eyes go wide.

Adam lets his eyelids fall shut.

The crunch of gravel warns him: rough hands seize his wrists, “Say it again,” Ronan whispers. He is crouched down before Adam’s knees, staring up at him, pale eyes ferocious, unwavering in their intensity, “Fucking – say it again.”

Adam allows Ronan to drag his hands down, away from his mouth.

“I’m in love with you. I didn’t realise until – I’m in love with you.”

Ronan kisses him fiercely, and achingly, and sweetly. Only he could do it all at once. His fingers stay wrapped around Adam’s wrists as Adam cradles his face in his hands.

“Fuck,” Ronan breathes, “I fucking – fuck. You horrible man. You couldn’t just – you could’ve led with that.”

Adam laughs into his mouth. The cold air stings his flushed cheeks. “I really couldn’t have.”

“I suppose not,” Ronan grumbles. He kisses him again, quickly, as though he can’t help it, and says, “I love you. I love you, too, God, how do you not know I love you? How could you think I would -?”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Adam admits, “I thought I must’ve been wrong, before. That things had changed while I was away. I thought you must love her, instead of me.”

“No,” Ronan tells him, the way that Adam says ‘no’ sometimes when Ronan has a terrible idea. He turns his head firmly, kissing each of Adam’s palms in turn, “Never. Just you. Only you.”

“Good,” Adam says helplessly, “Good.”

At four am, when Ronan pushes him out of his bed, bundles him into his dressing gown and out into the hall, Adam doesn’t swear at him too much. He can still feel that helpless joy buzzing inside him.

 

 

“Did you know I had come back?” Adam asks in the pre-dawn grey. Ronan had returned to the house late, just as Adam had tried to insist he shouldn’t, wanting to sleep in my own fucking bed, thank you, not that hayloft, and Adam is stupidly pleased by it. Probably because he is also in Ronan’s bed.

Ronan had tap-tapped insistently on Adam’s door until he’d stumbled – bleary-eyed from being woken unexpectedly – to open it, and then dragged him down the hall. They’d curled up in his cool sheets together and gone straight to sleep. Now it’s early, barely four thirty, and Ronan had nudged him gently awake to kiss down his chest, shoving his nightshirt up irritably to get at the warm skin beneath, and down again, further, to take him in his mouth. Adam had gasped and sworn and shook and dug his nails into Ronan’s shoulder, which made Ronan gasp in turn, and shove his hand down between his own legs while Adam came in his mouth.

Now Adam feels clearer, somehow – which makes no sense – and certain enough to broach the question that’s been eating at him since he returned a week ago.

“No,” Ronan grumbles, “Some prick didn’t tell me he was coming.” He has his face pressed into Adam’s shoulder, one arm and a leg slung over his body, as though Adam is preparing an escape attempt and he is ready to resist. Truthfully, this is not unfair. He will have to go back to his room before the maid comes to light the fire. “And news travels slower on the farm. It was two days before I heard.” Ronan rarely likes to be still. Even now his fingers trail vague, constant patterns over Adam’s skin: counting ribs, beating time, tracing lines between his freckles. It’s not as absent-minded as it feels, though. Adam can tell. “Why didn’t you send word to me? I didn’t even know you were on your way.”

“I couldn’t send word,” Adam says simply, “I ran out of money.”

Ronan props himself up on his elbow to stare at him. Adam misses his weight.

“What? How the fuck did you run out of money? You never spend anything. I gave you an advance. You’re so fucking careful with your accounts I should have you do the books for the estate.”

Adam shrugs and turns his face to the window, watching the sky lighten outside.

“Family things,” he says, “It’s complicated.” Ronan’s face darkens, Adam can see it from the corner of his eye.

Ronan is a lot of things: impulsive, dangerous, rude, etc. He isn’t stupid and he can read, in the way of people who have cracked ribs or broken noses more than once, the violent map that is Adam’s body. He knows that Adam is deaf in one ear, from early encounters: Ronan coming upon him unawares, and drawing his own conclusions from Adam’s wide-eyed start. And since Ronan knows how scars fade, and that Adam is not partial to his own preferred and frequently violent forms of entertainment, it’s obvious that these landmarks occurred long ago and without Adam’s consent. He hadn’t pressed when Adam had told him he was visiting his mother. He won’t press now. But he fumes, silently, and that is hard to bear in its own way.

Perhaps Adam shouldn’t have told him, but now more than ever some part of him rebels against keeping secrets from Ronan Lynch. He thinks it’s because he knows Ronan wouldn’t keep them from him, and that kind of trust demands repayment to keep them on equal footing.

“It’s over, now,” he offers instead, “I won’t go back.”

“Damn right you won’t,” Ronan grumbles, in a way that Adam knows means: I wouldn’t stop you, but I’d be fucking incensed. He settles back down so that even more of his body is draped over Adam’s, and Adam twines an arm around his neck, holding him near. Outside, it’s getting lighter and lighter. He really, really should go. Ronan mumbles something into his shoulder, so low he could pretend not to hear it if he wanted to, “Why didn’t you send a message once you were home?”

“I thought…maybe you were angry with me. For staying away so long. And then I heard about the wedding, and…”

“I was angry with you,” Ronan mutters vehemently into his chest, “Fucking four weeks you said. At the outside. But I still wanted to see you,” he curls his long limbs around Adam again, hugging him close. It’s a strange, vulnerable thing to have someone else’s naked body curled that tightly around your naked body, just a membrane’s width away from being one. “I fucking missed you like a lung, Parrish. It was awful.”

Adam laughs, feeling light very suddenly, as though all the weight of the past month and a half has left him in a rush.

“I couldn’t fall asleep,” Adam admits, “At the end of the day, when everything had stopped, I would lie there simply…wanting you. It kept me awake.”

“Next time, I go with you,” Ronan decides, “You’re a shitty letter writer, Parrish – no,” he fumbles a hand over Adam’s mouth; Adam licks it in retaliation, which, honestly, does nothing to discourage him, “Don’t argue – and you gave away all your money. Clearly you can’t be trusted to travel alone.”

“Alright,” Adam laughs against his fingers, “Alright. You can come, too.”

Some day, well into the future, Adam will reflect that he really ought just to keep his promises.

 

 

[1] Another way to say this might be: Forsan et hael olim meminisse iuvabit, which, from Fagles’ translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid, Book 1, means: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.”

Notes:

To be honest, I hate this chapter of Jane Eyre. SPOILER ALLERT for those who haven't read the book, but Rochester is such a manipulative asshole. This is an important moment, though, because it really confirms that he's a manipulative asshole. From this point on, in the book, you know to be very suspicious.

And this chapter is, I suppose, important in the opposite way: Adam assumes the worst, but it turns out Ronan is more steadfast than he'd imagined, already one step ahead, only waiting for him to catch up.

Still, I feel ambivalent about it, and can't tell whether it's because of how I feel about the source material, or whether I've just read this fic too many times. Hopefully it feels fresh enough to you, my lovely readers!

 

~
Next chapter: life is good.

And I have finally, finally caught up on comments. Thank you for your patience, and how lovely it is to have comments to catch up on. Really, the comments make all this fiddling around with formatting and such absolutely worthwhile <3

Chapter 15: He is not to them what he is to me.

Summary:

Exposure and bliss, the complexities of the mundane.

 

“Still fighting about geology?”
“I think she’d like it much better if I'd only let her eat the rocks,” Adam admits.
“Try bribery. That always worked on me.”

Notes:

Warnings: if smut is not your thing, skip the library scene. It begins "Adam would have known, if he had been paying attention, that Ronan had come to the library with wayward intentions," and things are PG-ish again from "And so, gradually"

That Ronan is pleased to have him back is obvious. They haven’t spoken much – spring farming duties bow to no man’s pleasure, and Ronan is often away from the house even at night – but he had kissed Adam just that morning. Ronan caught him in an alcove by the back stairs and stole the breath from his body before ducking away again before a servant could catch them, grinning like a fiend.

Adam holds these moments close, trying not to smile too often or obviously. Opal has taken to giving him suspicious looks, rounding on him suddenly to try to catch him in the act, or shoving her little face in close to his so she can look deep in his eyes. Eyes, she tells him seriously one afternoon, are where you keep your secrets, and she knows well that he has one. Adam gets down an anatomy text and attempts a cunning and slightly gruesome distraction.

But, though he thinks at times Opal is a little hurt that he refuses to share it, she forgives him his diversionary tactics because the mystery is so obviously a happy one.

It can’t last, of course. They can last – some days Adam feels that he and Ronan could last through anything – but in great houses like The Barnes, everybody living together for years on end, tucked into one another’s pockets…no secret is indefinitely safe.

And so of course it is Opal who finds them, which is both complicated and right. Adam knows they’ve not been particularly cautious around her. When it is only the three of them, out in the fields or the maze, or tucked under the willows by the ornamental lake, it is hard to imagine there’s any danger in being exactly as they are: a dream, a dreamer and his lover. And it’s exhilarating, intoxicating to touch Ronan out of doors. Adam had never realised of how many small touches a relationship is comprised, until he began to catalogue them, noticing their dips and peaks. When it’s only the three of them, Ronan touches him often, as though trying to make up for the rest.

And so Opal grumbles, gritty-eyed, into the schoolroom one morning to find Adam perched on the table’s edge, Ronan tucked close into the V of his thighs. She glares at them balefully for a moment, then stumps over to the window seat, throws herself onto the cushion, and shoves her nose pointedly into an anthology of Plautus’ comedies. Adam, frozen where he sits, his inner knees still flush against Ronan’s narrow hips, stares at the back of her head for a moment, then transfers his wide eyes to her guardian. Ronan frowns, shrugs, and then slides his palms quick and hard up Adam’s thighs and darts a kiss beneath his jaw, before – much to Adam’s irritation – slipping from the room.

Adam approaches his pupil warily, asks whether she slept well. Opal peers at him over the edge of her book, dark brows drawn menacingly low, and then gives him to understand that the schoolroom is their place, and Ronan is not to intrude unless he has something to share with both of them. Adam, who has grown accustomed to Opal’s general air of ageless otherworldliness, is caught off-guard by this abrupt display of childish jealousy, and struggles to suppress any outward sign of being endeared by it. He promises her at once that his affection for Ronan could never eclipse or disrupt their friendship, that she is in no danger of losing either of them to each other.

Cautiously, he feels around the edges of the more dangerous problem; but Opal seems entirely unconcerned that both Ronan and Adam are undeniably men. Adam releases a breath he’d not been conscious of holding. Opal is, after all, a part of Ronan, in her way. Her responses reveal aspects of Ronan’s inner landscape that he sometimes seems unaware of, if not wilfully blind to. Adam would be lying to himself if he said he had not been afraid to find some trace of discomfort or disgust.

As it is, he need not have worried. By his own measure, Opal has most assuredly seen worse things in Ronan’s mind than her father-figure and tutor being helplessly in love.

 

They’re more careful after Opal catches them.

Nights are hardest. ‘Sensible’ would be sleeping in separate rooms and only meeting in the brief, isolated hours of midnight to kiss and touch and murmur filth into one another’s mouths; but they cannot be sensible, not entirely, and Adam is discovering by praxis that sex is only one mark on the spectrum of physical delights available. A hand on the nape of your neck, for example, or splayed on your belly or hip. The specific pleasure of waking beneath the recognisable weight of particular arm. Getting tired together, falling asleep together, bowing their heads together over a shared book in the lamplit warmth of Ronan’s bedroom. Trading air, and clothing. There are a thousand small motions and touches and rotations that seem to him now indispensable, non-optional, impossible to give up.

So they try to be careful. But also, they want to live.

 

Adam would have known, if he had been paying attention, that Ronan had come to the library with wayward intentions. As it is, though he evidently hears the soft shush of the door sweeping open and then the quiet snick of the latch, he glances up only long enough to ascertain that it is Ronan, and not some hopeful book thief, who has invaded his precious morning off.

“You know,” Ronan says conversationally, “I give you this time so you can spend it on leisure, not work.”

Adam smiles over his notes, “Really? I thought you gave me this time so you could harangue me in peace, without Opal glaring at you.”

Ronan scowls good-naturedly, “She gets more time with you than I do.”

“Yes,” Adam agrees; he still hasn’t looked up properly from his book, “But she doesn’t enjoy all of it.”

“Still fighting about geology?”

“I think she’d like it much better if I'd only let her eat the rocks,” Adam admits.

“Try bribery. That always worked on me.”

“Oh, really? And what carrot would one use to lure Ronan Lynch into good behaviour?”

“Riding practice. Baby goats. Attractive farm hands.”

Adam lowers his face more studiously over his papers, and scratches something deliberately into his page, “Hmm.”

Ronan sidles up behind his chair and wraps his arms around Adam’s shoulders, nosing into the soft hair on his hearing side, “That last was meant in jest.”

“I caught it.”

“You could bribe me with you,” Ronan suggests, “I’d likely do anything you want for it.”

Adam huffs a laugh that is half disbelieving, but half something softer and much more vulnerable, “You really oughtn’t to tell people that.”

“You aren’t people, and there’s no purpose in hiding it from you,” Ronan points out. Adam has shed his jacket and is wearing just his shirt and waistcoat, the collar done up high beneath his jaw. Ronan trails a thoughtful hand over his necktie, his shirtfront, lingers over his waistcoat buttons, “You know already that it’s true.”

“Ronan,” Adam says warningly, laying his hand over Ronan’s restless fingers to still them, “What are you up to?”

“Making sure my lover doesn’t work himself into an early grave,” Ronan grumbles into his neck, “Are you not clever enough yet?” Adam smiles, warm and lazy and indulgent.

“It isn’t enough to be clever alone, one must know things, too. Knowledge is how cleverness becomes useful. And I don’t know nearly enough.”

“Sometimes I really think you only like me for my library.”

“Well,” Adam tells him seriously, “That was a contributing factor, to be sure.” Ronan pinches his arm and Adam yelps and then laughs at him. “Arsehole,” he says. It sounds fond. Ronan’s heart squeezes itself against his ribs. He sets his nose into Adam’s neck and breathes deeply, feeling tension ebb from his shoulders and back as he surrounds himself with the familiar scent of Adam: old papers, cut grass, sunshine, the faintest hint of something citrus in his cologne. Adam leans back against him with a contented hum, but he still hasn’t relinquished his damn book.

Fine, then. Ronan can work with that.

He draws Adam’s hand, and the hand it caught, up until he can wrap his arm more securely around Adam’s shoulders, keeping him in his chair. Adam squeezes his fingers absently, but he hasn’t noticed anything amiss yet, only settles himself back into Ronan’s embrace and turns a page. Ronan skims his free hand lightly down, over shirt and waistcoat, coming to rest against Adam’s thigh. Adam shifts slightly, when he squeezes, but doesn’t comment. Slowly, Ronan drags his palm up, pressing more firmly, running his thumb over the inseam of Adam’s trousers.

“Ronan?” Adam asks, finally. He tries to crane around to see Ronan’s face, but Ronan is having none of it. He nips Adam’s ear, quick and sharp, then kisses it thoroughly and repentantly when Adam swears and cranes away from him instead.

“God, you’re irritating sometimes,” Adam grumbles, “Isn’t there someone else you could be bothering? A horse you could fall off, perhaps? Opal found a dead bird yesterday – I’m sure she’d appreciate an assistant for her dissection.”

If Ronan were a less attentive man, he might buy this blatant diversionary tactic. But he is attentive, and he is tuned to Adam’s body in ways he’s never been to another human being. So, as Adam speaks, Ronan is conscious of how the other man’s shoulders have grown incrementally softer against him. When Ronan sweeps his thumb delicately over the place where his trousers stretch, taught, across his lap, he feels Adam’s tremble as if it is his own body.

Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to know that he is wanted. The thought of being truly unwanted by Adam, at any time, over any thing, has become a neat item on Ronan’s list of regular self-flagellators. He has no wish to give the self-loathing fantasy real-life fodder.

“I’ll go,” he murmurs against Adam’s neck, “You’re right. I shouldn’t interrupt your work.” He brushes his thumb one last time against the thin wool and moves to withdraw his hand.

Adam catches it. He fits his palm to Ronan’s knuckles and threads their long fingers together, applying pressure enough to press Ronan’s palm more firmly against his thigh.

“You really shouldn’t,” Adam agrees. Ronan hums acquiescence into his collar, feels the slow, controlled rise and fall of Adam’s shoulders. He flexes his fingers against Adam’s thigh and the rhythm syncopates. “I’ve lost my place” Adam tells him, exerting pressure on Ronan’s hand, dragging it slowly upward, “You’ll set me back a whole paragraph.”

Ronan allows Adam to guide his hand up into the V of Adam’s trousers. He presses down gently with the heel of his palm, and though Adam’s breath barely hitches, Ronan feels him subtly shift his thighs further apart; there, the first thrill of victory.

“You should keep going,” Ronan says conversationally; then, in a bald and shocking lie (so obvious that he forgives himself), “I hate to disrupt your schedule.”

Adam snorts, and almost certainly rolls his eyes, and then shifts subtly in his chair, sinking lower. The angle presses his groin up, ever so slightly, against their joined hands.

“Your work,” Ronan repeats firmly. He steadies the arm around Adam’s shoulders while his other hand shifts back, keeping the pressure tantalisingly light. Adam’s fingers tighten between his insistently, but Ronan will not be nudged. “I know you don’t want to lose any time. You should get on with it.”

Adam’s voice is incredulous, and gratifyingly rough at the edges, “What.”

“Your passage. If you want to finish it by lunch,” delicately, Ronan rocks his palm, applying just a fraction more pressure, “You should get back to it.”

“You wish me to return to my work,” Adam says flatly.

“Of course,” Ronan tells him, “I don’t want to fuck up your plans.”

“Really,” Adam says.

“Really,” Ronan tells him. Then, “I know, you ought to read it aloud.”

“What?”

“Out loud. Read the Latin, first. Then the translation,” Ronan presses again, flicks his thumb gently over the hardening bulge in Adam’s trousers, “Translations are always so much better tested aloud. One has to get a feel for how the language is supposed to flow.”

“You want me to read Ovid out loud. To you. Now.”

“Well,” Ronan grins against his ear. He flicks his tongue against the shell, and Adam’s sharp inhale fills him with a deep satisfaction, “Catullus would be better. But I’ll take what you have.”

Adam holds perfectly still for a moment. If he tells Ronan to fuck off, he will, of course. But he’s hoping, quite desperately as it turns out, that Adam won’t.

And he doesn’t. He untangles their fingers and lifts his book once more.

“Labitur occulte fallitque volatilis aetas[1],” Adam begins.

“Perfect,” Ronan murmurs. He fits his fingers around Adam’s length as best he can through the taught fabric of his trousers, begins with slow, even strokes.

Adam – and this ought to surprise no-one – is good at this game. His breath is slowly, steadily quickening, but he doesn’t stutter or miss a consonant. Ronan keeps at his task, focussed and rhythmic and infuriatingly slow, but Adam doesn’t falter until his erection is straining painfully against his trousers and he pauses, biting his lip, and opens his mouth to speak –

“Is that the end of the passage?” Ronan asks.

“No,” Adam bites out.

“Why stop, then?” Adam grits his teeth. Ronan keeps stroking him, painfully languid, through his pants.

“If you make me come in my sodding trousers –”

“Is there something else you’d prefer?”

“Ronan,” Adam says.

“Tell me what you want,” Ronan whispers fiercely, “And I’ll do it. Anything you want me to do.”

Adam turns his head until their noses brush, and Ronan can see that his eyes are half-lidded, pupils wide and dark. “Kiss me,” Adam breathes, “And then bloody well touch me, you bastard.”

Ronan laughs into his mouth and kisses him, breathlessly, defencelessly, because he’s hopeless and can’t resist; Adam makes a helpless noise against him that undoes any resolve he might’ve had left.

He makes short work of Adam’s flies, and then pauses. Adam is panting into his mouth, now.

“Well?” Ronan whispers.

“What?” Adam sounds a little dazed.

“Keep at it.” Adam just blinks at him, “The book. I like this part.”

“Fuck,” Adam says, swallowing thickly, “I didn’t – I thought.”

“Anyone could knock on that door, you know,” Ronan whispers, and feels Adam shudder beneath him, “But if they hear you reading, they’ll go away.”

“Y – Yes.” He seems to drag himself from the kiss by brute force, picking up his volume again and fumbling a moment for the page. Ronan gives his cock an encouraging squeeze, and Adam’s entire body twitches.

“Yes,” he manages, and there’s no way to tell whether he’s still agreeing with Ronan or saying something else entirely, “Yes. Alright…abstinet et caelo: caelo praefertur Adonis. Hunc tenet, huic comes est adsuetaque semper in umbra -”

Ronan strokes him slowly, steadily, not quite hard enough. He wants to drag this out, make it exquisite and overwhelming. He wants Adam to remember this every time he reads this passage in the future, wants the feel of Ronan’s fingers eternally seared into these words. He wants him to forget every word in his vocabulary.

Ronan is so absorbed in this task that he barely registers the shift in lexicon. Adam is translating: breathlessly, on stutters and half-gasps, accent slipping in at the edges.

“- he asks her why, she says: ‘I will tell, and you will wonder –‘ ”

“Fuck, Adam,” Ronan’s hand stutters as a shudder runs right through him.

“ ‘- and, look, a poplar tree entices us with its welcome shade, and the turf yields a bed –‘ ”

Who’d have believed that spontaneous translation would rile him so? But it isn’t the words, not really, it’s hearing Adam’s brain still whirring as his body falls to pieces beneath Ronan’s hand, Adam clinging to the last of his lucidity, clutching Ronan’s fingers at his shoulder like a lifeline.

“ ‘- I should like to rest here on the ground,’ (and she rested) ‘with you.’ She hugged the grass, and him, and leaning her head against the breast of the reclining youth –”

Ronan cannot take one word more in silence, “Jesus, Parrish, your mind is a fucking marvel. You’re so bloody brilliant, you ought to be at Oxford, or Edinborough, somewhere. Christ. What the hell are you about, wasting your time out here in the middle of nowhere? Why’d you ever pick up with a bastard like –”

The book tumbles to the table as Adam grabs blindly for the back of Ronan’s neck, pulling him down until they meet in a messy, searing kiss. Adam’s hips are pushing up, now, roughly, into Ronan’s fist, all pretence of calm abandoned, and Ronan tightens his grip thoughtlessly, hard-wired by now to give Adam what he wants. “Shut up,” Adam pants into his mouth, “God, shut up, you’re beautiful, you’re incredible – fuck I’m going to – God, you’re – ”

He comes all over Ronan’s hand, shaking and panting like he’s run for miles, sweat plastering the hair to his nape. Ronan, who has had occasion to do this sort of thing before, has the presence of mind to catch the worst of it in his handkerchief; then he feels his neck flush, embarrassed to be so worldly. He senses Adam watching him, words finally spent, dissolved beneath a roiling tide of pure, physical feeling, and looks up almost hesitantly to meet his eyes. But Adam, who is stroking a hand through the warm fuzz of Ronan’s hair while he catches his breath, only smiles in a way that makes Ronan feel at once wondering and gratified and known.

Ronan feels a heady rush of affection for him; Ronan, obviously, prefers a mess, would be best pleased if Adam were to walk around undone and smelling of sex at every hour of the day. But he knows what Adam likes, too, wants him to have it all. Adam, in his turn, only watches, dark eyed and still, as Ronan sucks his own fingers clean, making no attempt to hide it when his eyelids flutter at the taste of Adam on his skin. He squeezes Adam’s shoulder, turns his chair so Ronan can kneel between his thighs and clean Adam, too, gently, with his tongue. Adam shudders delicately and closes his hand around the back of Ronan’s neck, and Ronan’s breath stutters. He cleans Adam up and tucks him neatly back away, slips the soiled handkerchief in his own pocket and looks up to find Adam’s eyes still on him, unwavering, intent. Ronan grins, and reaches up to run a hand through the disaster of Adam’s hair.

“I barely fucking touched you, Parrish,” he says, “How are you such a fucking catastrophe?”

It takes Adam a moment to recover enough to realise what he’s talking about.

“God, Ronan,” he hisses, “Doing up my trousers won’t fix my goddamn hair. I’m a bloody mess! I’ll never be able to leave this library again!”

“Then don’t,” Ronan offers practically, “You can stay here and I’ll bring you food, and wine; we’ll make up a bed in the corner. Opal won’t mind taking her lessons in here. We can move the frogs in underneath the window.”

Adam laughs, and Ronan feels warmed by it, buries his face in the crook of Adam’s knee and just breathes in.

“I think that would rather give away our secret, don’t you? Carmen et error[2],”

“ ‘Error’ my ass. That was fantastic.”

Adam rolls his head to one side, resting his temple on the chair back and gazing down at Ronan. He still looks dazed, calamitous, beautifully irritable and amused at the same time. He flicks his eyes over Ronan’s face then down, reaching as best he can without moving, the lazy fucker, to trail a languid hand over Ronan’s shoulder and chest.

“Did you even…?”

“No,” he hides his face more firmly against Adam’s knee, “We need a little more privacy for what I want.”

“Oh, so you do want me to leave the library.”

“Eventually. Late is fine. Midnight is perfect.”

“The witching hour. How appropriate.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Ronan tells him. In perpetua[3], probably. Adam is so very worth waiting for.

 

And so, gradually, their shared life becomes…normal. Ordinary, in that most wonderful and expansive way that love, real love, can be. A mutual spring-time of growth and light and abundance. Adam continues his classes with Opal; Ronan spends his hours on the farm, roll-sleeved, broad straw hat barely keeping the pink from his fair skin. They bicker, snipe, trade books and best-loved passages and difficult phrases of Latin and Greek, and kisses in empty corridors, linen closets, walled gardens, drawing-rooms, bedrooms. Nights they spend together, touching, talking, reading, sleeping, fucking, loving, wandering, exploring. Bodies twined around and within one another, infinite-seeming permutations of closeness, of intimacy, which Adam had never imagined himself capable of, and Ronan had long-since despaired of finding.

Yes, they must watch their hands and eyes in public. Yes, there are restrictions. But at The Barnes, this world away from the world, where Ronan is king, they are less noticeable than they might be elsewhere. They are safe as can be; better, they are very nearly free. And they are together.

 

 

 

[1] From Ovid’s Metamorphosis, book X, 503-559: Orpheus sings: Venus and Adonis. The translation is by Anthony S. Kline, and can be found (along with the Latin version) here: https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome.htm#askline Once again, my I do not speak Latin, so I had to guess at the phrases Adam speaks.

[2] When Ovid was banished in AD8 for writing a how-to book on love, he described his wrongdoing as carmen et error – a poem and a mistake.

[3] Always, forever

Notes:

I made some last-minute changes to this and haven't time to go back over it as I normally would; please forgive any oddities, I'll probably re-read and fix at some point.

Also, the library scene should not be confused with some kind of sexy librarian fantasy; did you know that the prevelance of that trope in mainstream porn apparently contributes to a really fucked-up culture of sexual assault in libraries? I cannot stress enough how angry this makes me, because I love libraries, and while they may be happily involved in sexy scenarios at times, context is very important. Seriously, why do people ruin everything?/Failure to understand and respect consent is really the root of all evil in the world.

 

~
Next chapter: the various complexities of sleeping with a dreamer.

Chapter 16: The germs of love.

Summary:

Hazardous dreaming, ongoing negotiations, a pivotal theory.

 

 

The smell of damp wood and charred feathers permeates the room.
“Ow,” Ronan grumbles beneath him. Adam stares down at him with wide eyes.
“How did you survive this long sleeping alone?” Adam demands. He thinks – worries – about this question often.

One morning Adam wakes because he is wet. Not a little wet, but wet right through. Soaking. And cold, because the autumn nights are getting longer and it’s too early for the maid to have lit the fire in his room.

Thank god.

The bed is swimming with water, a puddle forming in the indent by his hip. When he looks up he realises that the reason for this is not a sudden cave-in or a meteorite, or even a window left carelessly open, but a rain cloud. Tucked in beneath the canopy of his bead like cotton wool is a roiling mass of storm clouds. They give no indication of letting up any time soon.

Ronan is still sprawled beside him on his stomach, arms crossed under his pillow and one leg tucked beneath Adam’s. When Adam turns to look at him he sees that Ronan is already looking back, pale eyes clear but unblinking.

Paralysed, Adam thinks. He’s familiar, now, with the pattern, though it unnerves him still, to wake to Ronan’s limp body at his side.

And then he sees a flicker of light above him and shoves Ronan bodily off the bed just in time to avoid a small but determined lighting strike. The smell of damp wood and charred feathers permeates the room. Ronan’s pillow smoulders.

“Ow,” Ronan grumbles beneath him. Adam stares down at him with wide eyes.

“How did you survive this long sleeping alone?” Adam demands. He thinks – worries – about this question often.

Ronan rubs at the bump on the back of his skull and squints up at him sleepily. Attractively. He’s very naked except for his legs, which are still tangled in the wet bedsheet, and Adam is also very naked, and it’s quite distracting to be lying here on top of him on the floor. Water starts to drip off the side of the bed and onto Adam’s thigh. He rolls off Ronan and stares up at the ceiling.

“What do we do with it?” he asks, trying to keep his mind on the issue at hand.

Ronan shrugs. Adam feels it where their shoulders are pressed together. “Shove it out the window where storm clouds belong.”

“How do we explain the damage?”

“Bath accident? Smoking in bed?”

“Won’t someone who knows put two and two together and realise that you were sleeping in my room?”

Ronan sighs, rubbing his hands hard over his face, “Maybe. Fuck, Parrish, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Adam is instantly sorrier. He reaches over to run the backs of his knuckles over Ronan’s chest, his belly, up again, soothing and rhythmic. “Don’t, it’s nothing. As you say. We’ll just push it out the window.” Ronan grunts. “Lucky there are all those spare bedrooms on this floor.”

Cold, wet fingers close gently about his wrist, and Ronan brings his hand up to press a kiss against his knuckles. His mouth is searingly warm, and Adam’s shiver is almost an automatic response, now, at the thought of Ronan touching his hands.

He takes a deep breath, trying to focus. “Fuck,” he says, “If the bed spills over any more it’s going to leak through the floor.” Ronan delicately bites the tip of his finger. “Ronan!” Adam pushes himself up on his other hand and tries to glare determinedly, “Stop that. Raincloud then fucking. Alright?”

Ronan, menace that he is, grins at him around his finger, sucking it briefly into his mouth and then releasing it with a sharp – wet, obscene – pop. Adam shudders. Ronan rolls smoothly to his feet, leaving the sheet tangled on the floor, and climbs, stark naked, back onto the bed. He pokes at the edge of the cloud.

“Alright,” he says, “If you go around the other side, I think we should be able to coax it out. Open the window first, would you? And don’t bloody let it float away, whatever you do – if it hits the ceiling we’ll have to go for a ladder.”

Adam sighs, bemused as ever by the pragmatism with which Ronan greets the bizarre occurrences that frequent his life. He rubs his hands though his hair, then stands to grab his dressing gown and do as directed. When he had occasionally, in what now seems like a past life, imagined connubial bliss, this is not exactly how he’d pictured it; he has to admit this is much more interesting.

 

 

Adam barges into Ronan’s study without knocking and slams the door behind him. Pictures rattle on the wall.

“Tell me what the hell this is,” he snaps, thrusting the clothes hanger towards Ronan. He can’t quite bring himself to risk the beautiful fabric in the mess of papers and ink bottles that is Ronan’s desk, but his scowl conveys the seriousness of his displeasure quite adequately.

Ronan looks up from his ledger with eyebrows raised, then lowers them to somewhere between ‘confusion’ and ‘suspicion’ when he sees what is in Adam’s hand.

“Did you hit your head, Parrish? Surely you recognise good English tweed when it’s set before you.”

Adam grinds his teeth together; Ronan, infuriating creature that he is, leans back in his chair and contemplates him with every appearance of ease.

“I noticed that the elbows of your brown suit were looking thin. Do you not like the colour?” the slightest flush pinks Ronan’s cheeks, as he adds, a little belligerently, “I thought it would suit you, but I’ll have it done again in something else, if you like.”

“The colour is not the issue, Mr Lynch,” Adam growls, shaking the offending article dangerously, meaningfully, in the air between them, “The issue is that you had a suit made for me.”

Ronan’s shrug perfectly feigns the bored arrogance of the wealthy, wastrel gentleman he is supposed to be – exactly the sort of man who would squander vast sums on outfitting a mistress in the latest fashions from London or Paris – and Adam only grinds his teeth more firmly.

“I can’t have you wandering around in rags, now, can I, Parrish? What would the neighbours say?”

Heat floods Adam’s face in a rush, and his hand, white-knuckled on the clothes hanger, begins to shake. “I was not wandering around in rags!” he snarls, “My clothes are perfectly sodding respectable and you know it!”

At long last, Ronan is beginning to catch up to the situation and to look, at least, a little alarmed, “Sweet Christ, Adam, it’s only a suit. One would think I tried to steal your wages.”

“No,” Adam says coldly, “You only attempted to dress me like a bloody doll, as though I am not perfectly aware that you spend as much on one season’s dresses for Opal as I might earn in three years. If you are ashamed of me, kindly tell me so to my face. Fine clothing will not mask my plebian origins.”

“Ashamed –“ Ronan pushes up out of his chair and leans over the desk between them, heedless of papers crushing beneath his palms, and says fiercely, “I’m not bloody ashamed of you, Adam, how could you think – good God, man, I don’t give a fuck what you wear! Parade around in flour-sacks and straw sandals, for all I care, your legs could use a bit of sun. Easier access, and all that,” he doesn’t even leer; his face is quiet and intense in its sincerity, when he says, “I don’t care a whit what other people think, Adam, but you do. I saw you were in need of a new suit and I thought…my only thought was that it must be a discomfort to you, to be anything less than well attired. I never intended to overstep my bounds. You bloody well know I don’t want you any way but as you are.”

Adam glares at him, trying to keep his anger wrapped tight around the confusion blooming beneath his breastbone, and Ronan holds his gaze and only shrugs again. This time it’s real: a little tired, a little helpless. Adam softens despite himself.

“You can’t simply –” he waves the suit again between them, feeling a little lame, all of a sudden, to be complaining about beautiful gifts from a man he loves; but, no. Expensive beautiful gifts, from a very wealthy man, who is also his employer, “Ronan,” he tries again, more firmly, “You mustn’t give me things like this. It’s too much. I could never afford it myself.”

“No,” Ronan says quite slowly, as though to a particularly recalcitrant child, “And nor could you have when my bookseller extracted a minor prince’s ransom for that leather-bound copy of Herodotus which you like so much,” Adam winces, but he can’t deny that he had suspected this truth, and tried to ignore it. “Perhaps you’ve not noticed,” Ronan continues, in a gentler tone, “But I’ve money enough to buy beautiful things for the both of us, and Opal besides,” he lifts one hand to reach out across the desk, just enough to touch the back of Adam’s knuckles, still clenched around the clothes hanger, “I want to do it.”

The fight is gone from Adam, and though it will return on many occasions to come, no doubt, Ronan’s heart is well-placed and impossible to argue with in this way.

“I know that,” he says, quietly, “I know that you do. And books, music – items for pleasure, things we can share, that Opal will enjoy, besides – that, I can allow. But this,” he lifts the suit slightly, where it hangs limp, now, at his side. The beautiful, silken brown threads glow in the low afternoon sun from the window at Ronan’s back, “You must let me handle my own needs, as I see fit. I must be in charge of my own affairs.” He senses Ronan’s rebuttal coming before the scowl can gather between his brows, and adds, his trump card, “Ronan. Do you not see how strange it would seem, that you should employ your own tailor to dress your daughter’s tutor? People will notice that I am living impossibly beyond my means, and become suspicious. Not of you, but of me. They will believe I am taking advantage of you, Ronan. That I have some hold over you, which I am abusing for my own gain.”

A small, sad smile twists Ronan’s lip. He glances down at the papers on his desk, idly tracing a column of figures with the tip of one finger.

“You do have a hold over me,” he says softly.

“I should hope so,” Adam tells him, equally quiet, “That seems only fair.”

Ronan glances up at him through his long black lashes, “Did you even try it on?”

“What?”

“The suit, idiot. Did you try it on before you stormed in here to berate me?”

“Of course not.” Adam glowers; that tiny smile tugs a little wider at Ronan’s mouth. His pale eyes take on a considering air, sharpening beneath the dark fringe of his lashes.

“Shame. It’s not like you to squander good things, Parrish.”

Adam glares at him a little more pointedly as the grin spreads across Ronan’s face. His treacherous thumb traces over the collar, feeling the fine grain of the tweed, the crisp curve of a well-crafted lapel. Ronan has a point. He does hate wastefulness. He glances over at the unlocked door, feels Ronan’s gaze heat as he traces the gesture.

“How did you get my measurements in the first place?”

Ronan’s shark grin gleams, toothfully irresistible.

“You sleep very deeply when well-fucked, you know.”

“Do I, indeed,” Adam drawls. He drapes the suit over the back of a chair and turns towards the door, starting on the buttons of his waistcoat. “No more, then?” it does well to check these things, where Ronan is concerned.

“Never again will I buy you anything you actually need, Parrish. Swear to my God. Swear on your life.”

“That’s a little excessive,” Adam tells him. Ronan is predictably unrepentant.

 

 

“Why don’t you simply dream them?” he asks, later, fingering the jacket’s sleeve, “I might not mind so much, if I knew the things you gave me came from here,” he brushes the rough stubble of Ronan’s scalp with his lips, “Rather than London or the Continent.”

Ronan shrugs bonelessly, irritation creasing the skin between his brows. Adam gentles it away with his thumb.

“I often try, first,” Ronan admits, sounding reluctant, “But not everything comes out as I might wish. Very specific things can be…complicated.”

“Complicated how?” Adam asks. Ronan cranes around to peer up at him, head pillowed on the crook of Adam’s elbow. The frown remains, despite Adam’s best efforts, and Ronan is giving him a slightly detached, weighing sort of look.

“Mrs Sargent said she found you, once, poking your head into one of the upstairs rooms in the westernmost wing.”

“Yes,” Adam says, “But she seemed so flustered that I didn’t like to ask her about it.”

“Well, you understand now, of course. That’s where we keep the dream things, the ones that don’t work.”

“There are things up there that you dreamed for me?” Adam asks, surprised.

“Only the ones that didn’t turn out.”

“Can I see? Will you show me?”

Ronan gazes at him steadily, pale eyes unreadable as a frozen lake; Adam lets him look. He’s almost used to it by now.

“Alright,” Ronan says abruptly, and folds himself upwards to sit, then unfolds again to stand. He reaches down to draw Adam up off the rug, “But some of it is dangerous, and most of it is very bizarre. Don’t say you weren’t warned. And,” he adds, as an afterthought, pausing in the doorway, “Don’t touch anything, will you. I like you with all your fingers attached.”

Adam, taking this warning to heart, tucks his hands firmly into his trouser pockets. The beautiful wool of his new suit is smooth against his knuckles.

 

 

On the third floor of the westernmost wing, a cascade of shuttered rooms runs down the right-hand side of a long gallery, flooded with late sun and overlooking the forest. Ronan wades carelessly into a lumpen sea of dust and dun-coloured sheeting, twitching back a corner here, prizing a box open there and sniffing suspiciously at its contents. Adam follows him a few paces back, wary of disturbing this strange landscape of cloth valleys and peaks, alien objects peeking out from the edges. There’s a line from something running though his head, Shakespeare, perhaps. Misshapen chaos…

Each chamber connects to the gallery by one door, and to the next room via a folding pair on the far wall. Ronan leads the way through one set, another. In the third room he swings his head about like a hound, scenting the air, and says, “Oh, here,” and yanks hard on a heavy sheet. It ruffles to the ground, revealing a tall, wobbling bookcase, lacquer flaking with age. Adam steps up beside him and peers into the shadowed recesses of a shelf at piles of poorly folded tweed.

“I tried this first,” Ronan is saying, as he snags one bundle and shakes it out, revealing a suit-jacket that is perfect in every way, except that the lapels are neatly and inexplicably fused to the back lining so that it forms a flat, cohesive fabric instead of a three-dimensional garment. “I was focussing too much on the fabric, I think. I wanted it to be warm and light, and also waterproof. And I suppose it might be, only it’s rather proof against wearing, as well.”

Adam reaches a little tentatively for a second pile, and pulls out a beautifully made brown suit so small it would not fit Opal. A third, though rightly sized, is of a cloth which is unpleasantly smooth, and smells persistently of wet wool. A fourth has shoulders so sharp and narrow they would not fit a doll, and sleeves that reach almost to the floor. Adam examines each one, fascinated, then folds and replaces it on its shelf.

Ronan, meanwhile, has meandered off into the gloom. Adam can hear him rustling about, picking up things and opening drawers.

“Here,” Ronan pops up suddenly over an unidentifiable piece of furniture and tosses something at him. Adam catches it automatically. He turns a silky black top hat in his hands and glances up enquiringly.

“Put it on,” Ronan tells him, “You’ll see.”

Adam sets the hat warily on his skull and finds nothing out of the ordinary about it until he hears a muffled snorting sound and looks up to see Ronan, face contorted, badly smothering a laugh. In the ensuing chase, Ronan tumbles back out into the gallery. Adam corners him – or, perhaps more accurately, once Ronan allows himself to be cornered – between a window and a dusty settee, jamming the hat down over his head, and watches slack-jawed as Ronan’s face transforms. His skin sprouts pale fur, and his nose and chin lengthen, joining to form a soft, whiskered snout, while his eyes grow huge and dark. A pair of long, dove-grey ears sprout from the hat’s crown.

Half-horrified, Adam reaches out to touch the trembling black nose, and is shocked by the weight of his relief when his fingers slide right through and brush Ronan’s familiar top lip.

“Well?” Ronan asks, mouth moving against Adam’s hand, “Ten guineas say I’m make a far more dashing farm animal than you do.”

Adam quashes a smile; it pushes out of him regardless.

“You certainly make a very sweet little grey rabbit,” he tells Ronan seriously. Ronan scowls, then brightens suddenly.

“The jest is mine, after all,” he says, “You’re a rotten old billygoat!” And he takes full advantage of Adam’s moment of astonished affront to sweep the hat off his head and attempt a fresh assault on Adam’s person. Adam squawks in a most undignified fashion and wrestles the hat away, tussling him down onto the couch, and Ronan only laughs up at him, dust blooming in the air about his head, gold-washed by the dying sun.

 

 

“I still don’t really understand,” Adam admits one evening. They are sprawled together on the fainting couch in Ronan’s study, door locked, fire burned low. He rests back against Ronan’s chest and feels warm and languid. Usually, this is enough lull him into contentment, but this question still niggles at him sometimes, even after months. He turns his face to press a kiss into Ronan’s neck, and mumbles, “Why do you want this, with me?”

Though his back, he can feel tension and irritation warring in Ronan’s body with the lazy satisfaction of the evening. “What is there to be confused about?”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Well that’s the easiest question of all. Every reason. Each single one.”

Adam shakes his head, “It’s too easy.”

Ronan laughs at him, a little meanly, and also as though he’s seriously considering punching him in the face, “You think this has been easy?”

“Well not this, specifically. But me. Here. With you. Of all the places in the world.”

There’s a pause, longer than he was expecting, and Adam feels a sudden premonition of…something, tickle down his spine. An ambivalent feeling. Strange. Ronan is biting his lip.

“Well,” he says, finally, “Actually. I think I may have about half a bloody good theory about that.”

Notes:

I went back and made this chapter about twice as long, partially because it seemed unbalanced, but mostly because I don't feel I've made the most of the whole dreams-come-true story-telling goldmine which is, to me, the greatest charm of the original books. I love how pragmatic Ronan is about dealing with his dreams, too, and that dynamic just opens up so many avenues for absurd and wonderfully bizarre situations...but I fear this is not the story to maximise on those possibilities.

Oh, well. More stories to write later, I suppose!

~*~

Next chapter...well. The next chapter's kind of a big one. I don't want to spoil it for you all.

Thanks as always to my lovely readers, kudos-ers, bookmarkers, subscribers, and commenters. I am so happy that people are reading and enjoying this fic.

Chapter 17: I am no bird;

Summary:

History, trees and woe.

It’s dark, there beneath the trees, and yet still not as dark as he’d expected. The farther they walk, the lighter it seems to get.

Notes:

I am so sorry.

I've not, in any way, abandoned this fic or my lovely readers; the internet, on the other hand, has temporarily abandoned me. I'm getting it sorted, but I'm afraid posting may be spotty for a little while :( Thank you to everyone who sent me nice messages hoping I was well - thankfully, I am, just technologically compromised.

Anyway, to tide you over, and to avoid the risk of leaving you with a cliff-hanger, I'm going to post two chapters today. I'm not sure "hope you'll enjoy them" is the right sentiment (you'll see what I mean), but I hope this helps in case it's a week before I can post again.

So this is how it ends.

Adam always knew it would, deep down at the root of his heart, where all the callouses have been stripped away and he is as vulnerable and raw as a fresh wound. It couldn’t possibly last. It was too good to be permanently, irrevocably real; his time at The Barns has been a type of longing dream, unfit for the knocks of real life, as has been proven to him many, many times.

Ronan leads him into the forest, where he has never before set foot.

The moment Adam realises where their path is heading, he does not want to go. His feet drag of their own accord, his lungs feel heavy. He wants to tell Ronan stop. Don’t. You’re breaking something. But he can’t find the breath. He’s not sure it would help anyway, because they’re here, now. It’s happening. Whatever ‘it’ is.

It’s dark, there beneath the trees, and yet still not as dark as he’d expected. In fact, the farther they walk, the lighter it seems to get. Adam thinks he must be imagining it when he feels the first lick of a warm breeze at the back of his neck, but he isn’t. As he follows Ronan through the trees he begins to be able to make out individual roots and branches, the mossy stones beneath his feet, the texture of the bark.

And, of course, it isn’t just a forest; it’s the forest. His forest. Only not his as it was in Henrietta, but rather that other forest, the dream forest, the forest that is his-but-more.

His and Ronan’s forest.

They step out into the clearing with the fast clear rill that splits around the large flat stone, the place where he had met Ronan for the first time in a dream, and Adam finds himself blinking up at a cloudless and fathomless blue sky. The air is so warm that Ronan is shrugging his coat off, rolling his shirtsleeves back, but Adam only stares: at him, at the trees – some deeply familiar and some only newly so – at the water rushing between mossy stones.

“This is impossible,” he says. His voice is rusty.

Ronan shrugs easily. “I know. I’m impossible, you’re impossible, this,” he waves a hand at the whispering branches and the clear, day-bright sky, “Is impossible. And yet.”

Adam sits down, hard, on a boulder.

“You knew all this time?”

“That I was dreaming about a real place? Yes. So did you.”

They’ve never really spoken of it before, their shared dream. It is one of those things so improbable, yet so palpably factual, that it is hardly worth discussing. Surely it is no stranger to share dreams than to be able to extract things from them, or to find the future in a deck of cards?

“Yes,” Adam admits, “But I thought – it’s gone, my forest. I went to see it when I visited Henrietta and there’s nothing there. I don’t mean burnt or cut down, I mean gone as if it never was. A field of weeds, a muddy brook. Nothing. Nobody else even remembers it.”

“Well, that makes a sort of sense, doesn’t it?” Ronan asks reasonably. He waves a hand again at the trees, “I mean, it came here. With you.”

“With me?”

“Yes. I didn’t notice it for a while, I don’t come here often except in dreams, and it hadn’t changed there. Not for me. But Opal noticed it, here, in the real world. She kept telling me that the real forest was different, that it had changed when you arrived.”

“But that’s absurd,” Adam says thickly, “I can’t just…move a forest.”

“I think, Parrish, that the only person who seems consistently certain of what you cannot do is you; and I have to tell you, you are very often wrong.”

Adam glares at him, but it’s the product more of habit than of any real irritation.

“So I…brought my forest. To your forest. To what end?”

For the first time, Ronan looks a little uncomfortable. He scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and glances at Adam furtively from beneath his long lashes, then quickly away.

“Well. The thing is, Parrish, this forest wasn’t always…here.”

“Alright.”

“Did you know I wasn’t born at The Barnes? I didn’t come here until I was three months old. My parents had been living in London, and when my mother’s time grew near they went to stay with friends in the country. An estate called Washington Park.”

Adam feels again that cold, prickling sense of premonition, but he can’t yet put together the pieces to reveal the final view.

“When you sent me that first letter from Henrietta,” Ronan says, “I was surprised to discover that I was already familiar with the area. I’ve visited it many times throughout my life because –”

“Because Washington borders on Henrietta’s grounds,” Adam says slowly. He feels a little ill, but still cannot figure out why.

“Yes.” Ronan says. Then, “You can imagine the groundkeeper’s surprise when, over a period of months, a small forest sprang up in the bordering valley. I believe they tried to cut it down at first, but each night it returned, and sooner or later they gave it up and instead began to avoid the place. It unsettled them, as perhaps it should. Magic is unsettling,” he glances up at Adam again, lingering this time, “For most people.”

When Ronan was born, Adam would still have been a babe not yet out of his swaddling clothes. That they had co-existed in this way, so close and under such extremely different circumstances – Adam, bundled into his mother’s (ill-named) hope-chest at the foot of the bed, while Ronan lay resplendent in an ornate cradle, only miles away – seems both incredible and somehow unsurprising. They echo each other now in so many ways, why shouldn’t it have begun even then?

But Adam is still missing something. The final piece that will put the picture together and bring his terrible presentiment to pass.

“So, the forest…” he begins.

“I dreamed it,” Ronan says in a rush, “It was the first thing I dreamed. All my life I’ve dreamed of this forest. I began dreaming it when I was born, in England, at Washington Park. And then my parents brought me here and I kept dreaming, and dreaming, and the forest grew. I don’t know why part of it stayed in England, and I don’t know why it disappeared when you came here, and reappeared, somehow, at The Barnes, with you; but if I’m honest, I’ve never felt I fully understood it. It’s not like the other dreams, not even Opal or Bonesaw, who are technically my psychopomps. I did dream it, but sometimes I feel that it was always there, only waiting for me to bring it out. Of course, when I dream it’s only ever been one forest, not two. Truthfully, I never really noticed that the real, physical one and the one in my mind were slightly different until Opal pointed it out to me…”

Ronan turns abruptly and fixes Adam with the full intensity of his pale gaze.

“I think it followed you because you are like me,” he says intently. Adam is distantly conscious that he sounds excited about this, eager to get his theory into the open, to share it with Adam; Adam, who is feeling increasingly cold, despite the breezy summer warmth of the glade, “Not like me, like me, but…also magic. A different sort of magic. Your knack, your cards. I think perhaps it stayed by Henrietta to be close to you, and when you left – and came here, as you say, of all places, which can’t possibly be a coincidence –“ he smiles suddenly, quick and sharp and shy, and gestures around them, turning a slow circle on his heel, “It followed you home.”

He looks so at ease here, loose-limbed and happy, head tilted back to feel the sun on his fair skin. At home in the forest. In his forest. All his words have been spilled out onto the lush grass between them, and he has made his peace with them, while Adam…Adam can barely look at him.

Adam can hardly breathe.

The forest didn’t follow Adam because he’s ‘magic’. It followed him because he, imbecile child that he had been, cold and in pain and terrified out of his wits, had struck a bargain with it. It had, presumably, followed him to hold him to his word.

And it is Ronan’s forest. Not in the way Adam has always thought of it as ‘his’ forest, which is to say, a place where he has felt safe and known – and what a horrible joke that has now become – but literally. The forest belongs to Ronan in the way that Opal or the dream junk cluttering the third floor belong to Ronan. It is his, he dreamt it, it is of him, an extension of his mind and body.

And Adam had pledged his eyes and his hands in its service.

Adam, who had believed himself to be moving ever closer to freedom had in fact only come full circle. He had escaped his father’s grip only to willingly submit himself to a softer leash. He belongs to the forest, and the forest is Ronan. He belongs to Ronan. Nausea wells in him.

Ronan, who is watching him with a burgeoning frown. Something, he obviously can tell, is wrong, though he could not possibly know what.

“Adam?” he asks, softly, “I apologise. It is a lot to take in at once, I know. We ought to return to the house, you can have time to think it out.”

Adam says nothing. He is trying to re-learn how to open his mouth.

“Adam, I –” he sounds uncertain now, “Well, it’s just wood.” Ronan raps a knuckle against a tree trunk, “Truthfully, after Opal, I didn’t expect this to be… You seem quite shocked.”

“Yes.” Adam manages finally. His voice is stilted, thick, “I am quite…shocked.”

“Alright, well, come on, then. We’ll go back to the house. Have a drink, calm your nerves –”

“No!” that much at least is clear. Adam cannot go back to the warm comfort of Ronan’s study. He can’t go anywhere with – with Ronan – he can’t…

Ronan is looking at him with a bemused sort of frown, “Will you sleep here, then? I’ve done it on occasion. It’s actually quite comfortable –”

“Ronan, stop.”

Benign puzzlement is fast surrendering to concern, “Adam,” Ronan says, closing the distance between them, “What is it? What’s wrong?” he reaches up to touch his fingers to Adam’s cheek.

“Stop!” Adam flings himself in the opposite direction. He can’t, he can’t. His heart feels sundered in his chest. He wraps his arms tight around his body, trying to hold it all in. He can feel Ronan’s eyes on his back.

“…Adam?” he sounds so terribly gentle and tentative, as he would be with a damaged bird. And Adam wants to go to him, to sooth him out of his uncertainty. Every fibre of his body wants it, and he plants his feet more firmly in the grass and hunches in on himself, waiting it out. “Adam, I don’t…now what’s wrong?”

“I have to – I’m going back to the house,” he turns on his heel, flings his arm out behind him without looking when he hears Ronan’s step, “Don’t follow me.” And then he stumbles forwards and, for the second time, careens through his night-dark forest. The last time he had run for his life, he had felt as though he ran towards safety. This time every step feels like something ripping from him, and he has never felt so bereft, so rudderless and broken and yet sure, in his life.

Notes:

You see, now, why I have to post the next chapter, just in case it's another week or so until I can get to AO3 again? I'm terrible at cliff-hangers anyway. I can't stand the tension (and I'm so sorry I left you with exactly that, all this time!).

~
Next: loss and long journeys; doors closing and new windows revealed.

Chapter 18: and no net ensnares me.

Summary:

Is this a new beginning? Are its linings silver? Can wonders grow in grief and betrayal?

 

 

At night, Adam lies awake shivering and listening to the roar of the trains and aches, thinking of his warm, silent room bathed in moonlight, of the sunlit schoolroom, the firelit library, Opal galloping up the stairs, Mrs Sargent sitting with him over tea in the rose garden. And Ronan. Ronan everywhere.

Notes:

As promised, second chapter of the day. Enjoy.

 

PS: also for internet reasons, there will be a delay in answering comments. Please forgive me. I love them and have/will read them all, but web time is a little short just now. Thanks for your continued patience and support!

Adam is gone.

It is a cold, undeniable fact.

His bag is missing, and what meagre belongings he had: a few books (none from the library, of course, only things that Adam had brought with him when he came), his cards, and his wages from the locked box in his dresser drawer. That he has money with him is a slight comfort, at least, but small in the grander scheme.

Ronan feels…there are not words for what Ronan feels. Desperate. Enraged. Ravaged. Bereft. These words are hollow, pitiful echoes of what storms inside of him. When he had found his father dead on the front steps of this very house, his head split open like a melon and blood and brain matter sinking into the pale stone, he had felt a chasm open inside himself and Ronan had fallen into it willingly.

This is almost worse, because he can no longer afford that luxury.

Where can Adam have gone? And – God above – why? Gone like a thief, between one sunset and the dawn, and his room cleaned out and tidied as if he had never been there, his personal notes collected from the schoolroom. At first, Ronan had suspected kidnapping. Somehow, somebody had snuck into The Barnes and spirited Adam away. He had felt hot with rage and then cold with dread at the realisation that this must mean some enemy of his family had discovered their secret.

But there was no sign of a struggle, and when he found the money gone, and the cards, Ronan had known with all the certainty of a first-hand witness that Adam had not been coerced into going. He had left.

Adam had left him.

Ronan sits on the heavy wing-backed chair in his study, sole survivor of his rampage only because it is too cumbersome for him to throw, too soft to satisfyingly tip over, and hangs his head between his knees, clutching at the back of his neck. His study is a ruin, which seems appropriate given the state of his heart. In his mind he goes over and over the evening before. Canoodling on the couch which now lies with legs in the air, spilling stuffing across the rug. Talking softly. The impromptu trek across the lawn and into the gentle darkness of the trees. Walking into the bright afternoon of Cabeswater, lush and green and welcoming, because it was theirs.

He had felt it in his bones the moment they entered the clearing. The trees welcomed Adam. They had been waiting for him, willing him to come home. Ronan didn’t fully understand their bond, yet, but he didn’t need to understand to feel their joy in Adam’s presence, and the sense they had – that strange tree-sense, ancient and slow, which did not in fact belong to the physical trees at all but to the river of uncanny energies surging beneath them – that it was right for he and Ronan to be there, together in that sunlit glade.

Ronan had turned to him to explain, expecting Adam to feel it too, and share in his excitement. But Adam had looked…strange. Strained. Perhaps even from the moment he had set foot in the forest. Ronan realised now that though Opal was in and out of Cabeswater all the time, he had never seen Adam accompany her. Was he afraid of the trees? It seemed unlikely, given his own faculty for the supernatural, and the way he’d spoken of the forest at Henrietta when they’d shared dreams…

It was only when Ronan had begun to explain the truth, that both Henrietta’s forest and the one at The Barnes had come to be in the most unnatural way, that Parrish had begun to look truly ill. Ronan sunk his head into his hands. Adam’s face when he had said ‘don’t follow me’, nausea and fear warring in his wide eyes.

Adam had not looked that way even in his nightshirt and dressing-gown, brandishing a walking stick and facing down a living nightmare at Ronan’s side.

So it must have been – it had to be – something about Ronan, in that moment, which had made Adam afraid. He wrapped his arms tight around his body, as Adam had in the forest, trying to hold it all in, trying not to fall apart. Sometimes, Ronan could not remember clearly the sound of his father’s laugh, or all the notes in his mother’s perfume. But he thought that he would recall, from now until the day he died, that moment when Adam – fearless, brilliant Adam – had looked at him with terror in his eyes.

 

Adam goes to London. Not from any particular desire to be in London, which is filthy and loud and over-crowded with human life, but because, being those things, it is one of those places where it is easy to hide. And he is hiding. He is sure that Ronan will look for him, and he certainly has the money to hire the best. Adam has no doubt that they will trace him to London, and would likely trace him out of it again by any but the most Byzantine route. But within London itself things are much tricker to find. London is a city comprised of cracks as much as cobblestones. It will be easy to secrete himself into one while he tries to think what to do.

At night, curled in a tiny room by King’s Cross station which he shares with five other men, Adam lies awake shivering and listening to the roar of the trains and aches, thinking of his warm, silent room bathed in moonlight, of the sunlit schoolroom, the firelit library, Opal galloping up the stairs, Mrs Sargent sitting with him over tea in the rose garden. And Ronan. Ronan everywhere. In shirtsleeves, digging in the garden or wrangling a new horse with his stablemaster; stretched out on the window seat in the schoolroom, soaking in the sun like a cat; bent over his account books, pale skin warmed by the yellow lamp; in the drawing room, the music room, Adam’s room, Adam’s bed. Adam can’t escape him. Every part of Ronan hovers there, waiting for him, just behind his eyes, at every hour of the day or night. Adam thinks he sees him constantly in London’s ever-shifting crowds: a broad shoulder, a long leg, the rough stubble of a close-shaven scalp. London brings all sorts, and he sees pieces of Ronan everywhere.

It's like being stabbed in the gut, repeatedly. Adam feels breathless with pain. When he had read of broken hearts, he had not realised it was meant so literally; he knows now that something within him has been ruptured terribly and, in a cruel Promethean turn, grows back nightly only to be torn again with the return of consciousness.

The pain is lent a horrifying cast by his conviction that its root cause is not feeling but magic.

How many times had his eyes sought Ronan, instinctively, thoughtlessly, even across a crowded room? And, finding him, how often had his hands ached, as though brought in suddenly from the cold, to touch?

You can have my hands, he had told Cabeswater, with unpardonable carelessness, You can have my eyes. And Cabeswater took him at his word, for which it could not be blamed, and used his hands and eyes to reach towards its master.

Or was it worse than that? Had Ronan known, all along, the bargain Adam had struck with that piece of him left back in Henrietta? Had he used it to draw Adam to him, commanded his limbs consciously? Adam’s whole self rebels against this thought. Ronan is not cruel. He is not entitled in that way. He loves wild things, is happier to entice a free beast to him than to pet a tame one. He lets Bonesaw come and go as she likes, pleased each time she returns to him, feeds from his hand, chooses his shoulder over all other perches to alight upon. That Ronan might have knowingly used Adam’s bargain with Cabeswater to enchant him into his home and, thence, his bed, is not merely repugnant but absurd. Perhaps Adam is being naïve. Perhaps, even this far from Ronan and Cabeswater, he is still enthralled; but he cannot believe it. Whatever Ronan is, he is not capable of forcing another person against their will. At The Barnes even the horses are broken by kindness and affection, and allowed to keep their spirit intact.

It is Cabeswater which is the wildcard. Who knows what an entity like that might do to please its maker? Cabeswater, Adam is increasingly convinced, had used its influence to drive Adam gently and purposefully towards Ronan, and then done whatever seemed most expedient to keep him there. Love is certainly a very effective way to tether a human soul.

 

The problem with London is that he cannot really afford it. Ronan had been as generous with his wages as with everything else, and Adam is far from destitute, but that won’t last him long between the rooming house and meals and transport, and besides, his five roommates are wearing heavily on Adam’s nerves. Turnover is high, and Adam finds himself slipping back into a self he had thought he could leave behind forever, on high alert at every hour of the day, sleeping with one eye cracked, trying not to flinch at every touch or sudden sound. He must get out of the boarding house, must find a new position, a more permanent place to live.

And this time he must do it alone, without his cards, because he can no longer afford Cabeswater’s heady influence, turning him this way instead of that. The effort of keeping the forest’s gentle, insistent rustling locked up tight is an extra burden he must bear, just one more drain on his energy, one more reminder of everything he has lost.

So he stuffs his tarot cards into the bottom of his bag and wanders London, heartbroken and homeless and quite probably bleeding internally, or so it feels. For the first time in almost three years Adam allows his baser instincts to take over; he has become soft, used to seeing the same roof over his head and drawing a steady wage. Now he must reach again for the hard, steadfast kernel of himself that had allowed him to survive his father and then climb, battered and undereducated and malnourished, from the bottom of the heap to become Top Boy in school.

Every morning he rises early, eats breakfast at the boarding house (not because it is good or particularly generous, but because it is hot, and included in his rent, and will carry him through until dinner time), and walks to St James’ Square and the London Library. He had felt an instinctive reluctance at voluntarily parting with the money for a subscription, but he needed a place to work, and access to all the regular newspapers, and it had been the logical solution. To his pleasure, Adam had quickly discovered that the library’s offerings extend far beyond a quiet table at which to read, and access to the classifieds. Its shelves are well-stocked, and though it could not ameliorate the pang he felt whenever he remembered, helplessly, the warmth and ease of his evenings in the library at The Barnes, it is a comfort to be able to immerse himself once more in his studies and ignore for a while the grimy, alien bustle outside.

He finds the job by accident.

Which is to say he gets a strong desire to pick up this particular paper, then to flip to the advertisements, and then, as he runs a finger down the page, feels a prickle of something as he brushes over a paragraph which reads: Research assistant wanted. Oxford and London. Latin, Greek and scientific drawing. Room, board and wages provided. He tries not to remember that the last time he experienced this same sequence of nudges and sensations it had led him to The Barnes. For a moment, Adam wonders if he ought to resist the pull. It could be intertwined with Cabeswater and its master. But it’s been months of unwashed bodies too close to him, of startling from sleep at the sound of drunken footsteps at his door, and of mounting anxiety about his financial situation; and although his bargain had seemed to strengthen his knack, the talent itself predated it.

Besides, Adam has always, at his heart, been ruthlessly pragmatic even with himself. That is, after all, how he ended up in London in the first place.

 

When, on the Tuesday following, he rings the appointed doorbell at the appointed time, nobody answers. Adam is a little surprised. Usually, when his knack is involved, things proceed quite smoothly. He waits ten minutes and then, just as he is turning to go, a handsome cab roles to a stop and a square, good-looking young man tumbles out and up the stairs.

“God, sorry, I’m so sorry – Mr Parrish, isn’t it – please,” he gets the door open and holds it, giving Adam a brilliantly warm smile, “Do come in. Richard Gansey. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Notes:

Well, alright, this one ends on a little bit of a cliff-edge, too, but it's a nice uplifiting one, to balance out all the angst. And, hopefully, I'll be back to fill in the next bit in a more timely fashion!

If not, I hope you all stay well and safe, and I will see you asap.

Thank you, as ever, for reading. Please do let me know if you're enjoying the fic, I live for comments :)

~
Next: everything is connected; there are no coincidences. New city, new friends, Adam reinvented.

Chapter 19: If self-respect and circumstances require me so to do.

Summary:

Beginnings, beginnings, ends.

 

 

“He really is quite dense, isn’t he.”
“Not about the interesting things,” Adam says, feeling loyal.
“No,” she agrees, “Only the important ones.”

Notes:

So, two things before we get to the chapter:

First, I wrote a whole long note becuause it has been a Long Time, but I'm putting it at the end so you can get to the story faster//skip it if you'd like to.

Second, I'm posting at least one more chapter right after this one as an apology//bonus for disappearing on all of you lovely readers, so stick around for that!

It's good to be back :)

Gansey is….extraordinary, frankly. He is clever and passionate and bizarre. He is frequently rude by accident, and when he speaks about his work or his wife or his friends his eyes light and he leans forward and one feels as though there is nobody else in the room. He has the sort of personal charm that rolls before him like a wave, enfolding all before it. Because Adam works with him – is constantly involved with the fervent, academic Gansey – it takes him a while to realise that there are in fact other versions. Archaeologist and scholar Gansey, whom Adam knows, is warm and involved and rather absent minded; Lord Richard Gansey III, seated between important people at one of his mother’s famous society dinners, is witty and charming and the perfect balance of distant and politely engaged; and when Adam meets Mrs Gansey he sees the hint of some third side, soft and warm and desperately affectionate. Someday, Adam thinks, he would like to be one of that select list of people who know this third Gansey, but maybe that’s just because he had something so close to that warmth before, and now keenly feels its loss.

Mrs Gansey is also extraordinary, not least because she is Mrs Gansey only on her marriage certificate and the indomitable Miss Blue Sargent on the covers of her books and in most conversations. Like Gansey, she is an archaeologist, and they spend much of the year abroad, scraping foreign soils and dusting fossils and uncovering all manner of extraordinary things. They have a private museum in the sprawling country house in Oxford and a smaller collection nestled into velvet-lined drawers in their shared study in London.

Like the study, Adam is a shared resource. He translates Latin and Greek, and is applying his considerable faculties to the study of hieroglyphics. As the weeks unfold into months, he accompanies either or both of them on trips to museums and private collections in the greater London and Oxford areas so he can sketch artefacts and make notes. The work is absorbing and the objects beautiful, and best of all he is learning things every day that make the world around him expand. Gansey and Sargent – another Sargent, and for the first few weeks that is painful, every time – pull him into their academic circle with affectionate abandon, and for the first time in his life Adam has…friends. Not like…well. But friends.

 

 

Friends like Henry Cheng, for example. A whirlwind in the shape of a man. A legendary wit in London’s private salons. Head curator of the antiquities wing of the British museum, he manages the collection with the same curatorial verve and attention to detail with which he manages his wardrobe. He and Sargent are particular friends, and Adam finds himself folded smoothly in: first to their picnic luncheons, camped on packing crates and between enormous stone sphinxes in the store room at the museum; then languid afternoon teas at the Langham Hotel; and later to meetings and lectures and more tea at 19 Langham Place. Once, they travel to Sheffield to attend a meeting of the Sheffield Female Political Association. Gansey does not come on these expeditions, because Gansey’s foot is unfortunately devoted to his mouth and there is general agreement amongst their friends that he cannot be trusted with new people. Adam, however, is warmly swept along. General suffrage, so recently awarded to men over the age of twenty one, is still denied to women, and it surprises Adam not at all to find Sargent in the thick of the debate. She weaves her passionate beliefs into the past, present and future, and Adam finds himself looking at artefacts, the world and his own situation through a new lens. Possibilities glimmer where he had previously seen only dead ends.

 

 

Life in the Gansey-Sargent townhouse is both predictable and irregular. Breakfast occurs like clockwork at six thirty am, after which they move as a collective to the study slash library and take up their various tasks. Adam is at present transcribing and translating a tablet in Ancient Greek, discovered beside some unusual statuary on a dig last year*. At twelve pm – strictly mandated by the housekeeper, who knows well that if she does not keep them to a schedule they all three will not think to eat until well on four – they break for lunch, and after that the day dissolves into happy chaos. Sometimes the three of them troop over to the British Museum, or a private collection. Sometimes they disband for separate appointments. Adam usually accompanies one or other of his employers, but sometimes they ask him to attend to things alone and report back in the evening with his notes, or he goes back to the London Library for a change of scene while he studies. He holds this implicit trust close to his chest, and it warms him through.

Dinner at the Gansey-Sargent residence is often cold, because it is rarely conducted at a predictable time. They are often out late, and regularly do not dine at home at all. Both Sargent and her husband are insatiably curious, unnervingly fearless, and not the least put off by social norms. They happily traipse around London’s less savoury quarters, and will eat just as readily at roadside carts or pubs as in the best houses and restaurants in town. In everything, they now include Adam, walking three abreast like equals.

At first this makes him uncomfortable; they are both wealthy, well-known independent scholars, and Adam is the poor only son of servants, attended a country boarding school, and had never set foot in a university until his current work took him there. London is not like the unruly warmth of The Barnes. Social status matters here, deeply. But it is evident that Gansey and Miss Sargent see no such distinction between them. In Gansey, this is probably a product of the sometimes charming, often irritating obliviousness with which he fumbles his way through the world. With Sargent it is different. From things she’s said about her past, Adam knows that Sargent was born neither wealthy nor famous. She made her name as an adventuress by writing books about her travels – it’s how she and Gansey met – and now, though she has access to the vast expanse of Gansey’s estate, still relies mostly on her own substantial income, accrued through the sale of her writings. She understands money in the way that Adam was forced to learn, and Gansey never will, and the two of them bond over this. Adam finds he can be honest with Sargent in ways he has never been with anyone, even Ronan Lynch.

It is not perhaps a surprise when, as they are sat around the breakfast table one morning in the second week of December, Gansey looks up suddenly and says, “What did you read in university?” He says it out of the blue, but as though picking up a conversation they’d been having a moment before, blinking earnestly at Adam from behind his spectacles.

“I didn’t,” Adam says calmly.

Gansey blinks at him again, but in a surprised way, “Didn’t what?”

“Go to university.”

“My dear Parrish! With a mind like yours! Why ever not?”

Across the table, Sargent is watching Adam closely and openly, while somehow managing not to be offensive about it. Gansey, for all his charms, does not have this knack.

“Gansey,” she says abruptly, and he turns instinctively towards her in a way that makes some part of Adam, deep-buried, ache. “Don’t quiz Mr Parrish so. I’m sure he had his reasons.”

“Oh,” Gansey looks genuinely surprised, and then, quite suddenly, embarrassed, “Oh, my dear chap, was I rude again? I am so sorry.”

“Don’t concern yourself,” Adam tells him. But though the topic moves away while he focusses on his plate, he can feel Sargent’s eyes upon him for the rest of the day.

“Gansey may believe me merely eccentric,” Adam tells her later, as they walk in the park before supper, “He is so good natured and oblivious, heaven knows, I doubt he has even noticed that my coat is four years out of fashion – but I know that you know I am not, and never have been, a wealthy man.”

Blue huffs at him, and threads her arm neatly through his, “Well of course I know, Parrish. I was brought up in a house where one actually had to know what a thing cost. And then scrape together the money to buy it.” She wrinkles her nose, “He really is quite dense, isn’t he.”

“Not about the interesting things,” Adam says, feeling loyal.

“No,” she agrees, “Only the important ones.” She squeezes his arm with her small, strong hand, and though it stings, still – would always sting, perhaps – to feel one kind of warmth and companionship and yet to have so thoroughly lost another, he is grateful, at least, to have her with him.

Still, since that abortive breakfast conversation, Adam will sometimes catch her looking at him, bent over his books, with an appraising, intent, planning sort of expression, as though she has made a decision and is only deliberating over how best to enact it. It makes him a little uncomfortable, but such is the lot of the employee. As long as he must work for his living, Adam will always be at the mercy of his masters, be they ever so generous and good. He puts her strange look from his mind and applies himself to his translation.

 

 

At The Barnes, Ronan dreams of Adam, and even when it’s beautiful, it’s a nightmare.

Adam, lying dead in a ditch beside the road, broken on train-tracks, flung from the roof of a building onto Dublin’s unyielding cobblestones.

Adam laughing, talking, bending his head to speak in some beautiful woman’s ear, or murmur sweetly into a lovely man’s neck.

Adam grey and wasting. Adam well fed and happy. Adam in rags or silks, smiling, weeping, shouting, raging.

“You left me!” Ronan screams at an Adam who is impeccably tailored and well-pressed, his dust-coloured hair brushed back from his sharp, elegant features, and Adam bares his teeth and snaps in his face.

Ronan wakes with tears on his cheeks, holding nothing.

He tends the farm. He rides until his mount stumbles, then feels guilty and sick, trudging back leading his horse. He keeps his papers with a precision and order so vicious that Declan eyes him warily when he visits to look over the accounts. He avoids Opal, and feels guilt again, but he cannot bear to look at her, or speak to her, to hear her ask for Adam, quote Adam, roll her rrrs around in her mouth the way that Adam had expressly told her not to do, when he’d let his accent slip and she had taken it up instead, delighted. He avoids Mrs Sargent’s well-meaning concern. He goes to church, of course, and to Dublin on business, ruffles Matthew’s hair because he can’t help it, but he also can’t stay. He goes back to the farm, flings off his Sunday clothes and stuffs his feet into solid boots and strides off to mend a fence, or dig out a pig pen, or anything, anything, that will set his muscles to burning so that when he finally retreats in the evening or rides off into town – either way to sink into the sharp embrace of a bottle – he has some chance of bludgeoning his mind quiet.

Sometimes he even meets with some success.

Notes:

*I just want to be clear on this: the Brits have stolen a lot of shit from other people. Like A Lot. And they’re still refusing to give most of it back, or even open dialogues, or talk about the various problems caused by this particular facet of imperialism. There’s a pretty great podcast called (I think you can probably guess what it's about) Stuff The British Stole. It’s funny and terrible. Anyway. I want to acknowledge that this was shit, and also that there comes a point where you can’t manage any more history re-writes, you know? This national kleptomania had a really significant impact on the UK’s culture, self-identity, etc., etc. Basically I didn’t know how to re-write it and keep the Sargent-Ganseys as academics, because that nonsense is woven all the way through.

 

And now for a slightly epic author's note:

I have to start with an apology. I am so sorry to have left you hanging. I hope you’ll forgive me.

It has been – as I know you all know, some of you probably more deeply than I do – a 'difficult' few years.

At the start of the pandemic writing this fic – and reading a lot of other fics – kept me sane. But you see, there was this point when, quite suddenly, the awfulness of reality reached critical mass and the escapism of fic (writing it, reading it or replying to comments) felt so far from what my actual life was like that it became literally unbearable. I actually stopped reading any fiction at all, fan or otherwise. I’ve only recently started to get back into it (bless you, Locked Tomb…quartet? Quintet? Hopefully? I digress).

Perhaps that won’t make sense to you. I know fic has offered comfort to many people during the pandemic. Plus, fic – particularly the type I like: heavy on the romance, always ends sweetly (very minor spoiler alert 😊 ) – is never terribly ‘realistic’. But usually the poignancy of that gap between love-in-a-novel and love-in-real-life has a delicious hopefullness to it. I think we read stories to imagine what could be, and then take pieces of them back with us to the real world, to fold into our lives and ways of being.

Deep in the pandemic times, though, it just wasn’t working for me anymore. Nothing felt hopeful, nothing felt good or right, and I couldn’t bear the magnitude of the chasm which had opened between my reality and the charmed lives (yes, cliff-hangers, heartbreak and all) I was writing. It was just too sad. Plus, I’m not great at making-while-angsty. Writing angst, can do. Being an angsty writer, no.

And so, lovely, lovely readers, I let the whole thing fall in a heap. I abandoned you, and for that I’m so sorry, but I think I needed this time to find my way back to the pleasure of fiction. There was no way out but through.

And then, one grey and rainy day (today, in fact), I was staring out the window at the mist and I thought: you know, I love writing. I miss writing. I miss STORIES! I miss worlds that aren’t this world, other lives, other thoughts. I miss love, and beauty, and romance by all its varied definitions. Most of all I miss how completely unabashed I can be about my affection for these things when I am in this space, in the company of you, fellow readers and writers. Here, I can share my delight in lush descriptive passages and true love that lasts, and not be ashamed because it’s ‘light’ or ‘silly’ or ‘too wordy’ (or whatever other nonsense people use to impose hierarchies on stories). Obviously, if you’ve made it this far, you like that sort of thing, too – and I love that you’re here, with me.

Alright, alright, that’s enough. I know what you’re really after. Bonus chapter to come.

But I do also want to say, finally, how much it meant to me, and how deeply humbled and proud and pleased I felt, when I finally logged back into my account after all this time and found all those messages waiting for me. Lovely, moving, engaged, excited, entreating messages. It’s always wonderful to receive positive feedback, obviously, but to be frank the other reason it took me so long to get back here is that I had lost a lot of faith in myself. Like all of you, I’ve been well battered by circumstances beyond my control over these past few years. Less than many, I’m sure, but enough to really shake me and the things I’d believed about myself before.

To find, when I finally, tentatively crept back towards writing, that there had been people here all along, waiting patiently, hoping for my wellbeing, letting me know how much they were enjoying this story…it helped something I thought I’d lost to slot back into place.

Thank you so much for that. Thank you for waiting. Thank you for your patience.

I hope you enjoy what’s coming; I’m just starting to remember how much fun I had writing it.

Chapter 20: In the corresponding quarter of your frame.

Summary:

Weeping, and dreaming, and gnashing of teeth.

 

 

He gasps and flounders in his bed, lungs tight, spasming as though they’ve grown accustomed to the clear, dreamy air of Cabeswater and are stuttering now beneath the weight of London’s eternal smog. His face is wet, and his stomach, his heart, his fingers all ache. He’d been getting better, day by day. He’d been trying to forget.

 

Now it’s all real again, as real as if he’s just dropped the latch on the side door and begun to pick his way up the gravel drive, leaving The Barns, night-still and green, behind him.

Notes:

In case the last chapter seemed mostly fine, in this one everything is terrible.

It's also a chapter that I feel needs a trigger warning, but it's a weird trigger warning because the potential victim doesn't see it that way, and nobody intentionally hurts anybody else (this will matter for some people and not for others).

The chapter includes a number of discussions regarding Cabeswater, its power over Adam's body (this idea definitely unnerves me), where that power may come from, who controls it and how it's been employed. I've provided more complete (ie, spoilery) notes at the end if you're still not sure whether to read or not.

I think the essential issues to think about are this:
1) magic that can potentially override someone's bodily autonomy is always alarming
2) realising the possibility that you may have used that magic unintentionally would be traumatic for everyone involved
3) multiply by 100 if it's somebody you a) love and b) have had a sexual relationship with
4) the involved parties may differ on the degree or extent of culpability they would ascribe to said unintentional use, which would colour how they view the situation

Adam has not seen The Barnes in close to two months when he closes his eyes one night and wakes in Cabeswater.

It’s nothing like the last time he was here, either in dreams or real life. Then, the air had been balmy, the sun clear, trees softly waving in a light breeze and murmuring sweet, unintelligible nothings in his deaf ear.

Now, something is on fire.

Something is on fire, and the sky above him is a roiling mass of red lighting and black clouds, and the trees hiss and moan, shaking violently. Adam turns slowly, cautiously on his heel, trying to get his bearings. There is a small brook just ahead. He follows it, trying to find a landmark, and eventually lights on a familiar tree. The green moss clinging to its bark looks ragged and limp. Adam lays a hand against it and feels a trembling in his mind, an aching, wailing sense of grief and loss, followed roundly by an abrupt spike of confusion. He yanks his hand back as though stung, and glances up in surprise; he’s not imagining it, the sky has lightened a little.

Cautiously, he forges on.

There’s no telling how long he walks. Time is strange in Cabeswater, it always has been, and in dreams it is stranger still. But eventually the trees begin to thin and then he steps out into Ronan’s glade, the place with the clear stream and the large flat rock and – there he is.

Ronan glances up at his footfall and goes still as a wild thing. The blood drains from his face and his eyes seem impossibly wide and pale and glassy. He gets to his feet and is across the clearing before Adam can move, reaching for him with eager, shaking fingers that flit to his face, his shoulders, his sides. His eyes rove Adam’s body like a third hand, and it takes Adam a minute to realise that he’s speaking, too.

“- Christ, Parrish. Are you hurt? Are you safe? I thought – Jesus, I thought – ” Ronan’s arms come up around him, pulling him in so tightly, so close, that Adam can feel the frantic rabbiting of his heart where their chests are pressed together. “I thought something had happened to you,” Ronan is murmuring into his ear, “I thought you must be hurt, or – or – I thought. God, Adam. God. I’m so – my God, I was so afraid –”

Adam is finding it difficult to process words. Two months since he’s seen Ronan. Two months since he’s touched him, or been touched by him or anyone, actually. The feel and scent and press of Ronan’s body all around him is overwhelming, and for long minutes Adam can do is stand there like an idiot, trying not to weep.

It takes Ronan about this long to notice that Adam isn’t responding; Adam supposes this is fair. They’re both out of practice. Adam can feel it in Ronan’s body when he realises, his muscles going rigid, pulling hesitantly away.

“Adam?” he asks, tentatively.

“Let go of me, Lynch.” It’s hard to keep his voice steady, to stay calm. He should never have come here. He should’ve woken himself as soon as he realised he was in Cabeswater.

Ronan recoils as if burnt.

“Adam,” he says, “I thought…it is really you, isn’t it? I am not dreaming.”

“It’s me,” Adam tells him. He still can’t stand to lie to Ronan. He watches fear and anger and hurt and betrayal and confusion chase over Ronan’s face and wills himself to stand still, to remain impassive, to give nothing away.

“You are…you are alive, then. Aren’t you?” Ronan asks falteringly.

“I am,” Adam tells him, “And now I’m going to wake up.”

 

 

The next time he wakes in Cabeswater the forest looks better. The sky is clear again, though it’s still colder than usual, and the light has a peculiarly flat, grey quality to it.

It’s been more than three months since he handed his bag up to the coachman and fled into the dawn, a month and a half since he had last seen Ronan in this very glade. In the intervening time, Adam has thought better of their last encounter. He’d been in shock, he thinks, seeing Ronan again, hearing his voice, feeling Ronan’s hands on his body. Overwhelmed by the moment, he hadn’t realised that he’d been given an opportunity, a chance to explain what had happened. It was only later, Ronan’s chalk-white face burned into his memory, his desperate hands, his voice in Adam’s ear – God, Adam, God. I thought you were dead – that Adam realised what a fool he’d been to squander it. He could not change the situation, but he could at least explain it, if Cabeswater would only give him another chance.

And now it had.

“I wondered how long it would be before you turned up again.”

Ronan is sitting on a huge boulder, picking lines into the black lichen with his pocketknife.

“I can go, if you want,” he says, “It’s your forest, too.”

Adam swallows thickly. “Technically, it’s your forest. Your dream. I suppose that means I am only a figment in your mind.”

How can it feel so real if it really is just a dream? Not even his dream. Somebody else’s. More than ten years ago when he was terrified and desperate, Adam had sacrificed his body, his independence, to Ronan’s wild imagination, and now it has brought every good thing he loves to ruin. The helplessness and fury he feels over this runs thick and deep, and it burns him. He probably owes Ronan his life; how cruel, like one of the best Greek tragedies, that the price for it should be the very things that first made it worth living.

Ronan looks subtly different. Darker, somehow, which he hadn’t thought possible. When he shifts around on his rock Adam sees that this is literal, as well as metaphorical. A large blue-black stain spreads around one eye and washes over the cheekbone.

“Jesus, Ronan. What happened to your face?”

“Horse kicked me.”

Adam narrows his eyes. He’s seen hoof injuries before, and this doesn’t look right.

“Really,” he says.

“Of course. Why the hell not?”

“Did you get into a fight?”

“Yes, Parrish,” Ronan snaps, “With a horse.”

“No horse did that!” Adam explodes; it’s as if the rage has only been waiting for an outlet. It bursts from him in a rush. If this is real then Ronan is…Ronan is bruised, has been bleeding, has been looking for and finding the kind of trouble that could get him really hurt. “Look at you!” Adam shouts, furious because he has lost everything, furious because he’s far, far away, furious because he’s afraid for Ronan and there’s nothing he can do about it, “You didn’t do that on a farm! Where have you even been finding people to fight? God, you’re so fucking self-destructive!”

“You left me!” Ronan snarls. His wrath is every bit as abrupt and concussive as Adam’s. He is rage incarnate. If he gets too near, Adam will be slashed to ribbons. “What did you expect? You fucking left me, with nothing. I thought you were dead! Did you imagine I would just sit quietly through that? You thought everything would simply carry on? Like there was nothing between us, like we were – well, Adam, as it happens, when you rip someone’s fucking heart out they bleed. At least this way my outsides match my innards.”

The rage leaves Adam abruptly, and he feels broken in its wake. “God,” he says softly, “God.”

“Fuck off,” Ronan bites out. “And fucking go wake up if you’re just going to get on at me. I didn’t come here for a fucking lecture.”

“Fine,” Adam says.

“Fine!” Ronan snarls back.

For long minutes they stare at each other in silence.

“Why did you come if you don’t want to be here?” Ronan says.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Adam snaps. A flash of hurt, too bright to bury quickly, crosses Ronan’s face. Adam feels an echo of it in his chest. “I can’t control it,” he amends, “But I did want to come.” It’s true, though now he’s here he’s torn between wanting to wake again immediately, and wanting to fling himself at Ronan and beg forgiveness, promise that he’ll be on tomorrow’s train. He mustn’t do it, he can’t; but can’t bear to leave, either. Bruises or no, he can’t tear his eyes away from Ronan (and isn’t that the problem?). He wants so desperately to stay, to make himself forget about interfering magic and his bargain and wrap his whole body around Ronan and wake in his wide, white bed at The Barnes.

And because he won’t, because he can’t…he owes Ronan an explanation. Even now, Adam is not one hundred percent sure that this is a true dream, but it feels right. Even if he never says this to Ronan in real life, he should tell him now. He should explain why he left, and why they can’t be…why he had to leave, to protect himself. To know that he was free.

As soon as Adam thinks of sitting down to have this conversation, he sees second boulder near Ronan’s, and can’t remember whether it had always been there or had only now appeared. Cabeswater bending to accommodate his will? That’s…new. He walks to the rock and sits, facing Ronan, hands dangling between his knees. Ronan glares at him from beneath his long lashes and then goes back to determinedly picking at the stone.

“Almost ten years ago,” Adam begins, “I made a bargain. I was…in danger, and the only safe place I knew was Cabeswater, though I did not know it by that name. What I did know, even then, was that it was no ordinary wood. The trees had this air about them, as though…well, you know how they are, don’t you? I felt they were listening to me. I felt they cared for me, and, in a moment of desperation, I prayed to them. I asked them to hide me, keep me safe, and in return I offered…well, I offered anything they wanted, but I didn’t have much. A terrified twelve-year-old. A stable-boy.” He’s never explicitly told Ronan any of this before, isn’t sure how much he’s guessed or found out by asking at Aglionby. Still, it doesn’t feel as crushing as he’d thought it would, to admit his low beginnings. Somehow, the last few months with Sargent and Gansey have opened him up, changed his perspective not just on the world but on his place in it. When Gansey defers to him on a difficult translation, or Sargent asks for his opinion on some ancient artifact, Adam feels not merely valued, but known, weighed, found more than sufficient. It changes the way he thinks about his past.

“I was nobody,” he says, because it’s true, but it doesn’t hurt as it once had, “But I told them I would give what I could: my eyes, my hands. If only they would protect me. And they did.” Adam takes a deep, shuddery breath and closes his eyes. “That night, my father died. An ‘accident’ in the woods – in Cabeswater. Later, the family at the house decided to sponsor me so I could go to school. I don’t know if Cabeswater had a direct hand in that, too, but either way the events of that night, my bargain and my father’s death, were the first link in a chain that changed the course of my life. I escaped Henrietta, received a sound Classical education, and eventually found my way to The Barnes. To you, Ronan. Cabeswater, my bargain with it, led me to you.”

He opens his eyes to find Ronan already looking back. His eyes are unreadable and hard.

“Alright,” he says, measured like he’s holding very firmly to his temper, “So?”

“God, Ronan,” it tears out of him like teeth. Worse. Like a vital organ. “Don’t you see? Cabeswater is yours. You dreamed it. You made it! It’s a part of you, like Opal or Bonesaw or your garden. I didn’t make a sacrifice to a magical forest, I made a sacrifice to you. I promised you my – my eyes, and my hands – and then, ten years later, I wind up in your house? In your bed? That’s not just bloody coincidence, Ronan, that’s –”

And then Adam wakes to a loud crash and Sargent swearing in the next room. He gasps and flounders in his bed, lungs tight, spasming as though they’ve grown accustomed to the clear, dreamy air of Cabeswater and are stuttering now beneath the weight of London’s eternal smog. His face is wet, and his stomach, his heart, his fingers all ache. He’d been getting better, day by day. He’d been trying to forget.

Now it’s all real again, as real as if he’s just dropped the latch on the side door and begun to pick his way up the gravel drive, leaving The Barns, night-still and green, behind him. Adam feels flayed open afresh. He presses his hand against his stomach and tries to slow his breathing.

It’s dawn outside. It’s dawn, in London, and he will have to get up soon for breakfast, and Ronan is a sea away, curled in his big white bed, watching the same sun rising over lush fields and licking into Cabeswater’s dense shadows. Adam feels so alone it hurts, a slow, cold pain lodged deep in his bones. If he closes his eyes he can almost conjure Ronan’s scent, can almost hear his slow breathing and imagine that if he shifted forwards just a finger’s breadth their knees would touch. It feels like more than he can possibly bear.

But what’s worse, much worse, is that all he can think about for the rest of the day is the sure bloom of horror in Ronan’s pale, blue eyes, just before he woke up.

 

The next time it happens he’s…well. He’s not prepared at all. But he should be. They’re in the clearing again, bare weeks later, and everything hurts. Still hurts. Hasn’t stopped hurting.

Ronan is crouched by the stream in shirtsleeves, one cuff rolled up to expose his left arm to the elbow. He drags his fingers slowly through the water and a school of tiny, glimmering fish follow in their wake. A trick of the light makes their colours shift, red to gold to black to red. Or maybe it’s just a trick of Cabeswater.

Adam clears his throat. Ronan lifts his head slowly, and Adam takes a sharp breath when he meets Ronan’s eyes. His pupils are huge, ringed by the thinnest band of glassy blue. He looks dazed, sluggish.

“Ronan?” Adam asks, crouching on the other side of the stream. It’s narrow, barely two feet across. They haven’t been this close since that first dream, two months ago, when Ronan had held him. Adam wants to reach out and brush his fingers across Ronan’s cheekbones, touch the bruises beneath his eyes, the tremble at the corner of his mouth. He fists his hands against the moss, digging his knuckles in firmly.

“Adam…” his voice is slow, too, and sticky at the edges. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m dreaming,” Adam tells him, “What are you doing? Are you…Ronan, are you alright? Are you safe?”

Ronan scoffs, loudly. The effort tips some fragile equilibrium within him and he lists dangerously forwards for a second before righting himself, just in time to avoid tumbling into the water.

Adam knows what drunkenness looks like, of course. He knows what Ronan looks like drunk, even. This is different. He remembers those sparse whispers amongst the servants, their master’s bad years, Paris, disreputable friends, the kind of goings on that no well-bred servant would speak about directly.

“Ronan,” he says, “Ronan, are you…did you take something? Are you at The Barnes?”

Ronan scoffs again, more steadily now, as though he’s getting used to it.

“What do you care?” he slurs. “Where are you?”

Adam swallows, “I can’t tell you that.”

“Right. Of course. Of course you wouldn’t tell me. I trapped you. I…kidnapped you, or…something. Forced you. I –” Ronan cuts himself off with a wet, ragged breath. He glances up at Adam and Adam sees that though his eyes seem clearer, now, they’re wet, too. They gleam, pale and terrible, in the gathering dusk, “Fuck, Adam,” he rasps, “Fuck, I, God. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I. God.”

And then there is a tearing sound above their heads. Adam and Ronan both stare upwards, and Adam stumbles back, to his feet, hand rising to his mouth. Something is coming, something terrible. Huge wings block out the stars, and the thunder of them is deafening. His clothes flap around him and the trees bend impossibly, willow-like, beneath the onslaught.

“Ronan!” he shouts, turning wildly towards him. Ronan is on his feet, barely, staggering against the gale.

“Go!” he shouts, “Adam, go!”

“No – Ronan!” Adam sprints for him, gathering himself to leap across the stream, “Wake up, Ronan, you have to wake up! Wake up before you take it with you!” he reaches the edge, only half-conscious that the little rill has grown wider, the water faster, deeper. He’ll never make it to the other side. It’s an impossible jump. Even as he launches himself into the air, the far bank – Ronan – seems further away. “Ronan!” he shouts desperately, “Ronan, wake up! You have to wake up! Ronan – !”

Adam flings himself forwards and the sheets tangle about his feet and he pitches down onto the hearthrug. For a moment he is winded, wrists aching, jarred when he flung his hands out to break his fall. He gasps for air like a fish. And then curls slowly onto his side and into a tight ball, and sobs until his head pounds and he falls heavily into a terrifyingly empty sleep.

 

“Ronan,” Adam gasps, and without thinking flings himself across the clearing and grabs for him. He clutches Ronan’s waist and the back of his head, presses Ronan’s face into his shoulder and wraps his other arm so tightly about his body that their ribs are crushed together, hearts occupying the almost the same thundering space.

“Adam,” Ronan chokes, crumpling against him, “Adam, I –”

“Fuck,” Adam swears frantically against his neck, “Fuck, Ronan, I thought you were – are you hurt? Did it hurt you? Fuck, let me see.” He pushes Ronan back, runs hectic hands and eyes over his face, his arms, his chest, checking for blood, wounds, bandages. It’s only been a week, but it’s been the longest week in Adam’s ill-gotten life.

“I’m alright,” Ronan gasps, “Adam, I’m alright. I’m fine,” he catches Adam’s wrists in his hands, gently but firmly, “Adam, stop.”

Adam stops. His breathing is ragged and he feels wild and untethered. His fingers flex of their own accord, trying to get to Ronan again.

The realisation stops him cold.

Ronan sees it happen and the look that crosses his face is…indescribable. He drops Adam’s wrists as if they burn, presses the back of his hand against his mouth as he stumbles a few feet backwards; he looks like he’s going to be sick, like his legs are about to buckle.

“Ronan,” Adam starts, holding out a careful hand.

“Don’t!” It’s so violent that Adam recoils.

“Alright. I won’t. I just…I was so goddamn terrified, Lynch. I was sure you must’ve brought the creature back with you, and you were obviously – you were in no fit state to fight it. And then I didn’t dream all week, and I thought…” God, Adam closes his eyes against it, presses the heels of his hands hard against his eyes to try to block out every way he’d imagined Ronan’s body torn and broken and bloody, “I thought…”

“Well, you thought wrong. I’m fine.” He doesn’t sound fine. He sounds strange, dull and flat. “I’m fine,” Ronan repeats, like an echo, “And now you know. So you can just. Go. Wake up. And you really ought to stop fucking coming here, Parrish, alright? It’s…you’re fucking up Cabeswater. You should stay away.”

“Oh,” Adam says. He opens his eyes again, looks around. The forest doesn’t really look any different to him this time. Maybe a bit more shadowed, a little less vibrancy to its many greens, “Alright. I didn’t realise…I had to know you were alright. I didn’t know that I was…causing you trouble.”

“Is this a Goddamn joke, Parrish?” Ronan snarls, “What did you think you were doing, turning up here again and again?”

“I told you,” Adam starts, “I had to be sure that you were safe –”

 “Don’t bloody start with me, Parrish!” Ronan swipes a furious hand across his eyes. It comes away wet, “What the fuck do you care if I’m safe? You’ve no right to ask me that! You can’t even look at me head-on anymore! Why did you fucking come here if you can’t stand to be near me?”

“I keep telling you, I don’t mean to. But I’m not…” he fumbles. Again, he can’t look away from Ronan. Not even like this, when he feels like a voyeur, watching a train wreck he has no right to witness, “I don’t regret it, when I do. It’s…good. To see you.” It isn’t, those are the wrong words. But he also doesn’t want to stop. Just seeing Ronan is like letting himself take a deep breath after too long underwater.

Ronan does not seem to agree. Ronan is wreaked, ravaged, poised on the edge of a cliff or an explosion, “No, it isn’t!” he snarls, “You fucking flinch when I move, Adam, I see you do it! Why did you come if you – you think I fucking prostituted you out, through a magical bargain, that I manipulated you into – into – you think I violated you – and I can’t promise you that I didn’t! Why do you keep coming back here if you can’t stand to see me?”

Adam makes a sound like Ronan has punched him. “God,” he whispers, “I never said that. I don’t think that. Good god, Ronan - how could you say that to me?”

“Because it’s the Godforsaken truth,” Ronan snaps. Sometimes he is like this, goes cold as suddenly and fatally as he burns hot, “Apply some of your famous bloody logic, why don’t you? If the forest is me, and it enchanted you all the way to The Barnes and into my bed then I enchanted you, Adam, I did that. I coerced you into – and I – for God’s sake, I can’t stand even to look at you now. You have to stop coming here, Adam, I can’t – I can’t bear it.”

Adam feels like something inside him, something vital, is falling to pieces as he speaks. “You really want me to go?”

“Yes,” Ronan snarls.

“And not come back?”

“Yes! God.”

“I can’t promise, Ronan. I can’t control it. But I’ll try, if it’s what you want.”

Ronan wrings his hands at the back of his neck, digging his thumbs painfully into the skin.

“I think it’s better,” he grates out, “You shouldn’t have to see me.”

Adam’s quiet for a long time, just standing there, watching him.

“I don’t want not to see you,” he says finally, very quietly, “It isn’t like that. I was afraid,” he admits, because even though he knows it will hurt, Ronan always wants the truth, “Of you. When I ran. But now I’m only frightened that I can’t be near you without falling under Cabeswater’s spell. When I’m within reach of you I have no way to know what’s…me.” Ronan hitches in a breath like he’s been sucker-punched, “But I don’t believe you knew what was happening. I think there’s some kind of…translation error, in the magic, between you, and Cabeswater, and me. I think it was trying to make you happy.”

Ronan chokes down a sob. The idea that this could be the product of an attempt to make him happy.

“Don’t you see?” Ronan says. His voice is thick, like it’s drowning him, “I love you. Like…a part of my soul. Like the dream. Like Opal. Like you’re family. Like my own hands. I thought you loved me, too. And now, when I look at you, all I can think is: he was just doing as he was told, and I took advantage of him.”

Adam closes his eyes, and bows his head.

“I’m so sorry.” He says, “I still feel –”

“Don’t,” Ronan’s voice cracks, “Please. Don’t.”

Adam nods, once.

And then he’s gone.

 

Only once he’s alone does Ronan allow himself, finally, to sink down onto the mossy ground, curl in on his side and weep. Around him, the trees of Cabeswater close ranks with a whisper, shifting to cocoon their beloved dreamer and shield him from his nightmares. They are unnerved by all this wild, human emotion, and the inexplicable rift that yawns ever wider between the two boys they have so long felt to be their own.

Notes:

So, if you need some more info, the thing is this:

Adam's theory is that, since Ronan dreamed Cabeswater, Cabeswater is sort of part of Ronan. Therefore, the pact he made with Cabeswater was actually a pact with Ronan, via a magial proxy or psychopomp - a bit like making a promise to Opal, except that Cabeswater seems to respond much more directly to Ronan's moods, and have fewer (human-like) feelings of its own. This is alarming because it makes him question to what extent his actions - though not how he feels, because remember, Cabeswater has his body/parts, but not his brain - were really under his control. And Adam will not be controlled. Cabeswater's influence as he previously understood it was complicated enough. Vitally, Adam does not believe Ronan did this to him on purpose, or even consciously. He thinks it's more like...Cabeswater wants Ronan to be happy, and so it nudged him until he got there, and possibly gave his hands a bit of an added push - touch is hard for him, remember. What if Cabeswater was quietly pushing him to bridge that tactile gap? So his first reaction was a justifiable freak out, but in the back of his mind he's still working at it like a problem, trying to figure out the boundaries, to tease out where Cabeswater's influence began and ended. Crucially, he does not feel that Ronan exerted any type of coersion over him. I think this is because Adam knows Opal very well, and knows that she's hardly just an extension of Ronan, or some kind of avatar for his intentions or desires. However, she does love him, and would use her unusual skillset to do what she thought was best for him. Cabeswater is much more powerful.

Ronan, on the other hand, interprets this theory as meaning that he - however subconsciously - has some kind of physical control over Adam, and potentially his life (eg, Cabeswater speaking to him through the cards), and this is fucking awful and traumatizing and a very, very different lens through which to view their relationship.

Ronan is so convinced of this that Adam also begins to seriously consider this angle. There's really no way to resolve it with the information they have, though, so everything is terrible.

I think that pretty much covers it. If anybody would like more info, if anyone reads this and feels I left something out, or if there are a large number of people who'd like a more fleshed out alternative script, please let me know and I'll sort that out.

(spoilers for TRK)
Now, I find ideas of magical coersion incredibly disturbing - in all ways, but any time trust or bodies or intimacy is involved the outcomes are always potentially so much worse - and I found the whole 'who controlls Adam's hands' arc really unsettling in TRC (though it also generated some of my favourite Adam and Ronan scenes, like Ronan refusing to defend himself when Adam's hands attack him, and Adam being stuck in the back of the car, blindfolded and unable to move or see or do anything while Ronan is choking and dying - terrible, awful, so good). But I also think it's a really interesting (narrative-wise), incredibly sticky problem when it's happeneing without a character's conscious intention, and when there are multiple entities and genuine feelings involved. I don't get to explore it as deeply as I'd like to in the main story, but there are post-epilogue episodes of this story that get into it a bit more (yep, I have extras. Actually quite a lot.)

Chapter 21: Till I die: I will be myself.

Summary:

Mistakes revealed, questions answered; a travel plan decided.

 

Adam hums noncommittally. It sounds like the sort of nonsense Gansey seems to stumble across intuitively, as though he has a sixth sense for uncovering impossible things that cannot be proven. Then again, who is Adam to discount anything out of hand? His heart is still twined firmly around a man who can literally dream things into existence. There’s surely no logical explanation for that.

Notes:

My last week has gone down like this:

1) Yes! Editing time, I'm ready.
2) Opens correct window and begins to read.
3) Starts daydreaming about halfway through the first paragraph about writing a new story featuring magical tattoos and Victorian claw-foot bathtubs and frankly all sorts of nonsense.
4) All focus dissolves.
5) Repeat.

But I made it! Finally. I don't think I'm super great at the angsty bits but, thank god, things are starting to resolve again in this chapter so I feel back on firmer ground.

Months pass. One, then two. Before anyone has had time to unpack lighter clothing, summer is there, sneaking warm hands beneath collars and skirts. Adam feels it, but it doesn’t really touch him. He switches out his lighter suits and carries on as he has been: working, keeping his head down, burying himself in new knowledge of ancient things.

Gansey and Sargent notice, of course, and Mr Cheng, and perhaps even the crotchety old librarian at the London, but after a few exploratory prods they back off and leave him to his own devices. They are aware that something in his past has tumbled hauntingly into his present, but since they don’t know much about what that past entailed, they don’t know what to ask to provoke an honest response.

Shockingly, then, it’s Gansey who trips – as is his wont. Perhaps it’s not so shocking, after all – into a crack in Adam’s shell.

“What do you know about ley-lines[1]?” he asks, flopping down into the chair opposite Adam’s. They’re in the generous library at the Oxford house, which is warm and sunlit and beautiful, and Adam has his work spread out across all six feet of one of the tables.

Adam blinks up at him. With the large arched windows behind him Gansey is lit up like an angel, limned in gold. It does not seem entirely out of character.

“Nothing,” Adam says, honestly, “Why? What are they?”

“Well,” Gansey says, and Adam sets down his pen with a smile and leans back in his chair, preparing himself for a story, “Apparently the earth is crisscrossed with these great lines of energy, like rivers only even more alive, just running under everything,” Gansey’s voice is quick with excitement, eyes bright, hot on the trail of a fresh mystery, “Lots of ancient civilisations knew about them – or so it appears – because even on entirely separate continents, at a time when they couldn’t possibly have known about each other, they built their sacred sites in straight rows, along ley lines: the pyramids at Giza, Stonehenge, that sort of thing. It’s really quite fascinating. There is some very interesting work being done in the spiritualist community, you know, trying to find ways to trace them reliably.”

Adam hums noncommittally. It sounds like the sort of nonsense Gansey seems to stumble across intuitively, as though he has a sixth sense for uncovering impossible things that cannot be proven. Then again, who is Adam to discount anything out of hand? His heart is still twined firmly around a man who can literally dream things into existence. There’s surely no logical explanation for that.

Gansey is still speaking “…The problem, of course, is knowing which sites to count, and how to link them. That’s where the spiritualists come in. I’ve just read a pamphlet by a woman in Bath who is hoping to find a way to sense the energies from above ground, something about a piece of crystal tied on the end of a string. But in any case the whole concept is interesting to me because, as it happens, one of the proposed lines seems to run along the border of my family estate in Kent.”

Adam, who had been only half listening, feels himself go abruptly still.

“Kent?” he says, slowly.

“Yes,” Gansey tells him obliviously, “Washington Park, you know – oh, lord, I forgot, you’ve never visited. You must come with us at Christmas, it’s a beautiful estate – in any case –”

But now Adam has stopped listening entirely. Washington Park. Kent. Henrietta. A line of wild, living energy running beneath the earth. Adam felt a whisper of clean, green-smelling air against his cheek. He heard the rustling of leaves in his bad ear. At the corner of his vision, in the dim upper reaches of the library, delicate shadow branches unfurled.

What had Ronan said? That he’d never felt exactly like he’d made the forest, only given it form. That it had felt to him as though something had always been there, a wild force just waiting for him to arrive and give it material weight.

“Gansey,” he says thickly, “Where else does that line run?”

“Oh, well, they don’t seem to go in nice clean grids, necessarily,” he chuckles, which is a very Gansey way to laugh, “That one, if you go by ruins and such, seems to run past London and Oxford and – this is such a curious thing, actually – when I traced it on the map earlier, I honestly believe it connects with another estate I know, belonging to a friend of mine in Galway. It’s very odd. I’d almost say – Parrish? Good lord, man, are you alright? You look shockingly pale. Here, let me get you something to drink.”

Adam stumbles to his feet and over to the window, pushing open the casement and sucking in huge lungsful of air. A lay line runs straight from Henrietta to Galway. Could it possibly be…god. Two mystical forests, sprung up on the ley line and later merged into one. Two strange boys, also born on the ley line, and later drawn together over miles of land and sea. What if it wasn’t Ronan pulling his strings after all? What if it had never been Ronan? What if, all this time, Adam – born with a strange knack right over a magical torrent of energy – had not been directly connected to Ronan, but rather to Ronan through Cabeswater? What if Cabeswater – or the ley line of which it was surely, surely a part – had brought them together not for Ronan’s benefit but because it recognised something in them both? Kindred spirits, born on the same line, just months apart?

He’s reaching, surely. He knows he is. Isn’t he? It’s too much, too improbable, too coincidental. But that’s something he’d learnt early on from Gansey: nothing is coincidental. Lines of deep and improbable connection criss-cross human history like a demented spider’s web. Why shouldn’t he and Ronan – singular and improbable as they each are – be part of that tangle?

It’s impossible. But so is Cabeswater. So is Ronan. So, in his own, much quieter way, is Adam.

He takes the drink from Gansey with absent, numb fingers. How can he possibly test his hypothesis? How can he know for sure whether his bargain is with Ronan – or some avatar or psychopomp of Ronan’s – or the ley line? Again, Adam thinks of his childhood and, more recently, remembers those strange urges that would drive him to the edge of the schoolyard, or the village, or The Barnes to unclog a stream or bend a branch in a peculiar way. Just last week he’d traipsed absently out to Longbridges to clear a waterway. He hadn’t even realised what he was about until he was wrist-deep in a stream, and he’d wanted to be angry – could he really never escape? This was his body, his life – but surely, surely that could have had nothing to do with Ronan and his dreams? He’d never considered how poorly that facet of the bargain fit his theory, and yet it had only begun after he made his pact.

Adam slaps his glass down amongst his papers and races from the library. He takes the stairs two at a time, rips open his dresser and rummages under stockings and smalls, tossing things carelessly on the floor. In the far back corner he finds it: the black velvet pouch, smaller, now, in his adult hands than it had seemed that strange afternoon at Aglionby’s gate. He dumps the cards on his desk and runs a hand through them fast, shuffling them messily. He sweeps them back into a pile and taps them square with deft, practiced motions, then pauses, trying to formulate his question.

From the doorway, he hears Gansey clear his throat. Adam holds up a hand and he goes silent again.

A question, a question. The question. Or a series of questions.

He holds the deck between his palms.

What is Ronan Lynch?

He cuts the deck twice, making three piles, for no reason other than because it feels right. The cards are warm to his touch. He hasn’t used them in so long; he thinks, nonsensically, that they’ve missed him.

The knight of swords. Well, Adam thinks wryly, I knew that already. Ambitious, quick-thinking; restless, impulsive.

The moon: illusion, the subconscious; also fear, and the release of fear. Ronan Lynch, weaver of dreams and nightmares.

The page of wands: freedom, creativity, limitless potential.

Greywaren, the cards whisper in his mind; or rather, something else whispers through them. It sounds like rustling leaves. Greywaren.

Adam breathes deep and shuffles the cards together again in his hands.

Did Ronan make Cabeswater?

Again, he splits the deck into three piles.

This one’s tricker. Yes, the cards say, but also…no. Not made precisely. Brought out. Awakened.

Is Cabeswater part of the ley line?

Four of wands. Interesting. Home. And the chariot: direction, control, willpower. So Cabeswater was the ley line’s…heart, perhaps. The centre of its power.

Am I bound to Cabeswater/the ley line?

The lovers. Yes.

Am I bound to Ronan?

His heart flutters in his chest. No. Yes. Yes-no.

Does Ronan control the ley line/Cabeswater?

Death. Definitive. No.

Does Cabeswater/the ley line do Ronan’s bidding?

Death again. No.

Does Cabeswater control Ronan?

No.

Does it work to ensure his happiness?

Leaves rustle excitedly in Adam’s mind, and he knows the answer almost before he starts flipping cards. It wants him to be happy. It does what it can to make his happiness likely.

That’s not a no.

Adam grits his teeth and forces himself to frame his last question with cold precision.

Did you make me love Ronan Lynch?

The Magician. And all at once Adam remembers:

“What game is that?”

Opal, throwing herself down beside him on the hearthrug.

And:

“ Tell me, Parrish, have I a dark, handsome stranger in my future?”

What was it Ronan had really wanted to know?

“I believe I may have…a choice to make, soon. I’d like to know if they’ve anything to say about that.”

And when Adam had pulled the Lovers, he had not seemed at all surprised. Amused, and alight with mischief, but not surprised.

It’s me, Adam realises, so suddenly he feels shaken by it, and by the strength, the absoluteness of his certainty. I am the Magician. The Lovers, bracketed on one side by the Knight of Swords, Ronan’s card, and on the other…

What a thing to be, to discover about oneself. The Magician embodies resourcefulness, a talent for manifestation and, for some reason Adam certainly can’t understand, power. In reverse: poor planning, untapped talents. And manipulation. Adam thinks for a sickening moment that this last may be a definitive yes to his question, but –

But Cabeswater rushes to him so suddenly that for a moment his bedroom is thick with leaves.

No. Not being manipulated, but rather a faculty for manipulation. Unflattering, and yet, in context, strangely reassuring.

There is no pull to draw a second card, as if this alone is sufficient. Most strangely, somewhere deep inside himself, Adam thinks it may in fact be.

 

“You know how to read tarot cards?” Gansey could not sound more astonished. He is looking at Adam’s crisply made bed, his neat dark suit, his slippers lined up precisely beneath a chair as though these mundane hallmarks of an ordered, disciplined mind offered strong evidence to the contrary.

“Yes.”

“And you can predict things, sometimes.”

“Yes.”

“You made a bargain with a magical forest on a ley line – possibly the manifestation of the ley line’s very heart – when you were a child.”

“Yes. Gansey!”

Gansey stops pacing agitatedly up and down Adam’s bedroom, but he is, after all, Gansey, and so he can’t quite help himself when he says, “But Parrish!” and a raw and childlike joy breaks across his face, like Adam is a miracle and Gansey cannot quite believe his luck.

“Gansey, it’s really not that exciting. I can’t even predict the weather! It mostly just…helps me to get to where I need to go.” Adam has a near palpable memory of bundling his clothes and papers into his bag in the thick darkness of midnight at The Barnes and carrying his shoes to the side door, listening over his shoulder every moment for Ronan’s familiar tread on the stairs. Gets me where I need to go, he thinks bitterly, And then lets me fuck it all up.

He needs to go to sleep. He needs to dream. God, what if he can’t get back to Cabeswater? What if Ronan isn’t there? What if he doesn’t come back to Cabeswater for months? He can’t imagine Ronan reading any letter he might send. He has to see him, face to face; in a dream, or in person, it doesn’t matter which.

“Oh,” says Gansey, waving an airy hand and beginning to pace again. Adam sinks his face into his hands; he’s getting a headache, “Psychics are never very good at that sort of thing. They tell you to bring a raincoat and forget to mention it’s for next week. Oh, lord!” Gansey turns on him a wonderous expression of mingled horror and glee, “Does Jane know?”

“No,” Adam mutters, “Of course not. Why would Sargent know?”

“Well, because – oh, of course!” there he is, trotting about again. Adam rubs viciously at his temples. Perhaps it’s not entirely Gansey’s fault. He hasn’t done a reading this long and complex in…well. Perhaps he’s never actually done a reading like this. “Jane’s family are psychics,” Gansey tells him excitedly, “Don’t look at me like that, Parrish,” he says this without even glancing at Adam, which Adam would find offensive except that he has, in fact, lifted his head to stare at Gansey incredulously, “They’re not frauds. They’re as real as you or – well – you, I suppose,” he laughs delightedly, “You must meet them. Jane will be back by six or seven at the latest.”

Adam hears him slide into expedition-planning Gansey, capable of holding days’ worth of train schedules in his head and still forgetting his glasses, “I think we can have all this packed up in a day or two, then take the train back to London on Thursday morning. This is so exciting, I can’t wait for you to meet them. Jane’s aunts – and her mother – are really very good. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Right. I’ll go down and tell Mr Edwards. Think about what books you’ll need for that Greek translation, will you? We’ll be in London at least a week.”

When Gansey has left, Adam lies back on his bed and stares at the ceiling, absently counting crescents in the elaborate moulding.

Ronan did not make Cabeswater, only the forest that was Cabeswater’s current form.

Cabeswater wasn’t even really Cabeswater, but a great river of energies rushing beneath the surface of the earth. Cabeswater was merely its…heart. Or possibly its mind, its nerve centre.

He, Adam, was bound to Cabeswater and, thus, the ley line. But the Magician suggested that perhaps he really had been something else even before that. That perhaps the reason he had been so drawn to Cabeswater as a child, the reason Cabeswater had made the pact with him at all, was because he had some gift or faculty to begin with.

Cabeswater loved Ronan, and wanted him to be happy; but Ronan did not control it, subconsciously or otherwise.

Cabeswater had manipulated Adam’s path, but it had not made him fall in love with Ronan Lynch.

Adam closes his eyes, and hopes to dream.

 

~.~.~

 

[1] Ok, so this is my one serious anachronism (that I know of). The term ‘ley line’ was coined by a landscape photographer called Alfred Watkins in 1921. I certainly didn’t go overboard for historical accuracy in this fic, but I did check things like when the first libraries popped up in London, estimated travel times, railway routs, etc. for the period around 1850. ‘Ley lines’, as a term, did not exist then – although apparently in 1846 (according to wikipedia’s entry on ley lines) a Reverend Edward Duke noted that some prehistoric and medieval sites of sacred significance appeared to be aligned with each other. I guess I could have called them fairy roads or corpse roads, but these aren’t quite the same thing. Sorry for readjusting your timeline, Mr Watkins.

Chapter 22: My heart was still.

Summary:

A letter, a reunion and an unexpected guest.

 

Hope blooms like a weed in Adam’s chest, wild and humming with urgent potential.

The most extraordinary thing happened while we were at Oxford. I had been discussing the possible implications of ley lines on our work when Parrish, most out of character, shot out of his chair and dashed off out of the library. When I found him he was standing over – I can still hardly credit the sight. When you meet him someday you will understand, for a more rational, contained young man I have never encountered – a deck of tarot cards, and poring over their answers. You can imagine my shock. It turns out that Parrish grew up on a ley line, and my research had sparked some fascinating questions as to the origins of his peculiar talent for divination. We have just arrived back in London by the early train and will dine with Jane’s family two evenings hence. I hope they will be able to furnish our Mr Parrish with some answers to this mystery. I admit that I find it all quite exciting. I -

Ronan sets Gansey’s letter, unfinished, on the sideboard and sinks shakily into his chair.

He had known, of course, that Gansey and Sargent had a new research assistant, and that his name was Parrish. But he had told himself that, after all, Parrish was not an uncommon name. And by the way they spoke about him Ronan had assumed he was a student at the university, or perhaps a recent graduate, which Parrish, he knew, could never afford to be (unless he someday deigned to accept one of Ronan’s various and unsubtle offers of help). At weak moments in the months since their last meeting in the dream, when Ronan had been particularly furious or hurt or drunk or merely missing Adam like a limb, he had thought of travelling to London just to see, just to be sure that Cabeswater, whatever it is, had not interfered just one more time to keep Adam in his orbit. And then he had felt sick at himself and, if he were not drunk already, had disappeared into a bottle, or hard farm labour, or had ridden off on Misrule to look for more alcohol – or, better, a fight – at the public house in the village.

But this…this is too much. Ronan doesn’t know what ley lines are, except that Gansey’s letter suggests they’re affiliated in some way with the supernatural, but he does know a Parrish with a ‘peculiar talent for divination’, who had grown up near a magical forest that Ronan, though he may have dreamed it into existence, only poorly understands. Worse yet Opal is, at this very moment, staying in that madhouse of improbable women who comprise Blue Sargent’s psychic family. If ‘Parrish’ is in fact Adam, and Adam goes to dinner there…he will soon find out that he is still as much in thrall to Cabeswater, and thus to Ronan, as ever.

And Ronan, counterintuitive as it may be, cannot not bear for him to discover this alone. He loves Adam, still and constantly (in his more nihilistic moments he thinks ‘forever’), and can’t stand to imagine him hurt that way and having to hide it, having to stand stiff and calm in front of strangers, or pretend for Opal’s sake that all is well. Ronan is supposed to be at his side in moments of crisis; isn’t that what love means?

He calls his steward to his study and explains he will be leaving for London soon, within the hour, and has him send someone to ready his horse. Ronan packs lightly. Nothing he needs is here, in any case.

Of course, because he is himself, he’s almost certainly going to fuck it up. But, good God, will ever he try to make it right.

 

Of course, now that Adam wants to dream, Cabeswater is nowhere to be found. Perhaps it’s punishing him. Perhaps he has waited too long. Adam tries to sleep as often as possible over the next few days, napping on the train back to London and going to bed early. Sargent and Gansey both look at him askance over this sudden change in routine – his wont is to use every possible hour on his studies or his work – but perhaps to them this is just the latest in a series of inexplicable behavioural changes, and they let him alone.

Still, it does him no good. Adam dreams, and wakes sweat-slick or frustrated or sad enough to weep, but he doesn’t dream. Of course when he wants it Cabeswater refuses him. He thumps his head back against his pillow, in his little bright room in the London townhouse, and drags himself out of bed. It’s useless.

He’ll just have to go to Galway in person.

 

The house is large and clearly differentiated from his neighbours by the riot of flowers that swarm, unruly, across the white façade. Adam glances at them as he mounts the steps in Sargent’s wake, but though many look familiar he hasn’t time to put names to them.

The door opens on a warm, scented foyer filled with yet more flowers and an overwhelming number of people. Most of them are women, some are children, all are talking or laughing or trying to go in opposite directions; none of them actually seem interested in moving from the entryway. Gansey and Sargent shoulder into the throng with practiced unconcern, but Adam hovers at the edge feeling more than a little overwhelmed.

“Oh, finally,” says a very quiet voice behind him, “You did take your time, rather.”

Adam turns. And stares.

There, in an old-fashioned gown of purple silk, her dark eyes piercing, her cloud of pale hair now reaching almost to her ankles, is the pedlar. The woman by the gate. The woman who gave him his cards.

“You,” Adam says, too stunned for politeness.

The woman looks a little bemused, “And you. I thought you’d be here sooner.” She peers around him curiously, looking at the door, “Where’s the other one?”

Adam looks back over his shoulder at the empty foyer. Gansey had been more excitable – and therefore less timely – than usual, and they seem to have been the last guests to arrive.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m not sure I understand.”

The woman frowns at him.

“Really? Odd. I suppose you took the long way around. I was sure those paths would be well intertwined by now. Never mind,” she pats his hand consolingly and threads their arms together, “Soon, I’m sure. Come along. She’ll find you in a minute.”

Slightly dazed, Adam allows her to lead him through into a sitting room. In the distance, he hears thunder. The woman lets loose his arm and steps neatly to one side.

By the time Adam has identified the source of the noise, he is already staggering beneath the slight weight of Opal’s body as she flings herself at him from across the room. Like a fucking catapult he hears Ronan say in his mind.

“Opal?” he gasps, dazed, “Opal.”

She clings, limpet-like, to his neck, her delicate hooves dangling feet above the floor. Eventually, she consents to be set back on the parquet, but he keeps his hands on her shoulders, unwilling to let her go just yet.

“Opal,” he says, “What on earth are you doing here? Where are your shoes? Where is – ” his voice falters and he has to swallow before he can try again, “Is Ronan here?”

It dawns on Adam, embarrassingly slowly, that he has been overlooking quite an important fact.

The Gansey’s hail from Kent, their traditional seat an enormous estate called Washington Park. Washington Park is situated on a ley line. Henrietta is also in Kent, also on that same line. Adam and Ronan had both been born near the same place on the ley line, the site of Ronan’s first dream thing: the forest manifestation of Cabeswater. What had Ronan said? He was born on a friend’s estate.

Adam sinks down onto the nearby settee and wraps an absent-minded arm around Opal when she sidles in beside him. It is laughably, un-mathematically improbable. The idea that he could have run across two landmasses, through two of the worlds greatest metropolises only to end up knocking on a door belonging to Ronan’s greatest childhood friend?

“…and – this is such a curious thing – actually, when I traced it on the map earlier, I honestly believe it connects with another estate I know, belonging to a friend of mine in Galway.”

Gansey and Ronan know each other. Sargent, too, given Opal’s presence in her familial home. For a moment Adam’s head feels over-light, his stomach weighted with lead as the full force of fate comes crashing down upon him. He’s never been particularly religious, never believed in destiny and or the will of any god. During his time with Gansey he has certainly come across some interesting intersections and coincidences, but while his employer tends to view these as concrete facts, Adam has always taken them with more than a few grains of salt.

And yet here he is, in the one house amongst thousands where Opal is staying, working with the one man in millions whom Ronan calls ‘friend’ (and now it’s all clicking into place, he remembers Ronan’s sharp handwriting peeking out from beneath a stack of ledgers, no greeting, just: Dick. Declan is pestering me to pass on an invitation to his upcoming nuptials. I told him no. You’re welcome. Richard Gansey. Dick. Of course.)

His connection to Ronan is inescapable, and –

Wait.

His connection to Ronan is inescapable.

Hope blooms like a weed in Adam’s chest, wild and humming with urgent potential.

In less than an hour he has been reunited with the pedlar and, if the sturdy grip of her tiny hand is anything to go by, forgiven by Opal. He squeezes her thin little fingers and she squeezes back. All that, and he wasn’t even trying. If he applies himself to righting his life, once and for all, what might he accomplish?

“Well?” snaps a voice from the doorway. A dark woman stands there, her crimson dress pulled in tight at the waist, hair piled in magnificent coils atop her head and studded with wine-coloured jewels. Though she and Sargent do not look alike, there is something in her manner which tells him this must be one of the infamous aunts who co-raised her. With a start, Adam realises that the pedlar must be the other, “Have you quite finished with your hysterics? Dinner is waiting and the staff get crotchety if we muck up their timing. Cook used to be in the military, you know.”

Adam has no idea what to say to this, but if Aglionby drilled in one lesson, it was to never be late for a meal. He gets to his feet, and Opal follows like a shadow, her hand still curled around his.

“My apologies. I was just getting re-acquainted with Opal. And –”

He stops, glancing uncertainly back at the pedlar as he realises that they have yet to be properly introduced

“Persephone,” the dark woman says, striding away down the corridor, “And I am Calla, and Opal is here on holiday,” she adds, in a slightly warmer tone, turning slightly to glance at the girl, “Aren’t you, pet?”

“Yes,” Opal agrees, and then turns her little face up to glare balefully at Adam, “And if you wanted to come to London, you should’ve just said. Ronan would’ve come, too, and then we’d all be together, and we’d go to the British Museum every day and look at all the stuffed animals,” she chews pensively at her lip, “Ronan likes animals,” she confides to Persephone, who is walking so lightly and smoothly by her side that she appears to be floating above the carpet, “I’m sure that would cheer him up.”

Adam feels a ferocious twist of pain, intertwined with guilt and a tide of humility that near overwhelms him. He had known that his absence had affected Opal, and that she must have suffered to see Ronan in pain; yet her faith in him, and her desire to see the three of them together again, seems unshaken.

Lost in these thoughts he almost walks into Calla, who has halted before generous double doors. He catches her exchanging a look with Persephone and feels his cheeks heat.

“Alright, alright. Enough of that, now,” somehow, Calla’s voice seems just a touch warmer than it had been, though still very gruff, “A good meal may set many things aright.”

In this as – Adam was to discover – in many things, Calla is right. Although not in precisely the way one might expect.

Notes:

So this is probably going to be...a few chapters longer than I'd planned? I'm doing a bit of re-writing, but I do think it's better for it!

Chapter 23: Somewhere under my left ribs.

Summary:

A shock, a crash, a wild flight.

 

Adam wants to fold in on himself. He can feel Gansey’s astonished gaze; can sense, even without looking at her, Sargent’s eyebrows climbing. He holds himself perfectly still, his back broadsword-straight, puts down his knife and fork and lays his hands carefully on the tablecloth to either side of his place setting.

Dinner is pleasant. The food is good, the conversation light – if, often, a little strange – and Adam listens politely and offers stories in exchange about the interesting things he has been doing with Gansey and Sargent. The wonderful thing about working with archaeologists is that he now has a store of tales both impersonal and entertaining to share. For the first time in his life Adam feels he is able to converse as easily as anybody else, without giving anything about himself away.

They have just begun the fish when, in the distance, Adam hears banging. He frowns, trying to concentrate on his neighbour’s rather improbable narrative about three dogs and a very expensive diamond necklace. He’s not sure it’s entirely appropriate for a dinner table.

The commotion in the hall seems to be intensifying. Now there are muted voices, locked into the kind of whisper-shouted argument that people have when they are simultaneously furious and trying to mind their manners. Something clatters dangerously, a woman’s voice rises above the others. There is a clang, a scuffle, and footsteps break away and careen towards the dining room. By this point, most of the guests have abandoned any pretence at conversation and are listening to the ruckus outside.

Something heavy collides with the door, which gives, bursting reluctantly inwards, and Ronan Lynch – wild-eyed, wild-haired, and trailing an irate footman – skids into the dining room.

“Fucking –” his eyes rove the table for half a second, land squarely on Adam, and everything…

…Stops.

Ronan’s pale face drains of its remaining colour. Every conversation halts. Every knife is still, every mouth politely closed. Every eye is avidly trained on the intruder. Ronan lifts a shaking hand to his mouth. Some heads begin to turn, following the line of his gaze to skitter over Adam’s neighbours to left and right before landing, unerringly, on him.

Adam wants to fold in on himself. He can feel Gansey’s astonished gaze; can sense, even without looking at her, Sargent’s eyebrows climbing. He holds himself perfectly still, his back broadsword-straight, puts down his knife and fork and lays his hands carefully on the tablecloth to either side of his place setting.

“It really is you, then,” Ronan says. His voice is hushed, but it rings clear in a room gone so silent that they can hear carriages going past outside. Everyone at the table is listening intently. Adam can feel their attention like the fine hairs of an exotic cactus, prickling across his skin, impossible to brush off.

“Dick said,” Ronan starts again, haltingly, “But I didn’t think…” he flicks his eyes in Gansey’s direction, then back to Adam quickly as though he might disappear in a puff of smoke, or fling himself out the second story window.

Not that Adam isn’t considering both options. His palms are starting to sweat, the back of his neck to burn. Ronan’s gaze is as focused as a rapier’s point, and it skewers him in place. He could be sitting alone at this dining table set for twenty. Still, he can’t say anything. He can’t say anything. Ronan scrubs a rough hand through those impossibly wild, dark curls, and mutters, “What are the chances, for Christ’s sake? How many Parrishs are there in the world? In London alone? How many – fuck, fuck. Of all the places you could’ve gone, you came here? To this – this Godforsaken grey, ugly, shitsmelling sewerpipe of a city?”

In another life, in someone else’s body, Adam would have felt embarrassment: for the rawness in Ronan’s voice, the abject bleakness in his eyes, for how completely, unabashedly open he is, standing there with his heart fully bared to the watching party. They could be dining in the anatomy theatre at Edinburgh University.

But this isn’t another life, another body. This is Ronan, and he is only himself, Adam, and so instead he feels an echoing crack along his sternum and is acutely aware that the other people in the room have begun to look at him with the same dawning comprehension, the same empathy, the same pity. Ronan is standing in the doorway, haloed by lamplight and silently irate servants, but it is Adam’s soft and vulnerable fleshy parts that are truly on display. It is his heart they can see, lying bloody on the pristine white table linen.

“God, Adam,” Ronan says softly, brokenly, “How could you possibly be here? It’s bloody…I’m bloody inescapable, aren’t I? You came all this way and still I’m…God. Fuck.” He scrubs a hand across his face and his glacial eyes come up wet, undone completely. Helpless. Despairing. There is something sharp lodged in Adam’s throat. He has to grip the table’s edge to stay in his seat. “God,” Ronan says again. And then, as abruptly as he’d come, he turns in the doorway and disappears down the corridor.

Tension stretches and thickens in the room like a summer thunderstorm, the threat of imminent and total inundation.

Slowly, what heads were left to turn do so, swivelling unerringly towards Adam. Reactions are varied. Gansey’s mouth hangs slightly ajar. Sargent’s eyebrows are in danger of getting lost in her hair. Persephone regards him with an intense look below crinkled brows that speaks of puzzlement, mild vexation, and an underlying determination that anything not clear at present should soon be made so. Calla sighs loudly and flings herself back in her chair, rolling her eyes with an extravagance that Adam finds, frankly, a little offensive. Mrs Sargent – Maura – merely exchanges a look with her Mr Grey and returns calmly to her meal.

Adam pushes his chair back, careful not to let it squeak in the oppressive hush. He considers apologising for the interruption, but somehow it doesn’t seem right. It would be disrespectful to Ronan, somehow, to apologise for that. He steps out into the passageway and closes the doors softly behind him, then leans for a second against them.

In the foyer a pair of servants are having a furious, hushed conversation. A brass urn has toppled – or rather, been pushed – over and walking sticks and umbrellas litter the tiles. Adam picks his way carefully between them.

“The man who was just here,” he says, “Where is he?”

“Mr Lynch?” the footman says, “He’s gone again, sir.”

The maid mutters something like “And good riddance” beneath her breath, but Adam is already jamming his hat on his head and struggling to wrangle his arms into his overcoat. His fingers are shaking, badly. His whole body feels cramped and too loose at the same time, sluggish and unresponsive. The footman darts over to help him with the sleeves.

“Do you know which way he went?” heads shake, mutely, and he can sense them exchanging looks behind his back, “Could you please – will you apologise to the Sargents for me? And the Ganseys? Tell them – tell them I’ll see them at the house – I’ll – “ but he can’t form a plan, a timeline. How can he when every delicate component of his carefully constructed life here has been suddenly shaken loose? How can he know where he will be, what he will be tomorrow, an hour hence, a week, when Ronan is out there, crashing through the London streets with that terrible, desperate hopelessness in his eyes?

He has to find him. He has to find him and tell him: about Cabeswater, the ley-line, everything. And then Adam must take him in his arms and hold him tightly until that awful helplessness is submerged beneath the roaring tides of his affection, and then…then something. Anything. Whatever happens, it must be an improvement on this.

Adam tumbles down the Sargents’ front seps and into the street. Glancing back at the house he realises suddenly why the flowers had seemed so familiar: they are Ronan’s flowers, unmistakable now he’s really paying attention, an impossible riot of reds and deep, visceral purples that gleam like silk velvet beneath the streetlamps.

He casts about for a glimpse of Ronan, straining to see through the soupy fog which muffles London’s dim streets. Adam remembers how, in his first month here, he would see parts of Ronan everywhere: a shoulder, a shaved head, the turn of a boot. Now he picks a direction at random and strikes out into the murk, searching, searching for a glimpse of a piece which will lead him to that beloved, cohesive whole.

“Ronan?” he calls, although it’s not especially wise to give voice to your location in London’s seamy dusk, “Ronan!”

Nothing. For once in his life he longs for the familiar susurrus of leaves in his silent ear, but Cabeswater is silent. There! A long, sloping form appears in the distance, the edge of a heel disappearing down an ally. Adam picks up his pace, skids around the corner only to find the passage empty. He comes to a major thoroughfare, busy even at this hour, and fidgets and fumes while an overburdened lorry grumbles out of his way, though there’s really no reason this direction should be better than any other. It’s the motionlessness that rankles. He feels a desperate need to keep moving, keep searching. He’ll never find Ronan standing still. As soon as the lorry moves he’s off again, darting across the road and into the dark space between a fruitier and a fishmonger only just shutting up for the night, oblivious to curious glances and enticing calls.

London’s noxious vapours whisper to him. An angry shout some streets away is a siren call. Again and again he is sure he feels…something, only to round a corner and find nothing but smog.

Cabeswater, he calls, Cabeswater! But the forest is silent. Perhaps, he thinks bitterly, it believes he has caused harm enough. Perhaps this is a sign that Ronan is finally done with him. Adam casts around for something, any hint at all – the rustle of branches, the trailing hem of a coat – but there’s nothing.

In the distance, a church clock strikes twelve. Finally, feet sore and heart aching, he turns up his collar and trudges home.

 

 

When he reaches the Gansey’s the house is as empty as is possible given the Gansey’s wealth and status; which is to say, full of servants, but no masters. When Adam enquires on the whereabouts of Sargent and Gansey at this late hour, he is told they came home early from dinner but went out again at once. Visiting with the Master’s old school friend, who is just lately come over from Ireland for a spell.

Chill apprehension prickles down Adam’s spine.

Of course. Gansey and Sargent have the advantage on him: they know where the Lynch’s townhouse is. They’ve been friends for years. Adam curses himself for never thinking to look up the address when he was at The Barnes. He’d always assumed that it was unnecessary. He’d had no need of the townhouse’s whereabouts because, naturally, should he have occasion to visit London he would be in the company of its owner.

He knows what they must be talking about, somewhere out there in the London fog. What else, after Ronan’s astonishing performance at dinner? And what is Ronan telling them about him? About them? Gansey is Ronan’s oldest friend. Adam has put it all together now, when it’s much, much too late to mitigate the damage, and all he can do is drag his leaden body upstairs and brace for impact.

Gansey is Dick, Ronan’s boarding school roommate, and to Gansey, Adam is only…what? The research assistant. The acquaintance. The help. Whatever Ronan divulges about their shared past, it will become the definitive version.

Adam can’t imagine Ronan speaking ill of him because he can’t stand to imagine Ronan thinking ill of him. But he remembers the gut-punch break of Ronan’s voice when he had said, Don’t you see? I thought you loved me. And now, when I look at you, all I can think is: he was just doing as he was told. Ronan still believes that. He can’t imagine how it will all sound to an outsider. If Gansey does not think him mad, he will simply believe him cruel, and either way Adam will be alone once more, his reputation in tatters, leaving everything he has come to care for all over again.

And the worst of it – the very worst of it – is that for a moment, just one brief soaring moment, when Ronan had slammed through that door and Adam had found himself pinned by those preternaturally clear eyes, all he could think was…finally. Finally finally, he had come home. Finally, after all these long, aching months, all would be well. For once the tables had turned and Ronan had appeared like a creature from one of Adam’s dreams, manifested by heartache and longing, come to take him back to where he belonged.

He had been so sure, earlier this evening, that it would all come right. Even as he searched uselessly, hurtling down alleys after naught but smoke, calling for aid that never came, even then some stupid, wayward, incongruously optimistic part of him had been certain that this was just another mysterious turn in a long, uncomfortably winding path that would eventually lead him true – and he now knew, perhaps had always known very deep down, that ‘true’ meant Ronan.

But of course that isn’t how it works, is it? It can never be so simple. Wheels turn and the moment you think yourself right-way-up some fresh quirk of fate sends the rest of the world spinning, and you are upside down again.

Adam shucks his dinner jacket, shirt, trousers, tie. Then he crawls between the cold sheets, burrowing deep down until the covers mute the sounds of the carriages going past outside, and tries not to dream.

Notes:

I return to you, cap in hand...

But really, if anyone is still reading this (or rather, has continued to wait to read this), I'm so sorry. I really wanted to come back to this but, well, does anybody else feel like life is just one long rollercoaster now? The scary kind, where the guy at the ticket booth wouldn't meet your eye, and the seatbelts look kind of frayed and, oh god, was that the sound of a rusty screw giving up the ghost? It sure does make things interesting.

Anyway, sometimes fandom is a place I find joy, and sometimes it's sort of too joyful, relative to what's on the news, if you get what I mean, so I duck out again. I won't make any promises to break this time, but my hope and intention is just to post one chapter a day until it's all done. Maybe two if I feel like I'm veering off course again.

Again, I'm sorry. I hope you're still reading this. I love and cherrish every comment that appeared in my inbox while I was away, and will respond to them as I go.

Chapter 24: I believe he is of mine.

Summary:

A midnight congress: revelations, explanations, a tennuous hope.

 

“Parrish,” he says, slowly and with great care, “Are you in love with Ronan Lynch?”

Gansey finds him, hours later, in the library-study. Seek as he might for oblivion, it had not come. Now unwanted, Cabeswater whispered and rustled incessantly, and whether he wished it to stop or just to finally, finally say something he could comprehend, Adam wasn’t sure. Eventually, wrung out and dry-eyed, he’d wrapped himself in his dressing gown and pulled out some translation work, desperate for anything that might focus his mind and drown out the gentle susurrus of leaves. He doesn’t even notice he has company until a hand appears to his left, placing a crystal glass deliberately in his field of view. He looks up and finds Gansey peering down at him, a serious expression curving his brows.

“Gansey,” he says, voice roughened by hours of silence, “Did I wake you?”

“Oh, no, not at all. You know me.” Gansey shrugs one shoulder. He looks unusually self-contained, almost closed off. If Adam didn’t know better he would even say…hurt. “Never can sleep through the night. And of course I understand you have…serious matters on your mind.”

“Yes,” Adam agrees, “Well.” He lifts his glass absently, swirls liquid amber. “Won’t you sit?”

But Gansey stays standing by the head of the table. He knocks his knuckles twice, gently, on the wood. Adam can almost see him thinking.

“Parrish,” he says, slowly and with great care, “Are you in love with Ronan Lynch?”

Adam feels himself go suddenly very still. Well. He has to hand it to Gansey: he knows how to be direct when he wants to be. Adam stares very hard at the table, trying to divine what to do. Gansey is his employer, but more than that, he is heir to an extremely respectable and well-titled family. Technically, the love affair in which he and Ronan are engaged is not illegal; but it is scandalous in the extreme, morally depraved in the eyes of many, and if they are exposed every shred of professional respect and standing which Adam has built over these past months will crumble like ash in a stiff breeze.

He tries to wish that Ronan had not shared their secret with Gansey, of all people. Sargent, he could almost handle, or Cheng, whom Adam has always suspected of having similar leanings himself, but Gansey is a straight arrow, thoroughbred to the core. Decorum runs in his very blood. Yet it is evident that Ronan and Gansey are close, and have been a long time, and Adam can’t bring himself to be angry with Ronan for seeking solace in their friendship. Logically, Gansey must have known Ronan during his dark days, in Paris and Europe’s even seedier cities, and so it’s likely he already knew that Ronan was an invert. Clearly it has not marred their relationship.

But Ronan is protected, to a certain extent, by his wealth and status, and Adam is…not. He’s nothing. Poor, obscure, with absolutely nothing but his sharp wits and dubious charm to recommend him. Without Gansey’s patronage he has nothing at all.

Adam draws in a deep, slow breath, and forces himself to come to terms with this fact. He will leave London. He will start again. America, perhaps. He’s done it before; he will find the strength to repeat the process.

He lifts his eyes slowly to Gansey’s face.

And what he finds there is not at all what he expected. There is no censure or revulsion, only concern, worry deeply etched between expressive eyebrows. Gansey is looking at him in exactly the same way he would have looked yesterday, had he come home to discover that Adam had been subject to some terrible and mysterious news: compassionate, open, wanting only to offer aid yet uncertain of its reception.

Adam is not sure this is any of Gansey’s business, although god knows what Lynch has already told him; but he is also exhausted, wrung out, at his wit’s end and terribly, terribly alone. And, in honest moments, he knows that Gansey is so much more than his employer. If there was no scandal in their situation, and Adam were to ask anyone for help... he takes a low breath and rests his head in his hands. “Yes,” he says, honestly, “Yes.”

“But you…left him?” There’s no censorship in the question, only honest confusion. Adam’s head swims. It’s surreal to be having such a normal conversation about his relationship, when he has hidden it for so long.

“It’s complicated.”

“So I’ve gathered,” Gansey says, “Did your feelings change?”

“No.”

“So…”

“It’s complicated,” Adam grits.

Gansey raises an eyebrow; even with his palms digging into his eye sockets, Adam can hear it in his voice. “It’s Ronan Lynch. I know you know about his…unique capabilities. If you really do love him, you must’ve known complexity was par for the course.”

“Not this particular…brand.”

“Parrish.” Gansey sighs, and then pulls out the chair next to him and leans his elbows on the table, “Look. I know you have your secrets. And I respect –” Gansey huffs at himself in that infuriatingly charming, self-deprecating way he has, “I try to respect that. But I’m having quite a lot of trouble wrapping my head around this situation. It’s obvious that there is something genuine between you – how you hid it from Declan is beyond me – and that it is still there, and real, even after months of separation, is undeniable. It is so undeniable, in fact, that I find it hard even to conceive of anything that could have made you leave. If you hadn’t known his secret…but Ronan says you did know it, long before you…well,” Adam lifts his head just enough to glance sideways; Gansey’s blush goes right down his neck, disappearing into his neat white collar. For a married man, he really is terribly awkward about love. “You know. What could be worse than that?”

“Do you know about Cabeswater?” Adam asks, and Gansey looks puzzled. “Well,” Adam says, “I suppose I should begin there.”

 

“…I thought,” Adam concludes finally, after explaining the whole mess as succinctly as possible, “I really thought – and still do not believe it to be an irrational concern – that if he had dreamed Cabeswater then the bargain I made must have been, in some way, with him.” He scrubs his hands over his face, leaning forwards to prop his elbows on the table and rest his forehead against his palms, “Logically, that would give Ronan a sort of power over me. Let him…own me, in a sense. Even if it didn’t allow him control of me outright, doesn’t it seem unlikely that my history would have no effect on our relationship? He dreamt the forest to which I swore service as a child. What if it chose to use that promise by…giving me to him? What if my actions, where Ronan is concerned are simply the result of…Cabeswater. Directing its servant. It’s done that before, you know. Many times.”

“That is…” Gansey pauses, mulling his words carefully, “Quite terrifying, actually. I can’t imagine not knowing whether what I felt and wanted was mine or a magical biproduct of arboreal affection.”

Adam quirks an eyebrow at him. “Quite.”

“He loves you. That much is obvious.” Adam doesn’t try to deny it. It is clear to him, as well, in a way that is heartrending just to be near to. “But,” Gansey continues softly, “If you can’t know for certain whether what you feel is true… He wouldn’t want that any more than you do.”

“I know. Ronan would never do anything that would…I know. But then. Then you began to investigate ley lines, and it occurred to me that…maybe I’ve had this entirely wrong.” Adam looks up at Gansey from beneath his hands. He is worn-thin from feeling, but there are still so, so many miles of it ahead. The journey seems both impossible and vital. “God, Gansey. You’ve no idea how much I wanted to believe that. As soon as you said it, I thought…maybe it isn’t him at all, maybe Cabeswater – the ley line – is its own entity, and Ronan and I are merely drawn to it, somehow.” He pauses. Swallows. Feels something light and breathless and almost unbearable flutter in his chest. “Maybe I can love him after all.”

“Hence your rush to consult the cards.”

“Hence my rush.”

“And they told you…?”

Adam’s grin is a ragged, unruly thing, breaking out around his edges without his say-so. “They say…yes. It isn’t clear cut, and Cabeswater, the ley line…it’s not like talking to a person. It doesn’t understand things the way you and I do. I do think it wants him happy, and would take action to make it so. And it does control my body,” Adam turns his hands palm up on the table and looks at them steadily. He lets out a shuddering breath. “But it doesn’t have my heart, does it? That wasn’t the bargain. If it has nudged me towards him, that still doesn’t explain what I feel for him. It doesn’t explain why I love him. It turns out that Ronan himself has no claim on me but the usual one.”

Gansey looses a slow, considering breath and leans back in his chair. Then his brows pull down in confusion.

“But…Ronan mentioned none of this when we spoke this evening.”

“No,” Adam said, “He wouldn’t. He doesn’t know. I went after him, after the dinner, but I…I couldn’t find him. In fact, I haven’t spoken to him in months.”

“But you intend to now,” Gansey says firmly, with all the irritating paternalism Adam can never quite hate him for, it’s so clearly well-meant.

Adam sighs and leans back until he can tilt his head to look at the ceiling.

“It isn’t so much what I intend with regard to him as what he intends with regard to me. I left him. I can offer explanations, but I believe what happens next is his decision.”

Notes:

So I'm adding this note because I dashed into my AO3 account and went straight into this draft, just to make sure I didn't chicken out or get caught up in re-edits or whatever, and then I went back to my dash to check my inbox and oh, guys. You're the loveliest. I'm so glad and...humbled, I think, is the right word. Thank you for waiting. Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting, it is really the best feeling in the world to feel like you're really sharing work with people instead of just screaming into the void (or that, at the very least, the void is very sweetly screaming back). Thank you.

See you again in a bit :)

Chapter 25: Two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us.

Summary:

Silence, then: a visitor, and some uncomfortably-roosting chickens.

 

Archaeological study is soothing in that way, like working in a glass bubble, one step removed from present reality.

 

Of course, just because Adam has taken himself out of the real world does not stop the real world from calling upon him.

 

In a bizarre twist of physics or fate that only London could accomplish, it is somehow more difficult to contrive to see Ronan now, when he is mere streets away, than when he was sequestered miles hence in Galway.

Adam sends a note; it goes unanswered.

He walks the scant few blocks from the Gansey-Sargent townhouse to the address he’s pinched from Gansey’s book and knocks; the door remains steadfastly closed.

If he weren’t perfectly well aware that his employers have met with Ronan every day since his arrival, he would assume Lynch had already left the grime and greyness of the city for his beloved green hills.

He hasn’t, though. He is simply avoiding Adam.

Adam dines again with the Sargents (this time he is allowed to finish his meal), much to Opal’s delight. They are all (somewhat to his surprise) incredibly discreet about his last visit, and in fact make a great effort to act as though all is perfectly normal.

He continues with his work. He continues with his research. He attends a lecture with Cheng and Sargent and participates adequately in the resulting conversation. He takes solitary walks in the evening and travels the long, long way around to avoid any path that could conceivably intersect with Ronan’s. The thought of encountering him unprepared is nerve-wracking.

And he aches. Obviously. Relentlessly. He aches and it will not cease, and as the days pass Adam begins to believe it may be permanent. He wonders restlessly whether Ronan aches, too, and attempts to desire that he does not; deep within, though, he hopes that Ronan does ache, terribly, because if Ronan is even half as heartsick with longing as Adam is, then surely he will not have to wait much longer.

It's late afternoon and the house is still. Sargent and Gansey are both out, and Adam is bent diligently over his Greek. There is something calming about struggling with words that were written down thousands of years ago. The world has gotten along fine without them so far; he can afford the extra time it takes to get them right, to try a few different turns of phrase, to test things out. Archaeological study is soothing in that way, like working in a glass bubble, one step removed from present reality.

Of course, just because Adam has taken himself out of the real world does not stop the real world from calling upon him.

There is a knock on the library-study door.

“Mr Parrish?”

“Yes, Molly?”

“Mr Lynch to see you, sir.”

Electricity stumbles through his nerve endings. It’s like waking up to a bucket of cold water in the face, or leaping into a winter pool. He feels hot, and cold, and his heart is speeding along like a runaway train. Anger and fear and hurt and hope all clash violently within him, and he fights to keep his voice calm as he lays down his pencil.

“Thank you, Molly. Show him in, please. We’ll take tea in here.”

Adam’s place in this house is, as ever, strange. He’s not a servant, nor a Gansey-Sargent, nor a guest. He’s never had a visitor before who was not somehow associated with Gansey, Sargent or their collective work. But he thinks they will not mind this: Ronan, pausing in the doorway as the maid shows him in, flicking his quick eyes over the glass-fronted cabinets, the books, the curios and Adam, still seated at the long table which occupies much of the room, its surface littered with stone tablets and statuary, and Adam’s notes taking up a good third. He has his own small desk tucked into one of the alcoves by the fire, but when he can he prefers to work like this, spread out, somewhere he can see the door and windows. Perhaps its only habit. He was so spoilt for space at The Barnes.

Adam sets his chair back and rises.

“Lynch. Come in. You’ll take tea?”

He gestures towards the hearth, where a deep armchair and a loveseat have been drawn up close on either side. They are as rich and lovely and hopelessly mismatched as everything else in Gansey’s possession, and Adam is now so accustomed to sit in that chair in the evenings, with Sargent and Gansey curled together on the loveseat opposite, that sometimes he finds it hard to remember that he hasn’t always been here. There was a time when that chair was not his chair, when his small desk to the left of the fireplace held only overflow. There was a time when his evenings were spent in a different study, curled into different chairs, or the worn velvet of a different couch. Having Ronan here, standing on the threshold of this room that has become so central to Adam’s new life, is jarring, surreal. A collision of worlds he had never hoped to see and cannot wrap his head around. Adam doesn’t know whether it’s miraculous or unbearable.

Ronan shrugs and, of course, crosses to the table instead. Molly ducks out of the room and the door swings to behind her with a click. For long minutes they don’t speak. Ronan pokes at artefacts, illustrations, diagrams; Adam watches him, standing poised by his seat. Is he a sprinter, waiting for the gun? Or a rabbit, frozen in a fox’s eerie glare?

Finally, Ronan grunts and sweeps across the room to throw himself into Adam’s chair. He looks perfectly at ease there. It occurs to Adam for the first time that he has probably been in this room before, has perhaps even sat with Sargent and Gansey, as Adam has sat, the three of them leaning their heads together over a late supper to unpick a new problem or myth, or Sargent’s latest political cause. He feels a clench of something hot and sharp: not jealousy but loss, and a kind of nakedness. How often have they stood in the same place, spoken to the same people, separated only by time? But for those few precious years at The Barnes, their lives have been like two pianos playing the same song out of synch, echoing back and forth, never quite meeting.

“Well?” Ronan growls. He’s not looking at Adam. He could be talking to the fire, for all Adam knows.

“Well, what?”

“You don’t have anything to say to me?”

“I have plenty to say to you,” Adam snaps instinctively, not sure whether he’s angry or defensive, emotions a roiling mess in his stomach, “But you’re the one who’s interrupting my work. Didn’t you come here with some sort of plan?”

Ronan scoffs, “Unlikely.” This, Adam concedes, is true.

“Do you want to talk?” he asks, and Ronan’s scowl deepens.

“I don’t know what the fuck else we’re supposed to do.”

“I’m surprised to hear it, given you’ve been avoiding me all week.”

At this moment Molly knocks and brings in the tea. It’s the kind of impeccable timing that only Gansey can usually achieve, and, Lord, Adam thinks madly, Perhaps it’s contagious. She lays out the things in record time, spurred probably by Ronan’s ever-darkening glower, and whisks out again. Adam glares at Ronan; Ronan glares at the fire.

“Tea?” Adam grits out eventually, when it seems as though Ronan really is content just to sit there all afternoon and commune with the flames. Another shrug. Oh, yes. This is shaping up to be a delightful encounter.

Adam pours the tea and settles back into the loveseat, determined to wait him out.

“I told Gansey,” Ronan says.

“I gathered,” Adam replies shortly. It hadn’t been his most pressing thought at the time, but in retrospect he’s not overly pleased with Ronan for spilling his most intimate secrets to his employer, without even bothering to warn him.

Ronan shoots a glance at him, then looks quickly back at the fire. “I’m fairly certain he thinks you’re too good for me.”

Adam snorts, “I truly doubt that.”

“Oh, yes. I’ve been hearing about you for months, you know. Parrish this, Parrish that. He thinks you’re a Goddamn genius. Suppose I should’ve realised sooner that it had to be the same Parrish.”

“It doesn’t seem to have mattered much in the end. We still ended up at the same dinner party.”

“That was Gansey, too,” Ronan tells him, “Albeit unintentionally. He sent a letter about tarot cards and ley lines and...well. After that I had to be sure. I knew, even as I made the arrangements to come to London, that the odds were pitiful. In a city this size there must be hundreds of Parrishs running about. But by that point I didn’t care. I saw the slightest chance to find you again and I took it.” Ronan lapses into silence for a long moment, but Adam doesn’t want to end it. He feels like he’s waiting for something, even if it’s only for something to break.

But eventually it’s too much.

“Then why not speak to me?” he demands, “Or reply to my note, at least? Why leave me waiting for so long?”

Ronan shakes his head, staring down at his hands where they curl together between his knees. “Because I knew, as soon as I saw you, staring up at me like you’d just had the greatest shock of your lie, that it had been wrong of me. It’s obvious you took pains to prevent me from finding you. Gansey had no way to know, when he sent that letter, that he was breaking a confidence; but I did. And yet I came anyway,” he smiles a sharp, bitter smile, “I couldn’t help myself. Not even for you.”

The blood drains from Adam’s face. Oh, god. Is it really possible that Gansey – Gansey, who is subtle as a collapsing bridge and has the poker-face of a small-child playing hide-and-seek behind a pillow – has left Ronan in the dark? For seven long days Adam has spent his time pacing and biting his lip, picking at the spectre of Ronan’s imagined fury like a scab, and racking his overwrought brain for any thing he might say or do to mend the rift between them. Only to find that he is not furious: he is devastated, because he does not yet know the shape and depth of Adam’s blunder.

“Lynch – ” Adam begins, but Ronan interrupts him.

“It’s alright. I’ve come. I’ve seen you, now; and, now,” he takes a quick, shallow breath and darts a glance at Adam from beneath dark brows, “Now we can…end it. Properly. No more loose threads.”

“Lynch –” Adam tries again, but Ronan rushes to speak over him.

“I just wanted to see you one last time, in the flesh. To be sure that you’re well,” his voice becomes fierce, as Adam has heard it before when Ronan speaks of Opal, or Matthew…or Adam. When he speaks of people he loves. “You couldn’t have found a better position, Adam. I know I rib him terribly, but Gansey is…he’s family to me. He’s the best sort of person. Sargent, too. They care for you, and you fit with them – I always knew,” his voice cracks a little, but he pushes on, “I always knew you three would get along. I’m glad you found them, even if we’re not to be…to…well. Anyway.” He has picked up a teacup, absently. He turns it back and forth on the saucer without drinking.  “In any case. You have work to do, of course, and I don’t wish to disturb you. If you will, Opal would, I know, like to see you again. If you could think of perhaps writing her sometimes, I know she would –”

Adam can stand it no longer.

“Ronan,” Ronan’s head snaps up, blue eyes fixed unerringly on Adam’s face, “I had planned to make my arrangements tomorrow.”

Notes:

Technical question for anyone who was actually given formal training on grammar etc.: does a door swing 'to' or 'too'? 'Too' didn't look right, but I'll correct it if I'm wrong. I must've read it in a book somewhere before but for the life of me I can't remember. Thank you in advance, you lovely readers you :)

(That also looks weird written down. Maybe my brain is just off today, but I was just reading The Dictionary of Lost Words, so you'd think I'd be in-focus, writing-wise.)

Chapter 26: The instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

Summary:

Storm and fury.

 

Adam is studying the rough, prominent knuckles of his perennially boyish hands. Hands which had always felt over-large and clumsily sketched, until Ronan had loved them.

Ronan blinks at him, uncomprehending.

“Your…arrangements?”

“Yes, Ronan,” saying the name is an indulgence, but it’s sweet, so sweet to have it once more on his tongue after all this time. To see Ronan’s infinitesimal twitch when he registers it. “My arrangements. For travel to Ireland.”

He senses, rather than sees, Ronan go very still. “You’re travelling to Ireland. To Galway?”

“Yes.”

There is, barely detectable, a hint of something unsteady in Ronan’s voice. “You were coming to see me.”

“Yes,” says Adam again, “Ronan, I have to tell you something –”

“Why?”

If Ronan interrupts him one more time, Adam may have to gag him.

“For god’s sake, Ronan, I’ve only been trying to tell you for the last half hour!”

In his mind, when Adam imagined this conversation, he spoke carefully, laid out the facts with care. It was a coward’s plan, he knew, but he had tried a hundred ways to see if there was any path that would allow him to reveal the truth and yet maintain the full weight of the assumption he had been operating under. To impress upon Ronan, simultaneously, that given the known facts he had acted in the only way he could and, now the facts had changed, he had taken all pains to rectify the situation. He was not the hero in this piece, but he clung still to his certainty that, believing the facts as he had known them to be true, he had done the only possible thing, and he could only hope that Ronan would see this in time and forgive him for having been so wrong.

Of course, in the moment nothing happens as it ought.

“We got it wrong,” Adam snaps, “No, I –“ it is important he take responsibility for this, “I got it entirely wrong. You never controlled Cabeswater. I’m not sure anyone could control Cabeswater. Cabeswater is a ley line, a river of energy as old as the earth – older, possibly – an entity I’m fairly certain nobody, not Gansey, certainly not me, not even you could fully understand. If anything, it helped to create us. Not the other way around. And it does,” he stumbles a bit, the heat of his irritation cooling as he becomes conscious that Ronan is staring at him. He is gazing at Adam with a mixture of shock and disbelief and, creeping in around the edges, absolute rage. “It does care for you,” Adam tells him, haltingly, “And it has taken action, I believe, to secure your happiness and wellbeing – and mine, too, even before our bargain – but Ronan, you never made Cabeswater. Only helped to give it form. And though it may, at times, direct my body…” How is it possible that this part is harder to say to Ronan than it had been to Gansey, or himself? “I no longer believe it holds any sway over my heart.”

The teacup is dancing in Ronan’s hand, beating a fine percussion against its saucer as his fingers tremble. Very carefully, he puts it down. In a smooth rush of moment, and without looking at Adam, he shoves out of his seat and strides to the window. Adam can see his reflection faintly, a pale face scowling in the glass against the dim afternoon outside.

“You’re saying that Cabeswater’s hold over you is – it has nothing to do with me?”

“No. Nothing.”

“And yet it does affect you? It has shaped your life, in ways that brought you to me?”

“Yes,” Adam says quietly, “Without a doubt.”

Ronan drags a hand savagely through his hair and then grips the windowsill; Adam can see that his knuckles are white with tension.

“It pushed you towards me? Into – into what we had?”

Adam knows when a precipice is near. He breathes slow to steady himself, tries to order his thoughts to make them absolutely truthful, and at the same time not to push them into the abyss.

“Towards you, yes. But not into anything. I believe it’s more…avuncular than paternal. It hopes to guide us towards actions and circumstances that will see us well, but once there it seems to have no direct influence over whether those circumstances come to pass.”

“I see,” Ronan says, taughtly, “So that means these last five months – you, creeping out like a thief in the night – all this, what it has done to me, to Opal, was completely, entirely unnecessary?”

Adam takes another steadying breath, pressing his hands together between his knees. His heart is awash with feeling, a boiling sea of contrary currents, and overwhelming all the frustration, fear and anger is grief, sharp and brutal. Grief for hours and days that have already been lost, yes, but much sharper, much nearer to his heart an anticipatory grief for the loss he is probably about to suffer. He grieves for the years that should’ve stretched ahead of them and which he pre-emptively, carelessly unmade because he was so afraid to be owned, and too proud to ask for help.

“Yes,” he says, clearly and quietly, staring into the fire, “That is true.”

Ronan flies across the room like a whirlwind. Adam lifts his head reluctantly to look up into incandescent eyes the clear, hot blue of a gas flame. A flame hot enough to melt glass.

“You bastard,” Ronan hisses, “You arrogant, stubborn arse. All you had to do was tell me. All you had to do was leave a note. A sentence. Write me one letter. Anything but what you did. Anything but leave me, not knowing, terrified for you, sure I’d done something terrible in my sleep, that I’d hurt you somehow, driven you away. One word from you and none of this – none of it – would be what it is.”

“You know that isn’t true,” says Adam, hollowly, “If I had come to you, can you honestly say you wouldn’t have tried to convince me to stay? If you’d known where I was all this time, would you really have been able to resist? One letter from Gansey, the slightest chance – that was all it took for you to come here, you said it yourself. If it had been what I truly believed it was, if it was you pulling my strings – can you really blame me, for being unwilling to risk it?”

Ronan’s eyes are glassy with tears he is stubbornly holding at bay.

“I would’ve tried,” he whispers, “I would’ve done anything to keep you safe. You know that. It has ruined me, these past months, to believe that I broke that trust, however unknowingly. How can you tell me what I would or would not have done, under those circumstances? You never gave me the chance to try. I thought we were as partners, equals, but in the end you truly believed I could not be trusted. You treated me like a criminal, Adam. As though for all we shared, I would rather keep you by force than release you for your own wellbeing.”

Tears sting at Adam’s eyes, knot in the back of his throat.

“I was coming to find you,” he rasps, haltingly, “As soon as I knew, I – I tried to find you in the dream and then… I was trying to come back to you.”

“God, Adam,” Ronan drags a hand through his hair; it’s so wild with tugging it looks as though he’s been shocked. He pulls his eyes away from Adam’s face and to the window with palpable effort. The glass has grown darker, now, the late afternoon turning dim. “What do we do now?” Ronan whispers. Adam shakes his head, staring into the fire and feeling as far from its heat as from the distant moon.

“What would you have done?” Ronan asks quietly, after a long while. “If you’d come to Gallway as you’d planned?”

Adam snorts, and in a rush of honesty says, “Thrown myself on Opal’s tender mercies in the hope that, together, we might convince you to let me through the door.”

Ronan glowers down at the innocent street, “She would’ve done it, too, traitorous brat. She adores you, you know.”

Adam hangs his head, a mixture of pleasure and shame, relief and regret warring in him, a flush chasing the smile from his face. “I know. I find it hard to believe I simply…left. I never even said goodbye to her.”

“Yes,” says Ronan, sounding hard again, “I’m familiar with the circumstances of your departure. I still haven’t found a tutor to replace you, you know. No-one else will stay with us above a month. I think she chases them off on purpose.”

Something – not a large something, but something nonetheless – unfurls hopefully in Adam’s stomach.

“They don’t know what they’re giving up.”

Ronan makes no sound of acknowledgement, but his frown deepens. “Oh,” he says, “We’re a treat. A joy to be around. Her, biting and kicking things, eating fucking everything. She’s gone back to speaking Latin, you know, almost exclusively, though you’ll be pleased to discover that your efforts were not wasted. Her grammar is much improved – and me –” he stops abruptly, drumming his fingers restlessly against the sill. “Well,” he says finally, when the silence has stretched to snapping point, “You know what I’m like in a mood.”

Adam does know. But he’s finding it hard to reconcile this Ronan with the one he remembers from The Barnes. He’d thought that Ronan sharp and dangerous, but this version is more so, and darker besides, with edges so sharp that even Adam, who had been relatively adept, he’d once thought, at the correct mode of careful handling, was perilously close to being cut. Had already been cut. Was probably bleeding somewhere, internally, if the pain in his chest was anything to go by.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly. There’s really nothing else he can say, when it comes down to it. Ronan now knows the whys.

Ronan stares hard at the glass. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he mumbles, finally.

Squaring his shoulders he turns from the window and carefully runs his fingers along the sideboard. He glances down at them as though testing for dust, which seems laughably out of character. What he does not do is look at Adam, only taps his fingers against the wood, studies it as though some long-searched-for secret may be hidden in the grain.

“Why were you coming to Ireland? Did you really hope…” he lets it trail off.

“I had to see you,” Adam tells him. They neither of them can look at the other head-on. Ronan speaks to the flower arrangement on the sideboard, and Adam is studying the rough, prominent knuckles of his perennially boyish hands. Hands which had always felt over-large and clumsily sketched, until Ronan had loved them. “I had to tell you what I’d found out about Cabeswater and the ley lines. I kept trying to dream, but I still don’t know how it works. Maybe you didn’t want to see me,” he rushes over this quickly so that Ronan can neither confirm this nor deny it; he doesn’t want to know, “Or maybe Cabeswater was keeping me out. And I didn’t hope, not really. I know that when I left I hurt you. Badly. But I…I wanted. To see you, at the very least. I can’t help it. I couldn’t stop myself from wanting.”

“Well,” Ronan says, and Adam feels the moment when he finally lifts his gaze, the heat it brings to Adam’s skin, “You’ve seen me. Is that it? Are your…wants fulfilled?”

“No,” Adam says, too fast, an instinct not a thought. Then, at a more measured pace, “If anything, they’re worse.”

He’s not sure what he expected Ronan to say, but instead silence seeps in thick between them again. It’s frankly excruciating.

When he can’t stand it any longer, Adam asks, “Do you believe me, then? About Cabeswater, and my feelings and…the two of us?”

Ronan shrugs, and rubs at the bridge of his nose. Suddenly he looks so tired and young that it twists Adam’s heart. “I don’t know yet,” he says lowly, “Perhaps. I’m not sure whether I believe it, or whether I only want to believe it. Perhaps it feels too neat, too good to be true.”

“Waiting to find the catch,” Adam says quietly.

“Something like that.”

Again they lapse into silence. Adam drinks his tea automatically but can’t stomach food.

“Well then,” Ronan says finally, with an abrupt tone as though some business has been concluded, an agreement reached. It’s been quiet for so long that Adam starts, and then feels foolish, and struggles to imagine what Ronan could have decided in that time. “You’ll stay here until Gansey’s work is finished?”

“I…yes. I suppose.”

“And then?”

“And then…”

“So you are not coming to Ireland after all?”

When Adam’s head jerks up he finds Ronan already looking at him, hard and cold and as aloof as he had been that very first night, a wrathful godling emerging from the fog.

“No,” he says, quickly, “I’ll come.”

“For how long?” Ronan asks coolly, “A week? A month? I’ll have to tell Opal something so she can prepare herself for your departure.”

“I’ll stay –” Adam fumbles, then says helplessly, “How long will you have me, Lynch?”

Ronan sucks in a sharp breath.

And then, with no warning at all, he storms out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

A picture on the wall rattles with the impact, and Adam watches it settle, feeling numb. Then he presses the heels of his hands hard against his eyes and leans forward, setting his elbows on his knees and letting his head fall low between them.

Chapter 27: Neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me.

Summary:

Dawn brings unexpected visitors. They circle each other; or, through a more hopeful lens, spiral.

 

“If you hate me for it, I’ll understand.” Saying it is like pulling out his own teeth, but he made this mess. Ronan has a right to handle it however he might wish. “If you can’t forgive me, I won’t hold it against you.”

Adam doesn’t sleep that night. He hears Gansey and Sargent come in around twelve, but despite the light under his door they leave him be.

And so he paces.

Back and forth, back and forth, and when the sky is outside is grey and the clock reads six, he gathers up his coat and hat and finds his way to Singer’s Close, to lift the neat brass knocker of number five. It’s long minutes before anybody answers, and when the door finally swings inwards there is Ronan, not a servant, leaning on the jamb, and with one cool, thorough sweep of those blue-ice eyes, Adam is completely undone.

Ronan looks worn, in shirtsleeves and last night’s trousers, his black silk waistcoat falling open to the sides. Adam sways unconsciously towards him like a wheat stalk in a breeze, and Ronan’s lip curls. He turns sharply and strides away back into the gloomy interior, leaving Adam to follow or leave, as he pleases.

Of course he follows. The door makes a loud, definitive snick when he pushes it closed behind him.

The house is still and quiet, obviously empty but for the two of them. Dust sheets swathe the furniture in the front rooms, and Adam follows the stomp of Ronan’s boots deeper in, down a narrow corridor and stairs, into the sudden brightness and warmth of a kitchen. The stove is lit, and lamps as well, hanging above a long, well-scrubbed table. A mess of books and pens and papers is scattered at one end and Ronan sweeps them up, viciously, and dumps them on a chair before Adam can more than glance at them.

For a long moment there’s silence. Ronan is staring furiously at the stove, hands on hips; Adam is, of course, watching him.

“I suppose you’ll want tea,” Ronan mutters, and starts to clang about with cupboards and such.

“Yes,” Adam says automatically, “Thank you.” Because Ronan almost certainly will not offer to take them, he folds his overcoat across a chair and places his hat on the table, sitting opposite where Ronan is slamming down tea things like some awful modern percussion suite.

Ronan measures leaves with savage precision and fills the pot from the great copper kettle on the stove. “Milk?” he growls, shoving the jug in Adam’s direction.

Adam cautiously snags both thick earthenware mugs from Ronan’s side of the table and adds milk and sugar as preferences direct, then slides them back into the centre while they wait for the tea to steep. At some time during the night Adam’s defences – whatever Ronan had left of them – had crumbled, and now he feels as translucent as bone china, his every want and need plain for all to see. Ronan has gone the opposite way: where yesterday he had been raw and open, today he is locked up tighter than a bank safe, and Adam is already exhausted by the prospect of hurling himself against those walls.

“Yours is on the left,” he offers, and Ronan grunts.

Another stretch of silence.

“You’re here alone?”

“Yes,” Ronan grits out, “I didn’t want to be slowed down. Besides.” He pours neatly and shoves Adam’s mug in his general direction. Adam barely catches it before it can spill. “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying.”

Adam’s hands tighten involuntarily around the searing curve of the mug.

“How long is Opal to stay?”

Ronan flings himself into the chair across from Adam and crosses his arms, giving him a hard look. “I’ve arranged for her to spend the winter. Better than being cooped up at The Barnes. Maura has sworn to teach her not to nibble the silverware in public.”

“All luck to her,” Adam says wryly, making a toast with his mug.

Ronan is silent. His tea steams gently in front of him but he makes no move to drink it. Before, when Ronan had been avoiding Adam’s gaze, he’d wished for nothing more than that the other man might look at him. Now he is, Adam remembers what an uncomfortable experience that can be. Ronan’s pale eyes are mirror-like: hard, unreadable, and promising nothing but sharp edges should they break. Adam forces himself not to shift in his chair like a child, and to drink his tea with sham impassively.

“Why are you here?” Ronan finally growls.

“That seems fairly obvious.”

“Not to fucking me, it doesn’t.”

“To see you, naturally.”

“Oh,” Ronan sneers, “Naturally. Five fucking months of nothing and now, naturally, at the ass-crack of dawn you traipse across London to see me. Obvious, is it?”

“You never answered me. Yesterday.”

Ronan looks suddenly tired. He rubs his fingers across his temple, avoiding Adam’s eyes. “Answered you about what?”

“Whether you want me to come back to Ireland. Whether you think it’s enough of an answer, knowing that my bargain is with Cabeswater, not you, even if it is an interfering pest. Whether you…” he feels a lump rise in his throat, and has to swallow hard to get the last words out, “Whether you can forgive me. For leaving you that way.”

“Whether I can – Jesus fucking Christ, Parrish,” Ronan throws him a wide-eyed look, “Is that what you want from me? Forgiveness? When did you fucking ask me for that?”

“I am asking you now,” Adam says steadily, “And I want a lot more, but I believe that’s where we ought to start. Do you disagree?”

Ronan laughs wildly, “You broke my bloody heart! And though I now understand why you did it and can’t begrudge your choice, the way you went about it, well, that I cannot comprehend. Can you imagine what it was to open your door and find your room… Good God, you were thorough. You left as though you’d never existed. Two years of you in my home, in my life – in Opal’s life – and you attempted to wipe the slate clean. At times I almost began to wonder if I had not dreamed you.

“Once I’d divined that you really must have left on your own – not been kidnapped, or murdered by one of my creations – I waited for a letter. Surely, I thought, surely there is some logical explanation for this. He has been called away to another fucking family emergency – who cares that we’re your bloody family, not that manipulative crone – he wouldn’t just leave for nothing. He wouldn’t just say nothing. Not Adam, who is conscientious and kind and knows that I – how much I –” his voice cracks, terribly. Adam opens his mouth to speak and Ronan cuts him off with a venomous look. “But no. Nothing. Not a word. Not a sodding telegram. Not even to say that you were safe. Opal had nightmares for months, did she tell you that? She’d wake me, sure that she’d dreamed true and you were dead in a ditch somewhere, or locked up in a castle, waiting for us, begging her to find you. I managed to convince her that not all dreams are real that way, but if I’m honest, I was not myself convinced that she was wrong. Certainly I was loath to imagine some other scenario in which you would be so callous as to leave us in that awful state of ignorance.”

The weight of Adam’s guilt is a crippling thing. In the back of his mind he hears every foul, rabid thing his father ever said to him, every name he’s ever been called: lazy, selfish, calculating, cowardly, useless, mean-spirited, cruel. Never had he imagined hearing any of them from Ronan’s mouth, because never had he imagined doing anything to Ronan that might warrant such vitriol. Ronan is right, of course he’s right. Adam could have written. He should have. Even when he truly believed that Cabeswater was in control of his feelings, he had always known that Ronan’s were real, and he had left him to believe that his lover had abandoned him for nothing, with not one word of explanation.

It strikes him suddenly, stupidly late, that Ronan got the worst of all this. When Adam and Cabeswater had gotten tangled they had both abandoned him, in their own ways, to the crossfire. If he’s angry now, he has a right to it. In this whole mess only Ronan has never actually acted wrongly, and still he’s had to wear the greater share of the fallout.

Ronan is watching him steadily with that cool, hard gaze. Adam imagines he can see it as each one of his arrows strike home.

“And then you came to me in Cabeswater,” Ronan says into the silence, surprisingly quiet and calm, “And I realised it was true. Oh, I understood your reasons – God, I feel ill just – but still, there you were. Hale and healthy enough, two good hands well equipped with fingers. But though you knew where I was this whole time – this whole time, Adam, months – still, you stayed silent. You left me in that hellish limbo, alone, to share my grief with a child.

“And of course I still fucking loved you, because I’m not built to fall out of love, but God I hated you, too. I misjudged you. And I thought: I must have lied to myself from the start, because I was not able to comprehend how you could have acted so. No matter the fear I felt, I would never have abandoned you in that fashion. I would have given you a chance to explain, to make it right. And I knew, at that moment, that whatever you had once felt for me, it was not love. Not as I feel it.”

None of Adam’s organs seem to be where they ought: his heart is clawing its way up his throat, his lungs are trying to break free of his ribcage. He has to swallow hard before he can speak.

“Oh, Ronan,” he rasps finally, “Ronan, no.”

“ ‘No’?” Ronan sneers at him, “ ‘No’?”

“No,” it tears out of him, “Don’t you see? It’s only because I love you that this, any of it, came about. I am not like you, Ronan. You think you are alone, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Opal, Gansey, Sargent, Matthew – even Declan – you are loved, Ronan, from all directions. From that vantage point you will never know what it is to love someone and to feel loved, for the very first time, any more than you can understand the horror of watching that love ripped away, revealed as nothing but a pretty lie. The thought of abandoning you was like tearing heart into pieces, yet I believed that feeling could not be trusted. I had discovered that nothing I had belonged to me, and all that was left in my power was the choice to leave.”

He raises his eyes to Ronan and finds him already staring back, rage and empathy warring in his gaze.

“I was so afraid I’d wake you,” Adam says, quietly. “If you’d stopped me that night, on the stairs, I’m sure I would have stayed. But what then? It would’ve seemed to me as if it was your magic that held me, and then what? Leaving you was the only way I could know, for sure, that I was free. And I cannot return to being someone’s property, Ronan. I won’t be. I must have agency over myself.”

At this, the rage wins out.

“I know that!” Ronan explodes, “Do you think I don’t know you? I know you, Adam Parrish. I know, and it fucking broke me but I understand. I understand that, but why –”

“I was heartbroken, too, Ronan!” suddenly Adam is angry as well, and he’s not sure why. Perhaps because they’re both right, in their way, and though he’s trying every bridge he can think of, the rift between them seems wider by the sentence. “I believed myself trapped into an impossible choice, and because of it I lost everything I loved.” His words almost overlap, fast and intense. “Wherever I turned, I saw you. Everything I thought or felt made me think of you. You were miles away, yet all I longed for was to have you near, and I wondered…is this my longing? Are these my remembrances? Or is this Cabeswater punishing me, crucifying me for leaving you? It was for the best I’d not the money for a train fare, or I would surely have returned to Galway a hundred times in that first month alone. So, no, Ronan, I could not write to you, however much I longed to do so. To sever ties completely was the only way I knew to protect myself from the force of my own feeling.”

Ronan’s shoulders are hunched forwards, his fingers tangled painfully in his hair as he takes the kind of shallow, dragging gasps one draws in an attempt to stay in control.

“Fuck,” he whispers, “God, this is such a fucking mess. I’m so –”

“If you hate me for it, I’ll understand.” Saying it is like pulling out his own teeth, but he made this mess. Ronan has a right to handle it however he might wish. “If you can’t forgive me, I won’t hold it against you.”

“I don’t fucking hate you, Parrish,” Ronan bites out, “That’s obviously the problem.”

“Is it? Because the fact that I love you seems like the easiest part of this whole situation.”

“Jesus fuck, Adam!” Ronan leans forward, jabbing his finger against the scarred tabletop, “You spooked like a horse and fled the country. What am I supposed to make of that? Am I supposed to welcome you back with open arms? What happens the next time something goes awry? If Cabeswater oversteps, of I pull something particularly terrible from a nightmare and put us all in mortal danger – will you leave me again, then? Will you even warn me of your intent? What we had was more than love: it was trust,

“I know that I love you. That hasn’t changed. I think even if you leave now, this instant, and I never see you anymore, I will continue to love you. I will spend my whole life loving you, even if it never hurts any less than it does right now. But you cannot ask me to be at peace with what we’ve lost. I feel it – ” he thumps his hand against his breastbone in emphasis – “Here, and I cannot forget.”

The ground is sliding out from beneath Adam’s feet. It was different, somehow, when they were only apart. It was different when he thought they’d never see one another again. It was different when it was you making all the decisions, says a brutal, honest voice in the back of his mind. Tears prickle at his eyes and he angrily beats them back. What Ronan says is true. Adam had found himself in a terrible position, but he’d handled it as though the subsequent injury would be his alone, and he’d left carnage in his wake. Maybe Ronan is right, and his parents, too. Maybe he cannot be trusted with other people. Maybe he is even more like his father than he’d feared.

“You’re right,” he says, finally, staring at his hands where they’re twisted together on the tabletop, painfully tight. His chest feels hollow, and his voice is rough and wet. “You’re right, of course. I’m so sorry.  There’s nothing more I can think to say. I’m not like you, Ronan. I believe there’s something in me that is better at breaking things than building them. It must be in my blood. I’m sorry,” he repeats. He ought to go. He ought really just…he should go. “You deserve better.”

Adam pushes his chair back and stands to leave, but Ronan shoots a hand across the table and closes it around his wrist. Adam stares down at pale fingers, stark against his brown skin, then at Ronan, gazing steadily back at him.

“You’re plenty good at building things, Parrish,” he says quietly, “At heart, I wonder if perhaps you simply didn’t realise what you’d made.”

Notes:

In which Adam is basically the antithesis of Olivia Rodrigo saying “fuck it, it’s fine”. It is not fine; Adam does not text his exes.

Also, there's a funny wordcount thing happeneing in this chapter and the next. This one is kind of long, the next is kind of short... I just couldn't find a more even place to cut them so it is what it is.

Finally, fuck me, has anyone else read On earth we are briefly gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong? It is doing my heart in.

Chapter 28: You are no ruin.

Summary:

The stakes are high and signposts few.

 

“You aren’t sure, are you?” he says. His voice is hushed with exhausted resignation. “Why keep going if you believe it will all come to nothing in the end? Why not just…what was it you said? No more loose threads? Why not simply end things as we are? Get it over with before we hurt each other more than we already have?”

Adam flexes his fingers beneath Ronan’s hand and turns his palm until he can grip Ronan’s wrist in turn. Ronan lets him. It’s the first time they’ve touched since that last, terrible evening and electricity races across his skin.

“What good’s building things if I can’t be trusted not to tear them down?”

“Maybe you’ll get better at it,” Ronan suggests.

“What if I don’t?”

“I’ll risk it.”

Adam stares at him. “Will you?”

“I don’t know what the Hell else I’m supposed to do,” Ronan tells him with shocking calm. He tugs his hand free and lounges back in his chair. Adam withdraws his empty hand and tucks it into his pocket, curling his fingers into a fist. “You walk out that door and I’m going to feel like my heart’s been shredded all over again. I won’t live through that shit twice, not if I can help it.”

“Are you saying you’ll simply…” Adam reaches for his chair and sits again; he is wary and unsteady, both. It’s an uncomfortable combination. “You’ll have me back?”

Ronan shrugs with fluid, forceful casualness. Adam mistrusts that shrug.

“Certainly.”

“Never mind that you distrust me,” Adam presses. “That you’re furious with me, still.”

Again, that too-smooth roll of broad shoulders.

“Do you even believe that you could trust me again? Someday?”

“Hell, Parrish. You’re the fortune teller. Why don’t you pull out your little cards and tell me.”

Adam forces himself to swallow that sting.

“You aren’t sure, are you?” he says. His voice is hushed with exhausted resignation. “Why keep going if you believe it will all come to nothing in the end? Why not just…what was it you said? No more loose threads? Why not simply end things as we are? Get it over with before we hurt each other more than we already have?”

For an hours-long moment Ronan gazes at him, steadily. At last he sighs and rubs the heel of his hand across one eye. “You know why,” his voice is rough but forceful. “You feel it, too. Perhaps Cabeswater has a part in it, or this ley line Gansey won’t fucking shut up about, but if it does…honestly I’m not sure that I care. I feel you beneath my ribs, Adam Parrish, like a string looped tight around my heart, and I am sure you hold the other end tied,” he levels a finger at Adam’s chest and, in response, Adam’s heart begins to pound, “Just there. What does it matter if we fight? What does it matter if things are not exactly as they were? The world is full of fool’s gold, but I believe this, here, is true. And it’s rare, Adam, so if you’ll have me, well. I’ll not let fear of pain keep us apart.”

Adam swallows. And then he holds out his hand.

Ronan uncoils slowly. His fingers walk across the table, sure as a cat on a tilting roof, until the tips kiss Adam’s. His thumb brushes the pad of Adam’s middle finger, and it twitches, and Ronan flashes him a wobbly grin and engulfs his hand in a grip that is, for a moment, tight enough to blanch the skin.

“Come here,” he says gruffly, and when he tugs Adam goes. He skirts the end of the table and comes to a stop only when the toes of their boots meet. Ronan looks up at him; Adam gazes down. Their twined hands hang loose in the space between them.

“What now?” Adam asks. His voice is so quiet that, if they were any further apart, it would be lost beneath the sounds of London waking outside.

“I don’t know.” Ronan brings their joined hands up to his face. For a moment he studies the prominent knuckles; they are chapped and red and ugly, and Adam tries not to squirm beneath the scrutiny and the heart-rendingly gentle sweep of Ronan’s thumb. Ronan bends his head. He pauses a moment and presses first his mouth to the rough skin, then his cheek. Without being aware of it, Adam holds his breath.

“Don’t go back to Gansey’s,” Ronan whispers.

Adam blinks down at him; he takes a breath.

“But – ”

“Don’t go.” Ronan tilts his palm, presses a kiss to the base of Adam’s thumb. Adam’s breath catches.

“I’d come back,” Adam tells him. He curls his fingers against Ronan’s cheek, scrapes a nail through the rough stubble. Ronan shivers, and Adam feels lighting again, crackling across his skin. “They’re depending on me to finish my work. And besides, we oughtn’t to try and force everything back into place at once. I know you’re still angry with me.” Ronan looks up at him, eyes ferocious, and presses Adam’s hand more tightly against his cheek.

“I am. And even still: don’t go.”

“Ronan…”

“I mean it.” Ronan leans forward until his forehead rests against Adam’s sternum, and for a moment they just breathe that way, until Adam draws together the courage to cup his free palm around the base of Ronan’s skull. Ronan looses a shuddering breath, and when it passes his shoulders sag bonelessly. “Stay, Adam. Stay with me. Now, and tomorrow, and the day after that. Even if we’re angry for now. Even if we shout across the breakfast table and slam the china about. Even if some days we can’t stand the sight of one another, stay. Stay anyway. Stay until we come to our senses and remember that we love each other, and always will.” He leans back and looks up at Adam, and he's so beautiful and fierce and absolutely steadfast that, in his heart, Adam has already said yes. “Say you’ll stay with me, Adam. I cannot bear to lose you again, not even to Gansey and Blue.”

Adam gazes down at him, cataloguing the precise arch of his black eyebrows, the new freckle at the corner of his mouth. He sweeps Ronan’s cheekbone with a thumb and lets his fingers sink back into the thick curls at his nape. It’s still strange; he expects stubble and comes up with silk.

“What if we say things we regret?”

Ronan shrugs. He closes his eyes and leans his cheek into Adam’s palm, pressing his mouth to the lines there.

“We’ll apologise.”

“What if we go to bed together before we’re ready?”

Ronan’s grin is sharp: Adam feels the scrape of teeth against the base of his thumb.

“We’ll make love. And then, likely, fight some more.”

Adam swallows. There’s a lump in his throat, and it’s hard to force the words past.

“What if you never forgive me?”

Ronan pulls back and meets Adam’s gaze; his eyes are glacier blue, and every bit as inexorable.

“I will,” he says, “Don’t you understand yet? There’s nothing else I would do.”

Notes:

Ugh. I rewrote this scene so many times. I feel like I should post the outtakes just to demonstrate how many different ways it could have gone. Some of them were very dramatic. I think this one’s more right, though. There’s been enough drama, apart; when they come together again it should feel like home.

Chapter 29: The highest and the sweetest given to man.

Summary:

It's a kind of dance: one step forward, two back, three to the other side. Towards, away from, together.

 

Adam pulls back to look him sternly in the eye. “I must warn you: if you storm out on me a fourth time, I will have to take it personally.”
Ronan scowls. “What, that? It hardly counts. I was making a dramatic exit.”

Notes:

Depending on your feelings on the subject, that title may be a little misleading, which is to say: this is mostly smut. You've been warned.

For those disinterested in that sort of thing, it's mostly story plus a bit of innuendo up to: “I do understand,” he says, softly, “How else do you think I came to be here?”. You won't lose anything vital by skipping the rest.

Adam stays. Sometimes it is terrible. One fight after another until they are both wrung out from feeling and convinced that the entire project is meaningless. They talk each other into circles, then knots, an unruly tangle of barbed words and seemingly-insoluble problems. They slam doors, fume silently into their teacups, go on long, angry walks both with and without one another.

Adam, apparently, finds that friction in his intimate relationship has a beneficial effect on his work; at the worst times he pulls his professionalism around himself like a cloak and stalks out into the chill London air, aloof as a marble statue and infinitely colder, and won’t return until long after the lamplighters have been and gone. Ronan sits up waiting for him, imagining him hunched over his papers like a malevolent library troll until some poor maid comes in to light the lamps and gets a wicked fright. More than once he has opened the door at midnight or beyond to find a sleepy servant and a note in Gansey’s hand: Found Parrish asleep over his books again. Please join us for breakfast and retrieve him. Gansey’s second-hand anxiety is so strong it permeates the paper, a sour taint below the warm serenity of lavender water – or perhaps that’s just the fresh ink. On other nights, Adam himself will stumble through the door, blurry eyed and smelling of vellum dust, to find Ronan, hollow and grim, sitting on the bottom step in the dark. Sometimes this begets a fresh seam of reproaches; sometimes Ronan will simply push to his feet, take the hat from Adam’s hand and fold him into himself. They stand like that until they get cold, and then take each other to bed.

But, at other times, things are good. So good, in fact, that those six lonely months at the Barnes seem like nothing but a bad and perfectly mundane dream. In the house at Singer’s Close they find themselves, for the very first time, gloriously alone. They giggle like schoolboys over scrambled eggs and the morning paper, stockinged feet tangling and untangling beneath the table; or spend whole weekends lounging about in the library in nothing but their skins, reading to one another (and doing other things, as well).

Together, they begin to explore London, following a list of all the sites that Ronan has never particularly wanted to see and Adam, though he never says it outright, had not the heart for, before. Adam drags him, sometimes bodily, to a lecture and a picnic, to dinner at the Ganseys, to the zoo and promenading in Hyde park. Opera tickets lurk in the blue Chinese bowl on the little spindly table in the hall. Ronan acquiesces to these things with variable grace but, sometimes, he will catch Adam smiling at him from the corner of his mouth and know that his secret is out: he doesn’t mind so much, after all. Many things he once viewed with disdain are, Ronan is discovering, more bearable with Adam in tow. Some are even – dare he say it? – a pleasure.

And there is, of course, this:

“Here?” Adam asks, breathless.

“Here.” Ronan laughs into his mouth, “Right over the arm of Declan’s prissy fucking fainting couch.”

Adam pulls back to look him sternly in the eye. “I must warn you: if you storm out on me a fourth time, I will have to take it personally.”

Ronan scowls. “What, that? It hardly counts. I was making a dramatic exit.”

“Oh, and every other time you were so restrained.”

“Silence, wretch.” And Adam would certainly have had something to say to that, too, only Ronan kisses him again and all his words are transmuted into something else.

Ronan fishes in his trouser pocket and presses something cold and cylindrical into Adam’s palm.

He takes the little pot incredulously. “Did you buy this while you were out? Is this why you left? In the middle of – when we were –”

“No,” Ronan snaps, “I left because I was fucking furious. Because you were so – you – and it was intolerable to think that we might – that I might have you again and then you would – but then I was walking and saw an apothecary’s shop and thought the better of it.”

“So, in fact, you came back for sex.” Adam says, “That’s your most compelling story.” He’s clearly trying to keep his face straight, Ronan can tell. He’s fairly sure he can tell. It hasn’t been that long.

It’s been twenty-two hours since they were screaming at each other in the library; nineteen since he’d slunk back in. It was fear that drove him home, a horrible, gnawing dread that had grown sharper with every street he crossed until he had no choice but to turn and retrace his steps. Adam would be gone, he was sure of it. By the time he reached his front steps Ronan’s hands were unsteady, and he had had to try the key three times before it fit the lock. The house looked just as he had left it. No lamps lit in the library, or the sitting room downstairs. You enormous twat. Of course he’s left again. You as much as told him you don’t want him anymore.

In that moment in the library that morning, with Adam stood before the great bay window, limned in early gold and near incandescent with rage, Ronan hadn’t been sure himself. Oh, not the wanting, that part was easy. He had wanted Adam almost from the start, from the very moment of their meeting, when Adam had stood, wreathed in mist like a fairy sprite, and fixed him with that piercing stare. Wanting, hot and physical, was assured; but carnal want alone was a sickly, pale thing compared to the vast constellation of desires Adam had long-since come to embody. The physical aspect of that sprawling galaxy was one thing – but what of the rest? One week prior he’d sat at the kitchen table and told Adam he didn’t care if things were different between them, but in that moment, staring across the room at the man he loved, the thought had entered his mind that if they did not manage to recover all of it, the whole sweeping mess of planets and stars, it would break his heart anew, and down fresh fault lines. In the Adam of The Barnes he had glimpsed a future that he’d long thought beyond his reach, and its spectre now taunted him cruelly. In this new Adam, more sure of his place in the world yet less certain of how Ronan fitted into it, doubt was a frequent visitor, and it made Ronan wild with frustration and fear.

He had fled that bitter ambiguity, and only once his infernal dress boots had begun to pinch – the real world shouldering in past the ugly fog of anxious self-absorption – had he allowed his mind to replay the scene and realised that, unbearable though the uncertainty may be, this was worse. Adam had broken them by running from his past; Ronan would not do it again by fleeing one possible future. He would keep his promise. He would not be ruled by fear.

The echo of the front door slamming had made the house feel cold, filling out its emptiness with hollow, raucous sound. He’d thrown off his coat and hat and was just shaking the rain from his hair when –

“Well?”

And Ronan had given up any pretence of detachment in an instant and dragged Adam in by the lapels instead, pathetically, irrepressibly grateful to have him in his arms again.

By the time the sun was disappearing into the noxious haze of factory fumes and coal-fires, they were curled on Ronan’s bed, perfectly chaste in shirtsleeves and stocking-feet. In sleep, Adam’s exhaustion was an almost palpable thing. Ronan had reached out to smooth the blued skin beneath his eyes, and Adam had sighed and burrowed deeper into the pillows, the taught line of his shoulders relaxing at last. Ronan had fallen asleep looking at him, fingers tangled in the cuff of Adam’s shirt.

He’d woken hot, from fingertips to toes, burning and ravenous and so done with chasteness that he might’ve screamed had not Adam turned his head to meet his eye. Ronan has no idea what he’d read in that taught gaze, but whatever he’d seen, it had made him smile like a gambler with a royal flush.

“Not just for that,” Ronan tells him, now; he is raw with longing and the brutal honesty of the past twenty-four hours. “I came back for you. I’m always going to fucking come back for you, Parrish, surely you understand that by now. All the smog in London couldn’t stop me, and I’d like to see it try.”

Adam touches his face gently, tracing the shape of him, and Ronan closes his eyes beneath his fingertips and turns his face into his hand, kisses the base of his thumb.

“I do understand,” he says, softly, “How else do you think I came to be here?”

Ronan crowds him back against the wall and Adam goes willingly, wrapping his arms around Ronan’s neck and kissing him until he’s breathless and hard, pressing his thigh in between Adam’s legs. Adam grinds his hips against him, but Ronan pushes him back against the wall and breaks away, panting.

“What?” Adam asks, and Ronan shakes his head, smiles, looks down at his toes. He feels suddenly shy.

“The things I’m going to fucking do to you,” he whispers.

Adam leans forward to kiss his jaw, his ear. “Go on, then,” he whispers back, a promise, or a dare. Ronan looks down at him steadily, then shoves him back against the wall, hard, and drops to his knees. He hears the soft thud of Adam letting his head fall back against the floral wallpaper.

Of course Ronan has thought about this a lot. He’s done it, too, since Adam left him, in dreams; not dream dreams, just ordinary dreams, the kind where you wake up sweaty and aching and heartbroken all over again, with empty hands.

This is so much better. He smooths his palms roughly up Adam’s thighs and presses his forehead into his stomach, breathing in the scent of him, sunlight, dust, old books, kissing him through the thin stuff of his shirt. Adam holds very still, barely breathing as Ronan unbuttons his trousers and pushes them down. His shirt covers him to the tops of his thighs and Ronan slides his hands up again, over bare skin this time, and catches the fabric with his wrists. He lets his mouth follow his palms, feels Adam shiver as he licks a stripe up the inside of his thigh, and drags his thumb through the rough curls above.

“Ronan,” Adam says, low and shaky, “I –”

Ronan presses a quick kiss to the head of his cock and then swallows him down, and Adam’s words end in a strangled gasp. He feels overwhelmed like this: Adam’s skin and scent and texture all around and inside of him, smell and taste blurring on his tongue. Adam is shaking with the effort of holding still, and Ronan holds his hip fast with one hand, and with the other reaches blindly for Adam’s fingers, bringing them down to tangle in his short curls.

“Ronan,” Adam says again, above him, and this time it sounds wondering. Adam tugs once, gently and experimentally, and Ronan groans and his blood rushes downwards as Adam laughs, gasps, tangles his fingers more firmly into Ronan’s hair. He doesn’t use his grip to give direction, only pulls idiosyncratically, when Ronan is least expecting it, and the sharp pressure makes him moan around Adam, full in his mouth.

Ronan fumbles with the lid of the jar one handed and gets some of the stuff on his fingers. It’s not as good as what he dreams, the herbal scent an alien presence in the familiar space between them, but it is slick against his fingers and Adam’s hole when he touches the rim.

Adam spasms above him, fingers clenching and head thudding back against the wall. “Fuck,” he whispers fervently, “Yes. Please.” And Ronan presses his finger inside. He stretches him slowly, working his finger in and out as he tongues the length of him, and Adam gasps, and shakes and moans and hitches his knee awkwardly up onto Ronan’s shoulder, giving him better access. His trousers are still tangled around his calves, but the new angle lets Ronan push deeper and he feels a jolt run through Adam’s entire body when he finds what he’s looking for. Adam slams his fist into the wall and Ronan thinks with pleasure of Declan finding a dent, and trying to imagine where it came from.

“Ronan,” Adam gasps, “Ronan, I’m –”

Ronan pushes him harder against the wall, and presses his finger deeper into him and his nose to the curls at the base of Adam’s prick. Adam’s fingers spasm in his hair and his other hand scrabbles for purchase on Ronan’s shoulder as he comes down his throat with a shout. They stay like that, Ronan tonguing gently at his softening cock and moving his finger in slow, even rotations as Adam drags in shuddering breaths and his knees start to tremble. He steadies himself against Ronan’s shoulder.

“Fuck,” he drawls out, slow, “Ronan.” He tugs on Ronan’s hair and Ronan lets him go, reluctantly, and looks up into Adam’s blown pupils; he leaves his finger where it is, rubbing slowly, and raises an eyebrow. Adam manages a breathless laugh. “I will certainly fall over if you keep doing that.” Ronan feels flushed suddenly, remembering that he’s desperately hard, and pulls his hand free fast enough that Adam’s breath hitches and he sags against the wall. Ronan catches him about the waist, steadies him he sinks to the floor.

Adam gestures at him in a sloppy way that Ronan correctly interprets as a demand for kissing; Adam winds a limp arm around his neck and drags him in close, kissing his own taste from Ronan’s mouth then opening for him as Ronan chases it back.

“I’m not sure I deserved that,” Adam murmurs eventually.

“Fuck what you deserve,” Ronan grumbles, “I deserved that. We deserve each other.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” And then, wickedly, ducking down to press a kiss against the crease of Adam’s thigh, “I can prove it, if you want.”

“If you still want to fuck me over the arm of Declan’s couch,” Adam tells him, with all the lazy truthfulness of a recent orgasm, “You’ll have to have to lift me. I really don’t think I can walk that far.”

“Rug will do for now,” Ronan offers generously.

“Oh, good. Looks soft.” Adam kicks his shoes and trousers away, allows Ronan to divest him of his shirt. They make it just far enough to be off the cold floor and safely out of the way of the coffee table.

When he reaches again for the little pot of ointment, Ronan feels that unfamiliar rush of shyness come upon him once more.

“Have you –” he starts, “I mean, since you’ve been in London, have you…”

“No,” Adam says steadily. Ronan can feel his gaze upon him, “Have you been with anyone?”

Ronan huffs a laugh, “Trust me, Parrish. Nobody wanted to come near me while you were gone. I’ve been…poor company.”

“As have I,” Adam says softly. Ronan feels fingertips graze his cheek, and he turns automatically to put his mouth to them. “After that last dream, I was… God, Ronan. I don’t even know how to speak about it.”

“Don’t,” Ronan says quickly, pushing up to pepper kisses over Adam’s chest, his throat, his face, “We won’t, alright? It’s done, everything is fine, it’s over.”

“I missed you,” Adam tells him fiercely, twining his fingers into Ronan’s hair and pulling him down to be kissed properly, hard and deep.

“Like a limb,” Ronan agrees into his mouth. He presses his whole body down against Adam’s, shirt to shirt, skin to skin, ribs to ribs, lungs to lungs. Ronan thinks of missing this, of all the times he’d ached just for this contact, and his chest feels tight. Adam must sense it, he thinks, because he folds his legs around him, pressing his thighs into Ronan’s hips, as though he can hold them both together indefinitely through sheer physical will alone. Ronan grinds down against him, and Adam lets his head fall back against the carpet with a groan, shifting to give better access as Ronan transfers his attentions to his jaw, his throat. When he rolls his hips again, his cock leaves a wet trail over Adam’s hip bone, and Adam relaxes his hold, flopping his arms out to either side and letting his heels trail languidly down Ronan’s thighs.

“Yes, alright,” Ronan shudders at how low Adam’s voice is, gravelly and wrung out, “Do it. Come on.”

Ronan props himself up on one arm; the other hand he trails, slippery, over Adam’s skin from collarbone to hip, watching goosbumps rise in its wake. Adam’s hand flexes on the floor, then lifts to tangle at the back of Ronan’s neck, holding him steady. Ronan bites down a moan.

When he pushes one finger in it goes smoothly, and Adam arches into it like a cat, lax and warm. Ronan traces slow circles inside of him until his hips are make little, abortive hitches against the carpet and his breath has grown shallow and fast. The hand at Ronan’s neck squeezes, urging him on. He presses another finger in and feels Adam’s breath catch. Slowly, he reminds himself, slowly. He can feel how tight Adam is. It’s been months, after all. He lets Adam shift around the intrusion, moving his hips in fractions until he adjusts to the stretch.

He tugs at Ronan’s hair again. “Go on.” Ronan fucks him, slowly and steadily, with two fingers until Adam starts to push back against him, faster, heels digging into the rug. He pulls his hand free completely and Adam bows up from the rug, then pushes three fingers and more slick inside of him in one slow, steady thrust and Adam cries out and thumps his head back against the pile.

“Can you come again like this?” Ronan whispers, dragging open-mouthed kisses over Adam’s chest and stomach.

Adam shakes his head quickly from side to side, “I don’t care. God. Don’t stop what you’re doing.” Ronan willingly complies. Adam looks half wild, flushed red all up his throat, eyes shut tight as if to close out everything but Ronan’s mouth on his skin, his fingers in his arse, and Ronan loves him with a ferocity that still startles him sometimes. He twists his fingers inside of him and Adam cries out again, almost a sob.

“Ronan,” he gasps out, “Ronan.” But at this moment Ronan isn’t even thinking about fucking him. It’s become a distant want, secondary. He wants Adam like this, helpless, begging, writhing on the edge. He pushes his fingers deeper into him then drags them out, slow, all the way, and Adam swears and says, “Yes, yes. Fuck, Ronan.”

“What do you want?”

“You,” Adam says immediately, panting, “You, come on, come on.”

“Of course,” he says into Adam’s skin, “Of course. Anything.” Ronan fumbles his trousers open and slicks his cock, reaching for Adam to hitch his thighs up over his knees. When he sinks into him, for a moment he forgets to breathe. Adam is lying beneath him taking huge, gasping lungsful of air. His eyes are still closed but now, instead of desperate he looks…euphoric, breathless from sensory overload. No, this, Ronan decides, This is how I want him, always. He rolls his hips slowly and Adam’s eyes slip open, fixing steadily on his. When he rolls his hips again they both gasp, and he sets a pace that is slow, dragging, heady as summer wine. Adam pulls him down into a kiss and they just breathe together, ragged and in time, while the coil in Ronan’s gut winds tighter and tighter. He barely feels it coming. Adam breathes his name and he cries out and Adam arches beneath him, feeling him swell and spill over into his body. He doesn’t want to move. This, he thinks, No, this. Twined together, joined. This is what he wants.

But the truth is, he wants all of it.

I love you, he thinks, I love you, I love you, I love you.

 

“I have to go to Fox Close,” Adam says later, as they are cooling side by side on the large silk rug before the fireplace. He looks gloriously debauched against that field of sky-blue, flushed and well-bitten about the collarbones, his hair a catastrophe, grinning like he can’t quite stop. Ronan wants to keep him this way, always, but probably someone – Gansey, Declan, someone – would object and make him wear clothes. He mollifies himself by leaning down to lick a long, clean stripe from hip-bone to nipple; Adam twitches, shivers, laughs. He twines his fingers in Ronan’s hair and pulls him down to rest against his shoulder and Ronan goes contentedly, feeling warm, happy, wanted, home.

Adam, who is obviously not as comfortable to just lie there and bask, asks “What’s the time?”

“Do I look like a sundial to you?”

“Why are there no clocks in this place?”

“I think there’s some gilt monstrosity in the hall cupboard, actually – don’t go look.”

“I want to know if we have time to call on them this afternoon.”

“Did you hit your head while I was out? It can’t be past two. I don’t know whether you noticed, back there, but neither of us lasted very long.”

“I know,” Adam says, cool as you please, “That’s why I was asking about the time. I want to know if I’ve time to fuck you properly before we leave.”

Ronan lifts his head to stare at him

“Adam fucking Parrish. You’re a menace.”

Adam smiles beatifically up at him. “That’s my line.”

Notes:

I realised as I was re-reading this fic that a) we have...not precisely left Jane Eyre behind at this point, but seriously abstracted it, and b) that this fic is, in a way, a fix it for the parts of that book that I find upsetting.

I have a lot of complicated but positive feelings about Jane's character, but Rochester (the love interest, for anyone who hasn't read it before) does not inspire similar affection. Although I didn't read it this way when I was first introduced to it, as an adult Jane Eyre is obviously a story about domestic abuse and power within relationships, and the intersectional factors which can affect or alter this landscape. I'm not super well-versed in other literature from that time, barring the big names, but I imagine Charlotte Bronte (and her sisters, for that matter) were probably in the minority in the way she treats this subject. In some ways it's quite an empowering book in terms of female emancipation, but the ending is also very dark, and the questions it asks about the cost of shifting a toxic power dynamic, or ending an abusive relationship, are pretty grim.

I find it so fascinating that you can write something without realising what it means, or the themes you're pulling out beneath the surface. It didn't occur to me that when Adam leaves without speaking to Ronan, he's pre-empting Rochester's reaction to Jane and avoiding that confrontation, and this simultaniously empowers Adam and disempowers Ronan (though Ronan, I would like to believe, would have tried to do the right thing); conversely, when Ronan says he would've let Adam go, he's re-writing a moment in the original book where Rochester demonstrates (not for the first time) that he's comfortable with controlling behaviour and violence.

This really is a fic of two fandoms, huh.

Chapter 30: I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.

Summary:

New tricks, and the gang(sey)'s all here.

 

Gansey raises very expressive brows, “Ronan, only you would count that performance as something even vaguely resembling an ‘explanation’.” Ronan at least has the grace to blush.
“Well I fucking know that,” he grumbles, “I just got worked up."

Notes:

Alright, so the first paragraph of this chapter is also smutty, but after that the only sexual references occur in the serves of trying to make Gansey blush. Skip to 'Calla' and if you wish.

In fact it is almost too late to be making house calls when they finally arrive at Fox Close. ‘Fucking you properly’ had turned out to mean, first, taking Ronan apart with fingers and mouth on the blue silk rug and then, because they hadn’t actually made it that far before, manhandling him over the arm of the couch so Adam could fuck into him, slow and sure, until he came, panting and cursing, over one of the ridiculous doily things Declan insists on putting on the armrests. Ronan would like to try it again; he’ll aim for that hideous velvet cushion next time. Adam laughs at him the whole time they’re putting themselves back together, but he doesn’t disagree.

Calla, Maura and Persephone are waiting for them in the reading room with a wide, shallow bowl full of red wine and a pair of lit candles.

“So I see you two made up. About time.”

Anxiety slides into Adam’s gut, and doesn’t dare look at Ronan. Calla doesn’t…she means only that they are evidently friends again. They had cleaned up well before they left the house. She can’t possibly know.

There are muffled voices in the hall and Sargent pokes her head around the door. When she sees them, perched awkwardly on spindly chairs, side by side across the table from her parental triumvirate, she grins widely and with the kind of knowing wickedness that leads her detractors to write desperate, pearl-clutching headlines about the dangers of giving women the vote.

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Sargent tells them, pulling up a chair.

Adam shrugs, “Nor I.”

“How do you know Persephone, anyway?”

“She gave me my tarot cards.”

Sargent snaps her fingers, “I thought they looked familiar. And Lynch?”

“I answered Mrs Sargent’s advertisement,” he says, realising something obvious as he says it. “She’s another of your aunts, isn’t she?”

“We Sargents are many and varied.”

“Too many,” Ronan grumbles, and everyone ignores him.

“I don’t know exactly why I’m here,” Adam admits, glancing at Persephone.

“Seph has been waiting on you a long time, boy,” Calla tells him, “But you seem to have come at things from the wrong direction. We were hoping to get to you before you learnt to dream, but I see that ship is long sailed.”

“I can’t really control it,” Adam admits uncomfortably, “I think I only began to dream because of Ronan – Mr Lynch. Proximity at first, perhaps, and then, when we were…separated, I believe Cabeswater led me there so we could talk.”

Sargent is looking at him with wide eyes.

“You’ve been communicating with Lynch all this time?”

“Not consistently,” Adam tells her awkwardly. He fixes his gaze on a point just over Calla’s shoulder because he can’t quite look at Ronan. It’s painful even to say it out loud. He feels like he is balanced on a knife’s edge; their bridges are so recently mended, one wrong word and he could topple them again. “As I said, I’ve no control. I don’t know what brought me into the dream some nights, or why it was denied me others. I never knew, when I closed my eyes, whether I would wake in Cabeswater or no. Were you,” he glances again at Ronan from the corner of his eye, “Were you thinking of me, perhaps? Did you detect any pattern in it?”

“I wasn’t,” Ronan grunts, “Well. No more than usual. I can’t make rhyme or reason from it either. It spun my head, never knowing when to expect you there, how long it would be until the next time.”

“I’m sorry,” Adam says softly.

Ronan lifts his head to meet his eyes, and his gaze softens at whatever he sees, “You didn’t mean to. That bloody magical forest had you all turned around, Parrish. You can’t control everything.”

“But I do believe you can learn to control this,” Persephone interjects clearly in her delicate voice.

Adam glances up at her, surprised, and then feels blood rush to his face as he realises how obvious they are being. Unthinkingly, he had sat next to Ronan and drawn his chair close, and here they are, in full view of strangers, their heads bowed in together like a pair of lovebirds. He has forgotten what it is like to be near him in company, that he must watch himself around Ronan at all times, refrain from standing too close, leaning in too far, touching too often. He’s being reckless, and stupid. Everyone at this table surely suspects. A tight knot forms in his stomach, fear and anxiety winding in together. He feels brutally exposed. Gansey has probably already told his wife, of course, but Adam can’t imagine the indomitable, rabble-rousing, revolution-raising Blue Sargent judging him for who he loves. Her family, though… A word from anyone in this house, lady or servant, and his reputation, such as it is, would crumble.

Persephone clears her throat deliberately. “Please do try not to get distracted, Mr Parrish,” she says, “I’m quite sure nobody here cares one whit about your private activities.”

To his right Adam hears Sargent smother a giggle, and then a curse as Ronan elbows her sharply in the ribs and mutters, barely audible, “Leave him alone, you trollop. He doesn’t know your coven of circus nutters like I do.”

“Mr Parrish,” Persephone says firmly, “Your attention, if you please.”

Adam realises that there are things going on here that he really does not understand, and hasn’t the mental fortitude to handle at present. It has been a wild, terrible, wonderful, heartrending, overwhelming week. He has reached the limits of his emotional capacity, which is fine, really, because he isn’t here to be emotional. He is here to learn to control his dreams. That is all. Adam is a good learner. He can manage this.

“Yes,” he says, straightening his shoulders. “I apologise. Please. I’m ready to begin.”

“Well, then,” Maura says, and if there is a hint of laughter in her voice, Adam can ignore it, “Have you ever heard of a thing called scrying?”

 

 

“So,” Gansey says, brightly. The afternoon is clear and warm, and they have laid out tea things and a rug beneath the great beech tree in the back garden at Fox Close. It is only the four of them: Gansey, Sargent, Adam and Ronan. Beside Adam, Ronan lounges splendidly against a velvet cushion the colour of spilled blood, with all the brooding ease of a sharp-edged godling. Adam is trying not to watch him too conspicuously; despite his straw hat, his nose has already gone a little pink in the sun. It’s quite distracting.

Gansey is looking between the two of them with the air of someone who has just discovered that he’s been having an important conversation entirely at cross-purposes. He’s been doing this now, off and on, for days.

“Adam,” says Gansey.

“Yes,” Ronan drawls.

“Your Adam.”

“Yes.”

“Is our Parrish.”

“He was my Parrish first,” Ronan leers, snaking an arm around Adam’s waist; then he seems to think the better of it and withdraws hurriedly to backpedal, “Obviously not – I didn’t mean that – he doesn’t fucking belong to me – he just, we –”

Adam pats his hand consolingly, twines their fingers together on the rug. I know what you mean. Ronan relaxes against his shoulder, obviously relieved. They are both still being very careful around one another. It’s more than a little stressful.

“But really,” Gansey is saying, “All this time? Did you know, or –”

“I’d no idea that you knew each other,” says Adam, “I realise now that you’re obviously the Richard Ronan talks about, but it’s not a rare name. And I already knew a Mrs Sargent,” he says to Blue, “If I heard the name mentioned, I would have assumed you were a relative.”

“Parrish is common, too, I suppose.” Gansey turns to Ronan, “You really didn’t think it might be the same person?”

Ronan shrugs against Adam’s shoulder, “I wondered. But it was…complicated.” He’s silent a long moment. “I couldn’t ask,” he says finally, “I just couldn’t.”

“But you’re here, now,” Gansey notes, and then pinks to his ears, “And you have obviously…made peace with each other. What changed?”

Ronan barks a laugh. “What changed, Dick, is that you sent me that fucking letter about bringing Parrish to meet the psychics while Opal was staying in this very fucking house. If it was the same Parrish, I knew I had to come and explain.”

Gansey raises very expressive brows, “Ronan, only you would count that performance as something even vaguely resembling an ‘explanation’.” Ronan at least has the grace to blush.

“Well I fucking know that,” he grumbles, “I just got worked up. And then I saw you,” he presses closer into Adam for a second, reflexively, “And all my good intentions just went out the fucking window. You don’t know what it’s been like.” He rolls away, back onto his cushion, and glares up into the canopy of the beech, “I couldn’t… I handled myself poorly.”

Gansey nods a little, eyes flicking between them. “And so this is just…” he looks like he’s trying to determine whether he will shortly put his foot in his mouth, but also as though his curiosity is about to get the better of him. Adam exchanges a long-suffering look with Sargent; they are both familiar with this process, “The two of you,” Gansey says, “I mean. You’re so…different.”

Adam laughs. He reaches instinctively for Ronan’s hand and feels a flutter in his stomach when Ronan meets him half-way, twining their fingers together.

“Not that different,” he tells Gansey meaningfully, “We’re both proud, prickly bastards. And there’s the other thing.” Gansey blinks at him, taking a while to get it, “The magic thing?”

Gansey stares, first at Adam, then at Ronan. His eyes widen, “Oh, of course – of course – Ronan said you knew before you, well.”

Sargent cackles at him, and he only blushes more. Adam is finding this whole conversation amusing in a way that is both surprising and, he’ll admit it, slightly mean. “Not to mention,” she says, eyes wickedly a-glitter, “I expect it’s a little hard to hide that sort of thing when you’re sharing the same bed.”

“Oh,” Gansey mumbles, “Well. Yes. That does make sense.”

“And I saved his life once, from a nightmare,” Adam tells them. “I think that marked a turning point in our relationship. Fighting monsters in one’s nightshirt is a very bonding experience.” Sargent giggles helplessly as Gansey turns from pink to a brilliant red. Ronan flashes him a smile with too many teeth; Adam’s stomach does that fluttering thing again.

“I’m sure,” Gansey says, a little weakly, “Well. Well. Alright, then. Goodness. It really is extraordinary, though, us all ending up here together. I can hardly account for it.”

Adam glances down at Ronan to find him already looking up; he meets Sargent’s eyes across the rug and catches her wry smile.

“Well,” he tells Gansey, “We none of us believe in coincidence.”

Notes:

Re-reading this end part, I wish I'd had more space in this fic for ensemble scenes. I enjoy them all together, giving Gansey shit...sigh. It really is one of my favourite things. If only Cheng was here...

Anyway! Tune in tomorrow for the season finale.

(Only one chapter to go, guys, pinch me.)

(sorry, that was terrible, I'm an awful human)

Chapter 31: My only home.

Summary:

We end at a beginning.

 

“Gansey,” Ronan drawls, “Do sit the fuck down. Do you perchance have some exciting news you would like to share?”

Ronan makes the journey between London and Galway many times during the followin year. Opal remains at Fox Close, and Adam and Gansey and Sargent split their time between London and the Oxford house. The travel wears on Ronan, but it’s well worth it to see Opal and the Gansey-Sargents. He’s missed his friends, he realises. It’s been years since they were so much together. Adam he sees more frequently; he excels in scrying as in his more mundane academic pursuits, and when they part in the waking world they meet again in the dream.

As autumn draws to a close and the last greens fade to brown beneath an early frost Ronan issues instructions to his farm hands and his household, has Mrs Sargent oversee the packing of his trunks, and sets off for London and an extended stay.

Back at the townhouse he opts not to bring in servants for the season. Declan is wintering in India, of all places, and the youngest Lynch brother is off at university in Edinburgh, so there’s nobody to complain when all he does is send out the laundry and hire a woman to come in twice a week to clean and cook, while he handles the rest himself. He has a crate of things brought up from The Barnes, strange and useful contraptions dreamed by his ancestors or his father or himself: a box that boils a perfect egg at the flick of a lever, a cistern which produces an infinite hot water supply, a tall, narrow cupboard that perfectly presses any item of clothing one hangs inside. Though it’s unusual for a gentleman of his resources to live without servants, it isn’t as though Ronan has any particular reputation to maintain, and his regular guests are hardly conventional. Besides, he bores quickly, and the labour of keeping a house is not unlike the rhythm of farm work. It’s good to have some heavy lifting to do.

That isn’t why he does it, though. He does it because this way there is no maid to gossip about unslept-in beds, or two frock coats in his wardrobe, or the fact that Ronan rarely bathes alone these days. Adam leaves his books and papers at Gansey’s townhouse, but over weeks and months his clothes and personal belongings migrate across town: his hat on a peg in the front hall, his dressing gown hanging on the back of Ronan’s – their – bedroom door. Ronan feels a hum of gratification when he slips his own over the other hook, blue and red side-by-side, sharing intimate space.

They fuck in the bedroom, the kitchen, the library and, more than once (to Ronan’s deep satisfaction), with one or other of them bent over Declan’s prissy modish furniture in the formal parts of the house. On lazy Saturday mornings when neither of them have to traipse across town to desk or church, Ronan will fill the big porcelain tub in the recently installed bathroom (one of Declan’s better ideas, even Ronan can admit it), and they splash around until the water gets cold and then stumble, giggling, back to bed, and there is nobody to catch them at it. They live like any couple: fighting, screwing, reading, laughing, and all of it at ordinary volumes and not behind closed doors.

Their only visitors are Opal, various Sargents, Gansey, and Henry Cheng, whom Ronan hates at first, bitter over the easy, sure way he and Blue and Adam interact. He can accept Adam’s relationship with Gansey and Blue because he had always known that they would meet, eventually. In fact, Ronan had imagined them meeting, in London or at The Barnes, and anticipated the warmth and pride he would feel, seeing Adam accepted and valued by his closest friends. But the dynamic between Adam and Cheng and Sargent is one Ronan has no part in. It is something that happened independently of him, a needling reminder of the time he and Adam spent apart, and how much he had missed. He resents Cheng for it, can’t help being a bit of a bastard when he’s around. He weathers confusion and irritation from Adam, and knowing looks from Gansey and Blue, but is helpless to stop.

And then one afternoon Gansey lets himself in unannounced and walks in on them, Ronan pressing Adam back against the kitchen table, one of Adam’s hands sneaking up beneath his shirt. Gansey stands frozen in the doorway and says, finally, “Oh. Bugger. Sorry.”

And then blushes to the roots of his hair, the prude.

But Henry Cheng, following a step behind, only peers over his shoulder, lifts a dark eyebrow and says, “Good form, Parrish. Carry on.” Then tows Gansey back out the way they’d come. After that, Ronan warms to him a bit.

For the first time in his adult memory, the London townhouse begins to feel a little less like Declan’s office and a little more like a home.

 

 

“Trinity!” Gansey shouts. He has barely opened the library door when he says this, so that his voice precedes him into the room. Sargent, looking exasperated, shoulders past him in that perfectly unladylike, perfectly Sargent way she has, while he beams at them from the doorway.

“Gansey,” Ronan drawls, “Do sit the fuck down. Do you perchance have some exciting news you would like to share?”

Gansey flops onto the couch without even looking at it, reaching for Sargent’s hand with the blind instinct of long years of trust. Adam feels the familiar pang when he sees it, but it’s different, now. Sweeter. A contented sort of ache. His hand rests innocently upon his book, but Ronan’s is set behind his shoulder on the back of his chair, close enough to stretch his fingers against Adam’s nape.

“Trinity,” Gansey repeats, with an air of deep satisfaction. He turns his shining face from one to the other of them as though this one word alone should be sufficient to include them in his joy.

“Trinity College?” Adam suggests, “In Dublin?”

“Yes!” Gansey crows, as Sargent sighs expressively and says, “Gansey, please. Start from the beginning.”

Looking slightly abashed, Gansey does.

Ireland is, as they know (they do), home to a great many ancient wonders and ruins. The department of Classics at Trinity College is of course world-renowned, and Gansey has just this moment written to accept a position there, as a new professor of Archaeology.

“Of course they won’t have Jane, at least officially,” Gansey scowls. Slights against the academic prowess of his partner are on the very short list of things that truly anger him, “But we’ll work on that once we’re settled.”

“Gansey,” Adam tells him, crossing the room to offer Gansey his hand, “That’s wonderful. I’m so pleased for you.”

Beside him, Blue rolls her eyes, “Naturally, he left out the most important part.”

Adam looks between them, “More important than a prestigious appointment at a fine university?”

“Yes,” Blue says decisively. She elbows Gansey sharply in the side and he winces, “Will you tell him, or shall I?”

“Adam,” Gansey says, looking up at him with an earnestness that would, on anybody else, be almost ridiculous. He still has Adam’s hand clasped in one of his own, and now he brings the other up to enfold it more securely. This, too – astonishingly – he manages to pull off.

“Oh for god’s sake, Gansey,” Ronan snaps, from his position by the window, “If you’re going to propose, just get it over with already.”

Gansey cranes around Adam to glare at him.

“Adam,” he repeats, “I know this is a little unconventional and sudden,” Ronan snorts loudly, “But one of my duties in my new role is the appointment of Research Fellows. I hope – that is, Jane and I would very much like – for you to accept a position within the school of Archaeology. You have a gift for the subject, and I very much hope that this opportunity will afford you the chance of furthering your Classical studies and beginning a serious academic career simultaneously.”

At his back, Adam can sense Ronan becoming very still, like leaves gone silent at the abrupt cessation of wind. Gansey squeezes his hand, and Blue is watching him steadily.

“Gansey,” he begins stiffly, “I neither need nor desire your –”

“It isn’t charity, Adam Parrish,” Blue snaps, “And if you’ll just take a moment to look beyond your infernal pride, you will see that right away. Gansey and I have no need of an incompetent researcher, and I hope you believe Gansey would at least be responsible with the university’s money, if not his own. We wish to offer you this position because it would suit you, and because it suits us to have you with us. Dublin is barely two hours from Galway by train. Even accounting for bad weather, you could be at The Barnes in half a day.”

Blue’s brand of earnestness is different from Gansey’s. She looks up at him fiercely, and sets her hand against his sleeve, “You ought to have been allowed a university education, Adam. This isn’t charity. It’s re-setting the balance. It’s giving you the opportunity to be where you should have been all along.”

Adam hears a step behind him and Ronan’s long arms twine about his waist. He sets his chin on Adam’s shoulder, beneath his good ear, and says, “The maggot is right. You were born to moulder in a library, Parrish. No point resisting it any longer.”

“He won’t moulder,” Gansey protests, finally loosing Adam’s hand, “Trinity is a very active research institution, and of course there will be regular fieldwork in the warmer months – there is a myth about a Welsh king I have been longing to investigate – ” Blue, with the casual ease of long practice, fits her hand across his mouth.

“Well?” she asks, meeting Adam’s eyes steadily, “What do you think?”

Adam allows himself lean back into Ronan’s arms. They are warm and steady and unerring in their support. Even when he’d run, somehow he’d always known that if he had needed them, if he had been desperate, they would have been there to lend him strength. They aren’t binding, and he isn’t being held up. There is a difference, he has come to realise, between a crutch and a walking staff. And perhaps it isn’t only Ronan he can lean on, when he needs to. Perhaps it’s Blue and Gansey, as well.

“I suppose,” he says slowly, twining his fingers through Ronan’s where they rest at his waist, “That I am about to discover what university is like.”

Ronan kisses the side of his head, hard, while Blue and Gansey beam. Adam feels warm, and wanted, and eager to begin.

Notes:

And we are...done. Complete. Complevit, as Opal might say. Or possibly completum; after years of Adam's dilligent tutelage her Latin is much better than my Google translate.

Anyway.

Thank you. Particularly to the readers who were there from the beginning and suffered through my "stop-start approach" to writing a very long story. Sorry again, and also, you are wonderful. Truly, your ongoing interest was what spurred me to finish posting.

And thank you in particular to everyone who's left comments. I can't tell you how happy it has made me every time I checked my inbox. I love that you have loved this fic. I hope it's been a satisfying ride for you and that the ending feels right (I read a good book recently with an awful fix-it ending that, aparently, nobody realised was a bad idea, so I'm a bit paranoid).

I do have some extra bits floating around, which I think I'll post over the next few weeks, but I haven't looked at those files in a long time so I have to do a re-read/edit.

Once again, thank you. It feels huge, honestly, to have written what is, essentially, a finished novel with someone else's characters, and all the conversations I've had in the comments have really been the icing on the many-layered cake. I hope you'll keep in touch - future readers, too! - I've loved talking to you all about writing.

 

I hope this last chapter has added something, however small, to your day.
xx