Chapter Text
“Adam,” Henry Cheng said, buzzing past him in the hallway backstage. He looked far too awake for someone who had been sleeping almost exclusively on a tour bus for three months, but then, he did mainline coffee from the moment he woke up in the morning until the moment he fell asleep. At least once a week, he fell asleep with a cup of coffee still in his hand. “We’re behind schedule. Are we tuned yet?”
Henry had a habit of saying we when he meant you . Adam found it endearing most of the time.
He was behind schedule, though through no fault of his own. Henry knew as well as Adam that Ronan could be difficult. In fact, Henry was the first to warn him about Ronan’s offensive personality when he offered him the job. But as tour manager of the Ravens, Henry’s job was wrangle leader singer Dick Gansey, and as the traveling guitar tech, Ronan was Adam’s responsibility. Technically only the guitars were Adam’s responsibility, but Ronan Lynch considered his guitars as vital to his physical person as his arms. Talking his Fender Stratocaster out of his hands for tuning and sound checks was rather like trying to catch a loose tabby and shove it into a bag. He had already stopped by his dressing room three times asking for the guitars, but Ronan was still plucking chords, feeling out rhythms that no one else could parse.
Ronan had a process before shows, which was a very professional way of saying that he liked fucking around and he didn’t like to be interrupted. People let him get away with it, because the second he stepped onstage, he transformed into something else entirely.
“Going to collect the Strat now.”
“Can you meet me onstage in twenty for early soundchecks?”
“I can do forty.”
“Thirty.” Henry walked backwards now, pointing. He grinned, displaying rows of perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth. “You’re a saint, Adam Parrish. Now go poke the bear.”
The bear was Ronan Lynch, and he really wasn’t as bad as everyone said. He had a certain reputation. It didn’t come from nowhere, but it was heavily exaggerated. He wasn’t particularly interested in making people like him, and he was too talented to have to be friendly. In the early days of the band’s career, Henry forced him to sit for interviews, thinking it would make them look bad if he didn’t. He realized quickly that fans liked Ronan better when he talked less and played more. He hadn’t done an interview in three years. He seemed to prefer it that way.
Famously, Ronan rarely spoke during shows, keeping away from microphones like they might burn him.
Adam worked with musicians for a living; he knew how to shrug off a bad attitude. On his first day, he expected Ronan to curse him out and make absurd demands, but he was surprisingly easy to work with, compared to some of Adam’s past gigs. He decided early on that Ronan’s unpleasant demeanor hardly reflected his true nature, and if one overlooked his filthy mouth and eyerolls, he could be very funny.
He knocked on the door to Ronan’s dressing room, thankful to hear that the apparent rave in Gansey’s dressing room had not spread across the hall. When no one answered, he stepped inside to find him, as he expected, still strumming an acoustic gently, his eyes closed. During shows, he hardly touched the acoustic anymore, except for one song toward the end of the setlist, but pre-show rituals were pre-show rituals. Relatively speaking, Ronan’s rituals were entirely manageable. All he needed was a beer, a pair of noise-canceling headphones—he wasn’t fussy about quality—and some peace and quiet. Adam pitied the man who had to wrangle Dick Gansey out of his dressing room every night, a process that often involved sending models away, puting the coke back in a suitcase, and taking the tequila from his hands.
Managing Gansey required mounds of patience; managing Ronan required rigid mental fortitude. He could be quite difficult when he cared to be, seemingly just for the sake of being difficult. In less diplomatic terms, he had to be treated like a grimy-handed toddler that didn’t want to put his toy truck down and go to bed.
Ronan sat in an uncomfortable-looking leather chair, the kind that was probably very expensive but felt rather like sitting in a waiting room at the doctor’s office. He had one foot propped up on the coffee table. His beer looked out of place in the neatly decorated dressing room. Before he arrived, someone left a six-pack on the bar cart beside a decanter full of what was certainly very good whiskey. There was a small mountain of guitar picks on the vanity. Whereas Gansey would probably spend an hour on his hair alone, Ronan hardly looked in the mirror before stepping out on stage, relegating the vanity to nothing more than a place to put all of the shit he dumped out of his pockets upon arriving at the concert venue.
In the first weeks, Adam was polite and professional, but that didn’t work for shit, and Ronan didn’t seem to respect him in the least until he cursed and made demands.
“Lynch,” he snapped, banging his fist on the vanity table to get his attention. Ronan slipped the headphones around his neck. “Hands off the guitar.”
“Fuck off, Parrish,” he said pleasantly. Ronan had a terrible habit of saying very rude things in a way that felt like perhaps they weren’t rude at all. “Ten more minutes.”
“That was ten more minutes. Ten more, and Cheng’ll probably beat me with Noah’s keyboard.”
Ronan snorted derisively. He did most things derisively. Adam learned quickly not to take it personally.
“Whatever.” He unplugged his headphones and set them on the floor. He handed the acoustic to Adam by the neck. “She’s already tuned.”
Adam took it carefully, slung the strap over his head, and plucked at the strings. He raised his brow. “Is not.”
He waved his hand. “Well, you have three fucking ears and hear things other people don’t hear.”
Adam hadn’t had more than one working ear in six years, but he didn’t tell him that. It was his job to hear things other people didn’t hear. The moment you hooked up to the sound system in a venue as big as this one, tiny problems had a way of becoming big ones.
Rebel-without-a-cause attitude aside, Ronan was a perfectionist, and even though he didn’t hear it in his dressing room, he would sure as shit hear the difference onstage, and if Ronan didn’t like how he sounded onstage, he made the rest of the night miserable for everyone else by how miserable he was, drowning his sorrows in the bottle in his top bunk over one bad song. Ronan didn’t like giving up his instruments before a show, but Adam needed every extra minute he could get to get the sound just right.
Adam lifted the electric from its stand in the corner.
“No,” Ronan whined. “Both of my ladies?”
“Sorry, Lynch,” he shrugged.
The second he was out the door, he was off, practically jogging down the hallway to meet the rest of the crew to tune the instruments and help with soundcheck. They left a cord behind at their last show and had to send someone out for a replacement. His old professor told him when he got into this business to anticipate that something would go wrong at every show. If he anticipated the fuck-up, he would always be ready when it came. The hardest part of the job was knowing he couldn’t be in perfect control at all times, and control was an even harder thing to obtain after factoring in Ronan Lynch who hated being controlled. Spontaneity made him good on stage but a nightmare for Adam. Sometimes he had stress nightmares about the first stop of the tour, when Ronan bashed his guitar into the ground at the end of the show and snuffed out his cigarette on the ruins.
It never seemed like they would be ready to start on time, but they always pulled it off in the end.
One of the great beauties of his job was that he could prepare for the show then step back and watch the night unfold from backstage. He only ever had to step in if there was a problem, and since Ronan agreed to stop bashing guitars, there rarely was.
The Ravens were a dream to watch every night. He would never tire of it.
Ronan took on a new life when he stepped onstage, and no matter how many nights just like this one, with sold-out arenas and a buzz in the air, it always took Adam’s breath away. Every night after Blue settled behind her drumset, Noah took his place at the keyboard, and Gansey saunted onstage, Ronan stepped out last into the lights. Every night, a heavy silence always befell the crowd, like for a single millisecond, everyone else too forgot how to breathe.
And then the screaming started.
Ronan wore all black like Johnny Cash but played a white Fender Stratocaster like Jimi Hendrix. Adam had an eye for those details after years and years of watching the greats. On Saturday mornings as a kid, after his father passed out drunk in the recliner, he watched MTV on the television from the doorway so as not to wake him. Sometimes he risked a black eye just to turn the volume up. Ronan liked to give people the impression that he had never watched any of the greats, that it was all effortless, like he had simply picked up a guitar one day and started playing like Van Halen, but a fanboy knew a fanboy, and Adam knew Ronan was cut from the same cloth.
“How’s our frontrunner tonight?” Adam asked Henry from the wings.
“Strung out.”
Adam smirked. “It’ll be a good show, then.”
“And our man in black?”
“Ronan’s always good.”
That was true. Even a bad show for Ronan was a good show by any other standards.
Adam watched Ronan step into the lights and play the first chords of the night, his expression focused and unaffected by the roar of the crowd. Photos of this moment would circulate Twitter tonight. They always did. In the privacy of his bunk, curtains pulled shut, Adam would scroll through them, but when the band stumbled back drunk and rowdy, he would plug in his phone, roll over, and try to sleep.
Crowds loved Gansey and his overt sexuality—the twist of his hips, the whine of his voice, the arrogant splay of his hands around a microphone—but Ronan Lynch did something else to him, with that white Strat set against his black attire. He looked like a black and white photograph, except for those eyes. Starkly utilitarian beside Gansey’s sequins and rhinestones, he concentrated all of the vanity in his body into his guitars.
In addition to being Ronan’s guitar guy, he was also, unofficially, his cigarette guy. When he stepped off-stage, Adam handed him a rag to wipe the sweat from his hands and face, then a bottle of water. Thirsty from exertion, he killed three or four bottles every show. He drank with his head tipped back, displaying the long line of his neck and his long, narrow fingers wrapped around the bottle. While he wiped his brow and hydrated, Adam took a new cigarette from the pack and held it to his own mouth to light it, then passed it on to Ronan, who then stepped back onstage with his guitar and his cigarette.
Ronan smoked casually during the day, slipping away from the tour bus on long stops when Gansey pissed him off. Gansey was his best friend but also happened to aggravate him to no end. He had every bit the ego one would expect from the acclaimed frontman. When Ronan was on tour, he went through a pack for every show. Gansey hated it and once tried to make him stop, but after Ronan played the worst show of his life without his cigarettes, the band mutually agreed to leave him be. Sometimes, on nights with long setlists, he tipped into the second pack. Adam usually bummed a few, sometimes lighting Ronan’s with his own still in his mouth.
Adam liked to think he didn’t get starstruck anymore, especially halfway through the tour. A a member of the road crew, part of his job was to walk past models and B-listers on a daily basis and pretend they weren’t famous. They didn’t pay him to gawk, they paid him to let very, very famous people feel normal. And yet, sometimes, holding the pack of cigarettes open for Ronan sidestage, he couldn’t shake the urge to stare starry eyed after him as he waltzed back onstage toward Gansey.
He was a god.
Adam grew up listening to the greats, and he knew like he knew the sun would rise that Ronan Lynch would one day be listed among them. That feeling hadn’t entirely worn off yet. Not in three months of touring, not in twelve weeks of sleeping in the bunk across from his on the tour bus. Every night, celebrities slipped backstage. The movie stars didn’t phase him, but Ronan still did.
Adam Parrish had the coolest job in the world.
The moment they exited the stage after their second encore in London, Adam grabbed Ronan by the back of his shirt. Ronan, bright-eyed and probably a little drunk, considering the drinks he had been nursing the whole show, plucked the cigarette out of Adam’s mouth and put it between his lips. He’d walk off with his guitar every night if Adam didn’t come to take it from him. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Cheng attempt to lure Gansey away from the models waiting in his dressing room to greet the fans waiting backstage, and he remembered that, relatively speaking, he had the easier job.
Adam slung the Strat over his shoulder led Ronan toward the waiting fans.
Gansey was unspeakably charming, but Ronan, as private as he was, held his own allure. Ronan signed autograph after autograph with the Sharpie the drum tech had pressed into his hand. Men and women alike fawned over him with unmistakable, lustful gazes.
Adam had seen the media speculation; everyone wanted to know Ronan Lynch’s deal. He had never had any public relationships, and the paparazzi had never even caught him on a date, leading to a lot of theories from the fanbase and the industry alike. Adam assumed the band would know. After he signed his mountain of NDAs, he hoped he might find out—out of sheer curiosity—but as it turned out, no one else in the band knew either.
Ronan certainly attracted attention. Some men were traditionally attractive and made no further attempt. Other men were average but dressed well enough to make them passingly attractive. Ronan fell under the rare category of men in that he was both traditionally handsome and dressed in a way that fascinated people—the sleek, monochromatic looks, his shaved head, the way he leaned back on his heels when he performed.
Gansey speculated that Ronan had no deal, that he wasn’t interested in anyone. Noah held that there had to be someone out there for him. Adam suspected he had discovered the truth, which was that the only thing Ronan was interested in were guitars.
But god was he interested.
Watching Ronan with a guitar, Adam understood why he never would have made it as a solo musician. He dreamed of it as a child—nearly everyone in this business at one point or another dreamed of being Ronan Lynch—but for him, it was about the spectacularness of the show. For Ronan, it was about the instrument in his hands, each individual chord. For Adam, it was about the spectacle; for Ronan, it was about the artistry.
While Ronan suffered his obligatory hour with the fans, Adam cleaned the guitars and stored them on the bus for the next show. By the time he made it back to the bus, his arms ached from hauling equipment, and the time on his phone read 2:36 AM.
It wasn’t typical to have a guitar tech traveling with the band. Before this tour, the Ravens hadn’t had one, but after the success of their last album, they had the funding to spare, and Ronan was particular about his guitars. He liked things the way he liked them, and he was generally unwilling to compromise. After Adam finished his degree in audio engineering, he worked a couple years setting up for small-time gigs in bars and clubs, before an old professor of his recommended that he apply for the Ravens position. He didn’t expect anything out of it, but he happened to have the right recommendations, and now he was on tour with the band that held the top of the charts.
It was a dream.