Chapter Text
Declan Lynch managed to look down his nose at everyone, somehow, even though Adam was probably an inch taller. God, he wished he had Blue there to suffer with.
“And am I correct in hearing that you know my brother?”
‘Know’ was not the right word. “We’ve been acquainted.”
Truth be told, not much had happened after Gansey and Lynch had left town. Adam and Blue were reluctant to admit it, but their lives had been rather more eventful since they’d, well, been acquainted, and there hadn’t been much to do once they’d left.
There had only been radio silence, despite Blue’s attempts to call and Adam’s attempts to email, which hurt Blue more than she seemed willing to admit, and despite his common sense, stung Adam’s pride. He hadn’t had the sense that Ronan and Gansey both saw the two of them as truly disposable, but apparently he’d been wrong.
Or maybe Helen had had something to do with it. He wasn’t sure.
The Aglionby alumni weekend was, impossibly, going to last for almost four days. They were two hours into the cocktail party scheduled for Friday and he was already wiped, and the rest of the weekend promised only more Aglionby: more schmoozing, more drunk middle-aged men who missed being in high school, more old-school politicians there to pick out the next crop.
Adam missed Blue.
“I see,” said Declan. “Well, I’m glad to see you here to represent Aglionby.”
Adam nodded. “My pleasure.” He couldn’t figure out why Tad hadn’t been able to shut up about Declan: he seemed to be just a slightly older Raven Boy, same slick veneer and unapologetic pretension as the rest of them. “I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend. Do you have any plans?”
“Well, as the host,” Declan said seriously, “I look forward to the whole event.”
Adam wasn’t sure what to say. “Right.”
“But I’m particularly excited for the string quartet scheduled for tomorrow night.”
“Oh?”
“The way they handle Schubert,” Declan intoned, “is phenomenal.”
“Adam?” said a gravelly voice.
Ronan. Adam turned, and saw Ronan Lynch, in a suit. What on earth was he doing here?
“Ronan,” Declan said darkly.
“Adam Parrish?” asked the man next to Ronan, who wore a wide grin and voluminous hair. Adam felt like he’d seen him before, but couldn’t recall where exactly. “What a pleasure to finally meet you! Declan, you’ll have to introduce us.”
“Adam Parrish, Henry Cheng. Henry Cheng,” Declan repeated, gesturing to Adam with what might have been disdain if Adam hadn’t elected to not care about it, “Adam Parrish.”
“Nice to meet you,” Adam said, as he tried to survive Cheng’s handshake. “You’re here with Ronan?”
“Speaking of,” Declan mumbled. “I’ll see the both of you around.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Adam.
Declan’s eyes were piercing. “Likewise,” and he moved briskly away. Ronan fled, too, but wordlessly, and in the opposite direction. Of course he couldn’t be bothered to make polite conversation, or even so much as actually greet people.
“So,” Henry said, with what actually seemed to be a genuinely good-natured smile. “Gansey and Lynch have told me so much about you. But let’s hear it from you.”
By lunchtime on Saturday, Adam badly needed a break from people—Henry provided the social stimulus of a lengthy dinner party in every interaction, and Tad seemed to lurk around every corner—and so he took to escaping into the forest behind Rosings Park.
On the first of these breaks, he found Ronan sitting against a tree, music blaring in his headphones, and said nothing, but flushed with anger at the universe for putting him on a collision course with Ronan Lynch that simply wouldn’t let up. He would have chosen someplace else to go, but the estate was flooded with Aglionby, making the forest essentially the only place to be totally alone.
When he met him the second time, he couldn’t just let it go again. Of course Ronan would come to this weekend just so he could skip every single event.
“Lynch,” he said, by way of greeting.
Ronan had no headphones this time. “Parrish.”
Maybe if he staked his claim, Ronan would know to back the hell off and find someplace else to be delinquent. “I like the forest. This is probably my favorite part of Rosings.”
Ronan blinked, then nodded.
Mystifyingly, Ronan was in the forest again after the cocktail hour, as if he hadn’t heard Adam’s clear warning. And back in the forest right at the end of the night, when Adam just wanted to listen to something that wasn’t string quartet. He not only greeted him but asked Adam the weirdest questions, in a polite tone of voice but with a grimace that made it clear the effort pained him: what he made of the trees, what he thought of the weather, if he could see the ravens in the canopy.
Once, Adam’s footsteps woke him where he sat at the base of a tree. “You caught me sleeping,” he said. Then he’d held out a hand to Adam, proffering a small, glowing light. A firefly.
Adam stared at it, then opened his hand. The insect flitted from Ronan’s hand—the feeling of those hands around his waist flashed into his mind—and into Adam’s, and didn’t leave until he deposited it on a bank of moss.
It was like Ronan was a new person—not only that, but a new person who could make small talk, if begrudgingly. Adam couldn’t fathom it. He certainly didn’t like the way it made his stomach turn, the way it reminded him of his last encounter with Lynch, the way it made Ronan look kind.
His silences started to seem less like disdain and more like— thought, or something.
On Sunday morning, Adam made his way cautiously into the forest, and for once it had no Ronan. He took his time, leaning against a tree with his eyes closed, thinking about an email from Blue that he had received that morning, in which she had sounded terribly lonely, when he heard someone approaching from not too far off.
It wasn’t Ronan, but Henry.
“I didn’t know you liked the forest,” he said.
“What’s not to like?” Henry said. “Trees, birds, a beak from the oppressive Aglionbying going on in there.”
The comment surprised Adam. Henry was so good at Aglionbying that he hadn’t considered that he would be able to think critically about it.
“Want to walk?” Henry offered, and Adam joined him.
“So you’re leaving tomorrow morning?” Adam asked.
Henry shrugged. “That’s the plan, but it’s up to Ronan, he drove me out here. He might want to ditch tonight.”
Adam hummed. “He does like to get his way.”
“Don’t we all?” asked Henry. “He’s just more successful at it because he’s rich and well-connected. If you’re not quite so well-connected, you know, you don’t have quite so many options.”
Adam considered his words, and then decided that saying nothing would be too easy. Plus, he liked Henry. He didn’t seem like an ass. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Henry, but I can’t imagine that you’re exactly short on options or money. Has money ever stopped you from doing what you want, going where you want?”
Henry nodded in admission. Thank goodness. “I suppose not. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have responsibilities.”
Most of Adam wanted to argue, vehemently, but it was true that he didn’t know him that well. And his voice had carried a sort of resignation that Adam was inclined to trust. There was silence as Adam turned his options over again, but he opted for asking, “Do you know Gansey?”
Henry beamed. “Of course I know Gansey.”
“His friendship with Ronan is… unexpected.”
Their walk had taken them towards a stream, and now Henry stopped to peer into it in the faint light of dusk. “It’s a two-way street. They take care of each other.”
“Oh?” Adam prompted.
“Well,” Henry said, “the thing I’m thinking of is really just conjecture, and I have no idea if it was Gansey, so take it with that grain of salt. Again: could’ve been Gansey, might have not been. But Ronan mentioned on the drive over that he recently—well.”
“Well?”
“I’m telling you this in confidence. But Ronan mentioned on the drive over that he had recently saved a friend—I only think Gansey because, well, Ronan is Ronan, he doesn’t exactly have a huge coterie—that he had recently saved a friend from ditching his whole life and college applications to spend his summer gallivanting around caves with some girl.”
Some girl. The words cut into Adam’s gut. “Huh.”
“Yeah. Apparently she was super cold to him.” Henry tilted him a sympathetic smile. “And her family was unusual.”
Adam didn’t hear a word of the speeches at that day’s luncheon. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Henry had said. Messing up Greenmantle’s life was one thing. But breaking up whatever was going on between Blue and Gansey?
It made him want to throw up. What had he been doing, spending time with Ronan? Adam laughed a little at himself. These Aglionby people, at some level, really were all the same.
By the time Sunday ended, Adam never wanted to see Ronan again. To hell with the forest. He made his way down the hall from the room Declan was letting him share with Tad to what Tad had termed the least interesting room in Rosings Park: the library. The windows, for once, were apparently nothing to write home about.
Adam closed the door firmly behind himself, and then double-checked it. Declan was probably so absorbed in whatever concerto was being played downstairs at the closing soirée that he’d never find him alone in here, so he helped himself to a book at random. Unfortunately, it was about sustainable land management practices in 19th century England.
He was halfway through a thrilling paragraph about ash trees when the door slammed open.
Ronan kicked it shut behind himself. He had his suit jacket in his hand and the top few buttons of his probably-Italian shirt were undone, tie loose around his neck like a taunt. He stumbled into the other armchair, flopped down, and was silent.
They sat in that silence for several minutes. Adam couldn’t say he was glad to see him, but he was hoping that ignoring him would make him go away. He was one night from being out of here.
Ronan began, “Parrish.”
“You should call me Adam,” Adam said, looking back down into his book and away from Ronan’s collarbones. “I’d prefer it.”
“You weren’t in the forest.”
Adam shrugged. “Why would I be?”
“I—” Ronan gulped. He had a blurriness about him that Adam recognized too well.
“Are you drunk?”
“I have to tell you—shit. You’re always reading.”
He couldn’t figure out where Ronan was going with this. “I guess?”
Apparently Ronan didn’t know where he was going with it either, because he shook his head vigorously. “Dude. Okay. Fuck,” he said.
“Eloquent. Look, Ronan—”
“—I, uh, shit. You have to let me tell you—fuck.” He smeared his hands up his face and then back down. He looked anguished.
“Out with it, Lynch.”
“Okay, look,” he said. His words slurred together a little bit, and Adam’s stomach turned. “You have to fucking let me tell you—”
“I am —”
“How much I admire you.”
Adam was sure he had misheard, and then sure that he had invented words where there were none. “What?”
“How much I—fuck—am in love with you.”
The land management book slid from his hands. This could not be happening. There was no way this was happening.
“You’re so fucking—I don’t even know. You look like a god, Parrish. You’re just too fucking hot. And then you’re so fucking smart." Ronan shook his head. "But like. I know I shouldn’t. Like I really know I shouldn’t. My life is complicated enough. And your life is super complicated. Like, you have to work all those fucking jobs to go to a school you hate. You hate basically all the people in your life, and the people who do love you, you refuse to let them, and then they show up in public to embarrass you and are just, fucking ridiculous, and oh god, if we were together I’d have to deal with those fucking witches all the time.” Ronan scrubbed his hand over his scalp.
“And you spend all your time wishing you were someone else when you’re always gonna be from Henrietta. And then you’re still in love with Blue, even though Gansey is so far gone over her, but they clearly won’t work out.” Ronan sighed. “And in spite of all of that, can you believe that I’m still in love with you? Maybe Declan is right, I should be with someone—a fucking—I don’t know, a senator’s daughter, or some shit, but I just. That’s how much I fucking like you.”
Adam was silent. Ronan finally looked at him. “Well?”
Adam still said nothing. His head was reeling.
“Adam? Are—?”
“I never wanted you to like me.” The physical impact of his words on Ronan’s body was immediate: the tightening, the curl inward, the way Ronan Lynch was suddenly made small. Ronan thought he could make him feel lesser, but he did not know what he had coming. “You don’t seem to actually want to like me, anyway, so that works out.”
Ronan seemed to actually be shocked that this wasn’t going well. “What? Why are you so upset—”
“I can’t believe you think you can say shit like that to me, and say shit like that about Blue, and ruin her life, and still have the nerve,” and that was part of it, too, right, that Ronan always seemed to have the nerve to do what he wanted, that was part of what made him terrible, that was part of what made it impossible for Adam to stop thinking about him, impossible for Adam to stop thinking about the way he danced and his ridiculous car and his terrible taste in music, “to think that you can tell me that against your will, against all reason, and against your own—I don’t know—character—you still like me, and then think I might want to be with—”
“What, you want me to be happy that you’re poor? You want me to be happy that you’re a mess?” Ronan had gotten his second wind for fighting, and cocked his head to the side. “Your pride just can’t take the fact that you have flaws, apparently.”
Adam didn’t even know how to respond to that. “It’s not that you’re a guy. Don’t take it that way, because it’s not that, and it’s not even what you just said, it’s that you are just such an asshole , Ronan. You show up in my life, with your stupid cheekbones and your car and your money, and you think you can say that shit to me? You think you can screw over good people like Blue and Greenmantle and walk through the world without consequences?”
Ronan gaped at him. “Greenmantle? What—”
“And okay, I guess you can give Gansey whatever terrible advice you want, but when it makes people like Blue this unhappy, and this lonely? She’s half in love with him, and—”
“No one—he was gonna just, like, throw over his whole—thank God I broke them up. I saved that man from himself—”
“And then you come to me like I’m supposed to see you as some kind of gift?”
Ronan was silent. Adam couldn’t read his face, and didn’t want to have to look at it anymore, so he stood up and walked across the room, put the book on the desk. He wished he were virtually anywhere else. He turned around.
“Ever since I met you, you’ve been arrogant and rude and self-centered. You are the last person I want to be with right now.”
Ronan’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly. Adam realized, suddenly, catching his breath, how angry he actually was. He felt overwhelmed by it: felt like putting a fist into a wall, felt like throwing the book at Ronan, felt like crying.
“Adam,” Ronan said finally.
“Out.”
Ronan looked away, stood, and slunk out. Adam sat back down and tried not to cry.
Adam was just getting back from a double shift at the factory the next Sunday when he nearly fell down the stairs in surprise. Ronan was sitting against the door to his apartment, eyes closed.
“Lynch?”
Ronan opened his eyes. Maybe he hadn’t been asleep.
“How long have you been there?”
“Since mass,” Ronan said, like it should have been obvious.
“It’s 5 PM. Wait, you go to St. Agn—how did you know I lived here?”
Ronan said nothing, but stood, and held out a folded up sheaf of paper.
Adam, despite himself, took it.
“Please read it,” Ronan said, and hurried off down the stairs.
“How did you know?” Adam shouted after him, but he didn’t turn around.
Adam made himself go inside and lock the door and set down his groceries and check the lock again before he sat down on the bed and unfolded the paper. It was in arial and pretty rumpled, like Ronan had been holding it for hours.
hey.
i'm not writing to repeat any of the shit i said last weekend. i’ll save us both the trouble. also i'm not sure i can rly say sorry for saying any of it because i only remember like half of what i said (i had a lot of scotch) but i am sorry i said it the way i did. i’m not great with words. but i’m sure youve figured that out by now.
if it makes any difference it was the anniversary of a pretty shitty day in my life and declan and i aren't on great terms, and being at his ridiculous summer house, surrounded by aglionby fucks, was hard. i'm not a big aglionby or declan fan. but im sure youve figured that out too.
you mentioned greenmantle and you mentioned blue. you dont have to like me, and you definitely dont have to like me like that, obviously, but you should know the truth.
this is really strange to put in an email but i’m sure those witches you hang around do stuff thats at least as impossible. and also you were there when gansey found gwenllian so. hopefully you dont lose your shit. my dad could take things out of his dreams. he would make stuff to sell to collectors. i don’t know the details rly. he got into business with greenmantle four or five years ago.
you might have noticed that greenmantle likes to collect things. he’ll collect you if you’re not careful.
i dont really know how to write this but last year, my dad was in the middle of a high stakes deal w greenmantle that wasnt going well, when one morning i came outside into our driveway and found his body. someone hired a hit man. my mom went into a coma and my brothers and i got kicked out of our home (long story but i only started being able to go back rly recently) and basically everything went to hell. i don’t know if greenmantle hired the guy who killed my dad but i do know that greenmantle tried to blackmail my brothers and I into selling him the rest of my dad’s stuff. declan and i cut him off bc he was so aggressive about it. also, blackmail, and maybe killed my dad. so.
the worst thing that i can prove he did was kidnap my baby brother matthew last year. i won’t go into it here but there’s something special abt matthew and greenmantle was gonna use him for— idek. i dont rly wanna think about it. keep him as a collector’s item or something fucked like that. he forced us to pay him ransom to get him back. it was not good.
you can ask henry if you dont believe me abt any of this. he’s tangled up in the same black market mess and he’s seen most of the shit greenmantle’s done to my family.
also abt blue. i didn’t rly realize she liked gansey that much. he was super into her but it seemed like he mostly annoyed her. he deserves better than someone who's mad at him all the time. i talked to helen about it and she agreed. also the psychics kinda freak me out but thats probably just a me thing.
so yeah. you dont have to ever talk to me again. i’m not going back to aglionby so i don't know if i'll even ever see you again. and i don’t think you’ll ever think i’m actually worth your time. and you’re probably right. but i’m sorry about that night.
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