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Adam's been dreaming about water since he was a child. Sometimes he's sitting on the shore of an ocean he's never seen before in real life. It feels like he's waiting for someone. They don't ever come. He wakes up alone.
Sometimes he's standing on a treacherous cliff, right on the edge, looking down. The water's rough, foamy waves beating against the sharp rocks at the foot of the cliff face. He closes his eyes. Feels the ground disappear from between his feet.
Sometimes, he's at the bottom of a lake, weighed down by stones or lead or the weeds wrapped around his ankles or the heaviness in his own heart. He stretches his arms towards the single ray of sunlight he can see at the surface. The water turns black, blocking all the light out.
He opens his mouth to scream, but there's no sound, there's no one to hear, there's no air anymore; there's only the inexorable weight of the water. Holding him down, flowing through him, becoming a part of him.
*
He turns on the bathroom light, fills the sink, breathes in, then out, slowly, preparing himself.
The mirror's fogged up; he haphazardly wipes at it with one hand. The shadows are there one second and gone as soon as he blinks.
They're familiar now, the faces, the voices prickling the back of his skull; they know his name. Maybe he's one of them, too, a ghost. He should be dead, by all rights. Maybe Cabeswater's saving him for something.
His eyes follow the ripples on the water's surface as he empties all thoughts from his mind, lets them in.
Flashes behind his eyes: a corpse rotted to bones; hornets crawling over a pale hand covered in dirt; bloody viscera spilled on the floor of a church; a pretty girl leaning in, tears in her eyes, saying, "Kiss me"; someone yelling, it sounds like his own voice; running, running, through a dark forest, hearing the breaths of something infernal on his heels; hearing pounding on his bedroom door, covering his ears with his hands, rocking back and forth, Just go away, go away; being swallowed up by the ground, a voice calling to him in the darkness, another voice saying not to listen; water seeping in the cracks in the floor, in the walls, pouring from his skin; someone's hands on his face, "Look at me," blue eyes, wanting to float away in them, someone saying his name, lips against his.
Drowning, drowning, drowning.
Something lurches in his stomach and he's snapped back into his body.
Only it's not where it was before.
*
He's in the middle of the lake and he's sinking fast.
(He almost drowned once. He's never told anyone, not his parents, not Gansey or Ronan. He figures almost dying doesn't really come close to actually dying, doesn't come close to creating monsters that actually want to claw your fucking heart out. He's not scared of water anymore, at least not when he's awake, but he used to be. Eight years old and getting pushed into the deep end, panicking, feeling the water fill his lungs quickly, too quickly. Getting pulled out, coughing and coughing until he was sure he'd hack up blood and organs all over the side of the pool. He taught himself to swim after that. Other people would've stayed the hell away from water but it felt too much like weakness. He could easily imagine his father's fury if he never learned. Just another failure from his failure of a son. But he doesn't ever talk about being on the swim team either, just like he doesn't talk about anything he does at Aglionby.)
His soggy clothes aren't doing him any favours, but he manages to make a few small strokes upwards. He kicks his shoes off and starts to claw and kick his way to the surface. He takes some huge gulps of air, assessing his surroundings. It's not a long way back to shore, but he has an odd feeling that something wants to keep him here. That he needs to be here.
And then he sees the arm waving in the distance. A second passes, and then it disappears under the water, along with the black leather wristbands.
Jesus fucking Christ.
It's not a dream, he tells himself, racing to where he'd seen him go under without hesitation. Ronan's not in his dreams, not in these dreams; there's never anyone else there when he's drowning.
He fills up his lungs, dives.
It's another world. The water's murky and saturated with seaweed; he can barely see right in front of his own face. Fuck.
He tries pulling the weeds apart but there's just even more and more beyond it. It's no use; it'll take fucking forever to find him.
He returns to the surface to draw in some more air.
He looks out across the water in case Ronan's made it back up, but the water's worryingly still.
He follows a ripple made by his arms across the surface with his eyes. And then he stops moving them.
And then he realises the lake is just a big scrying bowl.
He concentrates harder than he ever has before.
The Greywaren, the Greywaren.
His body knows where to go before his mind catches up.
He dives again.
When he finds him, he's just floating like he's been suspended, arms outstretched, legs covered in seaweed; it's like he's under some kind of sleeping spell, like a fucking fairytale prince trapped in a lake. Waiting to be woken.
Adam grabs his arm, and then touches his face, but gets no response.
He gets to work detangling his body from the weeds and then starts pulling them both to the surface, suddenly extremely grateful for all the extra laps he'd put himself through after team practice was over.
They're at the surface and he's still holding Ronan up and he's about to start pounding on his chest and yelling that he'll kill him if he doesn't wake up when he takes a shuddering gasp and starts coughing up water.
He carefully lets him go when he thinks he can keep himself above water.
And then something grabs his ankle and yanks him down.
He hears Ronan start to call his name but his voice is muffled when his head is submerged and then he's sinking, sinking.
He pulls and pulls on the vine wrapped around his leg but it just gets tighter and stronger. His lungs are burning; he's almost out of air. He can barely see the surface.
He closes his eyes and thinks, No, no, this doesn't happen today; he reaches out with his mind and it's like the water's flowing through him and he's flowing through it. Like they're the same being.
He gives one more yank and it slackens for a second and then the water's pushing him upwards away from the lashing vines and towards the light. Just like he thought it.
He sucks in a huge breath when he hits the surface. Ronan reappears a few yards away a couple moments later.
"I was looking — What the fuck happened."
"Let's just go."
He's exhausted and freezing; every muscle's aching but he pushes himself past the exertion, everything working in survival mode. Eventually, he reaches the shore, drags himself out, with Ronan right behind him.
He stumbles for a second and then falls to his knees, taking deep breaths.
Ronan just tips over onto his back, limbs splayed out.
"What the fuck, what the fuck," he keeps saying, chest heaving, body still shaking from the cold water.
"Shit," Adam says, pulling off his wet socks. "Shit, we need to get out of here."
"What the fuck."
"The third sleeper — I think, I think it's trying to murder us. Or you, at least. Did you call for me?"
"I asked Cabeswater —"
"For me?"
"For air."
Adam frowns; it feels like he's not telling him everything.
"We need to go."
"How? My phone's at the bottom of the fucking homicidal lake, probably." He's emptying water from his boots, looking more pissed about being cold and wet than about almost dying. Typical.
Adam gets to his feet slowly and starts walking back to the lake; it looks pristine and harmless, like it didn't just try to fucking murder them.
"I think — I think it's a portal or something, between places, between times." He knows it's true as he says it. "The water —"
"Are you fucking crazy?" Ronan says, back on his feet now, walking towards him while keeping a cautious eye on the water. "I'm not going back in there."
"Well, you can stay here and die of hypothermia, then."
Adam extends his hand to him; Ronan looks at it like it's going to bite him.
Adam sighs. "Take it if you don't want to end up stuck in a neverland of time-space fuckery."
Just as he's about to withdraw it, Ronan reaches out and clasps their hands together.
His hand's cold just like the rest of him but it's the first time Adam's felt safe since he woke up in the middle of the lake.
The two of them face the impassive lake, still shivering in their wet clothes, and then slowly, they wade in together.
*
When Adam opens his eyes, he's looking into a mirror. His handprint's still there.
"Fuck, that is not normal," Ronan says from next to him, clothes dripping onto his bathroom floor.
"Really? This is what gets you?"
Ronan just stares at him. Adam wonders if he's scared of him sometimes. Maybe he should be.
Adam realises, too late, that they're still holding hands.
"You have, uh —" Ronan starts. "In your hair."
Adam looks at him questioningly.
Ronan releases his hand and reaches up to pull a piece of green seaweed out of his hair.
Adam groans.
"Souvenir, I guess," Ronan says, shrugging, resting it on the sink. Yeah, because they really need one. Hey, remember when we nearly drowned? Good times.
"Thanks," Adam tells him, slightly choked. It's hard to forget how scared he was that Ronan wouldn't start breathing again.
"Shit, I'm fucking freezing," Ronan says, finally looking away from him, wrapping his arms around his own torso.
"Well, take your clothes off."
"What?"
"I mean —" Adam says, exasperated, looking over his shoulder at the shower.
"Oh."
"Get in. I'll get some clothes."
Adam turns to go, but not before he hears Ronan's whispered, "Hey, thanks." He figures it's not just for the shower.
*
He hands him an old pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt and tells him to get under the covers.
When he comes back from the bathroom, in pajamas, toweling off his hair, Ronan's sitting cross-legged on the far side of the mattress, a blanket draped over his shoulders like a robe.
Adam can't help but smile.
"Stop hogging, Jesus," he says, sitting next to him, head propped up on a pillow, legs stretched out in front of him. He doesn't want to move, ever, maybe. He wonders if he can beg off work on account of a mystical lake trying to murder him.
Ronan surrenders half the blanket but doesn't come any closer. Adam can feel his residual heat on it and takes a deep breath before shifting towards him an inch or two.
"What the fuck happened," Ronan mutters after they've warmed up a bit.
"You tell me," Adam says, toying with a frayed end of the blanket.
"I was in my room. I was dreaming. But it was different —"
Adam looks across at him and he has the same shaken look on his face as he did when Chainsaw was possessed in the caves, like everything familiar to him had become strange and unknown. He can't imagine what kind of malevolent being would take his dreams, that belong completely to him, and turn them against him.
"It was like it wasn't mine."
Adam exhales. "The third sleeper. It used the lake somehow to pull you into Cabeswater."
"But how?"
"It's underground. It has influence over living things in the lake, I guess."
"But what about you? That thing you did? I saw it. It was like a fucking underwater missile or something."
"The water's a part of Cabeswater just like everything else. It wanted to keep me alive."
"And the other thing you did?"
"Water's always fascinated me. It flows in everything. People, trees, the earth. It connects everything. Even time, I guess."
He's remembering when they found the Camaro wheel in the lake; he wonders if it was left there in the past or the future.
Ronan's just staring at him.
"I almost drowned once," he admits.
Ronan sucks in a breath. "I didn't know."
"It was a long time ago. I don't think about it a lot. But I did that night in Cabeswater."
"You mean, when you —"
"Yeah. I thought — I thought I was going to die. Knew it, almost."
"But you didn't."
"Maybe I should've," Adam says, picking at his nails and not looking at him.
"What about today? Were you scared?" Ronan asks.
"I knew I'd be okay. Somehow. Because you were there. Or because of Cabeswater." It wasn't anything like it was all those years ago in that pool, scared and alone, or walking into Cabeswater with nothing to lose. He has things to lose now. He has things to protect.
"Good thing that bullet didn't kill you. Then I'd be dead too." Ronan grins at him and maybe he's going to get up and leave soon (but his car's still at Monmouth) or fall asleep because they're both wrecked (but maybe he's afraid to now). It's still dark in the small room; they'd only been gone about an hour, miraculously. There's something he still wants to know; he thinks Ronan will tell him now.
"What did you ask for?" Adam says quietly, looking at him now.
"I asked Cabeswater for my life. And it sent you."
"Oh."
"Do you — Do you think it'll happen again?"
"I don't know," Adam tells him honestly.
"Good thing I have you to save me then," he says drowsily, a faint smile on his lips now.
Ronan finds his hand on top of the blanket and interlaces their fingers; they've both just almost died so maybe this is allowed, Adam thinks. Ronan turns on his side and closes his eyes, breathing quietly.
Adam turns to face him, their hands still twined between them, and he figures maybe this is allowed too, so he leans in and brushes his lips over Ronan's as softly as he can. He doesn't move or open his eyes so Adam figures he's already asleep and pulls away, slightly crestfallen. But then he feels him squeeze his hand gently and he smiles. He almost thinks he can stop his brain picking apart everything that happened long enough to get some sleep now.
They're okay, for now; they'll face whatever nightmares that come together. And they'll deal with the rest tomorrow.