Chapter Text
At the end of the day, there are a few things that Adam knows are true. He knows, for instance, that it was not luck that landed him at Yale, that it was discipline and hard work and a severe dedication to every extracurricular he could take, as well as a blatant disregard for his health. He knows that he won’t drop out of school, but he also knows that if there’s going to be a year for him to decide to do it, it’ll be in the first five months.
He knows that he’s probably really lucky that he isn’t living in Timothy Dwight or Silliman college, but instead that he’s living in Trumbull, which means that to get to the library he doesn’t even have to cross a street. He barely has to cross a courtyard.
He also knows that around nine at night the library begins to empty of even the most dedicated graduate students, and then it becomes his own private chapel to the god of overwork and over-dedication to the cause, although, since he hasn’t decided if he’s declaring Political Science or Engineering as a major, the cause is still a mystery.
The first time that Adam stepped into the library, he actually thought he had made a wrong turn. New Haven wasn’t so confusing as Boston, for the five minutes he entertained the notion of Harvard (until he was overcome with an urge to punch everyone on his tour with him, and he had to force himself to actually physically restrain Ronan from violence), being built on a grid. But he was still new, and it was still overwhelming, and he was still slightly (slightly being overwhelmingly) intimidated by the grandeur of it all, not to mention the fact that he lived in a building that looked like it probably had witnessed the rise of a European royal family inside it’s walls. So when he walked into the library, hoping to get a head start on being a student by figuring out the inner workings of the place, he thought he had maybe made a wrong turn and walked into a cathedral, instead.
The fact is that Adam had never been inside a cathedral, but as someone who lived a full year of his life in a church, he recognized the splash of Catholicism when he saw it. The soaring architecture, the stained glass, the long corridor that looked like it would lead to a crucifix instead led to a painting of a woman holding an orb and a book, and Adam wondered if that was a saint, and he turned and turned until he saw the sign for library services, despite the fact that there wasn’t a single book in sight.
That had been the first time. Now, knowing the stacks as well as he knew the ones in Aglionby and being on a first name basis with at least four librarians and one very angry archivist, Adam navigates the library like it is a calm port in the stormy sea of hard work. He thinks he’s more focused here, calmer. Sometimes he takes food from the dining hall and sneaks it through the building (although he also thinks that the security guard at the desk knows he’s doing it and doesn’t mind) to eat his lunch in the University Librarian’s courtyard, just to be surrounded by the library.
The semester passed so quickly; Adam can feel the pull of Henrietta in his bones. Not Henrietta, he corrects himself, but the pull of Ronan, the Barns, of Opal, of dreaming cows and leyline, of sticky cool Virginian winters. It’s late now, and there’s early snow falling which makes the city beyond glow with an odd blue light. As much as Adam loves Yale, his classes, the people he’s met who don’t care where he summered or where his family is from or why he can’t hear out of one ear, he’s generally unimpressed with New Haven as anything more than where this moment is his life has settled. The city itself is more than Henrietta, yes. But it doesn’t charm Adam. However, with the snow settling and the light’s glowing and the view from the fourteenth floor make everything quiet and still and blue, he thinks that it really is beautiful.
He’s comfortable, and he thinks he hears something out of his left ear, sees something, but then his phone is ringing with the Murder Squash Song and he’s flinging himself on his bag to answer it, both because he had that on silent this is a library, oh the humiliation, and also, because-
“Hey, asshole. Did you eat?”
Adam’s stomach rumbles so loudly he thinks that Ronan can probably hear it over the phone. He looks at his watch - newly acquired after accepting that Opal needed the one he gave her more than he did - and realizes that he missed dinner. “No,” he replies as he starts shoving things into his messenger bag. He fiddles with the strap that is starting to protest the weight of his books, papers, and the brand-new computer that was part of his scholarship package and contemplates how long it will hold out. “Did you?”
“Opal and I went to Cal’s in Singer’s Falls, got cheeseburgers. It gave her the most rank fucking gas,” Ronan says, and it’s clear that he’s back home at the Barns now, because Adam can hear one of the cats meowing softly in the background.
Adam wrinkles his nose involuntarily. “Thanks, Lynch,” he mutters dryly as he gets the elevator down to the first floor.
“Don’t bitch, you don’t have to smell it. Anyway, she’s in bed now,” Ronan replies. “What are you wearing.”
“I’m in the library elevator, you know.”
“So, jeans and that ugly sweater that Gansey’s mom got you, and no coat,” Ronan guesses, and Adam is disgusted that he’s right. His scholarship has deep pockets but he still resists buying a coat. He didn’t expect it to be cold until January, but December is already nipping at the bottom his his Virginian wardrobe. “You’re going to die of hypofuckingthermia, Parrish.”
The elevator opens and Adam bustles out of the stacks and into the nave, waving as he passes the late night librarians. They know his schedule, and they like him enough that they don’t mind him on the phone. Besides, it’s so late, there’s almost no one else in the library except the odd graduate student avoiding going home. “Shit, when did you become my mother?” Adam asks.
“Your mother doesn’t give a shit about you keeping warm,” Ronan snaps back, and it stings, because it’s true, and because Adam knows that he offended Ronan, but that was unwarranted.
And the sting doesn’t go away. “What do you want, Lynch,” Adam asks, as if he’s fed up with this conversation, even though his heart is thumping stop, stop, stop, because Ronan is calling, because Ronan is right here.
There’s silence. “Jesus Christ,” Ronan growls. “What the hell am I making the effort for?”
There’s a part of Adam that wants to apologize, another part (the part that knew better than to try and soothe Robert Parrish) that insists that apologies don’t work, a third, more frustrating part that feels the old Henrietta exhaustion rise up in him, and the last part that actually speaks for the three previous part. “Look, I’ll call you in the morning,”
“What the fuck ever,” Ronan snaps. “Eat something or don’t, do whatever you fucking want,” he finishes, and hangs up the phone.
Adam is just outside, his hands numb, and he fumbles his phone into his pocket and rubs his face. His nose is frozen. His ears hurt. He thinks about the mountain of work on his desk, about the essays he has to write, about his finals. It’s only a week left to go, and it feels like an eternity. By the time he’s back in his dorm apartment, his suitemates have all left their books in the common room and Adam has to pick his way through to his sad, lonely box of breakfast bars. He opens it and eats one, thinking of Ronan’s last comment, translating it from his anger and into the rare language of Ronan caring, and coming up empty.
Adam recognizes fatigue and is well equipped to deal with it. Tonight he puts an earbud in his good ear, curls up next to the heater, and reads until he falls asleep there.
He considers calling in the morning, but decides against it, pretended it’s not his pride and failing at that lie to himself. He looks at his phone to see if maybe Ronan called, but there isn’t anything there and Adam has to breathe through his mouth to calm himself down. There are a lot of reasons that Ronan doesn’t call every day, ranging from feeding the cows to just not wanting to. This day isn’t any different. They squabble all the time, over things and words harsher and crueler than that.
He manages breakfast and a study session, then lunch before he’s holed himself back up in the top floor of the library, stacks of books around him and his focus on the work in front of him. It’s easy to get lost in it; he thinks about calling Ronan, but then he gets distracted by the sweet temptation of work and study.
And he misses dinner again, looking up at nine to squint owlishly at his phone. The phone was a graduation present from Gansey, and Adam had accepted it because he was getting better at that. Because it came from a genuine place in Gansey, and Adam recognized that place for what it was, instead of thinking it was from that part of his best friend that liked to own exotic things. In any case, he needed a phone now. It was a real tangible line to his family - to Gansey and Blue, traveling the country, to Ronan and Opal. He wouldn’t care if the people in his class, in his dorm, his professors and peers thought that he was weird for not having a phone. But he needed one for the people who mattered.
Still, Blue had to step in and help him choose one, his data plan was abysmal so he mostly stuck to the Yale wifi, and the only luxury it had was unlimited texts.
He sees a few of texts from Gansey - we’re in New Mexico and the sky is so blue, the cold is different, it gets in your lungs followed by i think henry got got stung by a scorpion calling poison control which, okay, Gansey, followed by no it’s a weird cactus it jumped him it’s fine, a text that Adam had to read four times and still was unsure to what exactly it means. He sends a quick question mark back, and goes through to make sure that Ronan hadn’t called.
Still nothing.
It’s late, and the announcement the library will close goes off, so Adam packs his things. One of his favorite librarians, an older lady with a broad smile and a wicked sense of humor spots him. “You’ll get a brain bleed, studying too hard this late at night.”
“I’m trying to get ready for law school, I figure I should be intimately familiar with the library at night,” Adam replies. “This isn’t that much work, anyway,” he adds, although his bag and back groan a little in protest. “Got the short end and the late shift?”
“Is it law school this week? I thought you were going for mechanical engineering. And I like the late shift,” she replies. “Especially when it’s snowing. Even during finals, it’s quiet.”
It’s almost midnight now, and there are still people mulling about. Everyone looks as strung out and unhappy as Adam feels. “I bet you’ll be happy when we all leave.”
She laughs. “No, this place is weird when there aren’t any students. It makes it less easy to rationalize when you see something moving in the stacks.” She seems cheerful, though, it’s a joke. She presses her hand to Adam’s shoulder, a soft touch, something Adam hasn’t really had since he was back at the Barns for Thanksgiving, and he soaked in as much of Ronan’s skin as he could. This is different but it makes him realize how starved for touch he actually is.
He just smiles at her, a little nervously, but it’s a smile just the same. A year ago, he thinks, he might not have managed that. A year ago he was more of a mess. “You’re making it sound like the library is haunted.”
“Are you afraid of ghosts?” she asks, a mischievous smile on her face.
Adam thinks of Noah. It’s always weird to think of Noah, he seems to only manage to think of him like he’s thinking of someone slipping sideways through a room, like when he’s in the middle of doing something, thinks of something he needs to do, but forgets it a moment later. It’s a frustrating thing, because he knows he should miss Noah, but he can never latch onto the memory of him for long enough to miss him. “No,” he tells her. “I think that any ghost who stayed here is probably really lucky.”
“There are worse places on this campus to haunt,” she agrees. “Go home, Adam. Get some sleep. It’s going to do you better than another hour of work.”
He finds himself agreeing, sleepily, and making his way back to his dorm. His roommates had chipped in to buy a pizza (an apizza? Adam doesn’t know, or care) and Damen, who is 300 pounds of Hawaiian surfer with an astonishing gift for romantic poetry and a sharpness about astrophysics tells him to take a slice. He resists, choosing instead review his notes, except that about ten minutes in he can’t tell what he’s looking at anymore, and Damen is slowly pushing a plate of pizza his way. It doesn’t have sausage or avocado on it (Damen always orders his pizza with clams on it, and no one but Damen eats it willingly) and finally Adam finds himself choking a slice down, clams and all.
It’s almost two in the morning when Adam considers calling Ronan again, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. It’s not a good time to call him. Ronan isn’t the heaviest sleeper, and he still has bouts of insomnia, but he wakes up early to feed cows and chickens and Opal. Every morning, at five thirty, Ronan is already up and moving. It’s not fair to call him now.
But here’s Adam, his selfish need to hear Ronan’s voice gutting him. He’s so tired.
He doesn’t call. He doesn’t know what he would say, too tired to be able to figure out how to fix a fight that wasn’t a fight. He says the words out loud, whispering them, as if Ronan can hear them across the country. “Please call,” he says, his accent uncontrolled, vowels dropping like flies. “I miss you, I’m sorry I compared you to my mom, just please call.” He stops talking, and he thinks that this isn’t worth it, except that he knows that his hunger for the way Ronan smells and tastes and feels like will make him rethink that statement in a week. He wonders if this is his own personal addiction. He doesn’t drink because of what it did to his father, drunken and violent and arrogant, but he wonders if maybe he’s more like Robert Parrish than he wants to admit. The strains of addiction are there, except that Ronan is his drink of choice.
He gets up at seven and there are no missed calls, no texts, and he calls Gansey, which is very unfair, because it’s four in the morning in Arizona, which they arrived in the previous day. Gansey, however, is still a terrible insomniac, which means that Blue and Henry do a majority of the driving. “Adam!” he answers, cheerful, sounding robust and hale.
“How’s the Grand Canyon?” Adam asks. He has a map in his room that he uses to track where the trio are, but the truth is he doesn’t need it. Instead if he closes his eyes he can almost feel the phantom tug of Cabeswater, the thorny vines around his wrist that pull him right into Gansey.
Gansey’s voice is crackling a little. “Oh, it’s beautiful, but Blue got mobbed by psychics in Sedona and Henry thinks everything is too red, so I think we’re heading north next. They are,” Gansey says, a note of disdain entering his old man accent, “trying to convince me to go to Disneyland.”
Adam laughs. He is trying to picture Gansey, and Blue, and Henry all wearing Mickey Mouse ears they way he’s seen in ads online. It’s not difficult, because in the mental image in his head Gansey is smiling politely, Blue is staring at Henry, and Henry is grinning like a maniac. “It would be good for you,” he tries.
“Well, don’t tell Henry or Blue, they’ll try to get you to help convince them,” Gansey replies. “Adam, you do realize it’s four in the morning, right?”
“You don’t sleep,” Adam says. “Much.”
There is silence. “Well. Okay. How is Yale? My mother thinks I should consider it next year. We could be roommates.”
“They don’t room sophomores with freshmen, and anyway, you’ll probably end up in another college,” Adam says. “I thought she was advocating Georgetown.”
“I told her I would absolutely not live in D.C., can you imagine the nightmare, and if she considers a presidential bid, then it would be insufferable. I don’t want to talk about this,” Gansey says, uncomfortably, as if he’s just learning how to say what he doesn’t want to discuss.
“You started it,” Adam points out, and Gansey makes a noise like he’s sorry, so Adam drops the line. There’s silence. “Have you spoken to Ronan?”
“Last night,” Gansey says, and Adam feels something that he can’t quite describe happen in his stomach. It feels like someone found a rock, tied it around a string, and slingshoted it around his stomach. He didn’t think about what would happen when it was Ronan ignoring him. “He was very short with me,” Gansey adds, “but, well. Ronan.”
“Yeah. Ronan.” Adam didn’t think he could feel worse than the day that he sacrificed himself to Cabeswater, or the day that he was possessed by the demon and watched Gansey die, but the idea of losing Ronan over nothing, over a mistake, it’s just as bad. The idea of losing Ronan is like losing home, and he didn’t even realize it until now.
Gansey isn’t stupid, and Adam knows it, so when Gansey catches the shift in Adam’s voice he makes a soft noise. “You’ll be home soon. It’s all right. You’ll be fine.”
And Adam realizes that Gansey thinks that Adam just misses him. Which means, too, that Ronan hasn’t talked about it with Gansey.
It’s suddenly too exhausting to discuss any further. He just makes a small noise. “Okay. I should go.”
“Get some sleep,” Gansey agrees.
The next morning Adam hauls back to the library. He finds a desk on the top floor of the stacks, fills it with books, and reminds himself that work is the one constant relationship he can count on to keep the worst part of the world at bay.
He doesn’t call Ronan. He doesn’t have time. He drowns himself in studying, in complex math and ethical quandaries, he tosses himself complicated literature and sticky historical details. He doesn’t call Ronan. He puts an earbud into his good ear and eats breakfast bars for lunch and dinner so he doesn’t have to abandon his desk, drinks cold coffee from his cheap thermos. Around nine in the evening, when the snow is swirling down around the library and he can see the steam from the nearby buildings he sets his head down for a moment. He doesn’t cry.
He opens his eyes when he’s shunted in darkness, the lights of the library suddenly off, and he goes for his phone. “Shit,” he mutters, standing, then sitting back down. 12:01 the LCD reads, and he knows he’s fucked up. He doesn’t know how he missed the blaring announcement the library would close, but then he rubs his right ear and feels the distinct tingle of blood coming back to that side of his head, and he knows it was because it was pressed against the table. “Shit,” he says again and collects his things, and hopes and hopes that security hasn’t armed the building yet, but he doesn’t have hopes for that. He walks towards the elevator, down the corridor of books, and heaves his bag over his shoulder.
It bursts away from him, his books and his laptop scattering across the floor, his notes flying after. The strap he had been worried about for days snapped. A moment of panic fills him as he opens his computer to check, but the screen isn’t cracked, it lights up friendly for a moment. He closes it and picks his things up, putting them back in his back and tying the strap together. It won’t last - he’ll need to get a new one, his brain already calculating the cost - but it’ll do for a moment, anyway.
He rubs his eyes, exhausted, and hauls himself back up, heading out. Only he must have gotten turned around, because now he’s on the other end of the stacks, not near the stairwell and elevator at all. He can see the lights of New Haven all begin to blink out, the light of Yale dim with sleep.
He turns around and walks for almost a full three minutes before he realizes that he can’t find the stairwell in the dark. There’s panic for a moment and he reaches out his fingers to touch the wall when he hears something clatter. Instinctively he reaches for his bag, but it’s there under his fingers. “Hello?” he asks. “Is someone here?”
He hears something, movement, and he reaches for the wall again. This time it’s the sound of someone else moving, and his heart starts to race.
He hears it in his left ear.
But Adam Parrish has always been most proud of being able to master his own fear, so he pulls it back, breathes through his nose, and refuses to run. He moves slowly, trying to see through the darkness. It’s hard - all he can see is the shadows of the shelves (he remembers the librarian who gave him the first tour of the place announcing, proudly, that the shelves were structural, they held up the building) and the windows. He thinks that there’s a light app on his phone, so he reaches for that first.
His phone doesn’t respond, though. The screen doesn’t light up; it remains stubbornly dark. Adam looks around, as if there’s an answer in the gloom, but there’s nothing but silence around him, silence and darkness. He thinks yelling for help won’t work. This doesn’t feel real anymore.
Instead he inches his way around, following the wall. Each floor of the stacks are shaped the same, but the entrance is never in the same place. But in the center, there’s the pillar, the stairs and the elevator. He figures as long as he can find the stairs he can make his way down, and to the security desk at the front of the library.
He hears the movement but doesn’t let whatever it is scare him. He’s faced demons inside of his head, and demons outside, and demons shaped like people - sounds in the dark can’t hurt him. He knows it.
He finally feels the cold metal of where the elevator begins, but then he reels back. The door is gone, he thinks, he knows, suddenly. He can feel the empty, gasping emptiness in front of him and he falls back. Now he’s afraid. Now he’s afraid and he doesn’t quite know why, except that it feels like where the elevator should be there’s nothing.
The second the fear hammers through him is the second he can’t control it anymore. He makes a noise, calls out. “Cabeswater,” he says, as though the forest is there. As though Ronan is there, too, when Cabeswater is in Gansey and Ronan hasn’t perfected the new dream of it yet. It can’t save him. His heart slams a thudding beat in his chest, and he moves back until he feels one of the structural pillars behind him, and he he grips it. “Cabeswater, amabo te-”
He hears a high pitched whine in response, and a clattering, something running towards him, and he starts to run, hands outstretched, trying to find the stairs. He hears something, a scream like a bird. The door swings open and he tumbles, hitting his head on the way down, and then there’s silence as he lays on the cold ground between the floors, arms over his head.
~~~~
Ronan is asleep.
He’s been in hypersomnia for almost two days now; sleeping was coming easier and faster, dreaming more lucid and clearer. This always happened in high school. He would go weeks worried, thinking he would bring something dangerous, thinking about bees and hornets and giant monsters, and then sleep for days at a time, swinging between those two poles with vicious regularity.
This hasn’t happened since high school.
He’s asleep, facedown, his hands under his pillow when suddenly he’s jolted from sleep by Opal. “What the fuck,” he says, and he immediately checks. Nothing back. His dreams were strange and boring and not at all things he would have wanted in the real world. “What the fuck, Opal-”
She looks scared, and suddenly Ronan is wide awake - and so is Chainsaw, screaming her bad mood at Opal and Ronan both. Opal looks like she did, once upon a time, back when she was inside his head; her eyes wide and dark and her whole body shaking. “Adam,” she begins, and Ronan feels something inside of him turn cold and leaden. “vos postulo ut auxilium!” she says, and then she lapses from Latin into the language of the trees, but whatever she says it doesn’t matter because Ronan is already getting dressed.
“How did you talk to him? Did he call?” Opal doesn’t have her own phone, but she steals Ronan’s regularly to play Pokemon Go and Neko Atsume because Henry taught her how to and she’s endlessly fascinated by the repetitiveness and regularity of it. He reaches for his phone - there are no calls, no texts. He’s already calling.
Opal is shaking her head, and blabbering in no language that Ronan can understand when he’s awake or without thinking about it. Adam isn’t answering his phone. “Opal, fuck, English!”
“It was a dream!” she yells, finally.
Later, Ronan will think that if they were normal, he would have taken a breath and gone to sleep. If he were normal, he would have taken her back to her bed and told her it was “just” a nightmare.
But they’re not normal, not even a little. Dreams mean things to them. Opal has deer legs and she can digest anything and Opal can enter and exit Ronan’s dreams on a whim. He’s reaching for jeans and yanking them on. “Go get dressed,” he snaps at her, and she’s skittering down the hall.
The fact is that this isn’t exactly spur of the moment, either. He hadn’t spoken to Adam in days, after their fight. He thought the silence was because Adam was because of their fight and because of Adam’s finals; he called and when that went unanswered he asked Maura to watch Opal the next week so he could go up and get Adam, instead of letting him take the train to DC and picking him up there.
But there isn’t time to go drop Opal off now. She’s wide-eyed and silent as she gets into the car, her mouth around the leather strap of Adam’s watch. Ronan looks at her in the rearview mirror. He’s about to break a shitload of laws to get them from Singers Falls to New Haven in record time, and he has to be fucking smart about it. The rational part of him sounds a lot like Declan. It’s the part of him that says before you do this turn on your radar detector and make sure that Opal and Chainsaw are both strapped in. “Do you want to sleep?” he asks.
She’s perfectly still. “I don’t know if I can find him again,” she admits, finally. “I don’t know how I found him in the first place.”
Ronan considers that. Opal has never said anything about going into Adam’s dreams, or Gansey’s, or Blue’s. He didn’t think she was able. It was simple when it was just the two of them. But Adam always makes things complicated; even though he’ll deny it, Ronan knows he’s still a magician. He shifts gears, turns on the radio, and drives.
He slices time out of the distance between them, he drives like the devil is chasing them. Ronan has always always played tightly with truth; he is unlike Declan and his own father that way. He does not construct the world in lies and pretends them to be true. He doesn’t even lie to himself. So this is the truth, now, and he knows it: he would burn the world down for four living people, and two dead ones, and that’s both the start and end of his loyalty. Every mile that the tires swallow is lined with Adam Parrish’s name, every heartbeat that Ronan leaves on that stretch of highway thumps it out.
He gets to New Haven in record time, sliding into the city just as the sun is pinking the sky up. He thinks of the chickens and the cows and looks over at Opal, who has stayed dark eyed and awake the entire drive up. He hands her the phone. “Call Abraham,” he tells her, “tell him I need him to go take care of shit, I’ll pay double for the emergency.”
Opal takes the phone and does as she’s told, which means that she knows it’s serious. Her face is tiny and grim, and Ronan pulls into one of the parking garages that’s in walking distance of the university.
He hates New Haven strictly on principle, although he thinks even if Adam weren’t here for most of the year he would hate it if he gave it more than a second thought. The pompous architecture screams Aglionby. The Yale campus makes him break out in an anxious rash of boys who remind him of high school. The girls stare at him too long. The fucking castles are too much like a Disney version of Ireland.
Opal hands him his phone back. “I don’t know where he was,” she admits, then. “It was dark, like a cave, only bluer,” she adds, which is unfuckinghelpful. Chainsaw caws awake, displeased by this entire night, and vocal about it.
Ronan gets out of the car and takes Opal’s hand to assist her out, and they walk up past the town green towards Adam’s castle dorm. They’re close, they have to be. Part of him wonders if he overreacted, but another part of him doesn’t give a shit. Another part of him says it’s better to be a crazy overreacting boyfriend. That part of him says that if Parrish was ignoring him they can just fucking fight and get it over with.
A last, tiny, insistent part of him thinks that maybe this is all a bullshit reason to come and see him because the fight and the silence was making Ronan crazy.
Getting into Adam’s residential college is probably supposed to be hard. Ronan would like it to be hard, anyway, because the last thing he needs to think about is how Adam is totally and incomprehensibly poorly invested in his own physical fucking safety, and there’s no Cabeswater to summon if he needs to stab someone in the chest with a thorny vine or smother someone in poison ivy. But it’s not hard, because just as he’s marching up to the gate, Tad fucking Carruthers, fuckboy extraordinaire, is coming down the street in an expensive puffy coat and jeans, clutching a coffee and smiling, as if he and Ronan are friends. He has a girl with him. They look fucking collegial.
Ronan wants to suffocate them both with his bare hands, which is probably why Opal is gripping his right one so hard she’s cutting off circulation. She’s also making a tiny distressed noise, because she hates the cold more than anyone Ronan knows.
“Lynch,” he says, oblivious to the waves of hostility that Ronan is emitting that is currently causing tired undergraduates to give him a berth of about ten feet. “Still hanging out with carrion birds?”
“Let me in,” Ronan growls.
The girl stares at Ronan. “Who is this, Tad?” she asks with the self-preservation instinct of most wildlife that approaches Ronan Lynch, which is to say little at all. It’s humans who know better.
Humans, but not Tad Carruthers. “This,” he announces magnanimously, “is Adam Parrish’s dropout boyfriend.” He says these words as if they should enrage Ronan, but the fact is that nothing that Tad “summers in the Hamptons, winters in Aspen, year round resident of doucheville” Carruthers has said is a lie, and none of that description bothers Ronan. “And his weird little sister.”
“If you don’t let me in, I’m going to break your nose,” Ronan says, “and there isn’t a fucking jury on this planet that would put me away for it.”
“Adam Parrish?” the girl says, her eyes widening. She is already pulling her ID out, waving it in front of the gate. The massive lock clicks open. “I was just about to go see him, he was going to give me his notes.” She stares at Ronan, who pushes past her, done with her usefulness. Opal is dragged along. He hears her say, “Really? Adam is dating him?” with a note of incredulity to her voice that Ronan thinks she must have mined out of his own brain.
He storms into the building, scattering underclassmen in his wake, and gets to Adam’s door, pounding on it. “Parrish!” he yells, and pounds again. A minute later one of Adam’s roommates - a skinny kid with a head too large for his neck and a Minnesota accent that burns - opens the door and squints. “Parrish,” Ronan says, gritting his teeth.
“No, I’m Hendrickson,” the kid says.
Ronan resists throwing a punch, but just barely. “You are a Yale undergraduate,” he snarls, “so you cannot be that fucking stupid.”
Hendrickson blinks, and shakes his head. “Oh,” he says. “I don’t think he’s here,” he adds after that revelation, and steps back. Opal immediately heads for their shared bathroom, and patiently waits until Adam’s enormous brick wall of a roommate steps out. Ronan heads for Adam’s bedroom, the space where he left him three months ago, before any of these idiots arrived. “Who are you?”
Ronan opens the door to Adam’s room. He can hear the brick wall say, “Ah, you’re Opal, then,” and he hears Opal’s chirp reply - she closes the door, like fucking clockwork she needs to pee - and then the brick wall is at Ronan’s back. “I don’t think he came back from the library last night,” he says, and Ronan spins, looks up. The brick looks down at him.
“Opal,” he says, and she comes out of the bathroom a minute later.
Her hands are wet. “They didn’t have a towel,” she says, and Ronan looks at the cluster of boys that are now in various states of undress around him. “Did you find Adam?”
“Library,” he tells her, and she reaches for his hand, but he dries her hands off with his shirt, first. “And get a fucking hand towel,” he yells, because apparently he’s the only nineteen year old on the planet with any fucking sense.
He’s heading out when the brick wall follows him. “Do you need help?” he asks, and Ronan wants to snipe, no, fuck no, Ronan wants to reply with the truth which is that right now he’s panicking, he needs Gansey, fuck, he feels like he’s going to turn a corner and see Adam with his head exploded over the sidewalk, taken out by a tire iron. He thinks it’s not fair for his brain to supply this when Gansey is an entire nation away.
Opal whimpers and Ronan realizes he’s crushing her hand.
“Do you know where he studies?” Ronan asks, finally, the words wrenched out from somewhere deep in his gut. He could search the library, but he doesn’t know where Adam studies. He wonders how there can be something about Adam that he doesn’t know. Adam likes strange corners. In Aglionby, Ronan knew the window seat that Adam favored, hard to reach and oft-neglected in a strange part of the main building. It was quiet up there and fit Adam perfectly, a place he could stuff all his limbs if he tucked his books up under his legs. Curved in that space, Adam was quiet. Ronan loved to look at him, back before, from a spot under the staircase.
But here, at Yale, Adam has new spaces. Ronan doesn’t know them. He can’t make the rounds to find where he’s the most quiet, the most at home.
The brick wall looks thoughtful. “He likes the top floor,” he says. “But you can’t go up there. They won’t let you without an ID.” The brick wall, however, is already whistling. “Yo, Martinez,” he says, and Ronan’s lip curls at yo, “you staying in today?”
A lump on the couch that Ronan had assumed were pillows shifts, and reveals a Latino kid with a nose like a fishhook and a man bun. “Why y’all gotta be so loud,” he whines. “Finals ain’t even started yet,” he says, and Ronan isn’t sure if he likes him for not giving a shit about how he speaks or dislikes him for the same reason.
“I’m taking your ID,” the brick wall says, and reaches into a backpack, pulls out an ID on a chain, and hands it to Ronan. Martinez makes a noise like he acknowledges this, and also he doesn’t care, and pulls the blanket back over his head. “Come on,” he says.
Ronan looks at the ID in his hand. He could dream one but that would take time, and this is neater, faster. “Lynch,” he says, because the brick wall has just broken rules for him, so he deserves that much.
“I know who you are,” the brick wall says. “If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.”
“What the hell,” Ronan replies.
The brick wall laughs. “John Donne,” he explains, as if Ronan doesn’t know. But Ronan does know, because Ronan was the recipient of a classical education, too. “Parrish talks about you a lot. I’m Damen.”
Ronan is not ashamed that the name is only familiar in the vague way that all of Adam’s roommates have familiar names. But Ronan doesn’t care about Adam’s life at Yale, not in a concrete way. He cares that Adam is happy, he cares that Adam is satisfied, he cares that Adam isn’t rotting away. But he couldn’t be bothered with the minutiae, the details.
They leave the courtyard, turn the corner, and Ronan stares up. “What the fuck is wrong with this place,” he asks as they enter a building that looks like some Roman Pope consecrated it five hundred years ago.
Damen shrugs. “White people are weird,” he says, “but there’s power in stones.”
Opal makes another noise and this time Ronan picks her up, carrying her through the nave of the building, up to where he thinks there should be a crucifix and Mother Mary staring down at him.
Damen crosses into the stacks, and suddenly the feeling of church and holiness slips away from them. This isn’t a church anymore, except the kind where Adam and Gansey find the patience and the grace to say their prayers. It’s a cramped tower of books, rows and rows, some shiny or clearly falling apart with use, others dusty and forgotten.
Opal’s arms squeeze Ronan tight, suddenly. “Kerah,” she whimpers, and Ronan presses a hand to the top of her head.
Damen looks at them. “Is she all right?” he asks as he presses the button for the elevator, and Ronan doesn’t want to lie so he doesn’t say anything at all. They go up and up, and the doors open at the top. They step out and Ronan looks around; they’re stacks, just the same, towers of books that block out the light from the stained glass and weird windows.
Opal’s arms tighten again, and she opens her mouth to make a noise but nothing comes out. Ronan turns and at the end of some of the stacks are students, students curled up in strange configurations, which he realizes is over desks. Everyone looks underfed and over-caffeinated. It is barely nine in the morning and it’s packed, and Ronan recognizes Adam’s nerdy fucking brethren.
Ronan does not have the patience for this. He yells out, “Parrish, where the fuck are you?” and he’s greeted by a chorus of terrified noises, including one girl who yelps out, for fuck’s sake, this is a library! and do you know what time it is to someone responding showtime, showtime - Ronan is pretty much sure he’s missing something but he doesn’t care - and someone else who makes a suspicious moan.
But there’s no Adam stomping out from a cubbyhole to hiss about what the fuck is wrong with you, so Ronan looks up at Damen, who just purses his lips and nods. “Not this floor, then,” he says, and down they go.
Ronan’s cry for Adam gets increasingly filthier and angrier every floor they don’t find him on, until they’re on the first and Ronan can feel his heart seizing up. They’re on the first floor again and Opal’s practically catatonic. “Maybe he went to the engineering building, I know one of the professors was really impressed with his work,” Damen suggests, benignly.
Opal shakes her head. “No, no, Kerah, Kerah we can’t leave him here,” she says, which Damen looks confused at, but Ronan feels a chill about. Opal doesn’t usually insist on much, in the grand scheme of things. She’s still perplexed by things like can openers and automatic sliding glass doors. But she’s the reason they’re here, she’s the reason that Ronan even knew something was wrong in the first place.
He sets her down and she clings to his shirt. “Jesus Mary, did Timmy fall down the well again?” he snaps at her, and she kicks him, which he figures he probably deserves, but he lets out a string of cusswords anyway. They’re both exhausted. Damen looks utterly unbothered by this exchange.
But he can’t even consider sleep, not really. He sits down in the middle of the floor, which he knows will get attention but he doesn’t give a shit. Opal is on the brink of a tantrum; Ronan can feel it in his gut and in the space behind his eyes. “Okay, okay, what the fuck is going on.”
“He was here,” she says. “He was here and there’s something else-“ she begins, at this point, to lapse into Latin, and Ronan is surprised he’s keeping up as well as he is. “It’s like Cabeswater,” she explains, “it’s like us, only it’s not, it has him, it has him and I think it wants to keep him.”
Ronan feels a shiver run up his spine. “I need to make a phone call,” he says, suddenly, though really what he wants is to burn the entire building down until it spits Adam back up.