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harlotsforcinnamon · 9 hours ago

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The Last Time Comes Too Soon

(Divorce-era Pynch. Angst w an angsty ending. Proceed w caution. Also on Ao3)

“Alright, asshole.” Adam picked up the cat’s food dish. “What’s this? Suddenly you’re too good for the generic brand?”

Hal tucked his front paws under him and did not answer. Setting the dish on the kitchen counter, Adam crouched to pet the cat. He was a former stray, a brute of a Tom with notches in both his ears and a wide, squashed face.

Ronan had found him years ago, digging through the garbage, and had ordered a pallet of Fancy Feast that night.

It’d taken a month to finally lure the old battleaxe inside and get him into a crate so they could take him to the vet. Despite his lack of chip, he’d taken to the indoor life with a verve and tenacity that made Adam wonder if he’d once belonged to someone and since been abandoned, put out on the curb with the broken bottles and yesterday’s newspaper.

Adam petted the cat slowly, the way he liked. “I’ll buy you the fancy shit, okay? Cod Liver Pâté.”

Hal looked up at Adam with round yellow eyes, panting, and did not answer.

He was getting old, his coat soft and spare-looking. He felt thinner, his spine more prominent under his fur. When he consented to let Adam pick him up, he was lighter than Adam would have guessed.

It alarmed him, and for a moment he buried his face in the soft, fine fur. The cat began to purr like a football rattle, loud and raspy, and Adam held him closer, careful not to squeeze. Adam carried him in his arms and laid him on his favorite blanket on the end of the couch.

Ronan’s blanket.

Hal tucked his paws under his body once more, his eyes slitted in pleasure. Stopping only to run a hand from the flat place between Hal’s notched ears down the fragile curve of his spine, Adam grabbed his keys from the counter and shoved his feet into his shoes. He had time before he left for work. He’d walk down to the corner store and pick up the expensive cat food.

Back in the kitchen, he spooned brownish paste into Hal’s dish and set it on the floor.

The cat did not come running. Adam scraped the spoon around the tin a couple of times, in case Hal hadn’t heard him the first time. The vet had told them that Hal was half-deaf when they’d brought him in, and at the time Ronan had thrown Adam an annoyingly significant look.

Moving back through to the living room, Adam found Hal right where he’d left him. He’d flopped half-onto his side, eyes closed, but he swivelled an ear at Adam as he approached. He was still panting, his sides heaving.

Watching the cat, something cold began to settle over Adam. There was none of the hot-blooded immediacy of fear. It was certainty, icy-calm and paralytic.

He called out of work.

Then he called Ronan.

It was a four-hour drive from Virginia to DC. Ronan arrived just as the afternoon was kicking off its shoes and sighing with relief, settling into evening.

Adam sat in the kitchen, an untouched cup of coffee on the counter before him from that morning.

He heard the jingle of keys at the kitchen door and hastily wiped at his eyes. They were dry.

Ronan let himself in and locked the door behind him. It’d taken a while to get him in the habit, Adam remembered. Growing up on a farm in the secret fold of a secret valley, Ronan had grown up assuming the only reason one locked one’s door was to keep the animals out from underfoot. He’d particularly taken offense at the implication that he should be locking the door when either of the two of them was home, and he and Adam had gone ‘round and ‘round over it, until Ronan had finally grudgingly allowed himself to be housebroken.

It was stupid, Adam thought. They’d loved each other so hard they’d only had the stupid things to fight about.

Ronan stopped at the sight of Adam, a caught breath in the form of a person.

His voice vibrated, low and rumbly, and Adam couldn’t help it, he turned his head slightly to catch the sound of it better, a sailor steering his vessel across the wind until it filled his sails so taut they might burst. “I would’ve come sooner, but I knew you’d be at work.”

Adam slid from the kitchen stool but made no move to circumnavigate the island. His arms hung awkwardly at his sides, his hands an afterthought. “I called out.”

Ronan’s eyebrows went up, and Adam was sure that he, too, was replaying the old arguments in his head, both of them watching the same silent film. He knew there was contempt in the arch of those brows that he’d more than earned. They said, For a cat? And even louder, When you never would for me?

“Adam,” Ronan said. He still hadn’t taken off his boots. He’d driven four hours and was still standing on the rag rug by the kitchen door in his mud boots, and Adam knew it was deliberate, that it meant that depending on what Adam had to say, Ronan would have no compunction about turning right around and driving the four hours back down to Singer’s Falls. “Why did you call me?”

Adam knew that nothing less than the truth would keep Ronan there. He was stuck, because the truth was, he didn’t know. Worthless explanations about the cat died on his tongue. “I don’t know,” he admitted, and he fought down a grimace, because the truth seared in his throat like whiskey, like bile, like a man under geas always to lie, lest he should be struck dumb forever.

Ronan did not take off his boots, nor did he move. He was waiting, Adam realized. How had he never realized all these years that Ronan’s stubbornness was often merely patience in a studded leather jacket?

“I wanted to see you.”

Ronan snorted, but he also cast his eyes aside, and Adam realized with a pang that his answer had hurt him, as surely as Gansey had used to hurt Adam with his thoughtlessness, merely by being himself, all those years ago. He wondered if Gansey had experienced this same trapped feeling: trapped between the truth of who he was, and the comforting lie of who those around him might wish him to be.

Don’t break him, Adam. He’s not as tough as he seems.

For the first time since his arrival, Adam let himself really look at Ronan.

He was dressed much the same as usual, black jeans and a tee-shirt with the sleeves hacked off. Little wisps of hay clung to his pants, and there was dirt under his blunt fingernails.

He was unshaven, was working on a kind of five-o’clock shadow-turned-beard. His dull ice-chip blue eyes were sunken, as if he wasn’t sleeping much.

He seemed less, somehow. Pulled-in on himself. Instead of standing, his body electric with coiled energy, tethered to the Earth only by the tenuous grace of gravity, he simply stood, mud boots planted on the rag rug.

It was unfair how good he still looked, when Adam was already finding new gray hairs every time he looked in the mirror.

There came a whirring, gagging noise from the other room, and Ronan was looking away, both of them casting their eyes toward the living room.

By the time Adam stepped through the doorway, Ronan had already found Hal. He watched as Ronan gentled his hand against the cat’s heaving side, and Adam was struck by the memory of a much younger Ronan, his face smooth and handsome, lifting a sleeping mouse to press it to his cheek.

Ronan’s voice was uncharacteristically sympathetic. “One down, eight to go, huh bud?”

Something clenched inside of Adam.

He walked away. He had to.

In the bathroom he leaned over the sink and stared into his own eyes in the mirror. The darkness at the center felt like it would swallow him up.

There was the scrape of boots and Adam caught sight of Ronan in the mirror behind him, lounging in the bathroom doorway, his eyes pitiless as the kind of cold snap that makes kittens climb up into the nice warm car engine to die.

“Are you scrying?” There was contempt in his voice.

“No.” Maybe. Adam might have been doing it automatically. It was easier, sometimes, than looking at his face, than meeting his own eyes.

“You can’t run away from this.”

Adam glared, turning to push past Ronan. Ronan followed him at arm’s length, a shadow with a heavy tread.

Adam made himself stop in the darkened upstairs hallway. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’ll make up the guest bed. You can stay the night and head out tomorrow.”

“Are we really not gonna talk about it?” Now Ronan sounded angry, and Adam’s irregular pulse settled. This had become well-trod ground toward the end of their relationship. Ronan, angry. Adam, unforgivable.

“What is there to talk about?”

“Why did you call me?”

“The cat.” It was such a blatantly obvious lie that neither of them so much as acknowledged it.

“You can’t keep doing this to me.”

Adam pressed his lips together. “Don’t pick up next time, then.”

“That’s not–” Ronan sounded angry now– “You’re the one–”

“I know.” Adam wanted to look away. He wanted to look away. He wanted to scry into the abyss, but he knew the memory of Ronan was waiting for him there, like ink filtering down through water, spread across the horizon, vast and nebulous and all-consuming and beautiful and safe.

Adam took a painful breath. “Tamquam–”

Ronan made a low noise in his throat and wheeled away from him, his fingers laced behind his head, his shoulders tight and tense.

“Don’t. Don’t fucking say that. That’s not. It’s not fair.”

“Ronan–”

“No. Stop.”

Adam took a step forward. “I miss you,” He said savagely. “There hasn’t been anyone else for me.”

“Maybe I have someone else.” The words came out awkwardly, sort of sideways, as if Ronan’s mouth didn’t believe them any more than his heart did. Ronan may have been a lot of things, but a liar wasn’t one of them.

Adam reached out and took Ronan’s hand and Ronan flinched and turned his face to watch Adam through the corners of his eyes, as if looking at him head-on was too much for him.

They ended up pressed against the wall of the shadowy hallway, Ronan’s body a taut arc, shoulders and fists pressed against the plaster, only touching Adam where his cock graced his lips, collided with his soft pallet and Adam ached to work a finger up inside of Ronan, to see if he’d be tight, unfucked since Adam’s hands had left his skin for the last time. To see if Ronan’s body remembered his touch the way Adam’s still remembered his.

It felt safer this way, under cover of darkness, the diffuse streetlamp light falling through the doorways in soft bars, the part in the movie where the two estranged lovers press long-overdue I love you’s against each others’ skin and all the silly superficialities that drove them apart in the first place are silently and painlessly pardoned, forever and ever, Amen.

Instead, Ronan made a choked noise that sounded like a sob and pressed his knuckles between his teeth.

In bed after, alone in Ronan’s arms, Adam closed his eyes. In the privacy of his own mind, he tested out the truth, hefted it, exploring its density, its impenetrability.

I’m scared that you’ll die and I won’t even know.

He didn’t know how long he’d slept.

The sheets were cool, pressed flat and glowing a faded cornflower blue in the moonlight. Adam passed a hand over them, disoriented, and for a moment wondered if he’d dreamt him, there in his bed. If he’d slipped from his own thoughts into Ronan’s dreams, as if into a warm bath.

He found the walls were lower when he was asleep.

He sensed him more than he heard him and lifted his head.

Ronan stood shadowy in the bedroom doorway. He was wearing his boots and his hands left smudges on the white paint of the lintel.

When Adam finally understood, his ear throbbed, hot and sick, and for a moment he felt dizzy.

“He’s–?”

“Yeah.” Ronan sounded rough. For the first time, Adam wondered if it was easier for him. He’d assumed it would be, growing up on a farm, that Ronan would be well-used to living shoulder-to-shoulder with death, but, well.

A field of sleeping cows. A tiny field mouse cuddled up to his cheek, tender and wild. Non mortem, somni fratrem.

It was rare that Adam suffered an attack of conscience, but he was suddenly, woozily, horribly aware of what he’d asked of Ronan when he’d brought him here.

Wordlesslessly he pulled back the sheets and held out an arm.

Shedding clothes as he went, Ronan fell stiffly into bed and Adam pulled him closer, tucking Ronan’s head under his chin, tingling at the scrape of stubble on stubble, and ached to say Maybe if he’d gone sooner it could’ve brought us back together last June.

Instead, he pressed a palm to Ronan’s mouth and felt his lips move against him in a kiss.

They fell asleep like that, with their heads on the same pillow, their dreams all tangled together.

#cw animal death mention #pynch divorce era #pynch #adam parrish #ronan lynch #trc #trc fic #the raven cycle #the raven cycle fanfic #so it is written #posty mcpostface

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harlotsforcinnamon · 2 days ago

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Nowhere Man (Can You See Me at All?)

(The one where Declan hired the Gray Man to kill Niall. Also on Ao3!)

Declan Lynch.

When Colin Greenmantle had faxed him the file, the name had jumped out at him. Holding the manila file folder in his hand, the Gray Man knew with a certainty cool and smooth as a river rock that fate had brought him back to this specific backwater of Virginia for a reason.

It was not that he had any compunctions about going after a former employer. In fact, it wouldn’t even have been the first time. He was loathe to burn bridges, but given the nature of the job for which Declan Lynch had hired him, he found it highly unlikely that the boy ever planned to reach out again.

After all, he’d only had the one father.

The struggle was brief and violent, the time elapsed between kicking in the door, throwing Declan against the wall so he bounced painfully off the window casement, and Declan rolling under his right cross to snap up with a left hook, no more than a breath, a couple of frantic heartbeats.

The gun wasn’t so much a surprise as a curiosity. But then time flickered and the gun seemed to jump from Declan’s hand to the Gray Man’s, as if the phenakistoscope of events had skipped a couple of frames, and Declan was on the floor, bleeding.

Looking up at the Gray Man, Declan’s heart banged in his chest. They had never met in person when Declan had reached out to the Gray Man, but looking at him, who else could this be?

Adrenaline was spiking through him, rattling his extremities against the carpeted hardwood. He watched those expert hands turn over his gun, and knew with the unshakable certainty of imminent demise that one of the last things his father had ever seen was those same hands wrapped around a tire iron.

Declan wondered for the first time what Niall had been thinking in his final moments.

If he were to overlay his present racing thoughts over his father’s last ones, at what exact point would they begin to align? It would be perhaps the first time in both their lives. Finally seeing eye-to-eye, right at the end.

Declan wondered if Niall realized, in the end.

If he saw the shadow of Declan’s hand in the Gray Man’s.

Declan Lynch laid out on the floor below him, gun in his hand, The Gray man hesitated.

Logically, he knew he was in a high school dorm. Had been hanging around campus all day, casing the place, mentally mapping his entrances and exits.

But the boy before him looked very young to have hired a hitman. Looked exceedingly young to have hired a hitman a year and a half ago.

What could have made someone so young go to such lengths to kill his own father?

The Gray man thought of his own brother.

Slowly, as though his body couldn’t quite believe the signals his brain was sending out, he lowered the gun.

The gravity of the moment oppressed. That this ruined dorm room held the only two people to know who had really had Niall Lynch killed oppressed.

“Don’t tell my brother.”

It was not the kind of thing the Gray Man expected to hear in the wrecked landscape of a high school dorm, gun in his hand, his prey broken and bleeding on the floor.

“Which one?”

Declan’s eyes glittered, almost black, as he wiped a thread of blood from his mouth.

“Take a guess.”

Brothers. The Gray man knew about brothers.

“What’s it worth to you?” He doesn’t do this. Hadn’t done this since the early days, when he was young and eager and not too picky about how he got his information.

But from what he’d heard, the eldest Lynch boy wasn’t too picky himself when it came to favors.

Declan paused, half-sitting up, and in that pause the Gray Man crossed to him, used his thumb to wipe away the smear of blood at the corner of his lips that Declan had missed.

Testingly, slowly, eyes on the Gray Man all the while, Declan dipped his chin and took the Gray Man’s thumb into his mouth.

The Gray Man let out his breath in one long slow exhale. Control. Control.

Growing bolder, Declan wrapped a hand around the Gray Man’s forearm. Pressed his mouth against the inside of the Gray Man’s wrist. Not kissing. Just skin to skin. Somehow it seemed even more intimate a gesture than kissing. Tender, somehow, in the way a snake sliding its glistening coils around a mouse is tender.

“You were my man,” Declan breathed against his skin. “Once.”

#Graylan #the Gray Man #Mr. Gray #Dean Allen #declan lynch #trc #the raven cycle #trc fic #the raven cycle fanfic #posty mcpostface #so it is written

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