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I do love the phrase executive dysfunction bc the image it conjures is of a bunch of people wearing business suits around a long oval conference table  arguing with each other to the point where they’re getting into physical fights, but in the background there’s just a big empty whiteboard with a To Do list with one item on it and that item is “take shower”

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i probably won't be able to succinctly connect all the points and i'm sure it's been said before but there is just So Much biblical allegory in adam and ronan's relationship like. the way that ronan (though believing in his own god) Is a sort of god and cabeswaren is simultaneously the nothing he came from and the eden he creates. tangentially the whole parallel of genesis with the lynch brothers losing their father and their eventual becoming a family again (on the seventh day the lynch brothers discovered they were friends once more). adam being the first man, adam being his first kiss. adam always described as coming from dust, like he was the first of his kind. the way that adam never knew who he was until he found himself tangled up with cabeswaren and ronan, like coming into your own when you find the faith that works for you. adam's hands being cabeswaren's hands, which are also ronan's hands because they're cabeswaren's, this sort of father-son-holy spirit everything is everything and still they're all independent of one another. and even just the way that ronan, this god of creation, is obsessed with adam's hands, this common symbol for creation itself. the pivotal moment of adam losing the use of his left ear, which coincides with the instant he starts seeing ronan as someone who deeply cares for him (left commonly meaning temptation, right referring to righteousness). there is probably so much more i could add but i'm only a third through bllb on this reread and i have the whole dreamer trilogy to sort through god Help Me

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religious guilt induces a very specific kind of shame, especially when you’re queer. i think we can all agree that ronan lynch never felt the need to conform to heteronormativity or felt ashamed of being gay (at least, i really don’t). but guilt is etched into religious practice. the reason for that is: believing in god is being forever unable to escape him, it’s surveillance, it’s feeling watched and listened to all the time. would you share every thought you’ve ever had out loud? well, you don’t have to, god’s in your head. the privacy of intimate thought is not a thing for religious people. add that to social injunctions pressuring you, being a Teenager, trying to survive your trauma, and you get yourself a nice, ugly, inescapable spiral to fall into

there’s no guilt involved in that scene, but ronan praying for adam when he sees him for the first time is a good example of that, in my opinion. look, god, you’re seeing what i am seeing, right? you know how i feel already, you are omniscient, please, let me (fill in the blank: have him/keep him/understand myself)

sexuality wise, i always write older ronan as an exhibitionist not only because it’s hot but because i think a lot of us who grew up religious are used to performing for a transcendent gaze. sometimes, there’s solace in turning this into something erotic, because it gives you agency over your own wants, and in a way, frees you from the shame (again, especially if you’re queer, and subversion makes your blood run a lil hotter). i think that’s what ethel cain’s perverts is all about, actually

also, on that guilt thing, i really love the idea of ronan lynch feeling guilty for adoring someone other than god, not just loving but adoring; that ought to create crisis… that’s another root of religious guilt, being met with something, or someone, that makes you question your faith: god or being gay? god or being a sexual being? god or losing control? god or adam parrish? making it to that stage of “why would i chose? both give me happiness” is a tedious, solitary and anxiety-inducing process, but i strongly believe that ronan gets there pretty fast, mainly when he figures out that he is, in fact, a god of his own

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maybe i dreamt you

the greywarren and his magician

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“At night, he’d sit on the end of Ronan’s childhood bed and meet Ronan in dreamspace-Ronan, asleep, in a dream, Adam, awake, in a trance.”

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The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater as a Middle-Grade book (portfolio project)

Print here

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what was noah doing between saving gansey's life and appearing at aglionby just in time to be a monmouth roommate? what was it that first drew him back and start manifesting?

hi anon!! thank you so much for the prompt, i really love this question! this is what i came up with, i hope you like it!!

Time didn’t mean the same thing to Noah as it meant to the rest of the world; time was circular no matter what, but Noah was living in it as it turned, everywhere at once. Then and now, before and after – the distinction was lost in the tumble and decay that made up every facet of Noah’s life after death.

So, for Noah, there wasn’t really a time before befriending Gansey and Ronan and Adam and Blue. He was always their friend. There were just times that they didn’t know it yet.

Keep reading

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trc x twitter smau part 26/? ‼️

part 25

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📜💀 “Six for the truth over solace in lies” 💀📜

The Sixth House: the Emperor’s Reason, the Master Wardens.

Master Warden of the Library, Palamedes Sextus and his cavalier, Camilla Hect.

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kubo pynch 🤲

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i couldn’t keep this in my folder any longer …….. THIGHS!!!!!!!!!!!! 😋😋😋😋😋

i’m working on characters sheets also for Ronan and Gansey so i’ll keep u posted 💜🎾

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🥹😍😍

persephone and adam🔮

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“Hey.” Ronan’s voice was rough from lack of sleep, small in the vastness of Monmouth Manufacturing. It took Gansey a second to carefully set aside a piece of cardboard and peel his eyes away from his model of Henrietta, removing his glasses and rubbing one dry and tired eye with the heel of his hand.

Ronan was a blur in the darkness, lit softly blue by the screen of his Gameboy DS, abandoned in a tangle of sheets. He floated above the darkness, Gansey’s bed turned ship in a moonlit sea.

Gansey unfolded his limbs and stretched, wincing at the stiffness of his joints, and picked his way down Main Street, joining Ronan on the bed, leaning back on one arm.

Ronan, lying on his belly, craned over one shoulder to watch him out of the corner of his eye.

Daringly, Gansey stretched out a hand and traced the cruel hooks of Ronan’s tattoo, thrusting its claws up past the collar of his friend’s shirt, grasping at jugulars. It was a move Gansey would never have attempted in the daytime, but way out here on their little life raft in the middle of a vast sea, time didn’t count, somehow.

Gansey had never told him, but sometimes in the great silent void of his warehome, he could hear Ronan crying in his sleep.

Gansey skated the pads of his fingers up over the close-shorn stubble of Ronan’s scalp. Ronan leaned his mouth against his own shoulder and closed his eyes, a vulnerable slice of a boy in quarter-profile, his lashes a sooty smudge against his cheekbone.

Ronan’s voice was almost swallowed up by the vastness of the space, a soft-edged scrap of blue-gray silk in a world where light only served to accentuate the darkness.

“What was I like? Before?”

The question caught Gansey off-guard, and his fingers stilled. He was used to the question, put to him by his parents, too polite to more than imply their disapproval of his feral animal. He was used to it from teachers, those who had a man-to-man way of speaking to him, who brought him articles on archeological digs and cast nervous and disbelieving glances at Ronan, slumped in his seat with his tie looped loosely around his throat, like just enough rope to hang himself with. He was used to it from Adam, who’d put the question to him time and again in his exasperation, nursing scraped knuckles and raw feelings, flinging out the question as Ronan charged off in his father’s BMW, music a burnt-rubber-black obscenity against the backdrop of a shattered afternoon.

The question always made Gansey’s heart clench. The answer was a pearl, and Gansey had always thought it would take a knife to prise it from him.

But what was Ronan Lynch if not a knife in the guise of a boy?

Oh, Ronan.

As Gansey considered, Ronan winched his way across the bed until he was curled on his side around the crook of Gansey’s knee. As if the two of them lay before a roaring fire, exchanging ghost stories, perhaps, hilarious in their flimsiness under the onslaught of light and warmth, two lazy princes of Virginia, each peerless but for the other.

“Well,” Gansey said slowly, nerves jangling bright and sharp. “You’ve always had a mouth on you.”

Ronan pressed a thumb to the full bow of his lower lip, a ghost of Gansey’s habitual gesture, and snorted. “Thank my dad. I was encouraged to pick up swearing at a young age.”

Gansey closed his eyes. He felt clear-headed in that way that sometimes came with sleep-deprivation. He wanted to press his own thumb to Ronan’s lower lip. He leaned back on both hands instead and tipped his chin up, letting his head hang back between his shoulders.

“You used to tell me stories,” Gansey addressed the rafters. “That summer we spent hauling trash out of this place. You’d tease me with stories about heroes and shapeshifters to get me to take breaks.”

“I used to spin ‘em out longer just so we could sit in the shade another few minutes.” Ronan’s voice sounded brittle, and Gansey kept his eyes closed, his head tipped back. Privacy was a gift judiciously meted out.

“You had a truck. You used to drive it out into the fields and we’d lie on the truck bed after the sun went down and you’d make up the names of constellations.”

“And you’d tell me all the real ones. All the ones you could see from the ley lines in England and Wales. All their stories. Except the ones I already knew.” Ronan cleared his throat.

Gansey let the memory wash over himself for a moment. It was something he rarely allowed himself these days, because hot of the heels of that little seizure of joy, the last brilliant gasp of sunset light over the horizon, always came a wave of darkness, of pain, now knowing what was to come, overwritten over the memories of before–

Before.

But still, Gansey remembered the heat of the truck bed, almost uncomfortably hot after a sunny day sitting out on the cracked, weedy tarmac of the Monmouth Manufacturing parking lot. He remembered sweat sticking his tee shirt to his back, even as the descending darkness coaxed goosebumps out along his skin. He remembered his arm growing tired and his voice pleasantly hoarse as he pointed up into the vast smear of stars above them, glorious in their multitude, telling Ronan about the Seven Sisters, the Bear, the Dragon.

He remembered Ronan leaning up on one elbow, Gansey’s voice dying in his throat as Ronan had gazed down at him, unguarded, bold as a firework and twice as bright.

The kiss had tasted clean as a mountain spring, cold and melting.

A week later, Ronan had stepped out onto the front porch and frowned at the purple-gray gravel of the Barns’ driveway. It’d looked wrong in the early-morning light, dark and sticky.

Some blood never washed off.

Ronan’s voice ached in the close darkness. “I was more, then.”

“No.” The denial sprang to Gansey’s lips so quickly that it was only after his ears registered it that he realized the truth of it. Ronan Before had known contentment that Ronan After could only access like this, with his nose pressed against the plate glass windows of Gansey’s memories.

But Ronan After was a complex creature, who’d lived and died and been buried alongside his father and had come back to Gansey a twisted mirror version of himself, sharpened by grief, all edges and hard lines.

Gansey knew for every talon blazed across his skin there was another hooked into his heart, a hair's-breadth from exsanguination.

“That version of me–” Ronan’s voice caught. “Do you miss him?”

Gansey opened his eyes. Ronan was a misery in the darkness. He could taste it in the back of his throat.

“Sometimes,” Gansey admitted. “But I’ve never wished that he was here instead of you.”

There was a beat, and then Ronan surged to his knees and Gansey was pulling him forward by the front of his shirt.

Kissing Ronan was a forest fire, a car crash, a broken bone. It was new growth poking hopeful green leaves up toward a sun that hadn’t found its way to the forest floor in ages. It was perfect strangers clutching each other on their knees in the middle of the road, eyes stinging with blood and tears, babbling thank God, thank God, thank God. It was the place where a bone healed stronger for the break, forever marked by it, forever altered.

Gansey leaned his forehead against Ronan’s and tried to transmit his thoughts without words.

I am not leaving you. Even if you try to push me away, I will stand by you.

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she loves him

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It won’t be what you imagined, but it’ll be just as good

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witchy piece for @foundfamilyzine

you can still get a pdf version here!!