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robindrake93 · 3 years

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Kavinsky’s relationship with Ronan is so interesting when looked at from Kavinsky’s POV.

Kavinsky was skulking about Monmouth for Ronan before he knew that Ronan was a dreamer, which meant that he had some interest in Ronan as a person (which we know doesn’t happen because the dream pack and his family are...dreams). Kavinsky then finds out that Ronan is like him. They’re the same. They’re dreamers and Kavinsky has never met another one in the world. He went from being alone to being one of two. His whole world changed again.

Kavinsky spends like a year trying to tease the confession out of Ronan. Ronan is really only interested in finding the bottom of a bottle with Kavinsky (and racing and fighting with him). Kavinsky is the window in which Ronan’s bird tries to fly into repeatedly and violently. We can assume Kavinsky was met with failure because The Dream Thieves happens.

Kavinsky flirts and he insults in the same breath because he is the instrument that Ronan loves to hurt himself on (and he’s not a stupid boy who can’t read the fucking room - Gansey has a literal collar for Ronan; K isn’t pulling Gansey’s Dog from his ass). But Kavinsky isn’t the only one with sharp, cutting edges and Ronan (intentionally and otherwise) hurts Kavinsky too.

So time passes and Ronan is the same as he’s always been and Kavinsky gets impatient and desperate. He dreams Ronan’s leather bracelets, punctured with teeth marks like the ones in reality, the details noted carefully and lovingly.

“I know you” is what the gift says. “I know you’re a dreamer and I know you chew your bracelets when you’re unhappy and I’ve been paying attention because I care. Look.” Kavinsky leaves.

The next time they see each other, Ronan tosses him a pair of sunglasses. The ones that Kavinsky wears regularly. This is the acknowledgment, the “I know you too.” Except the tint is off, the lenses are slightly wrong (and oh I bet that haunts Kavinsky later, this tiny sign that Ronan isn’t as into Kavinsky as Kavinsky is him). But still. The fact that the sunglasses exist says that Ronan is accepting the gift, he’s returning it, and he’s trying. Which is more than Kavinsky got out of him before.

Things happen fast after that.

Because they’ve always shared dreams and been aware that they were sharing when Ronan dreams of Kavinsky, I’m assuming that the first one - the sex dream - featured a real Kavinsky (although I don’t think Ronan knew). Kavinsky falls asleep and into a dream where he’s fucking Ronan against the hood of a car. This isn’t Kavinsky’s dream, either. It’s Ronan’s. Ronan who controls his dreams. To Kavinsky, this has to seem like a sign that Ronan is very into him.

They’re both dreamers. Kavinsky lives surrounded by dream people and dream objects...why couldn’t they take a dream relationship to reality with them?

Ronan crashes Gansey’s car because of the night horror and Kavinsky shows up to save his life. Ronan’s life is valuable. Except Ronan isn’t grateful, he’s freaking out for no reason over the car. And there’s a moment where Kavinsky literally does not understand what the big deal is; Ronan can just dream a new one. It’s easy. He mentions that Ronan might have a head injury because he doesn’t know that Ronan doesn’t know Kavinsky is a dreamer.

But Kavinsky is going to take care of this and his stupid idiot boyfriend (what else would Ronan be? They courted, they fucked, dreams are reality). Kavinsky flirts on the drive over and Ronan sulks and Kavinsky says in words what he’s been saying in actions; I know what you are, you’re just like me.

Kavinsky is no ones dog. He doesn’t have a Gansey to distract him from his life. He lives with reminders of how bad life is and he’s an addict in a downward spiral. So the process of dreaming is something Kavinsky has had ample time and privacy to streamline.

Ronan doesn’t make cars because he’s keeping himself secret. By showing him the cars and that it’s even possible, Kavinsky says, “we don’t have to be a secret. You don’t have to limit and twist yourself into a tiny box. The world is literally ours.”

I’m not sure how they went from ‘let’s dream a new car’ to ‘let’s get drunk’ and can only assume that it was old habit to drink in each other’s presence but there’s a time skip where we next hear from them via Gansey. More specifically, via Kavinsky being at once jealous over Gansey (probably) being in a relationship with Ronan and where he both reassures Gansey and rips off the bandaid about the car. Kavinsky sends Gansey a dick pic with an Irish flag tied to his erection, a roundabout way of saying that Ronan’s already ridden his dick.

Kavinsky takes Ronan home after the field, they (or at least Ronan) drink alcohol and Kavinsky puts on a racing movie. Kavinsky texts Gansey his dick pick and the news about the car, and he’s not even next to Ronan. He’s giving Ronan space. I’d say the phone thing was invading Ronan’s privacy but Ronan doesn’t use his phone so...there’s nothing there to invade. When Ronan wakes up, Kavinsky tries to start a conversation. And it’s a pretty normal conversation; you handle your liquor well, oh hey you aren’t responding are you okay, wait you inherited dreaming from your dad?

Ronan leaves the room. He’s not very talkative. This probably isn’t going how Kavinsky imagined it would. Again, Kavinsky is an addict and his boyfriend is being more prickly than usual so he gets high. Kavinsky makes a joke instead of confessing to texting Gansey what was basically a “he wants me more than you” text. And Ronan responds with violence. Which Kavinsky points out and his only option is to lay his cards on the table. Kavinsky doesn’t want to play chase, he wants this thing between them to settle. So he spills that he saw Ronan dream the blood and he knew.

And all Ronan asks is how he did it. His hackles have finally soothed. Kavinsky almost literally jumps on the chance to teach Ronan and spend more time in his company; the company of someone like him in all the ways that matter.

There’s more beer to entice Ronan to stay, a little extra incentive to spend time with Kavinsky. Ronan’s first attempts aren’t interesting for someone who’s house is full of one trick magical dream items. Like I said above, Kavinsky has the dreaming process streamlined. He takes his pill, he gets what he wants from his dream and he dies for this. His heart stops for a few seconds. We don’t know if Kavinsky takes the pills to dream every time or if it’s just to make this fast and easy for Ronan’s training. If he does it’s because he’s suicidal, and if he doesn’t then it’s because he’s at the point that he’ll die for Ronan.

What does Kavinsky bring back? Something boring, like Ronan’s dream thing, but it’s complimentary. The cap to Ronan’s pen, the missing piece, that fits and matches perfectly. Which is what Kavinsky thinks they are to each other.

Kavinsky gets his jealous dig in about Gansey’s relationship with Ronan, which makes Ronan almost leave. This time, when Ronan tells Kavinsky to back off about Gansey, Kavinsky does. Because he wants Ronan to stay and he knows Ronan has a temper. Back to the safe stuff, to training, and this time when they dream together it’s intentional.

And when they get back? Ronan is still and he doesn’t react when Kavinsky touches him but he does open his hand when asked what he has. He laughs at Kavinsky’s joke, which doesn’t insult Gansey or insinuate that they’re in a relationship. Ronan laughs, a good sign, the best sign, and Kavinsky flirts. They open up a little, the first time that Ronan has shown any interest in Kavinsky’s home life, and then it’s back to dreaming together.

When Ronan dreams back a lit bomb, Kavinsky saves their lives by throwing it out the window before it explodes. They talk civilly and Kavinsky offers Ronan some cocaine; both to help him dream and because people who do cocaine just like to share with their friends and romantic partners (not diving deeper into this but trust me, it’s a thing).

They’re together so long that days have gone by. This is the first time that they aren’t fighting and antagonizing each other. It’s just dreams and each other. There’s still beer and cocaine because they’re addicts who are hurting, but they’re both comfortable with it. Ronan gifts Kavinsky with a twizzler, which Kavinsky takes because he loves Ronan.

Kavinsky thinks Ronan’s ready for the Camaro but gets angry when he realizes Ronan still doesn’t get how to dream. Ronan gets angry too, takes his failure out on Kavinsky because he just doesn’t get it. And Kavinsky points out how he’s been practicing.

So two things happen next. Ronan says he can’t go back without the car, to which Kavinsky replies to the effect of “then don’t.” He’s asking Ronan to stay with him. And Ronan replies that he’s going to try again, he’s going to dream with Kavinsky again, he’s staying. And that’s all that Kavinsky hears, he doesn’t realize that Ronan meant he was getting the car back so that he could leave.

A new pill comes out, one that keeps Ronan in his body but kicks his mind out. This is a pill that Kavinsky has tested before (once resulting in a girl overdosing) but now he’s got it perfected; this isn’t supposed to hurt Ronan. And Kavinsky re-enacts their first shared dream; Ronan against the hood, Kavinsky pressed up behind him, tracing the tattoo. They’ve already been here before.

But Ronan is gone, back to dreams, and when he comes to, he’s done it. He’s brought back the Camaro and it is perfect. Ronan’s success is Kavinsky’s success (which I’m sure he attributes to his magic dick and phenomenal teaching skills). They are perfect. This is a perfect moment for Kavinsky, a shining moment.

And Ronan crushes it immediately by telling him that actually he’s going back to Gansey; that he wasn’t going to stay. Kavinsky is so surprised that he stands in blank shock. Whatever defensive shields he has slam into place, a wall between himself and his boyfriend who refuses to stay. He can’t believe it.

Ronan mocks Kavinsky for thinking that they’d stay together and that this strengthened anything between them. But Kavinsky still tries to change Ronan’s mind by telling him he doesn’t need Gansey. And then Ronan breaks up with him. Ronan basically says that Kavinsky was nothing at all and he didn’t care about him.

Kavinsky is heartbroken. He says he’ll burn Ronan. He’s a jilted lover, spurned and ashamed and hurt. Ronan is leaving him. Kavinsky puts his finger gun to Ronan’s temple - one last touch - and says he’ll see Ronan later. The exact verbiage is “in the streets”, which might be a joke from Maggie about how they’re no longer seeing each other in the sheets.

But he doesn’t burn Ronan right away. He dreams him a car and lets Ronan know that he’s still jealous over Gansey.

The car gets no reaction and Kavinsky escalates in his attempts to Ronan’s attention. I don’t know how Kavinsky convinces himself that kidnapping Matthew was a good idea. But I want to know if it was before or after he realized that Matthew is a dream thing. When Kavinsky kidnaps Matthew? I bet he didn’t even have to resort to force. Just “hey kid, I’m Ronan’s friend, wanna get a milkshake?”

And he’d take Matthew to get a milkshake and sit in the booth opposite him and drill him with questions. And come to realize that Ronan dreamed him. Now that Kavinsky is actually looking at Matthew, he sees the signs of a dream thing; knows Ronan’s dreams intimately enough to recognize his handiwork. Kavinsky lives with dream things that are so real that no one can tell the difference. And Ronan did a really shitty job making Matthew. The kid has zero personality. He’s essentially a mirror: if K mentions he likes something then Matthew starts talking about it and he copies body language and speech patterns. He wasn’t just made to like people, he was made to be liked. (This was based off the snippet of CDH that was released and I don’t know if later installments negate any of this).

So if Kavinsky hands him a pill and says “swallow this” then Matthew does it and that’s how Kavinsky gets him into the trunk. He literally just asked. It’s that easy because Matthew was made by a child who had extremely base desires...who is very bad at realism.

Kavinsky sends Ronan texts from both his own phone and Matthew’s phone. This is what got Ronan’s attention; he calls. He’s never called Kavinsky before in his life, has never even texted him back before. So this is huge.

It’s important to note here than Kavinsky has replaced real life people with dreams and that he has to practice to get good at making something(one). People are replaceable. Dreams even more so. Matthew is barely a person, he’s a bad creation, and he’s replaceable. This is the key factor; Mathew can be redreamed. If something happens to this Matthew - like an explosion, say - then Ronan can always dream a new, better one. Kavinsky can help him. The point being that this is not actually a high stakes move for Kavinsky. This is breaking Ronan’s toy with the intent of gaining Ronan‘a attention and promising to buy him a new one (a better one, even).

When Ronan threatens Kavinsky on the phone, it’s nothing. Ronan has threatened violence before and it’s only fair for Ronan to make the same threats Kavinsky did. The important, takeaway is that Ronan is coming to see Kavinsky.

At the Fourth of July party, Kavinsky makes an entrance. He wants Ronan to see that he’s fine without him, better in fact.

But Ronan brought Gansey. And Kavinsky cannot resist a jab at Gansey, whom he feels stole his other half. He tells Gansey that he hopes Ronan can’t get it up for him. Ronan attacks him, demanding his dream brother back.

Kavinsky says he doesn’t know. This may or may not be a lie. Kavinsky brings up their relationship again, because that’s what this is about. He says, again, “I can’t believe you left me.” When this doesn’t get through to Ronan, Kavinsky asks Ronan to dream with him.

Ronan does.

Kavinsky is being attacked but Ronan came. He flirts, using a line he’s used before.

And it doesn’t work.

Kavinsky is being attacked by the forest and he tells Ronan that sometimes you have to take what you want; asking again if Ronan wants him, telling him that Ronan doesn’t need to ask before he takes Kavinsky. Again, he bears his heart to Ronan. He’s saying that Ronan is all he has because Ronan is so irreversibly tied to dreaming, dreaming is the only thing there is. Kavinsky says that if Ronan stays in the relationship, they’ll have each other.

Ronan tells him that it’s not enough, that Kavinsky is not enough. Here, Kavinsky begs that it’s not because of Gansey, that Gansey isn’t better than him. And then it comes out that Ronan would rather have a straight man than Kavinsky. A straight man who isn’t a dreamer.

Ronan says that there’s more to life and Kavinsky says that it isn’t true. Ronan says cars, sex, and drugs but he’s also talking about dreaming and that’s how Kavinsky takes it. Everything and a large portion of the people in Kavinsky’s life are dreams. He has no reason to think he won’t be continually replacing people and objects with dream copies. This is his whole life, it’s all he has, he’s made it from nothing. And this is when Kavinsky realizes that Ronan really doesn’t feel the same and isn’t going to return his feelings.

Kavinsky loses the will to live because he’d hinged everything on Ronan. Without Ronan, Kavinsky didn’t want to live. The last little thing he had in his life that was an equal, snuffed out Kavinsky’s flame. So Kavinsky summons a creature that’s essentially his heartbreak; not just this one but every heartbreak and all of his self loathing. This creature hates Kavinsky as much as it hates the rest of the world because it’s Kavinsky’s feelings manifested.

Kavinsky has escalated again. Now he’s threatening to kill himself. He looks Ronan in the eye and asks Ronan to stop him.

Ronan brings back an albino night horror. It fights with Kavinsky’s fire dragon and both boys just watch it. This is so interesting because Ronan’s only reaction is to tell Kavinsky to stop feeling. Stop having feelings for me. Kavinsky says that he can’t. Again, the dragon and the night horror are manifestations of Kavinsky and Ronan’s feelings; they’re metaphors come to life.

Ronan is still focused on his brother, though. Kavinsky even tells him that he’s missing the point of all this, which was to sort through their feelings (or fight through them like the dragon and horror were doing). Ronan finds Matthew, mildly drugged but fine and about to free himself anyway. And Kavinsky finally sees that Ronan really doesn’t care. So he stays in the path of their monstrous, overwhelming feelings made real and ignores Ronan’s pleas for him to get down because he knows Ronan will say whatever he needs to get Kavinsky to do what he wants.

And Kavinsky dies in flame, death via broken heart.

#rovinsky #ronan lynch #joseph kavinsky #the raven cycle #trc #the dream thieves #long post #I wrote this based on memory #and I haven’t read the dreamer trilogy #except the first little snippet of call down the hawk #so maybe something else has happened #to make something wrong #Idk or c

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morfinwen · 2 years

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For the Fandom Ask Game: The Raven Cycle, Red Vs. Blue, and the Cosmere (feel free to narrow this down to just one series if you need/want), please?

The Raven Cycle

I'm not even going to try to make this explainable to someone who hasn't read the books. Apologies for the incoherence.

favorite character: Richard Campbell Gansey the Third.

least favorite character: Barrington Whelk, devoid of virtually any good traits and holder of several awful ones. Joseph Kavinsky, partially because of his (to me) utterly inexplicable popularity with the fandom, partially because of who he is as a person.

brOTP: Gansey and Ronan. The Gangsey (Gansey, Ronan, Adam, Blue, Noah, and Henry) as a whole.

OTP: Gansey/Blue.

OT3: Not a thing for me.

NOTP: Ronan/Kavinsky. For so many reasons.

favorite storyline: One of my favorite, if not my very favorite recurring element is one or more characters coming to the aid of another, often in a way the other character didn't anticipate -- Ronan facing Adam's dad, Adam saving Ronan, Ronan and Gansey showing up at court for Adam, everyone looking for Blue when she's at Jesse's, everyone showing up when Gansey's underground at the estate, everyone refusing to hurt Adam when he's possessed, etc.

least favorite storyline: I think more could have been done with the demon, frankly.

what I wish had happened but didn’t: I wish there had been more exploration into the "king voice" thing.

what happened that I wish hadn’t: You can try to tell me they all forgot about Noah at the end, but i won't believe you.

Red vs Blue

... Yeah, this isn't going to make a whole lot of sense, either.

favorite character: Leonard Church. Or, more specifically, Alpha!Church and Epsilon!Church, who are effectively the same person. Not including the Director, who is also Leonard Church, and in some ways the same as Alpha and Epsilon, but also not really.

least favorite character: Malcolm Hargraves.

brOTP: Church and Carolina. Almost a literal brOTP.

OTP: Church/Tex and Carolina/York.

OT3: Not a thing.

NOTP: Some ships that are popular in the fandom, but i don't feel strongly negative about any canon ships.

favorite storyline: The Chorus arc is probably my favorite.

least favorite storyline: Well, i stopped watching sometime in season 15. I don't think it's terrible, but it lost my interest and never regained it.

what I wish had happened but didn’t: I would have liked to have seen more of the other AI fragments, especially like what we saw with Epsilon in seasons 12 and 13. A lot more AI bullet time!

what happened that I wish hadn’t: Eh, nothing i feel strongly about.

The Cosmere

Gonna restrict this to The Stormlight Archive.

favorite character: Shallan, followed closely by Kaladin.

least favorite character: Oh, who to pick? There's quite a list. I'll go with Sadeas, but all the prologues have built up Gavilar to be almost as bad (or possibly even worse!).

brOTP: Kaladin and Adolin.

OTP: Shallan/Adolin.

OT3: Nope.

NOTP: Same as above, nothing canon (at the moment) comes to mind.

favorite storyline: Oh, what to pick? I love a lot of things about all of the books, but i think there's something special about Kaladin's arc in the first book. If i could draw or animate or compose music, i would love to do something for the moment where he and the rest of Bridge Four decide to go back for the Kholin army. Just, incredible.

least favorite storyline: Not really a thing.

what I wish had happened but didn’t: Can't think of anything, offhand.

what happened that I wish hadn’t: Poor Elhokar should have had a chance to become a better king. (Not that i think it's bad from a narrative perspective or anything, but the poor guy deserved so much better).

Thanks for asking!

#ask #answer #valiantarcher

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willowbird · 4 years

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Congrats!! If you want, how about the first time Ronan sleeps over at St. Agnes? Like the pining!!

Yay! I was SO EXCITED to get a Ronan/Adam ask!! I may have gone a little overboard with the pining, but I hope you still like it <3 <3 This is actually my first Pynch ficlet! I hope you like it! Lemme know if you think I should post it on AO3 ^^; Since it’s my first time actually writing them and I haven’t read the books as many times as I’ve read AFTG I hope it’s okay!

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Ronan bounced the rubber ball against the sloped ceiling from where he lay on Adam’s bed, waiting for the other boy to get out of the shower. He’d been out, just driving around with no discernable purpose or direction, when it came around that time for Parrish to get out of work so he’d swung by and picked him up. There’d been no reason to say no when Adam had asked if he wanted to come up for a while. After all, he and Adam were friends -- no matter how much they seemed to bicker -- and Ronan liked being at St. Agnes. Sometimes, it was honestly more satisfying to be there than it was to be at Monmouth. Nothing beat being at the Barnes, but still -- St. Agness had a particular energy, it always had.

After all, Ronan Lynch was no stranger to St. Agnes. The hours he’d spent in the quiet pews could stack together to build a universe apart from the rest of the world, a separate realm that even the horrors inside his own mind couldn’t touch. And yet, since Adam came to live there, the hallowed halls of that familiar place had developed a completely new,,, feeling that Ronan had no idea how to feel about.

A part of Ronan wanted to be pissed off about it.

A bigger part of Ronan was fascinated in the way that the travelers in his father’s stories had always been fascinated by the glow of will-o’-the-wisps between the branches of the deep woods and frosted bogs. The peace that the church had once given him was spiked with something else now, something that fizzed like pop-rocks under his skin, and as annoying as that was -- he really couldn’t say that he hated it.

Considering he knew that the fizz of... enchantment was most definitely caused by the boy now living in that small, slanted room above the church? No, he really couldn’t say that he hated it at all.

Not to say that Adam I’ll-be-independent-if-it-kills-me Parrish didn’t make him want to punch his fist through a fucking brick wall -- because he absolutely did. But there was also something... undeniably right about the boy taking up residence above the church. After all, the infuriating pest already lived full time inside his head, he might as well sleep in the building that housed Ronan’s soul as well. At least he was fucking consistent.

The shabby door connecting the bedroom to the tiny bathroom creaked open and Ronan caught the ball on its rebound and didn’t throw it again, instead turning his head to look as Adam entered the room.

He did not expect to see Adam walk into the bedroom in nothing but a towel and instantly looked back up at the ceiling, throwing the ball again with a bit more force than necessary. Only his quick reflexes saved him from losing a fucking eye. He tried not to think about the way the other boy’s skin had been flushed pink from the heat of the shower, his hair damp and pushed haphazardly back from his face, exposing cheekbones and eyes that...

Okay, he tried -- that didn’t mean he succeeded.

“Sorry, it’ll just be a minute. I forgot to grab something to change into.” Adam’s voice was soft, lilted with the Henrietta accent in the way that only happened when he was either really emotional or perfectly at ease. Ronan would never tell him how much he loved hearing the edge of gravel and wild country grass around his vowels, not on pain of death, but that didn’t make it any less true.

“Take your time, Parrish. I don’t fucking care.” No one needed to know that the sigh that followed was relief at how nonchalant he had managed to make the words, instead of the dry irritation it sounded like.

Adam huffed a soft laugh and Ronan could feel the eye-roll being directed at him. He didn’t bother to hide his grin, just gave it a bit more teeth as he tossed the ball up and caught it again.

It was only another few minutes before the door creaked open again and Adam came out -- this time fully clothed. Ronan caught the ball and sat up, scooting over so that Adam could come over and sit down, which the other boy did with a flourish and a groan.

“Ugh, I just do not wanna do homework.”

“Then don’t.” Ronan shrugged and bounced the ball on the floor this time, angling it slightly so that when it rebounded it went toward Adam.

Adam caught it easily and bounced it back, timed perfectly with a familiar scoff. “Some of us care about school, you know.” Ronan waited for a beat, but when Adam didn’t follow that up with chastisement or prod for him to start caring about school, he gave a small shrug.

“Sure, but tomorrow is Saturday. It isn’t like you’ve got anything due tomorrow. You just got off work, learn how to fucking relax.” He caught the ball and held it for a moment, tilting his head back as he mimicked a thoughtful expression. “Oh, oh that’s right, you don’t know how to relax.” He gave a deep, mournful sigh and bounced the ball back at him. “Shame, for man so smart to be missing such a vital real-life skill.”

“Ha ha, you’re hilarious,” Adam sniped back, but his words were sharpened more with amusement than irritation.

“Oh, I know. I’m a regular comedy special,” Ronan agreed readily. “But that, actually, was not a joke.” He could press here. He could remind Adam that his whole world didn’t need to be as rigid as he was making it to be. He could tell him that he could afford to take a break every now and then, that he deserved to chill the fuck out. But if he did that he risked sounding too much like Gansey or repeating an argument that neither of them probably felt like jumping into tonight. So instead, he caught the ball and cocked his head, studying the other boy curiously.

Then he asked, “Where would you go? If you could go anywhere in the world with no consequences. What would you do? And not to accomplish anything great or whatever -- I’m talking just for fun.”

Adam held up his hand for the ball and Ronan tossed it to him. His eyes caught on the way he began to roll it between his palms, those long fingers curling around it, bony wrists twisting to pass it from one hand to the other. Ronan had the sudden urge to brush his lips over the prominent bump in each wrist. Not in a kiss -- but just to feel the protrusion against his mouth.

“That’s pretty broad,” Adam said with a hum, oblivious to his distraction. “There’s a lot of places I could go.”

“That’s the point. There’s no consequences, no limits. You could go anywhere.” He dragged his gaze away from those hands but this time they caught on the exposed bit of Adam’s collarbone on the way up to his face. “So pick a place, Parrish. Never known you to be so indecisive.”

Adam’s eyes dropped from where they’d been thoughtfully searching the ceiling, locking onto his as he flashed a sharp smirk. That expression cut him right between the ribs, twisted, and nestled in nice and deep for the winter -- because this, this was the Adam Parrish he couldn’t stop thinking about. Everyone seemed to underestimate him. Everyone thought he was so soft, thought he was so polite and sweet and yeah sure, he was all of those things, but that was only one part of him. It was just the surface setting to the multiverse that was Adam Parrish, and this sharp, biting, cunning side of him was closer to his core. Ronan knew he was one of the only people who knew that side was there, and was probably the only person who truly understood how much a part of him that facet was.

“All right,” he said, his voice smooth and low and Ronan had the distinct certainty that if that sound were a drink it would be a spiked mulled cider, husky and tart in a way that made your head light and your chest warm. “I’ll play. But you go first. Where would you go? Somewhere outside of the States,” he added, before Ronan could say the Barnes -- because he was apparently that predictable.

Ronan rolled his eyes, but shrugged and slipped off the bed, laying on the floor beside the bed and pillowing his hands under his head as he thought. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Adam stretch out on the bed on his stomach, hugging a pillow and using it to prop his head up a bit as he looked down at Ronan. The feel of Adam’s full and undivided attention on him did things to his pulse he didn’t want to think about.

“Probably Ireland,” he finally said after a long moment of thought that was torn up and distributed between flickers of distraction caused by Adam’s silhouette in his peripheral, from the way his damp hair was falling into his eyes now that it was beginning to dry all the way to the slump of his broad shoulders and the sharp jut of his elbows against the cushions. There just really wasn’t any part of Adam Parrish that Ronan didn’t want to look at.

A soft huff of laughter had Ronan turning his head to look at him straight on and the amusement on the other boy’s face told him that he was being predictable again. Ronan frowned -- he didn’t like being predictable.

“Don’t give me that look. Tell me why, Ronan Lynch.” There was a teasing note in Adam’s voice, and if it were anyone else that would have brought Ronan’s back up -- would have made him snap his teeth and snarl. Coming from Adam, he had to give himself a moment so he didn’t trip over his own foolish tongue.

Somehow he managed to avoid that humiliation. Instead, he told Adam about Ireland through his father’s eyes. He told himself he didn’t care about the softening of Adam’s smile, that it did absolutely nothing to him to watch the other boy close his eyes and rest his cheek on the pillow, leaving himself vulnerable as he dipped into his own thoughts. Rather, he focused on the stories he was telling Adam, reliving them as he did his best impression of his father’s cadence and storyteller’s hum. He told him stories about the fair folk, the fey and the night creatures. He told him about the magic of each valley and river and dale. He shared his favorite tales about cheeky brownies and powerful, dangerous sidhe that became captivated by the bright, fleeting magic of a human’s ability to create.

Adam listened to each one, and that smile...? It never faded, not even once.

“It’s your turn,” Ronan finally said, when his heart was full and his lungs tight -- torn between the memories caused by those stories and these newer, more electric feelings caused by the proximity of Adam Parrish’s smile.

“Mm, I think... I think that if I were to go anywhere in the world I’d want to see high mountains. High mountains and dark woods. Deep lakes. Flowers that seem to have their own language between the brightness of their colors and the way they sway toward and away from each other in a wind that affects them and them alone. Butterflies that cast shadows like birds of prey...” As he spoke his words drew further and further apart, his tone drifting as fatigue from the long day dragged him down toward sleep.

Ronan held his breath, almost wanting to prod him for more -- because it was rare to hear Adam talk... well, like a dreamer. Adam was a boy who kept himself grounded so deeply in reality it was sometimes painful for Ronan to be around him. This secret side of him, this side of dreams and hope and wonder... it was a vulnerable side that he knew Adam wouldn’t be indulging in if he weren’t perfectly comfortable and probably way more tired than he’d originally thought he was. It was a side of him that Ronan had always known existed (you couldn’t chase a dead Welsh king without being at least part whimsy, no matter how charismatic Gansey was) but one that Adam kept very close to the chest.

“Mm... Ronan?” Adam’s voice was soft and sleep-slurred, his eyelashes shielding the color of his eyes, he was barely able to keep them open.

“Yeah?” Ronan’s voice was rough, even to his own ears, but Adam didn’t seem to notice.

“Do you think a place like that actually exists?” The question was light, but there was a raw, sweet shard of hope beneath the words that cut Ronan in a tender space below his throat.

“Yes,” Ronan promised with certainty, not even needing to think about it -- not even needing to question it. “I know it does.”

Adam’s eyes dropped all the way closed and he smiled, sighing in relief. That sigh transitioned directly into the deep, slow breaths of sleep.

Ronan knew that he should get up. Sleeping on the floor would give him one hell of a backache, and Adam hadn’t said he could stay over. He should get up and stretch, then drive back to Monmouth, where he should crawl into his own bed for the night -- or maybe stay up longer and bother Gansey, because fuck knew that guy didn’t understand the concept of a regulated sleeping schedule.

Instead, Ronan watched Adam until his own eyes just couldn’t stay open any longer. Then, from the floor of St. Agnes, beside the boy who called to him like a fire-sprite, Ronan dreamed. He dreamed of dark woods and flowers that seemed to have their own language, between their bright colors and the way they swayed in their own self-contained breezes. He dreamed of butterflies that cast shadows like birds of prey. He dreamed of safe places even in the dark woods -- and when Ronan dreamed... well, when Ronan dreamed, reality itself seemed to listen.

#asks #anon #trc #pynch #pynch fic #fanfic #adam parrish #ronan lynch #pining #trc fanfic #adam parrish x ronan lynch #sleepovers!#my writing #100 followers #the raven cycle

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akumastrife · 3 years

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strike the match // dream pack (trc)

Rating: Mature Archive Warning: just slutty business, swearing, dubious consent bc canon appropriate drugs Fandom: Raven Cycle

Relationships: the dream pack but everyone’s sharing Proko as K watches, as things should be

Back!! on my bullshit!!!!

{Also on AO3}

The rowing team shirt was faded and ragged, tiny cigarette burns in one shoulder, and stretched entirely ill-fitting across Prokopenko’s broad chest.

It was never meant to fit. It wasn’t his.

The sleeves had been carefully cut off—speaking to Lynch’s theft of it from Gansey—and then the bottom half ripped off in a show of violence that could only hint at Proko’s subsequent theft of it when Lynch had left it last.

Three power play tug-o-wars to upset Kavinsky most.

By the way Proko’s lip was puffy and bleeding—wrapped slack around Kavinsky’s dick, relaxed between his knees, just breathing, jesus fucking christ—Swan thought maybe Proko was winning.

It was easier to stare too long at the disaster of a shirt, than at Proko himself with his busted mouth, wondering how good it’d feel.

Kavinsky scraped his thumb nail over the head of the match, already blackened and used up. It flared up again anyway, and he put it out against Proko’s shoulder. Another singed hole in the shirt. Swan had watched the cycle four times over already, primed for each spark.

“You just gonna gloat?” Jiang asked, accusation cutting quick through the heady lack of talking over the music, and the headier smoke filling the basement. It wasn’t quite pot. Too white, too fragrant, like a building smoldering in its own embers. Close enough for Skov, so it was good enough for Swan.

“Yeah, K, you got him looking so pretty,” Skov jeered. “How long it’d take you to train him like that?”

“Probably got him all doped up,” Jiang said.

Kavinsky said nothing; eyes saying nothing from behind those stupid white sunglasses. He took another drag on his joint, and then shifted his feet—the scrape of soles too loud for how the music rattled Swan’s bones—as he dragged Proko’s mouth off his dick by a hand in his hair.

Swan felt Skov wince in sympathy from beside him on the couch.

Proko gasped like he hadn’t breathed in hours, eyes fluttering and lips parted slack. It was such a damn shame he was so pretty. “Can I?” Proko asked, voice ragged and ruined already.

Kavinsky tugged him up to claim his mouth in a painful kiss, his own lips stained red when he pulled back. There was something… tender, in the soothing of his tongue along the cut in Proko’s lip. But that was all before he was releasing Proko and pushing him towards the two of them on the couch.

Jiang whined in disappointment.

“Fuck yeah,” Swan breathed and got up immediately to make room. His fingers twitched against his own thighs, wanting, eager, knowing to wait. He really wasn’t any better than Proko.

Were any of them?

He watched—eyes feeling too wide to match how his ribs cracked in expanding to make room for his lungs—as Proko slid over Skov’s sprawled thighs, folding himself down to let Skov have his mouth in a desperate kiss.

“Fuck,” slipped out on a groan. He adjusted himself through his sweats, glancing over at Jiang doing the same. “I wanna try his mouth.”

Skov glanced over Proko’s shoulder, pupils blown dark, stupid long lashes fluttering in that look of want Swan knew all too well. “What do you think, Proko?”

Proko moaned, high and breathy and utterly domesticated, what the fuck. Proko used to put up more of a fight, used to grin razor sharp and delight in tussling until he was put on his stomach and made to enjoy the surrender of it.

What the fuck had Kavinsky done to him?

He’d think about it later. Much later, he decided, as Proko staggered up and turned in Skov’s hands. He slid back, pupils and lips both parted around darkness and wanting, letting Skov handle him however he wanted. Gave into Skov’s spider-like fingers running eager up his ribs, down around his stomach and hips, like he was warming him up. Proko’s stomach tightened and flexed—eager.

Proko reached forward, hands clamping painfully tight around Swan’s hips to drag him forward, eyes trained on him with a single-minded focus that made Swan’s mouth bone-fucking-dry.

He groaned, knowing already he was doomed, and stepped up between both of their parted knees—Skov’s tilting out to push Proko’s more obscene—and fumbled at the worn knot of drawstrings, only looking at Proko, at Skov’s eyes flashing dark and hungry over Proko’s shoulder, at Jiang’s desperate reflection in the cracked mirror behind the sagging couch.

It was a fast and heady race between them to see who could get Proko first. Skov laughed brightly as he tugged at Proko’s cut offs, reaching under him to pinch Swan’s thigh as he pushed his sweats down. Swan swatted his clever hand away and then lost everything in a gut-punched curse, bowing over Proko’s mouth immediately around his dick.

“Jesus,” he hissed, nails biting into Proko’s shoulders. “Lemme fucking prepare myself, dude, fuck.” He hadn’t been ready; ready, yes, but it was fast and a shock and he was sensitive and Proko’d forgotten to not use his fucking teeth. He wasn’t like Jiang. He didn’t play like that. He preferred teeth in other parts of him, not his fucking cock, christ.

“Hurry up, then, and catch up,” Skov mumbled, rolling his eyes. He did something with his hands that had Proko whining and buckling at all his joints like a broken doll.

He had to stop thinking about Proko that way.

“How the fuck are you already—still?—slick, dude?” Skov said, split between awed and alarmed. He glanced up at Swan (looked up up up, eyes dark, teeth catching his bottom lip and farther to grab his snake bites—Swan wanted to fuck that mouth too. He would. After.) “I got four fingers in ‘im already, can you fucking believe?”

“What?” Jiang snapped. He struggled up and careened across the basement, crashing into the couch beside Skov and craning in to look. He inhaled fast and stuttering, tongue flicking out like he wanted a taste, tongue stud flashing in the low lighting, and Swan wanted to let him just so he could watch.

He fisted a hand in Proko’s hair, humming pleased at how Proko whined immediately at the pull, sinking farther down, taking all of him, and swallowed several times until Swan was seeing stars.

“Fuck, K, does he not have a gag thing anymore?” Swan asked. He locked his knees, hitching his hips forward, and rolled his head on his neck to look over at Kavinsky. At their king. But in the way a monster might sit above a fae court, volatile and untouchable.

He had to stop listening to Jiang ramble about his fantasy books.

He couldn’t see Kavinsky’s eyes, but he felt him looking back all the same. “You must’ve really worked on him.”

Kavinsky said nothing; chapped lips curling around the joint again and face turning to fix on Proko rocking back on Skov’s fingers, the sharp arch of his back

Judging, maybe.

Measuring his form to some standard Swan never wanted to know. K’s brows furrowed slightly. Dragged his thumb over the spent match head (Proko’s tongue dragged devastatingly over his slit.) His thumb was nearly as black.

“I’ll have him gagging,” Skov warned, and snapped Proko back by the hips, pulling him down onto his dick. Proko flinched and slid off Swan’s dick with a gut-punched sound so wounded that Swan almost came on the spot with nothing more than the flat of Proko’s tongue.

Skov swore low and drawn out, eyelashes fluttering. And then sunk his teeth into the back of Proko’s shoulder.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Jiang whispered, fumbling his pants off and peeled one of Proko’s hands off Swan’s hips to put it in his own lap, groaning loud and obscene. Not even the thumping music could cover it.

“Loud bitch,” Swan muttered, meeting Skov’s eyes and jerking his chin at him. Skov grinned, glittering sharp like a viper, and stuffed his fingers into Jiang’s mouth.

“Don’t be a bitch and bite,” Skov snapped. He didn’t have to. Jiang probably wasn’t even listening anymore.

Swan snorted. He pulled Proko back onto his dick, watching Skov more than anything. “How’s he?”

“Like a fuckin’ dream,” Skov groaned.

Out of the corner of his eye, Swan saw K smile. Just a flicker. Maybe that was just the hazy air.

Swan rocked his hips faster, bending over Proko to catch Skov’s mouth in a slick kiss. He felt Skov starting to smile, taunting, that asshole, and bit his lip to head that shit right off. He liked kissing Skov, fucking sue him, and he tasted better when he was getting his dick wet.

Thick smoke rolled over them, snaking into nose and mouth, and Swan nearly choked on it. Kissed Skov to keep from coughing: harder, meaner, greedier. Tried to forget about Kavinsky watching and couldn’t; felt his eyes on them like claws into flesh. The smoke was sweeter, musky. Rotting wood, maybe, or something that smelled like desperation and hunger.

He bit into Skov—

He was so hungry. For Proko’s tight throat and Skov’s pierced mouth. For violence and the simmering heat that bloomed whenever he put someone on their back. Arousal built on itself, climbing up his spine and pulling taut as wire.

“You just gonna sit there?” Swan asked, harsh and breathless. He glared over at Kavinsky. Hitched his hips to push harder at Proko to make him choke, relishing in the wet, gasping noises and how it made Skov breath harder, tone edged higher.

Kavinsky smiled. He had too many teeth—

Swan blinked—

Kavinsky wasn’t smiling at all. He shifted, slow and like his body was made of shifting and crumbling branches, and turned the music up higher. Louder and grating. He stood, taking another drag, holding it until he’d stepped over and blew the smoke into Swan’s face.

Swan blinked fast, inhaling against his better judgment and shuddering at the acrid tang of the smoke curling in his lungs, fucking Proko’s mouth a little faster.

“Fuck yes, baby boy,” Skov groaned, strained and right on that fucking edge. Swan knew it too well, knew exactly what he sounded like, tasted like, felt like inside and out when he was hanging on the precipice of losing it. Proko keened, moving faster; Jiang inhaled fast and sharp, chewing on Skov’s fingers and hitching his hips up into Proko’s fist, tight and wet.

Swan wanted to do something very stupid.

Something scraped sharply right in his ear, making him twitch (making his dick jump) and he turned his head to see Kavinsky still standing there, bright match in his hand. The flame flickered hungrily, licking charred wood and charred flesh.

Kavinsky’s sunglasses stared at him, unreadable and expectant. Held out the match. An offer or a demand, it was all the same.

Swan opened his mouth.

The world went up in flames.

#the raven cycle #the dream pack #prokopenko #kavinsky #skov #swan #jiang #my writing #sharing proko #I forget all their ship names but they all fucking okay #i got ansty and wanted to listen to trashy music and write about semi-aggressive fucking okay dont @ me

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jordanshenessy · 3 years

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@nyttvera hi bestie here’s the Adam parrish essay for more of my favourite Adam parrish moments that would def not fit in an ask lol

1. “From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear.”

Lmaooo Adam thinks Ronan swearing is poetry. And without the swearing it would not be Ronan at all. It would be cold, bitter, more hateful. Lemme laugh. Lemme cry.

2. And there are like a lot of specific quotes that I don’t wanna find rn but just the fact that Adam works so hard, he works so hard for what he wants and he wants it all so much. His living situation was definitely a motivator and by the time he moved above st.agnes church, I think he started dreaming just as much as Ronan. He was boneless tired for sure I mean he works a bunch of shifts as a mechanic and has to study AND take care of himself now but like…and the fact that he doesn’t want help from anybody, he wants to do it on his own, like this fierce autonomy that resides within him is like what I related to most about him. Cuz he doesn’t want to owe anyone anything. AND HES SO STUBBORN ABOUT IT TOO. But he slowly learns to grow out of it and accept help from his friends like when Ronan and gansey show up in court 😭😭😭😭

3. And I can’t for the life of me remember which book it was but there was a section going on about the time that he used to live with his family and he had to get going home and he was riding on his bike, and there were dark clouds which mean it was going to rain very soon and he just…watched the clouds get closer and darker, could practically taste the petrichor in his mouth already, he knows he can’t come home late bc his dad will get mad and his mother kept reminding him to get home but he just took that moment to watch the clouds and once the rain started he let it soak him. From tiny little droplets laying on his shirt to completely soaking him. And it was like a moment that he really enjoyed and probably the first time in his life he felt free. Even tho he knew he had to get home, he was like no let me have this. I might be remembering it wrong but I remembered this moment and relating to it a lot.

4. There’s also the moment where Ronan asks him “are you working after school” and Adam does “with a dreamer” and then it goes on about his smile that Ronan would start wars and burn cities for. SKDJDJDJ ADAM IS FLIRTING YALL. he’s straight up flirting. He’s not a stranger to flirting like have y’all seen him with blue, he’s smoooooth.

He’s just my favourite plssss 🥺😭💕💕😭

#also most of this is from the first series bc I have yet to finish call down the hawk loool #but he <3

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parrishh · 3 years

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i'm like, 90% sure all of the anons in my inbox right now are actually the same person so, if that's you, i'm just going to answer all of your mister impossible questions in this post since there are a lot of them and this is going to be really very extremely long

"Wait what why is Jordan awake?"/"Is the sweetmetal of declans picture helping jordan stay awake?"

i don't know why she's awake but i don't think it's the painting, because at the end of the book she's outside declan's apartment, not her own. i guess it's possible that she succeeded in making the painting a sweetmetal powerful enough to sustain her even there, but i feel like there's probably a different explanation. i've seen theories that she's inadvertently made herself into a sweetmetal by finally seeing herself as her own person rather than just a copy of hennessy, which is interesting

"And the things about the ley line Idgi? Hennessy wants to stop the power but for what"

i think hennessy thinks shutting down the ley line is the best (or even only) way to get rid of the lace. she hates herself for the lace to the extent that she doesn't even want to live anymore, so of course that's her primary motivation. she feels hopeless so long as the lace has power. she's desperate

"Why did he think adam was in on declans plan? I think the "oh" was more like oh you want to come with bryde of course...."

the "oh" is in response to ronan saying "i'm calling now. i need to see you", before there's even any mention of bryde. adam says "you're here? oh", not "you're here? why are you here?" the fact that he didn't ask why ronan was in town, the fact that he said an "oh" of realization instead, implied that he already knew why ronan was in town. and he could have only known by speaking to declan. i think it was a reasonable conclusion on ronan's part

"Ronan are you being serious????? Why should Adam/Declan drop everything and come fight with you - they didnt even know where you are, they don't know the plan. Then you accuse them of that Moderators plan without questioning them. And I mean, yes, Ronan is easily manipulated and he thinks everyone is against them and Bryde is the only one who cares but come on!!!!!!! Seriously, doesn't he get that he might be in the wrong????"

i mean, i think you hit the nail on the head when you said "he thinks everyone is against them." for a long time, he's been struggling with feeling alone, like he's a burden, like the people he loves don't really understand him. he's never had a healthy relationship with another dreamer, so it makes sense that he feels so isolated from literally everyone he cares about. and now he just found out two of the most important people in his life went behind his back to conspire against him (even if he doesn't have confirmation about adam, declan does admit to it over the phone) which is just...salt on a wound he's had since he was a kid. i'm not saying he's in the right, but i do understand why his immediate reaction was what it was. when you've been hurt like that, it takes some time before you can like, calm down and reconsider your own role in the situation

"Ronan basically dreamt Bryde in his worst dream right? Why does he still trust him"

i mean, i don't know how much we can believe what bryde says, but when he reveals himself as being ronan's dream he basically says that everything that he (bryde) wants, ronan already subconsciously wanted before he even dreamt him. that bryde wants it because ronan wanted it. to admit that bryde is in the wrong, ronan would have to admit he, himself, is in the wrong, too, and that's not easy. especially because a lot of his motivation is saving matthew and not wanting to live with the weight of matthew's life on his conscious anymore. especially because he's felt alone for so long, and now he just found out the first dreamer to truly make him feel less alone is his own creation. he's hurting. a lot. he will admit to being wrong in the third book, i think, but like i mentioned above, that kind of growth takes some time

"I think Ronan actually doubts Brydes plan too bc he thinks stuff like people built the dam, there are living things here, it cost a fortune..... and i personally never see a purpose in what they're doing bc bryde never tells them and ronan obviously doesn't know or he thinks he doesnt. I think he doesnt and he just trudts bryde blindly for now and his insecurities aka bryde take over and rule over ronan. Thoughts?"

i mean, i think ronan sees the purpose. here are his thoughts, directly quoted from chapter 17 when bryde is talking about restoring the ley lines:

"A world where Matthew could just live. A world where Ronan could just dream. A world where every dream was clear and crisp and easy to navigate, so there were never accidents or nightmares. He wanted it."

he wants, as i mentioned above, for matthew's life to not be reliant on his own (which i understand. that's a really heavy knowledge to live with.) he also just wants to be able to exist wherever he wants and with whomever he wants (thinking, for example, about how he wasn't able to get an apartment in boston in cdth), without constantly worrying that the nightwash is going to kill him. poor guy just wants a normal life

"Also did we ever actually see bryde get something out of a dream? Most work did Ronan"

this is interesting. now that you mention it, i don't think we do. supposedly he dreams the orbs, but i can't recall ever seeing that happen? i could be wrong, though

"And why is the nightwash mostly ronans problem? I mean hennessy and rhionna (?) had it very little and who knows if the other dreamers have it"

i think ronan is a much, much more powerful dreamer than any of the others. there's something...More about him. something special about being the greywaren. i don't know what it is, specifically, but i anticipate that's something we'll find out in the final book, and i expect it'll explain why the nightwash affects him more than it does the others

"Who the hell dreamt the mods"

i don't know! i think the most popular theory right now is that it was nathan farooq-lane. i'm not sure how that works, though, since they killed nathan and bryde took the sweetmetal off of lock pretty early in the book (unless nathan isn't actually dead, somehow) (or bryde is nathan, which is another popular theory). another theory is that it was ronan. like, he was feeling so alone and misunderstood that he accidentally dreamt his own persecutors? or it's possible that they were all just dreamt by random dreamers and that's why they felt strongly enough about the "cause" to become moderators, but that's kind of boring

"And why are R B and H so dangerous? Bc of what they're doing?"

yeah, and, i mean, according to liliana's visions, they have the power to end the world

"Can I point out that Idk what everyone is talking about, I dont get pynch possible breakup vibes at all from this book"/"Am I trippin or did I read another book? Because some fellas say there's no pynch"

i think when people say there's no pynch, they just mean that there's very minimal pynch interaction, specifically. because, yeah, even though they're both constantly thinking about each other, it is true that we only get one moment of them actually interacting (the phone call), and it's obviously not a positive interaction

i don't think anyone actually thinks they'll break up. at least, i haven't seen anyone say that and i've been feverishly reading everything under the mister impossible tag, so

"What struck me as really odd was that Adam bought this stupid 14$ waffle which he would have never done a few months back and I dont think he would do it now? 14$ is a lot of money esp for a waffle so why spend it on something as useless as this? And why do the others need Adams money? Are they all on scholarships? Was it just bc he had cash and the others didnt? And why is he treating them like his followers and they treat him as their guardian or whatever like he clearly needs to be honest with them"

okay, first off, i will say, as someone who grew up poor and, like adam, absolutely busted my ass in high school to get a good scholarship so i could go to college, the relief of actually getting that scholarship is...powerful. my financial anxiety definitely didn't disappear once that happened, but there was, at least in my experience, this feeling of "i made it, it's going to be okay now" that made it a little easier to spend money. i don't think it's that unrealistic that he, now having the security of a harvard education, would spend fourteen dollars on something he doesn't need every once in a while. it would be completely out of character for henrietta adam, yes, but it's a bit different now. plus, it wouldn't suit his faux Harvard Adam persona to refuse the waffle because of how much it costs

i think his friends are all a lot more well-off than he is. it was just that they didn't have any cash on them and the waffle truck didn't take card (also realistic, i never have cash on me so i always have to ask someone to spot me when a place turns out to be cash-only)

i think (a) they all look up to him because he has this really calm, cool and collected persona. more importantly, we can assume that they were all struggling with something when he met each of them, since they were all crying. now in swoops this guy who saw them upset and came to comfort and befriend them. of course they see him as something like a hero. and (b) i think he likes that. in high school, he was the one being rescued, not the one rescuing. i think he enjoys being the kind of person he used to wish he could be (ie. gansey. he's being gansey)

"I thought it a bit funny in a weird way that Declan talked about marrying Jordan…I can't imagine he was being too serious about it?"

no, i mean, i don't think he was literally proposing, not yet. he's just really happy for the first time in a long time (maybe ever) and, after a lifetime of pain and trauma and more responsibility than he ever signed up for, i don't blame him for wanting that feeling to last forever, even if he's not really thinking clearly

"Also I think it's amazing they make each other so happy but the ending makes me a bit sad or surprised bc shouldn't Matthew be his nr1 priority now?"

we only have jordan's perspective at the end, so when she thinks that it was clear declan had come out of his apartment looking for her, i don't think that necessarily means he wasn't also looking for matthew. i don't think it's fair to say that, in that moment, he should prioritize either matthew or jordan. he loves two dreams, so he can and should be concerned for both of them equally. i don't think one love is inherently more important than the other just because it's lasted longer or because it's family

#WHEW THIS TOOK FOREVER #thanks for the questions! sorry i don't know what i'm talking about half the time!#mister impossible #mister impossible spoilers #mi spoilers #w's mi asks #answered #anon

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stareaten · 4 years

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pynch.

~5k words.

read on ao3 instead

Adam collects things. He clings to them; he hoards them.

You wouldn’t notice it at first, not with how logical and calculating he is, certainly not within the small space of Adam’s tiny apartment above St. Agnes filled with the mismatched, makeshift furniture, and surely not in the cluttered mess of the mismatched, makeshift desk where Adam is sitting, hunched over, and scribbling some shit about some fucking thing in one of his notebooks.

But because Ronan is Ronan, he starts catching up. He is lying sprawled on his back on Adam’s uncomfortable mattress, bored out of his mind. He left his headphones back at Monmouth and can’t be assed to go back to pick them up. Adam shows no intention on paying him any attention – at least not until he’s finished with whatever the fuck he’s working on – so Ronan decides to bother him just a bit. (It’s his philosophy notes he’s working on, Ronan knows it, because Ronan clings to everything Adam tells him. That’s why he knows it isn’t so important, because Adam knows it but still insists on being a giant, pain-in-the-ass nerd.)

Ronan rolls back onto his stomach and scoots closer to Adam’s desk, peering over his arm to try to understand Adam’s chicken scratch. He grabs one of the pens lying around and goes to write something – something stupid or sweet or rude or, considering he’s Ronan, all three at once – in the margin of the open notebook. He starts to write but the pen doesn’t work so he picks up another one. This time he manages to write one big letter before it runs out of ink. He scowls at the pen in an attempt to intimidate it into working, and then shakes it vigorously. When it still refuses to work, because apparently pens can feel no terror, he chucks it away and searches for another one. This one manages two more letters before dying out. Ronan frowns again, shakes it – again – and tries to press it more firmly into the paper before Adam’s hand comes up to grab at his wrist.

“Stop it,” Adam says without looking up from finishing his page, “you’re gonna tear the paper.”

“I wouldn’t have to tear your paper if you had a damn pen that works,” Ronan replies.

Adam says nothing, just flips the page and starts writing on the left side of the notebook, effectively stopping Ronan’s attempts at delinquency.

Ronan huffs. And picks up another pen. He manages to write a big capital A on the corner of the page before Adam elbows him in the face. Ronan rubs at his chin. “I was just testing to see if this one works.”

Adam hums. “They all work.”

“Like shit they do.”

“They all work in a pinch.”

“This is a pinch. And they don’t fucking work.”

“I would hardly call your attempts at desecrating my notes ‘a pinch’,” Adam says, nose still buried in said notes.

“It’s not desecrating if I make them more fun,” Ronan says.

Adam sighs. “Go be bored somewhere else.”

Ronan scowls, but lies back on the bed. He manages some good 10 minutes before picking up a crumbled up receipt from the floor and drawing more inappropriate things before the pen dies out.

***

Adam picks up empty yogurt cups Sargent leaves lying around the Barns and washes them out in the sink. He dries them with a kitchen towel, stacks them up and puts them in the cupboard above the microwave, where neither of them will actually be bothered to reach them.

“You can’t recycle them,” he says when Ronan tries to dump them in the trash. “Doesn’t mean you can’t use them again.”

“What for?” Ronan groans. “There are plenty of cups here. Plastic cups and glasses and cups that sing and cups that curse at you and whatever kind of cups your ass desires. Fuck, Parrish, I’ll dream you up another cup, just for you, which recites pluperfect of esse whenever you drink your gross fucking no sugar coffee out of it.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “We can use them for seedlings.”

“Right,” Ronan mutters. “Fucking seedlings.” But he sees Adam putting the yogurt cups up in the cabinet anyway.

***

Ronan visits Adam at college one weekend when Adam isn’t too busy studying and Declan is too busy to chew Ronan’s ass over one thing or another.

Adam wraps his arms around Ronan’s shoulders and releases a deep sigh.

“Fuck, Parrish,” Ronan says, rubbing his hand up and down Adam’s ribs. “You know freshman fifteen means you gain those pounds, not lose them, right?”

Adam huffs into his neck. “Guess you better learn how to cook then.”

Ronan groans and for a moment considers how difficult it would be to dream up a stove that makes any meal on its own. He would probably still end up eating pizzas anyway.

Adam’s dorm room is not big and Ronan knows which side of it is his as soon as he enters. There is a corkboard above his desk and Ronan leans closer to inspect everything that is pinned there while Adam changes out of his clothes.

There are receipts from the store and scrawled reminders for papers and homework and exams. There is a single black feather and a printed out picture of Gansey, Blue and Cheng standing in front of- some fucking monument Ronan didn’t care enough to remember the name of, Cheng’s ugly mug uncomfortably close to the camera. Gansey sent it to Ronan’s phone some time ago, but giving that Ronan only started actually checking his phone once Adam left for Harvard, it sat in the messages until Adam picked it up and grinned at it so hard that, one afternoon later, Ronan cursed and kicked and glared his old printer back to life in order to print it out. There is also a postcard Sargent sent him from Bumfuck, Nowhere just recently - Ronan can’t see the message on the back, but he knows who it’s from because he has a matching one sitting next to his computer, collecting dust so he can pretend it didn’t make his insides twist when he found it in the mail. (His personalized message only read ‘miss you, asshole – blue’ and he grinned before thinking better of it.)

And then there are… other pieces of trash. A bubblegum wrap and what appears to be a torn piece of post-it and one of those paper bracelets you get on those obnoxious student parties. There is a red solo cup right underneath it with two fugly red and white pens with Harvard logo sticking out of it. Ronan silently wonders if they even fucking work. There’s also a bunch of pamphlets stacked neatly on the edge of the desk and Ronan flips mindlessly through them. Fuck, he thinks, I’m in love with a hoarder.

He is quickly distracted from that thought by the aforementioned hoarder’s arms sliding around his middle. Adam kisses the back of his neck and then the soft spot under his ear, so Ronan has no choice but to turn around and kiss him senseless.

“Hi,” Adam breathes against his lips once they part, soft and quiet. His thumb gently massages the back of Ronan’s skull, while fingers of his other hand come up to trace Ronan’s cheekbone.

“Hi,” Ronan says, soft and quiet, because he loves Adam, loves him when he gets all pushy and hungry, loves him even more so when he gets soft and gentle and private and just for Ronan to see.

“I missed you,” Adam says and Ronan gets an excellent idea about moving Adam’s fingers closer to his lips but then there is a knock on the door and Adam’s hands fall away.

To his credit though, they don’t go very far. Adam takes a step back, but stays well within Ronan’s personal space, one of his beautiful hands resting on the inside of Ronan’s elbow. Ronan still scowls at the person knocking even before they enter the room.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Adam’s roommate says poking his head inside. “I just forgot to grab my notes.”

“No problem,” Adam replies, smiling politely. Ronan elects to stay silent this time.

The roommate leaves the door open as he moves to his side of the room, rummaging through his stuff, and Ronan almost groans when he sees another person standing in the doorway.

“Hey Adam,” the other boy says, nodding. “We’ll get out of your hair right away.”

Adam waves his arm dismissively. “It’s alright, really.”

Ronan would beg to fucking differ.

“Adam?” the roommate says and makes an apologetic face. “You wouldn’t happen to have some notes from the last Doyle’s class, would you?”

“From Wednesday morning class?” Adam frowns and lets go of Ronan’s arm to search through his own pile of notebooks. Ronan grits his teeth.

He doesn’t care to hear the rest of that conversation and instead turns to scowl at the boy at the doorway when he feels his eyes on the back of his neck. “What?” Ronan presses out.

The boy seems to remember himself as he stands up a bit straighter. “Sorry, just. You’re Adam’s boyfriend?”

“Yes,” Ronan say, frowning deeper.

“You’re the farmer?”

“Yes,” Ronan repeats and stuffs his fists into his pockets.

“Huh,” the guy says and leans on the doorway again. “Sorry, you’re just. Not what I expected. But that explains the jacket.”

“The jacket?” Ronan wonders how deeply he will have to twist his face in order to get this guy to leave.

“What do you grow?” the boy asks instead of explaining himself, in an attempt to be polite or rude or nosey or fucking annoying, see if Ronan cares which one. “On your farm?”

Ronan shrugs, feeling out of his depth and hating it. “Potatoes.”

“Potatoes?” the boy repeats, frowning like he’s never heard the word before.

“He’s Irish,” Adam suddenly says, grabbing at Ronan’s elbow. He looks at Ronan and there it is again, that private smile of his. Ronan has no choice but to deflate a little. “He thinks it’s funny.”

The guy at the door breathes out a short, fake laugh and Ronan hates him. But the roommate is already pushing him out and saying to Adam over his shoulder: “Thank you so much, Adam, for the notes, and sorry for bothering you again. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He smiles and then they're gone.

Ronan still scowls at the door.

“Sorry about that,” Adam says and he is already putting his hands back where they belong, kissing just under Ronan’s jaw. Understandably, Ronan loses the ability to think for quite a while.

It’s only when he is finally, finally removing his shirt over his head that he remembers to ask: “The jacket?”

“Huh?” Adam says intelligently, his sole focus on the button of Ronan’s jeans.

“The other guy. He mentioned your jacket.”

“Huh?” Adam repeats, but now he raises his head to look at Ronan. “Oh!” he says as his eyes light up with understanding. “I took your jacket. The old leather one.” He shrugs. “You were going to throw it away, didn’t think you’d care. Some of the guys were teasing me, said it didn’t fit my style – whatever they think my style is supposed to be – I told them I took it from you.”

“The one with the burnt sleeve?” Ronan frowns again. “Parrish, if you needed a new jacket…”

“I didn’t need it, okay?” Adam says and rolls his eyes. “It’s just a nice jacket and you didn’t want it anyway. Can we now stop talking about clothes and get back to removing them?” To prove his point, Adam lifts the edge of his own shirt and pulls it off, and every other thought Ronan might have had flies right away with it.

***

Opal runs across the pasture straight into Adam’s arms as soon as she hears his car coming around the corner. Ronan berates her for it (“Let him catch a breath, for fuck’s sake.”) if only because he didn’t get to do it first.

But Adam just smiles and lets Opal cling to him, crouches down to be at the same eye level. She pulls out a piece of colorful candy wrapper, half-eaten and sticky with spit and fuck knows what else, and holds it out for Adam to take. Ronan watches, amused, as Adam tries not to make a disgusted face and promptly fails at it.

“Thank you, Opal,” he still says, taking it from her. Opal beams at him.

And then Adam finally straightens up and turns around so that Ronan can wrap himself around him and kiss his temples.

“I have a trunk full of stuff to take upstairs,” Adam says in lieu of hello.

“You also have two perfectly working legs and arms to match, so I don’t know how that has anything to do with me,” Ronan replies into his hair.

Adam huffs a laugh. “Asshole.” He pinches Ronan’s side and Ronan pushes him away, feigning being hurt, before turning around and heading straight for the trunk of his shit car.

It’s much, much later that Adam drags him to the laundry room. Well. He doesn’t exactly drag him there. It’s more that Adam hoists up a bag full of dirty clothes and heads towards the laundry room and Ronan wordlessly follows him there, picking up a new box of washing powder from the pantry.

Adam starts talking about the last oral exam he had and it’s a testament to how much Ronan missed him that he doesn’t even make a crude joke about it, just leans against the washing machine and watches Adam empty the pockets of his pants, clinging to his every word. And for someone who is constantly giving Ronan shit about the state of his car, Adam sure does carry a lot of trash in his pockets.

He pulls out a piece of candy wrapper Ronan at first doesn’t even recognize as the one Opal gave him – its colors shifted now that it dried in Adam’s pocket – and he doesn’t even pause his story before straightening it and putting it in the back pocket of the jeans he is currently wearing. Ronan frowns, but stays silent.

***

It was Adam’s idea to clean out the closets in the first place. Ronan, understandably, groaned and rolled his eyes and kicked the floor and used very colorful language to express his disdain. He even promised to dream up a new closet, just for Adam and his bunch of shit, really, Parrish, you won’t even have to look at Ronan’s clothes ever again, he’ll make it so that it chews and spits out Ronan’s tank tops even if he puts them there by mistake, just please don’t make him spend another summer day holed up inside.

But Adam, ever the pragmatic, just shakes his head. “Where would you even put a new dresser? The room’s cluttered enough.”

Ronan considers giving him a very imaginative answer to that particular question, but realizes that he is still going to end up cleaning the closets anyway, only this way he won’t have to deal with both of them pissed off. Not that either of them ends up happy though. It’s an incredibly uninteresting and tiring chore, especially given the fact that ninety-nine percent of Ronan’s clothes is black – the remaining one percent being dark gray or somewhat lighter gray or, very rarely, deep dark blue – and it’s hard to recognize which of his tees are the ones good to keep and which ones are too tight or too ripped even for him to wear. After an hour or so he just ends up chucking them on two separate piles randomly.

He stays out of Adam’s stuff for quite a while, mostly because Adam has significantly less stuff than Ronan (not that anyone would guess it, given their respective fashion choices), but Ronan’s fucking boyfriend is as pedantic about this as he is about anything else. Adam holds up every item, squints at it for a second or two, and if he decides to keep it he folds it carefully on one of the piles he has around the room.

“Go find a box,” Adam says after Ronan sighs for the fifth time in a minute, idly pushing Adam’s stuff around.

Ronan frowns. “What for?”

Adam doesn’t look up from his pile of clothes. “So we can pack up some of the clothes you just tossed away and I can drive it to Goodwill on my way to Boyd’s.”

Ronan considers it for a moment and nods. Okay, maybe Adam has a point, so what. Doesn’t mean he won’t be difficult about it, since he’s still bored as hell. “What boxes?”

“In the small barn, bring the sturdy ones,” Adam replies, folding another t-shirt carefully.

Ronan stomps to the small barn, kicks some stuff around, comes back empty handed. “There isn’t one.”

Adam frowns. “There has to be at least a few. I left them there months ago.”

“Oh, those,” Ronan says, sarcastically, but is immediately hit with a flashback of one very boring afternoon when he and Opal decided to set shit on fire after Adam let him know he won’t be able to come that weekend after all, and Declan called to tell him he’s coming down for some shit or another and he and Ronan should get lunch. “I got rid of those,” he says, because he doesn’t lie but also isn’t too keen on explaining Adam what exactly happened to them.

Adam closes his eyes and sighs. “Well, there’s gotta be at least one box around here somewhere.”

Ronan shrugs. “I’ll check the long barn.”

He manages to find two cardboard boxes, similar enough in sizes. He brings them all the way to the porch before thinking better of it and bringing them back so he can dust them off first. When he finally hauls them upstairs, he finds Adam frowning at a pair of jeans.

“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt,” he drawls as he watches Ronan drop the boxes at his feet, “and assume you know what kinda clothes are good for donation.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan says, which roughly translates to I’ll go through all my shit again and throw the good ones in the shittier looking box, and then he gets to it with just as much enthusiasm as before. Adam says nothing, but Ronan sees one corner of his mouth lifting into a very rude smile.

It must have been hours, days, weeks, fucking years later that they finally manage to sort the old but wearable clothes into the donation boxes (it’s mostly stuff Ronan doesn’t want to wear and Adam doesn’t want to steal from him, and then some stuff of Adam’s that do not fit him right anymore) and the unwearable clothes into trash bags. It’s certainly been long enough that Adam decides they deserve a break.

“Come on,” he says, offering his hand to Ronan who’s sitting on the floor, his legs splayed out. “There’s some ice cream in the freezer.”

Ronan squints up at him, suspicious. “Since when?”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Since the other day when I came from Boyd’s while you were busy chasing goats away from the long barn.” He wiggles his fingers a little. “Unless you want to keep cleaning.”

“You kept ice cream from me for three days?” Ronan huffs, but still takes his hand and lets Adam pull him up.

“It’s not hiding it if you never think to check the freezer,” Adam replies, because he has to be a smartass about everything. Ronan forgives him as soon as the ice cream is out and it’s the kind that Ronan likes the best but rarely when buys because Adam prefers a different one.

Ronan fills two mugs – cause they have a shit ton of those, but no clean bowls apparently – with the ice cream and brings them out to the porch where Adam is already sitting on the stairs facing the pasture. He hands him his mug and Adam leans up to press a chaste kiss to his cheek.

They sit in silence broken only by soft clicking of spoons against ceramic and crickets singing in the grass. The sun is setting behind the woods surrounding the Barns, coloring the sky red and pink and orange. Adam presses his leg against Ronan’s wordlessly and Ronan leans into him until their shoulders brush. Sometimes Ronan thinks he could stay like this forever, just feeling Adam’s body calm and relaxed against his, sharing the quiet between them without a care in the world. He wishes he could somehow freeze the moment and tuck it into his back pocket to look at it later, when Adam’s away and his side of the bed is cold.

“You know we still have to put the clothes away, right?” Adam asks nudging his knee with his own.

And sometimes, Ronan just wants to fucking kill him.

Instead of dignifying that with a response, he leans forward and licks Adam’s cheek.

“Eww,” Adam says, pushing at him playfully. “Real mature.”

“You had some ice cream on your face,” Ronan replies. “Couldn’t let it go to waste.”

“Gross,” Adam says, standing up and rubbing his hand against Ronan’s scalp.

Ronan follows him inside begrudgingly.

Once the boxes are out of the way, putting away the clothes is going much faster than sorting it out, albeit it’s not any less boring – for one part because Ronan doesn’t care where exactly in the closet his clothes end up and Adam is too busy organizing his own to berate him for just bunching up a handful of tank tops and stuffing them on the second highest shelf.

Once done, Ronan looks around the room to make sure nothing is left lying around when he spots one of Adam’s tees lying on the bed. He picks it up and sees that it’s threadbare, with a hole in the front and pieces of thread hanging from the sleeves.

“Hey, Marie Kondo,” Ronan calls, “you forgot this one.”

“The fact that you know who she is takes a significant part out of the insult,” Adam says, returning back to the room.

“Everyone knows who she is.” Ronan glares for good measure, even though he knows Adam is immune to it, and balls the tee in his hand, already reaching for a trash bag with his other, before Adam stops him.

“No, wait.” He grabs at the hand holding the tee. “I’m keeping that one.”

Ronan frowns. “It’s shit.”

“So is a good portion of your wardrobe,” Adam replies. “Give me.”

“My shirts at least don’t fucking look like moths had a dinner party,” Ronan says. “I’m throwing this out.”

“It’s my t-shirt,” Adam says, frowning deeply. “You can’t throw it away.”

“Watch me,” Ronan says and raises his hand higher in an attempt to get out of Adam’s reach.

Adam doesn’t attempt to reach anymore, though. He just crosses his arms over his chest and now Ronan knows he’s really upset. “Why are you being such a dick about it?”

Ronan’s frown deepens. “You were giving me shit about tidying up all day and now you’re giving me shit about throwing away an old t-shirt?”

Adam’s jaw clenches. “Sorry we can’t all afford to have twenty Tom Fords in our closets, Lynch.”

“You have a wardrobe full of shit, Parrish. This one’s basically see-through.” Ronan raises the tee in front of his face to prove his point.

Adam snatches it away. “It’s mine,” he says and turns back to the closet.

Ronan watches him as he folds the old t-shirt, his back tense and shoulders up to his ears. “Whatever, Parrish,” he says and takes the last trash bag outside.

***

Ronan can’t sleep. Which is nothing new, to be perfectly honest. He kicks the covers to the foot of the bed and gets up to piss. On his way back he pulls his t-shirt off and throws it in some corner of the room or the other. He glances at Adam’s back before climbing back to bed next to him.

There is no way Adam is asleep while it’s hot as balls, not while the sheets keep sticking to their skin every time they move, not while his body is wound so tight he would probably jump out of bed and straight through the window if Ronan touched him.

Fine, Ronan thinks. If Adam intends to stay pissed at him for no fucking reason whatsoever, who is Ronan to stop him. Adam always does what he wants, when he wants, anyway. Leaves when he wants, can leave Ronan behind if he wants, leaves Ronan feeling like shit over something he doesn’t even know he’s done wrong.

Ronan punches his pillow into, truthfully, no more comfortable lump than before and turns to lie on his back. He can hear the owl hooting outside. There is no fucking wind. Ronan rubs the heel of his hand against his right eye, but doesn’t curse out loud.

“It’s what I was wearing,” Adam says suddenly, his voice carefully neutral, “back then.”

Ronan considers this for a moment. “What?”

Adam stays silent for a moment before curling into himself a bit more. “Nothin’,” he mutters. “Forget it.”

Ronan frowns, thinks back to the fucking t-shirt now lying somewhere in the closet. “You were wearing it when?”

He hears Adam exhale slowly. “When you first kissed me.”

Oh, Ronan thinks. He lets the words sink in, but he can’t find anything good to say. “That’s why you didn’t want to throw it away?” It comes out more as a question than an explanation.

“Yeah.” Adam swallows. “No.”

Ronan stays silent, at a loss as to what to do. He wants to reach for Adam, pull him close and kiss away whatever it is troubling his mind. He wants to hold his hand and feel at ease. But he knows Adam would only just pull away now. So he waits.

Adam takes a breath before slowly rolling over onto his back and staring at the ceiling. “I didn’t have much growing up,” he says, and, no shit, Ronan still remembers the meager backpack and a cereal box Adam carried out of that fucking trailer years ago, remembers carrying the duffel bag and thinking ‘this is Adam’s whole life here’, remembers being careful not to bang it against anything.

“I had to take care of things if I wanted to have them for longer,” Adam continues, “cause once they were gone, they were gone. And even if something breaks, you keep it, because you can always reuse it in a pinch. Like the pens.” He swallows. “I can’t write an essay with an empty pen, but sometimes I can write down an important phone number or a reminder. A broken thing is still better than no thing at all, right?”

Ronan sneaks a look at Adam and finds that his eyes are firmly closed even as he continues.

“And if you gotta spend money, you want evidence of what you spent it on, so it doesn’t just disappear one day without you noticing." He pauses. "You want to make sure that the thing was real, y’know.”

And oh. Oh, Ronan thinks, there it is. “Adam,” he whispers gently and slides his hand across the sheets to find Adam’s. Because Ronan would know a thing or two about wanting to stick to something so badly, about being so scared of losing the one good thing he has, about being terrified it wasn’t even real to begin with.

Adam rolls his head from side to side, rubbing at his forehead with his other hand, but he lets Ronan entwine their fingers. “I know it’s stupid,” he says.

“Kinda is,” Ronan says. Tries for humor: “Glad to know that I’m not the only stupid one in this relationship.” Fails.

Adam rolls his head again, doesn’t open his eyes.

Ronan shifts until he’s lying on his side. “Hey,” he says quietly and leans forward to kiss Adam’s shoulder. “You’re not planning on getting rid of me, are you?”

“No,” Adam answers and finally blinks his eyes open. “Of course not.” He sighs and turns to face Ronan. “It’s just-,” he stops himself, swallows, tries again. “I’m happy. I’m so impossibly happy, Ronan, and one part of me keeps waiting for everything to be taken away from me.” He kicks the cover off with his legs. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”

Ronan wants to say something. He wants to say you’ll always have me, and if it’s up to me, you’ll never lack anything ever in your entire life, and I don’t want you to worry ever again, and I want you to have everything, and I love you so much it hurts sometimes. But Adam is smart, the smartest person Ronan knows. Adam knows all this already. Some scars just take longer to heal. Some scars just never completely heal. Ronan would know a thing or two about that, too.

So Ronan just scoots closer, heat be damned, and lets Adam hide his face into his neck.

***

Ronan dreams up a pen that never runs out of ink and puts it in Adam’s messenger bag while he’s working at Boyd’s. He debates dreaming up a pencil case when he realizes Adam doesn’t have one, then debates buying one from Amazon like any other asshole would, but then decides that Adam wouldn’t let him get away with that. He got better at accepting gifts from Ronan, though. It’s more that Ronan would be compelled to buy something ugly or funny or ridiculous – like that disgusting one shaped like a dead fish – and Adam would refuse to take it to classroom.

Adam washes out yogurt cups and ice cream containers, and Ronan dries them with a kitchen towel before turning around and using it to smack Adam’s ass with it. Adam cusses him out and chases him around. They both somehow end up in a laughing heap on the floor.

One night, Adam takes a cardboard box out of the closet and sits it on the bed before beckoning Ronan over. He takes out pieces of papers and shit and tells Ronan stories for every single one. Ronan recognizes a few of the items instantly: scraps of candy wrappers and dry leaves from Opal, a flower Ronan took out of his dreams while he was still building Lindenmere, one half of a watch band with teeth marks on it, another postcard from Blue.

Then there is a piece of wrap from a chewing gum Adam’s college friend gave him on his first night there. There is a movie ticket from a screening of some boring ass movie they had to see for one of their classes, when Adam and his roommate were the only ones in the theater and they ended up laughing so hard they were sick. There is a safety pin one of Adam’s classmates gave him to temporarily fix a shirt when he accidentally tore it right before his big presentation in the class.

Ronan knows every one of these stories already, Adam telling him everything over the phone, but he still soaks in every single word Adam says. He never realized before that Adam kept mementos. He realizes that, yes, these little scraps make the stories a tiny bit more real.

There is also an old, beaten to shit notebook which Ronan recognizes as Adam’s old Latin notebook and, sure enough, when Adam flips the pages there are profanities written in Ronan’s handwriting on the margins of the pages.

Next time he visits Adam, he takes him out for lunch, and Ronan pockets the receipt before leaving the restaurant. Back in Adam’s room, he scribbles something on the back of it – having found a working pen on the first try – and stuffs it in Adam’s pocket while hugging him goodbye.

(Ronan also happens to leave his hoodie under Adam’s pillow. Adam doesn’t ask, Ronan doesn’t lie.)

Adam comes home for the winter break hauling more dirty clothes and a bookshop worth of notebooks. He spots Ronan’s addition to the room right away, but waits until he deposits the bags so he can put his hands on his hips judgmentally. “This is new,” he says.

Ronan shrugs. He watches wordlessly as Adam crosses the room to carefully slide his hand across the big wooden chest. Its honey color is still shining faintly, and its hinges are golden. (It’s the third one he’s made, but Adam doesn’t have to know that. The first two were so goddamn awful that all the evidence of them was quickly destroyed, this time no thanks to Opal.)

“And you didn’t think we have room for another dresser,” Ronan says, just to be a smartass.

Adam doesn’t fall for it this time. “It’s beautiful, Ronan.”

Ronan crosses the room to stand closer to him. “Figured you’d need something sturdier.”

“Hmm?” Adam hums, still admiring the chest.

“You know,” Ronan says, and stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Your box is good and all, but it’s cardboard. It won't last much longer, not if you keep adding shit to it, and you’ll run out of space. And I know Opal keeps giving you fucking rocks, whatever, it’s your fucking fault for enabling her, but she-,”

Adam cuts him off by grabbing his face with both of his hands and kissing him, deeply and roughly. “Thank you,” he breathes against Ronan’s lips before diving in for another kiss.

***

Ronan considers the possibility that his boyfriend has some weird ass tidying up kink (and then promptly considers the possibilities of using that to his advantage) because Adam’s barely been home for three days before Ronan finds him decluttering their room. But apparently it’s just, no, Lynch, we’re already hauling stuff out so we can repaint the room so it’s only logical to go through the shit we don’t need anymore. Maybe it’s pragmatism kink. Or competency kink. (Fuck, does Ronan have competency kink?)

Ronan watches as Adam dumps a handful of pens into a trash can, follows those with candy wraps and a broken pieces of plastic from fuck knows what. Ronan joins him by throwing out three empty glue sticks, a pair of broken scissors, more fucking yogurt cups (which Ronan won’t ever admit drinking out of because he couldn’t be assed to wash out any of three hundred glasses lying around the sink). He gets bored quickly enough, and he doesn’t want to throw out anything Adam might want to keep, so he settles on hauling furniture out of the room. Adam teases him about showing off, but Ronan doesn’t miss the way Adam checks him out, his eyes catching on Ronan’s exposed arms, so fuck you, Parrish, I win.

“Hey, what’s this?” Ronan says picking up a ball-up piece of fabric lying on top of a trash can, before he recognizes it.

Adam comes to stand next to him. “You were right,” he says, and some other time Ronan might have been smug about those words coming from him. “It’s shit. And I don’t need it anymore.”

Ronan looks at the t-shirt in his hands, pokes a finger through the hole on its front. “No, you don’t need it.”

“I can kiss you whenever I want now,” Adam reasons, and leans forward to kiss Ronan’s shoulder to prove his point.

Ronan turns his head to press a kiss to Adam’s hair. “Maybe you could keep this one, though,” he says, too nonchalant to be anything but. “It kinda grew on me.”

Adam smiles up at him.

Yeah, Ronan thinks, some things are worth clinging onto.

175 notes · View notes

unsaidjulie · 4 years

Text

dea’s wips

the other day i posted a list of my jatp works in progress and... fell in love with all three of them at once. (and planned them to be way longer than originally intended.)

basically: i don’t know which one to work on right now, and i’d like to focus on one first, so i’ll let you guys choose which one you’d rather see!! (or if you want some spoilers/more info about the fics, feel free to send that in, too)

i know i’ll see you (on the other side)

after the orpheum concert, alex and reggie cross over, but julie still finds luke barely holding on in her garage.

this is a really short concept, but it can either be a one shot (pure angst, basically) or it can have a few chapters, since i have a version where what i mentioned above serves as a prologue as opposed to the entire fic. the plot would include caleb, one or two sacrificed souls, and a whole lot of angst with a happy ending.

(this one i could probably do the one shot first, and then determine whether i want to work on the sequel)

dream me the world // how do i know i love her? (because i can sleep after i talk to her)

when caleb covington offers them to play for him, the boys refuse, and sunset curve has got one year to either change their minds or fade away from existence. they’re running short on time when julie molina, while trying to communicate with her dead mother, accidentally summons them -- and somehow makes them stronger, enough that there’s hope they find a way to break the curse.

and there’s this little thing about kissing your soulmate…

inspired by blue and gansey from the raven cycle. the plot isn’t the same at all, basically, but the vibe of bluesey’s relationship and just the overall vibe of the raven cycle would be in this. i don’t think it would be very long, but i reckon there’d be a few longer chapters.

we’re going in circles (again and again)

when luke meets julie at a carrie wilson party, he knows her voice is something he’s never heard before. unfortunately, julie swears off singing, and it’s only a year later that they find each other again and things kick off.

he doesn’t know he’s in love with his bandmate until she starts dating some else, and everything is getting more complicated, with more than one thing putting the life of their band at stake.

originally inspired by heartbreak girl by 5sos, it spiralled from a one shot into a full-fledged multichap high school au with an actual plot and all that. this is the longest out of all three, and for not, the one i’ve planned out into the most details. (this is a long one, guys.)

anyway!

let me know your thoughts, which one you would like to see the most, it would help me out a lot. i’m currently very attached to all three of these but i genuinely, for the life of me, can’t pick one to work on.

so! have your say!

if you steal any of these concepts i will come for you

#julie and the phantoms #jatp #julie molina #luke patterson #juke #jukebox #juke fanfic #julie and the phantoms fanfiction #jatp fic #d.writes

37 notes · View notes

flyde · 4 years

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Ronsey, purple, midnight 💜

Not a lot of things have the power to render Ronan speechless. A whole bunch of fucked up shit, starting with but by no means limited to the murder of his father, has hit Ronan’s life like a tsunami. Dreams. Horrors. Magic. It might be debatable whether Ronan has kept his head straight through it all - Adam would argue that Ronan is as far from a straight head as anyone possible can be - but at the very least, Ronan’s head is still in its designated place and, as Ronan likes to think, sanity still has its place inside it somewhere.

When Ronan’s body goes rigid, breath catching in his throat, heart skipping a beat, a jaw trained in tension going slack - every time this happens, without fail - it’s something utterly mundane that’s messing with him.

Something like the bare feet of a friend who was suddenly taking steps so soft that it took Ronan’s breath away. Or a pair of golden arms coming out of a simple white t-shirt, a look so human that it was hard to look at. A mop of tangled hair so early in the morning that a mirror or a comb hadn’t had the chance to ruin it yet. Eyes squeezed into narrow slits, not hidden behind glasses, still adjusting to the daylight.

This time, it’s the scent of blood and sweat, adrenaline having turned Gansey’s cheeks red and his eyes glassy. His shaking hand, still balled into a fist. A split lip, the glasses missing - probably broken, judging from the cut above Gansey’s left eye.

“I don’t think I did it right.”

It’s the first thing Gansey says, breaking the silence. He’s standing inside Ronan’s room at Monmouth, waiting for Ronan to do something other than staring. There’s nothing soft about him this time, nothing quiet or half asleep. What Ronan was thinking about mundane things might have been bullshit. All of his speechless moments have one common denominator: Gansey out of control.

“I tried to remember what you taught me,” Gansey continues, “but it happened way too fast and I didn’t have the time to think at all. I don’t think I did it right.”

Finally, Ronan pushes himself up from his bed, discarding his phone and headphones. He’s not a stranger to bloody knuckles and black-blue-purple-yellow eyes, but so far, those lived in a world separate from the one Gansey exists in. As the line between the two fades in front of Ronan’s eyes, he can’t tell if it’s horror or relief that he’s feeling.

“You’ll know for sure tomorrow,” Ronan says, almost surprised that words are actually coming out of his mouth.

“Remind me to avoid mirrors,” Gansey replies. It’s not quite a smile, but one corner of his mouth twitches upward before he can regret it. Just a split second of pride he can’t entirely suppress.

“Your ribs will let you know before you even get the chance to open your eyes,” Ronan informs him. He can tell from the way Gansey is holding himself. If Gansey’s breathing was any less even, he would be seriously concerned. “Fuck, can you go wait in the bathroom? I’ll clean you up in a second.”

For someone who seems to have picked a fight, Gansey looks lost all of a sudden, turning around stiffly, moving out of sight with little steps. Something has to be wrong for Ronan to give orders and for Gansey to obey without a word.

Ronan exhales slowly, following in Gansey’s direction, except that he stops at the door, closing it for just a moment, dropping his forehead against it with a thud. “Fuck,” he murmurs softly, because Gansey coming home around midnight after a fight Ronan knows nothing about does a whole lot of things to him, but turning him on shouldn’t be one of them.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

Ronan shouldn’t be allowed to be the one tending to Gansey’s wounds. Although he knows what he’s doing better than any one of Gansey’s other friends would, this is bound to be a catastrophe. Now Ronan has to touch Gansey’s skin and be gentle. Now he has to be comfort and advice. And if other versions of Gansey have made him speechless, Ronan doesn’t know how to survive the intimacy between him and this one.

Ronan rubs his hand over his face and opens the door. He always knew Gansey was going to be the death of him one day. Time to find out whether that day will be this day or another one.

#end of 2020 drabbles #ronsey #ronan lynch #gansey #trc #the raven cycle #my writing #drabble #writing prompt #thank you anon #i appreciate you so much

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deadlyanddelicate · 5 years

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Something Wicked This Way Comes: or, the Rising Dark in Ronan’s Arc

as some of you may know because i never shut up about witch!adam i’ve been convinced for a while now that adam would go darkside in the dreamer trilogy. what i did not predict however, was that ronan is probably headed down a dark path himself. i thought the basic premise of the trilogy would have ronan in danger from both the nightwash and the zed hunters (which obviously still applies; he is very much in danger from those things), and adam striking some sort of dark bargain in an attempt to protect him. but after reading cdth, i think things might be about to take a more sinister turn.

so here are some thoughts i’ve been poring over, under a cut for length. what can you expect? well, there’s rambling! there’s bullet points! there are lyrics-inspired section headings! (we have fun around here.)

let’s start with the obvious, shall we?

1. “The Sandman, He Comes”

so...bryde.

we don’t know much about bryde - who or what he is, how he’s able to infiltrate ronan’s dreams, whether he can do it to other dreamers too, why he didn’t want to reveal himself, what’s his agenda - but what we do know is that ronan trusted him very, very fast. suspiciously fast, in fact. fast enough that adam remarks on it in chapter 39: “earlier today you had a gun on me. i’m just asking you give him the same shake as me”.

to clarify: in the previous chapter, ronan was shaken enough to hold a gun to adam, the love of his life, and not lower it even when he feels reasonably sure it’s him; yet it never occurs to him in the book to question bryde or his motives. when adam says he wants scry to try and get more info on him, ronan seems almost annoyed by adam’s wariness (ronan narrowed his eyes. “don’t gimme that look, ronan”) to which adam replies, understandably, that it’s only fair ronan holds a complete stranger to the same safety standards as his own boyfriend, at least.

but why shouldn’t ronan trust bryde (apart from the fact that he has no information about him whatsoever)? well, bryde’s behaviour is pretty damn shady, and extremely reminiscent of the ways that a cult leader might try to recruit people to his cause. @deerlovelylily discussed it very eloquently in this post, but just to recap:

bryde is able to access ronan’s dreams at will, including interacting with objects from them: he had the hoverboard at the end, and he knew exactly what was on the stomach of the murder crabs. (@streghe had a very clever suggestion that there’s a nonzero chance bryde actually caused the crabs to manifest in the dorm, since ronan barely saw them in the dream; why would bryde do that? well, to make sure ronan was cut off from adam, his real life support system and, coincidentally, a psychic who doesn’t trust bryde)

there is considerable evidence that he can access ronan’s memories/other parts of his subconscious as well, since he knows a lot more about his waking life than he should, constantly referencing people and events from it (as well as obviously knowing where ronan is/what he’s up to, which is very stalkerish in itself)

bryde uses this knowledge to manipulate and influence ronan through the words of people in ronan’s life. in ch. 58 he asks ronan “are you going to be quiet?”, which we know from trk is what niall used to say to the brothers before telling them a story. in ch. 43, he talks about the “emotional costs” of saving someone’s life, mirroring almost exactly the words of warning adam had told ronan in ch. 33 (“there’s such thing as an emotional cost”). adam was warning ronan about trusting bryde too easily, and we know ronan values adam’s opinion; by repeating adam’s words to him bryde is pulling a see, i can’t possibly have shady motives, because i am acknowledging the same risk adam warned you about.

that’s far from the only manipulative thing bryde does. his behaviour constantly alternates between praising ronan, guilting him, taunting him, and ordering him about.

in ch. 43 he tells ronan he’s “the most expensive thing he’s ever saved”, reinforcing the idea that A) ronan is special, B) bryde cares about him, and C) it cost him a lot to save ronan so ronan should feel grateful/guilty/indebted to him. he does this knowing full well that ronan isn’t going to doubt his motives for saving him, because ronan himself - brave boy that he is - has just told him he would save a dreamer without any questions asked.

bryde never shows himself to ronan until the very end, which has the combined effects of keeping him in the dark/at a disadvantage, and making him more intrigued by bryde’s mystery; at the same time, he constantly asks ronan to prove himself and earn the dubious privilege of finally meeting him (“next box”)

bryde promises things that he knows ronan wants: first and foremost, understanding of his dreamer powers; second, a community, by hooking him up with other dreamers (ronan’s been asking what am i, why isn’t there anyone like me, am i the only one? for a long time); last but not least, he heavily hints that he can free dreams from their dreamers, something ronan is desperate to do in order to give matthew his freedom

on more than one occasion, bryde gives ronan direct orders: “scrub [the word ‘real’] from your vocabulary”; “i don’t want you to think this ever again: it was just a dream”. and ronan obeys him, or is at least very affected by it. where he at first questioned whether his dreams of bryde were real, now he questions reality (e.g. holding a gun to his very real boyfriend and asking himself what is real?); in ch. 24 he thinks about the words just a dream and how bryde “had forbidden him from ever saying them again”. since when does ronan follow orders? who is bryde to “forbid” him to do anything?

bryde constantly deploys examples Us VS Them rhetoric, creating a schism between dreamers and humanity, magic and humanity. we know (and bryde probably knows) ronan has always struggled with not feeling human and not knowing what he is; that he deeply wants to be able to fit into the real world. what bryde is effectively saying is no, you’re not human, in fact humans and magic are enemies, and the real world is not for you... unless you can shape it to your will.

to me, bryde’s spiels sound very... dreamer-supremacist, for lack of a better term. at the moment, dreamers are oppressed by the moderators, so they’re right to rebel; but there’s an emphasis on dreamers being more powerful than anyone else, and what they could do with that power. it kind of reminds me of magneto re: mutants in the marvel universe. and i think that is the direction he’s headed in: separate ronan from his human family and escalate the conflict between humans and dreamers much further than simple self-defense from the moderators.

there’s plenty of reasons to be mistrustful (if not outright skeeved the fuck out), right? so why does ronan trust bryde? well, several reasons.

2. “On The Right Side Of Rock Bottom”

ronan is at the lowest that he’s been since tdt. it’s better and worse at the same time -- in a way, it’s worse because it’s better. in tdt, ronan was deeply in denial about himself and the things he wanted; now he knows what he wants (a happy life with adam) and can’t go after it, trapped at the barns. in tdt, ronan was suicidal; now he wants to live, and so of course his life is threatened on all sides, internally by the nightwash, externally by the moderators.

through all of trc, one of ronan’s main goals was to return to the barns, feeling like his key to happiness was in his childhood home. but as it turns out (and as i suspected all along), being stuck alone and isolated on a dream farm surrounded by eerie sleeping things and a handful of incredibly traumatic memories of his dead parents isn’t as fulfilling as ronan imagined. to make things worse, he’s created a security system for the barns that causes him to relive his fears and traumas over and over (ronan for the love of God, why would you dream something like that). his brothers live in DC, which is close, but not that close -- and though he’s mending fences with declan, they still are somewhat at odds. his best friends, gansey and blue, are travelling the country with henry, and we know from the opal story ronan misses them and feels left behind. at the start of cdth he tries to escape by following adam to cambridge -- and that immediately goes pear-shaped, whether by accident or, as said above, by sabotage.

now ronan is truly alone, cut off from visiting adam, living with the guilt of wrecking his dorm and the self-loathing following the fact that adam had to tell people he’s, essentially, an unstable drunk (the place he actually was at in tdt). it feels like the progress has been erased. this is the first time since tdt ronan has hit rock bottom, and cdth tells us he sinks into depression, staying in bed for days, not showering or changing, eating expired food. he thinks of a life trapped at the barns alone doing nothing, and feels understandably suffocated. all the more so because it feels like everyone else is moving on - declan has his own life, gansey/blue/henry have their adventures, and adam... well, adam is growing up, which ronan feels he himself can’t do. this comes up at several points in the book: in ch. 5 ronan doesn’t recognize adam, noting he’s “growing from something beaten down into whoever he was supposed to be”, but finds it ridiculous that adam doesn’t recognize him because he’s still the same: “adam was changing; ronan couldn’t.” later, in ch.23, he notes that he often dreams of adam as older/more adult, while ronan himself is stuck in arrested development.

essentially: ronan is stuck. so of course, any lead that comes up - whether that’s mór ó corra, the new fenian, hennessy, or bryde, is going to make him reckless and ready to risk everything, because anything is better than being buried alive at the barns.

3. “Guilty, On the Run, And I Know What I Have Done”

remember how i said ronan hits rock bottom at the start of the book? well, it’s time to grab a shovel and keep digging, because then there’s the matthew thing.

so... we learn very early on in the book (in case we didn’t already know from trc) that ronan feels deeply torn about his dreaming. he loves to create, but feels guilty about creating life, because that feels like an act of hubris against God to him. and he feels especially guilty about creating matthew, because that means A) that matthew’s safety and life depend on ronan’s, and B) that matthew essentially has no free will, something that’s very important to catholic morals.

the moment matthew figures out he’s a dream-thing, and calls ronan out on lying to him, ronan is dropped into a fiery pit of shame, guilt, and self-loathing (and we already know that all of ronan’s emotions which are not happiness manifest as anger). he remains despondent even in dreams, and essentially, refuses to deal with matthew’s hurt and disappointment. which on one hand is justified, because he has ~Dramatic Dreamer Developments~ happening; but on the other hand, he’s essentially avoiding responsibility towards his brother, lashing out at declan in needlessly mean ways when declan tries to get him to be there for matthew (“dad’s working, sweetie”... really?). it’s a kind of pettiness that ronan hasn’t displayed in a while, and it speaks to me of his own restlessness and self-loathing more than anything.

we already know ronan feels alone, frustrated, isolated, scared, trapped -- now he also feels guilty on top of it all, and it just redoubles his determination to free matthew (something bryde has hinted he can do, knowing the power it would have on ronan). this is ronan at his worst, and we see it not just in how dismissive he is of declan, but in how he treats hennessy in chapter 67. he wants hennessy to dream up the lace, so he can show her how to stop dreaming of it (which in itself is dangerous, since lindenmere can manifest dreams, and in fact it ends up almost killing hennessy). but he gets absolutely furious when hennessy can’t dream properly -- because she’s, you know, kind of stuck on the slightly traumatic memory of witnessing her mom killing herself in front of her. it’s something you’d expect ronan to have sympathy for, seeing as he’s witnessed both of his parents’ violent deaths. instead, he’s impatient, snappy, insisting hennessy isn’t trying hard enough -- and downright cruel, shooting hennessy’s clone before her eyes, then trying to force her to shoot herself (especially relevant when you remember the church scene in bllb, and how shaken ronan was at having to kill a copy of himself).

this new ronan, it seems, has reached rock bottom and then some, and he’s got no time for empathy anymore. we see this in the metaphor of lindenmere, a darker, scarier, more dangerous version of cabeswater (i.e. trc ronan), because “dangerous things can protect themselves”. we see this once again at the end, when he assumes his sundogs have torn someone apart limb from limb and he feels absolutely no regret, only rage. yes, matthew was in danger... but kavinsky also tried to kill matthew in tdt, and ronan still didn’t feel like he could kill kavinsky in cold blood. this is a new, darker ronan, brought to this point by desperation. he reminds me a lot of anakin in the prequel star wars movies (i know, i know...) and how he let his fear lead him to the dark side by trusting a powerful, shady mentor that he should never have trusted. how does it go? “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hatred, hatred leads to suffering.” and suffering leads to - or maybe is the dark side.

4.“Holding Out For A Hero”

still, you might say, why is ronan falling for bryde’s manipulation so easily? can he not see through it? how can he trust someone he doesn’t know, someone who refuses to be upfront with him? someone his psychic boyfriend with an uncanny character judging skills is understandably wary of?

in short... ronan needs a hero.

or well, he needs a father, and those things are the same to him. ronan idolised niall, and he’s missed him terribly ever since niall diad. he missed him badly enough that he wanted to die for a very long time. now he’s coming to terms with the fact niall isn’t coming back, and not just that, but it turns out that niall might not be everything ronan thought he was (ronan hasn’t fully realised it yet, but he’ll get there; he’s starting to put the pieces together, from what declan and other people tell him of niall).

but if he accepts that niall’s gone, and worse, that niall wasn’t the infallible hero ronan thought he was... who has he got left to guide him? niall wasn’t just his father, either, but he was the only dreamer ronan knew for the longest time (the only other one was kavinsky, who sexually assaulted him and tried to kill his brother, so... not a great example) and yet he didn’t give ronan any guidance. and ronan needs dreamer guidance right now, with the nightwash threatening to kill him at every step.

enter bryde, promising all that and more. bryde’s not only a dreamer, he comes across like the alpha dreamer, ancient and powerful and all-knowing. he promises ronan tantalising answers, and even more importantly than that, he promises him community -- other people like him, so he won’t feel alone, so he won’t feel like a freak or an abomination; it has not yet occurred to ronan that (as maggie said in her video explaining the art/creation metaphor of the series) not all dreamers are equal: they don’t share the same skills or motives.

ronan is desperate for what bryde is promising, for that kind of guidance in his life. all throughout the book, there is a lot of talk of heroes: ronan was raised on stories of the irish heroes of old, who accomplished amazing feats even though they were held back by geasa (magical weaknesses like his nightwash). ronan constantly thinks of these folk stories, while excluding himself from it (“ronan was no hero, but he knew fucking right from fucking wrong”). and how does he describe bryde when he finally sees him in ch. 79? yep, you guessed it:

“he looked like a man who didn’t have to posture, who knew his strength. he looked like a man who didn’t lose his temper very easily. he looked, ronan thought, like a hero.”

ronan -- who is always posturing, who doesn’t know his own strength, who loses his temper very easily, who doesn’t think he’s a hero -- sees bryde as everything he’s not. and he’s willing to show him the same faith and devotion he once showed niall, because he needs a hero, a father, a teacher.

but i don’t think bryde is going to be the hero. i think ronan is going to be. there’s some early foreshadowing of this with ronan being depicted as “a gallant irish hero of old” while he kills the crabs (more posturing, really) but actually, we’ve known this all the way since trk, with niall asking declan to make sure that “ronan was the name of the hero, not the spear”; dreamers are weapons, but they don’t have to be. being a hero, ultimately, is about knowing fucking right from fucking wrong. and i believe ronan does.

but before he gets to be the hero, he’ll have to be the spear. and right now? he’s a spear in bryde’s hand.

we know a dreamer is supposedly going to bring about the apocalypse through fire; we know ronan and fire have always been associated; we know bryde hates the modern world and would like to reboot it; we know bryde has selected ronan as his chosen one, for whatever reason.

when you connect the dots, they spell a whole lot of trouble.

#ronan lynch #bryde #cdth #cdth meta #dreamer trilogy meta #mp #i could go on and on and on (and i have)#but i gotta post this now bc i need to get back to work #what a trip this book is though #much to think about #hmmm #dt #meta #cdth spoilers #my meta #swtwc

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