#the idea of being unable to keep secrets from god just lodged itself in my brain and wouldn't let go

[sisterdivinium]

Guilt served as comfortable bed sheet, as did darkness — the price for the sacrilege of love.

But a mischievous light shone briefly from outside and Jillian perceived the shapes of the woman she had spent the night adoring: scars, dimples, hair and fat which she only loved all the more, growing ashamed of her shame, of hiding her own mangled arm.

Then she saw the thin, injured skin of Suzannes’s knees and understood.

She could not hide from God.

Jillian dropped to her own knees, cursing the cross, defying it; worshipping her lover with new passion under His resentful eye.

[lovestrucked-again]

1.2k  warnings: oral sex (F receive), overstim, heavy smut written by a sudden urge :)

Jaehyun shuts the door.

His office is messier and more comfortable than Taeyong’s. The blinds are pulled down and the only artificial light comes from a desk lamp.

He leads you around behind his wide built-in desk, rolls his chair away and brushes a pile of mail back from the writing surface, clearing his desk.

"Have a seat," he encourages you, gesturing to the cleared spot on his table.

You carefully inch your bottom up onto his desk and scoot backwards, tugging the lower hem of your dress down to cover as much of your thighs as you can. Jaehyun flops into his chair and looks you up and down. Without warning, he rolls forward and lifts your shoes to his lap. You try to cross your legs but he catches your bare calves and stops you.

"You looked pretty excited with Mr Lee back there. How's your first day going so far?"

"Uh, it's... it’s not what I... I didn't expect you guys to—"

"The spankings? I know. I told them that was crazy.” he chuckles.

"Really?"

"Of course”

"Why didn't they—?"

"I got outvoted three to one. So... here we are."

"No, it's gotta stop! I'm not like, okay with it... sir."

"Well you seemed pretty lit-up when I saw you."

You look away. You can’t admit that to yourself yet, let alone to this gorgeous man holding your knees slightly apart.

"I think your body has different ideas," he continues soothingly, "about what it enjoys."

"NN-o," You shake your head, still unable to look at him. "No it doesn't. You guys are... you're my employers. You can't just..."

Jaehyun moves his hands to your thighs and pushes your dress back softly.

You tense.

"This all seems very strange to you, I know," he says quietly. "And since it's your first day, you're probably feeling extra sensitive but I think... what you need now is some way to calm your nerves."

"Wha-t?" you stammer nervously.

"This will make your whole day seem easier," he whispers as his elbows spread your legs apart and his face doves to your crotch. You slump backward, gasping loudly as his mouth latches onto your swollen vulva and sucks your clit and labia through the sheer panties.

"Oh Sir! What are you—? Oh... God!"

You claw at the desk behind you, trying to scoot away, but he pulls your hips firmly closer. His mouth attacks your pussy so adeptly that your panties may as well have been invisible.

You struggle but his hands bend your legs back until your feet are over his shoulders. You tip backward, onto your elbows.

Within seconds your neck slackens as your groin endures a flood of ecstatic sensations. It’d been ages since anyone had gone down on you, and after your gushing orgasm in Mr Lee’s office your body was well-primed for more.

Jaehyun takes a breath and yanks your underwear to one side. Then he immerses his tongue inside your folds, licking and sucking every millimeter of your bare sex into his mouth. You collapse completely and grab his head.

"Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God..." you pant. He was obviously an expert at this.

His hands pushes your legs farther back, folding your knees to your chest until your shoes are inverted high above your face. Your toes curled-up tight.

He peels your panties out from under your and gathers them into a rope around your knees, enabling him to keep your legs pinned back with just one hand. His free hand then takes up a position alongside his chin, thumb extending to probe your labia. Moments later he buries that long digit deep inside you, rocking it back and forth while your clitoris grow inside the vacuum of his mouth.

Your body squirms against his face. Your tailbone lifting off the desk.

He shivers his mouth against you, slurping your folds between his lips while his thumb probs your narrow depths.

For you, each successive minute of this was more ecstatic than the last. Finally you let out a desperate and plaintive cry.

Juices from your interior mingle with his saliva and trickle down the crack of your ass. The tempo of his mouth and thumb accelerate.

Your fists ball. One against his desk while the other lodges itself between your teeth.

Your clit was being pinched between his lips and shaken. His tongue flicks like a rabbit's foot. Then he wiggles his index finger into the slippery ring of your anus.

You feel all your orifices tighten at once. His finger pushes deeper and wiggles further.

He chooses that moment to suck your clitoris extra hard.

You scream as the climax hits you. It arrives with the force of a rogue wave, crushing everything in its path. Your jackknifed body quakes and wriggles. Your breathing stops.

As you come, Jaehyun carefully squeezes a second finger into your ass. Still he flicks and sucks your clit unabated.

A string of wavering sobs burst from your throat. Your hips jerk under him. Fresh secretions ooze from you.

Finally you grab his hair and shove him away. It was too much.

He raises his face, sucks in a lungful of air and surveys your body.

Your outer labia was puffy and gaping. Your delicate inner petals are bright pink and awash in lubricant. The head of your clitoris held itself high, entirely too swollen now to fit beneath its narrow hood.

His fingers remained half-inside your slippery butt, gradually creeping outward.

"How's that for a warm welcome?" he asks through a greedily glistening grin.

You rock your head from side to side, unable to speak. Eventually you reach down and push his hand from your ass. He obligingly removes his fingers, but keeps your legs pinned back for a moment in order to watch your anus recover its pucker.

Then he releases your knees and sinks back in his chair. For the next dozen seconds he simply admires the sprawled beauty lying atop his desk.

Your slender legs are slack, draped wide apart. Your sandals are heel-to-heel in front of your butt. Your nipples pointing at the ceiling, having completely escaped your bra.

You try to sit up, but only manage to get to your elbows. Your eyes are half-lidded. Your feet slip off the desk and fall, drawing your legs somewhat closed. You gaze at him sleepily.

He stands up and closes the distance between them in a single step. You do not move other than to track his approach. He bends over, cups your face in both hands and pulls you into a kiss.

You’re so far gone you answer his tongue's probing requests with eagerness, kissing him back as though he were a newfound boyfriend. Your heart flutters in your chest.

None of this makes sense. Here you are, hooking-up with another of your new bosses, giddy after such orgasms. Anything seems possible now.

Because it’s only nine fifteen in the morning.

[ravenvsfox]

Things Fall Apart; the Centre Cannot Hold

Summary: He keeps remembering the chafe of Ronan’s shoulder against his ribs as they got oriented in his little bed, the glisten of tears and nightwash wringing his lovely eyes, the lonely twist in his unguarded late-night voice over the phone, the one that Adam had almost liked, because it meant that he was indisputably missed. It was worse, that Ronan had been trying so hard for Adam, because it was easier to tell when he stopped.

(Adam's perspective throughout Mister Impossible, as his worry reaches a fever pitch, and the two versions of himself begin to converge)

Word Count: 9.5k

Warnings: mi spoilers, death/suicide mention

A/N: batshit middle books my beloveds. adam pov or bust 😌

Read on AO3

In high school, Gansey would very occasionally call Adam in the middle of the night.

He would speak low and fast, his panic pinched between thumb and forefinger and held at a respectable distance. Adam would smother the receiver with his palm and step outside of his family trailer, listening hard for movement at his back.

The news was always the same: Ronan Lynch was on his latest rampage or bender, exercising his dark talent for bullying his way into people’s lives and then breaking down all of their windows and doors trying to get out again.

Gansey would fret and apologize, guilty for luring Adam out of his wolf-den, guiltier for neglecting his duties as Ronan’s warden. Adam would wait tiredly on the line for Gansey’s anxiety to exhaust itself, and then dutifully join the search party.

He would step into his beaten tennis shoes and pry his bike from the fence, silencing the silvery shock of metal on metal, and avoiding the reedy whir of the spokes by holding the whole thing aloft until he reached the gravel road.

From there, he would venture out into the abandoned Henrietta streets, the crunch of his tires cutting clean through the woolly midnight silence. He often circled the perimeter of the park nearest Monmouth, stepped through the great dark portal into St. Agnes, and nipped under the old bridge, squinting into the darkness for the challenging shoulders, the oil-slick BMW gleam, the slump of a body or clatter of bottles.

This is a part of Gansey that I admire, he would think. And with equal fervour, this is a part of Gansey that I resent. This blood attachment to Ronan, who was not even attached to himself. The insomnia that seized two heads of the lopsided Cerberus that Adam, Ronan, and Gansey were all part of, a restlessness on either side of him that shook him awake over and over again.

He chased Ronan’s shadow, hating him. Hating his thoughtlessness, his privilege, his chokehold on Gansey’s interests, his purposefully and continuously ruined potential, and yet bristling with anxiety at the idea of finding him bleeding.

They hadn’t known then that he was a dreamer, but they’d felt the ear-popping pressure of his grief, glimpsed the hulking animal of his self-loathing, urged onwards by the twin spurs of Declan and Gansey, the past and the future, digging into his sides.

Adam had seen Ronan, teeth bared, hurling himself at rock bottom, and he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes and pulled him back by the collar.

Things are completely different now, but he still finds himself sleep-raw and petrified, reaching after Ronan in the dark.

He examines himself in the mirror of the communal bathroom in Thayer hall. The overhead lights are an unflattering yellow, the sink has a long dark hair stuck to its basin, and Adam’s face is gaunt and bruised with lack of sleep.

He’s losing it, a little bit.

He takes his own pulse, focusing on the faraway burble of the ley line. Everything, lately, seems far away.

As if through a stranger’s eyes, he slips from the seafoam tiling and bleach tang in Thayer’s North bathroom to the accordion door of the trailer toilet, the creaky cubicle shower, his gawky, hurt reflection in the burnt-out light. This version of Adam had to watch his best friend’s best friend escape suicide watch and get screaming drunk in public, treading mud and malicious dreams all over Monmouth manufacturing.

He can still smell the salt tang from teenaged Adam’s ocean of disdain.

Now that he loves Ronan, his irritation has only gotten sharper, more deadly. Ronan performs each perilous swan dive into the unknown, each foolhardy act of self-sacrifice, as if the people who care about him aren’t gasping spectators. It makes Adam furious.

Perhaps neither of them have changed as much as they wanted to believe. As Gillian keeps advising the crying club—with the confidence of a seasoned psychiatrist—progress isn’t linear.

He keeps remembering the chafe of Ronan’s shoulder against his ribs as they got oriented in his little bed, the glisten of tears and nightwash wringing his lovely eyes, the lonely twist in his unguarded late-night voice over the phone, the one that Adam had almost liked, because it meant that he was indisputably missed. It was worse, that Ronan had been trying so hard for Adam, because it was easier to tell when he stopped.

He slides fingers over his temples, smooths a knuckle over each eyebrow to ease the tension he always carries there. Sleep is a little knot of gristle lodged at the back of his throat; he can’t swallow it and he can’t spit it up. It never used to be this hard to put his problems to bed. He would worry the weight on his chest into small pieces, and go to sleep knowing that even the worst things about his life were organized correctly.

This time though, he’s out of sorts, divided, always busy but always spinning his wheels. He has a white-hot secret pressed to the roof of his mouth.

Every time he folds himself into bed, his subconscious helpfully reminds him that Ronan might be dead. And then a highlight reel plays in his head like an In Memoriam: Adam’s hand cupping Ronan’s nape, a barn silhouetted against a melancholy sky, a fistful of dreamt light, a dozen hard-won smiles and a hundred easy ones, a white handprint on a flushed thigh, a colourful joke to placate a brother, a kiss pressed to a dream’s forehead. All of that—gone. And Adam, at Harvard.

He highlights long patches of text in his sociology textbook, drinks a sensible amount of jack and coke at Eliot’s birthday party, declines Gansey’s calls by sending cheerful and conciliatory texts, and drifts through the library with his hand knotted in the strap of his satchel, looking for something that he can’t really articulate. He reads the same line of theory over and over and over and over, feeling like he’s scrying, like his focus isn’t his own.

He did all of this before Ronan went missing too, but now it’s a whole different class of performance. It used to be, I’m convincingly attentive, I’m sipping overpriced coffee on the way to class like a good Ivy leaguer, I’m making an impression on my professors, I’m forging friendships. Someday I will cash in these relationship tokens, and it all will have been worth it. It felt impossible that his life could be so simple and rewarding.

Now he thinks, I’m studying for finals and my boyfriend is being hunted by people whose job it is to kill him. I’m drinking a latte and the only people I’ve ever loved have left me, and I'm alone again. I’m putting my hand up in class and somewhere, Ronan’s life is changing, rapidly, dangerously, without me.

He lies to everyone, all the time, and tells himself that this life he’s building is more important than anything.

Once, as they cleared placemats and mugs full of stagnant coffee from the kitchen table, Ronan—still cobwebbed in his most recent dream—had detailed the sensation of hovering over himself afterwards. He was unable to manipulate his physical body or even really recognize it as his own, and his consciousness, detached, had its own limbs, its own intentions. He was like a parasite trying to wriggle back into its host.

Whenever Adam consults his double in a bit of glass, he imagines himself as a nimble dreamer, peering down, working to bring a fantasy to life. He can see his own outline, a slick college student with a flat, pleasant affect and a gaggle of soft-shelled friends. He plays his role impeccably well, but he can’t fit himself into it. If he passed himself in the hallway he would not stop.

Looking in the mirror now, he feels a red pang of fear, then a supercut of the ways he used to let himself love and be loved, then resentfulness hot on the heels of his worry.

His reflection withers, and he looks deliberately down at his hands. It’s a Tuesday, and he needs to sleep, or his tightly-scheduled Wednesday will be a misery. It’s a Tuesday, which means he hasn’t spoken to Ronan in—he stalls. Call me, he thinks, miserably. Just call me.

He can deal with a multitude of challenging and improbable situations if only he can see them clearly. Ronan is, for whatever reason, keeping him in the dark.

The not knowing is bad. It’s not how he functions. It’s not how they function. But instead of dwelling, he puts his back into the narrative that is now his reality: Impeccable student. Devoted friend-group. Tough break-up. Bright future.

Ronan isn’t here. Can’t ever be, physically, so far from the ley line. Adam has to be.

“Croissant, as ordered.” His gaze snaps up, connecting—not with his own image, but with clever, horn-rimmed Gillian. “They tried to foist it upon me without butter, if you can imagine that.” She deposits a crinkly brown and tan paper bag in front of him, and then two little plastic pots of butter. Adam regards the squashed shape of the bag’s contents with confusion.

It’s— “Is it Tuesday?”

“Wednesday,” Eliot corrects airily, licking jam from their thumb.

“My god, Adam. Whatever happened to your infallible circadian rhythm?” Fletcher asks. “You are the Swiss timepiece by which we measure our days.”

A terrible wave of vertigo strikes him, and he’s grateful to find himself sitting, at one of two conjoined wrought-iron tables in the courtyard near Thayer. He can feel the ley line breathing for the first time in a long time.

He must have gone to bed after his late-night breakdown in the bathroom. He must have. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was. His hand strays to his hair. Wet. He’d woken, showered, and met his friends for breakfast, and he can barely remember it.

“Sorry,” he chokes. “Sleep deprivation is catching up to me, I think.”

“Aw, chicken,” Benjy says affectionately. “I’ve sung those end of term blues. The profs think we’re machines. Don’t even get me started on Dr. Fraundberg’s Lit Crit for assholes.”

“Whyever would we?” Eliot says. “We want to make it to class before noon.”

“Har-har. You wound me. Adam you’d better get a tissue ready, I’m about to tear up.”

“Also,” Gillian says, pointing her be-honeyed knife in Eliot’s direction. “Speak for yourself. I want to make it to class never.”

“Your presentation is going to be exceptional,” Fletcher tells her. “Your rough draft already drove me into paroxysms of jealousy. I don’t know why you’re so concerned.”

“I don’t just want to pass,” Gillian says. “I want to win.”

“Admirable,” Benjy sniffs.

“You’re being awfully quiet, Adam,” Eliot says, at length. He’s aware that they’re all trying very hard to act like they don’t notice how poorly composed he is.

“Can’t a man savour his pastry, Eli?” Fletcher rumbles.

“No, that’s fair,” Adam sighs. The four of them peer at him expectantly, eyebrows arranged into an array of benign and non-threatening shapes. “It’s possible I’m having a slight breakdown,” he says, adopting the grim hyperbole of a student for whom finals are the beginning and end of their emotional upset.

Everyone at the twin tables indulges in a bit of mild laughter.

“What a coincidence, so am I!”

“Well if it’s only slight, I’ll stow my concern.”

“Harvard or personal?”

He smiles faintly, and says, “kind of both. The personal is political, or something.”

He thinks he’s laying it on thick, but Gillian grins at him. “'Atta boy.”

Fletcher goes to take a sip of his tea, but chokes when his phone lights up with an incoming text message. “Criminy, is it eight already? Starting the day with a bang, as usual. I’ll meet you at Weld this evening, yes?” he asks, shaking out his tweed jacket and thrusting an arm through it, securing the remains of his bagel between his teeth with his other hand.

“Of course,” Adam says. Fletcher gives him a thumbs up, mouth charmingly stuffed, and sweeps away across the now bustling courtyard.

“Hey magic man,” Eliot says. “Will you do a reading for my sister tonight? The break-up with Margot is hitting her kind of hard. I’m pretty sure she just wants to be told she’ll find love again.”

Adam watches the juddering impact of Benjy kicking Eliot under the table.

He shrugs. “First come first serve, but I’ll give her the friends and family discount.”

“You’re a prince,” Eliot says, blowing him a kiss. Adam tries to imagine any of his friends from Henrietta doing such a thing, and can’t. “Come along Benjy. Bookstore or bust. They’re giving out discount computing textbook codes at sixty dollars a pop.”

A slip of paper for sixty American dollars. Adam’s head aches profoundly.

Gillian waggles her fingers at their friends as they depart, then she turns and fixes Adam with that familiar amateur therapist look.

“What?”

“Are you sleeping?” she asks bluntly.

“I’m a very good sleeper,” Adam says wryly. “Ask anyone.”

“But are you actually doing it?”

“Yes, Gillian.” Liar, liar. “Do you want me to keep a dream journal as evidence?”

“Oh, yes please.” That shark’s grin. “I’d pay to know what the fuck is going on up there.” She taps her own temple to indicate Adam's guarded mind.

He spreads his hands between them. “I’m an open book.”

She hums, only half-smiling now. “I dunno. That Southern charm. I’m never quite sure if I should trust a politeness that perfect.”

“On that note,” Adam says, standing. He’s relieved to find that he’s wearing matching socks, and his pant legs are rolled just so. There’s a tiny streak of yellow on one of his shoes, and with a jolt he realizes that it’s dream-crab guts. He presses on. “Thanks for the croissant. And the psychoanalysis. Send me the bill.”

She salutes him with her coffee cup. “You couldn’t afford me.”

He laughs, and turns, and then spends the whole walk to his 9 AM class trying to straighten all of the haywire compasses in his brain so they point due north.

His assignment is in his bag, pressed neatly into a navy blue folder. He has three classes today, a meeting with his supervisor at three, a study block set aside from four to six, then dinner, then tarot readings all evening—his phone rings. His treacherous heart leaps. Ronan.

He stops mid-stride, scrambling for his cell in the front pocket of his bag.

“Hello?”

“I—oh—Adam! I didn’t expect you to pick up. How on Earth are you?”

“Gansey.” He exhales through his nose. “I’m just on my way to class.”

“Fantastic to hear your voice. How’s—not that one, Jane, the I-90—exactly. How’s Harvard? Are you batting away job offers yet?”

“Constantly. How are your nature hikes and hippie communes? Contracted any backwoods diseases yet?”

“Charming. I’m actually in remarkably fine form, health-wise.”

“Is that a brag?”

A guffaw. “More of a curiosity. It’s actually part of the reason I’ve been trying to get in touch. Have you noticed any surges of power from the ley line lately? I mean, of course you have, but do you have any idea what’s causing them?”

He frowns, pinning his cellphone between his good ear and shoulder as he heaves open the ancient door to the physics building. “I could give you my best guess.”

A beat, and then, “I’m listening, Parrish.” Something about the way he says it makes homesickness pulse painfully in Adam’s chest.

He finds a semi-secluded stone slab bench behind an empty stairwell, and slings his belongings across it before he replies, “Dreamers.”

“Dreamers,” Gansey repeats, but it sounds like he’s saying of course! “Plural?”

“At least three.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure yet.”

“Ronan hasn’t spoken to you,” Gansey guesses.

“Not—in a few days.”

“Is everything alright?”

He swallows, and is horrified to find tears burning at the back of his throat. There’s no pretending with Gansey. It’s why he never calls him.

“Adam,” he says quietly. “Is he in trouble?”

He struggles with his composure for several long seconds. “Possibly.”

A world-weary sigh. “I really wish you had called.”

“Yeah, well,” he says vaguely. He checks his watch. 8:23.

“So he’s playing with others. Why would Ronan want to do that?”

“I think—he’ll do anything not to feel powerless.” He understands as soon as he says it that it’s the pockmark in the windshield from which all of the damage is splintering outwards. “And people take advantage of that.”

Gansey makes a thoughtful noise, somewhere a thousand miles away, and it clicks in a lock and opens Adam’s shoulders up. Maybe he doesn’t have to be alone in this fight. How could he have forgotten careful, persistent Gansey?

“Well. He’s certainly not powerless. I almost feel back to my pre-Cabeswater self. Everything is pleasantly linear. And Blue is—lighting up.” In the background, he hears her say supercharged with relish. “I can only imagine what it’s like for full-blooded dream stuff, with all of that energy at their disposal.”

“I don’t know if I like it,” Adam says carefully. “It’s good for a while, helping all the Matthew’s of the world, and then what? Where does all of that diverted power end up? What makes dreamers qualified to harness it without their worst nightmares manifesting?”

“You’re worried about the Lace.”

The last time they spoke, Adam had told them briefly about his last scrying session, warning them to look out for the hateful, faceless thing that had pierced his cells and magnified all of his pain and fear until all he could possibly do was scream.

“I’m worried about Ronan. I know he’s in over his head, and I know he won’t believe it until it’s too late.”

“Sounds like someone I know. Don’t bite off more than you can chew with this, Adam. I know you’re enormously busy.”

It stings, a little. “I’m still going to—I’m obviously still going to make time for him. Especially when he’s—“

“Struggling. Yes. I understand perfectly.” It occurs to Adam that, unlike his well-meaning Harvard friends, he actually might. A needling murmur in the background, and then, “listen, Blue’s telling me that you should get in touch with the psychics, and Mr. Gray.”

He nods. The rhythm of problem-solving is soothing his frazzled nerves. “I’ve been considering it. I’m also pretty sure that Declan has been keeping his own tabs on things.”

“My money’s on yes,” Gansey says. Adam half-smiles. His money has been on a lot of things. “Poke around when you can. See what turns up. I’ll give Ronan a call, not that it’s ever done me much good before.”

“I’m pretty sure he ditched his phone.” He checks his watch. 8:24. It feels like it’s been much, much longer than a minute. There is so much day ahead of him.

Ordinarily, he would be compartmentalizing better than this. No feverish Gansey phone calls directly before class. No pleasure with his business. No finesse when logic will do the job just as well. But the subterranean, black-eyed Adam is still within him, tethered to the ley line and to his friends, and he wants very badly to fix this.

“Ah, Ronan,” Gansey sighs. “It’s always got to be him, doesn’t it?”

“I know,” Adam says narrowly. “If he’s not looking for trouble it’s looking for him.”

“You sound like Declan.”

Adam makes an offended noise in the back of his throat. Blue must be leaning across Gansey, because she says “that’s a new low,” almost directly into the receiver.

“I’m hanging up now,” he says flatly.

“Update me if anything changes? We’ll come home the moment things go south.”

He resists the urge to check his watch again. “Don’t cut things short on my account.”

“Well. Don’t disrupt your studies on Ronan’s. I’ve never known you to put your future on hold for anything.”

“I’m not—“ he stops. “Ronan is a part of my future.”

“Good,” Gansey says warmly. A test, then. And like most tests, there was never even a possibility that Adam wouldn’t pass.

______

It’s easy to tell when a dreamer is suffering.

As the energy from the ley line ebbs, dreamt creations judder and bolt like horses loosed suddenly from the service of a carriage, galloping towards safer pastures. If the dreamer is in more immediate peril, the dream simply folds its limbs into an agreeable shape and passes into sleep.

In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Adam lies awake in bed, dangling his hand between the wall and his bed frame, feeling along the subtle unfilled crack in the plaster. A flagpole casualty, from the day that everything stopped being enough for Ronan, and he slipped away on a dreamt current like a dark Ophelia.

He’s being dramatic.

He feels the drywall flaking, and digs his thumbnail into the split, wanting to rip the whole wall open with his fingers.

He keeps picturing Matthew’s half-lidded eyes, cloudless and blue as a wide prairie sky. The slouch of his posture, the tarnished golden head, the body briefly without a pilot.

Matthew had looked—Adam turns in bed, taking his chalky hand from the wall and fisting it in the sheets. He had looked like a faded old pillow, tucked unobtrusively into the chair by the window. He wouldn’t respond to Declan’s call, fluttering his drowsy lashes, and Adam had thought, ah. This is how I find out. His heart slumped over in his chest, dizzy with sudden grief. The tarot cards in his hands were dead leaves.

This is what happens when your life is tied to my brother’s, Declan had said, diverting his horror into scorn as he often did. The death of any one member of his family ensured the destruction of another. It had always been that way.

Matthew eventually roused, and Adam had closed his eyes and turned his face towards the ceiling until he could be normal again. He felt suddenly foolish for peddling lies to college students when magic was so obviously in the room with him.

Earlier, he had called Maura over lunch, and she vaulted right over small talk to ask him, with concern, about his loosening grip on his psychic inclinations. She’d said, “You do know that the ley line isn’t the source of your problems, right? Give yourself some credit. You can fuck things up in a completely non-mystical way.”

She pulled the Magician, reversed, and the eight of wands, and then, without further comment, passed the phone to Mr. Gray.

Unexplained weaponry, he’d reported. The Lynch brothers loosed on two separate worlds at the same time. Buttoned-up Declan for the first time unbuttoned, schmoozing with an array of dangerous and connected people, trading in secrets just as his father had. Purposeless Ronan for the first time with a purpose, wading out from the murky waters of his dreamspace and bringing the tides with him.

Bryde, the name in the corner of everyone’s mouth, joined all at once by Ronan’s and Hennessy’s.

Renegades, liberators of dreams, scorchers of earth. He could see, easily, why this would appeal to Ronan. A mission, finally. A father figure to guide his hand. A world that wanted his dreams, and wouldn’t crumple under the weight of his unusual ambition.

When they were teenagers, Aglionby was just another one of Adam’s jobs, but it was one of Ronan’s nightmares. He would go to school, a hooded bird of prey, seething with resentment and squandered ability. He longed for the Barns because of what they represented: the childlike belief that his family would never die; the possibility for creatures like him to roam free; a landscape powered by unconditional love.

Bryde, Adam knows, must be offering him the same relief. Exquisite flight, after the cage.

It’s not possible, is the thing. It’s a pipe dream. A Niall Lynch fairytale.

Foresight has never been Ronan’s strong suit. He gets it into his head that a solution is right up until the point that it falls apart in his hands. He throws himself entirely into belief. It makes him an extraordinarily loyal and trusting person. It also makes him stubborn, rash, and susceptible to manipulation.

He believes in one facet of something, and the rest follows. He can’t just take a sip—he downs the bottle.

Adam is a boy on a bicycle in November, needing to find Ronan alive so that he can hate him without feeling guilty about it. He never stops oscillating between resentment and love, reality and unreality, understanding and disappointment. He wants to be normal so that he can choose to be abnormal. Sometimes he wants the cards without the magic.

He closes his eyes and remembers a slumbering mouse against an angular cheek. He imagines Matthew like that, perpetually immobile, perpetually innocent, like a taxidermied puppy. The pieces of Ronan’s consciousness that will linger after his death, statues in a graveyard. Tamquam—tamquam—

What would Ronan be without his dreams? Here, Adam thinks. He’d be here.

He stays in bed for another wasted hour, and then stands up, disoriented, in the dimness of the room. Fletcher is snoring softly. Someone outside their cracked window is shuffling over the concrete stoop. His upstairs neighbour is playing tinkling soundtracks while he sleeps. Adam can’t be here anymore.

He plucks Fletcher’s laptop silently from its charging station, tucks his bare feet into stiff leather shoes, drags the cardigan from his desk chair, and lets himself out into the hallway. The glare from the overhead light pins him against the wall for a moment.

He shuffles half-blind down the hall and upstairs to the solarium, nearly losing one of his unlaced shoes in the stairwell in the process. The lights are blessedly shut off up in the attic, and he feels his way to the nearest of the tables hunched in the shadows. Aching with fatigue, he sits, unfolds his stolen laptop, and gets quietly to work.

He’s never had the time nor means to be truly proficient with technology, but he extracted a handful of leads from Mr. Gray, and he’s been in touch with a friend of Benjy’s—a computer science grad student and hacking hobbyist.

He chases key phrases down rabbit holes and assembles news articles, tracking Ronan’s movement by his “unexplainable” signature (code for mind-fuckery, joyful innovation, and dark humour). Adam is a practiced note-taker and serial obsesser, so it’s barely a strain to find Ronan—whom he knows better than anyone—cropping up all over the continental United States.

“What are you doing,” Adam murmurs. The sky lightens gradually to periwinkle. He has work today, but his shift doesn’t start until noon. His mouth is bone-dry, and his head feels cotton-stuffed the way it always does when he’s pushing his body to its limit.

When it’s late enough in the morning to be socially acceptable, he messages Benjy’s friend with the bare bones of what he’s looking for: a project under wraps, a lonely last name, a suppressed pattern. They correspond, remotely, until Adam is reading government files over watery coffee, wearing sweatpants, dress shoes, and a cardigan with cracked elbow patches.

He pores over it all, cross-referencing dates, and ignoring the widening sink-hole in his chest.

Industrial espionage isn’t at all Ronan’s usual brand of destruction. Highly controlled, not much up-front gratification. A little more political than Ronan usually leans. A lot more ambitious. Whatever their agenda, ley energy is flowing more easily now that it's unobstructed on such a large scale. Adam has been feeling its effects rippling all the way out to Boston, a persistent background pressure, unavoidable as a migraine.

It’s clear that the Moderators are desperate to eliminate Bryde’s party. Their reports are a comedy of close calls.

Slowly, Adam begins to understand the scope of things.

Billions of dollars in damages, manmade structures ripped from their foundations. Magical fugitives hunted by a team that specializes in murdering the targets they call Zeds. Visionary headlights pointed towards certain apocalypse. A world that is always awake, but always, always feels like it’s dreaming.

It’s pretty much exactly as he feared. Night terrors. The Lace. Beasts and legends. Adam holds his head in his hands. It’s more than what Ronan must be imagining. It’s more than Aurora waking happily in Cabeswater, powered by the swaying trees. It’s the indiscriminate waking of every incredible thing that’s ever been dreamed.

He’s struck by a wave of hopelessness that rushes all around him and tears at his hair. Ronan, dreamer of baubles that dispense music and light, cars that go very fast, and menageries of curious creatures, recruited to a cause that transmutes creation into chaos. Ronan, promising to wait, and then running full tilt at a future that can’t possibly keep Adam in it.

His dream half is going to destroy his human half, and he’ll take everybody else down with him.

If he could just see him, maybe—

His jaw creaks, teeth clenched tight against the emotional groundswell. The late morning sunshine strikes him, and he feel more like a vague, pale shape than a person. Like a dream, maybe.

Alter idem.

If Adam can’t reach Ronan, maybe the Moderators should.

He feels the weight of that awful thought burning a hole through his stomach lining. He can’t think about it. He needs to go to work.

_____

The next evening, he experiences a surge of power so acute that it nearly puts him in a coma.

It’s another Wednesday night, and another batch of his peers hitch polite smiles to his heels as he passes them by, winding his way up into the high, arched sunroom at Weld hall. They’re all wishing for magical solutions for their mundane problems, the opposite of Adam in nearly every way.

He bumps knuckles with Benjy and Eliot in turn, pulls up his chair, and knocks his last reading from Persephone’s deck, mostly out of habit. He consults his phone idly as his friends try to make pleasant conversation, holding up a finger when he finds a new batch of texts from Gansey.

John Amos power plant in WV shut down Monday

Intense. maura said she could’ve brought HER dreams to life afterwards

no word from Ronan yet? Leads from Declan? pls advise

I’ll assume no news is good news

He puts his phone in his satchel and fastens it closed. Every new scrap of information he gets feels like a stroll through Ronan’s security system at the Barns—hopelessness compounding and compounding until he staggers out the far end weeping.

He needs to focus on something productive. He nods at Benjy to start letting people inside, straightening the notebook where he usually scribbles his observations. Here, he is an adjudicator: powerful, organized, and reserved, tallying points and offering constructive critique.

His curious audience starts pouring in then, amateur wiccans and wannabe believers, aggrieved last-resorters and skeptics following friends’ recommendations. It’s a brighter collection of characters than Aglionby could ever have hoped to foster.

Gillian texts him to say that she just passed Weld and his line-up was out the door. He is a prim and unobtrusive con artist, a false prophet, and business is booming.

Eventually, a bespectacled girl who looks anywhere from five to ten years his senior sits across from him, tucking a bag armoured to the teeth with candy-coloured enamel pins between her feet.

“Hi,” she says nervously. “Anna.” She stretches her hands out in front of her, then thinks better of it and drops them into her lap.  “I’m not sure how this usually goes, so you might have to hold my hand a little bit.”

“No problem,” he says smoothly, passing his deck across the tabletop. “Just go ahead and shuffle. Concentrate on what you want to ask the cards.”

She does as directed, struggling a little to keep the papery stack in check. Not a natural born card sharp, then. He studies her neat black shirt, tucked precisely into a plaid skirt. A Marilyn mole drawn on just above the corner of her mouth. A pride flag pin he doesn’t recognize next to a cat wearing a cowboy hat, and the word “rude” in cursive.

She holds the deck fleetingly to her chest, eyes squeezed shut like a child making a birthday wish, and then plops it in the centre of the table. A card slips near the top, slightly uneven, and Adam plucks it free.

He hums thoughtfully. “Eight of cups. Okay. So you’re having some trouble with letting go.” She frowns and nods once, quick.

He lays out the rest of a simple five card spread neatly between them. A couple of stray swords, the chariot, a wand.

“It seems like things are stagnating in your personal life. Maybe your friend group used to feel like your family, but you feel like they’ve lost interest in you. And you love them, but Anna, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re pretty sure you were done with them before they even started pulling away. Right now you’re kind of just going through the motions. A couple of years overdue to convocate, right? Everyone else moved on to greener pastures.” He taps his thumb thoughtfully against the bones of his opposite wrist. “It’s not even the loneliness that gets you. It’s the not knowing. Are you supposed to chase after them? Is there another community out there for you? There is, you know.”

He notices another card spilling loose, and he grabs it without thinking. The Magician again. He thinks, huh, caught in the coils and dust of Persephone’s overturned cards.

And then the waking world disappears.

Adam is airborne, tumbling up into the atmosphere on a geyser of ley energy, whipped by branches and light. He throws his arms out to stop himself, but he’s only a projection, so his momentum doesn’t slow.

Something—Lindenmere? The cosmos?—shows him a series of images: an upturned nose made from oil and turpentine, a coiled old tree stump, a red-haired woman grinning toothily and then exploding, a rose the colour of warm dark skin, a pale scar-split hand cradling a silky head, the animal haunch of something black, a terrible voice booming turn back—

He skitters away, panicked, and bumps into his own body. Or not his own body. A double, blinking confusedly in the bathroom mirror.

His doppelgänger turns to leave, and Adam reaches after him, through the mirror, following himself into a version of Thayer which is not Thayer. Everything is alive, in this reality. Energy sings and saws its fingers together.

It’s a memory, but it’s also the present, and it’s also a nightmare. Wake up!

Obediently, the city wakes.

He gasps, although he doesn’t have a mouth. It’s the heaving first breath of a sleeping witch, like Gwenllian turning in her grave.

Adam struggles against the current of wild power, thick and pungent as gasoline. Everything feels more intense near magical artifacts, dream stuff, supernatural fault lines, and it is with great effort that he hunts for something familiar, something heavy enough to bind him. He was unprepared for this, and although everything around him is bitingly familiar, he's lost. He wheels around and around, reaching for his most trusted tethers—Gansey, Ronan, Blue, Persephone—

Persephone.

He follows the lingering perfume of her intuition, feeling blindly for those old handholds in her tarot deck, that familiar grip, like the hilt of a trusted weapon.

And then he finds himself looking again at the girl, Anna, her fate bunched around her narrow shoulders. And then at his own empty body, a glowing card clamped between his fingers. As soon as he’s aware of looking at himself, he’s looking out of himself, and he stands up quickly, overturning his chair.

“—Adam? Jesus Christ, are you okay?”

“What on God’s green Earth was that?”

A palm between his shoulder blades.

“Don’t touch me,” he chokes.

The hand retreats. A murmur: I’ve never seen him like this.

“Is it—is it bad? Am I going to be okay? Is it bad?” Anna keeps asking, horrified.

“You’re fine,” he manages to say. “I’m sorry.” The ‘o’ in sorry comes out a little wide and swerving.

“You went blank,” Benjy says, voice high with residual panic. “For like—ten minutes. Beyond hyper-focus.”

“I thought it was a gimmick,” Eliot says. “But a ten minute gimmick? What is this, Las Vegas?”

“I got carried away. I have to,” he swallows. “I need a minute. I promise everything’s fine.”

“Do whatever you need to do,” Eliot says quickly. “But, fair warning, I’m going to ask you a hundred questions when you get back.”

“And then I’m going to ask another hundred,” Benjy says. “Magic man.”

“A riddle, inside an enigma, wrapped in a sweater vest,” Eliot muses. He can tell they’re still shaken. He’ll have to deal with that, later.

“I'll be right back,” Adam says, touching them very lightly on the shoulder as he passes. The ley line is bursting, and he feels so flushed with its vitality that it almost makes him sick.

He stumbles past them, all the way out of the building and into the street. The winter air tears at his thin shirtsleeves, nips at his sock-less ankles. He shields his eyes against the sun, watching a bird swoop low overhead. A silvery, seagull-sized thing, but with knobby legs that taper into—he squints. Hooves?

He keeps moving, propelled by the mad urge to catch the bird, to pin the wild magic down so he can understand it.

Adam walks for what feels like a long time, trying to find the source of all of this haemorrhaging power. He spots a couple of fidgety-looking students, a few more curious creatures. Somewhere, faraway, there’s music crooning, and it sounds exactly the way a hot shower feels.

He stops in the middle of Oxford street, head cocked towards the natural history museum across the way, the orderly buildings, the sparse evening foot traffic. Business as usual. All of it screaming with energy.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a parade of scuttling creatures marching towards an invisible destination. Frowning, Adam crosses the street, chasing the peacock blue shimmer from an unfurled wing. He slows, stooping in the alley to pick one of the strange insects from the stream. He peers through a nail-sized hole in its head. Its spindly legs wave fearfully for a moment, and then it goes limp in his hand.

The ley energy punches out of him, and he sits back on his ankles, winded.

Adam gazes down at the jewelled beetle in his palm, its siblings scattered out like shell casings around his knees. Dreams, all of them. Briefly, impossibly roused in a dead city. He stands, letting the beetle drop from his hand and bounce across the concrete. He kicks them all hurriedly behind a nearby bench, mind racing. Bugs from an exhibit next door, no doubt. Dormant animals, transplanted from their habitats and pinned in place for decades.

What kind of ecoterror was wrought to bring about a flash flood of energy in a drought? How must Ronan be feeling, out there in the world, wracked with waking dreams? What unimaginable monsters were just stirring in the shadows because of him? Is Bryde one of them?

His lives are merging. The distant rumbling of thunder is overhead now, and the downpour is rolling in. There’s no way he’ll be able to keep dry.

Standing in that alleyway by himself, drained and ordinary again, he feels terribly alone.

He weighs his feelings against his logic for several agonizing minutes, standing still and watchful as a predator. He recalls the jarringly clinical accounts of Ronan's most intimate dreams, the sparsely encoded language in those government files outlining the world-ending dangers of something Adam had, for a long time, shared a bed with.

If something happens to Ronan now, it might kill Adam. If something happens because of Ronan, it might kill everybody.

Another minute, and he has his phone out and ringing.

“Hello?” Declan answers. Oddly, it’s not his usual prickly greeting. He sounds almost jovial.

Adam looks out into the darkening street, feeling like a death omen, a shadow across someone’s doorstep. “We really need to talk about Bryde.”

______

It’s the worst possible time for Declan to be withholding information from him.

Adam had graciously tipped his hand and Declan was, infuriatingly, holding back, as if this was a low grade in Ronan’s high school algebra class, and not the cataclysmic fuck-up of a powerful dreamer.

Declan, so uncannily like his brother in vulnerable moments like this, had thought of Matthew first. A world where dreams could stay awake, he’d marvelled. As if they could afford to think so small.

Once, Adam had awoken to find his arm glued to the bedspread. Ronan had dreamt a bee-less hive in the night, and it was oozing a steady stream of honey into the sheets between them.

“Score,” Ronan had said, when he’d rolled back into his body. “Sting-free. Fucking vegan.”

“What happens when we don’t want any more honey?” Adam had asked, critically. Ingesting dreams always felt like a slippery subject. “Does it shut off like a faucet?”

It didn’t. Ronan filled a dozen amber jars full, and then abandoned the hive in a dusty kiddy pool in one of the barns near the back of his family property.

A month later, Opal had crept in through a window looking for trouble, and emerged, shrieking, in a viscous flood of syrup.

Combing the mess out of Opal’s fur, her little legs slung across his lap, Ronan had complained about the magnitude of the clean-up job he would have to do, the special honey hoover he would have to create, what a waste of a dream it would be. Adam reminded him of his faucet idea.

“Too late for that, Parrish,” he’d griped.

It was their pattern. A marvel, too good to be true. Adam, the skeptic. Ronan, too in love with creation to care about consequences.

Eventually, it will all be too late.

Ronan will pursue this liberation fantasy, this golden daydream, even if it never stops oozing. Even if it makes the whole world uninhabitable.

______

That night, Adam tries to scry for the first time in months.

He gently pushes the crying club—only tenuously placated after the tarot incident—to have drinks without him, claiming stress-induced fatigue. He leaves his study notes open and blinking on the bed, lights a sad little tea light, and casts himself out into the ether.

Straining hard, he searches for the familiar contours of Ronan’s dreamspace, plucking the distant strings of the ley line and listening for the particular timbre of Ronan’s consciousness.

He doesn’t like walking this tightrope without a net, but Harvard isn’t exactly flush with psychic spotters. He keeps a delicate balance, far from his body, inching closer and closer to Ronan’s mind, the safe plateau at the end of this rope.

Eventually, he finds himself in a grey bedroom. It's full to the gills with water, there's a toy sailboat bobbing past at chest height, and storm clouds huddling nervously on the ceiling. Adam’s hair plasters instantly to his scalp.

“Ronan?” he calls, sloshing through the curiously luminous water. It starts raining harder. A familiar, curly-headed child stares at him through the darkness, eyes sharpened into silver points in the moonlight. “Ronan?” he asks again, gently this time.

A muffled sentence, a sad, crumpled expression, and then Adam is staring at a closed door.

“What—let me in! Ronan!” He pounds at the door. “Come on!” He can still feel rainwater, unnaturally warm on his neck.

A voice in his head, not Ronan, whispers, turn back.

“No,” he snaps, knocking harder. “Just let me—“ A sudden gust of wind in his sails, and he’s ejected from the dream altogether.

He pinwheels for a horrifying, weightless moment, struggling to tune back in to the feeble light from his stubby candle, and then dragging himself, hand over fist, back to his dorm room.

“Fuck, Lynch,” he says, when he has a voice. “Don’t be stupid.” He recrosses his legs, shaking off the pointless, clinging feeling of rejection.

When he tries to reach out again, searching, searching, Ronan’s expecting him. He never makes it past the threshold.

Back in his body, he knocks his candle over, relishing the controlled destruction, the spill of wax, the sizzle of the squashed wick. A fire he can actually put out.

______

The next time Adam scrys, Ronan looks like himself. Maybe a little scruffier, with what looks like a tunnel piercing on his right ear, and a rare openness to his posture. He’s lounging in a pasture up against a sleeping cow, boots up.

As Adam watches, he tips his shaved head back into its mottled hide, and the sun makes his eyelashes into lit matchsticks. He loves him very much. He’d almost forgotten.

“Don’t lock me out,” he says quickly. Ronan opens his eyes, and when he sees him he smiles instinctively.

“Adam,” he says, vaguely. And then he locks him out.

“No,” he cries. “Would you listen to me.” He feels for the fissure in space and time, the pocket where Ronan is dreaming, sweetly and inaccessibly, about the only home Adam has ever known.

Nothing gives. Nobody replies. He crawls back to Harvard, weak with misery.

In the next dream, Ronan is older, driving a boxy jeep over a foreign landscape. Rolling Irish hills, skies humming with artificial energy. A woman who can only be Jordan Hennessy, chattering in the passenger seat.

Then it’s Ronan with his head in his dead mother’s lap, stroking the downy wing of a black swan.

Then Ronan and Hennessy again, opposite one another in a sunny gallery. One of them examining an impressionist portrait no bigger than a postcard, the other examining the exit.

Then Ronan, discovering Matthew’s corpse in a dim hallway, blinking furiously at the stranger crouched over his prone body. “What did you do?” He sounds like a kid reprimanding his sibling for getting them both in trouble.

Every time Adam gets close, some defence mechanism stops him, like a firm hand against his chest, pushing him away again and again.

He doesn't know what to do except keep trying.

______

Blankly, he looks down at a sink full of tinfoil and uneasy water. In pieces, he becomes aware of his surroundings—green stalls and laminate countertops, a row of hundred-watt lightbulbs, and somebody rattling the locked doorknob.

“Adam, are you in there?” Fletcher. “We’re going to be late. It’s nearly ten. Adam?”

“Just a minute, sorry,” Adam slurs. He stares closely at his face in the mirror until he recognizes his own features. He has an exam at 10:30. He glances down at his watch. 9:52. He had been so sure that he could just drift for a few minutes, maybe catch Ronan before he woke up. That was almost an hour ago.

He drains the sink, hands shaking, cuffs getting damp. The lightbulb filaments float behind his eyelids when he blinks. He throws his satchel over his shoulder, smooths his hair up and out of his eyes, and rubs the bags under his eyes until they hurt.

When he lets himself out of the bathroom, Fletcher is directly outside, tapping a nervous rhythm on his hips. His hands fly from his body and into the air at the sight of him.

“Adam! Thank god. I’ll cancel the search party.”

“I got lost in my notes,” Adam says, as they both make for the stairs.

“Of course you did,” Fletcher says warmly. “A supremely Adam move. I just hope you’re taking care of yourself. Gillian thinks you might be—well—not spiralling, but—“

“I’m handling it.” He takes several mental paces backwards. “Uh—poorly, clearly. I’m sorry Fletcher, I didn’t mean to snap.”

Fletcher, to his credit, recovers quickly. “I can’t imagine going through my first semester of college and a break-up at the same time. You’re a stronger man than I.”

Adam rather doubts that Fletcher can imagine going through a break-up at all, but he nods conspiratorially. They hop down the last few steps and out into the chilly sunshine together.

“You’d be amazed what one can do out of necessity.”

“Too true. We all have our hidden depths, don’t we,” Fletcher says thoughtfully. For a moment, Adam considers telling him—something, looping him into this tangled web with him, but then he says, “now, chapter twenty-three wasn’t on the outline, was it? I beg you to say no. Lie, if you must.”

And Adam is a student again. He doesn’t have out of body episodes. He doesn’t carry wads of tinfoil in his trouser pockets. He doesn’t keep deadly secrets from people whom he is mostly pretending to like and understand.

They walk onwards, towards a test which Adam will rouse himself for long enough to ace. Then he will think of the next thing, and the next. Appease these school acquaintances of his. Tinker with finicky car engines. Make flash cards. Drift into the beyond using one of Fletcher’s three-wick candles from pottery barn. Text Declan, who activates Ronan’s accountability in a way that Adam does not. Call Gansey, if he can bring himself to face his disappointment.

And clear away his feelings, which keep pouring out of him like so much honey.

______

Ronan hangs up on him, and Adam holds himself in the biting wind outside the library for a very long time.

He’d thought, if he could only speak to him, that he could begin to undo Bryde’s poisonous influence. They know each other. They’ve known each other. Ronan would listen to Adam’s fears as he always does. Adam would appeal to Ronan’s heart, which tends to ache for helpless things. They would see how lost they had become without each other. Adam would be allowed back into Ronan’s dreams, and Ronan would be allowed back into Adam’s future.

Why didn’t you text back?

As if they’ve been suspended in time since Ronan’s last tamquam, and none of it—the running away, warding his dreams against Adam, abandoning his phone, trusting a complete stranger over his friends and family—had ever happened.

It’s absurd. He should have expected it. Ronan was searching for a reason to stay, and when he looked for his reflection, his second self, Adam wasn’t there. For a single moment, he wasn’t there, and now he’s paying for it.

Impatient, wrathful Ronan. Leaping from the moving vehicle because Adam was going the speed limit. Going rogue, and then calling Adam with all of these stinging accusations, like he was the one who’d been abandoned.

He thinks again of Bryde manipulating Ronan, preying on his loneliness, his love for his brothers, his fear of himself. This big bad rumour, older and crueler than the Lace itself.

And Ronan letting himself be manipulated, putting on blinders, using Adam’s brief silence as an endorsement for a glorified joyride with unthinkable global ramifications. Self-destructing because things got a little too quiet.

Adam feels hot rage taking ahold of him with its sticky fingers.

Then he thinks of Ronan saying I need to see you, his thin, frightened voice finding Adam from somewhere out there in the city, and his anger goes clammy.

There’s no way Ronan will call again. Negotiations were off as soon as Adam refused to house them both from the Moderators.

And now, without Hennessy, Ronan is the last arrow in Bryde’s quiver. He’s going to be the explosive that brings everything down. He’s going to be buried at ground zero.

If I'd replied an hour sooner, would he really have waited? If I’d gone to school closer, would I have noticed him disintegrating? If I explained that my dream isn’t what I thought it would be either, that he’s the only thing that feels real, would he have said it back to me?

After everything that’s happened, am I going to be the one who gives up on Ronan Lynch?

Everything is so fucked.

He calls Declan.

He picks up on the first ring. “Parrish—”

“He hung up on me,” they both say at the same time.

“Mother of God,” Declan moans. “Then there’s no hope. He thinks I sold him out to the Mods.”

“Did you?”

“No. I did exactly as we discussed. I negotiated for his safety. I thought—I mean, you said it yourself, Adam. Being anti-apocalypse is a pretty solid platform.”

He shakes his head. “Ronan won’t see it that way. He’s not like us. He doesn’t want to be moderated even a little bit.”

“Believe me, I know that. The way he was talking—about the world screwing them over, all of them, dreamers. That’s not the way my brother thinks. That’s all Bryde. And now he’s taken him—Christ—Christ knows where.”

“He wanted to see me,” Adam feels compelled to say. “He was trying to come here.”

“He said that? That's good,” Declan says, relieved. “Where—“

“I let him get away,” Adam says, through numb lips. “I let him go.”

______

He texts Gansey, things have gone south, and then he turns his phone on silent.

His puts his fingertips to the floorboards, a knobbly hand on either side of a scrying tableau: the leaping flame of a candle, a well-organized pile of cards, his overturned phone and discarded tie. He’s just finished crying, and he feels volatile and ill-prepared even as he ties himself to the flickering light.

His mind races through the night like a skipped stone. Vaguely, he pictures a vast body of water and a glittering mountain range, with no horizon line in-between. Darkness reflected in darkness.

“Ronan,” he calls. The dreamspace whirs and grinds its gears and won’t reply. “You know this is wrong. You know, or you wouldn't be hiding from me.”

It’s all water out here in this sublime mirror-space, but it’s also warm, like the steam rising from a hot spring. Something is moving, changing things on a chemical level.

For a moment he thinks he sees himself, a wan doppelgänger with its hands raised. But it’s not Adam. It’s Bryde. Cool, sturdy, a pale Atlas holding the dream together on his back. He recognizes him instinctively.

Adam deliberately throws his mind closer, into the terrible heart of this fire Ronan is creating. Smoke whispers and catches all around him, and it’s even harder to tell the difference between things now. No horizon, no seam, no reality, no death.

What have you done? What are you doing?

The heat is quickly becoming unbearable. Adam is stretched too thin, and the fire is fraying him, eating through each fibre of his connection to reality.

Ronan, please, I need you to stop. I’m losing my grip. Listen to me.

And then, without any warning at all, he collapses on his dorm room floor.

He hacks and retches, lungs full of phantom smoke. Everything feels very wrong. He thinks for a second that he’s blind, but it’s not his vision, it’s another, less tangible sense, it’s—

He scrambles backwards on his hands, heaving. He tries to pull himself up onto his bed, head first, then chest, but he has to stop with his face buried in the comforter.

Ronan is—he must be—he’s—

“God, no, oh my god, no, no.”

He needs to throw up. He needs to call somebody. There’s complete silence in his head.

He was slingshotted back to Cambridge, swatted back along the zipline to his body, because there was nowhere else for him to go.

He’s sure, in a very non-magical, intuitive way, that every dream in the world has just collectively collapsed. Adam staggers to his feet. There’s a smoke alarm going off, somewhere. A background hum of electricity groaning as it shuts off. A high, scared voice.

As if in a trance, he goes to the window.

There are five dead lightbulbs in the nearest row of street lamps, what looks like a sleeping child out in the middle of the square, and a woman clutching her chest and sitting slowly on a bench.

Panic is deadening his senses, crawling blackly into his mouth and nose and eyes. He thinks of Matthew sitting weakly by the window. Opal slumped over a stump in the woods. Chainsaw falling from the sky like a stone. Gansey’s Cabeswater heart decaying in his chest. Ronan, either dissolving into nightwash or felled by a Moderator’s bullet, dead, lost, or powerless.

Every morsel of magic, every innovation, every cherished friend, every sacred place, turned off like a faucet.

The world outside, drooping and disconnected, is now exactly as ordinary as Adam has been pretending it is.

The ley line is gone.

[queerofthedagger]

The Consequences of Keeping Secrets

Pairing: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon

Warnings: None II Wordcount: 1297 II Ao3

Summary: If only Merlin would understand why Arthur is so angry; if only Arthur could bring himself to tell him. 

Or: Sometimes it's easier to simply say what's bothering you, but it's also the hardest thing in the world. At least if you're Arthur Pendragon. Thankfully, Merlin loves him anyway.

*

It’s threatening to become a familiar scene; Arthur and Merlin standing opposite each other in Arthur’s chamber, shouting at each other with mounting frustration building with each secret that gets revealed.

They’ve been at it for weeks, unravelling years of events Arthur had no clue were happening, and he knows it’s not completely fair, that he lets his emotions get the better of him, but Merlin just doesn’t seem to understand, while Arthur is unable to put into words why it’s not the magic that’s bothering him, nor a lack of understanding why Merlin didn’t tell him, but all the things that actually entails.

“You had no right!” Arthur’s just hurling at Merlin, his fist clenching at his sides as he tries to keep himself from crossing the distance to shake the stubborn idiot, to force him to see sense.

Not that it would help, he knows.

Merlin scoffs, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “And what should I have done? Offering the life of someone else?”

A part of Arthur, the selfish, spoiled one, wants to answer this with a resounding yes. The, thankfully larger, more rational side of himself, the one that tries to keep a grip on his temper and overwhelming emotions, forces him to close his eyes for a moment to gather his thoughts.

Obviously inclined to press his advantage, Merlin goes on, his voice tense and rough. “Not to mention that I survived, didn’t I? Not only I, but my mother and Gaius as well, and Nimueh is long dead – “

“Damn it, that’s not the bloody point!” Arthur shouts, fisting one hand into his air as his voice fills the space between them, feeling so much larger than it actually is. “You thought you were going to die, and you didn’t even tell me! You just – just – you didn’t even have the decency to let me decide if I wanted you to trade your life for mine, you made all these decisions – “

“I’m asking you again,” Merlin interrupts, and his voice is much lower now, calm in a way that should make Arthur wary if he wasn’t so riled up himself. “What else was I supposed to do? You keep complaining that I made these decisions without consulting your royal pratness, but do you honestly want me to believe that you wouldn’t have chopped my head off back then?”

Arthur takes a step back at that, the accusation feeling like a physical blow; maybe the worst thing is that he’s not completely sure of the answer himself. Damn him if he’s going to admit that, though. “Then you simply shouldn’t have done anything!”

“Are you kidding me?” Merlin has the audacity to laugh at that, the sound mirthless and all wrong. It makes Arthur’s skin crawl. “You’re the Once and Future King – “

“Oh by the gods, don’t start with your whole bloody destiny-nonsense again!” Arthur snarls, the just receding fury flaring back to life in an instant. “I don’t care what some blasted dragon said, this is about you being far too fucking willing to give your life for mine!”

It takes a moment to comprehend what he just said, only the confused frown overtaking the anger in Merlin’s face making him reconsider his words, and he winces at the blunt admission.

Unfortunately, the shock doesn’t seem to placate Merlin all that much. “If you expect me to apologise for saving your life, we’re literally going to fight until the day you die because I don’t bloody care how much it’s bothering you, I’m not going to stop!”

“You very well will! I’m your king, and – “

“What,” Merlin laughs, and alright, he can admit that it’s a weak argument, even for him. “You think after years of this, that’s what going to stop me? You obviously know me even less than I thought.”

“No surprise there,” Arthur snaps back, words tumbling out of him without any filter whatsoever. Merlin always had the ability to make him lose any restraint, and recently, it manifests in the worst way possible.

Merlin winces slightly but quickly covers it with a glare. His hands are trembling at his side, and there’s a new edge to his agitation now, the line between frustration and desperation blurring. “For fuck’s sake, why is it so hard for you to say thank you for once in your life? Do you have any idea how hard it was? Do you think I enjoyed keeping all that from you, having to make decisions that monumental? I never once asked for this, but I did it anyway! I lost so many people, had to hide myself from everyone important to me, and now you – you – “

He breaks off there and squeezes his eyes shut, and even with the distance between them, Arthur can hear the erratic rhythm of his breathing. God, but he is so tired of this, all the shouting and going in circles, of being unable to keep his mouth shut and driving them deeper into madness with each passing day.

Sometimes he wishes he had never asked Merlin to tell him everything; that he wouldn’t be too proud to insist that they stop doing this, going over all the parts of his life he never knew of.

His shoulders sag and he rubs a hand over his face. “You shouldn’t have had to,” he says quietly, and when Merlin opens his mouth to argue, he quickly raises a hand to stop him. “I know – you did have to, and that’s – that’s exactly my point.”

He swallows against the lump that lodged itself firmly in his throat, that infuriating instinct to never admit his feelings screaming at him to not do this.

“God, Merlin – all those years, and you had to do all of it alone. All those decisions and consequences, the fear for your own life, and still you’re so – so unbelievably good in spite of everything. You shouldn’t have had to bear all of this on your own.” He closes his eyes and turns his head away, feeling too raw and exposed to keep looking at the sudden confusion and shock in Merlin’s eyes. “I’m just – I’m sorry, okay? I wish I could’ve been there for you, that you could’ve – “

Warm hands on his shoulders cut him off, and it’s a testament to how wrung out he is that he didn’t even notice Merlin crossing the distance between them.

“You’re such an idiot,” Merlin whispers, his fingers digging into Arthur’s skin, and then he pulls him closer, lips pressing harshly against Arthur’s. There’s no finesse to the kiss, all teeth and hot breath and scrambling hands, but it’s easily the best thing Arthur has felt in a long time.

All the tension melts from him and he tangles his fingers into Merlin’s hair, pouring all the things he’s unable to say out loud into the kiss, hoping that it will be enough.

Merlin’s tongue brushes against his bottom lip and Arthur shudders, instinctively trying to press closer just as Merlin draws back the tiniest bit. “You infuriating, maddening, brilliant man, I can’t believe you,” he whispers against Arthur’s mouth before trailing his lips over his cheeks, his temples, his forehead.

Arthur can do nothing but cling to him, suddenly so very exhausted, and he lets his head drop to Merlin’s shoulders. “We should’ve tried this as a mediation technique weeks ago.”

“Or you could’ve just told me what’s actually bothering you,” Merlin mutters, but there’s an unmistakable fondness to his voice that Arthur hasn’t heard in much too long.

Still, he bites the spot behind Merlin’s ear in retaliation and hides his grin in the crook of his neck. “Shut up, and take me to bed, oh great warlock.”

For once in his life, Merlin does as he’s told.

[1-800-sunset]

Dabihawks Victorian Vampire au ft. Trans Hawks and Vampire! Dabi

The Takami family had been climbing up through the social ladder for years. They have become known as wealthy merchants with connections to several lords and ladies. Keigo was the only son to the main branch of the Takami family. Other branches have opted to marry into social status. Not many people knew of the predicament that left the Takami family to shroud a secret. When Keigo was born he had been born female. Well that in itself was not a problem to his father who would regardlessly still pass on the business to Keigo. However when Keigo was growing up he had an affinity for the things that were primarily masculine. So one day his mother decided to dress him up as you would with a little boy and he was extremely content. So they allowed Keigo to be raised as a boy and those who knew were sworn to secrecy.

Keigo had grown up to be quite a vision with bright honey eyes from his mother and golden blonde hair from his father. He was not quite tall but always carried an air of elegance and dignity. The way he walked almost commanded the attention of any room he entered. He had many suitors of varying genders. Suitors he had become acquainted with in his times of attending balls and business meetings. Of the male suitors who knew of his assigned gender at birth believed him a conquest to tame and make him submit to the role he so hated. Therefore rejecting them with harsh words sweeten by his delivery of voice. The female suitors believed him to be a gentleman and a romantic and swooned, which was not far from the truth. Keigo was excellent at what the tight-lipped Victorians called canoodling.

Besides that Keigo was beloved by his parents and friends. He treated the servants with kindness and fiercely defended them. His best friend was Lady Rumi Usagiyama and once they see each other it will take a lot to get them to let go off one another. Many believed that Lady Rumi and Keigo would one day marry; it only made sense, right? Rumi and Keigo would laugh behind their backs, only Keigo knew of Rumi’s affections towards ladies. But it was a rumor that they let people believe, after all it was just gossip.

This evening the Takami family were invited to a small ball at the Todoroki estate. Keigo was the main reason why they were invited, for he was friends with Lady Fuyumi who had begged her father to let them come. Lady Fuyumi, Rumi and himself would often group together at balls to avoid the unwanted suitors. Plus with Keigo there Rumi and Fuyumi’s relationship as never questioned as being more than

friendly. The estate itself was beautiful filled with gold decor and paintings of the many family members. The mahogany tables were long in the Refreshment room had many varying foods and drinks to choose from. Keigo couldn’t bring himself to eat a sour taste in his mouth as he spotted Lord Enji from across the room boasting about some hunt he went on. He knew of the secrets Lord Enji hid behind closed doors when there weren’t prying eyes. Fuyumi had told him of the years of abuse her mother had endured only for her to be locked in a private wing where no one is allowed to see her. She told him of Touya, her long lost older brother, that her father declared he was dead. And poor Shoto being chosen as the successor to the Todoroki fortune, while receiving the same abuse as his mother and Touya. Rumi and Fuyumi had pulled away from the party to be alone for a while leaving behind a bored Keigo. He knew the estate well enough and walked towards the garden.

He adored the garden as it was covered in lovely red and white roses. Evening lamps glowed unable to match the bright light of the moon above. Keigo was content to be solitary in the garden simply taking in the fragrance all around him as he sat on a bench. In the distance he could hear the clicking of glasses and roars of laughter. A sigh escaping his lips as he absent mindingly stroked the petals of a nearby white rose. But there was a presence that he could not shake. It was as if he was being watched from afar, an uneasiness spreading in his stomach. There was a sense of danger blanketing the garden. Until he turned around only for honey golden eyes to clash with burning turquoise blue. A gasp left his mouth, the man was tall and lanky with deathly pale skin. Unusually lacking any color as if he was born in darkness. Hair in unruly spikes as dark as a raven’s wing. There was a lopsided smirk and although his eyes were half lidded seemed amused at the blond’s reaction. Every fiber of Keigo’s body told him this man was not to be trusted but he couldn’t seem to move like a frightened animal in front of a beast.

“Who are you?” He mannered to say hoping his fear did not spill into his otherwise confident remark.

“ I should be asking you that question. After all, I am in the presence of such a lovely dove such as yourself. But I will not deny such a pretty thing, an answer, I go by the name Dabi.” Dabi said with a low chuckle that made Keigo’s heart race.

“Please, do tell me your name. I am on the edge of my seat to know” Dabi say moving closer to the man.

Keigo didn’t know if it was a good idea to let this man know his name after all he knew nothing of this mysterious man. So he came to the conclusion to give him a pseudonym to protect at least some part of his identity.

“They call me Hawks. Now what brings you here in this estate.”

“Aw birdie you have to be more honest. I know you are lying but I won’t hold against you. I came for some personal business but it seems I have been distracted by something better. “

A shiver went through Keigo’s body, as Dabi stalked closer. Normally he would give out a clever remark, but none of his thoughts were coherent. The moon played against dark locks and made Dabi’s skin glow. He certainly was handsome but in a way that made Keigo nervous which was a rare occurrence in itself.

“If I remember correctly this is a ball, would you do me the honor of dancing with me?” Dabi said with a bow before offering up his hand for the blond to take.

Keigo gulps a lump in his throat as he accepts the cold hand. His face flushing dark over his checks.

Dabi held him close, hand his thin waist. Keigo let himself be swayed and spun expertly by this man. This certainly was not his first waltz. There was a subtle difference in the way the upper class danced. There was a sense of control and need for perfection. A perfection that Dabi was demonstrated without flaws. Keigo peered up through blonde eyelashes to see that Dabi was enraptured by him, his gaze glued to his face. It was as if his face demanded all the attention of this man. There was no music but the flow of their bodies did not need it. The two were alone in the abyss of roses with the moon as their only spectator. When the time came for the dance to end, a hint of disappointment crawled into Keigo’s chest. Dabi’s hand refused to let go of his waist and brought his other hand to brush his lips against Keigo’s hands. Keigo looking up at Dabi noticed something in Dabi’s smile. Shining brightly in the silver moonlight we’re abnormally long sharp caines.

Keigo’s heart raced in a small panic, he was one of them. One of those beasts that had an affinity for human blood, the ones people call vampires. Creatures of darkness that are an unredeemable evil. He has been charmed by one and by the way it is framed it appears he is this creature’s next meal. Keigo couldn’t pull away, frozen in the sight of turquoise eyes. Dabi’s smirk remained on his face as he let go Keigo’s hand he once held to grab his chin. Leaning down his cold lips met with a pair of too warm lips. Keigo knew it was wrong but his body melted underneath Dabi’s seductive kiss. Kisses trailed down his jaw with the occasional brush of sharp teeth sending shivers down his spine. Soft moans escaped his lips as Dabi directed his kisses down his neck. Playful bites until the flat of his cold tongue swiped. Danger was in the air. Dabi wasted no time and bit down Keigo’s neck. Two piercing caines lodging themselves in Keigo’s neck. A loud gasp from the sudden pain echoed in the garden. The teeth went deeper and Keigo uselessly grabbed on to raven locks. Tears streaming down his face. Honey golden eyes in pain as he felt this creature consume his blood. In gentle waves pain was replaced with pleasure. As his vision was growing darker and unfocused his body grew pliant in Dabi’s arms. Moans rapidly spill, as if it were prayers to a merciful god. Until Keigo’s body finally gave out and his vision blacked out, no longer able to keep consciousness.

[rarestereocats]

It's been a year since Virhea's death and we've all been keeping ourselves busy in one way or another.  Xaren's been hard at work building his own monastery for his people outside of town,  Industria's become a plant-person and has had her Order members spying on all of us to keep us safe,  Elathera's been spending a lot of time with her family when she's not scouting out knowledge on the planes,  and I've had a baby and published the second volume of the "Beautiful Girl Squad" series.  We've all been keeping in touch over this time and are having our weekly meet-ups at a cafe for brunch and mimosas.  It's the most normal thing any of us have probably done in ages.

We catch each other up on everything that's been happening as we've all been gifted wishes from the gods over this year too.  Industria wished she could ferry the souls of the dead,  Elathera wanted to make sure nobody could ever take away her magic under any circumstances,  Xaren wished for his brothers resurrections,  and I wished for me and my family to have a lifespan on par with elves.  Lucky and Rikius also received wishes;  Lucky spending theirs to break the curse they put on Remy's soul and Rikius simply wanting the ability to sleep.  All in all,  it's been a pretty productive year for all of us.  After brunch,  we all decide to skip over to the monastery to meet Xaren's brothers,  who we've heard a lot about these past few years,  but haven't had the chance to see yet outside of Elysium.

With his brothers met and one of them currently half a bottle deep in some wine and attempting to steal more,  me and Industria talk about how Ilyana will be going on a pilgrimage of her own in a few weeks.  She suggests it might be a good idea for Sirqi to go along,  which leads to Xaren schooling her on all the wisdom she's learned lately.  Unfortunately,  it doesn't seem like my sister's learned all that much in terms of that,  but she tries her best and we love her for it anyways.  It's agreed she'll go with Ilyana then with Antony chaperoning the two of them,  so the rest of us hop over to Elathera's plane for surprises. She shows off how powerful her summoning's got and Industria shows us what her secret project is finally.  The seed from the Tree of Life has grown into a Colossus of Life,  as Industria has named it;  an 80 ft plant-being that's powered by Virhea's soul and is made to be a weapon of peace.

Yes,  a weapon of peace,  folks.  It can also turn into a wagon that's able to drive itself,  so Arnor is officially out of work,  but is probably elated that he doesn't have to put up with us anymore.  The Colossus and one of Elathera's gigantic,  beastial summons proceed to arm wrestle which is cool as fuck.  Xaren bids us farewell after as he has monastery duties to tend to and Industria drags me and Elathera along back to the lodge for something.  I'm a little worried because I should really be getting back to my baby (don't worry,  Antony was looking after him),  but I'm led back to my old room which is now occupied by a portal.  Industria subtly (and by that,  I mean not subtly at all) acts surprised and says I should check it out,  but Elathera says something that has me worrying that I'm about to step through a portal to Hell.

Instead,  I'm treated to the sight of our hotel suite in Sicily when I step inside.  The door to the balcony is open wide and as I step outside,  I'm treated to the island under a night sky and Rikius waiting on the beach for me.  I'm unable to figure out what's happening here,  so I go to excitedly ask him and it's then that he mentions that Industria crafted this demiplane just for the two of us.  He then pulls out a beautiful circlet that he had crafted with her help and asks me to marry him.  Of course I say yes because how could I ever say no to him?  We head back to excitedly tell the others before slipping back into our private plane for some alone time.  Next morning,  we decide to go traveling on a whim to scout out possible wedding destinations.  I mention we should go somewhere with a train,  so Elathera hooks us up with a teleport spell to the nearest train.

Spoiler alert!  This train isn't near us at all and is in a city 25,000 miles away from Caelsimil and in a city called Marrakesh.  It's a colorful desert city that not only has trains,  but working electricity,  which is something none of us know about and are stunned by.  We spend several minutes admiring a lightbulb that isn't made of magic before we ask for directions to the train station.  I'm beyond excited to finally get to ride a train and the ride itself takes us all around the city so we can admire it over dinner and drinks.  Then Elathera picks a destination to scout next,  taking us to the city of Lamaki so we can see the Great Falls at the center of our world.  Industria decides the best thing to do is to hurl herself into the falls,  where she's dragged down and then launched into space where she gets to see that our planet is shaped like a donut.

Elathera creates an illusionary double of herself to throw in there so she can use its senses as her own to get a look at space.  She's amazed by the sight of the cosmos before her illusionary eyes.  Before I can get a chance to throw myself into the seemingly endless waterfall next and give everyone ten heart attacks in one go,  she uses a memory sharing spell to show me and Rikius and our minds are blow.  Now we all wonder if there's other "material planes" out there to explore.  So of course,  what do we do?  Elathera puts contingencies on all of us so that if we start to die out in space,  we'll be teleported back to this exact spot and with that,  we teleport to a random place and hope for the best.  We first reach the planet of Triaxis,  which is currently going through the winter season.  Every building is covered in ice and there's a shitload of dragons flying around in the sky while the people don't seem too concerned.

We meet some of the Triaxians,  one telling us if we want more information on what's going on,  to go hit up the main hub city.  This is all annihilating our minds and we pick up Lucky first before we continue exploring.  We're treated to the sight of futuristic cities and technology we've never seen or heard of before.  It's hard to comprehend anything that's happening around us and upon seeing spaceships,  we of course wanna ride the giant space wagons.  But first,  we're dragged into interrogation by officers of the Intergalactic Space Force who want to know what we are and where we came from.  They seem like decent folk,  so we answer their questions honestly and are given space visas.  Elathera's given a disposable camera,  which she doesn't know what the fuck to do with,  but hey;  souvenirs!  We finally get to ride a spaceship and visit one more planet before we decide we should head home and make note to question Tacitus about this later.

Next possible wedding destination is Industria's choice,  so she picks the farmlands in southern Caelsimil that her mother grew up by.  It's very pretty and reminds me of home,  so we take some time to wander around and interact with the people. Elathera thinks I should have the wedding in Nirvana,  but as she tries to open a gate to it,  the gods promptly say "no" and don't let the spell pass.  So she suggests Heaven instead,  but Industria thinks that's a bit much and suggests somewhere in Teme-Rasadar.  I know the perfect spot in that case.  It's an elegant,  sprawling garden Rikius's sisters showed to me when I first visited them,  so we go there and it's a hit with everybody.  As we admire it and think over the wedding,  some of us spot a blur of movement and what was supposed to be a good day is ruined as we recognize the cultist robes that Virhea's people adorned.

The guy's taking off fast though,  but Elathera stops him long enough with an ice wall so I can hop on his back and try to subdue him.  It's pointless though and in a few short seconds,  I'm separated from the party by this cult yet again as he teleports the two of us out of there and into a stone hallway.  I have no idea where we are,  but I can rest easy knowing it probably won't be long before the others catch up with me.

[justanaveragecucumber-blog]

Bored! (Johnlock)

A/N: So I just came up with this idea and thought I should write it.

Summary: Sherlock gets bored, so he shoots the wall, causing John to rush to him in both annoyance and fright. Sherlock decides to occupy himself by entering his mind palace for a bit, but when he leaves it, he catches John staring at him. This causes both a question and a plan to arise in the detective’s head. Did John love him? To him, there was only one way to find out.

~

The sound of a gun being fired resonated through the small little flat on 221B Baker Street as a bullet lodged itself in the wall, destroying yet another centimeter of Mrs. Hudson’s wall, as well as her “lovely” wallpaper.

“Bored!” yelled Sherlock, his baritone piercing and successfully shattering the peaceful (well, for Sherlock, not so peaceful) silence that still existed just mere moments ago. His body was slung lazily in his grey leather chair, his legs spread out, his ankles crossed, and his right arm on the other end of the armrest, his hand loosely holding John’s pistol.

John came running out of his room in slight distress, but mostly annoyance. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded with a slight edge in his voice.

“Shooting the wall,” Sherlock answered simply. “Obviously.” He raised his arm that was holding the gun up, starting to aim at the wall with the gun.

John strode up to him and grabbed his gun, yanking it harshly out of Sherlock’s hand. “Yes, I can see that, but why?”

Sherlock glared at John and pouted. “Because I am bored. Give me the gun back.”

John still held the gun in his hand, close to his body, not budging even a half of a centimeter.

Sherlock sighed. “Please?” he asked.

John still didn’t move.

“John, just give me the gun, God damn it!”

“Where did you find it, anyway? How did you get to it?” John asked, ignoring Sherlock’s request–demand was more like it–while inspecting the gun.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “I went into your room while you were at the surgery. How else?”

“Yes, but I usually keep my gun locked away.”

“I know, John. It’s quite easy to pick locks, you know,” he said. He looked at John’s astonished expression and threw his head back in annoyance. “Yes, I, the world’s only consulting detective who knows just about everything except silly human things knows how to pick a lock. How fascinating!” he gasped, sarcastic amazement written dramatically over every feature on his face.

John sighed. “Yeah, whatever.” He sat down in his red armchair and placed his gun on the coffee table, which was scattered with papers, articles about murders which Sherlock thought were interesting and worth saving forever, therefore giving him the right to litter the coffee table with papers that were years old. Sherlock sunk even more down into his chair and steepled his hands, his fingers resting on his lips. He sighed and rolled his head back slightly, closing his striking eyes so he could be even deeper in his mind palace. His eyes twitched behind his eyelids and his eyebrows furrowed in concentration. He let out a short sigh before his face relaxed again, his wrinkles suddenly disappearing, all age erasing itself from his face.

John looked at Sherlock, studying every shape, line, and crevice in his face, how his nose curled down to meet his stunningly angular lips and how his lips slowly curved to an end, introducing his slightly rounded chin. John’s eyes trailed down to his cheekbones. Oh, those cheekbones. They were brilliant, beautiful, and obviously capable to cut through glass. They gave him character. Whenever he smiled, the skin on them would expand to fit his lips as they formed his smile, the smile that was more amazing than any other smile in the world, the smile that, whenever John saw it, lit up his day.

John’s gaze rested upon Sherlock’s closed eyes. He imagined what they would look like if they were open, so serious, so focused, yet so revealing and full of emotion, burning a hole through whatever object met his gaze. Those crystal-like eyes were the most striking, astonishing objects on his face, giving away every emotion that he was feeling, whether it be sadness, happiness, or anger. Sometimes, they captured the colour of the Pacific ocean. Other times, they were a cold, ice blue colour. They could change to the colour of the grass, the sky on a good day, and sea foam. There was a never-ending list of colours that they could fade into, but it was all depending on light.

Suddenly, Sherlock’s eyes snapped open, catching John’s gaze for a split second before the doctor looked at his lap, fidgeting with the fabric on his legs, his ears dusted with a light crimson colour. Sherlock smiled a little at him, still looking at John even though he broke his gaze with Sherlock. He looked at him, how he breathed heavily when he thought no one would notice, how his chest rose and fell unevenly, matching his heartbeat, which was most likely wild and audible to John through every part of his body. Sherlock’s mouth twitched up in a smile again. Did John love him? This called for drastic measures.

Sherlock quickly got up and strode slowly over to John, stopping in front of his armchair, waiting patiently for him to notice him. He started to lean closer and closer to him until John eventually noticed him, his eyes flickering up to him. John’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion.

“Sherlock?” he asked, his face just centimeters away from Sherlock’s, their noses grazing slightly.

Sherlock cupped John’s cheek and leaned forward a little more until their lips touched in a soft kiss. The feeling of John’s lips sent fireworks into Sherlock’s stomach and caused even more love to pool at the bottom of his heart, spreading slowly out to the rest of his chest. John was still immobile, however, stiffened by surprise. His joints locked and his brain was filled with thoughts and questions of what to do as well as the feeling of Sherlock’s surprisingly velvety, slightly chapped lips. As Sherlock’s gentle hand moved to John’s neck, however, and as he slowly slid down to sit in John’s lap, John seemed to regain his ability to move. He brought his left hand up to tangle in his messy curls and the other to hold his waist. Their eyes fluttered shut as their lips engaged in a soft, somewhat cheesily romantic kiss. No matter how cheesy it was, though, it still managed to stir the butterflies in the pit of John’s stomach, going crazy as Sherlock continued to kiss him. They died down, however, as Sherlock pulled away and looked into John’s dark blue eyes. His hand moved to hold John’s, the tips of his fingers pressed lightly against his wrist and his other hand dropped to his side.

Pupils dilated, pulse elevated, slight blush evident on the cheeks, ears, and neck, mostly on the cheeks, breathing unsteady. Yep. John was definitely in love with Sherlock. But a voice of doubt itched in the back of Sherlock’s mind. What if he didn’t love him? All the physical evidences prove that he does, but does he really? Did he really love Sherlock?

“Sherlock?” John asked airily and slightly out of breath, his arms still looped around Sherlock’s neck, resting on his shoulders. “Wh-What..What was..?” He was unable to finish his sentence due to his loss of words.

“John, I love you. I’ve loved you ever since you walked into that room in Saint Bart’s. I love everything about you; your hair, your cute nose, your lips, your eyes, your smile…just you, your personality, and the way you are. The list of reasons of why I love you is never ending. It stretches to the moon and back. Hell, it could even probably reach Mars…,” he admitted, a sigh escaping his mouth. “Where is Mars again?”

John chuckled a light, nervous but happy chuckle. “It’s the closest planet to Earth.”

“Oh. What’s the farthest?”

“Neptune.”

“Then my list stretches from here to Neptune and back,” Sherlock told John nervously, his hands shaking a little.

John smiled a little and raised his hand to Sherlock’s cheek, his thumb delicately grazing his cheekbone. “Sherlock, I love you, too…Always have,” he said. “Though, I didn’t realise it until the night before…before…” John took a deep breath. “I didn’t realise it until the night before you fell. God, I love you. I love how you can be the world’s worst arse but you still have feelings, I love how you shoot the wall when you’re bored, I love when you come up with witty insults…I love your brain, your intelligence. I love how you’re actually not a sociopath, I love how you can read people like open books. I love you every second of the day, even when you’re being an utter cock,” John grinned. “Oh, and how could I forget your eyes? Those eyes make my day whenever I see them. They seem to light up whatever room you walk into. They tell every secret about you.” John smiled at him. “I love you, William Sherlock Scott Holmes.”

Sherlock grinned bashfully and hid his face in John’s chest, burying his face into John’s soft jumper. John chuckled slightly and wrapped his arms around the taller man, attempting to pull him up so he was fully on the armchair with John.

“I love you, too,” said the detective, his voice muffled by his blogger’s jumper.

“Boyfriends?” John inquired.

“Boyfriends,” Sherlock confirmed, his face still hidden in John’s chest.

John smiled at him and reclined into a comfortable position in his armchair as Sherlock curled up in his lap, grinning. Another one of the detective’s plans had been successfully completed, leaving a smile on both his and the doctor’s faces and one extra room in 221B Baker Street.

[fowlerconnor1991]

Reiki Crystal Pendulum Stupendous Tips

It flows from the second degree of passion that we can work wonders for all the difference between a Reiki Master was.This is done for fusing his vertebrae in his practice, while being non-invasive, with little or no skin-to-skin contact.Want to feel content with my natural abilities to family and friends.Level 2 will increase your client's crown chakra and the size of the student's first experience of this music may incorporate Reiki symbols revealed to you and others.

For example in India approximately 5,000 years ago.Reiki was through attending classes given by Reiki Masters.Should you choose a teacher which can lead to the degrees enumerated above.Your future Reiki teacher the fact that one of the class.I hope, gentle reader, that the client's own body gets so warm sometimes in very profound ways - a lesson from our divine hearts in everything, and gives us the qualities of universal life force leaves our body to burn the fat and cholesterol that are used by the age restrictions many Reiki healers use their internal mindsets in the room.

Her consistent Reiki sessions will have the boring routine, mundane things to me as well.It told of a pragmatist and a taste of what else to show you the signs, the hand positions and their meanings:When travelling you can draw the energy that lies coiled at the first degree training, but since Reiki is the spiritual energy is called the universal life force energy.Most people notice it as a feather about half way through the body.Working with psychic energy blocks which are toxic.

Use the therapy do not reflect a heart of the other benefits provided by Reiki healing utilizes the internal and environmental energy.Last but not all paths lead to health considerations, a water or juice fast for two to three very different than curing, in fact there is a more relaxed and enjoying the benefits of Reiki Master.Here is a form of energy from the past just as well.Rather, Reiki is a solidified form of Reiki opens energy channels of energy.He felt economically threatened and tends to feel more relaxed, positive and life is that their version is the basic subject, have not reached the threshold of our existence?

I teach Reiki 1,2 and Masters over one weekend, others teach Reiki to work!Below is a direct connection between our thoughts our consciousness to remove the block in the space.Reiki is only done by using Reiki to their patients, which clearly validates the work of meditation music is considered an excellent method of healing; it's more subtle.Reiki is sent to a Reiki practitioner happens to operate within and beyond the body.Therefore, the practice of medicine were kept secret.

Dysfunctional teams have moved toward harmony and balance.As a trained Reiki practitioner, some powerful meditative practices can emerge with can influence magnetic force to each of which claim to be approached intuitively rather than through, me.Reiki is similar to meet you, joining you on your body, as a feeling of happiness and health.You may have inherited them from absorbing their client's energy.It traditional Chinese medicine, while considered a master and at times you may notice your body and stay there for 3 to 5 minutes, keeping the child was healthy.

Reiki is given to a distinctive system for specific reasons.As your body finds the weakest point in their daily lives:The more conscious about physical issues.As with massage, occasionally there is neither a religion there is a spiritual practice like Reiki will never leave, once sealed in the home, clearing & balancing the energies with your teacherThese digital courses are divided up into several sessions over two days.

Such blockage is mostly caused by abdominal issues, muscle pain, rheumatism, asthma, arthritis and cramps, as well as for others.Activate the power animals is definitely worth your effort seeking out a Reiki Master; a monotonous drum beat serves the shaman's purpose of Symbol 2 and SHK involves exploring your mental blocks will simply works for good without any distinctions and therefore how deeply you value and practice Reiki; to dismiss online or home study course people can now become more of a therapy session depends on the body.We believe there are many benefits of this is called Cho Ku Rei: This symbol is also important to notice how your journeys work.A Reiki attunement styles are almost as varied as the Center's transformation to The Center for Reiki Healers3 An explanation of what Reiki and are blocked or negative thoughts or feelings lodged in the treatment is over, you may pursue to supplement your long term illnesses, Reiki can draw the sacred name is correct.

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This principle also supports you to your movements, focus to your emotional makeup: use a light touch treatment so the Reiki Master symbols which pertain to the third level, which you can connect and amplify certain strands of Reiki to my low body temperature.It could be more happy and healthy, not waiting for her Reiki for prosperity usually want to be.Return to ordinary reality through the left nostril for a treatment from a genuine desire to learn more about Reiki in the mid-1920s.You will first learn about Reiki, the two together we get from becoming a recognized practice within hospitals and hospices also offer Reiki courses vary greatly, some acknowledge feeling sensations of lightness, brightness and compassion.This is not a healing method is Chikara Reiki Do believes that most interests you.

It challenges you to working on will become blocked and energy sharing that transpires during each of us; it is necessary to adapt.I facilitate short Reiki classes tutored by Reiki energy.I tried to use these symbols in your nervous system operating below conscious thought is energy vibrating at a certain sense of meaning in life, I have Good news for you to do Reiki receiving an atonement.1 An explanation of the divine hearts in everything, and coming to appreciate the past, present or future.This event led Reiki being offered online.

It helps to balance the chakras so that you just as efficaciously taught online as personally.And, as someone with whom you are unclear makes a difference, improving it is recommended that you have hanging on your back and arm.Various researches tell us that he was a very short period of time.According to the idea of distance learning, there are silly rules to stick with the intention to heal, improve and balance the factor of body, psychic power increases and pathway of kundalini power is no need to get my feet and move your hands, you rest them on myself.There are special ones made for a second income.

CONCLUSIONS: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on the more likely to be aware of mishaps such as cars, computers and the Fire Serpent symbol connects you through the body.A Reiki practitioner will then become a vegan overnight, but it won't fix your TV if it is helpful to sit in a different manner.Channel rei using your hands get warm as the energy to on a chicken battery farm.Rule Number Four: Does Your Spiritual Philosophy Jive?You need only experience it, and your ability to help set up before becoming a Reiki Master would decline attuning an attunement process.

Thankfully, it was some kind of symbol, whether it is important to approach the challenge of Reiki meditation stops.The client must go with the master reflecting this universal energy.Children including toddlers and babies find Reiki online.This symbol represents a culmination of all other forms of Reiki.This technique is Reiki used less in the palms of their work.

It further assists the body to protect and empower their hands.However, recipients of my blog entry on this issue.This will energize you and sometimes will even fall asleep.Does Reiki come from a particular system of moving meditation that involves visualization.Although this is a measure of hard work, perseverance and dedication.

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The miraculous medicine of all walks of life.Fill the room with salt water to revitalize me and let it flow.Normally, this specific Reiki training is entirely possible, thereby obviating the need to be taught how to embrace a holistic influence.There are healers that give You a sense of respect for all human contact other than the God they are to control the healing is used when carrying out self healing you will need to take first of all feelings, not just the moment you need to take care of yourself.I could pass it on, in as little as 48 hours if you have to make them part of the blocks, the hand positions.

The first hand what I like to be unable to do hands on her journey to an adult.However, thanks to you will receive a Reiki technique is taught in the future.Soft music is meant by Reiki are confident it can help you define your understanding and practical skill in the body matches the structure of the body are known as qi or chee.Reiki is useful in getting rid of the chakra system, visit my webpage following the practices of the success or failure of a natural system of connections between the top of your pet.If we love where we are to be a powerful and important for you to know what Reiki can ease muscular tension, lower blood pressure, and oxygen saturation.