Over the years, Jaskier filled his absence with his letters. Then there was one time that Geralt had to fill that absence himself.
3,7k, epistolary, fluff (ao3)
It was one-sided at first. If he thought back, Geralt could still remember the first time he had entered the inn after a long winter in Kaer Morhen and found the innkeeper standing in front of him, his hand outstretched. In his hand he was gripping an envelope, light blue and sealed with white wax.
He’d frowned then. Even though, somehow, he knew. Somehow his fingertips tingled when he touched the paper. And, well, somehow, he knew the right time to read it would be way later, in the darkness of his room, under the light of the candles. He really knew how to set an atmosphere. He would laugh at himself now.
He hadn’t, back then.
Instead, he had sat on his bed, unfolded the paper and just in time, he’d caught a stem of dried basil before it fell on the floor. The leaves had crumbled between his fingers. If he smelled his fingers now, he would probably still catch their fading scent. He smiled. Jaskier was too vain to consider the long-term ending of dried basil leaves.
He hadn’t minded then. He didn’t now. He couldn’t, as his lips silently moved to form the words he’d read then, just like he did now, under the candlelight.
Geralt,
I know you are most likely to be surprised by the letter, if you, my friend, can actually be surprised by anything in your long life. However, I also know that you’re delighted to hear from me, even via paper, dare I say it’s extremely more pleasant to you to read my ramblings rather than hear them for days on end. It seems though that since you are reading this, we are yet to meet, and probably won’t actually meet for some time still. That is, until next month. I’m pleading you to forgive my unexpected absence and I know how devastated you are to hear the news. I can see your idiot smug face as you pretend you don’t give a shit.
As soon as I learned about my needed presence in the Academy I made sure this letter reaches you. It seems that for the first time during the five years of our acquaintance, you’ll have some more time to bulk in your comfortable, though insufferable if you ask me, silence.
And since I knew that you wouldn’t make a fuss about not finding me after winter --our paths always cross as if by Fate, you see-- I felt the urge to break that particular silence of yours with this letter. A fun little thing, until we meet again. A reason for me to talk, if you will.
Truth be told, I have no real news for you to acknowledge. I was merely hoping to hear yours or, in any case, hear anything from you. An extra month in the Academy is enjoyable nonetheless; my thoughts and wishes though are with you. Write to me, if you wish. Till we meet again.
Regards,
J.
The sheet smelled of basil and wildflowers, of ink and twenty years. Geralt brought it to his lips. He smiled to himself. He hadn’t written back then.
I hear you’re recovering in Ellander. I am terribly sorry for not being at your side at this time, I have seen how hard the whole process can be and I would give everything to make you forget about your pain for a while. I’m afraid though it’s too long for me to come, I’m close to Cintra, you see, and I know the news about your injury already travelled late to my ears. Truthfully, I am not even certain that this letter will reach you before you heal and entirely depart from the temple. In case you are indeed reading this, however, I am relieved that you are alive and hopeful to see you soon, once your suffering is over.
Dear friend,
Oh dear, I was carried away and entirely missed the point of my own letter! Well, not entirely, I mean I still hope you’re doing well and we’ll see each other again. I’m not going to tire you with elaborate blathering, dear friend, fear not. I wish though, for this letter to keep you company, even if it cannot replace mine, a failed substitute, if you will. And I so hope that the smile I remember on your lips, that one rare of yours, is what embellishes your weary, brooding face as you read my words.
Give my greetings to Nenneke, I know she’ll cherish them the way she only knows. My thoughts are with you, hopeful of a quick healing. Till we meet again, Geralt.
Take care,
Jaskier
Geralt brushed his fingers over a stem of blue salvia, dried and tucked inside the old sheet. On the ninth year of their friendship, Jaskier had sent him that letter. He had appreciated it, a good company, a substitute. Nenneke had cherished the greetings. A small smile, nostalgic, curved his lips as his eyes flew over the ink-stained words. He hadn’t written back, still.
I hope you are doing well. Of course, I doubt the happenings of the opposite, since your new acquaintance seems to lift your mood like no one has ever managed to do before. I trust that this letter finds you where I left you at Rinde, otherwise it’s highly unlikely that it’s you reading it now and not some random mailman that failed to find you. I know, however, that you planned to stay for a few days. That’s why I left the town on my own, after all.
Geralt,
Forgive my forwardness. It has nothing to do with you, my dear, only the past few days have been brutal to my mental state. You were there though, no need to tire you with information you have already witnessed. Your witch’s spell was highly effective, it feels like nothing happened to my voice ever and, if I’m to take a little pride, I managed to charm much bigger crowds than usual yesterday evening. You must be wondering how I am doing. Excellent, I dare say.
Sometimes I feel like somebody wrapping their hands around my neck, choking me. I guess this will take some time to pass. But that’s a matter for another time.
I’m considering heading to Tretogor for a change of environment. If you depart some time soon, it’s highly possible we meet on the road. You won’t, probably, but a friend can hope.
My sincere regards to the witch, if she deigns to accept them. I know you’re having a good time and I couldn’t wish for more. Till we meet again, friend.
J.
If he thought about it, Geralt could remember all those times Jaskier’s hand trailed his throat, exactly where the djinn had injured him. It was an absentminded gesture, he knew. Or at least, he liked to hope. Yet it made something twist in his stomach.
He stared at the frail daffodil in his hand. He hadn’t paid any thought then, neither at the flower nor the way Jaskier’s words stung like daggers. He had no reason to; the bard had a rough few days. Now he saw why, though. And wondered what he would have said, if he had ever written back then.
As he thought back, he considered the last prospect to be the most probable. A while ago, he would blame himself, for letting his feeling take hold of him, for being impulsive, absurd. Hopeful. As he read the bard’s letter, the one he had responded to, he knew there wasn’t much to be done for his resistance to persist. And, as he roamed between the words, oh, how he ached. Ached for something he knew he couldn’t have anymore.
There had actually been a time, during the last years, when Geralt started responding to the letters Jaskier stubbornly continued to send. Maybe he thought that way the letters would stop. Maybe he indeed had something to say to him in return. Maybe it was for an entirely different reason.
Dearest friend,
I haven’t sent you a letter in years and I’m certain you are more than surprised to read this now, only a few weeks after we parted for the winter. I feel though, that I wasn’t able to say a proper farewell to you, considering the circumstances of our separation. Honestly, I have no explanation for your sudden departure before the sun had barely risen, but I’m sure it was for the best, gods forbid you ever have a vile purpose. I know you are rolling your eyes right now and no matter how pissed you wish to look, that little scowl of yours never fails to be endearing. And pretentious. But I’m not writing you to analyze your body language.
In fact, there is no actual purpose for this letter, apart from saying goodbye. And also pointing out, my dear, that you unfortunately forgot to empty your bag of all my clothes, resulting to you taking away one of my shirts, the one with the embroidered roses on the collar, if I am not mistaken. Fret not, I have plenty of others, it’s barely a loss. You can even keep it if you wish, although I doubt your enormous muscles will be restrained under tight silk. I know you are not fond of ornate clothing anyway. You oaf.
I hope this winter treats you well. You deserve to rest, my friend. I’m looking forward to seeing you again in spring and may the blooming flowers mean the hopeful beginning of another year of company. My best wishes, till we meet again.
Sincerely,
Jaskier
Geralt’s fingers curled on the paper. Sincerely, Jaskier had signed, yet oh how many things had gone unspoken in fear of brutal sincerity. The sheet smelled of gardenias, just like the one that fell on the wooden floor when he unfolded the letter. It was not that old, anyway. Strange how bitterness stains a sweet word in no time.
He still had the shirt. Forgot to return it, or at least that’s what he said to Jaskier. If he was being honest, he hadn’t even forgotten to take it out of his bag in the first place. Instead, when he woke up that morning, Jaskier curled inside his arms and his heart beating way faster than a mutant’s should beat, he knew he wouldn’t be able to find the words to say goodbye when the bard was awake. As he took the shirt in his hands and took in its scent, the same he had wrapped in his arms minutes ago, he decided it wouldn’t harm to devoid him of one.
He still had the shirt. He still clutched it on his chest. A substitute, he thought with a bitter smile, for someone he wished was here. Or something he wished was real. It hadn’t lost its scent, he thought. And even if it had, it would always pierce Geralt’s mind, as if it was still there.
He had written back. And, in contrast to Jaskier, he had been brief and chary of words.
Jaskier,
I noticed your shirt when I was already far away. I will return it in spring. I left early because the sky was overcast and I feared of a snowfall that would block the road to the mountains. I apologize for not saying goodbye. Thank you for the wishes. I too hope you have a good time and unnecessary gossips to bother me with when we meet. Farewell, then.
Geralt
Geralt hadn’t been sincere; in fact, he hadn’t even tried to. For the best, he thought. Still, when he had hugged Jaskier come spring, the bard’s hug had been warmer than he remembered, and something in his eyes had changed.
Dearest Geralt,
The last letter wasn’t old. Yet it felt like it carried the weight of two decades on its marked words. There were smudges of ink under which the unfortunate phrase was unreadable, apart from the greetings. There, on the top of the page, Geralt could discern an erased Geralt, beloved, and the first letters of what seemed the starts of darling. Finally, Jaskier had settled. Just like he’d done then, Geralt found himself craving to actually be called what the bard first intended to call him. Instead.
Before you adorn your face with the look of utter confusion, I want you to know there is no real purpose for this letter. Only, albeit we’re just two months apart, I was thinking about you. I’m thinking about you as I write, sitting on the dock in Novigrad. The sea is calm tonight, so much that one would say the stars are reflected on the water. So many stars, Geralt. I wish it stays like that until we see each other again, so that I can show you the constellations. Well, you probably know them. Still.
Remember that mermaid? The one that traded her tail for love? It indeed made a great story, a sacrifice for love, denying one’s nature. You know, it didn’t make it to the story, I preferred to keep the happy ending, however, she’s alone now, argued with whom she once would do and did anything for. Ironic, isn’t it? And yet, I like to think, as a poet should think and as a lovestruck one should do, that if she could, she would do the same mistake over and over again. If one can name it a mistake, you see. Just for the moments of genuine love. You probably think it’s idiotic, a waste of time. It may be, dear, I can’t know, I am but a poet. But can you ask the lovestruck for sense?
Foolish of me to say, but I miss you sometimes. Gazing at the sea, I’m thinking of taking a small break some time soon. Just for a few months. Maybe somewhere near the coast.
I know I didn’t do much to avoid your confused look and that frown between your brows. But care not, let’s pretend I’m drunk. I promise to sober up, till we meet again.
Yours, truly,
Jaskier
Red tulips. Dried. Like their meaning, thought Geralt, and the thought pained him more than the actual letter. Hadn’t he been a fool, he would have appreciated the sheer irony. Isn’t a poet always a lovestruck? Isn’t a lovestruck always drunk? Jaskier knew. For Geralt to realize, it had taken time, and half-uttered affections, and loud accusations and a sob that choked him mercilessly every time he returned to those letters, every time he brushed his fingers over their words as though to catch a fleeting feel of Jaskier’s skin, as though to make them sing his voice. A substitute. Once more.
He had written back again that time. As if it would make any difference in the end, as if he understood why he had written back. As if he understood what he had written.
Jaskier,
The mermaid was indeed unfortunate. But don’t lose your hopes.
I miss you too. Save a glass of whatever it is you’re drinking, or pretending to, for me.
The coast truly sounds fitting for you.
Geralt
A fool. A fool when Jaskier had offered him a glass of wine with a smile when they had reunited, a fool when Jaskier had mentioned the coast once more. Fitting, he’d said, as if Jaskier cared to fit, as if this wasn’t all he was the one to crave all his life.
He read it, over and over again. Those last words played over his mind like an endless wheel of torture, each turn mocking him with laughter. Yours, yours, yours, yours. Truly. How he wished. How he wished it was true. But even when it was, he had eventually rendered it a lie. Yours. His. Over and over again, but never out loud, never to set it true, as though afraid to give away a part of himself, as if he hadn’t already given himself away whole a long time ago. And now in that empty shirt in his hands, he found scattered pieces of a mirror, of the self he’d offered so hesitantly he had taken it back in the end.
With time, Jaskier’s scent on the shirt had faded away slightly, he knew now. Now he could smell his own scent as he buried his face in it, searching among the pieces for something familiar, something to indicate that Jaskier was still there, still owning him, still being owned and his. It pierced his mind, lavender and wildflowers, and yet it was barely there. He hoped it was there and maybe the only thing he smelled was his hope. Still, it was there.
Slowly, he folded the letter back. Just like he had done dozens of times now. Out of the open window, Novigrad was breathing alive with people. The sun had almost set.
On the table, there was paper and quill. Geralt swallowed and took a deep breath.
There’s a letter for you, sir.
A tug of sleeve.
Wh—Me? Who is it from?
Confidential. Also this.
A rose? Hey, wait!
Geralt watches as the kid runs away and disappears around the dark corner.
Then his look returns on the deck. On Jaskier.
He prays for his eyes to never watch anything else than him.
There he stands, almost gaping and still staring at the long gone kid. In his hand, an envelope and a rose. Geralt is not a romantic, gods forbid. But if that’s what it would take, he had no intention of wasting another chance.
He thinks he can hear Jaskier’s breath hitch as he turns to the sea again. Oh, he knows. He is certain, as he comes closer, that there are tears in his eyes. He can smell their salty scent and it not the sea, not this time. He longs to kiss them away.
With trembling fingers, Jaskier unfolds the letter.
Jaskier,
I was wrong. I hope you can forgive me. Your absence can’t be replaced by letters anymore, neither your words with flowers. They never could.
I love you.
Behind you,
Geralt
Jaskier gasps and turns around with a spin, then freezes. Geralt meets his eyes, blue and clouded over like the ocean, and for a moment he feels his heart stopping, the months that had gone without them suddenly hitting him like a wave. He waits. Forever, if that’s what it takes. Jaskier though doesn’t speak, not immediately. He just stares at him, lips parted and eyes wide and the sheet shaking between his fingers. Silent.
Geralt feels his heart sinking for a moment, yet he doesn’t give up. He clenches his fists, swallows. “Do you still want to show me the constellations?”
“Oh, you fool!” Jaskier sobs and shakes his head, the tears shining in his eyes. Then laughs. Gods, he laughs and Geralt knows he would be content to leave unforgiven, if this is the last sound he hears out of his lips. But Jaskier isn’t over yet. “You complete, utter fool!” Before Geralt manages to frown in confusion, eager arms are around him and Jaskier throws himself in his embrace. With his breath cut, Geralt wraps his arms around him and holds him tight on his chest, feeling Jaskier shaking. After some time, he cannot tell if it’s the laughter or the sobs.
“You oaf, you idiot, gods, Geralt,” Jaskier’s words are muffled in the witcher’s shoulder but he doesn’t fail to keep talking. He only tightens his hug even more, burying himself as if that way they would become one. Geralt closes his eyes and nuzzles in the bard’s hair, taking him in, his scent, his body, his voice, anything he can savour. A fool, that’s what he is. Never fails to be. But at least he can make up for it now. Jaskier huffs and draws away just a bit, just to look into his eyes. He smiles, and it’s probably to swallow more tears, but he doesn’t care. “There’s not a day when I haven’t forgiven you, dear heart.” He shakes his head, gazes at him. “There is not a day when I haven’t missed you.”
Geralt bites his lips and he feels the sob choking him all this time suddenly absent. “I missed you too, Jaskier. Too much.”
“Can you say it?” Jaskier twirls the rose between his fingers and looks at him with a stare that screams, begs. Geralt hears his voice quivering. “Can you say it out loud?”
Geralt chuckles. He could scream it if that’s what Jaskier wanted. Slowly, he holds his face inside his hands, wipes the remaining tears with his thumb. And leans closer, only an inch. “I love you, Jaskier. Most sincerely.”
With a released breath, Jaskier closes the gap between them. His lips are soft, and warm and welcoming, as if uttering all those words that although written, had remained unspoken. Geralt kisses back with a sigh, eager, and as their mouths fit together he thinks his chest is going to burst. He feels Jaskier smiling. He smiles too.
Jaskier pulls back, their lips still touching, and looks into his eyes. “I love you too, Geralt. I love you with my life.” He huffs a small laugh, his hand coming up to hold Geralt’s on his face, and warmth, so much warmth in his eyes. “Beloved.”
Geralt smiles and kisses him again deep, the rest of his confessions humming down Jaskier’s throat as he moans weakly and, breathless, gives into the kiss.
Later, when the deck is silent and they sit by the sea, Geralt runs his hand down Jaskier’s arm making him shiver. He rubs the fabric of the sleeve between his fingers. “I still have your shirt,” he mutters and it feels like he confessed his deepest secret, if the pain of loss is a secret to anyone else than the mourner.
Yet Jaskier smiles. As he turns to look at him, he shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. It’s yours now.” He swallows, his eyes brighter than a million stars. “I’m yours.”
The word echoes in his head and it’s Geralt’s turn to shiver. Mine, he thinks and gets drunk just with the thought. Truly. He holds Jaskier closer still, on his chest, and this time the shirt isn’t empty but flooding. Just like his heart.
The newest and roughest of the collection. I was half-awake for half of this *and* this is what i call a ‘working it out story’. I find that if i just start writing I can work out kinks faster than if I try to puzzle it out beforehand. This was one of those. I had a vague idea but wasn’t sure how it would work or what the world would be like, so I just…started writing. So it likely contradicts itself as my thoughts start to solidify.
This quickly morphed with another idea of mine and an iteration of this will be released on my ao3 in a little while.
Premise: Jax is a florist in a sleepy town and Pomni moves there to work for the local grocery store corporation. Funnybunny with whole cast present.
Note: some place holder words! Dani is Evil Pomni.
Straight out of college Pomni had been offered a job in a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere. Which wasn’t exactly her speed but it also wasn’t something she hated the idea of, either, and she really needed to get her foot in the door. She could spend a few years paying down her student loans and putting aside some savings so she could buy a house and get some physical equity.
The house she was renting, a small, old house off one of the main roads was picture perfect. The whole town was, actually. When she’d first arrived she’d been certain she was in the wrong place, because the whole thing was way, way prettier than she’d ever thought it could be. The main roads had ‘no car’ rules, so her house had a back alley that let her park her car on her rented property while not infringing on the rules of the road outside her front door. There was a strip of picturesque shops a road over, and the two roads were connected by a sprawling, beautiful park.
From her house she could get to pretty much anything the town had to offer in less than twenty minutes of walking. The town was, frankly, perfect, and she was saving a ridiculous amount of money. But things were <I>boring</i>. While she wasn’t the world’s <I>biggest</i> thrill seeker, she still liked at least a <I>little</i> bit of thrill. At the moment, the closest she got to ‘thrill’ was the weekly flavor mix-ups at the coffee shop down the street from her place, halfway between her house and her office.
It didn’t even matter what the flavor was, she never even bothered to look, she ordered it without fail the day they posted the new recipe. If she liked it, she got it every day. If she hated it, she got it once more ‘to be sure’ and then spent the rest of her week idly wondering if she’d like the next week’s flavor better. None of that was very exciting, either, but short of driving into the next city over in an attempt to broaden her horizons (three hours one way on a good day) she was kind of left without a lot of options.
She was standing in line, staring at the bagels lined up in the display case and trying to sus out if she thought she’d prefer a carrot bagel with cream cheese or an everything bagel with lox. The problem she was having is she wasn’t sure if lavender-infused green tea with mocha would go with either of them, so she wasn’t really sure what to do about breakfast, when there was a commotion at the front of the store. Not her business, really, but she could hear some mild arguing followed by an annoyed snap. She politely ignored it, figuring the cashier probably had it under control. Like, she probably <I>knew</i> the guy snapping at her, that’s how small this town was, right? So it was probably fine.
He might even be related to her. So decidedly not her business at all, and she wasn’t going to get involved. Not that she was going to get involved anyway, she very rarely did.
But by the time she’d put in her order there was no more commotion, just polite silence like usual. The girl, a whisp of ribbons with a mask, took her order and told her chipperly that it would be ‘just a moment’ before she smiled a little more warmly, as if they knew one another. She supposed they did, kind of, know each other, because the woman seemed to work the same shift every week, and that was when Pomni came by on her way to work.
”I knew you’d want to try the special,” She said. Her nametag said ‘Gangle’ on it in pink glittery gel pen. There was a sticker beside it of a little pink bunny, but Pomni wasn’t sure what it was.
“Haha,” Pomni said, politely, “Yeah, you guys have a new flavor every week.”
”I know,” Gangle said, shyly, “I make them.”
”Really?”
Gangle nodded sheepishly, “Yeah…so, um, if you have any feedback…well, you know where to find me. Maybe you could sit down with me and tell me which ones you’ve liked…some…time?”
”Uh, sure, but—“
”Gosh, <I>Gangle</i>,” a man’s voice came from over her head and Pomni jerked away, startled by his sudden proximity. He was almost leaning on her. A complete stranger. What an absolute dickhead. He grinned, looking lazy, “Are you asking her on a date?”
”What?” Gangle squeaked, startled out of her smiling as her two ribbon-hands pulled up in front of her, wringing together, “No, of course not!”
”Then stop flirting!”
”I’m not—“
”Uh, it’s fine,” Pomni said, interrupting them.
The guy was much taller than she was. She maybe came up to his stomach, but it was hard to tell, because he was slouching over the counter and leaning his chin into his palm, grinning at a frustrated, worked up Gangle. He was dressed really casually: jeans and a loose shirt. His feet were bare, and he was holding one of their brown to-go bags in one of his hands. He didn’t look like the professional sort that <I>usually</i> came through here, other office workers like Pomni or some of the local business owners, like Ragatha. When the man processed what she’d said, he turned to her with a frown.
”What’s fine?”
”You can have her,” Pomni said, and his ears twitched. “I wasn’t trying to intrude. I’ll just take the coffee and the bagel and you guys can pick up where you left off.”
”Oh, he wasn’t—“ Gangle said.
The man spoke at the same time, tone clipped and angry, “You think <i>I’d</i> flirt with <i>her</i>?”
”Sure, isn’t that why you care so much what a stranger’s doing with her?” Pomni replied cooly.
The man scowled and his ears drooped and her eyes flicked up at the motion, making him scowl more and they sagged for a moment before he ‘clicked’ back into place, ears springing up, grin back, eyes wide instead of narrowed. Huh.
“I don’t care,” he said, “But there’s no way you’d actually entertain her. I mean, look at her. She’ll snivel all over you.”
”Are you always this charming or are you only like this with people you don’t know?”
He considered that and then held his hand out to her, and she balked. What was the game here? This guy seemed a little unstable at best, did she <i>really</i> want to encourage this behavior? Maybe. This was the most interesting thing that had happened to her in the four months or whatever that she’d lived here. She slid her hand into his and gave it a nice, firm shake. His grin widened.
”Jax.”
”Pomni,” She said, and took her hand back.
“What—“ Jax began, but they were interrupted by Gangle holding out her drink to her.
”Pomni?” Gangle said, “Here. On the house. Sorry about that.”
”Don’t worry about it. You can’t control other people. Thanks, Gangle. See you tomorrow. And I’ll bring a list of my favorite coffees for you, okay?”
“You have a list?”
”Yeah, I write them down and do little reviews in my bullet journal. I can get a copy for you of my favorites and why.”
”That would be—“
”<i>That would be</i>,” Jax mocked, annoyed. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Enjoy your lame coffee. It’s <I>matcha</i> flavored.”
”Thanks,” Pomni said, and reached around him to take the coffee from Gangle’s outstretched hand. When she turned to go she had to force herself not to look back at him. It wasn’t worth it.
Pomni’s office was run by an older man who had peaked sometime in the early nineties and been coasting along comfortably in his office ever since. He barely did much of anything, honestly, and she wasn’t entirely sure what to make of him. Sometimes he seemed perfectly able, and other times she was pretty sure he was barely cognizant. But the company did fine even with him as the manager, so they felt no need to move him. Or something. She wasn’t sure. While she didn’t know a ton about corporate jobs she got the feeling that immediately questioning the companies decisions on personnel might make her a target or labeled as ‘difficult’. Which she wasn’t, she was mostly <I>curious</i>.
But companies didn’t seem to make the distinction.
She had a meeting today, sort of, and she was kind of dreading it. Most of her office was fine, but there was another woman she worked with that looked almost exactly like her. They were so similar in almost every way that people had started jokingly referring to them as ‘The Twins’. Pomni had once had the singular pleasure of someone telling her, as if it was a compliment, that the <I>other</i> lady was the ‘evil’ twin.
So now instead of making a good impression, or her preferred <I>no</i> impression at all, she was one half of a pair. And not even the more interesting half, but the boring, dependable half. Not that she should be complaining about that, that was certainly better than being the wild card when her job was <I>accounting</i>.
”Heeeeey, there she is!” Came the low, drawn out tones of her ‘other half’. “Good Pomni, right on time. Ready to watch the Queen of Accounting hold court?”
Pomni tried not to smile. For all her hating being half of a pair, she did think ‘Evil Pomni’ was funny in her own way. She talked like a man and moved like a bro and, for some reason, refused to wear pants to work. She had a number of tight, severe pencil skirts that showed off her spiky heels, the kind with the red sole. Today she was in a black skirt and a dark gold top, her hair swept up into a french twist and held in place by gold-and-red hair sticks.
Much more feminine than her own attire: black slacks and a white button down with a red tie. She’d started the day with a feminine blazer on, too, so she wasn’t <I>entirely</i> dressed like any of the men. But that had already come off and was draped over her arm, so…well. She was dressed like any of the men.
”Yeah, hold on. Let me drop my stuff off.”
”Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you. Couldn’t live without showing off to my other half,” The other woman purred, and winked, flashing her a grin full of sharp teeth.
Pomni rushed to her desk and set her stuff down. Her desk was in the corner, against the windows, and she wondered how she’d lucked out not for the first time. She loved being by the window so she could look outside and see the people walk by. Her desk was rather bare. There were a few things tacked up to the small cork board hanging on the wall beside her computer monitor, a framed photo of a cityscape at night, and a tiny plastic figure of a bunny asleep on a flower.
She tucked her bag into her drawer and draped the blazer over the back of her chair before she headed back to meet Dani. Dani was waiting at the door, and when she approached she turned, all sharp smiles and loose body language.
They headed in together, but Pomni’s mind was anywhere but on whatever Dani’s presentation had been about. Well, not anywhere, but focused on that guy at the coffee shop and how weird that whole thing had been. God, he’d been kind of a dick and yet every few moments her mind returned to him and how good he’d looked leaning over that counter. He was slim, barely had anything to work with, but she liked the arch in his back and the way his long limbs draped loosely when he spoke, like he was too lazy to care…
Until he wasn’t, anymore, and something lit inside of him.
Man, she hadn’t been attracted to someone like this in years. It was almost too bad it was unlikely she would see him again, because she thought he was a perfect mild thrill to get caught up in. Just the kind of distraction for her. And he was kind of a jerk, so she knew he wouldn’t get wild and ‘catch feelings’. Easy, clean distraction.
And distracted she clearly was, because the moment they left the meeting, Dani turned to her and said, “So what the fuck’s got your attention?”
Pomni blinked, “Huh?”
”Oh shit you’re cooked, babe,” Dani said, and Pomni cringed at the ‘endearment’. Dani didn’t notice (or pretended not to notice) and carried on, “Who are they? Tell me it’s not your fucking realtor, she’s suuuch a fucking <I>drag</i> man, you can do <i>way</i> better than her.”
”Uh, no, not Ragatha,” Pomni said, although she had to admit she’d considered it for like, a minute.
All the way up until she could tell that Ragatha was the type of lover that would…cling. A little. Which was fine! Totally fine! For people who weren’t <I>her</i>. She didn’t do the cuddling after sex thing. She didn’t do dates. She didn’t hold hands. And Ragatha felt like the type of woman who needed all of that and then some. Pomni just didn’t have it in her. And not just for Ragatha, but kind of for anyone. She’d do it now and again, if she ran into someone she liked well enough that she thought it was worth it. But it was so rare that it ever worked out in any meaningful way that she’d kind of called quits on the entire thing.
No more dating. Especially not <I>here</i>. She’d stick to what she knew so she wouldn’t be stuck in a town of fifty people with an angry ex.
“So who’s the fucker that’s gotten under your skin and hopefully between your legs?”
“Uh,” Pomni said, flushing a little at how crass (and <i>loud</i>) she was.
“Spill, you know you gotta kiss and tell in this place. We’re the same person, haven’t you heard? What’d we get up to last night? Tell me they had you flat on your back with your legs in the air and their—“
Pomni’s hand closed over her mouth and she could feel Dani’s big, toothy grin press against the flesh of her palm. God, no wonder she was the ‘evil’ twin. She was a fucking menace. Pomni wanted to throttle her. She glanced around nervously to see if anyone had overheard their uncomfortable conversation and then removed her hand from her mouth.
”Nothing happened. I just had a weird interaction when getting my new weekly coffee flavor with some guy I’d never met before and I guess it’s thrown me off.”
”Aahhh, so you finally met a local that makes you we—“
Pomni clapped a hand back over her mouth and stifled whatever she was going to say, sweating a little when their boss walked out of the conference room. If he thought it was weird that the two women were standing in the hallway, just out of view of the conference room, standing too close together with her hand clamped over her mouth, he certainly didn’t <i>look</i> like he thought it was weird. But today he kind of looked…dazed. And he had since she’d come in. Not a good day to try to talk to him or make sense of much of anything at all.
”Oh, hello girls.”
”Hey Kinger,” Pomni said, and Dani mumbled under her hand before her tongue darted out. Pomni recoiled, wiping her hand on her pants, glowering at the other woman.
”Hey, Kinger,” Dani grinned. “Pomni was telling me about—“
”Don’t,” Pomni growled, flushing.
”—this new coffee down at Gangle’s. You like green tea?”
”Oh, green tea! Hm, no, can’t say I do. But gosh my wife could make a mean tea. Did I ever tell you about the time we had to go to the hospital because she asked me to bring in the sunshine pitcher and I completely forgot and then…”
Dani had stepped around Pomni and started to walk, and Kinger, eager to share with someone who would listen to him, had walked off with her, so his story faded into soft mumblings the further her got from her. Pomni watched them go and then turned to head to her desk, dropping her empty coffee cup into a bin on the way.
Seated at her desk, she pulled up her emails and groaned out loud when she saw an email from <I>Kinger’s</i> boss. An over-eager, loud, socially inept man who seemed to like to overreach because he knew, at least on some level, that Kinger wasn’t well enough to oversee an entire branch.
The email was short and to the point, but as usual the intro was weird:
<I>To my Pumpkin Spice Pomni,
Another MONTH has passed and we find ourselves with ANOTHER day of BIRTH.
Please go forth to (floral shop name in all caps) and pick up THE GOODS.
Your BEEKEEPING BOSS,
CAINE</i>
Well, okay. Great. So now she had yet another stupid side quest to do. At least the florist wasn’t too far away. If it had been on the other side of town she would have had to ask Dani to drive her, since she’d left her own at home.
Dani lived clear on the other side of town, so driving was a necessity for her. She seemed to like the ‘commute’, which was less of a true commute and more like a ten minute drive through a town devoid of traffic. She told her she liked to listen to music, it gave her time to unwind. Before she got home and had a brownie, apparently, and then she’d winked but Pomni hadn’t really understood she’d meant an <I>edible</i> until, like, a week later.
She finished up a few tasks before she called the florist and enquired if the bouquet was ready.
The man on the other side of the phone sounded nervous and sweet, and his voice trembled a bit as he spoke.
”Um, hi, how can I help you?” He said, nervously. A voice was saying something behind him and he made a soft little noise not unlike a whimper. Pomni glanced at the receiver before he said, “This is (name of flower shop), um, how can I help you?”
”Oh, uh, hi,” Pomni said, “This is Pomni from (name of grocery store), I was just wondering if you guys have the bouquet we ordered ready? I want to come pick it up.”
Title: And Said Once More: Saudade (Part One)
Fandom/Pairings: Young Avengers/ Wiccling
Word Count: ~8,300 below the cut (14,766 total)
Summary: When faced with Billy's impending death, Teddy is given a choice: rewrite their history to save his life or keep their time together and let him go. Of course, the choice is easy: Teddy saves Billy. But who does he become if he never meets Billy? And why does it feel like something's always missing in this new life?
Read It Here or on AO3
Chapter One: Saudade
Saudade: Portuguese; Noun. A vague, constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist; a nostalgic longing for someone or something that has been loved and then lost
It happens in an instant: Billy drops like a rock.
Teddy catches it from the corner of his eye; the frantic flap of Billy’s cape hurtling towards the ground – falling, helplessly – a hundred stories in a second.
Wings push their way out of Teddy’s shoulders. He springs for Billy. A second later, he’s got Billy wrapped in his arm, sheltered under his wings as the fight continues around them. Somewhere in his head, he knows that they can’t stay there. It’s an all out brawl – laser guns, magic users, ninjas – and he can feel something hitting the back of his wings already. Still, he can’t get past the way Billy lies in his arms, limp and feverish...paper-white and unresponsive.
“Billy,” his voice tries to crack. He swallows a lump in his throat and presses his hand to Billy’s cheek. “What hit you?”
“Teddy!” Kate yells over the din of the battle.
He hears the sharp thwak of her bowstring release. His head snaps up and an arrow whistles past his ear. It implants itself in the chest of a Kree soldier right in front of him. He blinks at the splurt of blood, belatedly noticing the muzzle of a phaser rifle at his temple.
“You can’t just sit there.” Kate hisses, rounding closer to him, still firing off her bow: thwak, thwak, thwak. “Teddy,” she tries for his attention again. When she tips her head to try and meet his eyes, she catches sight of Billy instead. She inhales sharply; it’s as much of a gasp as she can muster given how out of breath the fight has left her.
Eli cuts his way through the assailants from the opposite side. “What’s happened?” he growls as he closes in.
“Billy’s down.” Kate answers.
Eli glances at Billy, nods, and takes a stance on the opposite side of Teddy, flanking them with Kate. “What hit him? You need to get him out of here.” The first part he says to Kate and the second to Teddy, but it takes Teddy too long to realize that and Eli calls for Tommy instead.
There’s a small explosion, a plume of dust, and then Tommy skidding to a stop in front of them. “Saw him fall,” he says it fast, words sliding into each other with so little space as to be unrecognizable until he looks at Billy. “Who hit him–?”
“We’ll figure it out later.” Kate snaps. “We’re all going to get hit if we don’t…”
“Got-it, I-got-it.” Tommy kneels down in front of Teddy. “Come on, man. You’ve got to let me take him.” He pulls at Teddy’s wrist.
Teddy nods, but his hold on Billy doesn’t falter.
“Let’sgo,” Tommy says. “No one’s getting better out here, and he’s going to be pissed if you get hurt, too, C’monTeddyLet’sGo!” His voice breaks on the end. It cracks in a sort of young and desperate way, a futile and accidental noise that Tommy would usually try to cover up if he even let it slip to begin with. He doesn’t do that now, just stares at Billy, wide-eyed and urgent. Scared.
Teddy finally lets go of Billy and Tommy snatches him up.
They’re gone in a second, and Tommy’s back just as quick. “Left him with SHIELD. Strange is there.”
Teddy stands up, wings stretching.
Eli catches one wing by the phalanx. He locks eyes with him. “We need you here, Teddy.”
“Let him go,” Kate says.
Eli turns a glare on her, “Every man counts.”
They meet each other’s eyes, glaring fiercely at one another.
Tommy looks to Teddy. “I’m here, and IWouldn’tBeIf-”
He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t think they had time.
Teddy nods and shakes himself out. “Let’s finish the fight.”
They go to SHIELD as soon as the fight ends. They’re sooty and tired – soaked with sweat and injured in their own ways – but none of them look any worse than Billy does.
When Teddy steps over to the medical cot Billy's laid out on, he can see that he’s still deathly pale. His veins stand out blue-green beneath his pallid skin, and the hand Teddy grabs to hold is clammy and ice cold. “Billy,” he whispers, but he can’t think of anything else to say. He leans forward and presses their foreheads together. He squeezes his hand again, shifting back to his human form as he does so.
He’s seen Billy hurt before, but never like this.
Never so unresponsive.
Never so close to death.
Eli clears his throat and turns his attention to one of the nurses at the doorway. “How’s he doing?”
Before she can answer, the pneumatic doors swish open.
“He’s doing poorly,” Dr. Strange announces, striding into the room and right up to Billy’s bedside. “Excuse me for not being here when you arrived; I had to call in a second opinion and it was…” he pauses, passes his hands over Billy’s chest, then hovers them over his forehead. His brow creases in consternation and he drops both palms to his sides. “It was not an easy call to make.” He lifts his wrist to his mouth and presses a button on a watch to say, “Please let her in, Director. It is both urgent and dire.”
The watch lights up and audio cracks on with a szzt. “Strange, if she cannot contain herself-”
“Then I will contain her,” Strange hisses. “Let her in, Director.”
The doors open again.
The nurse pales and leaves when she spots the new arrival.
“Wanda!” Tommy blurts out.
Wanda turns – in full Scarlet Witch regalia, just as tattered and battle-worn as the rest of them – and gives him a small, sad smile. She reaches out and pulls him into her side. “Did anyone see what hit him?”
“Nothing,” Tommy says, extricating himself from the hug after a moment’s indulgence. “He was up there casting, then he just fell. I saw him fall. NothingHitHim.”
Teddy watches as Dr. Strange hovers his hands over Billy again. “It’s magic, certainly.” His voice is grave when he tells them, and his face looks even more grim when whatever he’s trying to sense fails again. “But whoever placed this hex is a caliber above me. Far above me, in fact.” He gestures to Billy. “Wanda, would you?”
Wanda grimaces and steps to the other side of Teddy. She squeezes his shoulder once before hovering her hands over Billy just the same as Strange had done. Red chaos magic blooms over him, then fizzles out. Wanda’s brow furrows. She bites her lip. She tries again. The light of her magic spreads over him, bright red, then all at once it blinks out. “Something’s wrong. Whatever Hex is on him, I can’t touch it. It feels like…”
“Like it’s absorbing it?” Strange finishes for her.
She nods and presses a hand to the side of Billy’s face. The corners of her eyes are wet with unshed tears. “I won’t lose him again, Stephen. I won’t.”
Dr. Strange reaches across Teddy to squeeze her upper arm. “Wanda. If this is beyond your magic, and it is beyond mine…”
She snaps her head up to look at him. “Then we will find who did this!”
Dr. Strange startles at the harshness of her tone. He stands straight up and pulls the wrinkles out of his vest as he recovers. “Of course,” he says. “Of course we will.”
Kate steps forwards with Cassie hanging on her arm. “There may not be anyone with that sort of power in this universe, but…”
“The multiverse!” Strange says. “I had not sensed a disturbance in a while, but it is always possible one occurred too slowly for me to notice. We can check at the Sanctum.”
Teddy squeezes Billy’s hand again. The heartbeat on the monitor picks up for just a moment.
“Does he have that much time?” Teddy asks, voice hoarse from being quiet.
“Time is both finite and amorphous.” With that answer, Strange opens the portal to the sanctum. “Still, the sooner we begin, the better.” He slips through the portal and holds it open as Wanda, Eli, and Cassie walk through it.
Kate notices that Teddy hasn’t moved from the cot and pauses right outside the portal. “Teddy?”
He shakes his head at her. “I’m staying.”
She nods and leaves, but Tommy still lingers behind.
“Do what you’ve got to do,” Tommy says eventually. He darts to Teddy’s side, knocks their shoulders briefly together, and adds, “It’s going to be okay, Teddy. He’ll be alright.” Then, he’s gone and the portal closes with a flare of light.
“It’ll be okay,” Teddy repeats to himself, then says to Billy, “You’ll be alright.”
He wants to believe the words – he really does – but something feels different about this.
“It’s not the first time you’ve gotten hurt. It’s always worked out. It’s always…” He waivers and leans down to press a kiss to Billy’s temple.
It has always worked out before, but there’s never been someone stronger than the Sorcerer Supreme targeting them...never someone with magic stronger than the Scarlet Witch’s magic. Never at a time where the Avengers, and the X-men, and the Brotherhood are all beaten down by a simultaneous invasion from the Kree, the Skrulls, and Majesdanian Renegades. It feels overwhelming, like the deck is stacked against them.
More than that: it feels like it’s something that’s never happened at all, anywhere, any time.
Teddy turns Billy’s hand over and draws his fingers over the lines of his palm, tracing the spot that Billy had told him was his lifeline.
What did it mean if this is the first time something has ever happened in the multiverse?
And why would it happen to Billy?
Teddy’s chest feels tight with the need to cry, with a despair and an anger that he doesn’t know what to do with. He swallows against the lump forming in his throat and blinks back the tears threatening to fall. “You’ll be okay. We’ll get through this. We have to, because I need you, Billy and you can’t...Please, you can’t die.”
On the wall opposite of them, smoke curls up through the paint. The smell of sulfur eeks into the room. Plaster disintegrates and a man walks through the opening it leaves. “Oh,” he says, upon spotting Teddy. “You’re not supposed to be here...I think...no. Definitely not. Hm.”
Teddy lashes out. His arm extends, green and scaled and with a sharply taloned hand that he wraps immediately around the stranger’s throat. He hoists him up against the wall, right next to the soot-filled mark he’d appeared from. “Who are you?” he growls, all the anger and despair finding an outlet with this new target; good guys never appeared from Hell, and there were still flames licking at the baseboard.
“Master….Pandemon….ium….” The new-comer squeaks with what little air Teddy allowed him. “I think.”
“You think?” Teddy hisses back.
The man simply nods, goggle-eyed and absent.
Anger and fear throb like poison in Teddy’s blood, but even with them clouding his thoughts, he knows that this isn’t the dangerous criminal he’d originally expected. He pulls his hand back from the stranger’s throat and watches him crane his neck to look at Billy.
Master Pandemonium raises a finger to point at him. “Demiurge?” Without waiting for Teddy’s response, he steps forward to the bed. “Yes. The Demiurge. So much power. So Young. This is what happens.” From one of the long, red sleeves on his outfit, he pulls out an amulet and hangs it over Billy’s chest.
Teddy snatches it from his hand. “What are you doing?”
Master Pandemonium blinks at him, then hums. “A job. I think. They’ll give me back my mind if I finish it. They said so.”
“You did this?” Teddy clutches the amulet so tightly in his hand that he can feel the ridges digging into his palm. “Undo it.”
Master Pandemonium blinks at him and cocks his head. “I can’t. It’s not my magic. No. I can…” he flexes his hands in front of himself and frowns. Some lucidity passes in his gaze. “I can only make him die faster.”
“No.” Teddy says, then roars, “No, he is not dying!” He slams Pandemonium up against the wall again, this time with a hand on his chest. “Tell me who did it. I’ll find them and I’ll-”
“It was not one who did it,” Pandemonium cuts him off. “One could not do it. Not to the Demiurge.”
“I don’t know what you mean demiurge,” Teddy says, anger finally dropping from his voice. “I just want to know how to save him.”
“Hm.” Pandemonium lifts a hand to scratch at his face. “The amulet could. I think.”
“It could?” Teddy lets Pandemonium free so that he can turn the amulet over in both hands. It’s an oval stone set into silver filigree and hanging from a silver chain. The stone is purple, but not just. As it moves in the light, he can see liquid swells of blue and red moving beneath the stone's surface. They always come back together as purple, but it’s not one, just as Pandemonium had said.
Teddy thinks again: Why Billy? But this time, he thinks he might know the answer.
“How do I do it?” Teddy asks, “How do I use the amulet to fix this?”
Pandemonium slumps down against the wall. “It can be appeased. With Love. And Change.”
Teddy looks into the stone, watching the blue and red merge and separate. He feels it pulling on him, drawing out an emotion below the desperation simmering in him. Love. Warm and fond, and sacrificing. “I don’t understand.” He runs his thumb over the curve of the stone. “It wants my memories?”
“More than that,” Pandemonium says. “Much, much more than that. Yes. Memories. But History, too. That stone was made to force a split in the multiverse. The demiurge… the cataclysm it brings… they said little could stop it. Death, the most permanent. Death, separation. A fork that shouldn’t happen. Could be placed anywhere, but here it is the most…” He sniffs, seems to forget his train of thought. He restarts, quietly and more to himself, a moment later. “They made the stone together. They made it with Love. For Change. For You.”
Teddy swallows. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you…?” Pandemonium tips his head, eyes unfocusing. “You want to change its purpose. You can. But it will take all your memories of him, all your time with him. A fork. A separation. Not just to be unremembered, but to be unknown. Would you do it? Give up your boyfriend to save a stranger?”
Teddy looks to Billy. He sees the labored way he breathes, listens to the achingly slow beat of his heart. He couldn’t picture a life without him. But the idea of losing him, of living with that grief...and knowing he could have done something about it.
“I would... Yes.” His voice cracks when he repeats it. “Yes.”
The warmth of the amulet spreads out from the stone, across Teddy’s palm and up his arm until it overtakes him completely. He closes his eyes against the heat and the black space of the back of his own eyelids expands to more, to a void that he’s drifting into.
Time is finite and amorphous.
How long he stays there, he doesn’t know. Couldn’t say.
But now there are a lot of things that he doesn’t know and can’t say.
Everything starts to fade out…
And then it’s gone.
Chapter Two: Mutant
“–that mutant. Can’t go there until they reno’ it.”
Teddy does his best not to listen to the rest of the team in the locker room – he usually likes them less whenever he does join the conversation – but the word mutant makes his head perk up. “What happened?”
The point-guard and JV forward look over at him in surprise.
“What?” the forward asks. “Do you live under a rock? Upper wing is blocked off. Some mutant freshie tried to kill someone up there. Left scorch marks on the wall and everything.”
Teddy blinks. “There’s a mutant here?”
“Yea,” the point-guard says. “Jesus, Altman, there’s probably a hundred. Big Gov won’t make ‘em go to their own schools, you know.”
He does know. He’d seen the news coverage of the new X-school...and the bus that had been bombed on the way to it. Not that the team paid attention to that sort of thing; it wouldn’t matter to them.
“And now,” JV huffs, “We can’t go smoke in the upper bathrooms because one of ‘em went Carrie upstairs.”
Teddy’s brow furrows. “Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” JV shrugs. “Some freshman. Kesler was all over him, think he was a f-”
“You didn’t catch a name?” Teddy asks, more urgently than he means to. Mutant means a lot to him; mutant means he’s not alone.
The locker behind him slams shut.
Greg Norris laughs sharply. “What’s it matter, Altman? You trying to make friends with a Mutie freak?”
“No,” Teddy says. It comes fast and reflexive. He doesn’t mean it at all, but he knows that his place in this school, his friendship with these boys, everything is so very tenuous. “But if he’s in my grade…”
“Yeesh, don’t worry so much.” the Point-guard slaps Teddy’s shoulder. “You’re on our team, now. We’ll get a collar put on any mutant that tries to mess with you.”
Teddy forces himself to look relieved. Forces himself to smile. “Thanks.”
The bell overhead rings three times to signal their dismissal.
The rest of the team heads out immediately – more than one of them jonesing for a smoke after a long day without – but Teddy and Greg linger behind.
“I’ll meet you out on Fifth.” Greg says, brazenly assuming everything is alright between them. “I’ve got some plans for us tonight. Big plans.”
Teddy glares at him. “Mutie freak?”
“Oh, come on,” Greg snorts. “You know I had to say it. You were halfway to outting yourself.”
“You didn’t have to say it,” Teddy says, voice flat with disapproval.
“Look.” Greg hoists his duffle bag over his shoulder and starts to walk. “You know I don’t care. We’re friends, yea? I know you’re one of the good ones. But the boys don’t know you like that. Not yet.”
Teddy grimaces as he follows Greg to the door. “They think all Mutants are evil bank robbers and serial killers. You’re not helping that.”
“A Mutant just tried to kill Kesler, Teddy; give them a break.” Greg props the locker room door open with his hand, wide enough that anyone else would be able to hear their conversation if they walked by. “Are we meeting on Fifth tonight, or what?”
Very wearily, Teddy asks: “What are we doing on Fifth?”
Greg rolls his eyes. He sounds exasperated when he answers: “We’re not doing anything on Fifth; we’re just meeting there.”
Teddy stares at him, waiting for more, but Greg just looks at him expectantly.
Mutant means so much more to Teddy than any of the team could begin to fathom.
But Greg – at the very least – is someone that he doesn’t have to pretend around.
It feels like that should mean something, too.
“Okay.” Teddy sighs. “What time?”
Teddy keeps his head down and his ears open over the next few days.
“–three day suspension; what a crock!” Kesler yells. “He tried to kill me!”
They’re in the courtyard having lunch, so the loudness goes mostly ignored by the teachers chaperoning them. Teddy’s a few tables over. He’s pretending to do algebra. You can’t play basketball with anything less than a C, and he’s told the team he’s nearing a D to get them to leave him alone.
Someone says to Kesler: “Can’t believe you got your ass beat by –”
And there’s a name. Teddy’s heart starts to rejoice because there’s a name, but Kesler kicks the person speaking and the name gets lost in a grunt and a swear.
“Mutant,” Kesler says it like the word is it’s own, dirty slur. “It’s like bringing a bomb to a fistfight.”
A girl at the table beside Kesler’s group leans over to glare at them. “Can it, John. We all know you were beating on him; learn your lesson and shut up.”
Teddy smiles down at his half-finished school work.
Greg sits down in the seat across from him. “What’re you smiling about?”
“Nothing.” Teddy taps his pencil against his workbook. “I had a break through. That’s all.”
“Liar.” Greg says. “I know you’re not failing algebra.”
Teddy closes the workbook. “My grades are slipping.”
“I don’t buy it. I-”
Kesler’s table breaks out into a howl of laughter. The girl that had spoken up is blushing furiously from her seat. They’ve done something to her. Or said something horrible. Teddy can tell by the look on her face.
“You’re snooping,” Greg says lowly, drawing Teddy’s attention away from the scene. “You’re trying to get that Mutant’s name, aren’t you?”
Teddy turns a guilty look down to the front of his workbook.
“Are you suicidal?” Greg hisses. “You get caught talking to an attempted murderer and no one’s going to be friends with you, mutie or not.”
Teddy feels his face heat up with shame. “If he really tried to kill him, he would be going to jail, not coming back from suspension.”
“Doesn’t matter!” Greg smacks Teddy’s arm to get him to look up and meet his eyes. “You put your lot in with any sort of Mutant throwing their weight around like that, and I won’t be able to protect you. Not at all, Altman. Everyone’ll be watching you, waiting to see you two form the next Brotherhood. Don’t be stupid.”
A frown tightens across Teddy’s mouth. “I’m not being stupid...I’ve never...I’ve never met a mutant before.”
“Well,” Greg says. “Watch them on TV; look them up online. Go to one of those Mutants Anonymous things they’ve got all over the city. Trust me! I’m looking out for you, Teddy. Don’t do it here. Not in public. You can’t come back from that if you get caught.”
Teddy curls his fist against the table. Shame crawls up the back of his throat.
“Tell me you won’t do it,” Greg says. “Say you’re not going to put yourself through that.”
“Greg…”
Greg says: “You’d be bringing me down, too, you know. We’re friends. If they start asking about you, they’re going to start asking about me, too.”
“You’re not a mutant…” Teddy answers.
“No, but if they knew about you, I wouldn’t be able to stick around.” He looks pointedly over to the girl by Kesler’s table. She’s got her head ducked down, hands slid over her ears as Kesler and his goons flank her, calling her every horrible thing they can think of, calling her Mutie Lover. “Guilty by association, Ted.”
One of the teachers chaperoning lunch pushes her way through Kesler’s group to help. The girl is in tears by the time they get her up from the table and start steering her towards the door. Kesler’s group sits back down, snickering and grinning without any consequences.
Teddy grits his teeth against the unfairness of it all, but he knows that Greg is right. Greg is always looking out for him, and he doesn’t want to lose that friendship. Solemnly, he whispers back, “I won’t do it,” but he doesn’t unclench his fist.
“Good. Good choice.” Greg relaxes. “Let’s hang out tonight. Take your mind off of it.”
By hang out, Teddy knows Greg means sneaking around and pretending to be someone else to get them places they aren’t supposed to go. He also knows it won’t make him feel any better, and it certainly won’t take his mind off of all this. But he doesn’t know what else they can do together if they can’t do this.
“Where?” He says, then, “What time?”
There’s a boy at the bus stop.
Teddy recognizes him.
At least, he recognizes him as much as anyone can recognize someone whose name they don’t know and whose face they’ve never seen.
The hoodie is familiar, though: bright red, the hood pulled all the way up.
The backpack is also familiar: denim, with black straps and a Thor keychain hanging off the zipper next to a rainbow flag.
Then, finally, there’s the loneliness: no one would go around the Mutant boy unless made to, and this boy was sitting on the bus bench all alone.
Teddy stares at the back of his head for a long time, long enough that the bus pulls up.
He watches carefully, hoping for at least a glimpse of a face.
Greg pulls up behind the bus. He honks.
Teddy looks away for just a second and when he looks back, the bus doors have already shut behind the boy. With a feeling of loss so big that it hurts, he slides into the passenger seat of Greg’s car. “Where are we going?” he asks.
“It’s a surprise,” Greg says. “I’ve got a good place tonight. No shit, you’ll love it, but we’re grabbing a bite first; it’s too early.”
Teddy’s brow furrows. Too early always meant a very late night. “When are we getting back?”
“Dunno.” Greg spins the wheel and pulls haphazardly back into traffic.
“My mom’ll worry,” Teddy says. “What time?”
Greg only flashes him a smile.
Teddy tries to ask again, but he’s just as ignored the second time; so, they go out. They get food. They play games at an arcade. It’s almost like what real friends do, and Teddy is so desperate for real friends that he almost forgets that Greg has plans for them.
It’s nearly midnight when Greg cuts the engine to his car a block away from Avengers Mansion.
“You see that guy,” Greg points to the security guard standing outside the gates. “Think you can do just the uniform?”
“Just me in the uniform?” Teddy asks incredulously.
“Yea,” Greg says, then adds, “And someone else’s face. You don’t want to use your own face.”
Teddy glances dubiously out the front window. “What are we doing?”
Greg gives him a devious little grin. “We’re going to tell that guy his shift’s over. Then we’re going to go inside.”
“I don’t like this, Greg.” Teddy crosses his arms over his chest. “This is Avengers Mansion. We should go somewhere else.”
“I know where it is.” Greg rolls his eyes. “They abandoned it. They’re gone. They left it like a museum, Teddy. Don’t you want to look? I thought you’d love this. I went out of my way to pick something you’d like. And you don’t even want to take a look?”
Teddy bites the inside of his cheek and looks out at the security guard again. “Just a few minutes, Okay?”
“No worries,” Greg laughs. “A place this big? This empty? Creeps me the fuck out, but I thought you’d like it.”
Teddy gives him an appraising look.
Greg frowns right back at him. “Am I a shitty friend? Did I pick the wrong place?”
He sounds so earnest – so close to hurt – that Teddy starts shifting before he really thinks it through.
A moment later and he’s someone else. Someone older and gruffer that easily fits into the security uniform he’s now wearing.
“Awesome!” Greg beams. “You’re awesome! Flag me down when you get him to leave.”
Teddy almost hopes that the security guard will sense the ruse on him, but he doesn’t. A few minutes later and he’s alone outside the mansion. Another minute after that, he’s inside the mansion with Greg. It’s dark. And dusty. But there’s still something amazing about being inside of Avengers Mansion. Teddy shifts back to himself and aims the flashlight he’d gotten from the guard up at the ceiling. “Do you think Spiderman left the webs?” he asks.
“What?” Greg says, then, “Oh. I don’t know. Regular spiders did it, probably.” He’s lurking over by the wall, checking a glass dome with one of Thor’s old helms beneath it.
Teddy shines the flashlight over the glass. “They say that’s the one Thor was wearing when he first came down from Asgard.”
“Think it’s worth any money?” Greg asks.
Teddy frowns. “Maybe. I don’t know. The Avengers don’t sell their stuff.”
“Sure they do,” Greg says. “I’ve seen it everywhere.”
Teddy gives him an affronted look. “Not like that. They don’t take a profit; it’s all charity.”
Greg blinks back at him in the dim, offshoot beams of the flashlight. “Don’t get all defensive on me.”
“I’m not-” Teddy flusters, realizes it, and says more flippantly: “I’m just saying, they don’t sell their stuff unless it’s for charity.”
Greg taps his fingers on the dome as he considers this. “Bet it’s still worth something.” He slides his hand down the glass to the wooden base and tries to push up on it. “That’s heavier than it looks, damn.” He wiggles four fingers beneath the glass and lifts it a few inches.
“Greg!” Teddy hisses at him. “What are you doing?”
“Help me get this,” Greg answers.
Teddy’s mouth falls open. “You said you just wanted to look! What are you doing? What-”
“They aren’t using it!” Greg snaps. “Come on, we’re already here. Help me lift it.”
“Let’s just go, Greg.” Teddy sweeps the light back across the floor to the front windows, suddenly afraid that the security guard might come back after all. “This isn’t fun, Greg. I’m not-”
“Shut up, Altman,” Greg says in exasperation, letting the dome fall back in place and nearly squishing his own fingers in the process. “Do you think it matters what you want right now? Get over here. Help me get this; I know you’re strong, too; you could do this one-handed.”
“I don’t want to do this.” Teddy storms up to Greg’s side, grows a few inches taller. “Don’t you get it? I don’t want to do this.”
“Don’t go all Mutant Madman on me.” Greg glares up at Teddy. “You’re in this now. If you don’t help, I’ll get caught, and you’ll come down, too.”
“We can just leave,” Teddy says. “I’m not helping you loot the freaking Avengers Mansion.”
Greg shakes his head. “I’m not leaving.”
Teddy looks him over, then picks him up by the collar of his shirt, lifting him easily up onto his toes. “I’ll carry you out then.”
Greg kicks his feet. Then, seeing that he can’t get out of Teddy’s grip, he snarls: “If you do that, I’ll tell. I’ll let everybody know there’s another Mutie Freak at our school. That you’re probably just as crazy as the one that attacked Kesler. You want that, Teddy? You want to be that guy? I tried to keep you safe-”
“No, you didn’t,” Teddy says, his heart sinking so low in his chest that he feels like it might make its way to his stomach any moment. “You didn’t try to keep me safe. You just wanted to keep me secret. You wanted to make sure nothing got in your way of…” Teddy frowns, feeling himself break apart a bit more as he puts words to a revelation he’d been trying to ignore. “Of the parties, the court-side games, the VIP treatment that you couldn’t get on your own.”
“You had fun, too,” Greg says, still wriggling in Teddy’s grasp. “Let me down, damn it!”
Teddy swallows. “I didn’t. I wasn’t ever having fun, I just felt like I had to do this to be friends with you. None of this was for me, and I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t even want to be friends with you anymore, Greg.”
“Fine,” Greg spits. “I hope you get on with that attempted murderer in your class then, because no one else is going to be friends with you. You’re done, Altman, get it? You do this and the second I get back, you’re done.”
“As long as I can be done with this, too.” Teddy slings him over his shoulder and carries him out of the mansion like a sack of potatoes. For the moment, he feels brave and more confident than he ever has before. It lasts as long as it takes Greg to drive away, swearing out the window as he leaves Teddy alone.
Teddy’s mom comes to pick him up. It’s well after midnight at that point.
Teddy knows that she has every right to be upset with him – to ground him or at least yell at him – but she lets him sit sullen and silent in the passenger seat for the whole ride home. He’s braced for the worst once they’re inside the apartment, but she guides him to sit on the couch without a hint of anger.
“I don’t understand, Sweetheart.” She puts her hand on his knee. “I thought you were out with your friend?”
Something breaks in him at the word friend.
He starts to cry.
“Oh honey, sweetheart.” His mother pulls him up against her side and wraps both arms around him. “Teddy, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“Greg’s not my friend.” He sniffles. “And he going to tell everyone, Mom. No one’s ever going to talk to me again.”
“That’s not true, honey.” She rubs a hand over his back. “Whatever it is, you’re too sweet and kind; you’ll have plenty of friends to talk to, you-
“You don’t get it, Mom…” Teddy miserably lifts his head from her shoulder and looks at her just as despairingly. “I’m a mutant.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” She brushes her hand over the side of his face. “You’re not a mutant.”
“Mom–”
Before he can get out his protests, she started to change. Her skin turns green and her chin slits into obviously alien features.
Teddy blinks at her and rubs the side of his palm against his eyes. “You’re a Skrull?”
She gives him a long, quiet look.
“We’re Skrulls?" He corrects himself, then looks bewildered. "...I'm a Skrull?"
“Yes,” she answers quietly. “I need you to know you’re loved. And no matter what terrible things that boy says about you, you’re going to have friends and this is not the end of the world. But-”
“But I’m not a mutant.” Teddy holds his hand out in front of himself and lets it change, shifting it green and talon-like.
His mother takes his hand between her own. “No. You’re a Skrull. And Kree...and it’s not safe for that to be known, either…” She squeezes his fingers between her own. “I’m so sorry. I really am.”
He swallows. “So, what now?”
She presses a kiss to his temple. “Now, there’s a lot to talk about…”
Chapter Three: Squad
Teddy’s dreams are a confusion of color and sound. There’s bright red, bursting blue, a flash of silver. He sees a faceless smile, feels incorporeal hands brush through his hair. There’s a voice he doesn’t know, a laugh he’s never heard before.
And there are stars.
There are so, so many stars.
They’re all around him, like he might reach out and touch one...like he might reach through its shining center and find himself somewhere else. In his dreams, he is reaching out. He’s watching the night sky turn into a hand reaching back.
Then, he wakes up.
He can still feel the heat of those stars pressed against his palm when he opens his eyes to his bedroom ceiling. He brings his hand to his cheek, splays the fingers over it, and imagines for a moment that the warmth he feels belongs to those phantom hands he’d dreamed about. With his hand still pressed to his face, he moves from the bed and crosses the room to his window. It’s still dark outside. He finally drops his hand to open the window and climb out onto the fire escape.
There, he lies back on the narrow platform and looks up at the sky. He squints at it. He can almost make out Orion somewhere beyond the light of the billboards. The moon hangs like a satellite dish just above the nearest sky scraper. It’s only a bit more than he could see at their old apartment, but it’s still something...
and somewhere out there – probably not visible from anywhere on earth – Skrullos is orbiting its own star...
and somewhere out there – maybe even on Earth – the person he’s dreaming of might be dreaming about him, too.
So something is better than nothing at all, and he lies out there looking for anything until his mother pops her head through the window.
“Are you ready for your first day?” she asks.
Teddy shakes his head. “I still need to get dressed.”
“You’ll want to hurry.” She gives him a reassuring smile and rests her hand against his forearm. She shifts, letting her skin darken to green and become tougher. “You don’t want to be late and make a bad first impression.”
He covers her hand with his own and shifts to match. It still feels odd to look like anything other than his school pictures...but it feels good, too. He sits up and takess her hand, letting her help him make his way back in through the widow.
His mother brushes her hands over his head, fingers fussing with his hair. “Be quick, okay. We’re going to have to drive through…” She grimaces and chews over her words. “Traffic.”
Teddy knows that what she really means is protesters, but pointing that out isn’t going to do anything for either of their nerves. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Teddy makes his way past the metal detectors and scoops his bag from the X-ray machine on the other side of it. It’s the last of a long string of security features recently installed at the Manhattan X-school. It seems excessive, but they’ve got a good reason for them, one that had been on the news. There’s a memorial just inside the doors, next to a sign announcing that buses will no longer run to the school. It’s not exactly the most uplifting thing to see on his first day, but he gets it, and it’s nice to see people acknowledging what happened without the addendum of What did they expect?
“Hey, Newbie!” A girl with a shock of electric blue hair flags him down as he makes his way to his locker.
“Hi, uh, Oldie,” Teddy answers, already weary as he turns the combination lock.
“It’s Noriko.” she beams and sticks out her hand. “I’m supposed to be showing you around.”
“Oh, right,” Teddy sticks his hand out to shake hers. The second their skin makes contact he feels the stinging snap ping of electricity shoot up his arm. He pulls his hand away with a ack and a little glare.
She meets his look and impishly adds, “They also call me Surge.”
Teddy pops the locker open and sets down the things he won’t need until after lunch.
“That’s your schedule?” she asks, plucking the paper right from his hands. She purses her lips as she looks it over. “These are all core curriculum. Like, the standardized stuff the State makes us take.”
Teddy raises an eyebrow at her. “What else would it be?”
“Training. Your squad advisor and, you know, squad stuff.” Noriko waves the paper at him. “You should at least have classes to help control and grow your powers.”
Teddy shifts uncomfortably from one foot to another. “Yea, I, uh...I got a waiver for that stuff.”
“A waiver? Unbelievable.” The air sizzles around her, making her hair float with static electricity. When a strand of her pigtails crosses in front of her face, she swats it away and scoffs. She’s quiet for a minute, letting herself wind down enough that the air cools and her hair drops again. “What’s your power anyway?”
Teddy’s mouth twists with hesitance. He looks up the hall, then down it. There are some with visible mutations, and some without; he could go on just the way he always has if he wanted...but there’s a reason he’d begged his mother to go to the X-school when they'd moved. If he couldn’t tell anyone what he really is, then he could at least be a little more himself.
He shifts, shrinking down a few feet and letting his hair grow out long and blue until he looks just like Noriko.
“Oh, I don’t like that,” Noriko says, but she’s giving him a curious once over, circling him and sizing up the way he’s shaped himself in her image. “Do you have my tattoo, too?”
“What’s it look like?” he asks.
“A lightning bolt outlined on my hip.” She answers.
He grins. “I’ve got it now.”
“Let me see,” she orders.
He lifts his shirt to show her.
“Oh, no.” She pokes the tattoo, then scrunches her nose. “Laurie’s right. It would look like I’ve got a cutie mark. Damn... guess I won’t be getting that one.”
Teddy shifts back to himself, or at least the self that he’s used to being out in public. “Did you just use me to try on a tattoo?”
“Yes.” She hands his class list back to him, then waves for him to follow her. “Let’s get you to first period, and we’ll meet the rest of the group later. Feel free to be whoever you want, just tell me it’s you or I’ll end up trying to walk every shapeshifter I see to the Chemistry lab.”
The group is really just Noriko’s Squad: Josh, Jay, Laurie, Sofia, Kevin, and David.
But more often than not, they used their team names: Elixir, Icarus, Wind Dancer, Wallflower, Wither, and Prodigy.
“You need one,” Noriko tells him a few months later. “Codenames are a Mutant right-of-passage.”
Teddy wants to tell her that he’s not a mutant, but he can’t.
David gives him a different excuse from the opposite end of the table: “He’s not on a squad, Nori. He doesn’t need one; he’ll never use it.”
Noriko rolls her eyes. “We use our codenames, all the time, Prodigy.”
Josh looks between them and Teddy, then carefully says to him, “You don’t need one, but it is a part of Mutant heritage. Codenames have always been used in Mutant communities to help us identify each other and what our powers are...even before we became activists.
“Is that what we are?” Kevin asks bitterly. “Activists?”
Laurie starts to reach for him, then pulls her hand back. “Wither…”
Before anyone can be drawn into Kevin’s line of thinking, Jay plucks a few strings of his ever-present guitar. “I like Shrek. Goes with the green.”
“Shrek?!” Teddy’s eyebrows shoot up to his hair line, blonde traversing green. He’s not exactly a Skrull, but it feels close enough to the truth. “I’m not using Shrek as my codename.”
Noriko pokes him with her fork. “Then come up with something, or you’re going to get stuck with it.”
“Put a gun to my head, why don’t you,” Teddy grumbles back at her.
Lightning zings down the fork and the tines zap him where they’re still pressed to his bicep.
“Pow,” Noriko says when he flinches.
Teddy rubs his hand over the spot.
“The Thing, maybe?” Laurie supplies quietly. “You know, from the horror movie.”
Josh frowns. “Doesn’t that feel a little self-deprecating?”
“What about Hulkling?” Teddy asks.
“You want to scrimp an Avenger’s name?” Kevin asks distastefully.
“Again,” David says dryly. “It’s not like he’ll use it in the field.”
“But The Avengers?” Kevin asks. “They’re not exactly singing Mutant praises. Did you hear them supporting that name-the-mutants bill?”
Teddy pushes the last of his food around his plate. “There are Mutants in the Avengers, too. A lot of them have spoken against the registration act.
Jay plucks a few stanzas of the old Avenger’s theme. “There are no Avengers anymore. They’re disbanded. And it’s not like the Registration Act is going to pass congress.”
The table sits in uncomfortable silence as they think about this.
Finally, Prodigy says, “I think it’s apt. You’re green and you’re an Avengers fanboy...aren’t you, Hulkling?”
Teddy smiles down at his food and pushes it all over to one side. “Fanboy is such a strong term.”
“That’s not a denial.” Noriko says, then adds. “Hulkling it is. Look! There! You’re all set up if you do join a squad.”
“He’s already in a squad,” Laurie whispers. “Our Squad – On the field or at this table. You’re one of us, Hulkling”
Teddy looks up to smile at her, but when he does it, he meets David’s eyes instead. There’s a tense and knowing look in them. Of course he knows; with his powers, how could he not? Teddy’s been waiting for the reveal since day one, but so far he hasn’t said anything. Instead he’s just been standoffish...and kind of a dick.
Teddy slowly peels his gaze away and looks to Laurie instead. “Thanks, Wind Dancer; I’m happy to be here.”
Not for the first time, he thinks about Greg and his old school and everything that he’d come from. It’s so much easier to be himself here, so much easier to fit in his own skin. He wonders about the Mutant boy from his grade and if he would have liked it here, too...he wonders what his codename would have been…
Teddy gets the chance to join a squad a few months later.
He’s out watching the stars again, squeezing his eyes shut until the airplanes look like slow-moving meteors making their way above the buildings. There’s so much light around him – and so much noise below him – that he doesn’t even notice the thrusters approaching until a miniature Iron Man floats into view. A red screen projection flickers out from its visor, showing Teddy’s old school picture next to a list of his attributes.
“Theodore Altman?”
Teddy sits up slowly. He glances conspicuously at the projection and debates his ability to lie. Even shifted to his green skin and wings, there’s an undeniable resemblance to the picture. “It’s usually more polite to introduce yourself first when hovering over someone’s fire escape and projecting their face to all of Manhattan.”
“My name’s Iron Lad.” The miniature Avenger drops to the fire escape next to Teddy, his boots hitting the platform with the slight klak, klak of metal on metal. The projection vanishes and the helmet peels back from his face, more like a symbiote than the traditional Iron Man visor. The face beneath it is no older than Teddy’s own. “I’m from the future.”
Teddy takes a deep breath. “Am I John Connor in this scenario?”
Iron Lad shakes his head. “We should leave the balcony. I have a lot to tell you.”
“Fire escape,” Teddy corrects, but he’s already moving towards the window. He sits down on the edge of the bed as Iron Lad slips in after him. “How did you find me?”
Iron Lad holds his hand up and the projection reappears. “This is the Avengers Fail-Safe Program. It was created by Vision to help locate the next generation of Avengers should something happen to the first one. Your name is on the list.”
Teddy blinks up at him. “The Vision knows my name?”
“Yes,” Iron Lad says. “You and several other powered youth that he thought would be able to form a new team…”
Teddy feels his heart start to beat a little faster. His eyes go wide. “You want me to be an Avenger?”
Iron Lad frowns at him. “Not...exactly…”
Teddy’s face falls. “What are you asking me, then?”
“I want you to be part of the next team of superheros. The Young Avengers, if you will.” Iron Lad pushes a hand back through his hair. “The Avengers aren’t coming back, but this timeline is vulnerable the way it is. There are things coming, Theodore. Bad things. I need to put a team together to help protect this universe. I need you-”
The squeak of the bedroom door cuts him off.
Both of them look to the frame where Teddy’s mother stands, one hand wrapped tightly around the door frame and the other pushing the door wide open. “Don’t do it,” she says. “Teddy, please. Don’t do it.”
Teddy stands from the bed. “Mom, they need me.”
“They need someone,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be you.”
“What if I want it to be me?” Teddy asks. “I know you think I’m destined for something bigger, but...Skrullos isn’t home to me. I’ll never be able to do anything for them. I can do something here, I can do something for Earth.”
His mothers eyes start the well. She drops her cover as human and shifts to her Skrull form. “I’m not asking you as Princess Anelle’s nursemaid. I’m asking as…” She takes Teddy’s hand between her own and holds it tight. “...Your mother and I were friends when I lost her...but I’ve had you since you were a baby. I rocked you when you cried, I held your hand when you were scared. We’ve laughed together and grown together. You’re my son...and all I have left to love on this planet.”
“Mom…”
“Please.” She brings their clasped hands up to her head and presses her brow up against their clasped fingers. “Don’t do it, Teddy; I cannot watch you die, too.”
Tears bead along her lashes and fall heavy and quick down her cheeks.
Teddy folds his arms around her and pulls her close.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
She shudders and sobs in his arms, whispering a soft Thank you and an even softer I’m sorry.
Teddy looks back over his shoulder at Iron Lad and says, “I can’t.”
Iron Lad gives them both a sympathetic look, then climbs back out the window and rockets away.
Title: Building Blocks
Fandom/Pairing: The Raven Cycle/ Pynch
Story Summary: Adam Parrish has worked hard to get where he is, which is, by design, as far from where he started as possible. Just as all the effort he’s put in starts to pay off, his old life comes to call, literally, in the form of a younger brother he never knew about. As Adam navigates this revelation, he returns to his home town to face exactly what he left behind and why, including a relationship that refuses to fizzle out.
Tags: Original Character, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Anxiety, Dissociation, Flashbacks, Fostering, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical
Table of Contents
Chapter 13 of 13: B...like when they say Beginning
Adam leans over the sink, cups his hand below the faucet, and drinks the water from his hand. In his head, he thinks of how often the courthouse bathrooms are really cleaned and what germs he might have picked up from holding the railing on the way up the stairs. Neither thought does anything to stop him from swishing the water from cheek to cheek; the taste of bile in his mouth easily overrides even the most reflexive of concerns. He spits the water back into the sink just as a knock on the door makes him jump. “Just a minute,” he says. “Almost done.”
The door opens and closes; in his hurry to get inside the bathroom, he must have forgotten to turn the lock.
“It’s just me,” Ronan says, and Adam meets his reflection in the mirror. “How are you-”
Adam makes a small, strangled noise in the back of his throat to cut him off. “I threw up.” He wipes the corner of his mouth with his hand to emphasize it. “But I think I’m okay now.”
Ronan’s reflection narrows its eyes suspiciously at Adam. “Define it.”
Adam raises both eyebrows. “Define ‘okay?’”
“Yea,” Ronan says. “I want to know what you think it is.”
Adam snorts. “Don’t handle me like I’m a patient; I’m not having a pediatric crisis.”
Ronan’s face scrunches and he steps closer to Adam, standing almost right behind him due to the small size of the bathroom. “Maybe not pediatric,” he mumbles. He starts to lift his hand, but drops it with a hesitance only too obvious in the mirror. “I don’t want to handle you,” Ronan says, irritation coloring the softness of his tone. “I just want to make sure you’re actually okay.”
Adam sweeps his eyes over their reflections and makes the decision to lean back.
Ronan’s arms come up to catch him, settling around his ribs the same way they had years ago, as if the days they’d spent together weren’t just memories now. He rests his hands on Adam’s stomach, one over the other. “Adam?”
“I’m not okay,” Adam admits. “It seemed...easier, I guess. In my head. I thought I’d be fine.” Ronan nods and Adam brings his hands up to cover Ronan’s hands. He’s too exhausted to feel the ache of how much he’d missed being held, but his memory fills in the blanks of what he’s been missing anyway. He’d spent mornings and nights in these arms, knew the way that Ronan would tuck his head to Adam’s and kiss his temple, soft breaths moving the flyaway hairs on top of his head. Ronan does not kiss him now, and want fills Adam like water into an empty cup. “Nothing’s been easy for me. Nothing but you, and I went and made that hard out of habit.” Ronan’s hold loosens on Adam just enough that Adam can twist around in his arms to look at him him face to face. “I think it’s maybe something I should talk to someone about…”
Ronan smiles softly. “I might know someone.”
Adam brings his hands up to hold Ronan’s face. “I’m glad you were here today. I know it’s been a lot.”
“Always.” Ronan says.
“I know,” Adam says and his chest warms with how completely he believes it. He knows it’s always been true, but the sentiment really settles in him for the first time and it feels so heavy that he might cry.
Ronan’s hands move to his hips in the silence and he squeezes them once. He can see that conflict on Ronan’s face, the want to lean in and the need to pull away, to preserve what they’ve got in case chasing more would mean losing it all again. Adam knows if he doesn’t say anything that this will be the end of it, and he finally lets himself admit that he can’t stand to live like this anymore.
“I’m all-in,” Adam says. “If trying again is still an option...”
Ronan’s eyes go wide. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Adam punctuates it with a sharp nod of his head. “I’m yours; I always have been.” His head falls forward a little shamefully. “Even when I thought I shouldn’t be, I have been, and I don’t want to hold myself back anymore. If you’re still interested, I’m all-in.”
“If I’m still interested,” Ronan parrots with a snort and hooks a finger below Adam’s chin to lift his head. “I’d marry you right now if I thought you’d say yes.”
“Jesus,” Adam says, but his smile is growing to a grin so large it hurts. “It’s been years, Ronan.”
“Yea,” Ronan pulls him closer. “And it’s been a long time to wait for you to come to your senses.” He starts to lean in for a kiss and Adam moves his hand to block him.
“I just threw up,” he reminds.
Ronan pulls the hand out of the way. “Do I look like I care?”
“I care,” Adam laughs. “It’s gross, and we should get out of the bathroom, anyway. Someone’s going to wonder what we’re doing in here.”
“I sent the rest of them to dinner,” Ronan says. “We’re meeting them at Nino’s after we pick up Daniel from the community center.”
“There’s other people besides our friends in the courthouse,” Adam says.
“Who cares about them? Let them think whatever they want,” Ronan huffs and presses a kiss to Adam’s cheek instead.
The gesture pushes Adam off balance and he stumbles a half-step back into the sink. For a moment, he wishes very much that they were anywhere else in the world. He feels something stir in his chest, that old longing that he’d been calling seventeen, though now he realizes it had just been him all along. He quiets the feeling to stand in the moment with Ronan. He tilts his head and lets Ronan kiss him, just the once, before he drags them both back out into the hall.
They leave then, both of them piling back into Adam’s car to get Daniel for dinner. They decide not to tell him just then, but he eyes their clasped hands on the console the whole ride over to Nino’s. Their friends seem to look at them with the same suspicion when they pull out the side-by-side seats that the rest of them had left open for both Adam and Ronan. The looks don’t last past that, though, as the group spots Daniel hanging just behind Adam.
“Oh, wow,” Blue says, blinking in surprise. “You look just like Adam when he was younger.”
Adam gestures between the two of them. “Daniel, this is my friend, Blue. Blue, this is Daniel. My brother.” It still feels strange to say the word brother, but it’s getting easier every time he does it. No one else takes note of it, as far as he can tell; it’s already as real to them as the restaurant they’re sitting in.
Blue extends her hand, and Daniel gives it a hesitant shake before saying, “Blue is a color, not a name.”
Blue shrugs both shoulders. “I like it as a name.”
This seems to settle any further questions from Daniel, and Adam goes around the table introducing the rest of them. Previously, he might have made the distinction between his friends from Virginia and his friends from Harvard, but now he just calls them his friends in general. Daniel accepts all the names quietly until they get to Gillian. His eyes light up at her and he says, “Were you the one on the phone the other day?”
She nods. “That’s me.”
“Do you really live in Connecticut?” Daniel asks.
“Where else would I live?” she asks.
“Right,” Daniel says. “Is it really far?”
“I told you it’s a few hours,” Adam says.
“I didn’t ask you this time,” Daniel says back, earning him a few chuckles from the rest of the group.
Blue elbows Adam in the ribs. “He sounds like you when you were younger, too.”
“He does seem to share your tenacity,” Gansey says from her side.
On the other side of the table, Daniel starts pestering Eliot to move so that he can sit next to Gillian.
Benjy laughs at Eliot’s exiled pout and joins in on ribbing Adam. “They’ve both got the audacity, too, it looks like.”
Adam starts to protest again, but the waitress comes by to take their orders and the group settles into a more reserved state. As soon as she gets their drinks, Ronan slings his arm over the back of Adam’s chair and turns half-way towards him, drawing a few curious looks that can’t ask questions for fear of disturbing the order taking. “You did good today,” Ronan whispers. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you before, but you should know it; you’re saving that kid’s life.”
Adam shakes his head. “I don’t know about that...I’ve still got to go through family court, too…”
Ronan starts to say something else, but Gillian’s ears have perked up at the words family court and she jumps in before he can. “You know, there are a lot of moving parts to a custody case, Adam. I can help walk you through them if you need-” She stops at a sour look from Ronan and raises both hands. “Sorry. I didn’t realize…” She blinks at Ronan’s arm around Adam’s shoulders, then shrugs and finishes, “I didn’t mean to be an ass, I guess.”
“Gillian!” Fletcher hisses reproachfully and turns a pointed look from her to Daniel.
Daniel gives him an annoyed look in return. “I’m not a little kid; I’ve heard the word ‘ass’ before.”
Gillian sweeps her hand towards him. “See, Fletch, he’s heard it before.”
Eliot, now seated across from them, pipes up, “No offense, Gill, but I don’t think you get to set the rules for him; he’s not your kid.” At that, everyone turns their eyes onto Adam expectantly.
Adam’s brain stalls at the realization that they’re expecting him to weigh in... that, technically, he’s the one in charge of Daniel. He looks away from them and to Daniel instead. Two round blue eyes return his gaze with a challenge, and Adam wonders for a second what he’s gotten himself into. Then, Ronan squeezes his shoulder and he feels like he’ll be able to handle whatever is ahead of him.
“I think that you can swear in front of him,” Adam says and then points to Daniel. “But you’re not allowed to repeat anything you hear.”
Daniel lifts his chin, still looking annoyed. “So, I’m not allowed to say ‘ass,’ but they can?” In response to the flat look Adam gives him, he says, “You know they call a donkey an ‘ass’ in the Bible. What if I’m reading the Bible? What if I’m talking about a donkey? Can I say it then?”
Adam does not change his expression when he says, “What do you think?”
Daniel gives him a devious smile in response. “I think I should be allowed to say-”
“Don’t be a smartass,” Ronan cuts him off.
Daniel’s gaze snaps to him, absolutely betrayed. “He asked!”
Gansey settles an amused look on Adam. “He’s not very strong on rhetoric, is he?”
Blue says, “Have you ever had any old ladies curse you with a child just like you?”
Adam turns towards her placidly, “Is that one you get a lot?”
She scrunches her face and sticks her tongue out at Adam.
“Hey!” Daniel says, “Miss Lilliana says it’s not nice to stick your tongue out at people.”
“Yea, Maggot,” Ronan says, clearly taking any chance to bother her, “Be nice.”
Blue draws her tongue back into her mouth and lifts both hands in apology. “My bad.” Then, she lowers her hands below the edge of the table and flips Ronan off instead.
All of it feels so easy. Adam lets himself lean into the feeling, lets the jokes and the stories wrap around him like a blanket. It all fills him with a warmth and contentment that he can’t remember feeling in a very long time. If he’d known that this is what it would be like to let the two halves of his life meet, he would have done it a long time ago and spared himself the heartache of always trying to hold them separate.
He lets his head dip down to rest against Ronan’s shoulder. The looks glance off of them again, but this time they’re accompanied by soft smiles. No one says anything about it until they’re ready to leave, passing cards and cash one over the other to the waitress.
“I’ve got yours,” Gillian says to Adam. “Consider it my gift to the happy couple.” She pauses, giving Adam space to rebuff and correct her. When he does neither, she stretches her leg out to kick his shoe. “Good on you, Adam. Keeping you two apart has always been a losing battle.”
“You’re telling me,” Blue agrees with a huff. “Did you hear any of those calls he gave me those first few months. Always asking: How’s Ronan doing? What’s Ronan doing? Has anyone checked on Ronan lately?”
Ronan tilts his head to the side and looks at Adam. “You called about me like that?”
Blue makes an exasperate noise. “Every week!”
Adam feels his face heating up in embarrassment. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Oh yea, keeping constant tabs on the ex you broke up with!” Gillian snorts. “Definitely a totally normal and sane thing to do.” She looks back to Blue, “I had to change Ronan’s name in his phone to keep him from staring longingly at it in the middle of class.”
Ronan turns a shit-eating grin onto Adam. “What’d she change it to?”
“She didn’t change the whole thing,” Adam says, “But I think we need to go now that we’ve paid; the waitress probably wants to turn this table over sometime tonight…”
“I tried to change the whole thing,” Gillian says over Adam’s shoulder as they shuffle out the door. “He said it was tacky.”
Ronan gives Gillian a narrow-eyed look and asks: “What were you trying to change it to?”
“Something tacky,” Adam interrupts, taking Ronan by the arm and pulling him out of the crowd.
Ronan’s suspicion breaks into teasing and he leers, “Come on, how bad could it be Adam?”
“Bad enough.” Adam gives him an exasperated shove at the same time that Gillian whispers, “Get my number from Adam and I’ll text it to you.”
They spend a few more minutes circled around the cars in the parking lot, all of them talking about Adam and attempting to pinch Daniel’s cheeks. Daniel for the most part, doesn’t seem to mind this attention, though he spends most of the conversation trying to monopolize Gillian’s time. Eventually, they get everyone into the cars and drive home just as the sky starts to darken.
When they finally park outside the townhouse, Adam looks into the rear view mirror with a sigh. “He fell asleep.”
“I’ll carry him in,” Ronan whispers. “No point waking him up just to tell him to go to bed.”
Adam nods and goes to open the door while Ronan scoops Daniel into his arms. They shuffle down the hall to his room and manage to get him into bed and covered up. The second he’s tucked in, Daniel opens both his sleepy eyes.
“Go back to sleep,” Ronan orders.
Daniel’s nose crinkles. “Are you staying the night?”
Ronan looks over his shoulder to where Adam stands at the entrance to the bedroom door. “I don’t know yet.”
Adam shrugs, “I wouldn’t mind.”
Daniel accepts this softly. “I’ll make us eggs in the morning. I’m pretty good at it.”
“Sounds like you’ll need to get up early then.” Ronan taps a fist against his chest. “You’ll need the sleep.”
“I’ve already slept,” Daniel says, though the yawn that chases the words is less convincing. Before anyone else can encourage him to sleep, he rolls onto his side to peer at Adam. “Are you happy?” he asks.
The questions startles Adam. He glances between Ronan and Daniel and searches himself for any traces of the anxiety that he’d been carrying since returning to Virginia. Eventually, he settles on his answer; with a smile, he says, “Twice as happy.”
Daniel nods his head and snuggles into the covers. “Good. I like being around happy people.”
Adam feels something blossom in his chest at the way he says it. It's a gentle, protective feeling and he steps into the room. "Daniel..." He sits down on the edge of the bed and places one hand on his brother's ankle. "What would you think about staying with me a little longer? A lot longer, actually..."
Daniel's eyebrows furrow together in a mirror of the worried look on Adam's face. "I thought that's why you were asking for custody?"
Adam blinks at him. "You know about that?"
"Yea. Since the beginning." Daniel yawns again. "I heard you talking about it."
Ronan snorts once. "You shouldn't listen to other people's conversations."
"I just wanted to know," Daniel says softly. "Daddy always said that if they took me away, that I'd never come back. He said I'd end up somewhere worse..."
Adam's rubs Daniel's ankle. "Sometimes people try to scare you to get away with the bad things they've done."
"I know," Daniel answers him. "I mean, I didn't know at first, but when you came to get me I thought...you just. You didn't look mean. And you didn't look worse. You just looked like me."
Adam swallows, the protective feeling in his chest growing more fierce. "You don't mind staying?"
Daniel shakes his head. "Not if you want to keep me."
"I do," Adam says, but Daniel's eyes have slid closed again. He worries that he might not have heard. He stands up and brushes some hair back from his forehead. "I am keeping you," he says again to his sleeping face, then looks to Ronan, "I'll tell him again in the morning."
Ronan smiles up at him from where he's still kneeling by the bed. "You're going to be good at this."
Adam hums, not quite agreeing or disagreeing. "You'll help me be good at it."
"Yea." Ronan rubs his hand over Daniel’s shoulder, squeezes it once, and then gets up to turn off the light. Adam closes the door behind them as Ronan passes through it, looping one arm around his waist so that they end up moving as one towards Adam’s bedroom. They move slow, meandering across the floor as though waltzing until they hit the closed door of Adam’s bedroom.
“Did you really mean it when you said you’d marry me?” Adam asks.
Ronan huffs, “Obviously.”
Adam smiles and it's teasing despite its softness. “Mr. Adam Lynch.”
Ronan kisses the side of Adam’s face and whispers into his hearing ear: “Mr. Ronan Parrish.”
Adam laughs, one hand reaching behind them to open the door and let them tumble into the room. They hit the bed with an oomph and a chuckle. “It doesn’t sound like us.”
“Yea,” Ronan agrees, “But we’ve got time to figure it out.”
Adam nods to himself and they flop side by side on the bed, hands clasped between them as they both stare up at the ceiling. “I need to find somewhere to live first.”
“Declan could get you a townhouse. One that isn’t a rental.” Ronan says.
“I can get a townhouse myself.” Adam tells him. “But I was thinking…” he rolls over onto his side and props his elbow against the bed so that he can put his head in his hand and look down at Ronan. “Maybe we could see how Daniel likes the Barns?”
“Really?” Ronan sits up to be on Adam’s eye level. “That’s quick, Adam, that’s-”
“It’s been years,” Adam says softly. “And I’ve missed you every day of them.”
“I’ve missed you, too.” Ronan tips his head to kiss Adam. They stay like that for a long time, kissing, and breathing, and wading late into the night with thoughts of what they’re going to do next. It’s like falling into each other all over again, to the point that it almost feels like they’d never fallen apart.
Title: Building Blocks
Fandom/Pairing: The Raven Cycle/ Pynch
Story Summary: Adam Parrish has worked hard to get where he is, which is, by design, as far from where he started as possible. Just as all the effort he’s put in starts to pay off, his old life comes to call, literally, in the form of a younger brother he never knew about. As Adam navigates this revelation, he returns to his home town to face exactly what he left behind and why, including a relationship that refuses to fizzle out.
Tags: Original Character, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Anxiety, Dissociation, Flashbacks, Fostering, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical
Table of Contents
Chapter 12 of 13: J...like how they say 'just'
Adam stares in the mirror. His reflection is a very serious young man – mid twenties, though there’s something about his eyes, he thinks, that seems a bit more mature – with a cornflower blue tie lying on the chest of his suit, undone. It feels like looking at a different person altogether when he reaches for ends and starts to fold the pieces into a half-Windsor knot. For a long time, it had been the only knot he could do, but he’d learned a language of ties between classes and internships; those who knew what to look for could read a conversation in the folds and so he’d diligently learned what they say, so as to never be mistaken in what he meant. Clothes, like words, could be weapons, too...
Could be a sword and shield.
Could be armor.
This particular tie had been a gift from Blue. It matches his eyes, she’d said, and the color said her name, which he thought felt a bit like magic in the mundane. She’d given it to him after he got his Harvard acceptance letter, and he’d worn it to anything that made him nervous. Interviews, internships, networking events. Things that turned out fine, eventually. Probably not thanks to the tie, but he’d developed a bit of superstition about it none-the-less, which made it a natural pick for his time at the county courthouse.
He teases the knot of the tie into shape and smooths the length of it over his shirt. His reflection does not seem so weathered now; the fine cheek bones and long lashes read boyish more than anything. He smooths a hand over the tie again and breathes out a long, steady breath. His mouth dries up on the exhale. His fingers catch at his sternum and he rubs there, trying to free up his lungs from the anxious weight settling on them.
Someone knocks on the door.
“Just a minute,” Adam says and flips off the tap on the sink. It’s been running the whole time, and there’s a small pool at the bottom of the porcelain basin.
“It’s me.” The voice is low and familiar.
“Just a minute.” Adam repeats, checking himself in the mirror again. He slips out the door a second later, breath caught and shoulders back like he isn’t sitting at the precipice of a panic attack.
Ronan looks unconvinced by his perfect posture. “You okay?”
Adam nods, but he doesn’t trust himself to speak. Ronan takes him by the shoulder and leads him back to the hallway outside the courtroom. Already, there’s a handful of people milling about outside the door. More people than he expected to confess to, though he’d spectated in courts before and knew how the benches filled with spectators, witnesses, and those whose trials were going to happen further down the docket.
Vivian spots them on their way over and gives Adam the same disbelieving once-over that Ronan had given him. “Remember,” she tells Adam. “You’re not on trial. You’re just here to give context to the type of person-” she’s cut off by a screech of Adam’s name on the other side of the hall.
Blue barrels towards him and stops just short of running directly into him. “I can’t believe you weren’t going to tell us it was happening today!” She punches his shoulder, then pulls him into a hug.
Behind her, Gansey approaches in a much less harried fashion, though there’s a quickness to his steps that would have gone unnoticed by those that didn’t know him. He claps a hand on Adam’s shoulder and beams. “Helen and Declan are sniping at each other in the lobby, but they’ll be up soon.”
Adam looks over the tufts of Blue’s hair to Ronan. “Did you call everyone?”
Ronan shrugs. “They were already coming.”
“All of them?” Adam asks dryly as Blue pulls away. “Even Helen?”
Ronan rolls his eyes. “Yes, all of them.”
Gansey says, “To be fair, I did call Helen. She’s got some sway with the court that could speed things along.”
“Yes,” Helen says, appearing behind Gansey. “It’s sway that I’m sure Parrish wouldn’t ask me to use, but I would have been here anyway.” She leans on Gansey’s shoulder to pinch his cheek and smiles. “With the way he goes on about you, you’d think you were my brother-in-law…” She pauses to look up at Adam, and there’s something similar in her look to the one that Declan had given him when he’d first returned. She adds, “Twice removed, of course.”
“Helen!” Gansey gives her an indignant look. He swats her away. “A little tact, please.”
Helen huffs and crosses her arms over her chest, but her chance to say anything else gets swallowed up by a ruckus on the other end of the hall.
There’s a group of people bumbling up the stairs like lost tourists, their heads swiveling left and right as they pop into the hall. A few stop to ask for directions to the proper court room. Before anyone can answer them, they all seem to spot Adam at once. “Found him!” Someone shouts and grins break out across four faces.
Gillian, Fletcher, Eliot, and Benjy crowd into the space outside the door, politely pushing their way around the others waiting there to get to Adam. “We were afraid we wouldn’t make it in time; that guard downstairs seemed as lost as we were when we asked what floor we needed to go to.”
Adam can’t help the look of shock on his face. “I told you all not to come.”
Benjy’s nose scrunches up. “And we said we should come anyway.”
Eliot nods their head next to him. “I told you already: you wouldn’t let us go through this alone.”
“Exactly,” Fletcher says. “It’s quite alright to want the same thing of us here.”
“You are not Adam-Parrish-Army-of-One today.” Gillian cuffs his shoulder and she’s so much like Blue in that moment its almost funny. “You’re just another member of the Crying Club.”
Adam starts to speak, but can’t find the words for what he really wants to say. Eventually he just says, “I didn’t even tell you the date.”
Gillian waves him off. “It’s all part of the public record, Adam.”
“Oh,” he says, “So, you’re using your paralegal skills for evil?”
She gives him a devilish look, but it quickly falls away. “Actually. I need to…” she glances around the group and takes him by the top of his arm. “I need to talk to you for a second about that.” She leads him away from the big group amassing around him and pulls him into a shallow alcove near the stairs. “I didn’t notice the charges on your dad’s case until we were already on our way; I haven’t told anyone else, but…”
Adam watches her mouth pinch as she trails off, and he realizes she knows. Of course she does; she had been interested in family law at one point, and they’d read all the think pieces and practicum together before she’d changed her mind. Too many sad kids, she’d said with the implication that neither of them would fall into that category. He’d tucked his arm over his hearing ear for a minute then and wondered if knowing a sad kid might make a difference in the search for her specialty. It was the only time he’d ever gotten close to telling any of them.
While Adam stalls in his memories, Gillian jumps ahead to damage control: “I can tell them it’s a closed gallery. It’s not like they’d know the difference.” She takes his hand between both of her own. “I’m so sorry, Adam. I didn’t know.”
When he blinks back into the present and looks at her, he expects to see the pity he’d feared earlier in the week. What he sees instead is guilt. “It’s okay,” he says and his voice sounds different, softer than he ever let it be with them. “I didn’t tell you... I didn’t tell anyone.”
“You don’t have to tell them now,” she says earnestly. “I don’t want to force you into it.”
“It’s okay.” This time when he says it, it comes out resolved. “I was going to tell you all when I saw you again, anyway.” He shifts awkwardly from one foot to the other and pulls his hands away to tuck them both into his pockets. “Could you get them, though? I don’t want the first time they hear about it to be at a trial.”
“Yes. Absolutely.” Gillian nods fervently and returns back to the group to gather the Crying Club. The whole mob of Adam’s friends move with them, though, and they end up circled around him on one side of the hall. Gansey, Blue, Ronan, Declan, and Helen already know, but they stand there and listen anyway. He doesn’t have time to go into details – he thinks that he wouldn’t have wanted to, even if he did have the time– but he gets out the most important pieces. A short monologue, maybe two or three minutes, just to say this happened, and it happened to me.
Adam’s last word hangs in the air when he finishes. The second they know he’s done, the people around him surge forward to bring him into them. He’s not sure whose arms land where, just that they hold him tight. Crushed among the bodies of all these people that love him, Adam looks up to the ceiling and there’s something spiritual about the fluorescent lights flickering above him.
Sound whites out to just the buzzing of the bulbs. He feels like he’s being pressed back into himself, like all those old Adams are falling into one. The before meets the after and he’s Adam Parrish, seventeen, but also... nineteen, and twenty-one, and twenty-three. All the years in between come together with every moment of good and bad inside him. Even in the squeeze of his friends' hug, he starts to feel like he can breathe again...
And then the court room doors open.
His friends have to pull away as people filter inside. He worries for a moment that he’ll end up alone in the hallway, but then a hand slips into his. He looks over to see Ronan looking back at him.
“Are you ready?” Ronan asks.
Adam nods and lets himself wrap his fingers around Ronan’s hand in return. They make their way down the aisle and find a bench near the front, clustering with Vivian and the guardian ad litem. All of his friends crowd around them, taking up so much space that the small courtroom quickly becomes standing room only. On the other side of the room, in benches a little further up, Adam can see the back of his parents' heads; they do not turn around.
He expects to feel something at that – maybe the same creeping sense of invisibility that he’d run from when he originally left Henrietta – but he doesn’t. There are no ghosts crowding out his lungs now, no memories begging for his attention. He rubs at his sternum with his free hand, massaging away a tension that isn’t as tight as it used to be. He wonders, briefly, if the only reason his past had seemed so loud before was because he’d never let it out of the carefully constructed cage he’d made for it in Connecticut.
Ronan, as if sensing his growing discomfort, pulls his hand from Adam’s and sets it on his knee instead. He squeezes it once to stir Adam from his thoughts and then a second time to reassure him. If there were any words he’d thought to say with the gesture, he leaves them behind as the judge enters the room and the bailiff calls all rise.
The proceedings from then are silent and dry. There are several on the docket before Adam and many go up in just a handful of minutes as the Judge passes down one decision or another. Adam busies his mind by clocking the minutiae of the court and how its systems differed from the ones he’d spectated up North. When he glances down the bench, he can see Gillian’s face screwed up in a similar concentration. He wouldn’t be surprised if she were doing the same thing; he subtly tries to catch her attention, but the judge calls their case before he can get it.
Adam’s body goes rigid at the sound of his last name. Ronan squeezes his knee one more time as he turns to face the front of the courtroom. It’s a little longer until he’s called up, but his nerves still haven’t resolved themselves by the time he gets on the witness stand. The first few questions are easy, simple. What’s his name? What’s his relationship to the defendant? Why is he here? He can vaguely recall the set of questions from some exercises he’d done about introducing a witness. He knows how they’ll phrase the next questions, too, and he answers them in the same stringent manner until they hit was your father typically violent?
Habitually would have been the better word to use, Adam thinks, but he says yes. For all that he’d worried about the details they might drag out of him, it seems to be the final question. They offer a chance for his father’s counsel to take a stab at him, but they decline. When Adam turns a curious look to the defendant's table, he sees the furious look on his father’s face. Robert – who never had to tiptoe around someone else, who had always been the biggest person in the room, who had never learned to hide all that unseemliness – looks just like the abuser that his counsel will try to say he isn’t.
For a second, Adam is caught under the familiar heat of that look; he misses his first dismissal from the stand. The second time he’s told to go, he stands stiffly, eyes locked on Robert as he tells the judge: “Excuse me, You’re Honor. I’m deaf on this side.” He taps his fingers against his deaf ear as he steps down; the implication is enough, he hopes, if not for the court than for his father.
He’s not seventeen anymore; he isn’t going to hold on to the fear from that age any longer.
He’s not going to let his childhood dictate the adult he’s going to be from now on.
He takes a deep breath as he sits back down next to Ronan. He wonders if Ronan can feel him shaking when he throws an arm around his shoulders and pulls him to his side. Behind him, Gansey reaches over the back of the bench to squeeze his arm. Fletcher gives him an approving nod and Gillian stretches her leg as far as she can to nudge her boot against his shoe in support. The whole group surrounds him when they’re allowed to leave. He can still feel the tremors in his legs as they walk down the hall.
Behind him, there’s yelling. He hears his name shouted over the crowd. Part of the group falls back. Declan, Helen, Fletcher, and Gansey form a wall between Adam and his mother as she continues to shout.
“Are you happy with yourself?” The words chase after him, shrill and accusing. “You’re going to put your own father in jail, huh? You’re going to take that boy from his mother?” Adam glances over his shoulder at her and sees her trying to push her way to him, despite his friends making deliberate obstacles of themselves. “Ungrateful!” She screams. “We raised you! You wouldn’t have nothing-”
Courthouse security steps in, adding themselves to the barricade and threatening her with arrest.
Ronan presses his hand to the small of Adam’s back, pushing him further down the hall. “You okay?”
Adam looks ahead, eyes unseeing, and nods. “I’ll have to see her next week...when we go to the custody hearing.”
“But today,” Ronan says, “Are you okay?”
“I-” Adam chokes on his words and looks back down the hall. Most of the group has broken apart now and is regrouping with the ones that had formed the barricade. His mother is gone, either scared off by the threat of arrest or otherwise taken somewhere to cool off. “I…” There’s a ball of anxiety settling underneath his ribs with a sickly, fluttering feeling that makes him come up short on his next step. He’d really done it. He’d told them all what his father had done and there was no going back now; separating one life from the other – hiding himself and starting over – would never be an option again.
Ronan’s hand runs up the curve of his spine and settles against the top of it, his thumb hooked by his neck in a gesture so familiar that Adam wants to lean into it. He’s frozen stiff, though, his head bowed to stare sightlessly at the tops of his shoes as this new reality settles in, every bit of it including the dispelled illusion that maybe one parent had been looking out for him at some point.
Ronan lets his hand fall away. “Adam.” He starts, voice low and cautious, similar to the way he spoke to Daniel during his outburst.
Adam tries to count in his head. One, two, three...one, two, three...one, two… but his breath is stuck somewhere under his diaphragm, jammed there like crinkled paper in a fax machine. He rubs at the muscle, manages to get enough air to his lungs to say “I need a minute,” and slips into the same bathroom he’d locked himself into before the courtroom opened.
Title: Art Therapy (Word Count: 6,419)
Fandom/Pairing: The Raven Cycle (TD3)/Ronan & Hennessy (GEN) Summary: Ronan's not getting the grade he wants in the art class that Jordan TA's for, and Jordan thinks she knows someone who can help. Hennessy agrees out of curiosity and, in pursuit of an assignment that doesn't suck, her tutoring session with Ronan gets more personal than expected via the tried and true adage that all great artists suffer for their work.
Notes: This was written so that it could be read as a standalone work, but the idea came from a discussion with @meledde in the comments on Building Blocks about what Ronan was doing during the Pynch breakup. So, this can be viewed as connected to that verse, too. You're not missing anything, though, if you read it without reading that story (and vice versa: won't miss anything in BB if you don't read this fic.)
CW: Brief discussions of parental death & miscarriages wherein which both Ronan and Hennessy are dickish about both topics. Also, a few sex jokes.
Read it Here, or on AO3.
“What,” A young man hisses, slapping a piece of paper down onto Jordan’s desk like he wants to catch an assault charge for it, “Is this?”
Jordan takes a breath and taps a wine-colored fingernail against the paper with a measure of patience that she only just manages to keep. “That, Mr. Lynch, is a distressingly flat composite of the first page of Google when you put in the assignment terms.”
“It’s not plagiarized.” The aforementioned Lynch cocks his head back with a sneer, looking jackal-like and forbidding in his leather jacket and ripped jeans. “I drew it myself.”
“Obviously,” Jordan says dryly. “If you’d copied it, you might have managed to impress me before I recommended your discharge from our class.”
“You’re a TA,” he growls, a man imitating a rottweiler with its hackles raised. “You’re not ejecting anyone from class, and you’re not giving me a ‘C’ on that piece. The actual teacher-”
“Look,” Jordan cuts him off, “Bryde might enjoy your miserable take on modern technology, but this is not your Dead Poet’s Society moment. Your work is flat. Empty. As soulless and grim as your current performance of affluent prick, and I’d recommend you for theater before I’d ever change the grade on that piece.”
His fearsome posture drops at her words. “Well,” he snaps, shifting from one foot to the other, jaw still set, the dim lights of the classroom casting him in uncertain shadows: the image of a soldier facing unknown foes. “Isn’t art subjective?”
“Art is.” Jordan shrugs. “But Google isn’t.”
“Come on,” he urges. “How’s that get a C? It looks as good as anyone else’s work,”
Jordan shakes her head. “And therein lies your problem.” Everyone always expects an easy A in the class, and – as Bryde is fond of monologue-ing to the class on the death of Romanticism and not much else – it always comes down to her to defend the technical and educational aspects of the class when their grades don’t meet that expectation. Well, not today. It’s late... the end of the last night class... nearly 10pm. She does not have the will to stand around wasting precious hours of sleep trying to explain art to someone that she’s sure is hellbent on denigrating it.
She picks up her sketchpad, snaps it closed, and tucks it into her bag with a sharp, final shove. “A ‘C’ is still passing. You’ll either get used to it or get better.”
“That’s bullshit.” He follows her as she steps out from behind the desk, and further ignores the hint that the conversation is over when she walks brisk and unturning out the door. “If you’re not going to grade pass-fail, you’ve got to have some feedback or something.”
“Or I can grade however I want.” She flashes an unimpressed look over her shoulder as he dogs her steps to the lobby. “Now, if you keep following me, I’m going to taser you.” She pauses at the door and flicks her eyes over him. As imposing as he looks, her heels put her at about his height and she meets his icy glare with a heated look of her own when she adds. “I’ll do it twice, too. Once because you deserve it, then again because I think it’d be funny. Do you understand, Mr. Lynch?”
“Ronan.”
“What?”
“My name’s Ronan.” he answers. “It’s on my art.”
She purses her lips in disbelief. “Mmm, no. I don’t think so. We’re not going to be on a first-name basis.”
“I just figured if you’re going to go all dominatrix on me…” Ronan tucks his hands into his pockets and gives her a smug look.
“You’re not my type,” she huffs, “And sexual harassment isn’t going to improve your grade.”
“I like guys,” he says. “But I bet all your boyfriends call you daddy, so I’m trying to understand your homophobia right now.”
“You’ve got problems.” Jordan touches one finger to her eyebrow and considers him slowly. There’s something familiar about his abrasive persona and idiotic jokes, and it takes her a moment to pin down who he reminds her of. When she finally figures it out, she swears, sighing out an almost ironic crumbs under her breath. “What’s your major?”
“Psychology and Early Childhood Development.” He folds his arms over his chest again and adopts the same aggressive stance from before to stare her down. This time, it reads less affluent prick and more insecure egghead.
She taps her fingers along the push bar on the front door as her perception of him rearranges itself. “And you took this class to brush up on your finger painting?”
“It was the only hands-on class available.” He shifts again, his edges seeming a little less sharp when he realizes that this explanation isn’t going to be enough for her. He adds, “It’s all theory, every class. Just shit-tons of paperwork and reading. If I’ve got to take random classes to get all my credit-hours, I want something I can actually work on, something I can do with my hands.”
“Something real?” She offers. “Something that means something?”
He jerks his head back in one swift, affirmative motion.
“Fine.” She says. “I’m not changing your grade. But I might know someone that can help you.”
His voice is full of disdain when he asks: “They’ve got art tutors?”
“Something like that.” She pushes the door open and steps out into the chilly night. “I’ll tell you next class if she wants to help you. Don’t follow me to my car. Seriously. I will taser you, and I won’t feel bad about it.” She gives him one last meaningful look before she starts out across the parking lot, happily unfollowed.
Jordan kicks open the door to her apartment and shuffles in with her purse and a rustling armful of groceries. “No, don’t help,” she says when she spots her sister sprawled across the couch, her booted feet kicked up on one arm and her head propped up on the other. A cigarette hangs loosely from her lips as Jordan adds, “I’ve got this, obviously.”
“You’re strong and empowered, Luvvy!” Hennessy pulls her cigarette from her lips to bring it to her eyebrow in a mockery of a salute. “The sort of woman Margaret Thatcher would view as a threat.”
Jordan stops in front of the couch to drop a bag of frozen pizzas onto Hennessy’s stomach. “Don’t smoke in the house.” She snatches the cigarette from Hennessy with her newly freed hand and moves on to the kitchen with the rest of her haul. “Chris’sake,” she mutters, “I’m never getting my security deposit back.”
Hennessy’s lip curls up as she lifts the bag from her stomach. “Right, then,” she says, wiping a hand over herself to clear away the cold and condensation left on the skin below her crop top. “What’s got your knickers in a twist?”
Jordan drops the groceries onto the kitchen table. She pauses to wave one dismissive hand through the air before she opens the fridge to fill it. “I met an asshole today.”
“Yea?” Hennessy comes to the archway dividing the rooms and rests one hip against it. “Are you going to marry him?”
Jordan tips her head out from behind the fridge door to roll her eyes. “He’s a student in one of my classes.” She holds her hand out for the bag of pizzas.
Hennessy takes a box out of the bag before handing Jordan the rest. “So?”
“And he’s an asshole,” Jordan adds, snapping the door closed. She eyes the pizza in Hennessy’s hand. “Are you cooking that now?
“I had a nicotine breakfast,” Hennessy answers.
Jordan snorts, “When was breakfast?”
“Around 3,” she says, tearing one end of the pizza box and letting the contents slide carelessly down onto the pan. “I missed tea time. Couldn’t be arsed to walk down to the Dollar General for snacks.”
“So, you waited on me?” Jordan sits down in one of the chairs at their two-person dining table, leaving it cockeyed so she can watch Hennessy slide the pan into the oven without preheating it. “How sweet.”
“What are sisters for?” Hennessy asks, turning a cheeky smile over her shoulder at Jordan. When she joins her at the table, she slides her hand behind her ear and produces another cigarette to replace the one that Jordan had just thrown out. “And anyway,” she goes on, the words shaping themselves roughly as she presses the cigarette between her teeth to light it. “You’ve never let a fuckboy personality stop you before.”
“Alright: Give,” Jordan demands, reaching her hand out towards Hennessy with two fingers held up like victory.
Hennessy blows a lungful of smoke out the side of her mouth and slides the filter into the V of Jordan’s fingers. “What about that security deposit, huh?”
Jordan doesn’t acknowledge the comment, just takes a drag from the cigarette and taps the ash into an empty vase at the center of the table. “I said asshole, not fuckboy,” she corrects a moment later. “And you don’t get it. He’s not just any asshole, he’s an asshole just like you.”
“Is that right?” Hennessy leans back in her chair, one arm thrown over the back of it as she grins. “Maybe I’ll marry him then...get myself out of this apartment.”
Jordan shakes her head again. “He’s gay.” She extends the arm with the cigarette and waves her hand in a gesture meaning I’m done, take it back.
Hennessy happily obliges and returns the stick to her own mouth. “A lavender marriage, then. I hear they still do them down here.”
“He’s got this oiled-duck look to him,” Jordan says. “All inky and pathetic. I kind of want to help him.”
Hennessy laughs. “And what’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know yet.” She mirrors Hennessy’s pose in the chair. In her mind it constructs itself into a painting: oil on canvas, the title Twins, Opposed in the style of Edward Hopper. She was often drawing or painting in the style of others, leaving her critique of Ronan’s art somewhat hypocritical. “He's unoriginal. Bottled up and repressed, to start.”
“Oof,” Hennessy says, producing another cigarette from behind the other ear. She uses the remnants of the cherry on her first one to light the next, and then discards its wasted corpse into the same empty vase-turned-ashtray on the table. “You really don’t like his work, do you?”
“I can’t tutor for the same classes I grade for.” she says, giving Hennessy a meaningful look, “But I want to help him.”
The new cigarette slips a little lower over Hennessy’s lip, like a dog’s tail turning down as she realizes what her sister wants. “Crumbs, Jor, you want me to teach the little shit how to paint?”
“Not painting, specifically,” She says. “Originality. Conceptualizing. How to get what’s in his head out into the world.”
Hennessy moves her lip, expertly pulling the cigarette back into her mouth to take another puff off it. She then removes it altogether, snuffing it out on the side of her boot and setting it down on the windowsill behind them for later. “What if he’s got nothing in his head?”
Jordan shrugs. “Then put something there. I know how you like to cull the lemmings.” She didn’t actually think that Ronan Lynch’s head was empty. She’d heard him talk long enough to the professor about silence and sound and how pop culture and adverts numb society to know that he has at least a few things worthwhile somewhere, between all the other horrors one might find there inside him. But she also knows her sister and that nurturing talent wouldn’t be nearly as appealing to her as creating a monster.
“Besides,” Jordan adds, less hostile than she means to be: “You could use a project... since the job search isn’t going anywhere.”
Hennessy’s mouth falls open at the same time that the oven beeps what should have been the alert for reaching the correct temperature. Now, with the pizza already inside it, the beep just serves as an alarm that the pizza is ‘done enough.’
When Hennessey gets up to pull it from the oven, she shakes the pizza down off the pan and onto a plate, fully uncut. “I’ll tutor the brat,” She starts as she returns to the table, “But I’m instructing him not to turn in anything but Andy Warhol knock-offs throughout the rest of the semester.”
Jordan huffs a laugh at the threat. “I will fail him for that. And a stunt like that will piss off Bryde, too, and I’ll tell him you did it.”
Bryde and Hennessy were something like contemporaries in certain art circles, though they often fell into a space too niche for anyone else to recognize them. Still, having recognized each other – and fully exploited Jordan’s TA position to meet – they’d each found their adoration of the other’s work somewhat strained by knowing the artist. In the brief time that Jordan had been in her position at the school, they’d moved from collaborators, to mentor-mentee, to estranged and mutual critics.
“You think that’d stop me?” Hennessy asks, tearing her side of the pizza with her bare hands and wincing as the sauce burns her fingertips.
“Well, I’m not setting it up as a challenge,” Jordan answers and stands from her chair to grab a set of forks from the drying rack on the counter. “Thank you, Hen, for doing the dishes... and for meeting with Mr. Ronan Lynch.”
Country living has never suited Hennessy. Not in the UK, and not here in the Southern United States where the country is twice as big and twice as empty as any she’d ever visited across the pond. She’s so unsuited for it, in fact, that ever since making the move she’d taken any chance she could get to drive upstate and into the city for true freedom. Unfortunately, the state of Virginia had long disagreed with Hennessy’s attempts at liberation. Or, at least, it disagreed with the really quite small list of traffic laws she broke in pursuit of it. Either way, it means that Jordan is the one behind the wheel of their gloriously yellow Lexus when they pull up to the farmhouse.
“Have you seen The Hills Have Eyes?” Hennessy asks.
Jordan tuts as she idles at the top of the long and narrow drive, but she does not answer.
“What about Deliverance?” Hennessy tries again.
“I think you could do with a little less telly,” Jordan says. “Now, go. Play nice. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
“On God, I think I might die.” Hennessy replies, craning her head out the window to look the place over. “Are those cows? Like milk-and-cheese real cattle? Where have you brought me, sister mine? Is this because I took that lacy bra out of your laundry? Looks better on me anyway, you know.”
“Get out,” Jordan orders, her demand like a beleaguered howl against a backdrop of doleful moos and froggy croaks.
The door to the farmhouse swings open and a man steps out onto the porch, eyes landing on the car as if spotting a bug he might squash.
“Look what you’ve done.” Hennessy says. “You’ve brought out the locals. Is that him?”
“Yes,” Jordan says.
“The asshole himself.” Hennessy leans out her window, raking her eyes over him without shame. He’s not her type, not really, but she doesn’t quite get the oiled-duck vibes that Jordan had mentioned. Inky, yes – it would have been hard not to draw that conclusion when he was dressed head to toe in black – but not pathetic. Not at first anyway. He’s too sharp, too squared off. It’s like looking at a disdaining model for a brand of clothes that gets accessorized exclusively with chains and studs. She could just as easily picture him crosshatched in India ink as she could picture him wearing a harness and leash.
“Mr. Ronan Lynch,” she calls, testing the sounds in her mouth and finding that they rolled around with a certain crude quality that she struggled not to attribute to the man as well. “I’ve heard you’re shit at art.”
The bug-squashing look on his face moves from the car to Hennessy herself. “Who are you?”
Hennessy ducks back into the car just to push the door open. “Your tutor, of course.” She leans into the floorboard to drag out the supplies she’d brought. “You could call me muse if you want, though,” she adds, grinning deviously and bouncing out of the car and onto the balls of her feet.
Jordan heaves a long-suffering sigh from the driver’s seat. “Or you could just call her Hennessy, since that’s her name.”
Hennessy shoots her a sour look. “Boo.”
Mr. Ronan Lynch walks down the porch steps, approaching curiously if not cautiously. “You two look alike.”
“My sister,” Jordan says. “I’ll be back to pick her up at the end of your tutoring session...Godspeed, Mr. Lynch.” With that, she leans across the console to close Hennessy’s door, then cuts the wheels to go back down the driveway.
“Well, then, show me in.” Hennessy orders after the car’s depature. “This stuff’s heavy, and I think I spilled turp on this box before I left.”
Ronan’s eyebrows come down over his eyes. “Turp?”
“Turpentine,” she says. “Or something like it that’s getting my arm all wet.”
Seemingly satisfied with this explanation, he turns and leads her back onto the porch. “It’s messy,” he says without even the barest inflection of an apology. “We’ll have to work in the kitchen.”
“Here I thought we’d work in-” She cuts herself off as he opens the door and the sheer disaster beyond it overwhelms her. The living room is cramped with furniture. It’s not the kind meant to be sat on or otherwise put to typical use. Though it does seem like nearly every flat surface has been turned into a table for half-drunk soda cans and empty bowls, it speaks more to the sort of clutter you’d find in a roadside antique shop. Each piece appears to be half-finished, sanded or sawed in chunks or otherwise half-stained.
On the way to the kitchen, she sidesteps stools and woodcarvings and plastic bags full of screws with no small amount of awe; she’d been prepared for beer cans and condoms on the light switches, but this is something else. She imagines she’d only ever see it again if she somehow manages to find Santa’s workshop and convince the elves to do a round of Adderall with her. “Christ,” she says once they finally hit the tiled floor of the kitchen. “I’m sure that’s a treat to clean up when your landlord visits.”
“Its a family house.” Ronan says.
Hennessy hefts her supplies onto the kitchen table and shakes her head. “I’m sure your parents’ll love what you’ve done with the place.”
“They’re dead,” he tells her, the look on his face just as disdaining as before. “Don’t say sorry about it.”
Hennessy yanks a chair out from the table and drops herself into it. “Why would I say sorry? I didn’t kill them.”
Ronan crosses his arms over his chest and eyes her suspiciously. Finally, he says, “You’re not what I expected.”
“It’s the twin thing, isn’t it?” Hennessy leans forward conspiratorially. “It seems to freak a lot of people out around here. I guess you don’t get to see it much in this town; not enough forks in the family trees to get that little curse swimming in the gene pool, I bet.”
Ronan’s lips twitch, not exactly a smile but something amused none-the-less. “Do you want a drink?”
“I’d love a pop.” Hennessy beams, feeling herself smiling in a true, friendly way that she doesn’t use very often. Winning the approval of someone so disapproving feels good, and she wonders if this is how people felt around her, too. After all, Jordan had said he was an asshole just like her; it almost felt like kismet, if she chose to believe in such a thing.
She didn’t believe it, though. Not really. And Jordan’s always going on about how she rushes into things – friendships, relationships, job opportunities – without any of the good sense she’d need to see obvious consequence. That, and she hadn’t even started teaching him yet; men tended to have very specific responses when she told them what to do.
Still, she doesn’t temper herself as he returns to the table and passes her a coke. “What’s the next assignment you’ve got in Jordan’s class?”
Ronan sits down in the chair across from her and frowns. “We’re supposed to make a piece using different values of the same color to evoke an emotion. Minimum size 6 by 6 inches and it has to be pigmented, but there’s no requirements for base or medium beyond that.”
“Of course there’s not,” Hennessy chuckles. “I love your teacher, by the way. Have you seen any of his art?”
Ronan shakes his head. “I didn’t realize he made art.”
“A lot of people don’t think he does.” Hennessy pulls her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and starts to scroll through her phone’s gallery. “That’s his,” she says, lying the phone flat on the table. “You get the assignment?”
The picture on the phone is a tree with a painting done on the front of it. The whole thing is probably twelve inches by twelve inches, but it’s hard to see all of it with the way the trunk wraps around. She’d taken the picture when the installation was up in London, a hundred trees planted like a forest in one wing of the Tate. Each tree – harvested pieces that bent or curved too much to be usefully reduced at a sawmill, despite their intentionally smoothed trunks – was painted with one color per picture. The pictures varied, but each showed a different aspect of modern society. The one that Hennessy had saved was a child in a pram, left to sit in front of a television in an otherwise empty room. The center had been so bright and the edges so dark; it seemed almost claustrophobic, like the world was closing in on the child. It wasn’t the only picture that felt that way, and the silence of the viewers – encouraged by a note at the entryway of the installation – left the room feeling as full as it was empty. Hennessy didn’t dare speak the emotion it invoked in her to wander through an installation like that.
Ronan stares at the picture like he might know the words she’d use anyway.
She picks her phone up and puts it back into her pocket.
“What’s that prompt mean to you?” She asks.
Ronan shakes his head. “Make a picture and give it feelings.”
“Art brought to life,” she says. “What color are you going to use?”
Ronan gives her stack of art supplies a mistrustful look. “Does it matter?”
“Yes, it matters.” Hennessy stands to open the box she’d brought in. From its mangled maw, she pulls out a sketchpad and an ordinary ink pen. “Here.” she sets them both in front of Ronan. “Draw the shittiest version of the assignment you can.”
She watches intently as Ronan picks up the pen and opens the pad to the next blank page. In the upper right corner, he scribbles a stick figure with one extended arm. There, at the end of the arm, he takes an extra moment to scratch out a semi-realistic hand giving her the middle finger.
Hennessy laughs and taps the drawing, “I can see Jordan giving you a ‘C’ for that.”
“She’s already giving me Cs,” he grumbles and flicks the pen away from himself.
“Aw,” Hennessy coos, “Does that make you emotional?”
He throws up the middle finger at her and she slaps a hand over his shaved head in response.
“Come on, Love,” she says. “My parole officer’s going to be back before you know it, and you don’t really want to waste this time pretending you can’t do this, do you?”
Ronan sneers up at her. “I don’t know what to draw.”
“Dig deep.” Hennessy slides the pen back over to him. “Somewhere under your angry little face is an artist. Or at least a passing-grade kind of piece. You know how I can tell?”
“Because everyone’s an artist?” Ronan answers dryly.
“Ha! No!” Hennessy retorts, her laugh just as dry. “I can tell... because boring people don’t wear their insides on the outside.” She draws a finger over the back of Ronan’s neck, her long nail following a hooked bit of tattoo down to the edge of his shirt collar. “And you do.”
Ronan swats her hand away and she takes her seat again. “Not everyone with tattoos is an artist.”
“I didn’t say they were artists.” She tilts the box and pulls out one of the smaller sketchpads inside it as well as another pen. “I said they were interesting. Now,” she points towards his discarded pen, “Be interesting, Ronan Lynch.”
Ronan picks the pen up again and taps it against the page. He darts a quick glance at her neck. “You’ve got tattoos.”
She doesn’t look up from bird that she's started sketching. “I already know I’m interesting.”
“I got mine when my parents died,” he says, eyes focused on his sketchpad and the dark lines he was shaping into...something hard to tell from any other angle than straight ahead. “I wanted my insides on the outside, like you said.”
Hennessy pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and chews it for a long, silent second. “Each flower on my neck is a miscarriage. I’ve never wanted kids. I still don’t, and I know I would have been a shit mum... But I named them all anyway.”
Ronan tilts the sketchpad and draws another line further from the first. “Your sister’s got the same flowers on her neck.”
Hennessy shrugs without looking up. “Maybe I’m lying, then.”
The sound of Ronan’s pen stops.
She looks up to see what he’s doing only to find him looking right back at her.
“I don’t think you are,” he says.
She holds his stare, and when she sees it’s not relenting, she says, “Are you still sad about your parents?”
Without breaking the eye contact, he sets his pen down on top of the half-finished sketch. “Not about my parents.”
“But you’re still sad about something.” Hennessy says, pointing her pen at him triumphantly. “Well, draw it out, you sorry sack of shit. Bryde loves when art is agony. Jordan might hate it, but it’ll get you an ‘A,’ easy.”
Ronan’s face does something twitchy. Eventually, he drops his eyes back to the sketchpad and flips it to a clean page. “Do you have the chalk shit?”
“Chalk?” Hennessy tips her head to one side. “Uh, no. I didn’t think this was a chalk situation.”
“It’s not real chalk.” He waves his hand through the air absently. “The smudgy stuff. Looks like chalk, but it’s really soft and bright.”
Hennessy tilts the box and pulls a little wooden case out from the bottom. She opens it up to show him the set of pastels inside. “These?”
“Yea, those.” He takes the box from her and gives the set a once over before taking out the two yellows, the black, and the white.
Hennessy gives his selections a curious look. “Yellow is a happy color, Mr. Lynch.”
“In English,” he says, “They told us yellow could mean sickness, too.”
“Are you sick, Ronan?”
“And twisted,” he adds.
Hennessy gives that a derisive snort. “Someone never made it off Myspace.”
Ronan lifts his head with squinted eyes. “Are you part of the Myspace generation?”
Hennessy blinks at him. “Are you not?”
“It’s not polite to ask a woman her age…” Ronan gives her a cheeky look and adds: “But Y2K must have been very stressful for you.”
Hennessy kicks him under the table and picks up the pastel box from where he’d left it. She considers the remaining colors and picks out a few for herself. She could get pretty far with some strategic blending, but they’d have to share the black and white eventually. It’s a moment she finds herself waiting for, even as she flips the page to begin her pastel drawing from scratch.
They work in silence for a moment, but she’s always had a contentious relationship with quiet. Inevitably, she finds herself breaking it to ask, “Why are you menacing my sister, anyway? There had to be an underwater basket weaving class or something you could have filled your electives with.”
“Projects,” he says. “I explained it to her, already. I wanted to do something with my hands. I hate sitting in a classroom and learning shit I won’t use.”
Hennessy chuckles to herself. “Seems like you don’t like school much.”
“I don’t,” Ronan confirms.
Hennessy pauses in her sketching. She drops her hand, carefully smearing purple pastel along the edge of the table as she considers her work. “Daddy’s last dying wish, then? Or a bet between you and your friends?” She looks up, lifts the pastel from the table and marks down an errant line in the middle of her picture. She tries again, “You made a promise that you’d be someone you’re not, and you’re too chickenshit to pull out now?”
“You’d know about the pull-out method,” he says back, flat and dead.
Hennessy throws the purple pastel at the side of his head. “I need the white.”
Ronan rolls the white pastel across the table to her and they work in silence for a few more minutes. Eventually, Ronan spits out a disgruntled sigh and says, “The last one, but I thought I was a drop-out.”
“Oooh.” Hennessy dabs the pastel against the page. “So, your midlife crisis is an attempt at being a respectable citizen?”
“Something like that.” he says, carefully using the tips of his fingers to blend out the edges of some pastel blocking he’d put down.
“Hey Ronan,” she starts and waits for him to look up before she says, “What are you rebelling against?”
Ronan rolls his eyes and answers, “What do you got?”
Hennessy hums to herself and presses her pinkie finger to the sketch to blend the shades together. The tooth of the paper isn’t particularly large, but the rubbing still leaves her skin feeling raw. She lifts her hand and presses the digit to her tongue to soothe it. As she licks the paint away, she watches Ronan work. There’s something so lonesome about the way his shoulders scrunch down, bending his spine with a weight that didn’t only come from his head.
When she drops her finger from her mouth, she asks, as if there hasn’t been any pause in their conversation, “And who’d you promise that you’d be a loser forever?”
Ronan doesn’t answer, just sets the pastel down and says, “I think I’m done.”
“You think, or you are?” She asks.
“I’m done,” he corrects himself and dusts his yellowed fingers against the thigh of his black jeans, leaving jaunty little streaks by his pocket like spring pollen.
“Me, too,” she agrees, and lifts her sketchpad to show him what she’d been working on. “I thought I’d take a stab at the prompt, too.”
The page she shows him is done in purple and purple alone. It’s zoomed in, a snapshot of a table and two bodies leaned against it. Elbows, hands, a vase with the bottom filled with cigarette butts. From the lines and the shades, the viewer would know that the two figures weren’t facing each other, but parallel. One turned hand suggested the start of a conversation, the other suggests an ending. A cigarette burns low in the grip of the figure that shows both hands and a cloud of hazy purple suggests smoke circling them, connecting each body from rib to rib in a way Hennessy had hoped would seem ephemeral.
“Name it,” she orders when Ronan stares too quietly for too long. “What’s it make you feel?”
“Guilty,” he answers.
She nods her approval and shuts the sketchbook. “Now you go.”
“I’ll show you mine, since you showed me yours.” Despite his suggestive response, there’s still something almost shy about the way he lifts the picture up for her to look. The page is taken up by a scene that she thinks look suspiciously similar to the kitchen they’re sitting in now. Its yellow shades evoke light across the whole thing, even in the darkened spots where shadows should have curved the room. The palest spot appears just at the start of the last third of the page, where two chairs sit beside a window: one empty, one taken up by a boy in profile. Ronan had struggled for detail in the medium and the boy blended in with the light from the window, half-disappearing from the picture to become a ghostly imprint of himself. Still, she can tell that this figure is not Ronan lynch.
“Who’s that?” She asks and she thinks that she understands Ronan’s comment that yellow could mean sickness, too. It’s not the sort of sick that lingers in your stomach, though; it doesn’t turn through her like nausea. It sits heavy in her chest: heartsick, lovesick.
Ronan says, “Name it.”
She looks up to his face and there’s something about it, something embarrassed and shameful as he waits for her to gut him the same way he’d done when he’d named her piece.
“Who is that?” She asks again.
Ronan looks away, silent.
Finally, she sighs. “I’d call it hopeful.”
Tension drops from Ronan’s shoulders as he sets the sketchpad back onto the table. “Do you think it’s ‘C’ work?”
“No.” Hennessy says. “And I’ll kick her ass myself if she puts a ‘C’ on it.”
The sound of a car rolling up the drive catches both of their attentions. Ronan says, “Speak of the devil.”
A smile cracks across Hennessy’s face. “I guess that’s our time, this week.” She reaches for her things and starts to pack them away, leaving both the pastels and the larger sketchpad behind for Ronan to use. “I’ll be seeing you again, Mr. Ronan Lynch.”
He stands up, looks her over in a way that makes her afraid he’ll try to shake her hand, then simply jerks his head back once in agreement. “Thanks.” When he leads her back through the catastrophic living room, they’re both surprised to see a set of cars outside the front window. Opening the door reveals the empty drivers’ seats and the occupied fenders of both cars. At the meeting of the bumpers, Hennessy’s sister sits shoulder to shoulder with a man that’s definitely a Lynch, though one that seemed to have been starched and ironed at conception.
“Your…?” Hennessy starts to ask Ronan, her tone dripping with contempt.
“Brother,” Ronan supplies, seeming just as unhappy to see him.
At the sound of them, Jordan and Declan both lift their heads in a way that suggests something has been interrupted.
Ronan and Hennessy share a look. Without discussion, Ronan slides his arm around her waist, and she tucks a hand into his back pocket. They take the porch steps together, twin smirks on their faces.
“The lavender marriage is on the table after all, Sis,” Hennessy announces, then turns her head expectantly towards Ronan. “Isn’t it, babe?”
Before Ronan can answer, Declan’s unimpressed voice – just as flat and boring as the rest of him looks – interrupts: “She already told me you’re being tutored.”
“Maybe I’m hot for teacher,” Ronan shrugs.
Jordan purses her lips, “That’s teacher’s assistant’s sister, actually.”
“We figure,” Hennessy starts haughtily, “That you can’t fail your brother-in-law and that my services are best rendered in the bedrooms of the multiple, multiple closeted women I’ll attract from his church.” She does not actually know if Ronan has a church, but she knows it's as good a guess as any when it came to a town that had one on every street corner.
Jordan looks helplessly to Declan. “She’s always like this.”
“Should I resent that?” Hennessy asks Ronan. “I feel like I should resent that.”
Ronan shrugs and extricates himself from their faux-intimate pose. He turns his attention back to Declan, “What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk to you about something.” He stands up straight and tugs invisible wrinkles from the white dress shirt he’s wearing. “Though, I think my questions have been well-illuminated by meeting your...friends.” He gives Hennessy a look that, despite its blandness, registers to her as something offensive.
“We’ll leave you to it,” Jordan says and pulls Hennessy over to the car by her upper arm. Not a second later, they’re rolling down the driveway and turning out onto the road while Hennessy stares into the rear view.
“How was it?” Jordan asks.
“I think I get what you mean, now,” Hennessy answers. “About the oiled-duck thing.” She thinks about the art that Ronan had made, pictures all its melancholy lines and illuminated shadows. “He is a little bit pathetic.”
“But you like him, though,” Jordan says. “And you want to help him.”
“Crumbs.” Hennessy sinks down into her seat and kicks her feet up onto the dashboard. “I think it’s more than that.”
Jordan looks over at her from the corner of her eye. “Do not tell me you want to marry him.”
Hennessy’s nose wrinkles in amusement when she meets Jordan’s side-eye. “A different feeling,” she says. “A magical one that comes devoid of sex, yet is somehow less disappointing.”
Jordan laughs. “You want to be his friend?”
“It sounds gross when you put it like that.” Hennessy gives the ceiling liner a petulant look and crosses her arms over her chest. She thinks of her own art, tucked away in the sketchpad inside her box of art supplies. It’s lines and shapes, its hue: Purple. Had she meant to pick a complementary color to Ronan’s work, or had guilt simply guided her hand to it? She looks over to Jordan, her subject: a sister subjected to all her failings in pursuit of the person Hennessy promised she’d be when they moved.
Nothing had felt right in America until she’d sat down at that table with Ronan. She thinks the word kismet again and this time it sparks in her like something she might believe.
Story Summary: Adam Parrish has worked hard to get where he is, which is, by design, as far from where he started as possible. Just as all the effort he’s put in starts to pay off, his old life comes to call, literally, in the form of a younger brother he never knew about. As Adam navigates this revelation, he returns to his home town to face exactly what he left behind and why, including a relationship that refuses to fizzle out.
Adam sits on the patio of the same little coffee shop he’d met Ronan at the week after he’d arrived. He lifts his hand to check a watch that he no longer has, then checks his phone instead. It’s five minutes until the time Gillian said the Crying Club would be calling him, and he feels something like anticipation bubbling through him. He knows it’s only been a few weeks, but he hasn’t gone without seeing at least one of them in the last few years; he’s surprised at just how much he’s missed them when he stops to think about it.
He picks up his drink and wipes away some of the precipitation with his thumb. Water beads up almost as soon as it’s gone, a testament to the sweltering heat of the late-May afternoon. His own neck is doing a similar thing beneath the collar of his shirt, but he tries not to think about it as he waits. He knows the Club can be loud, and nothing – not even the uncomfortable tack of damp cotton pressed against his neck and the promise of air conditioning inside the cafe – will convince him to take a call at any significant volume in an enclosed space.
He picks up his phone to check the time again and the call comes through before he can read the digital clock. When he answers the call, a whoop and a cheer crackle out from the speaker. “Adam!” Benjy shouts. “I was afraid you weren’t going to answer!”
Adam taps the button on the side of his phone to lower the volume. He would have used his headphones except that the monoaudio option on his phone didn’t always work right – sometimes, he’d lose entire chunks of sound to its faulty processing options – and he didn’t want to try to guess what any one of them might have said. “Why wouldn’t I answer?”
Eliot leans over Benjy’s shoulder to make sure their face in is the screen when they says. “Because you ghosted us, duh.”
“I didn’t ghost you.” The defense comes quickly, but it still rings hollow. He hadn’t talked to anyone but Gillian since he’d returned to Virginia, and – without counting the short conversation they’d had this morning – that singular exchange had been short and cagey.
“You definitely ghosted us,” Benjy says, and Adam really should have anticipated getting this back and forth from him and Eliot; if they were not on Adam’s side, then they were always on each other’s side instead.
“Okay, alright,” Adam concedes. “How about this: it wasn’t intentional.”
At this, Eliot holds the phone a little further from their face, bringing both Gillian’s head and Fletcher’s profile into frame. There’s a moment, quicker almost than the phone’s camera can catch it, where the group looks around to each other. They’d caught Adam in a few different lies over the years; usually, it was nothing that they couldn’t forgive in the same breath that they’d found out, but it still made them question some of the things he said.
This time, at most, they could only catch him on a half-truth. He’d made the decision to keep his life in Henrietta separate from the rest of his life before he’d ever stepped foot onto Harvard’s campus. In his mind, it would be a nice and perfect dichotomy of before and after that never need mix. It didn’t occur to him that there are no dichotomies that cleanly made in nature... and then he’d brought Ronan into his dorm. The before met the after and he’d had to dissect one in favor of the other to keep that boundary. So, in fact, it isn’t intentional that he didn’t tell them about this visit; it was only intentional that he didn’t tell them about anything at all from his life in Henrietta.
Before they can come to a decision on his honesty this time, he says, “I heard you got that job on the Hill, Benjy.”
“Yes, I did,” he beams, half-singing the answer. “And I got the salary you said to shoot for. It’s basically a dream, Adam.” He hooks an arm around Eliot’s shoulder and jerks his head toward the phone in a gesture that can only be interpreted as tell him.
Eliot shrugs off Benjy’s arm with a little huff and turns a smile towards Adam. “I signed on with Harper-Collins,” they says. “I’m going to get that anthology out at the end of next year and if sales go well…”
Adam can’t help but smile back at the four of them. Everything that they were doing now is the culmination of long nights full of targeted research. School had almost seemed easy when it came to sorting through publishers or applying for entry level jobs that required a graduate degree. They’d spread themselves thin in the common area of his dorm night after night, biting their lips over what their lives could be in the next few months. Just thinking on it, Adam can nearly feel the keys of his computer beneath his fingers, thumb lingering on the track pad as the Crying Club circles around him to see the firms he’d applied to. He might have gotten one job temporarily, but it felt suddenly like he’d flung those applications out into the ether while the void laughed; how could he ever have expected where he’d be today?
Fletcher reaches his hand into view and steals the phone away from Benjy and Eliot. “Enough about us and our petty boasts,” he says, batting the others away like the owner of one too many feral cats. “Tell us about what’s going on. Have you been alright? And the brother? What’s happening with that?” His plummy voice makes the questions sound like good-natured commands from an old general, and Adam feels the tension he’d been carrying falling away at the base of his spine.
If he were to take the same surgeon’s knife to the line between the before and after, they’d land on the same side as Ronan had so many years ago- the side that couldn’t be tended to. It’s an amputation that he can’t bring himself to make anymore. “I’m doing fine, but it’s been...difficult,” he admits. “I’d say there’s a light at the end of the tunnel with the court date at the end of the month, but...that’s just the first court date. There’s going to be more, and I’ll have to be here for them.”
Gillian scoots her chair over to Fletcher’s side and leans into the frame. “How many court dates?”
Adam scratches absently at the side of his face as Eliot and Benjy squeeze their way onto the screen. Once they’re all there, he drops his hand and says. “I don’t know how many. I’m going to be petitioning for permanent custody, so…” he trails off as at least one gasp pops across the call. “It’s going to be a year, maybe more, of me staying here in Virginia.”
“You could end up there until your brother’s eighteen,” Gillian says.
Adam nods. “I know.”
Eliot’s mouth twists from shock to something more somber. “What about your parents?”
“Yea,” Benjy leans forward over Fletcher’s shoulder to get a better view of the phone. “What’s going on, Adam?”
Silence falls on both sides of the call as Adam considers what to say. They knew now that his life in Henrietta wasn’t as full of sunshine and roses as he’d made it out to be that first semester, but he couldn’t say what sort of story they’d put together about him in their heads. He imagined that each one had carved his past with the same sort of tools that had made their own, but that would have them falling short of how unfortunate it had been every time.
“I-” he starts, but all four sets of eyes fall on him rapt and expecting. The words get strangled in his throat, and he can’t bring himself to tell them all of the awful just yet. It would kill him to have to see pity cross their faces from 400 miles away. He settles on something vague, an olive branch to truthfulness, if he ever gets the chance to tell them face-to-face: “With any luck, my parents will be deemed unfit by the judge. I’ll be testifying to some of that at the end of the month.”
Eliot is the first to break from their surprised stupor. “Okay. So. When can we come down?”
Gillian nods and reaches to take her phone from Fletcher. “Give me the court date; we’ll be there to support you.”
Adam shakes his head. “No, don’t do that. You all don’t even have PTO yet; you can’t-”
“My God, Adam,” Fletcher interrupts, voice rumbling in disbelief. “As if we need the PTO!”
“What he said,” Benjy jumps in. “Let us come be there for you.”
Eliot pulls Gillian’s arm to put themself into the center of the screen. “You wouldn’t let any of us go through this alone.”
“It’s a waste to come down here,” Adam says, as the group shifts once again to put every face into view of the camera. “It’s a full eight hour drive, and you’d have to put off all the things you’re working on and, for what? It’s not like they’ll decide anything at the first court date.” Four identical, unconvinced frowns remain unmoved on the other side of the call. Reluctantly, he adds, “It’s not like I’m alone, anyway. I’m sure I couldn’t keep Ronan out of that court room under threat of death and dismemberment.”
Eliot’s eyebrows shoot up to their hairline. “Did you say…?”
“Ronan?” Benjy near-shouts. “The Ronan?”
“I don’t know if he deserves a the,” Fletcher murmurs disapprovingly.
Adam winces. “I thought Gillian would have told you.”
Three heads swivel to plant their accusing stares on her while Gillian only shrugs. “It seemed personal. I figured you’d tell them if you wanted anyone else to know.”
Before Adam can respond to that, Fletcher pulls the phone back towards him. “Are you two back together, then?”
“No,” Adam says. “He’s just helping me out.”
There’s a noise like a snort from somewhere off camera, but he can’t tell who makes it. Even then, he can see Benjy rolling his eyes over Fletcher’s shoulder. Eliot’s hand appears in the screen again, but Gillian pushes it away as Fletcher’s face folds itself into a very deep frown.
“Now, Adam,” Fletcher starts, “You’re in a very-”
“I already told him,” Gillian says and plucks her phone from Fletcher’s hands. “Now, tell us what day we need to come down. Your ex is not the only one that’s going to be Team Adam in that gallery.”
“Seriously,” Adam says as firmly as possible. “Do not waste the time and the gas on this.”
“Adam-” she starts, but someone out of frame taps her arm. They have a conversation that’s exchanged entirely in facial tics, one-half of which that Adam cannot see. When she turns back to the camera, there’s something amused about the curve of her lips. “We’re going to table this while we get food. Expect to hear from us again.”
Adam squints at the phone suspiciously. “I’ll keep an eye on my calls and texts.”
“You better!” She snaps playfully, and the smile on her face grows to a grin. “Talk to you later.”
The facetime call goes black a second later and Adam stares at the screen with a knot between his brows. He rubs gently at the skin there, trying to smooth away the tension beneath it as he returns his phone to the home screen. From there, he navigates to the contacts page and sends a text out to Ronan. Can we meet up? Custody related. He figures that with everything going on, it can’t hurt to be as clear as possible; he knows, though – and with more certainty than he’d known anything else the last few weeks – that he could have said anything and gotten the same when/where message back from Ronan.
They end up at St. Agnes, their cars parked at the far end of the lot where the shade from the surrounding trees can cover them. Adam arrives first and leaves the air conditioned interior to sit on the front fender. He stares up at the steeple where he’d lived in the church apartment for most of his senior year of high school. While it will always be Ronan’s church in his mind, it’s also the first place Adam had learned to live with himself and all the gritty details that went with that. Some days, he thinks that this is the spot where he’d finally left the trailer park behind. Most days, he feels like it’s the last place where he knew how to move forward; it’s this second thought that needles at him most as he watches Ronan back into the parking spot next to him.
When Ronan comes over to lean against the fender with Adam, there’s a certain haggardness to his face. The circles beneath his eyes are starting to show up, and there’s that ghost of stubble along his jawline again. He flicks his gaze over Adam and says, “Custody related?”
“I didn’t want to be misinterpreted.” Adam answers and turns the coffee cup in his hand.
Ronan looks from Adam to the church across the lot and settles his gaze on the steeple as well. “Why here?”
Adam shrugs. “I was ready to leave the coffee shop, and I didn’t want pizza.”
“There’s other places in town,” Ronan scoffs.
“I know,” Adam stares at the side of Ronan’s face as he looks over the church. He wonders what sort of memories Ronan keeps from the last two semesters they were at Aglionby together. Distant ones, he thinks, but all he says is, “You look tired.”
“Yea, well,” Ronan places his hand on the hood, testing the heat still left in the metal. A second later, he comes to a decision and jumps up to sit on it, leaving his feet on the fender by Adam’s hip. “I work PRN and sometimes they put me on overnights.” He rubs the back of his knuckles against his jawline and frowns. “This is basically 3am for me.”
Adam passes him what’s left of his iced coffee.
Ronan takes it and drinks almost half of it in a single sip.
The heat is tempered by the shade of the trees and the occasional breeze as they sit. It’s a comfortable silence that falls around them, both watching the church as though it were another guest in their meeting. If the walls could talk, what would they say? Would they say anything at all or would they be as stalwart and silent as the priests who took confession? Adam wonders if Ronan still goes to mass on Sundays.
Ronan finishes the coffee and tries to balance the empty cup on top of Adam’s head. The plastic is too light to do anything but fall over immediately, and Adam catches it on its way to the ground.
Ronan makes an approving noise at Adam’s reflexes, then says, “You’ve got court at the end of the week.”
“Yea.” he looks down between his feet and scuffs the dirt. “I still don’t know what to say. They’ve tried to tell me what they’re looking for and what to expect, but…”
Ronan drops his hand to Adam’s shoulder just long enough to squeeze it. “Just tell them the truth.”
Of course that would be his advice, the truth; Adam almost wants to roll his eyes. “It’s not like I could lie under oath.” He heaves a frustrated sigh and Ronan gives him the space to simmer in his discontent.
He pushes his thumbs into the plastic cup and listens to it crack and crinkle as it gives. “Right now, it’s almost like everything that happened might have happened to someone else. But if I say it out loud, if it gets written down by the court recorder, then it happened to me.”
“Saying it or not saying it doesn’t make a difference.” Ronan tells him, and Adam can feel the way he’s watching him without looking up. “It happened to you, either way; that doesn’t change.”
Adam wants to chuck the mangled corpse of the coffee cup across the parking lot, but he’s got principles when it comes to littering. He sets it one the ground by his feet to be picked up later and folds his arms over his chest instead. “So I just say: I got beat. Harder than I should and for things I shouldn’t have? And they want me to talk about my mother at family court next month, too... but about what? It’s not like she did anything.”
“That’s kind of the problem,” Ronan says and Adam presses his fingers into his elbows tight enough to bruise.
Adam feels seventeen again, but it’s not seventeen and yearning, not seventeen and hopeful. It’s seventeen and lying on the ground while Gansey stands between him and his father threatening to call the police. It’s seventeen and sitting in a hospital bed being told that he’ll be deaf for the rest of his life. It’s seventeen and having nowhere else to go. It’s seventeen and scared. He sucks in a breath and says, “I thought I wouldn’t have to feel like this anymore.”
Without saying anything, Ronan puts his hand on the side of Adam’s head and pulls him into his side.
Adam presses his forehead against Ronan’s ribs, and he knows that this is the sort of comfort that he’s no longer entitled to, the sort that is inherently selfish to let happen with everything from yesterday still hanging in the air around him. He can’t bring himself to pull away, though...because maybe, a little bit, this is about him as much as it’s about Ronan and family and all the things he missed while trying to feel safe again. He uncrosses his arms from his chest and wraps them around Ronan’s body, letting himself cling to Ronan in a way that he’d be embarrassed to let any one else see.
