Piss Off, Snow (Chapter 1)
This is my Pynch fanfic for the TRC gift exchange! @trc-exchange. It’s on ao3 if you want to keep up with the next chapters http://archiveofourown.org/works/13175187/chapters/30135276
However, I don’t know who my giftee is. So. If you could redirect me, that’d be great.
Somehow Adam had never entertained the idea that the Lynch brothers had other relatives. Nyall, Declan, Ronan, Matthew, Aurora. That was it. But apparently it wasn’t.
“My aunt Claudia wants me to visit for Christmas.”
He could hear Ronan’s loaded sigh over the phone, even if the service wasn’t the best from his dorm room. He began again, slowly, “My aunt Claudia–”
“No, I mean… You have an aunt?”
“Yes, dipshit, catch up.” Ronan paused for a moment. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” Adam said, uncapping a pen with his teeth to underline something about quantum physics in his notes. It was midnight. The lamp in the corner of his room was almost ready for a light bulb change. It kept flickering. Something about these nights studying, talking to Ronan on the phone, listening to the clacking keys on his roommate’s laptop (his name was Ricky, he was an English major, and he was scared to ask about the identity of Adam’s boyfriend because he sounded scary), was surreal. He felt as if Cabeswater was back in his system, like he was connected to the moon or something poetic like that. He felt poetic.
Then he heard a frat boy yelling vaguely sexist things from the sidewalk and it disappeared.
“Do you want to come with me?” Ronan said.
Ronan sighed again, sounded falsely aggravated. “I said–”
“I thought we were going to spend Christmas at Monmouth,” Adam protested, still confused. “Gansey got a tree. A… big one. He and Blue and Henry are already heading back from Connecticut.”
“Ireland is pretty Christmas-y all the time.”
“Ireland?” Adam asked. Ricky looked up from his laptop, bewildered. Adam waved his hand at him, the universal signal for ‘don’t worry about it, go away’.
“We’re Irish, Parrish,” Ronan said. Adam could hear the exasperation in his voice. It was familiar to him as the backs of his hands by now. Ronan was often exasperated by things– Chainsaw, Opal, Adam, weather, politics, socks (“What medieval dumbass went oh, look, my feet are naked, gotta fix that?”).
“Your aunt lives in Ireland?” Adam said.
“I think Harvard is killing your brain power, Parrish. Yes, Ireland. I said it like three times. It’s cool. Green shit’s everywhere.”
“You mean grass?” Adam said.
There was a pause in which Adam distantly heard Opal saying “Look!” and Ronan yelling, “Drop that! Stop! Opal, you little–” Something scuffled. Chainsaw cackled. Adam waited patiently; this wasn’t really that unusual. After a minute of silence, Ronan said “Sorry” into the phone, not sounding very sorry at all.
“Mmh,” Adam hummed. “What’s this about a foreign country?”
“We used to go for Christmas, sometimes summers. She has a house outside of Dublin.” Ronan sounded affectionate. “Stubborn lady refused to get an apartment, but she doesn’t have enough money to really keep it up, so it’s kinda falling apart.”
“Like the Barns,” Adam said.
“Bastard,” Ronan said lovingly. “I’m getting us plane tickets.”
“Look at that. Look at those boarding passes. One. Two. There’s two of them. There’s two of us. Numbers are incredible.”
“Your passport was in my underwear drawer. Don’t ask me why.”
“What?” his boyfriend asked irritably.
“We can’t just… go to Ireland. We said we’d spend Christmas with the… people. Henriettans. Gansey and Blue and Henry and Fox Way and Mr. Gray. Don’t you think that’s kind of important?”
“I already asked,” Ronan said. “And I already got the tickets. You don’t get to complain about me buying them, because you’re a college student and you’re probably in crippling debt.”
Adam frowned. “I got a scholarship.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not in crippling debt.”
“Isn’t everyone,” Adam said, “in some way?” They both fell into a comfortable silence. Adam highlighted an entire passage. He should’ve just highlighted the whole thing. It was all important, and he was going to fail this test. He ran his hands through his hair and laid back, staring at his ceiling and listening to Ronan’s breathing on the other line. It was heavy and slow, steady enough that Adam thought he was asleep until he started murmuring crude jokes to Chainsaw in Latin.
And so in this way it was agreed. Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch were going to visit Ronan’s previously unknown Aunt Claudia in Ireland.
jbbartram-illu
2087
baratheonpilled
dededos
