#jiang trc | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

clotpolesonly · 11 months

Text

As Hazy Heaven Trembles

Adam really should talk to Gansey about Monmouth’s front door. Namely, how easy it was to jimmy open even when it was, supposedly, locked. All it took was some aggressive jiggling of the heavy metal, not unlike shaking a vending machine to loosen a stubborn bag of chips, and the locking mechanism cheerfully gave up the ghost. It was horribly unsafe and Adam had been meaning to say something about it for months.

As he jiggled the door open, though, he acknowledged to himself that he wouldn’t. That would require admitting why he knew. It would require admitting that he let himself in sometimes when no one was home. It would require admitting why.

He closed the door behind him, sliding the faulty lock back into place. The clunk of it echoed in the cluttered emptiness of the main room, Gansey’s miniature Henrietta a harsh but silent judge sprawled out across the stained concrete behind him. Adam gave it a quelling look. It continued to judge him, like it always did, as he picked his way toward the bathroom.

He could only bring himself to care so much when his head hurt as much as it hurt right now. He was pretty sure the bleeding had stopped, and the dizziness had only lasted a minute or two, so he wasn’t worried about concussion. At least it hadn’t been the face this time. Black eyes were a lot harder to hide or explain away. He’d have to wear long sleeves for a while, though, for the handprint blooming dark and ugly around his forearm. Keep his coveralls fully on and zipped up at the garage. Hope he didn’t get heat stroke for it.

He’d be fine. He always was. Unless Mr. Lockwood docked his grade for missing first period again. He was usually pretty chill about it, so he probably wouldn’t. It was Mr. Traynor that Adam had to watch out for, but if he showered quick and pedaled fast and luck was on his side, he could still make it to second period on time.

Luck was not on his side.

“What the fuck?”

Adam swung around, his overfull backpack slipping from its careful perch on the only part of his right shoulder that didn’t hurt. The sharp stab of pain caught him off guard almost as much as the sight of Ronan, shirtless and bleary-eyed, leaning out of the bedroom he was not supposed to be in right now.

“What are you—” Adam cut off the stupid question, the answer to which was guaranteed to be a caustic ‘I live here, dumbass, what are you doing here?’, and tried again. “Your car’s not here.”

“Left it at the fairgrounds,” Ronan said, flat with the uncomprehension of being not fully awake yet and, probably, a little hungover. “Got a ride home from Jiang. Gansey’s driving me back out for it later.”

Ronan’s sleepiness was disappearing fast, blue eyes sharpening into shards of ice as they took him in. Adam was acutely aware of the blood in his hair, the hunch to his shoulders that he couldn’t straighten out and still be able to breathe properly, the bruises on his arm hidden under one measly layer of thin cotton blend, the blank fear no doubt on his face.

He expected Ronan to say something. To yell, maybe. About the blood and the bruises and the fear, or about Adam breaking into their home, or a million other things because Ronan liked yelling and was never short on excuses for it. But he didn’t. He just stood there, ramrod straight in his bedroom doorway, so tense that Adam could see the clench of his stomach muscles.

Adam swallowed. “I was just gonna borrow y’all’s shower before second. If you don’t mind.”

Ronan looked like he minded every single aspect of the situation, but he shook his head sharply, once, and Adam took that as the most permission he was likely to get. He had his hand on the door, calculating how much time he could spend on washing up and still account for the traffic around Aglionby, when Ronan found his voice again.

“You’re bleeding.”

Adam ducked his head. His hand found where the hair was damp and sticky before he could stop himself. Face burning, he said, “It’s fine, it looks worse than it—”

“Not there, dumbass.”

Adam’s backpack was yanked off his shoulder. It brought with it another flare of pain, sharper than expected. Ronan’s hand was on his back then, his palm wide and hot through the fabric of Adam’s shirt, and when he brought it around to Adam’s line of sight, there was a smear of fresh blood on it.

Adam didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say, not least because he didn’t remember receiving that particular injury. Logically, he could deduce that it was the same impact with the open refrigerator door that had cut his head open, or maybe the edge of the kitchen counter he’d staggered into in the subsequent dizziness, but there was something disquieting, on a level deeper than logic could touch, about seeing blood he hadn’t known he’d spilled.

When Ronan opened the bathroom door, Adam didn’t resist being pushed inside. Ronan didn’t offer him much choice in the matter and fighting wasn’t worth the effort. He’d wiped Adam’s blood off on the thigh of his sweatpants, red-brown on gray. It would stain if he didn’t wash it soon. He didn’t seem fussed about it.

There was a first aid kit stacked between the microwave and the toilet tank, such that Ronan had to unplug and relocate the microwave to get at it. It wasn’t really a kit, honestly, just a shoebox full of stuff that the factory’s inhabitants had thought might come in handy in case of minor injury. A plethora of loose band-aids of various shapes and sizes, peroxide, gauze, a few half-empty OTC pill bottles, some disinfectant spray, a tub of arnica, a wrist brace that looked like it had been through a war zone and wished it hadn’t made it out alive.

Ronan grabbed the peroxide and a wad of toilet paper.

“Shirt off.” He kicked the toilet lid shut. “Sit down.”

“I don’t need—”

“Off.”

Adam gritted his teeth against a rising tide of words. Biting words. Cruel words. Words that would make Ronan drop the nursemaid bullshit and leave Adam the hell alone to handle his own fucking problems like he wanted to. Like he’d been handling them his entire life just fine.

The words were right there, on the tip of his tongue. They would work. They would probably even feel good to say, in the moment.

He didn’t say them.

Getting his shirt off proved difficult, between the cramped quarters and the way his shoulder protested at being forced to rotate. He didn’t think anything was torn or broken—he knew how that felt—but it was sure sore as all hell. Might be a strain.

Ronan didn’t offer to help, thank god, and he didn’t comment on the moment of struggle. He just waited expectantly until Adam slid around to straddle the lidded toilet in front of him. The peroxide stung like a bitch. Adam swallowed down the hiss he wanted to make. It didn’t feel like too big of a wound, judging by the track Ronan followed along his right shoulder blade. Too big for a band-aid, but nothing he needed to be really concerned about. He’d had worse.

The toilet paper wad disappeared, replaced a moment later by something softer and less astringent; Ronan must have found a reasonably clean washcloth somewhere. He was rinsing away the blood. The cool water felt good. Adam let his head fall forward to meet his forearms, folded across the newly exposed porcelain tank. He did hiss then and shifted his right arm out of the way. The bruises there, tellingly arrayed, stood out plainly even in the dim light from the tiny, grimy window set high in the wall.

“I could kill him.”

Ronan’s words fell into the silence between them like a pebble in a lake. The ripples of it caught in Adam’s throat.

“For what he does to you,” Ronan added, as if either of them needed clarification. “I would kill him with my bare hands if I could get away with it. If it would keep you safe.”

The ripples took hold of his lungs. Something in Adam shook.

This wasn’t a thing they talked about. Gansey talked about it sometimes, because he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t keep his nose out of where it wasn’t welcome. Noah didn't bring it up often, but he had a bad habit of doing so when Adam wanted him to the least. Ronan had never said a word, though. Adam knew he knew, but he’d always known it quietly. Ronan knew it in the way he showed up sometimes to drive Adam home from late shifts to make sure he got there on time, in the way he sometimes did stupid shit on purpose to get Gansey’s attention when Adam didn’t want to deal with him, in the way he never asked a question Adam didn’t want to answer.

He still wasn’t asking. It didn’t feel like an offer either, or like the threat it could’ve been. It felt like something wholly different. Something loud and something quiet and something altogether more honest than Adam had ever known how to be.

“You know murder is a sin, right?” he murmured against his own skin. Ronan was still dragging the cloth over his back, though surely there was no blood there left to wash away. It had warmed in his hand.

It stilled, a light pressure between his shoulder blades.

“Some sins are worth eternal damnation.”

Adam turned, Ronan’s hand following the motion until it couldn’t anymore and his back was left cold and bare with its absence. He kept his head down when he said, “Don’t say that.”

He couldn’t see Ronan’s face, but he could see the way his fingers tightened around the cloth, the way his knuckles whitened. He could see the smear of blood now well-dried on the thigh of his sweatpants and the traces that remained in the creases of his palm. He could see Ronan’s bare feet against the dull, grimy tile and, from the corner of his downturned eye, the heave of Ronan’s chest as he breathed and spoke.

“I mean it, Parrish.”

Adam raised his head then, drawn by the force of Ronan’s tone.

“I know you do,” he said. “That’s what scares me.”

Ronan didn’t flinch to meet his eyes, but he did frown. The furrow of his brow was something new, at odds with his declaration of surety. In the small bathroom, with Adam turned around to face him properly, there was very little space between them, but Ronan made no move to step back. At his side, his hand twitched forward, then fell.

“You’re not the one who should be scared,” he said. “I don’t want you to—”

“I’m not scared of you.”

The words fell like another pebble in the lake, bringing ripples of silence in their wake. They were as honest as Adam knew how to be.

Ronan looked at him for a long time, brow smoothing and then furrowing again. His lips parted, but no words emerged from them. This was new too. Adam had never known Ronan to be lost for words. Even in his silences, he had always been deliberate.

Now, Ronan closed his mouth and, deliberately, he lifted the washcloth again. It found a spot just under Adam’s left eye. There was no blood there, but there was a scar. A small one, old and long-healed, from the sharp-edged tab of a thrown beer can. Ronan pressed his cloth against the mark like he could wash it off too, like he could make Adam new again.

Adam took hold of his wrist.

“I don’t want you risking your soul for me.”

Ronan stilled but did not take his hand away. He could have, if he’d wanted to. Adam’s grip on him was loose, unrestraining, but he let Adam hold him in place anyway. He was stood, now, between Adam’s knees.

“Do you even believe in the soul?” he asked, somewhere between sardonic and genuine. His eyes were on Adam’s fingers against his skin.

“I don’t know,” Adam admitted. “But you do.”

“It’s my soul,” Ronan said, a stubborn, petulant twist to his mouth. “I can do what I want with it.”

“Ronan.”

He looked away then, blue eyes downcast. The cloth fell away too and left Adam’s fingers with nothing but cool, empty air between them. His feet shuffled, carrying him out of the cradle of Adam’s knees, and Adam was struck by how bare they were, paler than the rest of him with how seldom they were exposed. The open expanse of his chest didn’t hold half the vulnerability of the way his toes curled against the tile. Adam was struck with the urge to kick his own shoes off to match. To meet Ronan where he was.

He stood. There wasn’t room for it. The bathroom, crowded as it was with a laundromat and a kitchen and two mostly-grown young men in it, often felt too small for even one of them. The motion brought Adam into Ronan’s space, almost chest to chest. He said Ronan’s name again and he didn’t recognize his own voice. It was doing something he’d never heard it do before. Something new. Something that his dad would have a lot of unkind things to say about, if he could hear.

Those unkind things were there, stinging, in the back of Adam’s mind. He’d heard them all before, launched at him alongside beer cans, thrown Gansey’s way for daring to wear color, lobbied at the TV and the guy on the sidewalk and anyone else determined to be a worthy target of his father’s rage and derision. They were there, and they stung, and they didn’t matter because Ronan’s eyes were on his again and the silence felt like a holy thing. He could feel Ronan’s breath on his cheek.

It wouldn’t do him any good to tell Ronan that he wasn’t worth sacrificing for, no matter how true the words felt where they sat on his tongue. Telling Ronan what to do was a fruitless endeavor at the best of times and an outright challenge to do the exact opposite at the worst. No, he couldn’t tell Ronan not to care about him. But he could sway forward to close the distance between them. He could let his body, at least, be honest in the way it pressed against Ronan’s, skin to skin in the dim mid-morning light, and turn his head just so until he found Ronan’s parted lips with his own.

He felt the sharpness of Ronan’s indrawn breath, the way Ronan’s chest rose against his, the way the air he took in was taken from Adam’s own lungs. His lips, though, were wonderingly soft, moving gently, questioningly. His eyes stayed closed long after they parted. Adam was sure he’d never seen anything as delicate as the way Ronan’s eyelashes lay against his cheeks. They fluttered there like butterfly wings until his eyes finally opened.

“Why did you do that?”

Maybe Ronan felt the sanctity of the moment too, because his words were hardly more than a whisper.

“Did you not want me to?”

It wasn’t really a question, but Ronan frowned as if it was. His hand rose like he wanted to reach out, to touch, and Adam found that he wanted him to. He wanted the warm weight of Ronan’s palm on his bruised back. He wanted Ronan’s callused fingers on his cheek. He wanted to step forward again until he could feel Ronan’s heartbeat in his own chest. He wanted a lot of things, with a sudden and immediate desperation, that he had never allowed himself to want before.

But Ronan’s hand still held the washcloth, damp and bunched up and turning his fingertips pruny from how long he had been holding onto it. Ronan looked down at it, his frown a living thing, and said, “That’s not why I—”

Adam laid his fingers over Ronan’s. “I know.” Gently, he pried the cloth from Ronan’s grasp and dropped it, not caring where it landed. “I wouldn’t have, if I’d thought so.”

Ronan looked like he wanted to repeat his question, to demand that Adam justify what he had done, but the words were swallowed when Adam did it again. He kissed Ronan simply, because that’s what it felt like: simple. It wasn’t, he knew, not really. But in this moment, in this nonsensical space, at a time neither of them should’ve been there, with bare skin and blood in his hair, kissing Ronan felt like the simplest thing in the world.

Ronan’s hands found his waist, then his ribs, then the curve of his neck. They were softer than Adam would’ve expected, if he’d ever given himself leave to speculate on how Ronan Lynch would touch him. Not like he was broken or breakable, but like he was precious. The tenderness of Ronan’s thumb on the hinge of Adam’s jaw, feeling the motion of their mouths together, brought with it a dangerous wave of emotion in him, something hot and cold and complicated that lodged in his stomach and would not be moved.

Those roving hands slid up into his hair next and a hiss of pain caught them both off guard. The blood had dried, but the wound remained, and the back of Adam’s head still ached something fierce.

“Fuck,” Ronan muttered against his lips. “Sorry.”

“S’alright.” Adam let him retreat, not that there was far to go. He reached up to poke at the wound himself, wincing double as his shoulder reminded him of its own damage. The hair there was molded into sticky-crunchy spikes. Flecks of dried blood flaked off between his fingers. “I really do need a shower.”

Ronan nodded. His cheeks were pink. So were his lips, flushed and wet and familiar now in a way they’d never been before. Eyes averted, he cleared his throat.

“Right. I should, uh…” He thumbed over his shoulder.

Adam had never thought he would be able to smile with his own blood on his hands, but he’d also never thought he would bear witness to Ronan Lynch looking shy. Whatever holy stillness had surrounded them a moment ago was gone, leaving just a boy in its wake. A boy who cared about Adam more than himself. A boy who didn’t make demands of him. A boy with a sharp smile and soft hands. A boy who Adam had kissed, and kissed, and already wanted to kiss again.

A boy who lingered in the bathroom doorway to say, “You’re probably not gonna make it to second period.” He even had the good grace to sound sorry about it.

Adam shrugged his good shoulder, though. “Traynor’s a jackass anyway.”

Ronan’s bark of laughter took even him by surprise. “Yeah, fuck that guy. You should skip the whole day and hang out with me instead. Save me from my lonely, hungover house arrest. You know, I always feel like Gansey’s little diorama is judging me on his behalf?”

Adam ducked his head to hide the flush that stole across his cheeks, somehow both embarrassed and pleased to have had the same thought. “We can add a few buildings ourselves,” he said around a stubborn smile. “Put an X-Mart downtown, see how long it takes Gansey to notice.”

Ronan’s answering grin was all mischief. He knocked his knuckles against the door before closing it behind him. Adam could hear him whistling something lively as he moved about the main room, probably gathering building supplies.

He should go to class. He should rinse the blood off quick as he could, get on his bike, and pedal hard to salvage as much of the school day as he could manage. But the urgency from earlier was hard to keep hold of. So he would miss a few class periods, get docked a few points, have to borrow Gansey’s history notes and ask Tad Carruthers what the homework was in English Lit. It had all happened before and likely would again. So he would have to go home tonight and keep his head down until his father’s mood had passed. That had happened before too, and would again.

For now, he had a warm shower, and hazy mid-morning light through grimy windows, and a wonderful, messy, contradiction of a boy waiting for him in the other room. As Adam finally turned the water on, he thought that maybe luck had been on his side after all.

#Pynch #Adam Parrish #Ronan Lynch #TRC #the Raven Cycle #fics by me #fanfiction

47 notes · View notes