Oldsaints - Monsters.

I can’t afford to forget the blood. Or who spilled it.

Marjorie Liu, Monstress #1

Imagine this: Ronan Lynch kisses with his eyes wide open because otherwise he is afraid he might be dreaming

It’s because they’re in his bed at Monmouth and he’s had this exact dream so many times. 

At the Barns it’s different. At St. Agnes it’s different. Hell, even naps in Cabeswater are different. Those are places he inhabits with wakefulness and awareness. The awareness that comes from being amplified by a place and feeling too big for your skin. 

But here he simply is. Here he is not a king or a god or a worshiper. Here he is a boy who dances with sleep, sometimes leading and sometimes following. Who knows the cracks on his ceiling like he knows the back roads of Henrietta. Who sometimes dreams of tangled sheets and tingling lips and the rush of blood to every point of contact. Who wakes up alone. 

Who just this evening had tangled sheets and tingling lips and the rush of blood to every point of contact and then passed into dreaming alone. Who woke up just now with sleep bleary eyes and a glow-in-the-dark clock (not a dream, a gag gift from Gansey) telling him that it’s just after 3:30 AM and Adam Parrish is still next to him. 

Here, amidst his haphazard collection of impossible things, an impossible boy. All those dreams and he had never once dared to hope…

But it has to be real, doesn’t it? That’s what waking up means, bringing yourself through to fruition, reborn every day with weight and want and need and. Being. Knowing. 

He knows. He thinks he knows. He traces his finger down the slope of Adam’s shoulder where the shine of pale skin in the light of the streetlamp bleeds into the shine of pale sheets. Dreams bleeding into reality. 

Hope is a form of dreaming, right?

Adam stirs and Ronan pulls his hand away. He doesn’t mean to wake him, would never mean to take him from sleep any more than he would mean to take him from anything else Adam finds important. 

Adam wakes anyway. He rolls onto his side so that he’s facing Ronan and looks at him with heavy lids. He yawns and stretches and settles again and reaches out to run his hand gently over Ronan’s head. The pleasant tug of his fingers against Ronan’s short short hairs is so satisfying. Adam’s hand comes to a rest against his cheek and Ronan tilts his head into it, body heavy with sleep but still drawn to Adam’s touch like Adam’s gravity and the earth’s gravity have equal weight. 

They don’t. The tug of Adam is so much stronger. 

“You’re awake,” Adam says, voice low. 

Ronan hums his reply.

“God,” Adam says. He takes a deep breath and then exhales, long and slow. “God, god.” And the word sounds different every time. 

God, the dark suits you.

God, I never knew there was touch like this.  

God, our bodies are a riot in the quiet night. 

Ronan agrees, but words are insufficient, so he kisses Adam instead. Because he wants to. Because he wants to prove that they’re real, that this moment is made of flesh and blood. 

Adam closes his eyes, already halfway back to sleep, but Ronan keeps his open and clings to this. 

Up close Adam’s freckles blur into one another. His eyelids twitch with the restless movement of his eyes beneath them. Ronan slides his hand around Adam’s lower back and pulls him closer. Adam’s eyelashes flutter, then still. They fan out large against the gentle slope of his cheek. 

He of impossible being. He of passionate boyhood. He of crackling magic straining against the frame of one of the people Ronan loves the most in the world. He, he, he. 

It was always going to be a he, Ronan knows now, but he feels lucky that it’s this he, that it’s him. That Adam wants him back. That he’s willing to tangle himself up in Ronan’s sheets and Ronan’s limbs. That he’ll give parts of himself to Ronan, parts he’d previously been holding so tightly.

So Ronan keeps his eyes open, watches for the threshold between asleep and awake, and makes sure to keep his promise to find Adam on either side of the divide. 

307 // 358

Persephone had it right. If you must go, might as well take all of spring with you—

Cathy Linh Che, from Split; “Letters to Doc” (via luthienne)

Adam: knows Ronan has a crush on him

Gansey: knows he's gonna die

Noah: knows literally everything

Ronan: doesn't know a fucking thing, my guy

Hi, just wanted to say your adam parrish meta is fantastic and i love reading it. I was wondering if you have any thoughts about the difference between Adam's reaction to when he thought Gansey paid his rent vs. his reaction (or lack thereof) to Ronan paying it. I feel like it maybe says a lot about his relationship with both of them and how he maybe views their richness differently but idk. I'd like to know what your views on it are though

I think there is no point at which Adam assumes that Ronan Lynch is trying to control him, which is really the difference. 

Adam outright links his father’s control to potential control by Gansey in the first book. He clearly sees how Gansey is different from him socially and what others might take from Gansey offering him assistance: not love, but charity, and charity of a kind that makes Adam one of Gansey’s things. And he seemes to read Gansey’s love in that way too. He doesn’t really give Gansey credit for trying to be a friend until BLLB’s courtroom scene. And I don’t think Adam is 100% wrong? He’s like 75% wrong, but I will give him partial credit because, honestly, Gansey and Control is a thing. every time I’ve suggested that Gansey likes to control his situation and that of those around him, I’ve had people violently react with Gansey is not controlling!!! which, like, okay. He’s not controlling in the way Robert Parrish is controlling. He’s not controlling in the sense of being deliberately manipulative or cruel or getting high off of having power over people’s lives. 

but Gansey absolutely – absolutely and understandably when you think about his background and his upbringing and his trauma – does not want situations to spiral out of his control. To misquote Ronan Lynch in TDT, because he is Gansey, he usually wants all of them there and he wants to be in charge. It’s not malevolent control but it is a desire to make sure his people are safe, to know they are all handling each other appropriately, to trot out logic and rationality and wisdom and all those clear-headed Glendower qualities and use them to make everything right for everyone. Because he loves these people! He loves them and he wants to make the world right for them. Control. you can’t really be a king without it, though maybe he’d like to think he’s a king like the best myths about Glendower and can rule people out of sheer love, idk. 

My point is: I wouldn’t really be surprised if Adam has a hard time telling love and control apart, and I wouldn’t really be surprised if Gansey theoretically can tell the two apart but in practice expresses his love by, like, trying to talk at Adam about what Adam’s experiences are like and very logically delineating the boundaries of Adam’s life in a way you really shouldn’t do with abuse survivors because their right to trust their own impressions >>> your right to love them so hard that you get to be annoyed when they don’t let you dictate how they should be reacting to you.

Gansey clearly never means to come across as controlling to Adam, but he does, and part of that is Adam’s own issues and inability to see genuine friendship, and part of that is that Gansey really does want to control Adam’s life for the better. 

so I don’t even think Adam is kinder to Ronan about it because he loves Ronan more or because Ronan is so super clever about the way he offers help or w/e. I think it’s mostly because Adam hardly sees Ronan as likely to control his life. mind you, this isn’t totally fair to Gansey. Ronan isn’t immune to telling Adam what Adam’s needs are or what Adam should be doing. in BLLB, Ronan tells him to forget Aglionby and college because Adam has a bond with Cabeswater. Adam just dismisses him outright. There’s no agonizing over it; there’s no internal pain over Ronan setting out what Adam should do or Adam becoming one of his things. Adam pretty clearly doesn’t perceive any danger of that with Ronan. Ronan’s not going to try to control the universe to make things better for people. and tbh at several points in the books Adam’s (and a lot of other people’s) perception of Ronan is that Ronan barely makes any effort to control himself. 

“I think being with you guys is good for me.”

self healing

Adam: I’m cold.

Ronan: Here, take my coat.

Blue: I’m cold too.

Blue: …Gansey!?

Gansey: Here Adam take my coat too! You can never be too warm!