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Adam leaving for England junior year hurts like a bitch, and it just goes on hurting the whole time that he's gone.
Ronan can't even complain about it: Adam wasn't going to go, was going to turn up his nose at his adviser and the scholarship committee and the once in a lifetime opportunity, just so he could stay only as far away as Massachusetts. Ronan spent three months of Adam's sophomore year convincing him that he wouldn't die from neglect and would Adam just buzz off already, so it's not like he can go around showing off the huge gaping hole in his heart now.
-
There's two things that help.
They've stuck with their daily phone call like it's a commandment. That had started when Adam first left, when Ronan thought Massachusetts was so fucking far away. They made a promise that they would talk every day, unless that's too much, unless you're too busy, unless, and no, Ronan, it's not too much, I'm not too busy.
After a month of talking every night, wondering if Adam was just humoring him, if he was interfering with Adam's life, if Adam was starting to resent him, Ronan put his phone down without calling.
It rang ten minutes later, Adam asking are you busy? with so much poorly disguised misery that Ronan tripped all over himself apologizing.
So they talk every night, even if sometimes Adam can't spare him more than a few minutes, even if sometimes Ronan burns through his daily allotment of words in less time than that. They still talk, every night.
-
The second thing that helps is the cottage.
Ronan has been picking through Niall's legacy since he regained the Barns, digging through cryptic dream things and dusty old papers, sorting out the boring and the benign and -- everything else. It's slow going. So much of it doesn't make sense, like someone slipped in pieces from a completely different jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces make all of the other ones make less sense than they had before.
But some of the pieces are very straightforward, like the deed to the cottage. It maybe doesn't make sense why his dad owned a cottage in Middle Of Fucking Nowhere, England, twenty miles outside a village so small that the town sport was probably sheep-heckling, but at least it was simple: the place exists, it belonged to his dad, that means that it's his, now.
Adam has a week-long break coming up, long enough to get lonely in student housing, not long enough to fly all the way to the States, so he goes to the cottage. It's exactly what they agreed he'd do, back over the summer, a million years ago, and that helps, that Ronan can do something for Adam, even from the other side of an ocean. It helps, that they're still following the plan, because the last step of the plan is Adam comes back to Ronan.
So he calls every day, in his afternoon, in Adam's evening. Adam tells him about the cottage, getting it set up for a week's habitation, buying groceries at a farm on the way out of town, chopping back ivy where it's overgrown its trellis, dragging the rowboat out of its shed and onto the pond.
Every last detail is the lamest thing that Ronan has ever heard, and he has to think about it that way because otherwise it would sound way too nice, him and Adam alone in their own little cottage.
-
The third afternoon, when he asks Adam how he's doing, there's a moment of hesitation before Adam says "fine."
"What is it?"
"Nothing's wrong," Adam says, too fast.
Ronan had been sprawled out along the couch; now he props himself up, halfway to sitting, elbows under him and one foot on the ground. "Okay, then what's right?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You tell me."
"You're the one making some kind of insinuation -- "
"You're the one hiding shit."
Adam sighs. "If I said I had my reasons, would that satisfy you?"
"No."
Adam sighs again, longer. "Declan showed up."
Ronan rockets upright.
"What the fuck is Declan doing there?"
"Apparently," Adam says, stretching his words out to a drawl like he does when he's being an ironic little smartass, "he had some business out in London, and he thought he'd come by the cottage for a getaway. Can you imagine?"
"Don't act like that's okay when he does it."
"But it is when I do it?"
"Yes." One of Ronan's heels is tapping over and over as his knee bounces up and down. He grinds it down into the floor. "How'd he even know about the place?"
"You found out about it, didn't you?" Adam says, and then like an afterthought, except it isn't: "he called it one of your dad's old safe houses."
Ronan doesn't like safe house. Ronan doesn't like one of.
"And that means he gets to drop in whenever he wants?" Ronan demands.
"It means he gets to before I do."
"He said that?"
"No, I said it, just now."
"He can't throw you out," Ronan argues. "I have the deed."
"He didn't try to throw me out," Adam says. "And I'm not throwing him out, before you go there."
"I thought the cottage was one room."
"It is."
"So where is he going to sleep?"
"On the couch, Lynch."
"You shouldn't be forced to put up with him on your vacation."
"I don't mind," Adam says. "It's kind of nice having company."
"Fine," Ronan spits, "don't let me keep you," and he hangs up even as he can hear wait, Ronan --
-
Ronan calls Adam the next day, because they talk every day.
They don't talk about the cottage. They don't talk about the fact that Ronan's stupid brother doesn't have a soul. They don't talk about the fight; it wasn't a real fight, anyway. They're starting to figure out, with a lot of trial and error, when an issue needs to be laid bare and fought over properly, and when the best thing to do is just let it go and not make it worse.
It doesn't really leave them a whole shit ton to talk about, especially since Ronan keeps waiting for Adam to tell him that having Declan around is ruining his vacation and Adam keeps not saying it.
-
Day two after a fight-that-wasn't should be back to normal, nothing weird except maybe Adam flirts more than usual.
Instead Adam is evading questions, aggressively talking about shit that Ronan thinks is boring, and generally being cagey as fuck.
Ronan gets sick of it fast.
"What the hell is going on?"
"I told you, I couldn't find the fifth edition of the textbook -- "
"I don't give a shit about your textbooks. What's going on with you?"
"I'm fine."
"And Declan?"
Adam pauses before he answers, but that could be anything from oh fuck he's onto me to I'm not going to lose my temper even though I'm in love with an idiot.
"We're both fine."
"Sure." Ronan crams in as much insinuation as he can into one syllable. He doesn't really know what he's afraid is happening, so that syllable has to cover a lot of ground. "I bet you are."
"Would you stop being paranoid? I slept on the couch, nothing happened, nothing's going to happen."
Ronan's heart thuds, because he hadn't really thought there was anything to insinuate about.
"You said Declan was sleeping on the couch."
There's silence, three more thuds, and then Adam says, carefully neutral, "there was a change of plans."
"What does that mean, Parrish?"
"An old friend showed up and needed to crash, that's all."
"What kind of secret fucking hideout is this place if everyone in the world knows about it?"
"It doesn't matter, Lynch, we're handling it."
"What, did some old friend of dad's try to kick you out, too?" Ronan asks. "I guess Declan deserves that, anyway."
That silence is easier to decipher: how close can I get to a lie without technically lying.
"Spit it out, Parrish."
"You're going to be mad."
"I'm already mad."
"It's not a friend of your dad's," Adam says. "It's Mr. Gray."
Ronan doesn't respond.
"You know he's been...traveling," Adam goes on, because fighting a one-man crusade against the entire supernatural criminal underworld is just such a mouthful. "He was nearby, he needed somewhere to lay low for a few days."
"You mean he was in trouble," Ronan translates. "And he came to the cottage, oh, so thoughtful of him to bring that trouble right to you."
"No one can find him now that he's here," Adam says, exasperated, as though this should be obvious to Ronan. "He says this area is some kind of null zone, for magical tracking, that's why he came here. It's not like he went looking for us."
"And how about when someone else comes to find him the same way he found you?"
"They can't, okay?"
"What, because he said so? Why did you even let him in?"
"He was in trouble."
"Too fucking bad. You don't get to cry sanctuary in the house of your murder victim."
"We talked about it and decided -- "
Ronan interrupts. "So Declan's decision counts more than mine, is that it?"
"Declan," Adam says, ice cold and precise, "is here."
Ronan recoils from his phone like it dripped acid down his face.
"Fuck you, Parrish," and this time he does not hear Adam asking him to wait before he hangs up the phone.
-
Ronan doesn't sleep.
He pictures it a thousand times instead, Adam and Declan conversing, being ultra-reasonable, making perfect logical decisions together and agreeing about how much they love hanging out with murderers instead of Ronan.
He calls Adam in the morning. There's no answer. He calls a second time, because even if this isn't when they talk, Adam can't be that far away from his phone. The cottage is only one room, after all, and he doesn't have an alarm clock or a watch, so why doesn't he have his fucking phone on him --
Ronan gives up on reason and calls Adam over and over and over again. Part of him knows that's totally psycho, but all of him knows that Adam spent yesterday with a hitman, a hitman who was laying low, and Ronan is fine with Adam being pissed at him if it means he's alive enough to pick up and yell at him.
Adam doesn't pick up. Of course not, because Ronan is being psycho, who would want to talk to a psycho? Ronan gets that through his head and goes outside to cool down.
The Gray Man helped them, in the end. And before that, he'd only ever been a tool, a weapon, not the actual murderer. Supposedly these days he does good things, good, dangerous things, things that put him in a place where he needs to escape somewhere and lay low because people are looking for him, to hurt him, and why isn't Adam picking up, he wouldn't ignore Ronan calling that many times just because he's pissed, just because the clock on their argument hadn't reset to evening yet --
-
It's pure desperation, and he knows it. He calls Declan anyway.
Declan doesn't pick up.
Declan's phone is never off. He'd never risk missing a business opportunity, or a chance to suck up to his boss, or some chick sending him nudes. His phone is practically a part of his anatomy, he'd forget it somewhere like he'd forget his dick. And he wouldn't ignore Ronan, no. He'd be all too happy to lecture Ronan, for being psycho, for being a drop out, for being in America when all the cool kids are in one rustic fucking room in Sheepfucker, England, and Ronan wouldn't even mind a lecture, right now.
-
The next rational thought Ronan has is that, according to the highway sign, he's twenty miles out from DC.
At that point the decision is pretty well made. There's nothing to do but find the airport, find a plane, find a car, find whatever highway can get him past all this disgustingly charming English countryside.
-
It's the ass-crack of dawn when he bangs on the door, which is probably why there's no answer, except what if there's no answer because murder, and Ronan's just decided he's allowed to break a window when Adam opens the door.
Ronan's fist is still up in the air. He can't move it. He's too busy soaking in the sight of Adam in front of him, not dead, very annoyed, and then very surprised, and then annoyed again, with twenty other emotions splashed on top of that.
Adam slams the door in his face.
"What the hell, Parrish?"
Adam yanks the door back open. "No. No. Not what the hell, Parrish, what the hell, Lynch, what are you doing here?"
"Everyone else is here!"
Adam slams the door shut again.
He kind of ruins that gesture by pulling it open again a second later, indecisive like Adam never is. Ronan is still marveling at that when Adam plants his hands on Ronan's chest and shoves him, out of the doorway, halfway down the pebble-lined walkway to the quaint stone wall around the property.
"You're unbelievable," Adam says, which is at least familiar. Adam tells Ronan that he's unbelievable a lot, although the range of emotions when he says it is pretty fucking wide. "You can't have a conversation with me, but you can fly to Europe?"
Ronan puts his hands over Adam's, holding them hostage. "I can't have a conversation with someone who doesn't pick up their goddamn phone."
"You called at six in the morning," Adam says, more acid. How dare his phone rat on Ronan like that. It could have tried to make him sound less like a stalker, your adoring boyfriend called for you at some point, you should call him back, immediately. "I wasn't expecting you! Since when do you call at six in the morning? Since when are you awake at six in the morning?"
"Since when do you ignore me?"
"I didn't ignore you, I left my phone in the cottage while we were fishing."
"Oh, why the fuck didn't I think of that," Ronan says, "obviously you all went fishing, really, only an idiot wouldn't think of that, and obviously I'm such an idiot -- "
Adam shuts his eyes. He has an expression like he's swallowing down his anger, telling himself this is what it is, I'll just live with it, and that's the opposite of how Ronan wants Adam to think of him.
He already has Adam's hands. It's easy to twist him around, until he's behind Adam and holding him in something between a hug and a wrestling hold.
"Knock that shit off," he growls in Adam's good ear. He doesn't want Adam to stew over this. This is a fight that needs to happen, now.
"I don't want to fight anymore," Adam says.
"I do. Why are you mad to see me?"
Adam laughs, a harsh bite of sound. "You're not here to see me, you're here to check up on me."
"Because I thought you were dead!"
"Oh, bullshit, Ronan, you were jealous."
"Fuck. You know what? Yeah, I was jealous. Because you were trying to make me jealous."
Adam doesn't answer right away. Ronan can just see the edge of his cheek turning red.
"Fine," he spits. "Fine. I missed you and you didn't believe me that I missed you, and that hurt. So I hurt you back."
Ronan breathes in. Too deep. He thinks he can smell Adam's sweat. He thinks he can smell the ivy on the trellis. This whole place smells like wilderness and shame. He doesn't like it.
"I know you miss me," he says. "It doesn't help. I just go on missing you."
Adam breathes out, harsh, and Ronan feels it like it's his lungs. "You said you were fine. You said you wanted me to go abroad."
"I didn't want you to give up anything for me."
"That's not how it works, Ronan. People give things up for each other."
"Okay," Ronan tugs the words out, one at a time, from that blown open hole in his chest. "Then I'm giving up one year. So that you can have this."
Adam shuts his eyes. His breath is ragged, like he's been trying to escape from Ronan's grip instead of just standing there. "It's not fair. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything for me."
Ronan says, "that's not how it works."
Adam leans his weight backward. Ronan holds him up. Adam's head tilts back far enough that Ronan can kiss the corner of his mouth. Adam breathes out with a shudder and relaxes completely against him.
-
Inside the cottage, the Gray Man and Declan are both wide awake and sitting up -- the Gray Man in the room's one bed, Declan on a stuffed armchair with a blanket thrown over it -- stretching and rubbing their eyes and generally acting like two men who had not just overheard someone else's deeply personal argument.
"Good morning," the Gray Man says to Ronan and Adam.
"I was just thinking this shack didn't have enough people in it." Declan is noticeably off his game. He would never audibly insult a home in which he was a guest. Ronan wonders what exact combination of factors caused that slip up. He wonders if he can replicate them, later.
-
The Gray Man moves slowly as he gets out of the bed. Which, okay, everyone is moving slow, none of them have slept enough and it shows.
But he keeps moving slow, after they've all resigned themselves to being awake and Adam has put breakfast together, and there's a particular careful way that he reaches out for a cup of tea. Suddenly Ronan remembers -- Declan, when they were kids, one day when Ronan thought he'd mastered a check hook (he hadn't) and wanted to show it off. Declan had agreed to spar with him, but he'd moved like that, before they started. Ronan had won, even though his hook was a disaster.
He's injured, Ronan thinks.
He slurps his own tea and puts the bottom of one shoe up on the arm of Declan's bed-chair, and he doesn't think about it anymore.
-
"Who's taking care of the farm?"
Ronan blinks at Adam.
"Someone is taking care of the farm," Adam says, and it is deliberately, obnoxiously, not a question.
"I'll ask Gansey to do it," Ronan says.
"You're going to make your friend drive down from New Haven to feed your cows," Adam says, voice completely flat.
The Gray Man grins in amusement. He doesn't look like he's tempted to weigh in, but Declan is just a few feet past him, and Ronan doesn't want to hear whatever fucking best practices Declan thinks he has for managing cattle.
"Why not? He wants to be a cowboy."
Adam pinches his lips together. "Just -- try to figure out something where no one dies."
"Do cows count as someone?" Ronan asks, but that isn't obnoxious enough: "Do Connecticuters count as someone?"
"That doesn't count as a word," Adam says, avoiding the question, and moves along to pour another cup of tea.
Ronan doesn't really want to explain where he is to Gansey. He texts Sargent and asks her to get her tribe of Amazons to take care of it.
-
YOU'RE AN ADULT
ASK FOR YOUR OWN FAVORS
but the animals are hungry
:(
don't you care about the animals sargent
You suck
-
One hour later:
you owe Calla big time for this
Ronan has a feeling that she asked her scariest relative on purpose.
-
The pond is a lot bigger than Ronan had expected.
"These people call the Atlantic a pond," Adam says, not above teasing Ronan; very much wanting to tease Ronan, in a way that's comforting, safe, I wouldn't make fun of you if I was still mad at you. "You can't trust their judgment."
There's a whole section of the pond that Ronan can't even see from the dock. The pond has a corner. This whole country is fake.
Ronan eyes the rowboat skeptically. Its measurements have not been quaintly understated. It is, in fact, a rowboat.
The Gray Man is maybe making the same assessment as Ronan, or maybe his back-shoulders-arms-torso-whatever hurts, or maybe he thinks it's weird to be rowing out on a pond with the son of the man he killed and also his boyfriend and also his brother. Like just the boyfriend and the brother wasn't too weird, but Ronan tips it over the edge.
"Go on," he waves a hand at them as he lowers himself into a deck chair on the ocean shore.
"Conceding so easily?" Declan asks.
The Gray Man almost makes a facial expression. "Easily? Perhaps." He shuts his eyes and leans back.
-
Adam is an actual, unquestionable genius. Ronan is the only person he knows who is smart enough not to waste his time at college. And Declan, whatever, isn't exactly stupid.
Ronan knows for a fact that the Gray Man is smarter than all of them, because he's the only one who knew better than to get in this fucking boat.
"Wh--" Ronan starts. It isn't even a word. Declan is already turning, somehow motionless, and shushing him, somehow soundless, before he can get out any more than that. His poor little word is smothered before it was ever born.
"No talking," Declan says, practically subliminal. "You'll scare the fish away."
Ronan flicks his eyes over to Adam. His head shakes, minutely, above his own fishing rod: don't bother.
Ronan's eyes flick further over to the dock. He's pretty sure the Gray Man is asleep.
Someone really should have told Ronan that fishing was boring as fuck.
"You know what?" Ronan says, carefully quiet. "You're right. I don't want to get in between you and your fish." He chucks his fishing pole over the side of the boat, before he stands up and jumps out the other side of the boat.
When he surfaces Declan's eyes are pointed up to the heavens, long suffering.
Even better: Adam is laughing.
Ronan swims up to the boat and holds a hand out to Adam.
"Oops," he says, blatantly insincere. "I fell overboard. Help me back in?"
The look on Adam's face as he sets his rod down says that he knows exactly what's coming, but he takes Ronan's hand anyway. He kind of shifts his weight forward when Ronan pulls, so he falls into the water, but the boat doesn't tip over. Declan only gets half-splashed. Damn.
-
The Gray Man is awake and watching by the time they wade onto the shore.
"Had enough fishing?"
"I've caught as much as I can handle." Adam bumps into Ronan, not on accident, as he turns to look over his shoulder at the rowboat. "Somehow I don't think Declan's going to have much success this morning. It looks like your record is safe."
"I'll feel better when I can win my watch back," the Gray Man says.
Adam snorts. "Good luck."
-
Back in the cottage, Ronan asks, "what was that about?"
"Your brother cheats at cards." Adam starts pulling clothes out of his tiny luggage. "I can't figure out how he does it, but I know that he does..." He frowns up at Ronan. "Did you even bring a change of clothes?"
Ronan shrugs.
Adam throws a pair of sweatpants at him, followed by a hoodie that says HARVARD across the front. It's a little big on Ronan. It's even bigger on Adam, which Adam had to have known when he bought it.
Ronan breathes in the scent of Adam's laundry; unfamiliar after dozens of washes in foreign detergent.
"First you all go fishing," he says, "and then you play cards."
"Were we supposed to sit around in complete silence? That would be a lot weirder," except that's what the afternoon has in store for them. Adam, newly dry, buries his nose in a textbook. Declan returns from sea and flips irritably between stacks of legal pads. The Gray Man settles back into bed with a book that is only maybe in English; Ronan isn't going to get close enough to check. Ronan isn't going to do anything besides sprawl out along the couch that smells like Adam, get between Adam and his textbook until Adam has to arrange his entire body to allow for the intrusion, until Adam rests a hand on Ronan's elbow and starts idly rubbing at the bone there, through the crimson fabric.
Ronan is jet lagged. Ronan is beyond jet lagged. Ronan is time fucked. He buries his face in Adam's stomach and falls asleep.
-
Ronan knows Adam is there before he knows where there is. There's no one else who he could have woken up on top of, no one else who would rest their fingertips on the side of his head while he slept. So he reaches for Adam's hand and pulls it to his mouth, kisses his wrist and his palm and each fingertip, before he even opens his eyes.
There's a soft longing in Adam's eyes. But there's also a blush across his cheeks, and he's biting his lip, like he's nervous.
Or like he's embarrassed, like Ronan had just made out with his hand in front of his brother and also a hitman that once helped them frame a guy. Right.
"Morning," Adam says, quiet but warm.
"It's not even close to morning, is it?"
A smile pulls on Adam's mouth. He isn't biting his lip anymore. "No."
If Ronan has already embarrassed him, they might as well make the most of it.
He hooks a hand around the back of Adam's neck and pulls him down. Adam laughs, a startled "Ronan!", and makes no effort whatsoever to resist him. Ronan kisses him as soon as he's close enough, awkward and upside-down and folded in half, and Adam laughs again and shifts under Ronan's head until he can kiss him again, properly.
-
Declan has his back to the room when Ronan gets up off the couch. He's ignoring all of them to pour himself a cup of tea.
Ronan waits until he's finished pouring and put the kettle back down, and then he steals the cup, takes a sip before Declan can try to steal it back.
It tastes really gross. Ronan spits the tea back into the cup and holds it out to Declan.
Declan walks out of the cottage without even saying good morning. Some people are so fucking rude.
-
"I think it's time to get started on dinner," the Gray Man says, and Adam pipes up, "do you need a hand?" and the Gray Man says "I'd appreciate that," all so fucking agreeable in this stupid picturesque cottage, they're like talking Beatrix Potter mice. Ronan could puke.
Then they actually start on dinner, and Ronan thinks maybe he could puke for a different reason.
He hurries out the door to the little side garden between the cottage and the pond. Declan has been pretending he isn't sulking by chopping firewood. There's a stack by the door, already more than they could need, and he's lining another log up.
"They're butchering my fish," Ronan blurts out.
"Yes, one generally butchers meat before cooking it."
"There's guts and shit everywhere."
Declan rolls his eyes and swings the ax. Thunk. The log splits neatly in two. "God, it's like dad's hunting trip all over again." He positions one half of the log to be chopped again, halved-and-halved-and-halved until it's been Zeno's paradoxed into the right size.
Ronan frowns. That's more confusing than Declan's usual insults. "Hunting trip?"
"You don't remember?" It's a great opening for Ronan to jump in, no, I'm just asking follow up questions because I love our fucking conversations so much. He doesn't. "Dad dragged us out camping in the woods and made us fire a bunch of his old guns? You shot a rabbit and cried so hard that dad called the whole thing off early."
"Bullshit," Ronan says, but it sounds flimsy. "I don't remember that."
Declan raises an eyebrow. "Are you that surprised we remember our childhood differently?"
-
There's already too much firewood; Declan puts the ax down. Ronan picks it back up.
His first log isn't great, splits off a quarter instead of a half. He kicks the runty part away from him, which goes about as great as kicking a log ever does.
"You really don't give a shit that he's here?" Ronan does not specify who he means.
"I can dislike something without throwing a fit over it," Declan says. "Some of us have complex motivational systems."
"Fuck you, I'm not simple."
Declan shrugs.
"Bet you really don't care," Ronan says. "Bet you're already best friends. Is he complex too?"
"The last time I was alone in a room with him," Declan says, "he pistol whipped me."
Ronan adjust his hold on the ax. Adjusts it again.
"Huh," he says. "Maybe he's not such a bad guy after all."
"He's not the one I have trouble sharing a room with," Declan adds, like this is checkmate, a killing blow.
"You'd rather hang out with him than me?" Ronan demands.
"That's not what I said," Declan says, pointedly. Stupid cryptic brothers with their stupid know-it-all attitudes and their stupid complex motivational systems. Ronan should've tried harder to flip that rowboat.
-
Ronan decides he never liked fish. He eats a lot of potatoes, instead.
-
The evening is like the afternoon, weird silent camaraderie, except there's a fire going in the fireplace. Ronan sits as close to it as he can get, even though he's not really cold. Shit that's on fire is automatically more interesting than shit that isn't.
Even so, he starts getting antsy, thinks he's just about on the verge of doing something stupid when Adam comes to sit next to him. He's holding two books.
"Double fisting it? Maniac."
Adam hands one of the books to Ronan. "Unless you want to keep communing with the fire."
"I thought we could start another poker tournament," he says. "I bet I'm at least as good at cheating as Declan."
"That has disaster written all over it," Adam agrees cheerfully, but he's already reading his book, which is about a thousand pages long and has footnotes. He probably wouldn't actually enjoy a huge loud argument right now. And God forbid Ronan disrupt the peaceful beauty of the countryside.
Ronan opens the other book. If Adam thinks he'd like it he at least wants to know what it is.
If he's doing things Adam's boring way, though, he is going to at least place a hand on Adam's side and inch closer to him.
-
The Gray Man tries to offer the bed to them, some boring utilitarian principle rearing its head. Adam tries to refuse. Declan watches without comment; he already knows, however this shakes out, that he's stuck with the worst bed in the room.
Ronan, frankly, doesn't see any problem with making the injured guy sleep on the couch so that Ronan can be more comfortable. If the Gray Man really needs a bed so badly he could have picked somewhere other than Ronan's cottage to lick his wounds.
Adam wins the argument in the end, through the simple means of falling asleep on Ronan's shoulder on the couch. It takes him less than a minute to do it; Ronan was just waiting on his turn for the cottage's tiny bathroom so he could pretend he brushed his teeth when Adam sat next to him, put his cup of nasty-ass tea ("it's herbal," like that excuses anything) on the end table, and then thirty seconds later he's out. Tea and gargling and all hopes of a decent night's sleep, gone. There's no fucking way they're going to both fit on the couch, but there's even less fucking way that Ronan is going to wake him up. Ronan has already rudely woken Adam up once today.
He lifts one leg up slowly and lowers it down behind Adam, and then he angles his body so that he's stretched out on a diagonal to the couch. Adam slides down to rest on Ronan's chest, ends up sprawled out on top of him and between his legs. Ronan uses the foot that's still on the ground to awkwardly push Adam's legs up onto the couch; it's as close to horizontal as either of them is going to get.
He accidentally makes eye contact with the Gray Man, who's watching the pair of them with a blank face. Ronan tries to decide if the Gray Man is some kind of peeping Tom, spying on other people's private moments, or if he's just gloating that he gets the bed after all. Probably it's both.
Ronan shakes his head once, dismissive, take your stupid bed, and tries to distract himself from his upcoming uncomfortable night by sniffing Adam's hair.
A hand lays a blanket down on the back of the couch. Ronan turns, but the Gray Man is already walking off, in that irritating slow grandpa's war wound is acting up way. At least Ronan doesn't have to say thank you. He focuses on spreading the blanket over Adam without disturbing him.
-
The Gray Man tells them at breakfast that someone will be arriving to pick him up later in the day. He and Declan exchange excruciatingly polite farewells. Adam does the same, but he manages to catch the Gray Man outside at an odd moment, when Ronan is berating Declan about what kind of sicko puts salt in their tea, and Declan is berating him back about how this wouldn't happen to him if he didn't steal other people's drinks -- so Ronan doesn't really know what else, if anything, they say to each other. He doesn't really know how he feels about it. His motivational system is too simple to process it.
-
The Gray Man's pick up arrives mid-morning, a mysterious woman in sunglasses and a leather jacket, driving -- holy fuck, is that a Lotus? It's a Lotus, Jesus Christ. How bad of a person could the Gray Man really be?
-
Declan sticks around well into the afternoon. Ronan wonders about that. Is it a fuck you, that he's not giving them space? Or is it some kind of roundabout generosity to Adam, creating plausible deniability about the fact that he's going to give them space? Or is he just being an asshole, making Ronan worry about whether they're ever going to have space?
Or maybe he's just killing time until his flight.
Naw, that isn't complex enough.
Joke's on him, though. Ronan manages to coax Adam into an impromptu ax-throwing contest, and it's not like Declan can refuse to take part in a competition. So whatever gesture Declan thought he was making, his actual last act at their dad's old safe house is to get into an argument with Ronan where he tries to claim that the tree they'd designated as the target had somehow deliberately slighted him. It's not exactly impressive. It's Ronan's favorite moment with Declan since he got here.
-
Ronan stares down the tiny country road, long after Declan's car has disappeared from sight.
"If everyone else is gone," he tries not, still not looking at Adam, "I guess I should leave too. Let you have your vacation."
"No," Adam says, from somewhere very close behind Ronan. "You shouldn't."
A grin starts to break out on Ronan's face. He dares to look over his shoulder. "Why? You want to go fishing?"
"Definitely not," and Adam drags him back inside the cottage.
-
It started raining at some point, just hard enough to make a little patter-patter of raindrops on the roof that harmonizes with the low crackle from the fireplace. The air smells like water, like growing things. The daylight outside the window is soft and diffused, and inside they've only got the firelight, dancing warmly across the room. It's cold enough, naked, that they pulled the blankets up on the bed.
The overall effect is one of complete, suffocating coziness. Ronan tries to cling to judgmental superiority, but it isn't working. It's nice in the cottage. He likes it here. He likes the little bumps and dips of Adam's spine as he hand runs up and down his back. He likes the warmth of Adam's breath on his throat. He likes the soft noises Adam makes that tells Ronan he's half-asleep. He wants -- this, more, everything. He wants.
And then Adam breathes out, quick, nothing sleepy about it, and inhales just as sharply.
"What?" Ronan asks, frowning.
Adam turns his face in, presses it up against Ronan's chest. It isn't enough to muffle his laughter, and even if it were, Ronan can feel it, Adam's back shaking under his hand.
"What?" he asks again, exasperated instead of worried, exasperated for having been worried.
"You flew all the way to England," Adam says, the words choppy like he's choking on them, "because you were jealous of Blue's mom's ex-boyfriend," and that sets him off again.
"I flew here to rescue you," Ronan says, stiff and haughty.
"Rescue me from fishing."
"Yeah, well," Ronan sighs and resigns himself to being laughed at about this. "That's the kind of sacrifice I'm willing to make for you."
Adam turns his face up toward Ronan. Everything -- jealousy, panic, getting laughed at, two nights sitting up with no sleep, two and a half fights, whatever horrible price the psychics end up extorting from him, which he has a sneaking suspicion is going to involve doing manual labor while Sargent's horny cousin hangs around watching him -- all of it is worth that second, where their eyes meet.
"I guess I should say thanks, then," Adam says. "I'm lucky to have you."
"Yeah, you are," Ronan says, reflexive gloating at winning something, and then it soaks in. "Even if I'm simple?"
Adam snorts. "Ronan," he says, sounding dangerously close to hysterics again, "nothing with you is simple."
Ronan tugs the blanket up a little higher around both of them, making the nest around them an extra bit more snug. The fireplace, the rain, the cottage -- all of it is nice, and he doesn't need any of it. There's only one thing in this whole stupid country that he needs, and if that makes him simple, who cares, because it's the one thing that he knows he gets to bring back with him, the one thing he knows he's never going to lose.
"Good thing you're so smart then," he says.
Adam hms, half a dissent. "Not smart enough to ask you to visit me." He bites his lip; nervous, not embarrassed. "Thanks."
Ronan runs a thumb lightly over Adam's lip, until he stops biting it. "Thanks for letting me," he says, and Adam smiles at him, and suddenly the light in the room is blinding.