the smell of polluted pleasure

[thedreamthief]

He's sore all over, bleeding from his bottom lip as well as from a re-opened gash across his chest. His sides and lower back ache, doubtlessly covered in not-yet-visible bruises, and his right cheek is already sore to the touch. Ronan hasn't taken a look at a mirror at all yet, has no real idea how roughed up he looks, but he can feel it.

And he feels like he's flying, utterly high with it, adrenaline still pumping through his veins as he heads for Adam's. He can't go back to woods like this, can't let Gansey's disapproving eye bring him down right away.

He's at least smart enough to text him, a short and sweet 'at Adam's' to keep him from worrying. Because the only thing worse than Gansey in lecture mode is a Gansey in mother hen panic mode.

Ronan doesn't have a key to Adam's place, doesn't have the access that St. Agnes provided. Though that hardly deters him.

Even bruised and sore, Ronan has little difficulty using well-placed windowsills and ivy trellises to climb his way up to Adam's second-story balcony. Grinning wide, he bangs on the glass door, then cups his hand to try to squint inside. It's late and it's dark and there's a good chance Adam's asleep already, but it's fucking Friday, Parrish, open the goddamn door.

Comments

[incognoscibilis]

"You're the Greywaren. Who knows what you bring with you," Adam said. He dropped into the seat next to Ronan, wondering if he should sit closer. Did he like Ronan back, really? Or was it just the simple satisfaction of being wanted? Or was it Cabeswater? Adam pushed the though aside for now.

To keep his hands busy, Adam began to shuffle the cards. "I like them, the meanings. I don't think they're telling me the future. But they help my head when it comes to the present."

[thedreamthief]

A Greywaren, Ronan thinks instinctively, but then stops himself. Adam knows more than he does, has lived through and seen things Ronan has only been told. What does it mean if he's the Greywaren? Does that change anything at all? Does it make him different than his father or Kavinsky?

Does he even want to find out?

Adam takes a seat on the couch and Ronan's skin prickles all too aware of how close they are, the limited amount of space between them. He keeps his focus on Adam's hands instead, frown deepening as he shuffles the deck. Finally, he glances up again.

"So you want to try to find meaning in me," he says, more of a question though it comes out sounding like a statement. "Fuck that, you already know me."

It's maybe the closest to a lie Ronan's ever gotten. He wonders about what Adam means though, about keeping his head. He wonders how much he's really missed in being stuck here, how much Adam's had to deal with that Ronan hasn't seen.

[incognoscibilis]

The first lie, which Adam had known years ago, was Ronan claiming to be straight. It was the only lie he knew Ronan ever to tell in the whole of their friendship and Adam didn't think that Ronan even knew it was a lie. Adam supposed he did know Ronan, but not as well as he thought he had.

"I know you as well as you know me," Adam said. And it was the truth, but Adam was mostly unknowable still. Except, maybe, to Ronan.

At random, Adam peeled two cards off the top of his deck and two from the bottom and laid them flat on the table, face down.

[thedreamthief]

Sometimes Ronan likes to tell himself he knows Adam better than Adam knows himself, but he doesn't think that's true. What is true is he knows Adam better than Adam thinks he does. Or wants him to.

It's surprising that Adam wants to know all that much about Ronan, though.

Ronan eyes the cards laid out one by one then arches an eyebrow. He knows how this is supposed to work, but that doesn't stop him from smirking. "Am I supposed to pick one?"

[incognoscibilis]

Adam shook his head and turned the cards over, one at a time. Death was the first card, reversed, then his own card, The Magician, also reversed. The third and fourth cards were upright, the Ace of Cups and the Two of Wands. "In reverse, Death can mean stagnation, being held back by fear. The Magician, reversed, is wasting talent and resources. Usually I get that one upright..." he said. Not necessarily because that was his future but because Cabeswater wanted him to know who he was now.

"The Ace of Cups is Blue's card, I guess. Her mom always told her it meant she had potential. The potential for change and good things. The Two of Wands is about initiative, starting out for a change."

He leaned back, letting the cards stare up at Ronan. "Make of that what you will."

[thedreamthief]

Ronan honestly has no idea what to make of any of it. He squints down at the cards, examining the artwork as he considers. Adam's words tug at the back of his mind: stagnation and fear, wasted talent and resources, initiative and change. He wonders if it means anything that he got Adam's card and Blue's, if the reading is trying to tell him that even if they've broken up, they're still a pair, destined.

Frowning, he pulls the ice pack away from his shoulder and looks back at Adam. "Aren't you supposed to figure out what it means? I thought that was the deal."

He's deflecting, maybe. But this was Adam's idea to begin with.

[incognoscibilis]

"I told you what the cards mean. Now you have to figure out what they mean for what's happening in your life," Adam said, shrugging. He thumbed the edge of the deck, the rifling sound filling up the quiet between them. "Right now, without Cabeswater or the line, they're just cards and symbols. You get to decide what they're symbolizing."

A knock sounded at the door and Adam got up to retrieve the pizza, leaving Ronan alone with the cards. Adam thought they were for Ronan, but he wondered if they were for him too. If he was doing something counter to his purpose as the Magician or if he was the one who was supposed to be taking advantage of the moment.

He didn't think he had the courage for that.

[thedreamthief]

Adam gets up for the pizza, leaving Ronan to puzzle over the cards. He feels like Adam wants him to find something in them, like he's asking for something and hoping Ronan will figure it out.

Maybe Ronan doesn't know Adam quite as well as he thought after all.

Well, no. He knows the Adam he left behind. This Adam is different. He's Cabeswater's Adam now, the eyes and hands, confident and sure. The magician, apparently.

"I think it means something that I got your card and Blue's," he finally says because he feels like he needs to say something. Adam's disappointment is always different from Gansey's, always less rewarding somehow. With Gansey, he feels like a child acting out, unconditional care always underlying the scolding. With Adam, he feels judged. Lacking. Constantly needing to prove himself.

He reaches for the Death card, picks it up to look at it more closely. "What does this one mean if it's not reversed?"

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

"Death doesn't actually mean that someone's going to die," he said, sitting back down. Their thighs touched and Adam made no mention of it. Reaching out, he took Death from Ronan's hands and wished he was brave enough, certain enough for something as simple as a brush of their fingers. Putting the card back on the table, Adam turned it upright. "When you turn it like this, it means change, transformation. Rebirth, more than actual death, really. I've always thought it was Gansey's card, since that first reading."

Adam took it and turned it upside down again, the way it had been dealt out. "Reversed it means the opposite. It means things aren't changing, but not in a good way. In a stagnant way. Like there's no energy."

If they were in Henrietta, he would wonder what Cabeswater meant by this with Ronan near. That if they didn't change what they were, then things would stagnate?

Adam thought it was wishful thinking.

"The Ace of Cups is Blue's card because it has potential. The way that she gives things more power. And the Magician is my card because...Cabeswater needs me to be that."

(frozen)

[thedreamthief]

It's the 'no energy' idea that grabs Ronan and starts to make sense. He remembers what Adam had told him before about Kavinsky and his party and draining Cabeswater. But there's no Cabeswater in Darrow, no energy for Ronan to draw from, leaving him stagnant and empty. He's still pulled things from his dreams but, with the exception of Verity, nothing all that substantial and certainly nothing very useful. Ever since Gansey and Adam showed up, he's constantly felt behind, struggling to make sense of what they've told him, struggling to prove himself, and failing at every step.

Ronan's gaze drops to the Ace of Cups and he pays particular attention to Adam's tone when he speaks of Blue, trying to decipher the feelings beneath, if there's still something still there. Not that it matters either way, of course, he reminds himself. Doesn't change a fucking thing.

He pulls away abruptly, reaching to grab a slice of pizza and sits back, careful to make sure they're not touching as he takes a large bite.

"Guess that makes Noah the Two of Wands," he says, his smile sardonic even through the huge bite of cheese, sauce, and bread. He's deflecting again, refusing to try to figure out Adam's fucking cards, refusing to acknowledge that he's stuck, useless and broke and unimportant, refusing to think about how they all have a card while he's just a monster, a snake.

"Think ghosts can change?" he snarls, still chewing. "Maybe he'll get a new wardrobe."

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

"I don't think Noah's really about bold, new action," Adam said. "I think the Two of Wands just came along for fun." He took a piece of pizza with his left hand and took the deck in his other. Turning it over so all the cards were face up, he spread them along the table in a fan until he found The Moon, sitting between the Hermit and the Two of Swords.

Withdrawing it, Adam laid the card flat in front of Ronan. "This one is your card, if I had to pick one," he said, running a finger along the edge of the angry, restless moon. "It's a card for vivid dreams and creativity. Unconscious thoughts and powers. Desires, I guess."

It was the closest he got to saying anything about Ronan's desires. "If you reverse it, though, it's deception and confusion. Depression." Like Ronan, Adam thought, on a dark day. It was the only kind of Ronan he'd known. Gansey said he'd been happier once, easygoing. Adam would have liked to have known that Ronan, a Ronan without pain.

(frozen)

[thedreamthief]

Adam doesn't bite on Ronan's anger, a fact that is almost as disappointing as it is surprising. Sullen, he takes another bite of pizza and watches as Adam spreads out the deck across the table, picking out a card from near the middle. His gaze darts to Adam's face with the mention of one word, guilty, and wondering yet again how much Adam knows and hasn't chosen to divulge quite yet.

Ronan isn't honestly sure he wants to know.

"I don't deceive," Ronan says, defensive. He couldn't argue the rest. He wonders if it means anything that Adam picked out a card just for him, like he could read Ronan's mind. Maybe mind-reading is part of being Cabeswater's magician. Ronan sincerely hopes not.

He wonders if he's changed just as much as Adam has, if maybe in Adam's timeline back home, Ronan's learned how to lie.

Then again, he's been lying by omission for months and, as far as he sees it, there's no good reason to stop.

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

"You don't," he agreed, turning the card back around and then turning back to the pizza. Ronan hid things, from others and from himself, but he never lied. Adam was starting to wonder what would happen if Ronan ever told a lie, as if his powers were contingent to his honesty. It couldn't really be like that, or else Kavinsky could never have been a thief and he would never have been their problem.

"I'm pretty sure I only ever called you out on a lie once. And you were being sarcastic anyway." He wondered if Ronan remembered that day. When Ronan claimed to be straight and Adam said it was the biggest lie he'd ever told. Maybe Adam should have just come out and said it. Asked Ronan if he was reading into those looks and Adam was just imagining things, clinging to the memory of being wanted.

Instead, he looked at Ronan's arm. "Do you still have the scar from when we hooked up that cart to your car and took turns riding on it?" He, personally, still had faint scrapes on the backs of his arms and at the juncture of muscle that led from neck into back.

(frozen)

[thedreamthief]

Ronan's brow furrows, lips curving downward as he tries to remember what Adam's talking about, what lie he might have told, sarcastic or otherwise. Before he can ask, though, Adam's moved on. Ronan's honestly thankful for the change of subject.

There's only the crust left of his pizza slice and he pops it length-wise between his teeth, freeing up his hands to tug the bracelets away from his wrist, revealing a heavily faded scar leading up the outside of his forearm. The tail end of it almost looks like a scar from something else now, mixed in with claw marks Gansey once thought came from a razor.

Of course now it's nothing compared to the state of his back, chest, and shoulders.

This mark, at least, brings good memories with it and Ronan runs this thumb along a section of it, smiling around his pizza crust before he tugs it out of his mouth and grins over at Adam. "Good times, Parrish," he says, his gaze then dropping to Adam's shoulders. "You still got yours?"

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

Adam was aware of Ronan's scars in the way that he was aware of Ronan's arms and legs. They were there and Adam didn't question them. They were part of him. Tugging aside the collar of his shirt, Adam twisted to show Ronan the most impressive scars from the faded road rash. This looked like a pink smudge more than anything else but it was still the darkest.

"After school started again," Adam said, caution in his tone. "We had to go to the store and you told me to climb into a shopping cart and ran behind it until we crashed." He'd laughed like a god damned maniac and Adam remembered that he'd laughed too. Laughed from the sheer exhilaration of surviving something so stupid.

Adam looked at Ronan then, wondering if he'd said too much or if he should say more. He didn't even know if he wanted more or how to ask. Adam had rejected so many offers he'd forgotten how to make a request.

(frozen)

[thedreamthief]

It's about as prominent as Ronan remembers it, a rash across Adam's upper back and he feels a strange stab of nostalgia mixed with... something much darker. Possessiveness. Fucking ridiculous.

His fingers itch to touch, but he keeps them to himself, focusing instead on chewing and listening as Adam shares yet another one-sided memory. There's an irritation under his skin, but it doesn't boil over into anger this time, just simmers at a low-grade jealousy. Jealous at himself, or at least some version of himself that got to have that with Adam, got to put that pleased, far-off look in his eye.

"Sounds pretty stupid," he says, trusting Adam to know he means the exact opposite. He's done with his slice now, thinking about grabbing another, but he keeps his eyes on Adam. "You got any more?"

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

"Scars or stories of the things we did?" He rolled up his t-shirt sleeve to show Ronan a much fainter mark on the back of his upper arm, just above his elbow, and then twisted to show him a similar mark on the other arm. Those were all he had of that misadventure.

The biggest scar Adam has is invisible. It's in the ruined ear that shows no outward blemish, no proof of the way in which he was fundamentally and irrevocably broken. He found himself touching his own left ear self-consciously, not quite facing Ronan as he spoke. "You were there for this scar," he said.

All of the happiness drained out as Adam remembered the sense of how unfixable everything had been that night. He'd let Gansey throw money at the problem and never paid him back a cent for the certainly astronomical emergency room fee. That was the first fight he'd gotten into with Gansey that kicked off a summer of getting into fights with Gansey and Blue. The only person he hadn't fought was Ronan because Adam was still broken enough to fear his kind of anger.

(frozen)

[thedreamthief]

Ronan had meant the stories, but Adam's rolling up a sleeve before he can clarify and Ronan is both smart enough and masochistic enough to keep his mouth shut in favor of watching. It's not as if Adam's skin is foreign to Ronan. Summers get fucking brutal in Virginia and they've all wandered around shirtless in the heat, stripped down to nothing but boxers, draped across the floors of Monmouth Manufacturing, right between the shitty window a/c and the fan.

Still, getting a glimpse is always still a thrill, pale, lightly freckled skin stretched across muscle. The scars are like lines on a tapestry, telling a story, holding a memory. Ronan wants to read every word.

Without thinking, Ronan reaches out to cover Adam's finger with his own, right over Adam's left ear. It's fleeting, barely there at all before Ronan catches himself and pulls his hand back.

"That's a fucking battle wound," he says, his voice low but light, lips quirked in a half grin. He's not making light of it, and he's not implying that Adam should be proud because he knows Adam could never accept that. He wants to say that he's proud, though, wishes Adam could see in himself, for even a minute, what Ronan sees.

The air in the room is getting too heavy, too tense, and Ronan's smile turns snake-like. "Good thing you're just the eyes and hands," he says, relaxing back into the couch, fingers of one hand fidgeting with the bracelets around his other wrist. "Imagine how fucked Cabeswater would be if it had made you its ears."

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

Before he could hide the reaction, Adam's skin rose up in goosebumps and he drew in a quick breath before he could think to stop himself. Without Cabeswater, Adam knew that whatever electric feeling it was that shuttered across his skin, it was generated from his own self. When Ronan's hand slid back, Adam started to reach for it, only to grasp air and remember himself.

"Cabeswater's a forest. It has ears," Adam said. "As long as there are trees."

He couldn't think of himself as having any battle wounds. Calling it a battle wound implied that Adam had fought back, had done anything but curl around the soft parts of his body, tried to make himself an impenetrable stone. "There weren't any battles," he said. "I never defended myself."

It was curious, how bereft he felt now. Adam had rarely been touched affectionately in his life, aside from handholds with Blue and the occasional fist bump.

(frozen)

[thedreamthief]

He doesn't miss the way Adam jolts a little, fingers twitching as Ronan pulls away. Adam isn't used to being touched, not kindly. And gentleness is probably the last thing he expects from Ronan.

"Bullshit," Ronan snarls, comforted by the flash of anger that flares in his gut. It's a muted sort of rage though, muffled by the stillness of the night and the fact that the one person its focused on is locked in some other dimension. "You spent your whole fucking life defending yourself."

More than that, actually. Defending. Surviving. Strategizing. Stubbornly planning an escape.

And he'd found it, eventually. Though some of Ronan's darkest nightmares are alternate outcomes of that night, 'what if' scenarios where he'd left sooner or hadn't looked back. Adam Parrish is, undoubtedly, his own goddamn savior, but there's still a part of Ronan that feels like he'd managed to do something good that night, something important.

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

"It didn't feel like that at the time." It had felt cowardly in a way that Adam hadn't condoned in others but had. "You're the one who saved me." He wondered if Ronan knew that Adam had only pressed charges to spare him expulsion from Aglionby. If it had been anyone else coming to his rescue, Adam would probably have refused and would still have been in that double wide, as damaged as ever.

All Adam could think about was the phantom sensation of Ronan's fingertip on his hand. Slowly, he turned in his seat and looked at Ronan, trying to find some signal, some proof that this was real. All he found was proof of his own hesitation and Adam glanced away and quickly stacked all the Tarot cards.

At the last second, he fanned them all out, face down and drew at random. The Four of Wands. Adam turned it back over and slid the card back into the deck. "Stability, happy home, romance," he recited.

(frozen)

[thedreamthief]

Ronan shakes his head, just a slight movement though it gets the point across. Because it isn't true. He knows the only reason Adam didn't press charges is because he didn't want Ronan expelled, that he would've endured living in that shithole with those two sorry excuses for human beings for another year if Ronan hadn't been enough of a fuck-up.

If Ronan saved Adam that night then Adam saved him right back.

Adam looks back at him then and Ronan swallows, wondering what it is Adam sees in that moment, what he's looking for. Something curls inside him, shifts, but then Adam's turning away again, quickly gathering up the cards.

Ronan lets out a breath, relieved and disappointed at once, and rubs a hand across his face. He stops mid-movement as Adam, instead of putting the cards away, fans them out across the table and pulls one. Brow furrowing, Ronan glances down at it, noting the four upright pole-like things and some sort of building in between. Sighing, Ronan curls his hand around the back of his neck, ignores the unsteady hum of energy under his skin.

"That your card or mine?" he asks, meeting Adam's eyes.

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

"I don't know. Both of us, I guess. Or maybe it's someone else. Or maybe it's just a random card in a place without Cabeswater," Adam said. Without the line or that forest, anything he found in the cards was speculation, little more than a game.

If he were better at this, maybe Adam would spin some tale about potential romance, filling a more susceptible head with hopes of a new love in the future. If he was braver, maybe Adam would suggest that the romance the card indicated was theirs; the stability was something they could claim for themselves. Adam was not brave enough.

He slid the card back into the pile and stacked them neatly, running a thumb along the soft edges. Persephone's cards had been shuffled and shuffled, possibly for years. There was so much attacked to this deck that he'd never know now.

(frozen)

[thedreamthief]

The buzz under Ronan's skin calms then, dying slowly. It's a random card, just like the rest of them. Doesn't mean fuck all.

"It's all bullshit," he declares then, breaking the tension with a flare of welcome anger. Reaching forward, he grabs another slice of pizza for himself. "Maybe it meant something back home, but it's useless here." It'd sound more cruel of Ronan wasn't painting himself with the same brush stroke. "We could go through the whole fucking stack and shoehorn every card into making sense, but it's still bullshit."

Holding his pizza in one hand, Ronan again lunges forward, this time pulling the top card off the stack, making out what looks like some kind of jester before flipping it over almost violently between thumb and forefinger to show Adam. "Let's start with this one. It means I'm a fucking idiot, right? Or you are. It means we thought we could do something important, thought we could matter, but then fate or magic or fucking God pulled up to show us how wrong we were."

(frozen)

[incognoscibilis]

"Never said it wasn't," Adam reminded him. The cards here were just cards without Cabeswater to guide them. It was the random nature of seventy-eight cards stacked and falling together in infinite ways in spreads and reversions. He could tell Ronan that the Fool was a card of new beginnings and child-like optimism, of hope, but what was the point.

"It means whatever you think it means here." There was no reason to tell Ronan not to be angry. It was like telling Ronan not to breathe. They could probably go out into the desert for months and starve, but Ronan would survive, fed on his own anger. Silently, he dared one of the Old Testament prophets to do better than that.

Adam took the Fool away from Ronan before he could hurt a card from Persephone's deck and then went for another piece of pizza. "The cards are telling me to eat."