InsaneJournal

This had undoubtedly been the weirdest week of Adam's life. Magic notwithstanding, he had been thrown into a home of people he had written off years ago, forced to have conversations with them. Get to know them. Grow to like them. As if there was something missing in his life and these people, in particular, had filled it. Maybe in another life they could have been friends. Maybe in another life those wedding pictures with Ronan Lynch were true. Photoshop made people do wild things without ever having been there.

Or, well, that was what he had been telling himself in order to not stare wistfully, longingly, confused at the gallery wall in the upstairs hallway.

Adam had avoided it for most of the week, claiming the couch in the living room or—when he finally discovered it—the pull out bed in the office. And as much as he pushed away the thoughts of the pictures, and particularly, of Ronan, he couldn't stop. He circled it in the same way he circled puzzles he needed to solve: carefully, analytically, with a keen eye to what was causing this obsession. Worst of all, his gut was telling him to give into baser needs when Adam was around him. Intrusive thoughts of holding hands, or touching his back, or even—

God, shit, he needed to get laid. Studying for finals had really gotten in the way. Traveling to this place had also really gotten in the way.

So instead of being left alone to wonder about all this bullshit, Adam started to investigate. He thought he was alone, or at least mostly alone. The little feral girl that lived out in the woods had stared him down one too many times this week for his liking and then growled once when he asked her what. But she mostly stayed outside, away from the house. Adam, currently in the house, walked briskly past the pictures upstairs and into the first bedroom he could find.

It was obviously Ronan's. Adam couldn't explain why, he had never been inside, but a feeling of familiarity washed over him. Bright, and colorful, and whimsy. He had been here before, deja vu. He walked around, looking at all the objects stuffed onto the shelves on the wall, but his fingers ghosted across a tiny model car. Curiosity took over, a memory too, but Adam was better at resisting them these days. At least until he was in the safety of privacy, and not prowling around Ronan Lynch's room.

A floorboard creaked and Adam looked up from the car to see Ronan in the doorway. He didn't hastily put it back, he was already caught, so he just offered him a shrug and a sort of wry smile. "I'm not going to steal anything, if that's what you're worried about."

Ronan tried not to stalk Adam. He had enough to worry about with a farm full of blatant dreams and a market openly selling them without having a genius with a stupid beautiful face pissed off at him. But if Adam entered a room he was in, he didn't leave. And if he made an extra plate every time he made dinner, that was his own damn business. This whole thing was messing with the very careful shields he'd build up over the years to keep everyone from seeing anything all that interesting about him. He passed by the pictures of himself looking tattooed and anything but boring on the walls and it felt like a thousand needles under his skin.

Now he'd had days around Blue and Richard, Gansey as people kept calling him, the little hooved dream girl Opal and Adam fucking Parrish. Ronan's emotions felt liquified. He was turning into someone else just being in this strange place, picturing a life he wasn't allowed to have. He tried not to stalk Adam, but he'd be lying if he claimed he hadn't followed him just this once.

"Nah, I know you're smart. You'd pick a better target than all the crap in this room," Ronan teased, moving slowly out of his lean in the doorway. He started to hesitate, but he took a steadying breath and sat down on the bed next to Adam. "Were you trying to get away from everyone?"

"This is the perfect room to target. So many small things to take, it would be awhile before you noticed it was gone. Anonymity and clutter hides the theft," Adam said matter-of-factly. He still wasn't going to steal anything, but explaining what and why he would, in this instance, probably didn't help his case or suspicion that he still might. He was, after all, still holding the toy car.

He should have flinched when Ronan sat down next to him. They weren't touching but closeness had always been a hard pill for Adam to swallow. Contact was even worse. Being in this house was a hard learning curve on how to get over years of feeling afraid of people and the physicality of them. There were too many memories wrapped up in all of his undiagnosed and untreated trauma. He had thought moving away would fix it and nearly five years later, it hadn't.

That wasn't Ronan's fault, though.

Adam shook his head, but only barely. Like he was trying to decide whether to lie or not—his default. "I was curious. I thought I was alone. I figured no one would bother me for poking around, especially you," Adam said as he chanced a look at Ronan again. "I guess I was wrong." He had been wrong a lot this past week: about Richard, about this farm, about his life, about Ronan. Adam didn't particularly like being wrong, but it made him wonder more often than he liked.

"And what were you doing? Because I know it's not following me around the house. You usually just stick around in a room when I come in, instead of leaving." Adam looked proud of that little observation, but it also gave away how much he had been tracking Ronan, too. "Or did you think I didn't notice?"

Ronan squinted one eye and smiled in spite of himself. He didn't mind being noticed. At home, it would've been a bad thing - anyone paying that much attention to him, let alone someone as smart as Adam Parrish. Here, it felt nice. A lot of things felt nice here. Ronan reached over and plucked the car out of Adam's hands and spun the wheels around idly.

"I was trying not to hover. It's weird having people in the house, let alone…you." He'd seen Adam once, years ago, riding his bike. And he'd had a moment of want that he didn't understand. He understood it better now. And he thought he understood Adam a little better now too. He knew that Adam would read something terrible into that statement if he didn't clarify. "I had a stupid little crush on you," he quickly added. "Back in school."

It felt actually illegal to admit that. Like having everyone see all his dreams lined up on tables earlier this week.

"Couldn't do anything about it and, well I would've been too much of a chicken even if I didn't have to keep my head down. But you know. Here you are. And there are pictures of me kissing you in the hall. Seems fucking unfair really," he murmured softly as he finally looked back up Adam with a beseeching sort of stare.

Adam didn't know what to do with this information. Usually, he would learn something new: Ronan had a crush on him. He'd sort out the details: Ronan had a crush on him in high school. Then he would start finding the obvious problems: Ronan had a crush on him in high school, not since high school, which meant probably he no longer did. In fact, Adam couldn't seem to understand the first part, the initial crush. Adam Parrish was not worthy of a crush. Adam Parrish was not even fit for normal conversation, if his fight with Richard earlier this week was any indication.

The look Ronan was giving him, imploring him, was still up to subjective interpretation. Adam couldn't bear to give in and be wrong. He'd hurt himself, he was sure of it. And Adam was tired of hurting himself, but he was also a masochist when it came to getting what he wanted. He glanced away, to the wall of stuff so he could try and analyze everything he was hearing.

"I know," Adam said, almost sounding disappointed. "About the pictures in the hall, the unfairness. Not the crush. I didn't know about that." And how would he have? Adam had also spent time keeping his head down at Aglionby. Anything else other than school and work would have been a distraction. He wished he had the toy car at this point still, to fidget with. To turn it over in his hands like he tried to turn over thoughts of Ronan in his mind.

And then because the guilt of his anger still bore down on him, Adam furrowed his brows together. "You don't want to have a crush on me. You're getting everything all mixed up seeing photos of us kissing. I'm not good en—" Adam shook his head, the self-deprecation too much. He was trying to give Ronan an out.

"You don't. The pictures of us in the hall are not me. They can't be." That Adam looked too happy to be him. And if he was happy with Ronan, then what did Adam waste so much time on being unhappy for?

Ronan scowled. He had no way of knowing it, but he more accurately resembled the Ronan who lived and loved in this house.

"Those pictures aren't me either. And they don't have anything to do with it." He felt like a kid, kicking his feet in a tantrum. Probably because they were in his childhood bedroom. "I liked you before I ever saw those. I liked you because you were an outsider like me and you were stubborn and fierce. You were the only person at that stupid school that felt real. You argued with me. You made me feel…alive."

If this place was doing anything, it was making him take a long hard look at his life. And everything he was missing. It wasn't just Adam and this life they apparently had together in another world. It was the kind of friendships and love that he wasn't allowed to open himself up to at home.

"I think I'm just starting to realize I've been going through the motions ever since," he admitted quietly.

Adam, for all his big-brained thinking, didn't get it. He knew he was alive. Existence was obvious with every one of his senses firing constantly: the warmth of Ronan next to him, his palms starting to sweat against the rough denim of his jeans, the wonderful horrible sight of seeing Ronan be worked up over telling Adam he was stubborn and fierce like those were good things. Parts that someone like Ronan Lynch could like, and not be used in an ugly way to push people away. The urge to do it now though was overwhelming.

But Adam stayed put. His fingers curled into his leg painfully. A reminder that he was alive, and here, and—"I know what it's like, to go through the motions," Adam admitted right back. His chest hurt with the honesty, he hadn't spoken the truth in years. Maybe ever.

"It's like sleepwalking. And no matter what you do, or what you say, or what you change, it never really stops feeling like a dream. Like you're still sleeping through most of your life until some asshole tries to argue with me about the correct conjugation of irregular verbs in Latin class and gives you a taste of what the real waking world is like."

He looked up at Ronan again, realizing that he was giving the same painfully longing stare at him. Ronan had been that asshole in Latin. He had been on his mind too much than was strictly necessary of someone he 'just went to high school with'. He wanted this crush to be real, he wanted the life the other him had, he wanted Ronan Lynch, and yet Adam Parrish held himself back. He couldn't always get what he wanted, right?

"I just need to know I'm awake. And that my life isn't going to pass me by."

Ronan had been watching Adam closely enough to know he wasn't happy with his life. It had been another thing to draw him in. If the smartest guy he'd ever known wasn't happy with his Harvard life, then it wasn't so ungrateful for Ronan, gifted with a lovely family and a beautiful home, to feel like he was in a gilded cage. Even with his incredible power. Maybe because of his incredible power. He could literally bring his dreams into the world. So why didn't his life feel more like a dream come true?

Still, he was surprised Adam admitted he wasn't happy. And he felt himself smiling as Adam talked about their high school bickering like it was something he missed.

"Well, I'm better at controlling dreams than real life, but…" He swallowed and set the toy car aside. His hands were damp. This was maybe a terrible idea and Adam might shove him away, but he felt like he was reading the moment right. And Adam wasn't the only one who wanted to know he was awake. "...Let me see what I can do." He leaned in to kiss Adam. Unlike his other self, this wasn't his first kiss. But it was the one he'd longed for the longest.

Adam knew what was coming. It was impossible not to know, the moment Ronan walked into the room and they were blissfully alone. He had about half a second, from when Ronan put the toy car down to when he kissed him to make a decision. But instead of thinking with his head—the one that put up all the roadblocks and hurdles and overthought everything—he let his body move. Adam swayed listlessly into Ronan as they kissed, a gravitational pull, an inevitability.

He sighed into Ronan's mouth, relief and want tangled together. If this was his kiss, his only one from Ronan Lynch, he wasn't about to let him get away until Adam kissed him back. Adam was a starving animal, and this physical contact was more than just a scrap of food to him. It was a lifeline, it was everything. His hands grabbed onto Ronan's shoulder for support, as though he was about to tumble away. Ronan was a lifeline, and Adam could only hang on.

Maybe he would regret this later, when his brain caught up to his heart, but right now, Adam was coaxing Ronan's mouth open with his tongue, and running his hand up to cradle the back of his head, and god, he couldn't breathe. He had been so hungry for this that he had forgotten basic things like air. And he pulled away abruptly, blinking at Ronan like he was seeing him for the first time, in a different light, all over again.

His heart was pounding in his ears, and his chest was heaving, inhaling and exhaling roughly like he had been drowning. He would drown again for this. "I'm awake, I'm awake."

Ronan had suspected that Adam had a lot of pent up feelings inside of him, strapped down as tight as he could get them. But it was still a shock to feel his passion in full force. A good shock. Ronan sank easily into Adam's mouth and hold, looping his own arms around Adam's narrow waist. He clawed his fingers into Adam's shirt, up his spine, and almost wished this was a dream just so he could stop time and keep them here.

Unfortunately, everything had to end eventually, but that didn't stop him from chasing Adam's mouth and pressing their foreheads together.

"Me too. If I wasn't, we'd still be kissing," he joked gently. Twisting to the side, he pressed a kiss to Adam's jaw. "We don't have to go back down yet, right? We could stay here for a bit?" He sounded needy but he was, so that didn't really bother him.

This was good. Adam didn't often say that, think it really, but kissing Ronan was good. The kind of good that hurt, the kind of good that he knew would become his obsession, his singular focus. He would remember the way Ronan's mouth felt on his, how his hands felt digging into his back, the dizzying feeling he had now. His breath came out soft and shaky like he could barely contain what his fingers itched to do again.

"We can do whatever we want," Adam said. He sounded excited. Not necessarily because he was going to keep kissing Ronan—though it was a bonus—because he had the freedom to choose. He could do anything he liked. "And I'm okay with staying here."

His hand was on Ronan's knee and he squeezed, encouragingly or as a warning; it was up for debate. "I have nowhere else to be, for once."

And then he was bracing his hands on either side of Ronan's hips and using his body weight to push him down onto his bed and kissing Ronan again. There was nowhere else he wanted to be but here.