Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Adam’s first instinct was to just keep walking. He was tired and on his way home from one of his countless jobs. With no time to take anything beyond twenty minute naps for several days, he didn’t think he had it in him to do anything except fall down on top of his bed that was waiting for him just around the corner but, for some reason, he stopped and once he’d stopped he couldn’t pretend like he hadn’t seen anything.

On the other side of the street was the entrance to a little alley. It was dimly lit and generally not a place Adam would ever voluntarily enter but even with the lack of proper light, he could tell that someone was being robbed. It was one against three, a man pressed against a dumpster, a knife to his throat and his arm twisted in a way that wasn’t pretty. Neither the color of the numbers on his forearm nor the digits themselves were visible from his position, but Adam knew what was happening.

The man was being robbed of his time and if they’d take all of it and leave his dead body behind in the alley it would be the merciful alternative over leaving him with a broken face and minutes, maybe an hour to live.

Adam looked at the numbers that shone from his own forearm in purple. 26:43:08. A little over one day left to live. Crossing the 24-hour mark would turn the digits into a color as red as fresh blood. Hitting zero would be his death. Aesthetically speaking, the red suited Adam better than the purple, standing out nicely against the color of his tanned skin. Adam’s favorite shirt, partially because it was his only one that was more shirt than holes, was red too, with a Coca-Cola logo slowly fading from its front.

Adam contemplated his next move. He wasn’t used to seeing purple on himself. Like everyone else’s, his clock had set to one year on his twenty-fifth birthday. One year was a lot in theory, but not if you were in debt before your time even started ticking and not with the prices for normal life things like rent and food and water going through the roof. Adam hadn’t even made it one week before he’d first hit red but unlike most of the kids he’d grown up with, he was still alive several months later, capable of earning just enough time to keep living.

“Leave me alone!” The guy being robbed in the alley yelled. With a knife to his throat, Adam definitely wouldn’t have opened his mouth for something as useless as that but there was something in the man’s voice that caught his attention. Maybe it was the desperation. God knew Adam was used to desperation but it hadn’t ever sounded quite the same way.

“Don’t worry,” one of the attackers sneered, twisting his arm a little further, wrenching a strangled scream out of the man. “We don’t give a shit about you. I bet you aren’t worth half the time you carry around with you.” He was yanking at the sleeve of his victim’s coat then pulling a knife out to simply cut it open.

How stupid, Adam thought. There was no way of taking the man’s time without killing him first. They could have forced him to give them everything except a little in exchange for his life, but that didn’t seem to be their plan. If he’d been them, he would have killed the guy first, a quick and clean job and then he would have taken all his time, however much there was.

“I need my time!” The man yelled and all three of them began laughing.

“Everybody does, asshole.”

“Someone needs to find Ronan!” He continued shouting at them, not caring that they were clearly mocking him. Adam snuck closer on his tippy toes, holding his breath and straining his ears. It wasn’t uncommon for people to be robbed of their time in the streets, but it seemed highly curious to him that this one was so distraught for somebody else’s sake as it was happening.

“He’ll never make it back in time on his own!” The man kept going, thrashing, making it hard for the three men to hold him still, although he was neither particularly tall nor especially strong or skilled as a fighter. “Ronan!” He howled into the cold air of the night. A hand wrapped around his wrist. “Don’t you dare touch me before I get to look after him.”

Curiosity definitely wasn’t a good enough reason to step in and get involved in the mess of kicking feet and sharp blades. Maybe the memory of Adam’s best friend Noah was though. Noah had died two days after his twenty-fifth birthday in a situation pretty much exactly like the current one, except that nobody came to help him.

Adam decided to go for the one holding the knife to the victim’s throat first. Although his opponent possessed a lot of raw strength, Adam knocked him out easily, taking the weapon from him and then jamming the handle against his neck twice until he’d hit the right spot for the guy to drop like a sack of potatoes.

“Let him go,” he demanded of the two others sounding almost annoyed which, frankly, he was. He had better things to do than to give a bunch of criminals a beating in the streets, but he would if necessary. The look in his eyes was almost as cold and sharp as the blade he had pointed at the one of the robbers who had done all the talking, figuring that the other would follow if he gave up.

Three pairs of eyes looked at him annoyed, and one with surprise and hope in it.

“I said, let him go,” Adam repeated. A lot of people in the neighborhood owned weapons for the purpose of self-defense but most of them were too afraid to use them properly. Adam wasn’t one of those people. He cut into the thief’s arm, not so deep that it would do any serious damage, but enough to draw blood.

If life had taught Adam one thing, it was to look cold and unbothered while feeling the exact opposite. He appeared calm and collected, his lips forming an unimpressed frown. “Are you going to make me repeat myself?” He asked. If the answer was yes, he’d be fucked.

“Motherfucker,” the guy grumbled. He didn’t seem very happy but he retreated and, like Adam had assumed, number two disappeared out of the alley behind him.

Behind Adam, a deep breath was released. “Thank you.” The voice sounded much less shrill and a lot more pleasant. Adam turned slightly and found a friendly face looking at him. For some inexplicable reason it was important to pick up the guy’s glasses from the ground first, maybe because Adam hoped his stare would become less intense through them, which wasn’t the case. They were slightly crooked, but still, with them back on and a hand smoothed through hazel brown hair and the collar of the dark, heavy coat the man was wearing fixed, he looked different than before. Alien, Adam was tempted to say.

“You saved my life,” the stranger said. Adam wished he wouldn’t make such a fuss about it. “How can I thank you?”

“You probably can’t,” Adam replied. “Didn’t you have someone to find anyway?”

“Ronan, yes,” the stranger nodded. He held out a hand and smiled, and that was when the puzzle pieces fell into place in Adam’s brain. He didn’t know this particular man standing in front of him, but he knew his kind, had worked for them for half of his life.

“You’re on the wrong side of town,” Adam stated. It all made sense, the haircut, the thick coat and the more than strange shoes. The crease along the side of his pants that came from ironing them. Although the riches made up less than ten percent of Henrietta’s population, Adam had seen many of them before. Just never in his side of town.

“I’m not. This is where Ronan must be, so I’m right.” The words weren’t good enough to count as a plausible explanation but Adam shook his hand either way, mostly because it was the polite thing to do.

“Richard Campbell Gansey,” he introduced himself, “the Third. But you can call me Gansey. Just Gansey. That’s really all that matters.”

The third. For a name like Richard Campbell Gansey, you wouldn’t think there’d be so many of them.

It wasn’t just the odd name but something about the man’s smile that distracted Adam for a moment. A faint humming dragged him back to reality, a sizzling feeling beneath his skin where cold but soft fingertips were touching his wrist. He looked down, at their joined hands first and then his forearm.

“What are you doing?” Adam asked, his voice just a distraught breath into the wind. He couldn’t stop staring. His brain wasn’t even registering the digits. It was too confused by the blue color. Blue. Adam’s best guess was that he was being poisoned or something, but it didn’t make any sense at all. He looked up into the man’s face and then back down again. The second look revealed the truth.

“Thanking you,” Richard Gansey III answered, shooting him a smile that Adam knew immediately was part of a routine, a façade, put on well and carefully, but still not impossible to see through.

Adam tried to pull his hand away. Time was being transferred onto his clock. He couldn’t see the other man’s timer, but the number on his own was rising so high that he felt a little sick to the stomach. There were over fifty years all of a sudden, and then fifty-five, sixty…

“Stop!” Adam all but yelled, yanking harder. When he freed his arm from the stranger’s grip, he was left with seventy-eight years. Adam knew not a single living soul of that age. It wasn’t a thank you, it was an eternity.

Frantically, Adam’s eyes scanned their surroundings, making sure they were alone. He tugged at the sleeve of his shirt, desperately trying to cover the blue digits up. In this part of town people were killed for a lot less. He had to give the time back. It was more a curse than it was a gift, and no good intentions were going to save him from the attempts of being robbed of it.

“You can’t do that,” Adam said dumbly. He was wrong, very obviously, but also too deep in shock to find better words. “That’s too much.”

Gansey seemed taken aback for a minute but then he ordered his face to do the thing where the corners of his mouth perked up in a way that was unsettling because of how good it looked. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, waving his hand as if worries were little things you could simply brush away. He pulled up the sleeve of his dark coat and revealed shiny blue that still seemed unreal to Adam. Gansey’s clock had two digits more than his own, even after the more than generous gift to him. “That’s really nothing.”

Adam got it, truly. He knew the world of the riches was a different one. In Henrietta, time mattered only to those who didn’t have enough of it and the rest, like Gansey, had endless sources of more and more time, had access to infinity. They were the employers, the landlords, the politicians - in other words - immortals. Considering the large figure on Gansey’s forearm, it was easy for him to speak of more than a lifetime as ‘nothing’. In his head, Adam was smart enough to understand this.

The core of who Adam was though, refused to process the information.

He shook his head. Slowly at first, turning his chin to the left and then to the right, but soon more vehemently as it dawned on him that he couldn’t go home like this. He couldn’t go on like this. He’d saved a man’s life and in return his own had been sent to absolute chaos.

“This,” Adam spit out after finally finding his words, pointing at his arm. “This isn’t nothing. This is death.”

“I would think the opposite is the case,” Richard Gansey the damn millionth answered. In his brown eyes lay both confusion and curiosity. Adam felt his composure drifting away from him at the collected calm he was facing.

“Maybe in your world,” Adam sighed. Part of him wanted to give the time back, maybe keep a couple of hours as the thank you that Gansey meant to give him. Another part was reminding him of the shrill female voice that had once tried to annoy manners into him. He didn’t want to be rude. A third part came from so deep down inside him that Adam found it hard to admit even to himself that it was there too, clinging to the newly found treasure and refusing to give it up again.

If he’d been asked if he wanted seventy-eight years, he would have declined, Adam was sure of it. Now he’d seen the number on his own forearm though, and that changed the game a little more than he felt comfortable with. He knew now what blue looked like against his skin.

“You saw what happened to people who have more than a day in this part of town,” Adam pointed out. “With this much, I’m going to get myself killed. Possibly by the roommate who’s awaiting me at home because he won’t be able to get the rent together in any other way.”

Gansey’s stare was strangely blank, directed past Adam’s head and to a point in the dark behind him. “It’s not right,” he muttered.

“It’s how things are. Besides, even if I survive the night, I won’t get jobs like this. I’m getting paid by rich people for two different reasons. The first is pity because I’m poor.” Adam spit out the words. He hated his own poverty, he hated the pity, and above all, he loathed how much he depended on it to keep himself fed. “The second is the fact that I’ll do any sort of work a lot cheaper than the competition. You’re taking me out of business.”

It was silent for a moment before Gansey spoke again. “What do you do?”

“What?”

“What is it that you do to earn time?” He repeated. Adam had heard him, he just didn’t understand the interest.

“Cars,” he replied shortly. It wasn’t much of an explanation, but it hit the nail on the head. “Whatever issue you could possibly have with your car, I’ll fix it.”

All of a sudden, the pair of eyes was back on Adam’s face, lighting up with intrigue. “Now that’s certainly interesting,” Gansey said. Adam wondered what reason he could possibly have to find a car mechanic’s job this exciting.

“I apologize for being thoughtless about the time I gave you,” Gansey continued. “I didn’t mean to cause you a problem. Although, if you allow me to show you something, I might happen to have the solution as well.”

Now it was Adam’s turn to be intrigued. The ache in his limbs reminded him of his need for sleep as he moved to follow Gansey out of the alley but he paid no mind to it. A tingly feeling was keeping him on edge, starting in his arm where blue had replaced purple and spreading throughout his entire body.

“Would it be strange if I asked you to help me some more?” Gansey asked as he led the way. Like earlier, Adam’s eyes were drawn to him but he couldn’t decide which part of him. The weird shoes, the hand casually diving into a pocket of the fancy pants, the way his steps made too little noise in Adam’s opinion?

“No,” Adam answered, although it would have been a yes if he hadn’t had so much freshly acquired time to live.

“Wonderful.”

Gansey rounded a corner and Adam followed behind, his eyes immediately spotting what he was supposed to find there in the dim light of a flickering street lamp. Even in the dark, the bright orange color of the car practically attacked his vision but Adam didn’t let that distract him. He whistled through his teeth, hoping that Gansey knew he wouldn’t ever have done this as a reaction to anything else but a car.

A 1973 Camaro presented itself in front of Adam’s eyes. He lost an entire ten seconds to his admiration of the car before he winced, thinking about the neighborhood it was parked in and the fact that its owner had simply left it alone. Quite frankly, it was a miracle that it was still there.

“The Pig,” Gansey commented, gesturing at his car. Adam didn’t necessarily approve of the name, but he’d heard far worse. “There’s nothing wrong with it right now. I call it a work in progress.”

Adam nodded, concentrating on not showing too much enthusiasm but he could barely contain it. He’d gotten his hands on many cars, one of them more ridiculously expensive than the other, with engines more powerful than any sane person could ever find use for and the silliest custom ordered special equipment imaginable. None of the people Adam had worked for so far would have put up with one as old as the orange Camaro though. Adam was impressed, if a bit reluctant to let it show.

“So, what you’re saying is you need a mechanic,” Adam figured. “I’d have to look up some stuff about this particular model first, I guess, and with older cars it’s never possible to make any promises, but-”

“Another thing,” Gansey suddenly interrupted him.

“What is it?” Adam looked up from the car and over to its owner. With every new glance at the guy there came a fresh sense of strangely twisted fascination.

“I can offer you a room,” Gansey said. It seemed a little out of context, a little beside what Adam was expecting to hear. “Rent-free. In exchange for your help with the Pig when I need it. And some information now.”

“What kind of information?” Adam wanted to know. He was almost certain he didn’t know anything worth the price Gansey was willing to pay him.

“Do you know of a Catholic church in this neighborhood?”

Adam did but he was confused. This Gansey guy was becoming a little more odd with every sentence he spoke. “St. Agnes,” he replied, unable to keep the wariness out of his voice, “basically right around the corner from here.”

“Great,” Gansey smiled. He opened the door to the driver’s seat of the Camaro and climbed in. “Are you coming?” He asked when Adam didn’t do anything except to stand there and stare and wonder. “We can get your things later. This is more urgent right now, I’m afraid.”

Something in the way Gansey talked to him made Adam’s body obey before he got the chance to choose to do so with his head. He wondered if that was why Gansey was so grossly rich, whether he’d simply ordered people to give him time until he’d had enough of it. With everything he knew so far, Adam wouldn’t have put it past him. He got into the beautiful car and gave directions until they parked in front of the little church of St. Agnes.

Gansey was either a very creative kidnapper or too kind to be true. Adam was highly suspicious of his alleged generosity. If he’d had a life worth staying for, he would have told Gansey to fuck off immediately. Something about the things Gansey promised and the way he did, though, made him curious. He could always change his mind later, Adam told himself as he sat in the passenger seat.

“What are we doing here?” Adam asked Gansey as he followed him towards the heavy doors leading into the church. It was either late at night or early in the morning depending on how you looked at it but either way definitely not the time normal people went to church.

“Ronan,” Gansey said simply, pulling the door open. Adam didn’t understand, but whoever Ronan was, his name sounded unlike anything else coming from Gansey’s lips and, for some reason, that was enough to keep him from asking. Adam trailed after him and hoped that this Ronan would turn out to be at least a little bit less of a crazy freak than Gansey was, although he readied himself for disappointment.

Disappointment wasn’t quite the right word for what they found, though.

*

“Is he dead?” Adam asked. They were looking down at a motionless body on the floor, legs slung over the front pew in a way that looked unnatural and entirely unlike a living person.

Gansey didn’t answer, instead he kneeled beside the guy’s head and took his hand. Red was all over his forearms, cuts and scratches on one of them, an abundance of zeros on the other, but it wasn’t too late yet.

Adam could almost feel the sizzle at his own wrist as he watched time travelling from Gansey to who must be Ronan. With a groan, the latter came to and pulled his hand away. Heavy boots thudded on the floor as he let them drop, pulling himself up onto his elbows. Red turned into purple turned into blue so fast that Adam felt dizzy.

Now that Ronan was less a dead body and more an actual person in Adam’s eyes he took in his appearance. Everything that Gansey was, Ronan wasn’t. His eyes were blue and cold, shooting dangerous sparks even when they were half-lidded. His skin was too pale for someone who lived in Henrietta. Except for the blue of his eyes and clock, Ronan seemed to consist of black and white and edges, sharp and threatening. He wore dark jeans and a black tank top that ink was crawling out of like claws digging into his shoulders.

Everything about Ronan seemed unsettling, from the amount of black he wore to the unamused expression on his face, to the empty bottle of whiskey lying on the ground next to him to the way he breathed almost aggressively. All of those things put together into one living person should have been enough to send Adam running in the other direction but instead he stood there and looked, thinking how a heap of little messes could make complete sense sometimes.

“Dick!” Ronan slurred, interrupting Adam’s thoughts. “My knight in shining armor!”

Gansey pressed his lips together and dragged Ronan up onto wobbly legs. His grip around Ronan’s biceps looked painful and Ronan’s weight leaning on him seemed to heavy, but Gansey didn’t make a noise as he slowly moved his friend out of the little church to the fresh air.

“Don’t be so grumpy,” Ronan continued, although Gansey didn’t look half as grumpy as Adam assumed he had the right to. “I was just saying a little prayer or two. You know, asking the Lord for mercy on our doomed souls. I was just going to nap until Sunday Mass.”

“You wouldn’t have made it until Sunday,” Gansey replied. Miraculously, it didn’t sound like an accusation, not even a little bit. It was just a fact he was stating and Adam had no idea what on earth he was witnessing.

“Not without you,” Ronan continued his drunken ramble. “Dick, my savior. My hero. Always so concerned about my well-being. Until the end of time.” He hiccuped and started to giggle. “Get it, Dick? The end of time. Isn’t that just hilarious?”

Adam held the door open for Gansey to drag Ronan through and outside until a cold wind hit them all in the face and Ronan widened his arms like he was standing on top of the Titanic’s rail and living the dream.

“Get in the car, Ronan,” Gansey ordered. Adam climbed into the back so he could have the passenger seat, just in case there was any need to vomit out of the window at any point of their ride. Ronan took his sweet time with doing what he’d been told, giving Adam a strange sort of second-hand fear of the consequences.

“By the way, this here is…”

Adam needed a second to look up and find Gansey looking at him expectantly until he realized he hadn’t introduced himself yet. He’d been too busy processing what was happening to him.

“Adam,” he said, more to Gansey than Ronan, who wasn’t even paying attention to them. “Adam Parrish.”

“We forgot my whiskey,” Ronan pointed out. Gansey started the engine and saved himself the answer. “That’s fine,” Ronan shrugged, “we can stop for more on the way.”

Out of all the things that made so little sense to Adam that he couldn’t stop staring and thinking and trying to figure them out, the one that stole his attention until the car came to a halt and it was time to get out, was the tension in Ronan’s jaw, daring his eyes to look at it from diagonally behind Ronan in the backseat.

“Welcome home, Stray,” Ronan murmured before he got out and inside the massive building that Adam was looking at. He wasn’t even going to ask. The building was too big and he was too far away from home or any of his comfort zones. Gansey was a walking mystery and Ronan was entirely too much to even start with. Adam let Gansey show him quickly to his room, a bathroom and the kitchen.

He planned to pass out the second he hit the mattress but it wasn’t happening. Cutting through the darkness around him, there was a blue shimmer that Adam wasn’t used to, that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from. He silently scolded his brain for wasting valuable time by keeping him up longer than necessary until he realized the mistake in his logic. Falling asleep was less like sinking under and more like soaring away into unfamiliar directions that night.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t until Adam woke up that he realized the room he’d been given was bigger than his shared apartment and the trailer he’d grown up in combined. It seemed unnecessary to occupy so much space, considering how few possessions he’d be bringing in. The wardrobe opposite of the bed stretched across the entire wall, five out of the six bookshelves hovering above the bed would remain empty and Adam felt too small to fill the room with life. Sunlight shone through a large window onto the smooth, dark surface of a desk as if the universe was showing him how little he belonged.

Monmouth Manufacturing was an old brick warehouse a little outside of the settlement Henrietta’s riches lived in. It was huge, but not particularly pretty. To be exact, the entire first story consisted of nothing but dirt, and the charm of the second story that Gansey, Ronan and now Adam lived in was more in the wide open spaces than anything else. Monmouth Manufacturing was a new world entirely to Adam, unlike what he was used to but also as different as possibly imaginable from the villas attached to the garages he’d worked in.

Adam climbed out of bed and threw on the same clothes he’d come in, which made him feel more than stupid when he met Gansey in the kitchen. Cargo pants and polo shirts weren’t necessarily what Adam considered stylish but on Gansey, they appeared like they belonged exactly that way, even if the shoes were still the ugliest Adam had ever seen but he chose to forgive Gansey for them.

“Dick,” Ronan said with a nod as he stormed into the kitchen in what smelled like the same tank top from the previous night and a pair of boxer shorts, long, wiry legs stomping loudly due the boots he was wearing. “Stray.” He nodded at Adam as well and that was it, apparently. Ronan sat down on top of the kitchen counter, reached into a fridge, pulled out a bottle of orange juice and drank directly from it.

As generously as Gansey had paid Adam back for saving his life, Ronan didn’t seem to want to do the same. Adam didn’t understand why, but he was under the impression that he was more upset about it than Gansey was. All that Gansey did was close a messy looking notebook and push up the wire-framed glasses resting on the bridge of his nose.

“I have to leave soon,” Gansey declared. “Ronan, we have talked about this. Do I need to take you with me or are you going to dial it down a bit?”

“Why?” Ronan asked back, sounding serious. “Isn’t that why you hired a babysitter? So he can take care of me while you’re gone?”

While Adam generally agreed to there being a certain necessity of someone keeping an eye or two on Ronan he considered himself far from qualified for that job. He’d rather have attempted to tame a lion, probably. The lion would have killed him faster, he assumed.

“That’s not what he’s here for,” Gansey replied. “And I didn’t hire him. He lives here now.”

“In the room right next to mine,” Ronan added, “I’ve noticed that. Very convenient for you, isn’t it?”

“Can you just promise me not to do anything extraordinarily stupid while I’m away?” Gansey asked, ignoring whatever Ronan was accusing him of.

“Do I get to keep my normal dose of stupid?” Ronan would have sounded like a child if not for the low voice he had. A feeling of impending doom arose inside Adam as Gansey stood up and stuffed his notebook in a bag that had been resting on one of the kitchen chairs.

“Wait. Hold on. Where are you going?” Adam asked. He hadn’t intended to sound so worried. He was a grown man and he’d only known Gansey for less than a day. He hated depending on people and he hated sounding so pathetic but the thought of being left alone with Ronan gave him a whole lot of feelings he wasn’t ready for.

Absolutely everything about Ronan made Adam nervous.

“To meet some people,” Gansey answered calmly, “discuss a few things. Politics, mostly. I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details. And besides, there isn’t much to tell so far anyway. We’re currently not making the kind of progress I’d like to see. Which is why this is important. Don’t worry, Ronan will behave.”

Meanwhile, Ronan did absolutely not look like he was planning to behave but Adam guessed it wasn’t really his problem, or at least he hoped so. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

“Ronan will behave,” Ronan snorted, “Dick will bring us world peace. Don’t worry, Stray. We’ve got this.”

Adam watched dumbly as Gansey threw a strict look Ronan’s way but Ronan only shrugged his shoulders. Adam didn’t take him for the kind of person who ever felt sorry for the things they said. Gansey told them both goodbye with an apologetic smile towards Adam and left. Without him, Monmouth Manufacturing was even bigger.

Adam couldn’t have been more surprised by Ronan’s words when he said, “Tell me, Stray, what are we going to do on this fine day?”

There wasn’t supposed to be a ‘ we’ between Ronan and Adam and Adam had never once in his life started a day wondering what he was going to do with it. Work had always been the answer to a question that hadn’t needed to be asked. One job and then the next and another and so on until he had enough time together to go to sleep again. Staring at the blue digits on his forearm, Adam felt almost empty.

He had seventy-eight years and no rent to pay. What on earth would he possibly spend all that time on?

“What do you usually do?” He asked Ronan. He had a hunch that Ronan wasn’t exactly the person he should ask this but he was the only one currently available.

“Whatever the fuck I want,” Ronan shrugged. He put the orange juice back into the fridge. “We could go back to your side of town to get my BMW back. I must have left it somewhere last night. We could also forget about the BMW and just take one of the eight other cars that are parked behind the building, I don’t really care.”

“You don’t care about your car?” Now, for the first time, Ronan’s ignorant act was getting on Adam’s nerves a bit.

“I’ll just get myself a new one. I’m not really in the mood to search all of Henrietta for it right now.”

Adam exhaled and huffed. “No way,” he decided, “we’re getting your car.” He got up and marched out of the kitchen. Adam might have just moved into some sort of parallel universe, but he wasn’t going to throw all of his principles overboard because of it. Not even because of Ronan, no matter how much bare skin and how many dangerous looks were trying to throw him off. Some things simply weren’t negotiable.

“Alright, Nanny,” Ronan said mockingly, following behind. Adam had to beg him to put on pants before they left. “Now there’s something I haven’t heard from a guy before,” Ronan commented on it with a wicked grin. The jeans he reluctantly pulled out of a wardrobe were so destroyed they barely deserved the name but Adam let it count.

When Ronan had mentioned his eight other cars behind the building, Adam hadn’t thought that they were all BMWs, all in slightly different shades of a dark grey, a couple of them older models but ultimately, it was still utterly pointless for one single person to own all of them. Adam wanted to say something, but he couldn’t come up with anything that would accurately describe his mix of anger and resignation towards Ronan.

“For someone who has as much time as you do, you sure drive a lot too fast,” Adam pointed out as they were on the main road through Henrietta. He wasn’t surprised that Ronan had as little respect for speed limits as he had for people but he’d worked too hard for his time to be killed in a car accident.

Ronan only shrugged. “Is your dumb time worth more if you spend it slowly?”

Adam sighed and pinched his nose. “Gansey gave you that time last night.” He tried a different approach. “Don’t you think you owe it to him to be a little more careful with it?”

“Things you do because you owe them aren’t worth shit, Stray,” Ronan said. “Dick knows that.”

Adam’s lips parted, but he pressed them shut. He wasn’t a big fan of people but Adam had learned how to smile and where to look while talking, had figured out how to use words and facial expressions to get what he wanted. He could articulate himself well enough to deal with most unpleasant social situations. Sitting next to Ronan, staring down at white knuckles on the gearshift and not daring to follow the arm up, Adam genuinely couldn’t think of a thing to say to the other man.

“So this is your home, huh.”

Adam looked out of the window. It was his home, but the streets and houses didn’t look the same out of the inside of the BMW, although it was ridiculous, and he didn’t have the right to think something so dramatic after spending one night on the other side.

“Isn’t it your home, too?” Adam asked. It wasn’t until then that he realized the question had bothered him. The way everything about Ronan seemed to be the opposite of Gansey, his rudeness, the fact that they’d found him at St. Agnes, the sharpness in the word ‘Stray’ when Ronan said it. The red digits on his forearm, even if they’d been gone just a second later. As much as the idea made Adam’s skin crawl, Ronan was a lot closer to what he himself was than Gansey.

“I don’t have a home,” Ronan answered shortly.

“So you’re a stray, too?”

“No,” Ronan growled.

“Then where did you come from?” Adam felt weirdly triumphant at Ronan’s apparent discomfort, but the taste of victory was brief. Ronan had a way of turning sweetness into bitterness like nobody else.

“Straight from hell.” Ronan’s hand relaxed. Adam knew he’d lost even though he hadn’t even started to try to figure out the game they were playing.

Ronan acted like nothing could touch him, like he was only driving around because he had nothing better to do and Adam was just the first best person to help him bring the second BMW back to Monmouth Manufacturing. Adam couldn’t see behind the mask consisting of his harshness, but he could tell that it was a mask and that was enough to not run away for now.

In spite of his statement that he didn’t remember where he’d left the car, Ronan found it a lot quicker than anticipated. Adam got out but surprisingly so did Ronan, stepping towards the slightly darker grey BMW they’d been looking for and tossing Adam the keys for the other one without looking. “You can keep it,” he said. A few hours earlier, Adam would have taken those words for a joke but with Ronan, there was no way to be sure.

A part of Adam was surprised that the driver’s seat was warm and not cold as ice as he climbed behind the steering wheel. He operated the vehicle with an awe and caution that seemed ridiculous, considering the way Ronan had chased down the roads in it and of course the fact that they were eight others just like it, but he couldn’t help it. Adam had worked on enough equally or even more expensive cars in his life but driving it was something different and he couldn’t resist giving in to the illusion that he wasn’t Adam Parrish for the while that it took to get back to his new residence on the other side of Henrietta.

While Ronan disappeared in a cloud of dust Adam took his time, although he understood the appeal of an engine that accelerated in an instant when hitting the gas. He kept the speed limit in mind but it was possible that he still went a little bit above it. He wouldn’t let the adrenaline take him on a high, but he could feel it rushing through his system, trying to make him weak.

At the only red light that stopped him, Adam found himself next to Ronan, although he had no idea where he’d come from all of a sudden. He made sure to roll his eyes to demonstrate his annoyance, but he still let the window down when Ronan signalled him to do it.

“Care for a little detour?”

“Where to?” Adam wanted to know.

“Freedom,” Ronan answered and then he was gone before Adam realized the light had switched to green. Not knowing where they were headed he only had two options. Bailing on Ronan and driving back to his new home alone or hitting the gas and going fast enough to keep up and follow Ronan. His right foot pressed down on the gas pedal and the BMW shot forward beneath him. Ronan dared him to take it to the point of racing heartbeats and held breaths and Adam had never before been so afraid of liking something.

Insanity was the only word that was at least remotely accurate for what was happening. For the first time in his life, he had several decades to spend and, for the first time in his life, Adam allowed himself to be stupid enough to risk it. Why he felt compelled to chase Ronan through Henrietta and god knows where Adam had no idea and was too afraid to think about.

Buildings passed by and disappeared into a grey blur and then a green one. They weren’t in the dirty parts of Henrietta anymore and they weren’t in the shiny parts either. Adam would have looked around if not for the fact that he was driving way too fast to let anything distract him. Although the thought had no business popping up in his mind, he imagined Ronan’s smirk if he’d been in the passenger seat in that moment.

“Do you have a death-wish or something?” Adam asked as he climbed out of the car.

“Something like that,” Ronan shrugged, making Adam regret his comment immediately.

“Where are we?” Adam looked around and found cornfields melting into the sky in every direction.

“Hell,” Ronan grinned, walking away and towards a group of buildings that looked small from a distance but appeared to be bigger than Monmouth Manufacturing and significantly prettier. Adam wasn’t sure whether ‘hell’ was simply Ronan’s default answer to every question he didn’t want to seriously reply to. Otherwise it could have implied that they were in fact entering Ronan’s home but it wasn’t possible. Not only was Ronan not from this place, he couldn’t possibly be from the same planet. Besides, Adam was watching him breaking in and that at least was an observation of the truth, not a feeling born of his confusion.

“You’re not going to get me in trouble, are you, Ronan?” Adam didn’t know what answer he expected. He had a feeling that the way to stay out of trouble would have been to just keep walking instead of saving Gansey’s life. Then again, Gansey as well as Ronan would have been dead in that case. Adam shuddered.

“You?” Ronan laughed. “You’re free to go.”

“What about you?” Adam asked next. Not getting himself in trouble didn’t seem to be a priority to Ronan.

“Oh, always,” Ronan confirmed. “Dick would be so disappointed if he came back and didn’t get to lecture me about anything. And he’s already getting bored to death right now.” For a burglar, it was quite a peculiar thing to leave the dirty shoes at the door, Adam thought. Ronan walked into a bright kitchen and pulled a fridge open, pulling out two beers and offering one to Adam. Due to a lack of better ideas Adam took it and watched as Ronan got another one so that he had two again. They crossed a generous dining room and Ronan pulled a glass door open, letting in sunlight and air that tasted different than it did in the streets of Henrietta.

Watching Ronan moving freely in the house was comparable to watching a bull running into a china shop. Adam was tempted to reach out here and there to prevent things from falling and breaking, except that his bull proved to be a lot less chaotic than he’d thought.

Ronan looked exactly the same as earlier, still wearing the ripped jeans and black tank but in socks, his feet seemed to move differently across the soft carpets. Rough hands moved gently over the surface of a closed piano, cuts, bruises and calloused patches making no sense anymore as fingertips brushed the wood as lightly as only feathers could. Adam trailed behind him, not daring to breathe too loudly, afraid to break whatever fragile calm Ronan had temporarily going on.

For the first time, Adam’s eyes registered the tattoo that was half covered by Ronan’s top as more than just dark ink beneath skin. What he’d taken for claws before were really feathers of wings spread over Ronan’s shoulder blades, moving with every step he took as if he was only half walking and half flying. Whatever meaning ‘hell’ bore in Ronan’s eyes, it wasn’t at all what Adam had expected.

They moved through every room of the main building like this, Ronan taking swigs of his beer and touching the wallpapers, his eyes trailing over everything. He definitely knew his way around the place and unlike Adam’s first impression, he wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Adam made himself as invisible as possible. Back in school, sometimes he’d been asked to look at a picture for a minute or so and remember as many details as possible. After the minute had been over they’d taken the picture away and asked him questions about it. Adam felt like he was looking at one of those pictures again, not knowing what questions would be fired at him later, almost certain that he wouldn’t be able to answer all of them correctly, but still trying to fill his memory with as many tiny specifics as he could.

After the main building came a barn at its side before they finally rounded the whole area once. “Alright,” Ronan declared all of a sudden. Adam had almost forgotten that he could speak. “We can go now.”

“What were we here for then?” He wanted to know. Somehow the way Ronan’s eyes had taken in everything about the place was more shocking than if he’d raided it.

“It’s hell, Stray,” Ronan replied, “the devil has to make sure the temperature is staying high every once in a while.”

Of course. Ronan must be allergic to serious answers, Adam thought to himself.

“Now, to the fun part of the day.”

Adam wanted to go home. He wasn’t sure which home, or if he even still had one, or if he’d ever had one to begin with but he craved silence from his running thoughts and peace from Ronan. He would have gladly laid down beneath a car in that moment, no matter how damaged. As long as he depended only on his own hands and the head on top of his shoulders to fix something, he knew he was going to be fine.

*

What Ronan had proclaimed as the fun part of the day took place in a dark basement that reeked of vomit and smoke. Adam’s flight instinct kicked in the second he saw the smile on Ronan’s face when entering. It was a lot more frightening than the usual death-glare. Horrible electronic music was blaring from every direction and one of the present people looked more dumbly overdressed than the other.

“Lynch!” A man got up from a table as soon as they stepped into the basement, pulling a pair of white sunglasses from his face and revealing hollow eyes beneath them. He was handsome, but definitely the kind of handsome that Adam didn’t trust, even more so than Ronan.

“Got something worthwhile for me, K?” Ronan asked, and that was when Adam realized that Lynch was Ronan, a person with a surname like a real human, not a synonym for Satan.

“Where’s your boyfriend?” K wanted to know with a dirty grin. He nodded at Adam. “And who’s the newbie? You bringing me fresh meat?”

“So that’s a no then?” Ronan replied with annoyance, turning around towards the exit. “In that case, see you never.”

The other man laughed. Adam didn’t understand what he could possibly find funny about their conversation. “Oh Lynch.” Ronan stopped in his tracks when K spoke again. “Don’t act like you’re not the dog that keeps coming back for bones whenever it gets hungry. I might even have one for you.”

Ronan’s jaw was clenched, but he decided to stay. Adam saw red and in spite of the car key in his pocket that gave him an opportunity to leave, he couldn’t. “I don’t think we’ve been officially introduced,” Adam said, raising his voice above the music. “Adam Parrish.”

“Joseph Kavinsky,” said the guy Ronan had called K. “Provider of services, bender of reality. Fulfiller of dreams.” Ronan rolled his eyes and Adam nodded seriously.

“What’s the damn dream for tonight, K?” Ronan interrupted him. “I’m getting bored around here.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want that now, would we?” Kavinsky grinned. He gestured towards a table where several men that looked like they’d been taken out of a horror movie and then dipped in glitter were playing poker. “Join us, if you like.”

“That all you got?” Adam was unsure what exactly Ronan was looking for, and even more unsure if he wanted anything to do with it.

“Since when do you not have the time for a little foreplay, Lynch?” Kavinsky turned towards the crowd around the round table that snickered, raising his hands up in the air like he was announcing something worth celebrating. “Gentlemen, our dog here craves to be put on a leash. He wants to race me.”

Adam looked at Ronan, who seemed content, if not entirely pleased with the show Kavinsky was making out of the whole thing.

“How much, Lynch?” Kavinsky asked then, looking Ronan straight in the eyes, waiting.

Adam didn’t follow until Ronan held out his forearm for everyone to see the number on it. “A millennium,” he said simply. Adam’s eyes flickered down and he read the digits. Ronan had one thousand years and a little less than one hour left.

Kavinsky’s eyes looked a lot less dead all of a sudden, a dark shimmer lingering in them as he contemplated the challenge. He shrugged off the shirt that had hung open and loosely from his shoulders. Underneath he was wearing a white tank top and scars.

“Are you crazy?” Adam hissed at Ronan. Gambling over what was close to hundred percent of Ronan’s and not even half of his opponent’s time could only be described as a suicide mission.

Ronan dragged his eyes away from Kavinsky and to Adam instead. He was clearly annoyed by Adam having an opinion about this. “You don’t even know how crazy,” he said, grabbing Adam’s wrist and looking down.

“Let’s raise that by seventy-eight years, five months and twenty-three days, shall we?” Ronan offered, sounding like he was making a completely reasonable suggestion.

While Kavinsky gave a triumphant smile, Adam’s mouth fell open.  

Chapter Text

“No,” Adam repeated again, shaking his head vehemently, arms crossed in front of his chest. He didn’t think Ronan was listening to him, but what else was he supposed to say?

“Oh come on, Stray, I need a co-pilot,” Ronan insisted. Adam hadn’t even meant to say no as in ‘ No, I won’t get into your car for an illegal street race’. It was more like a general no to Ronan’s overall insanity. Adam couldn’t believe anybody could be stupid enough to bet a thousand damn years on something, let alone put in more than the time Ronan himself even had on his timer, dragging Adam down with him.

“You want to kill me,” Adam breathed out. There was no other explanation for what was going on. Possibly, even the attempted robbery of Gansey’s time had been just an act, just a part of some intricate plan to confuse the living hell out of Adam before murdering him.

“You’re not dying,” Ronan sighed, definitely sounding a lot more annoyed by Adam’s reluctance than he had any right to, “I’m not dying. Nobody’s dying. I’ve done this a million times before, and do I look dead to you?”

“Well, some time has to be the first time, right?” Adam was one hundred percent sure that he was not getting into the car. Or giving up any of the time on his clock. Or talking to Ronan ever again.

Ronan clicked his tongue. “Don’t be a drama queen. I already have one of those.” Right, Adam thought, because he was the one acting like a crazy person, of course. “Now I need a co-pilot. It’ll increase my chances of winning.”

“What you need is to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital,” Adam countered.

“It’s like you don’t even want me to win,” Ronan complained.

“Excuse me? How dare you-”

“So, you in? Excellent. Hurry up, get in there.”

In absolutely no way whatsoever had Adam agreed to anything and yet, he found himself climbing into the charcoal-colored BMW and fastening the seat belt. It could only end badly, he knew it, but was it better to watch it ending badly from the sidelines?

“Pay attention,” Ronan ordered, “tell me what K’s doing when I can’t see him.”

Adam felt sick. He wondered how it would affect Ronan’s chances of winning if he threw up inside the car.

“Fucking idiot,” Ronan growled as they stood, two cars next to each other, Kavinsky in a Mitsubishi Evo with a license plate that said ‘Thief’. A damn joke of a person indeed but Ronan definitely didn’t seem much better in comparison. Kavinsky played with the gas pedal and let his engine roar while Ronan seemed focused, at least.

“Tell me you’re going to beat him,” Adam whispered. If Ronan hadn’t lied to him, that meant he’d done this often enough before but Adam didn’t dare to ask about his track record.

Ronan shrugged and answered the unspoken question anyway. “It would be the first time.”

Adam let out an audible, shaky breath. He was going to die after all.

“Some time has to be the first time, right?” Ronan smiled. A gunshot echoed through the air and Adam was pressed back into the seat almost at the same time. A narrow road lay ahead of them and in the distance a bridge. They’d turn around by circling one of the piers and then get back to the starting line, hopefully faster than their opponent.

The first couple of seconds sent Adam’s heart racing. His fingernails were digging into the seat left and right of his thighs. As a kid, Adam had dreamed for many years of his father taking him somewhere where he could ride a rollercoaster. Maybe what was happening now was karma punishing him for his foolish wish.

Although Ronan had a slightly better start, Kavinsky seemed to be a little faster. The cloud of dust around the Mitsubishi indicated where he was but it was hard to tell where exactly the car started and ended.

“He’s faster than you,” Adam stated. Ronan was staring straight ahead, fingers tight around the steering wheel. Everything was noise and a blur, and then the bridge coming closer in the middle.

“I know, smart-ass,” Ronan pressed out between clenched jaws. “It’s not about speed.” His eyes were focused.

Just when Adam wanted to reply Ronan changed from gas to break, slamming his foot down, his arms tensing up. The pier of the bridge had appeared right in front of their noses sooner than anticipated. It wasn’t about high speed alone, it was about the right speed to survive the turn, Adam realized. Kavinsky steered towards the right side of the massive concrete pier. He was ahead of them, but all that Adam could think about when Ronan decided on the left side was the two cars colliding.

“He’s faster,” Adam said, “you need to get on the inside.”

It was risky. If Kavinsky wasn’t leaving enough space between the Mitsubishi and the concrete, they’d crash into either one of those things. If Ronan wouldn’t get the BMW slowed down enough, it would end equally ugly. Kavinsky disappeared from Adam’s view and Ronan jerked the steering wheel almost violently.

The mitsubishi came back around before they’d made it halfway around the pier but Ronan managed to maneuver his car through the narrow space between the other vehicle and their obstacle, which gave him the advantage of a shorter distance. As soon as he’d set the steering wheel straight again, he hit the gas and Adam watched Kavinsky emerging at the other side of the pier they both left behind, the BMW now only a few feet ahead but the remaining distance until the finish line seemed too long.

“It’s not enough,” Adam pointed out, eyes focused on the spinning wheels of the Mitsubishi.

“Shut up,” Ronan hissed, but the edge in his voice didn’t make them any faster or Kavinsky any slower. The Mitsubishi was catching up. Ronan didn’t look anywhere but the line he had to cross. It came closer and closer but Adam had his eyes on the competition and he knew they weren’t going to make it even when Kavinsky was still behind them.

The BMW shot over the line and Ronan waited a few seconds before releasing the gas pedal and letting it slow down. Neither of them spoke, but Ronan knew as well as Adam that they’d lost. Unsure whether his racing heartbeat was the aftermath of the race or the dread of its consequence, Adam got out of the car and followed Ronan to where the rest of the crowd gathered around Kavinsky.

Ronan’s look was grim, his shoulders tense and his jaw clenched. Adam almost expected him to throw a punch or something but it didn’t happen. Instead, all of the tension was released from Ronan’s body with on powerful exhale. He held his hand out before Kavinsky could say anything.

“Such a well-trained dog,” Kavinsky scoffed, taking the offered hand, wrapping his fingers around it in a way that made Adam’s skin crawl. Adam had never considered how long it would take to transfer one thousand years from one person to another. He was squirming as the moment stretched, Ronan’s clock running down until it turned purple, and then red. Something stung inside Adam’s chest.

“Now you,” Kavinsky said to Adam a few seconds later. Adam looked down at Ronan’s forearm. There were nineteen minutes left on his clock.

“I didn’t agree to your sick deal,” Adam pointed out. The years had been given to him by Gansey and although everything since that moment had given him the impression that he’d been better off without them, he wasn’t simply going to hand them over.

“Lynch here did,” Kavinsky replied dryly. “I didn’t see you doing anything against it.”

“I think someone needs to explain the general concept of consent to you.”

Kavinsky laughed. Someone handed him his white sunglasses back and he put them on. “Parrish, was it?” He smiled in a really dirty way. “I think someone needs to inform you that I’m not asking. I was promised seventy-eight more years. Seventy-eight years, five months and twenty-three days.” He stepped dangerously close and grabbed Adam’s wrist. Adam made a move to defend himself, but he felt something cold against his temple a second later and went still.

“You can give me what I’ve been promised,” Kavinsky threatened, “or you can give me your life. Your choice.”

Adam hated it when people said dumb things like ‘your choice’ although it was absolutely not his choice. He hated Kavinsky and the feeling of his fingers on Adam’s skin. He hated watching the numbers spinning on his forearm and the color change. He should have been at least partly relieved at the red returning to where it belonged, but Adam felt betrayed. Out of all the things he hated, Ronan Lynch was the worst.

“Happy now?” Adam spit at him as he walked away.

Ronan laughed and followed after him. “You have more time left than I do,” he pointed out.

“I also have more functioning brain cells. And now I’m going to use them to earn me some time somewhere so fuck off.” Adam was going to take the dumb BMW without feeling bad about it. He was going to ask the nearest of his regular clients for an advanced payment and work off his debt starting immediately. He wasn’t sure it would work but it wasn’t the first time he walked around with less than an hour left. It was only the first time that something as incredibly pointless as Ronan’s little bet was the reason.

“I have more than enough time at Monmouth,” Ronan shrugged. “Just gotta get there in time.”

“What?”

“What? Did you think I was giving away everything I own?”

The words came like a punch to the gut to Adam. “You gave away everything that I own,” he yelled. He couldn’t believe it. So Ronan was playing his stupid game with a safety net. As if the betrayal hadn’t been bad enough already.

“Stop whining, Stray,” Ronan muttered, “I’ll pay you back. Double if you shut the fuck up about it. And now get your ass in one of the cars, we don’t have a lot of time to get home.”

Adam looked down. Eighteen minutes. Ronan had twelve. He jumped into the BMW that they’d used for the race. They could either worry about the other one another time or the problem would have solved itself. Adam didn’t comment on the long way they had to drive. Ronan started the engine again and hit the gas. Bitterness filled Adam’s mouth as he realized that Ronan looked just like he had earlier. The immediate threat of dying seemed to do absolutely nothing to him. Adam stared out of the window.

Ronan drove incredibly fast and passed red lights here and there. The silence was tense between them until Ronan coughed and then spoke. Adam was so lost in thought that he didn’t understand the words, but it drew his attention to Ronan’s forearm, where the last three minutes had begun. He hit the brakes and pulled over.

“I’m gonna pass out,” Ronan said simply, dragging his body over the middle console and into the back of the car. “Call Gansey.”

Panic got a hold of Adam. Ronan’s eyes drifted shut and his body went slack. Adam had nine minutes. They weren’t far from Monmouth Manufacturing, but he had no idea where to look for the time Ronan had mentioned, let alone how to get access to it. For a second, he prospect of his life actually ending paralyzed him but Adam snapped out of it and scrambled into the driver’s seat, getting the BMW back on the road while dialling Gansey’s number.

“Who’s the drama queen now?” Adam muttered as he waited for Gansey to pick up. He looked at Ronan through the rearview mirror. Monmouth came into sight when seven minutes were left. Adam dialled Gansey’s number again and reached back to get a hold of Ronan’s wrist, giving him another minute. The skin beneath his fingertips felt warmer than expected, still alive.

“This is Richard Campbell Ga-”

“No time,” Adam cut him off. The tires screeched in a terrible noise before the car came to a halt. Adam decided to give Ronan another minute before he jumped out of the car and ran inside. “I’m at Monmouth. You have three minutes to tell me where to get time from so I can save Ronan’s life.”

Gansey reacted instantly, which Adam would have worried about if he’d had the time. “The other bathroom,” he said, “the one between Ronan’s room and mine. There’s an emergency capsule behind the mirror. You need Ronan’s fingerprint to access it.”

Adam ran up the stairs and barged through the door of Ronan’s room. The mirror in the bathroom could be moved easily, but the egg-shaped item behind it stuck for a moment before Adam held it in his hands. “Got it!” He let Gansey know as he ran back down. At the top of the stairs, he had two minutes and eighteen seconds left, but Ronan had approximately two minutes less than him. Adam couldn’t tell how much exactly.

Almost falling down from the front porch, Adam ripped the door to the BMW open. Ronan looked dead, but there was still movement beneath the skin on his forearm.

00:00:06

Adam grabbed his hand.

00:00:05

There was a round little button at the front of the time capsule. Ronan’s finger fit it perfectly and a little screen just beneath it started blinking.

“The blue button, Adam,” Gansey shouted from the loudspeaker of the phone that had fallen down and was lost somewhere beneath the seats. “The blue one.” Adam pressed the blue button and earned an electric jolt from the capsule.

Ronan’s clock had counted down to two remaining seconds before it went into the other direction. Adam released a deep breath and slumped down in the backseat of the BMW, his hands clenched tightly around the capsule and Ronan’s hand. Purple replaced red and Ronan flinched, his eyelids fluttering open.

Adam wanted to cry, or throw up, or scream. Ronan was alive. He sat up and stared at Adam with bright, blue eyes. Adam was looking for the words to express his relief but couldn’t find them. He felt strangely far away from the reality where he was in a car with Ronan, boneless, weak.

Adam blinked away the tears that were welling up in his eyes, but his lids wouldn't open again. Maybe he just had to rest. Maybe, if he’d just allow himself to fall back and relax for a second…

*

Adam woke up to Ronan’s face uncomfortably close to his own. He didn’t know where the hand holding his own had come from, but it felt nice.

“I told you you were drama queen, Stray,” Ronan said. “You really didn’t have to pass out on me.”

Adam hadn’t meant to, he’d simply forgotten to pay attention to the number on his own forearm for a short while. He stared down. Time was still trickling from Ronan’s surprisingly soft fingertips underneath his skin, digits spinning, turning from purple to blue again. Adam wanted to say stop at twenty years, simply because his instincts told him it was more than enough, way more than he deserved.

Ronan owed him seventy-eight years so he held still. The blue eyes directed at his face made him want to escape their gaze as much as they made him want to stare right back into them until he’d find something there, something that made sense. He distracted himself by tracing Ronan’s neckline and the muscles of his arm to their joined hands.

Way too late, the sizzling sensation stopped but Ronan’s fingers were still there and a soft palm against the heel of Adam’s hand. Adam searched his brain for all the accusations he had to make, for all the things he expected to change from this moment forward but he couldn’t concentrate.

“Well, that was a close call,” Ronan said, finally letting go of Adam’s hand and opening the door at the other side. Really? Was that all he had to say about it? If Adam hadn’t been so overwhelmed, he would have had one or two things to say about it right about now.

“Never again,” was the one thing that came out when he stood outside of the car again, slamming the door shut. “Never do that again.”

Ronan raised an eyebrow at him, but if he was waiting for an elaborate explanation as to why Adam was opposed to joint suicide-missions he was even crazier than Adam had thought. One would have thought it was obvious.

“No,” Adam said, shaking his head. He walked inside and up the stairs towards his room. “I’m done for today.” It wasn’t late. He was used to not sleeping for way longer periods of time but not on this day. He needed to get away from Ronan, whose presence felt warm in the one moment and like it was threatening to burn him in the next.

Simply because he felt like it, Adam locked the door to his room from the inside, falling against it, his back hitting the wood with a dull thud. There were two hundred years on his clock. At the very least although he hadn’t gotten any other thing right the whole day long, Ronan had paid him back generously. Still, Adam’s eyes drifted down over and over again, just to make sure he was safe.

Looking around the room suddenly got too much, like there was too much space that was empty, same as there were too many years that didn’t mean anything if they could just be gone the next minute. Adam crawled beneath the sheet on top of the bed where the sun couldn’t put its spotlight on him and he couldn’t see the world that he didn’t belong in. It didn’t smell badly enough and the sheets had neither holes nor stains, but inside his little tent, Adam could tell himself that he was okay, breathing slowly, watching the seconds slip away from his arm without making him anxious.

From Ronan’s bedroom next door, he could hear music blaring, electronic, similar to the kind in Kavinsky’s obscure basement but not quite the same. Although he wished for nothing else than to close his eyes and sleep, to forget the entire day he’d had, he couldn’t stop his thoughts from spinning. What was Ronan doing at the other side of the wall right now? What did almost losing his life mean to him? Not for a single second had Ronan seemed scared or even shocked by the events of the day. Did he even care?

Adam couldn’t stop thinking about it. He spiraled himself from paralyzing shock to disbelief to anger. Like Gansey had said, he wasn’t Ronan’s babysitter. He didn’t even know the guy, and judging from what he’d seen, it was definitely smart not to try and change that. Ronan had a serious problem. Nobody should have been able to put a freaking millennium on the table to easily. And nobody in the right mind would have added a bystander’s entire lifetime on top of it. Who did Ronan even think he was to do that?

Adam was done with him, he decided. Obviously, he hadn’t come to the other side of town to make friends amongst the riches. Ronan wasn’t just not a friend, Ronan was a bomb that could go off at any given moment.

No, Adam didn’t feel entirely good about having two centuries to spend all of a sudden. No, he didn’t think he was above others now because of it. As he’d always had, Adam wanted to live. He wanted to go to sleep and wake up again the next morning. He didn’t need eternities, because he wasn’t spending time as thoughtlessly as Ronan. He only needed the opportunity to earn enough to make it through another day, that was it. For all the years Ronan had added to his clock afterwards, he’d almost taken that opportunity away from Adam, who didn’t think he could forgive him.

The music turned louder and became nothing but horrendous noise. For a moment, Adam had thought Ronan lived for nothing but maybe he’d been wrong. It was possible that Ronan lived to be an inconvenience to the world.

In the middle of the night, Adam began to understand why Gansey and Ronan lived at Monmouth without any immediate neighbors. ‘Silence is a luxury’ , his previous landlord had said to justify the thin walls of the apartment. Adam remembered the words and almost began laughing. Technically speaking, he was rich now but if silence was a luxury, it was one he still couldn’t afford.

Chapter Text

Just from the soft knock on the door, Adam could tell it wasn’t Ronan who was standing at the other side of it. “Come in!” Adam turned away from the one bookshelf he’d chosen as his own where he was arranging all of the books he possessed.

“Hey there,” Gansey greeted him with a smile.

“Oh, you’re back,” Adam said, sitting down on the bed. “Hello. How’s it been?”

Gansey shrugged. “Could have gone better, but it could have gone a lot worse, too, so that’s something. But listen, Adam, I’m here to apologize.”

“For what?” Adam asked. The one person who had an actual reason to apologize hadn’t come to try it, nor had he seemed like he was sorry at all. Adam had avoided him, reducing kitchen and bathroom trips to a minimum, going out to explore the new surroundings and working a few jobs to keep his head straight, although the latter was harder than ever before with Ronan around. They’d barely talked for the two days they’d spent waiting for Gansey’s return, but the amount of things left unspoken was threatening to drown them both.

“I didn’t think he’d go full Ronan on you the very first day,” Gansey said. “He usually keeps it down when I’m away.”

“It’s not like it’s your fault,” Adam muttered. He didn’t like that Gansey felt compelled to make him feel better about what had happened. It didn’t really matter as long as Ronan was still so unapologetically Ronan.

“I could have warned you,” Gansey replied. “I could have shown you the time capsule before I left, at least to prepare you for the case of emergency. I could have asked Ronan to come with me.”

“And he would have listened?” Adam asked. The first half sounded sarcastic, but he ended on a genuine question. Adam wondered who Gansey and Ronan were to each other.

“May I?” Gansey asked, pointing at the mattress next to Adam. Adam nodded and watched as Gansey sat down, the motion of his body graceful, his face serious. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I know he seems… catastrophic to you.”

“Are you going to tell me he’s not?” Adam found that catastrophic was a pretty accurate description for Ronan.

“Aren’t we all a bit catastrophic at times?” Gansey asked.

Adam shook his head. Not like Ronan, no. Most people wouldn’t have the energy. “How many times, Gansey?” Adam wanted to know. It was most likely not his place, but he simply wanted to know. He’d felt the panic that accompanied the direct prospect of death in the car with Ronan while racing back to Monmouth. He hadn’t remembered in that moment, but many times since then; Gansey kneeling in the church of St. Agnes, taking Ronan’s lifeless hand and breathing air back into him. “How many times have you saved him?”

Gansey seemed reluctant to answer, but he did in the end. “I don’t know.”

“Why?” The possible reasons were so far beyond Adam that it frustrated him. Why did Gansey put up with Ronan? Why did Ronan insist on destroying himself? And why did Adam have to become a part of any of it?

“I can’t tell you,” Gansey answered. He was calm without appearing completely collected. “There are a lot of things about Ronan that I don’t understand. There are a lot of things I understand in my head, but have a hard time relating to. He’ll be better.”

“Are you sure about that?” If so, Adam would have loved to know what Gansey’s trust was based on. “He did that on purpose. He couldn’t have thought he’d win. He went to Kavinsky, and he offered a bet he could only lose. And when I tried to stop him, he threw in my time as well. Just like that.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you, Adam,” Gansey said, but it wasn’t what Adam wanted to hear, not at all.

“You’re not supposed to make excuses for him!” He all but yelled. In the presence of Gansey, he felt guilty for raising his voice, but so, so many things were terribly wrong, he couldn’t contain himself. “And it’s not something that happened to me. Don’t say it like that, like it was an accident. You know as well as I do that it wasn’t. I almost died! And that didn’t happen to me. Ronan did that. He did it, and it was a decision. He decided not to care whether I’d die or not. You’re not going to come up with anything good enough to make up for that.”

Gansey nodded. “He’ll be better.”

“How can you say that? Hell, how can you believe that?”

“I know him,” Gansey responded simply. “He’s like a brother to me.”

“Don’t you mean a stray?” Adam snorted. It wasn’t right that he was making it sound like Gansey was the one to blame for anything, but Ronan wasn’t there, and even if he had been, he wouldn’t have cared about Adam’s accusations. Gansey seemed taken aback, confused.

“What?” Adam spit into his face. “Is that not what you’re doing here? A little private charity project? Picking up poor people like me, giving them more time than they ever had and making them your pets?”

“That is certainly not what I’m do-”

“Let me ask you a question, Richard Campbell Gansey III.”

Adam was too loud and he was too harsh and he hated being ruled by his anger, but he had things to say, questions to ask that he needed answered, preferably as soon as possible.

“What is it that you get out of it? I mean, I guess I can see how those years you gifted to me don’t mean anything to you, but still, nothing is ever for free. You made it sound like you needed my help with your car, but it doesn’t make sense. How does Ronan fit into this? What does he give you? You let him live in your house, you take care of him. You save his life, over and over again. You give him as much of your time as he takes even though you know that he wastes it without a second thought. If I’m your stray, then what is Ronan?”

Gansey shook his head, then stilled, looking at Adam, his lips pressed into a thin line. Again, he shook his head before he spoke. “You misunderstand,” he said. “You’re neither a stray nor a pet. You’re a person. I let you live here because there’s space nobody else needs. You saved my life, I’m helping you out. I’m sorry if I made you feel like it was any other way.”

Adam sighed. “You’re not answering my real question.”

“Again,” Gansey replied, “you misunderstand. Ronan is a different story. He’s not from your side of town. I didn’t pick him up as a project, he’s been my friend since we went to school together. As I said, he’s like a brother to me. We grew up in this building together. I’m not letting him live off of my time. That capsule you got from behind the bathroom mirror? It’s his. Ronan has more time than he can possibly ever lose to Kavinsky.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” Gansey hummed softly. “Neither do I. But I know him. He hasn’t always been this way, and eventually, he’ll be better again. It’s not my place to tell you any more about it.”

“Doesn’t his time have any worth to him?” Adam asked. He couldn’t deal with this. Every second of his life had been spent obsessing over how much time he had left, how much time he needed to earn, how expensive things were, how to get through the next day. He’d assumed Ronan was the biggest asshole in the world and therefore willfully throwing away Gansey’s time, but why would he ever do that with his own?

“It’s not that simple, Adam. We all have our issues, right?”

“Ronan doesn’t have issues,” Adam commented, “he has a death wish.”

Gansey was silent for a moment. Adam felt sick all of a sudden. “I know it can’t continue like this,” Gansey whispered. “Ronan knows it too. I’m just trying to keep him alive until he finds a way out.”

Adam wanted to protest. He was no stranger to broken lives and damaged souls. Something about the way Gansey spoke about Ronan made him want to believe there was a good enough reason for Ronan to act all crazy. Gansey’s love and dedication made him want to believe there was something behind all the shadows and the sharp edges that was worthy of those things, but it was hard. Ronan was playing with fire, and Adam had touched too many flames not to be angry about it.

“He needs to find a better coping mechanism,” Adam said, sounding bitter. He was making it about himself when it wasn’t, but Ronan didn’t have the right to own an immeasurable amount of time and not know to appreciate it. Adam despised the idea that a decade, or a year, or even an hour didn’t make a difference, and the fact that neither Ronan nor Gansey, for that matter, could see what was wrong with it drowned him in frustration.

“He needs many things. We’re working on them.”

“No,” Adam said. He couldn’t accept it. “You don’t understand. He gave up over a thousand years today. But you don’t even know how much that is, do you?”

“It’s a lot, I know.”

“You don’t know,” Adam insisted. “You have all this time, but really, it’s just numbers to you, isn’t it? It doesn’t make a difference if there’s one zero more or less on your timer, because an eternity is still an eternity. You wanted to give me a century and you said it was nothing, but it’s not nothing. One year isn’t nothing. One hour isn’t nothing. You don’t get to throw away all that time when there are people at the other end of town starving! You don’t get to pretend like not every single one of those minutes counts!”

“I understand,” Gansey nodded. “You have every right to be mad.”

“Do you though?” Adam wanted to know. “You like to wear these sweaters, right?”

Gansey gave him a confused look and Adam let out a bitter laugh. He was fairly certain he should give up. Their conversation wasn’t going anywhere except Adam getting upset. But what use was it, if Gansey didn’t seem to speak the same language as he did?

Adam looked down at his hands, at his wrist, the vein standing out from his skin, a faint blue shimmer shining through it. Life. Like the digits on his forearm, blue as well, but brighter. He sighed deeply, his voice way more quiet when he began to explain.

“I own one long-sleeved piece of clothing, Gansey. Where I come from, everyone does. It’s our one outfit for special occasions. Christmas and such, when we pretend that our world isn’t ending for a couple of hours.”

Gansey didn’t say anything, didn’t interrupt, but he was looking at Adam, listening.

“It’s because we need to see. When I’m in the middle of work, or when I have my hands full, whatever I’m doing, I need to be able to check my timer. I need to make sure I’ll survive. We all start doing it that way eventually. Maybe in the beginning, you cover your arm because you can’t deal with the red. But if you want to stay alive, you have to accept it. Sometimes, when I’m lying beneath a car, I’m literally working against the time. I know I won’t be paid until the problem’s fixed, so I give everything I have in me. And when I do that I need to know how much time I have left.”

Adam could hear Gansey swallowing. “I didn’t know that.”

“Why would you, right? You don’t have to worry about such things. You don’t have to check every minute to know you’re going to be alright.”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Adam. No, I don’t know what it’s like to live with the red. I’m sorry I wasn’t here while Ronan dragged you back into that.”

“I don’t care that I almost died,” Adam said. If he was being honest to himself, he’d felt some sort of relief at the red returning to his arm where it felt like it belonged. “Almost dying is basically just my life. I care that Ronan doesn’t give a shit about it. He didn’t have to give me two hundred years to make up for it. Actually, that makes it a little worse. It just proves that he doesn’t care about these years either.”

“Have you ever considered that in a way, we’re all ruled by the same system but in different ways?” Gansey asked. He was being cryptic, or so Adam thought, but in Gansey’s eyes he could see sincerity. Something was going on that Adam didn’t know about. Something he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in on.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gansey said, “but it sounds to me like you don’t think Ronan has the right to struggle as much as you do because he’s rich and you’re not.”

Adam thought about it. “Well, yeah. I mean, I’m not saying everything’s easy for him in life, but at least he has a life that he knows isn’t going to end. Literally, every problem I have ever had could have been fixed with more time. He’s got all the opportunities. In his place, I’d be taking that time and doing something with it. Something that matters.”

“You’re wrong,” Gansey said with a sad smile as he got up. “But I trust you’ll see for yourself.” He gave Adam one last look and turned away to the door. When Gansey’s hand was pressing down the door handle, Adam decided he had one more question that needed to be asked, so he simply blurted it out.

“Have you ever thought about not saving him?”

“No,” Gansey shook his head. “Did you?”

“What?”

“When you were with him after the race and both of your time was running out, did you think about not saving him?”

Adam’s lips parted, ready to let out a reply, but in his head he didn’t know. He had to think for a second. It wasn’t a pleasant memory, Ronan’s silence and red numbers and the bitter taste of pure fear. He hadn’t thought about anything else than making it in time.

“No,” he answered, only finding that it was the truth after the word was already out. Gansey nodded knowingly before he left, closing the door behind him so silently that it gave Adam a brief moment of dissatisfaction.

*

After his conversation with Gansey, Adam felt restless. He hated things he didn’t understand. Someone could have explained to him and he would have followed, he was sure, but he had a feeling that Gansey wasn’t going to share everything he knew and Ronan was going to share nothing that Adam could ever want, so he accepted his fate for the moment and decided to go out for a walk, or a run, wherever his feet would carry him, preferably until he’d be exhausted enough for his brain to simply stop working.

Adam pushed through the heavy front door and outside, sucking in a deep breath in the hope of getting more, cleaner air into his lungs, but it was too hot outside, too dry and sticky and not what he needed. Adam began walking, for some reason not down the street that he’d already familiarized himself with, but around the house and into the direction of the woods that followed after what was supposed to be a meadow but looked burned. Dead grass crackled beneath his hasting steps and Adam wished there’d been a way not to make any noise while moving.

His heartbeat slowed down when he reached the trees, maybe because he was finally surrounded by enough green to feel like he had escaped Monmouth Manufacturing, maybe because the soft ground swallowed his steps, maybe because the shadows cooled his skin. Maybe because it smelled like he’d found one of the rare places where no human was making a mess of destruction.

Adam slowed, realizing that he wasn’t moving in order to get anywhere, that he didn’t want to discover the end of the little forest. He just wanted to be alone where nobody could see him as he struggled not to go off the rails that were everything he’d ever known in life, where nobody could catch him thinking and not immediately making sense of everything. Where he could be weak for a moment and tell himself it didn’t count even though he knew better, even though he was the one who’d just held a big speech about how every damn minute mattered.

A few minutes later, Adam wasn’t really moving in any direction anymore, he was just roaming, breathing and listening to the trees talking. He was calmer, not because he was suddenly okay with all the strange things going on, but logically, he knew that there was no point in getting hung up on them. He wasn’t going to get an apology, but he wasn’t going to get to see remorse in Ronan’s eyes, either, so there really was no point in waiting for one.

His body changing directions as many times as his mind did, Adam lost track of time and his sense of orientation, which - strangely enough - didn’t scare him half as much as it should have. He had nowhere to be, nobody to come home to, no work his life depended on, no goal, no purpose, just himself, and he wasn’t sure anymore whether that was not enough for him or too much entirely. Adam looked down at his arm, at his timer, searching for the numbers that would ground him, would give him a kind of certainty, but they were blue, of course, so they didn’t give him anything at all except the feeling that he was undeserving maybe.

Before he could catch himself spiraling, Adam tripped, but didn’t fall. He’d stepped over sticks and roots and dodged low-hanging branches without paying any conscious attention whatsoever, but all of a sudden he was thrown off, and when Adam let his eyes follow the noises he made out somewhere behind a tree, he almost had to laugh at what they found.

Ronan Lynch, of course, because he didn’t even have to try to throw Adam off. A part of Adam wanted to run in the opposite direction. Ronan hadn’t seen him. He was sitting on a tree trunk with his face turned away from where Adam was hiding. Pale arms and dark ink covering a broad neck was all that Adam could see, and then a shoulder that caught his attention because there were curves where Adam expected edges, and he couldn’t tear his gaze away.

A second part of Adam wanted to step closer and take a look. Although he couldn’t understand the words, he heard Ronan speaking, voice less low and less rough as usually, so much less that if Adam hadn’t still seen Ronan in the man sitting in front of his eyes, he would have described it as soft. Gentle. He felt like he was witnessing something that had to be secret at the very least, if not a reason to be murdered by Ronan the next time he’d be foolish enough to sleep, but he couldn’t go. He demanded answers, although he wasn’t sure which questions to ask, answers as to why Ronan was like this now when he never even tried around actual people. It was in that moment that Adam caught sight of the raven.

It was a little black bird, seemingly breakable in Ronan’s hand, but unafraid, cocking its head to look at the human, letting Ronan feed it, taking whatever it was that he was giving it from his fingers. Adam held his breath as he watched the scene, expecting for the bird to fly away at any given moment, to flee at least when all the food was gone, but nothing happened except murmured words, presumably in a foreign language, leaving Ronan’s mouth and the raven listening to them as well as Adam did, seemingly fascinated.

Adam watched as Ronan raised one finger, slowly and carefully, bringing it next to the bird’s head. A moment of sadness came over Adam, sadness that the raven was going to take off, that the magic would be broken, but nothing happened. Ronan touched the raven gently, finger touching her little head and neck, and Adam released a breath before he turned around and started to run before the tears that had no place in his eyes could catch him.

*

It was late at night and Adam was finally tired enough to want to close his eyes and let himself fall out of consciousness. He sat on his bed in a pair of plaid pyjamas that he’d always thought didn’t exist outside of television, but Gansey proved to be a collection of slightly crooked and twisted clichés, non-matching and kind of amusing.

Adam looked at his timer, because he couldn’t not check his remaining time before going to sleep, even though he now knew there was enough of it to sleep through the night and then spend a lazy morning in bed, or a lazy rest of the week, or the year, for that matter. He would never get used to the blue digits, and for a brief moment, he wondered whether the reason the color itself - in the shape of numbers on an arm or not - was so unfamiliar to him was that the people he’d grown up around had somehow banned the reminder of wealth they didn’t have from their part of the town.

Deep in pointless thought, Adam was startled into an embarrassing jump when the door was pushed open almost violently, almost as if Ronan hadn’t bothered with its handle in the first place, as if he’d simply crashed through and the door had yielded.

“The fuck is your problem?” Ronan snarled, standing uncomfortably close in front of Adam, chest heaving and sinking more prominently than it should have. Adam felt a physical urge to move in one of two directions; either away from Ronan and out of arm’s reach, or close enough to hide his ridiculous outfit from the icy blue eyes boring into him.

Why Adam was intimidated, he didn’t have an explanation for. Ronan wasn’t the one who had any right to utter accusations. Still, the way his nostrils were flaring, hands balled into fists, made Adam want to defend himself, except that he didn’t know how. It should have been obvious what his problem was, even to someone as ignorant of other people’s feelings as Ronan Lynch, so Adam closed his parted lips without saying anything, possibly staring.

“Oh, I am?” Ronan snorted. He switched from anger to condescending sarcasm in a matter of milliseconds, which Adam found a little scary. “ I’m your problem, stray? Solve it, then.”

He stood there, jaw tense, his posture steady and slightly leaned forward. What exactly was he expecting Adam to do?

“Excuse me?”

Adam hated how dumb he sounded, how little and weak, but he didn’t know how to deal with someone like Ronan, who was like a bomb that would either go off in a second or turn out to be a joke on Adam’s expense.

“You want to tell me what an asshole I am?” Ronan spat. “Go on then. No need to bottle it all up, I promise it won’t hurt the devil’s feelings, Stray. You want to hate me for having all the time you don’t? Fine, see if I care. You want me to pay you back more?” Ronan held out his hand, still shaped into a fist, but with the soft inside of his wrist presented, offered to Adam. “Take what you need. You want revenge for almost dying? Go ahead. Drain me.”

Adam shook his head. Where was all of this suddenly coming from, after days of silence? Ronan didn’t seem very remorseful. If anything, he had found some mysterious reason to be mad at Adam.

“You’re only making it worse,” Adam growled. “I don’t want your time. I wanted you to want to keep it for yourself, but I guess you’re a lost cause, if you can’t even pull yourself together for Gansey.”

Adam saw Ronan’s eyes widening and a second later, he was pressed into the mattress, fists clenching around the collar of the borrowed pyjamas, Ronan’s face so close to his own that it didn’t look like Ronan anymore.

“Leave Dick out of this,” Ronan said, voice low, but loud and clear, steady. It sent chills down Adam’s spine. So whatever had come over Ronan, it was most likely related to Adam and Gansey having a talk about him. “You don’t get to make him feel bad for the things I do.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Adam replied, because he wasn’t. He was just curious, or maybe curious wasn’t quite the right word to call it, maybe he was more desperate to make sense of the living chaos that was Ronan, and frustrated because every question earned either sarcasm or retaliation.

“You did. And you won’t do it again, are we clear? Next time you and I have an issue, you grow a pair and throw a punch, or run me over with my car, or something.”

Ronan’s breath was hot where it came in puffs against Adam’s cheek.

“Have you considered not having any issues with me again?” Adam asked. He didn’t know why. He sounded like a child, a little bit like he was going to cry if Ronan said no.

By the way Ronan looked at him, Adam could tell that he was taken by surprise.

“I have,” he answered with a bemused smile on his lips, “I just don’t think it’s realistic.”

With a push against Adam’s chest, he got off of him, stepping away from the bed and heading towards the door as if they’d just had a normal conversation between roommates and he was now happy with the result and leaving again.

“Which car, Ronan?” Adam asked, holding his breath as Ronan turned before walking out the door. There was no sense to his question, but he’d wanted - needed to say something more, afraid of them simply going back to not having anything to say to each other.

“What?”

Ronan looked at him, and the brief moment of a puzzled expression on his face felt like a victory.

“Which of your dozen cars am I going to run you over with?”

Adam wouldn’t call it a smile, but the corner of Ronan’s mouth quirked up. Together with the slightly changed shade of color in his eyes, it made him look like a new Ronan, closer to the one at the mystery barns than any other version Adam had met so far, but still not quite the same, still unfamiliar. Not unwelcome, though.

Instead of answering, Ronan buried a hand in the pocket of his ripped into barely more than denim shreds jeans, fishing around until he tossed a key at Adam, who was still half lying on the bed, propped up on his elbows, unable to catch it, the key hitting him against the chest, but the slight sting of pain couldn’t take the feeling of triumph away from him.

Ronan shook his head and pulled the door closed from the outside. For ten seconds, Adam listened to his own breathing, and then Ronan’s typical, terrible music-noise started to sound from the other side of the wall they shared, causing Adam to release the tension in his body and relax into his bed, car key buried beneath his pillow.

Chapter Text

Only at Monmouth Manufacturing, and only with Gansey and Ronan as his roommates, could the request to be run over with a car ever lead to peace, but Adam wasn’t going to complain about it. He kept the key to Ronan’s BMW in his pocket at all times, no matter where he went, even if he didn’t dare to drive it around. He was sure Ronan wouldn’t have minded, but something still held him back every time he considered the possibility.

Adam picked up a couple of his old jobs, not all of them, since he didn’t need them anymore. While Gansey was busy scribbling into the thick, clearly well-used notebook he always had on him, sighing deeply, putting his glasses aside to rub his eyes every now and then, Adam spent an entire day taking a look inside the Camaro Gansey called The Pig, doing what he could to prevent future damage, cleaning up the engine, feeling a little bit like a kid with a toy train, not that he’d ever owned one of those.

For several days, Ronan had neither actively tried nor avoided being an asshole, he was simply Ronan, sharp at the edges and honest, not in the things he said but in the ways he let his expressions show exactly what he thought. Like on the night when all three men debated for half an hour what they were going to eat, including Ronan telling the story of how Gansey had gotten himself banned from Nino’s by tipping a waitress he had a crush on decades upon decades in spite of her telling him to stop. It was the first time Adam consciously noticed Gansey blushing and it was hilarious until the topic changed to the never ending pineapple-on-pizza-yes-or-no discussion. Gansey was a firm yes, Adam said no, and Ronan’s eyebrows said he judged both of them.

Things like that happened, kept happening, things that made him laugh and forget that time was passing for a moment. It wasn’t much of a shock to Adam that they did, what really threw him off was the fact that they happened without him realizing, only looking back when he was alone again at night, remembering the events of the day but not feeling like the same person who’d lived through them anymore, as if he’d been high for as long as Ronan and Gansey had been around him.

Ronan and Adam never really talked without Gansey around, not since the curious and strangely heated discussion on top of Adam’s bed. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t have things to say to each other, it seemed more like the things they had to say were nearly  impossible to put into words so they lived side by side in momentary peace, making confessions every day, giving promises, offering agreement without ever saying anything out loud.

For two people as fundamentally different as Ronan and Adam, it should have been difficult to interact that way, or at least less natural, but it wasn’t. It came easily, in fact, showing in a million different tiny little things, like the fact that Ronan left his music turned on at top volume even when he went out at night even though Adam had never told him how he couldn’t sleep without the noise anymore, which technically, Ronan could absolutely not have known, or Adam pretending like he’d cooked too much food and subtly sliding Ronan a plate with the rest piled on top of it.

Gansey wasn’t so much the type of person to keep silent about issues that bothered him, so one morning when they were all having breakfast together, he and Adam at the kitchen table and Ronan sitting on top of the kitchen counter, Gansey asked Adam what he planned on doing with all the time he now had. It seemed like an odd question at first, expectant, like fixing cars wasn’t good enough for someone living under the same roof as Richard Campbell Gansey III, but only as long as it took Adam to look up and into genuinely curious, hazel brown eyes lingering on him.

“I don’t know,” he answered, not because he lacked ideas, but because the thoughts running through his head would have been ridiculed in the world he came from and he wasn’t used to the people around him asking questions without paying him back for the answers in the form of judgment, or worse, mockery.

Both Gansey and Ronan watched him for a moment, chewing slowly, keeping their comments to themselves, but clearly waiting for him to come up with a better reply. He had a future now, Adam reminded himself. He wasn’t a freak for dreaming anymore, on the contrary, he would have been a freak if he hadn’t.

“I suppose I could go back to school after all,” Adam shrugged. It was the first thing that came to his mind. He’d missed learning new things as a main occupation. “Maybe even get something close to a high school degree. See what I can do with it.”

“Wait,” Ronan interrupted his uttered out thoughts. “You didn’t finish high school?”

Adam shook his head. “Not a lot of kids do where I’m from.” It was true. Adam was by far not the brightest star in Henrietta that had been dimmed before ever really getting the chance to shine. “My mom pushed me through middle school, but after that it was over. I knew how to read and write and do basic math. That’s not exactly- Well, it’s not something that can be said about every other kid I grew up with. I simply couldn’t afford to go to school any longer, so I started working.”

Ronan set down his bowl of cereal, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, looking like something shocked him at least a little for the first time since Adam had met him.

“Bullshit,” he said, voice rough and more aggressive than he had any right to be. “You were a kid. Your time wasn’t even counting down yet. You could have done whatever you wanted.”

Adam looked back at him and swallowed. He didn’t know who’d given Ronan permission to be the way he was while looking the way he did, suddenly turning into a defender of people who didn’t have the time he thoughtlessly wasted on a daily basis.

“What world do you live in?” Adam asked, although he knew the answer. It was the same world he’d recently set foot in, the one where numbers on forearms were blue and death a foreign concept. “I had parents, Ronan. Parents whose roof I lived under. I ate the food from their fridge and wore the clothes they gave me. They’d given me enough time for an education that would give me opportunities later and then I had to pay them back.”

Ronan snorted, unconvinced, and very, deeply unamused. “They were your parents . They had you .”

The thing was, in a part of Adam’s brain, he knew how far from ideal his upbringing had been. He even thought that Ronan was right, kind of. There was a reason why he hadn’t seen either of his parents in a long time, and why he wasn’t interested in going back. They’d given him nothing but what he’d needed to survive and asked for a lot in return. Still, there was no point in Ronan’s anger towards them. Every family among the poor was broken in a similar way, because even morals weren’t free.

“It doesn’t work like that for all of us,” Adam shrugged. He didn’t feel like stopping and unpacking everything he had to explain in order to make Ronan see his point. “Doesn’t matter anymore though, does it? Now I’m here, I’ve got enough time. I can go back to school. I can learn whatever the hell I want to.”

“Exactly,” Gansey nodded with a soft smile. He’d been noticeably quiet during their conversation, but at that moment, his encouraging expression was easier to look at than Ronan’s pissed-off one. “You should check out Aglionby Academy’s program. Ronan goes there, too.”

Now it was Adam’s turn to be shocked. The mental image of Ronan sitting at a school desk and raising his hand before speaking was so ridiculous that he almost spat out the orange juice he’d been about to swallow.

“Don’t choke, Stray,” Ronan growled, hopping off of the kitchen counter, seemingly uncomfortable with being the center of attention. “I study latin.”

Adam didn’t know what to say to that. Mostly because he was afraid Ronan would punch him for breaking the unspoken rule between them, but at the same time, he realized that he wouldn’t know which question to start with.

“Were you ever in class in all the time I’ve been here?” He finally asked. Not only had Ronan never mentioned school, he’d never let Adam catch him studying either, or doing homework, or any sort of work for school whatsoever. In fact, he wouldn’t even have believed Ronan owned a pen.

“I don’t really do class,” Ronan said to brush the topic off before he left the kitchen, putting on a leather jacket over the black tank top he was wearing and disappearing god knows where while Adam was left dumbfounded, looking at Gansey for help, eyebrows raised, but Gansey didn’t have much to say about it.

“He really doesn’t,” Gansey shrugged. “They’re not happy with his attendance, but he aces each and every exam so they let him be.”

“Or maybe they’re scared of him,” Adam murmured. He was being half sarcastic, but Gansey didn’t pick up on it, nor did he take offense on his friend’s behalf.

“Maybe.”

And that was it, the conversation was over, Gansey’s attention directed at the newspaper in his left hand and the phone in his right hand at the same time, Ronan was gone without an explanation, leaving Adam with an abundance of unanswered questions and unfamiliar emotions, shaking his head as he stood up and washed the dishes before he retreated to his room. He didn’t feel like Ronan Lynch should be taken as a role model, but the fact that even Ronan could keep up an academic career gave Adam hope.

It had been over a decade since he’d last gone to school, but he wasn’t completely against trying it, so he spent the morning browsing Aglionby Academy’s website on a laptop he borrowed from Gansey until his head was dizzy, maybe from looking at the computer screen for so long, or maybe from the sheer amount of unexpected possibilities opening up right in front of his eyes.

*

“I’m not getting in a car with you,” Adam insisted. He, Gansey and Ronan were standing in front of Monmouth Manufacturing with half a dozen suitcases, all of which contained things Gansey couldn’t leave behind during his work trip. Only because there was so much luggage, Adam had agreed to tag along and drop Gansey off at the airport.

For once, Adam agreed with Ronan on the fact that Gansey could have taken his private helicopter, but Gansey had an entire speech about a person’s ecological footprint prepared, and it was too early to have that kind of discussion. Ronan’s car it was, except that Adam had a tiny little problem with that.

Ronan rolled his eyes, “You’re not seriously still holding that against me.”

Out of all the things Adam was holding against Ronan, yes, that was absolutely the peak. “You’re making it sound like we didn’t both almost die the last time,” Adam spat back. He’d never expected to grow very old, but he definitely wasn’t ready to die just yet.

“I can drive,” Gansey offered. Adam thought that he deserved an award for never sounding annoyed when talking to or about Ronan. It was truly impressive.

“Dick,” Ronan replied, giving him an intense stare. It looked like there was going to be more than the simple “No.” that followed.

“Ronan, please,” Gansey sighed, “this once?”

“Why the fuck are you looking at me like I’m the one being difficult right now?” Ronan objected, clearly offended by Gansey’s plea. His fist was tense around the car key, his jaw even more tense, eyes dark.

“Forget it,” Adam groaned, “I’m going back to bed. Let him have his way.”

When he’d already turned around, hands buried in the pocket of his hoodie, ready to climb up the stairs and fall into bed again, Ronan called after him. It took Adam’s sleepy brain a second to process the fact that it wasn’t an insult, and it wasn’t Ronan having the last word.

Strangely enough, it was a compromise.

“What was that?” Adam asked, turning around, unsure whether he was dreaming.

Ronan looked at him, stubbornly and right into his eyes. “You can drive us,” he said again, loud and clear. “You have a key. You can drive.”

Maybe, if it hadn’t been extra early in the morning and Gansey hadn’t had a plane to catch, there would have been a conversation. About why Ronan refused to let Gansey drive his car but offered the same to Adam without a second thought or even a moment worth of hesitation. About why giving in, as much as it seemed to go against Ronan’s very nature, was better than driving without Adam. But in the rare moments of Ronan’s sincerity, brief and without explanation, Adam was afraid to overstep boundaries he wasn’t aware of, so he nodded, fished the key Ronan had given him out of his pocket and helped the other two cramming Gansey’s suitcases in the trunk and the backseat.

While Adam had had his reservations about driving around in another man’s car before, doing exactly that while Ronan was quietly seated to his right felt wrong. He was sure that Ronan wanted to comment on his driving, on the way he treated the BMW, and every time he stole a glance, finding nothing but a relaxed body, arm propped up and making a pillow against the window, eyes empty and somewhat hollow, it almost pained him. It was during those hours that Adam thought for the first time that Ronan’s asshole side might have grown on him, that not getting to see it made him feel like missing something.

“One day, you’re going to have to explain to me what exactly it is that you’re doing,” Adam said to Gansey after the latter had ended a phone call promising that he was already on his way.  

“One day I might,” Gansey said with a smile.

He turned to Ronan next, but Ronan shook his head, telling him not to bother with the please-behave-this-time speech. Gansey didn’t. They said their goodbyes and walked into opposite directions, Gansey’s mind already fully focused on his business and Adam’s on where the hell Ronan had managed to disappear to so quickly. He was not a nanny, he reminded himself, and on top of that, he was not the one depending on the other to get back home, so what did he care what shenanigans Ronan was currently getting up to?

No, he didn’t. Absolutely not.

*

“You weren’t going to go home without me, were you?” Ronan grinned, catching up with Adam when he was about to get back into the BMW.

“You weren’t going to get yourself in whatever kind of trouble again,” Adam replied dryly, “were you?”

Ronan’s grin widened as he held out one of the plastic cups of coffee in his hands, offering it to Adam. “I wasn’t. I was getting us coffee for the way home. Thank you for your trust, Stray.”

“Fuck off,” Adam mumbled, without any edge in his voice. The hot beverage both warmed and woke him, and although a curse was better than a thank you towards Ronan, he did indeed feel grateful for it.

“So, now that we’re unsupervised again, how about we have some fun, huh?”

“No,” Adam said, dead serious.

“You want me to just shut up then?” Ronan asked.

Adam maneuvered the car through the city traffic and towards the highway.

“Should I pretend to be asleep, too?” Ronan continued, daring him. “So you don’t have to shit your pants because I might do something crazy and actually live?”

“That’s not what I call the thing that happened with the car race, Ronan,” Adam replied. Ronan didn’t have the right to make it sound ridiculous. It was easy to tell it as a fun little story, but to someone who could still taste the panic on their tongue, it wasn’t quite that entertaining.

“Man, I apologized for that. Are you ever going to let it go?”

“Actually,” Adam noted, “you didn’t. Apologize, I mean.”

He could feel Ronan’s eyes like daggers boring into his skin. Adam pursed his lips and waited.

“Fine,” Ronan sighed. “I’m sorry. Are you happy now? Do you feel better?”

“No.”

“See?” Ronan shrugged. “Because apologies are bullshit. Because they don’t change what’s already happened. Why would you ever apologize for something you meant when you did it? What sense does it make?”

“It would make sense, if you were actually sorry. And in that case, yes, it would make me feel better.”

“You know what saying sorry reminds me of?” Ronan asked. And then, when Adam stared straight ahead instead of answering, he continued, “My mom forcing me to go over to the neighbor’s lady because she’d complained about me spying around and looking through the window inside her bedroom while was undressing.”

Adam wasn’t sure what the most unsettling part of that story was. Maybe the mental image of Ronan being a young boy, not yet hardened and sharped around the edges, not the devil, but a mother’s son.

“So you’re a pervert,” Adam mumbled, “big shocker.”

“What? You think I cared about those tits of hers that reached to her knees? I sure as hell did not. It wasn’t my fault that her window was right in front of my favorite tree to climb, and it wasn’t my fault that she decided to get naked without checking first if anyone could see her. It’s not like I looked. I couldn't have cared less. If anything, she should have been the one to apologize to me. I was a kid, and she’d traumatized me. My mom didn’t even think any differently about it, but she made me buy flowers and say sorry anyway.”

“I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to take away from that story,” Adam commented. He really wasn’t.

“I feel like every time I’ve told someone I was sorry, it was because it was expected of me,” Ronan explained. “What’s it worth, then? Basically, that’s lying. And when I lie, I do it for my own advantage.”

“So you lied to me, just now when you said you were sorry,” Adam concluded.

“Yes. To prove a point. You’ll hear me apologizing for real if I ever actually feel regret for something.”

“You’re so full of shit, Ronan,” Adam said.

Ronan laughed. “And you think you’re not? Fine. Tell me something you feel sorry for.”

Adam let out a bitter laugh, only to show Ronan how little he was even considering it. “Why the hell would I share anything with you?”

“Because I asked you to,” Ronan replied promptly.

Not a good enough reason, Adam thought. “Are you going to tell me what I ask of you too?” He wanted to know, not because he had any hopes to get to know a little of the chaos that was Ronan Lynch, but because he was sure it would shut him up. Against all odds, though, Ronan shrugged his shoulders.

“Yeah.”

The moment Ronan said it, Adam was sure it was a joke, but the moment stretched and it remained silent between the two of them, and with every passing second, the echo of Ronan’s answer changed its tone a little, or maybe Adam changed the way he chose to perceive it. Maybe, there was a crack in the stone cold surface that Ronan wore like a mask. Maybe, if he took a closer look, he’d find something beyond sarcasm and swearing, something untouched by alcohol and gambling and self-sabotage.

“Noah,” Adam heard himself saying. Nothing more, just that name. He realized in that moment that he hadn’t said it out loud since Noah had died.

“Okay,” Ronan nodded. “Who’s Noah?”

Adam swallowed. “Noah Czerny. My best friend for as long as I can remember. We were like brothers. We were supposed to be inseparable.”

As a general rule, Adam didn’t cry. He’d done it once in his adult life, and he remembered the lump in his throat and the burning of tears on his cheeks and he loathed the memory. He didn’t cry, and he sure as hell wouldn’t ever do it in front of Ronan, so instead, he hit the gas and went above the speed limit. If Ronan noticed, he didn’t let anything on.

“What happened to him?” Ronan asked.

“What happened to you ?” Adam spat back. He wasn’t mad at Ronan for asking, he was mad at himself for crumbling, for giving in first, for delivering answers he didn’t owe. Noah was none of Ronan’s business.

“What happens to all of us sooner or later,” Ronan whispered, “we lose something. And then we lose ourselves.”

“Nothing special,” Adam pressed out. “What happened to Noah wasn’t even worth a mention in the newspaper. He didn’t even make it through the first week after his time started running. He was killed for the few hours he had.”

Ronan said nothing to that. Adam wasn’t in the mood to ask any further questions himself anymore. He felt like he’d earned the right, but he wasn’t sure what exactly he was digging for, and he didn’t trust his voice to sound the way it was supposed to, and he was thinking about Noah now, about floppy, light blond hair flying in the wind and crooked teeth grinning and freckles and the exact smile that Noah would have had for Ronan, because no matter how angry Adam tried to be at the thought, somewhere deep inside him he couldn’t deny that the two of them probably would have gotten along perfectly, if in a really weird and twisted way.

The rest of the drive was quiet. Ronan turned on some music that was almost as rough and loud as the kind he usually listened to, and then he turned away, shutting up, either pretending to be asleep or actually slumbering until they arrived back in Henrietta and Adam suddenly needed to get out of the car and away, just away.

As it turned out, sometimes getting away was a lot harder than expected. While Adam was too caught up in his own thoughts as he parked the BMW in front of Monmouth Manufacturing, Ronan was the one who spotted the visitor they had, sitting on the front steps, waiting.

“The fuck is that clown?” Ronan grumbled, directing Adam’s attention at the slumped down figure. “You know him?”

Although the man looked older and sicker than Adam remembered, of course, he recognized him, the realization hitting him hard like a punch to the guts, but that wasn’t all. The punch to the guts was followed by claws digging through his skin, a fist closing around his insides and twisting them, ripping them out with a malicious laugh to watch him bleed.

“Adam,” the man said. Adam wanted to throw up. “There you are. Been looking for you.” Even before he came stumbling towards Adam, the alcohol in his breath sent a shiver down Adam’s spine. For years, he’d been thinking he’d escaped this exact kind of hell, but the nightmare was moving right up to him.

He was getting close, and Adam was getting small and weak. He didn’t want to, didn’t want that to be his reaction after he’d turned his life around so much, but it was, and his eyes lost focus, his body going numb, readying itself for whatever the hell was about to come for him.

Chapter Text

“And who the fuck are you?”

All of a sudden all that Adam could see were pale shoulders and a dark tattoo covering them. Ronan stood in front of him, back tense, hands balled into fists.

“Out of my way, you piss-poor excuse of a man,” the visitor snorted. He reached for Ronan, but his hand was slapped away and he was a little unsteady on his feet. When he looked back up, he looked angrier than moments earlier, eyes dark, heavy puffs of air escaping his flaring nostrils. “I came here to talk to my son and you will not stand between us.”

In fact, Ronan was standing right between them, unwavering.

“Adam,” the older man snapped, “you ungrateful little rat. What a nice home you’ve found here.” A thick, sweaty finger pointed at the brick warehouse that he’d been living in for the past couple of weeks, and then to the BMW he and Ronan had just arrived in. “And what a shiny car. And yet you didn’t think you should share any of that wealth with the people you owe your life and everything you are, huh?”

Adam swallowed thickly, closing his eyes. Not for a moment had he considered the possibility that his father would come and find him. He’d worried about a lot of things since the digits on his forearm had turned blue but not once about the one person who’d made his childhood and youth hell on earth. Not even for a second.

He could hear his father’s breathing, and it was disgusting, making him feel sick. He could hear Ronan’s breathing as well and for all the physical stillness, Adam could tell that on the inside, Ronan’s blood was beginning to run hot. Ronan tried so hard to seem like he didn’t care about anything, but he’d admitted to the exact opposite by stepping in front of Adam, and now he was about to snap.

“Come on, Adam,” his father said with an ugly grin, “give me your hand.”

“Don’t you dare touch him,” Ronan growled but to no apparent effect.

His father must be blind drunk, Adam thought, if he managed to mistake Ronan Lynch for harmless. A mistake. A stupid, fatal mistake.

“Go away,” Adam said, trying to keep his voice loud and clear. Ronan felt like a weapon, and for some reason, he still prefered not having to use it on the man he’d known for all of his life.

“Why so selfish, Adam? Don’t you have more than enough time now?”

A muscle twitched in Ronan’s right shoulder and Adam barely caught his wrist in time to stop him from throwing a punch. He wrapped his fingers around warm skin, feeling a pulse beneath his fingertips, letting it ground him, anchor him.

“You wasted your time coming here,” Adam said coldly. “I don’t owe you anything, and neither will I give it to you. Don’t bother again. We’re done here.”

With those words, he turned away. There were many more things he could have said, many more accusations to make. He was angry about all the years he’d been tortured by the man standing there, mad for countless punches and beatings and humiliations. Simply leaving wasn’t strong enough, wouldn’t hurt enough, but Adam had no hope to be heard, let alone understood, so he took all his anger with him and headed for the front door, letting go of Ronan’s wrist and the past of his broken family at the same time.

“You think you can just do that? Just wait, I’ll show you what-”

Adam heard his father mumbling words and then moving, ragged breathing and hurried steps, and then a crack followed by a thud and a cry.

“You little fucking bitch!” Robert Parrish cursed, his words muffled.

Adam turned around and found him on his ass in the dirt, blood running down the hand that was covering his nose and mouth, Ronan standing over him, glaring. They were closer to Adam than they’d been when he’d turned away. Ronan looked like a bomb ready to go off, even more so now that he’d thrown the punch.

“Ronan,” Adam said, because out of the two people he was looking at, he was the one that still mattered, “let’s go inside. Don’t get your hands dirty.”

In spite of looking surprised, Ronan complied and followed him inside the building, letting the door fall shut with a bang. Adam almost apologized but then he imagined Ronan shaking his head. His father being the way he was wasn’t Adam’s fault, and Ronan wouldn’t accept it as a reason to be sorry, so he closed his mouth and they both did what they did best, namely not talking about it.

“You should order us pizza,” Ronan declared, and Adam let out a sigh of relief. Some things were complicated with Ronan, more so than with anybody else he’d ever met, but some things were truly simple, and in that moment, he couldn’t have appreciated that more.

*

It was late at night when Adam woke up from a dream he couldn’t remember but had all his alarm bells ringing. Something wasn’t right, but then again, something was very right, and somewhere inside him he felt incredibly warm and fuzzy and honestly, Adam just wanted to go back to sleep and continue whatever had been going on in his thoughts. He turned from his back to his stomach and hissed. Oh no, he thought. Oh fuck.

Adam let one hand slip underneath the weight of his body, reaching for his middle, barely containing a moan when his fingers brushed over the tent in his damp pyjama pants. For a moment, Adam gave in to the temptation of rocking his hips and grinding into the mattress beneath him, but then flashes of his dream came back and he stilled, biting into his pillow.

Not only had he woken up hard and leaking, he’d woken up from a dream about Ronan. Out of all the cruelties life had to offer, Adam’s subconscious was the worst one, the biggest traitor.

Normally, he would have wrapped a hand around his dick and milked the inappropriate lust out of himself. Face pressed into the pillow to muffle his moans, he would have fucked into the mattress and changed the sheets later, would have gotten it out of his system, released the pressure and then moved on like before, but this time, it was about Ronan, and because of that, it couldn’t be that simple.

“Fuck my life,” Adam muttered, pushing himself out of bed. He looked down on himself, at a raging boner and blue shining through the thin cotton of his pyjama sleeve, almost laughing at how ridiculous the image was. Like a movie, his life had taken a few plot twists lately, and although he’d still call it a drama, all things considered, it sure did have its comedic moments.

Adam needed a cold shower. He tiptoed out of his room and into the hallway, only remembering that the shower in his usual bathroom was broken and he was supposed to use the other one when he was already in front of a wooden door, so he turned around and made his way to the other end of the dimly lit by moonlight hallway, entering through Gansey’s empty bedroom into the bathroom that lay between there and Ronan’s room. Considering the noise Ronan usually tortured him with, there was no reason at all to even try to be quiet, but the night was silent this time, and Adam didn’t want to be the one to disturb the peace.

Without turning the lights on, Adam retrieved a towel from the cupboard and placed it on top of the sink next to the shower cabin. He stripped off his clothes, biting his lip when the strained pyjama pants were finally gone and no longer restraining him. No, Adam reminded himself, he wasn’t supposed to feel relieved. He got into the shower and turned the water on, standing there and clenching his jaws as it sprayed his naked body, ice cold and almost hard against his skin.

Adam stood under the water for as long as he could take it without freezing to death. By the time he shut it off and reached for the soft towel, he was shaking like a leaf, and although his body wasn’t showing any signs of it anymore, his mind was still very much occupied with Ronan. Adam tried to wipe the thoughts away with harsh rubs over his damp skin, and while he was at it, he tried to wipe away the damn timer on his forearm as well, but in the dark, the digits shone as bright as ever.

“Shit, Stray, the fuck are you doing?”

Adam almost had a heart attack. He covered himself with the towel he was holding and looked in the direction where Ronan’s voice had come from, thicker and lower than it usually was. He would have liked the sound, possibly, if it hadn’t just tried to startle him to death.

“Me?” Adam gasped, groping the tiled wall of the room for the light switch. “The fuck are you doing? And for how long have you been sitting there?”

Adam wrapped the large towel around himself, hiding as much of his naked body as possible before turning the bathroom lights above the sink on. Ronan was lying at the opposite side of the room in the bathtub, a heavy, dirty boot resting on its ledge, a pillow offering him comfort behind his neck, a bottle of whisky clutched in his hand.

“Not sure,” he shrugged. Adam’s eyes fell to his forearm, but other than himself, Ronan didn’t keep track of time, and he probably wouldn’t even if he had as little of it as Adam was used to. Ronan’s arms were covered by the sleeves of a big, black sweater, the hood drawn over his head and deep into his face, making him look like there was nothing but a pair of piercing blue eyes, a sharp mouth and a pair of pale, wiry hands in the darkness. Adam wanted to touch him, wanted to see if it would burn his skin or cut it, wanted to know regardless what it would feel like.

“I thought you were out,” Adam stated, “I didn’t hear your music.”

“I was,” Ronan replied, sending a shiver down Adam’s spine. He raised the bottle in his hand to his lips. Adam caught a glimpse of his bruised knuckles and remembered the events of the day.

“Why did you hit him?” Adam asked out of nowhere, his voice barely above a whisper, like he was afraid to pose the question, but really, what he was scared of was Ronan giving him a sincere answer.

Ronan set down the whisky and considered Adam, his lips a thin white line, grim and serious.

“He’s not allowed to touch you. He was going to. I didn’t let him.”

“He’s not allowed to touch me?”

“Fuck off, Parrish,” Ronan sighed, taking another swig of his drink. “I said what I said. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

It was a big deal, Adam thought, not even because Ronan did care about some things after all, which Adam probably should have seen coming, but because he’d been upgraded from ‘Stray’ to ‘Parrish’, which still wasn’t the same as simply calling him Adam, but better, way better.

In a moment of what must have been insanity, Adam decided to climb into the huge bathtub and sit across from Ronan, to reach for the bottle in the other man’s hand and test the boundaries, expecting everything from being yelled at to a broken nose, but not the electric jolt that went through his entire body when their fingers brushed only for a short second.

Ronan let go of the whisky and watched bemusedly as Adam grimaced at the burning in his throat.

“Back to my original question,” Adam said, “what are you doing in the bathtub in the middle of the night?”

“Drinking,” came the immediate response. “Usually, Dick would keep me company right now, but he’s no fun when it comes to alcohol. He prefers to use his insomnia for pointless things like work.”

“I can’t imagine his work being pointless.”

“No,” Ronan shook his head, “we’re going to watch him change the world one day.”

“We are?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Ronan asked.

Adam sighed. It was strange to hear Ronan talking about Gansey. He was so much softer all of a sudden than ever before, although he still looked the same, sounded the same, but there was a silent kind of affection there, something that almost seemed sacred, and Adam didn’t know what to think of it.

“Are you going to change the world?”

Ronan let out a laugh that didn’t sound like a laugh at all. “No,” he said. “I don’t care enough about the world. I’m not the knight-in-shining-armor type of hero.”

“What kind of hero are you, Ronan?” Adam wanted to know. He could already feel himself getting tipsy, and how much of the whisky Ronan had had, only Ronan knew, so it was more a drunken conversation than anything else, but Adam really, genuinely wanted to know.

“I don’t know yet,” Ronan answered, which wasn’t much of an actual information, but it wasn’t a joke either, or an insult meant to divert the topic.

“How long do you think you’ll need to find out?” Adam asked. “How long do you think your life should be, ideally?”

Ronan chuckled and reclaimed the whisky, chugging down half of the remaining liquid inside it, head tilted back, Adam’s apple moving under his skin as he swallowed. Adam was watching, mesmerized.

“Dick says that scientifically, the ideal lifetime lasts about fifty years after you turn twenty-five.”

“Oh.” Adam looked down at where tiny blond hairs had risen from his skin and his timer informed him he currently had way more than that. “Fifty years? That’s all?” It was way above the life expectancy where Adam came from, but still not nearly as much time as he would have guessed.

“Yeah,” Ronan nodded. “There’s only so much life one person can take, I guess. You see, the time you’ve got only keeps you alive physically. Breathing in and breathing out isn’t all it takes though. As a human being, you have certain interests. You have a certain need for social interaction. To lead a fulfilling life, most of us need purposes in the shape of either a job we’re doing or a role we’re filling in a relationship. But there’s no unlimited growth in those things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple,” Ronan explained. “At some point, you’ve had enough. At some point, be it after fifty years or thirty or one hundred, but sooner or later, you’re full. You’ve learned the things that you wanted to learn, traveled the places you wanted to see, been friends with all the people you cared about. At some point, there’s nothing left. You just keep going on forever, but it’s not worth anything if there’s no end. Eternity is a curse, Parrish.”

“Says someone who doesn’t know what it’s like to be poor,” Adam muttered, taking back the whisky and drinking some more.

“I know it’s not fair,” Ronan said. “The point is, if you live forever, you might as well not live at all.”

“That’s not true,” Adam insisted, because it wasn’t. There was all the difference in the world between blue numbers and red ones.

“It’s just a different way of being dead.”

“It’s still the better way,” Adam pressed out. He was growing frustrated.

“Says who?”

“I imagine that Noah would,” Adam said coldly. Ronan had tried his best to get on the other side of death. Adam had been right there with him in the passenger seat of the BMW when it had happened, and he knew it had by far not been the first time. Scars grazed the insides of Ronan’s wrists like pressed flat earthworms, but other than Noah, who’d fought for his own survival on every day of his life, he was still breathing. He still had a tomorrow to put all his hopes on.

“Noah should have had more time,” Ronan began talking, but Adam didn't let him. He couldn’t listen to it. Just couldn’t.

“Yeah, Noah should have had a lot more time than he did. And there are a thousand Noahs out there, you know. Countless innocent little kids being born into that kind of life. Your pity doesn’t mean shit as long as you sit here with an eternity on your timer, and another eternity stored in a time capsule, throwing it away without a second thought because you’re bored.”

He stood up and held onto the towel around him with one arm, taking the rest of the whisky with him as well although he wasn’t the biggest fan of its taste, but Ronan didn’t deserve to get it back. Not tripping over his own feet was considerably harder than anticipated, but Adam’s grim determination to save himself from Ronan’s offensively sharp jawline led him to his room and under the sheets, towel dropped to the floor somewhere.

The bottle in Adam’s hand didn’t make much sense as he lay in bed, and for a second, he considered it, but then he simply emptied it all in one go, the burning now not even remotely as bad in his throat anymore. In fact, he thought that he quite liked it, and once the bottle was empty, Adam felt pretty okay. He closed his eyes, but of course, of course, he couldn’t have peace and quiet.

“It’s not because I’m bored,” Ronan said, crashing through the door and into the privacy of Adam’s bedroom, making him hyper-aware of his nudity.

“What?” Adam asked, clinging to the thin cotton sheets that were covering his body. Was it hot in his room?

“I’m not a good person, Parrish, but it’s not because I’m bored.”

“Is it because you’re the devil?” Adam asked, giggling. With the way Ronan looked down on him, blue eyes wide open, it seemed hilarious. Ronan’s face looked angelic, in a way. Adam wanted to laugh out loud.

“Maybe,” Ronan said, but they both knew that it should have been a no.

It was quiet, then, for a moment that would have given Adam anxiety if he’d been sober. In his current state though, he seized the moment to look at Ronan, not remembering why he usually didn’t allow himself to do it, why Ronan’s eyes catching him was such a terrible thing.

“You could say that you’re sorry,” Adam whispered, because he didn’t want to fight. He didn’t want Ronan to think that he hated him, because he’d tried and failed to do so.

“Am I, though?” Ronan asked, sitting down on the mattress, not touching Adam, but still so close that the heat of his body was radiating off of him and giving Adam chills. “And if so, then what exactly am I sorry for? For being born into a family that has endless time? Not my choice. For still being alive when Noah isn’t? Again, not my choice. For having time and still not being eternally happy? Grow up, Parrish, life isn’t that simple.”

“You could tell me something,” Adam offered instead. He wasn’t going to ever get an apology. “You could tell me something honest about yourself.”

“I’ve never not been honest with you.”

Adam shook his head a little too vehemently and then stopped himself before he could get sick from it. “What you mean is that you’ve never lied to me. That’s not the same.”

Ronan opened his mouth to respond, but apparently thought better of it. The black hood had come down, revealing the whole, unmatched beauty of his face. Although Adam could tell that that wasn’t what Ronan wanted people to see in him, he couldn’t find a way not to. Everything from the buzzcut to the cold stare to the ink in his neck was supposed to be a threat, but the sensible part of Adam’s brain was floating somewhere in the distance on the surface of an amber-colored lake of whisky, and the other part wanted to do something crazy, something completely insane, like maybe pulling Ronan down and trying the taste of his lips.

“Say something,” Adam pleaded, “you don’t need to hide from me.”

His heart was beating against his ribcage so violently that it was all that Adam could hear. Ronan’s eyelids fluttered down, but not quite shut. He was closer all of a sudden, and Adam didn’t know how it had happened. Who of them had moved? He? Ronan? Both of them?

Adam almost couldn’t stand the tension. He was waiting, not wanting to ask again. Ronan had to give in, had to take a step in his direction, or else, there was no reason for any of their current physical proximity. It felt fantastic, making goosebumps rise all over Adam’s skin, but it wasn’t enough.

“I have two brothers,” Ronan finally whispered, his words barely audible. “We grew up at the barns that I took you to. We don’t talk much,  which is for the better, mostly. Neither of them is anything like me. They wouldn’t know what to do with me if I ever…”

In that moment, Ronan’s eyes were back at Adam’s, making his heart skip a beat. Adam thought about the unspoken ending of Ronan’s sentence, about the time they’d only known each other for less than a day and both of them could have died.

“I didn’t know what to do with you either,” Adam said. He hadn’t thought about it. He’d simply driven like crazy and then run, adrenaline and sheer panic carrying him.

Ronan shook his head and put on one of his half smiles, half frowns.

“But you did,” he replied. “Do you think I wanted to die that day?”

Adam wasn’t sure how to answer that question. If not an attempt at suicide, then he didn’t know what else to call the events of their first day spent together.

“Did you?”

Again, Ronan shook his head. “If I had, I wouldn’t have brought you along.”

“I don’t get it,” Adam whispered quietly. “Why would you ever…?”

“You need to stop wanting answers from me that I don’t know, Parrish,” Ronan said. “The world is complicated. Life is complicated, and if you think a shit ton of time is all it takes to make it simple, you’re wrong. I didn’t die though. You didn’t die. We’re both still here.”

“And I want to stay here.”

“Yes,” Ronan nodded, “I want to stay too. Not forever, but I haven’t had enough just yet.”

“Anything in particular you’re thinking about using your time for?” Adam asked, feeling bold, his body tingling from the inside. Ronan’s breath came warm against his cheek.

“Maybe,” Ronan breathed out, and what spread on his lips after the word had faded into the air was the closest to a real, human smile Adam had ever seen on him. He couldn’t stop staring. Didn’t want to, either.

“Why don’t you do it, then?”

Without there being a conscious decision in favor of it, Adam’s body was suddenly incredibly close to Ronan’s, a hand wrapping around his arm. A slight tilt of a head, an inch closer, just a little more and they would have been kissing.

“Because you’re drunk,” Ronan said. It took Adam a moment to realize that the tone had changed, that the statement wasn’t one he liked. He wasn’t trying to be kissed by Ronan because of the whisky he’d had, didn’t Ronan know that?

“I’m scared you’ll have changed your opinion once the sun is up again,” Adam said, speaking out his exact thoughts. He hadn’t ever dreamt of getting so close, and he was afraid he wouldn’t get another chance.

“In that case you’d be lucky,” Ronan answered, visibly swallowing.

Part of Adam wanted to punch him in the face, and another part wanted to grab him by the neck and kiss him. He didn’t want the night to be over, didn’t want to go back to the reality where non-violent co-existence was the best he could hope for.

“You’re wrong,” Adam insisted, but Ronan was pulling away, emotionally even more than physically, and physically he was already off the bed and halfway out of the room. The moment was over, and all of Adam’s Ronan-related insecurities back.

“Maybe,” Ronan shrugged, “but that’s a risk I’m taking tonight.”

“I fucking hate you,” Adam muttered, hearing Ronan’s chuckle before the door clicked shut and he was left with the same taste on his tongue as he was used to from waking up after a dream, and that may have been the worst part of it. For a short time, it had appeared like Ronan was finally being real in front of him, and Adam loathed the thought that it hadn’t been the case.

He let himself fall back into the pillow, sighing loudly. What the hell was he supposed to do about this Ronan issue? How on earth was he ever going to get out of it with his stupid heart in one piece?

Chapter Text

Adam wanted to scream, and the worst thing about it was, he didn’t understand why. He knew where the feeling came from, could clearly picture its cause: piercing blue eyes and dark wings - but he didn’t think Ronan Lynch had the right to affect him this way.

Instead of sleeping, he put his clothes back on, trying to cover up the shame that he felt about his urgent wish to be close to Ronan while being naked. He pocketed his phone and wallet, but that was as far as sensible thinking went for the moment and when music started to sound from the room next door, Adam had to get out. He didn’t know where, but away.

The stairs reminded him of almost tripping when trying to save Ronan’s life, the main entrance reminded him of Ronan’s fist being sprinkled in his father’s blood. The area around Monmouth Manufacturing reminded him of a ridiculous number of BMWs and the woods he knew lay a bit in the distance reminded him of the soft touch of a hand on a raven’s feathers.

Adam looked down at his arm, at the glowing blue numbers telling him he was in possession of almost two centuries and while Gansey had somehow started all this madness in his life, Ronan was the reason. Ronan was the reason why Adam and Gansey had met in the first place, and Ronan was the one who’d transferred several lifetimes on Adam’s clock. Ronan was the one who made him angry, the one who made him remember Noah more clearly than on all the other days, the one that got under his skin.

And the one who’d rejected him.

Been reeling him in first, making Adam want to play with fire, only to push him away when Adam finally started to cave.

Adam knew he should be thankful. He was at least a little tipsy and saying that he was confused about his feelings would be the understatement of the century. He was fairly certain he would have regretted kissing Ronan in the morning or that Ronan would have found a way to make him regret it.

He wasn’t supposed to want to kiss someone whose lifestyle he despised so much. He wasn’t supposed to want to kiss someone at all. Adam Parrish’s life hadn’t started to be worth calling it that until he’d cut some ties and burned some bridges, until he’d freed himself and become independent. He belonged only to himself, and the one person he’d willingly given a part of himself had taken that part with him to a grave that didn’t even have a gravestone.

For months, Adam hadn’t thought much about Noah. Not that his death hadn’t hurt, or mattered, but Adam hadn’t had the time. After all dying young was nothing special where they’d come from, and statistically speaking, they always knew to expect exactly what had happened - for death to come between them before their first real year would be over.

Somehow, with Ronan in his life, Adam was able to feel a lot of the pain that had been there before but it hadn’t burned so badly, affected him so deeply. It was related to all the things Adam was suddenly mad about - not being able to change them, simply accepting the cruelties of the world he’d been born into, it wasn’t good enough anymore. It was related to having time, having so much of it that he felt uncomfortable looking at his forearm.

Adam walked, setting one foot in front of the other stubbornly, refusing to stop, although he didn’t know where he was going and tears were blinding him, blurring his vision. Life was ending for someone at the other end of Henrietta, probably right that moment, and life was ending all the time, and Adam couldn’t stop, because it wasn’t fair, because there were places to go and things to learn and people to get to know and feelings to explore and there was time - enough time for everyone, in theory - and he needed more, he needed to go further, he needed to run until he would taste something that would feel like life to him.

Adam passed by houses that were silent because their residents could afford to sleep peacefully through the whole night and houses that were brightly illuminated because the electricity bill wasn’t going to be the death of the families inside. He passed by exuberant parties and places that were as big and beautiful as they were abandoned.

He thought about the long list of things missing from his life when he’d been a child, a teenager, a young man, and he thought about the one thing missing from his life in that very moment. Then he realized that one form of misery wasn’t worse than the other. He thought about Ronan again, about countless scars on pale skin and red digits where they didn’t belong, about blue eyes fluttering shut and silence that had scared him more than anything he’d known before.

In a field somewhere outside of town, when the sun was soon going to be rising again, Adam dropped down to the ground, shaking, but not knowing whether it came from the cold or the whirlwind of emotions inside him, crying, exhausted, his body begging him to stop running. He looked up at the pastel colors in the sky and then discovered that an army of fireflies was surrounding him.

There was nothing to see except grass and a few single trees, almost-darkness and little sprinkles of warm, yellow light in every direction. Adam didn’t know where he was, and he hadn’t ever known there was a place as beautiful in Henrietta and he’d never seen fireflies, but he also hadn’t ever stopped and sat with the sole purpose of watching and admiring.

Slowly, Adam’s breathing calmed and the traces of tears dried on his cheeks but then a new wave threatened to crash over him, one that he could feel more intensely before it was even really there. He looked at the fireflies, at little lights appearing and disappearing here and there, at the mass that kept moving although one light was dimmed here and one went out there, and new ones turned up out of nowhere, keeping the wheel spinning.

Adam looked at his arm again, at the light that was blue instead of yellow, blue instead of purple, instead of red, and he thought that maybe, just maybe, it didn’t matter where he’d come from and it didn’t matter how much he’d lost. He thought that maybe Gansey had been right about the time making all people its victim in one way or another.

The darkness faded, and with it the fireflies, one after the other until not a single one was left. No matter how much time he had at the moment, Adam wasn’t immortal, and he didn’t want to be. Gansey could as well have been killed by some gangsters stealing his time. And Ronan could as well have been killed by himself, by whatever demons haunted him.

No light shone forever.

And nobody, no matter how much time they possessed, was safe.

Adam took a deep breath out and got up. The field wasn’t nearly as pretty without the little lightning bugs everywhere. His muscles were tired and aching but feeling a little bit of pain offered Adam a certain contentment. An easy life wasn’t worth fighting for. And the things worth fighting for were never easy.

No matter the accusations Adam had made towards Ronan for being an asshole, for wasting his time, Adam could see more clearly than ever that he’d made a mistake himself by letting himself believe that life would be better thanks to the blue digits on his skin. He’d pretended to be reluctant, but he’d taken the years gifted to him, same as he’d taken the room at Monmouth Manufacturing, hell, even the damn car keys Ronan had tossed at him. He’d taken the invitation to visit Gansey and Ronan’s world, and then he’d judged everything he hadn’t understood about it.

A decision was being made in his head has Adam walked back, not running this time, not hurrying, not with his feet and not in his mind. This time, he was being solid. Certain. Responsible. Realistic. A little more so with every step he neared the place that he’d wished to be a home to him for several weeks by then. He wasn’t sorry. Sorry wasn’t going to change anything, as Ronan had taught him. But Adam was.

Without apologies, Adam used the key Gansey had given him to get inside. Without apologies, he climbed the stairs and went into the room that held his few belongings. Without apologies, he packed everything he needed in a bag that was bigger somehow than the one he’d moved in with. Without apologies, he stopped in the hallway and pressed his ear against the door to Ronan’s room, listening to the blaring electronic music for a minute, moving on when his thoughts about Ronan turned too intense.

Without apologies, Adam crossed Gansey’s empty bedroom to access the little bathroom attached to it, reaching behind the mirror with much more purposeful movements than the last time he’d done it. He felt the time capsule in his hand, too small and too light considering all the time stored in it. The item came to life and Adam exhaled deeply, his fingers tense on its cold surface. Without apologies, he stood still as the minutes and hours and days travelled, his wrist and forearm tingling as the digits spun. When he finally let go, everything was back to normal, and although nothing could ever be the same again, Adam felt a certain relief.

The timer on his arm showed purple numbers, the same he remembered looking at last before stepping in to save Gansey’s life.

And with that, Adam was done. Done living his little adventure at the other side of life. Done dreaming of things that weren’t meant for him. Done wanting what could never be his. He left the key on the kitchen table and pulled the door closed behind him, breathing in fresh, cold morning air. It didn’t taste like a fresh start, and somehow, that comforted him.

*

Adam came back at exactly the right time. Although he was of course terribly late with the rent for his apartment by the time he’d come to his senses, he could still beg his landlord for another two days and then find a job that paid enough to get the required sum together. After neglecting his usual contacts for quite a while, the whole operation was difficult, but without significant breaks for irrelevant things like sleep, Adam managed.

The man he rented his crappy little place from wasn’t amused, and frankly, Adam was scared of him, but getting paid late was better than not getting paid at all and having to look for a new resident was effort, so Adam was given one last chance, and a very graphic threat of what would happen if he’d ever fuck up again.  

After only days, Adam’s back hurt from the cheap mattress more than from the constant lying on the ground beneath a car. Sometimes he caught himself being surprised at the number on his forearm because he wasn’t used to checking it every five minutes anymore. Sometimes he simply forgot the immediate danger to drop dead, and sometimes, when the digits turned out to be red, it didn’t fill him with the same amount of dread as it had used to in an earlier life.

Things shouldn’t have been different, and going back to normal shouldn’t have been hard, but they were, and it was, and every thought about it was accompanied by a thought about Ronan Lynch and how in a system that divided people into rich and poor, damned and immortal, Ronan seemed to be the only person who didn’t have a place, who refused to take the one he’d been assigned. Adam wondered if Ronan truly was as stupid as he’d thought so many times, or whether maybe, possibly, he was the only smart one of them all for his rebellion.

One day, after Adam’s timer had just gone from purple to red, an ugly, scary red, a red like fresh blood, his phone suddenly buzzed and while he took the call more than gladly, grateful that he might be hired for another job, he had absolutely no idea what was following.

Of course, he should have expected it sooner or later. He could run, yes, but he couldn’t hide, and he should have known that.

“Adam?” Gansey asked. Adam recognized his voice immediately. It sounded like no other, even when it was coming across slightly more frantic than usually.

Adam pinched his nose. He wasn’t ready. There was no saying sorry. He didn’t want Gansey to try to do with him what he’d been doing with Ronan, saving him, over and over again although there was no goal in it.

“Where are you? Why aren’t you home? Are you okay?”

Adam wasn’t going to answer the first two questions. There was no point.

“I’m fine. I will be fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”

The only person who had the right to worry about Adam Parrish’s life was Adam Parrish, and that was what freedom meant to him. He wasn’t questioning Gansey’s intentions, nor would he ever do so, but he wasn’t going to be another Ronan in Gansey’s life. He wasn’t a stray.

“I’m on my way to the airport right now,” Gansey informed him. It sounded like he was hurrying, his breathing heavy, steps sounding through the phone into Adam’s ear. “I’ll be home in a few hours, then we can talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Adam told him. There were things to talk about, but talking wouldn’t ever change them.

“You left,” Gansey stated simply.

“I shouldn’t have come with you in the first place,” Adam sighed. “I didn’t need to be paid for helping you out that one night in that alley. If anything, I’m glad you’re still alive and well. But that has nothing to do with me. My life doesn’t need to change because of it.”

“I don’t understand,” Gansey said, “I wasn’t paying you. I was doing you a favor.”

“Thank you,” Adam replied. The words were stiff and polite, like they should have been when Gansey had said them to Adam, nothing more to them, just a moment of gratefulness before each of them moved on with their life.

“That is… Wow. Adam.” The way Gansey pronounced his name was soft and gentle in the same way his behavior had always been soft and gentle towards him, in the same way that made Adam feel a little uncomfortable. “I’m coming home, okay? That can’t be all.”

Adam’s time was red and Gansey’s wouldn’t ever be. Shouldn’t ever be. Not for a least a few more decades. His thank you was all. Had to be all.

“Not because of me, right?” Adam checked. “You’re not coming home today because of me?”

The moment that it took Gansey to answer told Adam more than the response that followed.

“Don’t,” Adam pleaded.

“Ronan’s worried about you,” Gansey said, which was ridiculous, really, considering that Ronan himself hadn’t even tried to call Adam, not even once, and while Gansey was busy making the world a better place god knew where in the United States exactly, Ronan was in Henrietta, and yet, Ronan wasn’t the one making the transition back to plain old Adam hard on him.

“Ronan doesn’t have the capability to worry,” Adam said, sounding bitter even in his own ears, but he couldn’t change the tone of his voice. “And if he had, he’d better be worried about himself. Certainly not me. Are you sure he even noticed I’m gone?”

Adam was remembering the feeling of their legs touching in the bathtub, and the way moonlight had shone upon Ronan’s face, and his fingers being drawn to it like magnets, and the urgent need to press their lips together, and his heart beating in a whole new rhythm, creating his favorite melody from that point forward. And Ronan turning away, pulling back, retreating, leaving him.

From the beginning to what Adam himself had decided to be the end, Ronan had been cryptic, mysterious, a riddle. From the refusal to call him by his name to the non-answers of Adam’s questions to the walls around him he hadn’t allowed Adam to take down, Ronan had never let him in, and that was a thing that went beyond poverty or wealth, beyond red or purple or blue, beyond the line society had drawn to separate them.

“He called me,” Gansey insisted while Adam’s mind was reeling. “He’s never called me while I was away before. Not when the two of you almost died, not ever. Only this time. Only because you were gone and he didn’t know what to do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

To be fair, it was hard to say those words to Gansey, because Adam was genuinely sure Gansey wouldn’t ever lie if not absolutely necessary. On the other hand, it was even harder to picture Ronan being thrown off by literally any damn thing, let alone another person, a person he decided not to get close to.

The thought made Adam happy, or it would have, but at the same time, it made him incredibly sad.

“You could ask him yourself,” Gansey countered. He was pretty damn good at that game where words were supposed to change people’s feelings, a lot better than Adam had any hope to ever be, and Adam knew that because of this, he couldn’t listen to Gansey for much longer, or he’d lose.

“I don’t know what you want from me, Gansey.”

He didn’t. He didn’t know, couldn’t imagine. He didn’t know what Ronan could possibly want from him either, but with Ronan, there was a chance that the answer was nothing , so Adam wouldn’t be foolish enough to ask.

“I want you to be well, Adam. I want you to have the time you deserve instead of the time you manage to exhaust yourself for. You’re not a machine that’s meant for nothing except functioning until the battery runs out. You’re a person. You can be a person with me. And Ronan.”

“Are you sure Ronan knows how to be a person?” Adam asked.

“Yes,” Gansey answered promptly, without hesitation. “He may have forgotten for a while, but that’s not his fault. I told you, he’ll be better. He was better. Those past weeks with you around, he was better.”

“You know,” Adam said, his voice weak, “maybe you’re even right. But he’s not my responsibility. If you want to make him yours, fine. But I can only be a person on my own.”

“I don’t believe you,” Gansey repeated Adam’s words from earlier, brutally using them against him.

“I know you mean well, but that’s not my responsibility.”

Adam heard the beginning of a replying sentence but he lowered the phone. He’d wasted too many minutes talking to Gansey already, and those minutes were now rare enough for him again. He almost said that he was sorry before he ended the call, but he couldn’t, so he pressed a button with a trembling finger and blinked back tears he could no longer afford.

Life didn’t ever stop long enough for him to get lost in dreams and illusions, and time didn’t ever stop ticking, not in his world, and there was only one direction to move - forward. Without apologies.

Chapter Text

Growing up, Adam had always believed that contentment would equal happiness, which was an abstract thing and impossible to imagine. Contentment was something he could picture, and a goal that was clear enough in his head to stay focused on.

The months after Adam’s twenty-fifth birthday and before meeting Gansey hadn’t been what he would have called happiness, but they’d come pretty close to the picture he had of contentment. A healthy body, a roof over his head, a safe place to sleep, two capable hands earning him as much time as he needed. Independence, a will on his own, the freedom to do as he pleased.

The period of time that he’d spent at Monmouth Manufacturing falling in love and hate with a new world and the devil trying to survive it, Adam couldn’t even begin to think about putting in a category like that, but the real problem was the after.

After the blue digits, after the taste of not constantly thinking about time, after weeks of speeding - and after Ronan - contentment had become a concept at least as far away and impossible to even fathom as happiness.

Nothing had gone back to the way it had used to be. It looked like it from the outside, sure. Adam wore his old clothes, carried the same old colors on his forearm, got up at the same unholy hour in the morning, spent all his time working, or getting from one job to another, or squeezing in quick naps.

On the inside, there was a hole no amount of work was able to fill, one that he couldn’t be distracted from. Something was constantly tingling underneath Adam’s skin, keeping him from finding peace and quiet. Every attempt to sleep led to another dream about Ronan and the truly disturbing ones weren’t those that left Adam hard and aching, they were the ones about Ronan and his little raven, the ones Adam was merely a part of, just an observant of whispers and featherlight touches and looks that went so deep they scared him.

As long as Ronan and Adam had lived door to door, he hadn’t seen what was all over his restless mind now that he was far away, namely the absolute impossibility to stay away. He succeeded physically, but not emotionally, not even for five consecutive minutes.

After poverty and cruelty and growing up too fast, after violence and mental abuse and death, for the first time in Adam’s life, something was really missing. For the first time, he felt empty.

The emptiness kept him from sleeping at night and from paying attention as he crossed the street on his way to work one day. It kept him from eating and it did previously unknown damage to his concentration. It was almost like Adam had been lying to Gansey without knowing, claiming that he could only be a person by himself. He wasn’t feeling like a person. He was barely feeling alive at all.

And out of all people, who turned up out of nowhere right when Adam was at his lowest, was the one person Adam had always believed didn’t value life at all. But he’d been wrong. He’d been wrong about so many things, as it turned out.

“Parrish!”

Adam was in the middle of taking apart the body of the car he was working on, sweat covering his forehead and running down his spine when his name was called, harshly and like a command, pretty much the only way he was used to, but the hairs in his neck knew something was special about the voice before his brain caught up with it.

“What the fuck,” Adam breathed out, staring up from where he was kneeling on the dirty floor, blinking twice but still seeing the same lanky body and the same expectant face in front of him. Heavy, black boots, the shoelaces ruined from all the times Ronan had stepped on them after being too lazy or simply too Ronan to tie them.

After talking to Gansey on the phone, he’d had to ignore a few more calls, but never from Ronan, and while Adam had indeed been a little scared of Gansey trying to find him and convince him to come back to them in person, he’d been one hundred percent sure he didn’t have to fear that Ronan would ever get idea.

Because Ronan didn’t care.

Right?

“No time for small talk, Parrish,” Ronan said shortly. “We have somewhere to be.”

He turned around and walked away, one hand in the pocket of his pants and one playing with the car key dangling from his fingers. He didn’t offer an explanation, and he didn’t look back. Out of the blue, he’d turned up, and then he acted as if Adam following his directions was the only option.

He’d said ‘We have somewhere to be.’ like there’d ever been a ‘ We’ that meant the two of them, like there could ever be a place where Ronan and Adam would be expected together, like it wasn’t the most insane thing Adam had ever heard.

And yet, he got up, dropped everything, made a pathetic attempt to beat the dust off of his hopeless outfit. There was no answer to the question how Ronan had found him, just the dismissive brush of a hand and a brief statement about irrelevant details.

“Ah-hah,” Adam said strictly, folding his arms across his chest until he saw Ronan’s eyes dropping to the purple digits on his arm. He let his arms hang from his body instead, feeling slightly uncomfortable. “Where do you think we’re going?”

Ronan sighed, but stopped before he’d reached the charcoal grey BMW that was parked at the sidewalk outside of one of Adam’s countless workplaces. He briefly wondered how long it had taken Ronan to find out where he was at the moment.

“I think there’s something you need to see,” Ronan said, sounding very un-Ronan. It was the only way Adam knew to describe the relative softness and seriousness in his voice without using words that would fit any other person just as well.

“I think you’re forgetting something,” Adam pointed out, nodding at the car. He knew stubbornness wasn’t a big sign of maturity, but getting over the feelings Ronan had arisen in him and then hurt all at once wasn’t an easy thing to do, and why would he even want to? He didn’t want to give Ronan the impression that it was that easy. Adam Parrish couldn’t simply be bossed around like that.

“You know, Adam,” Ronan said, and Adam wished he hadn’t just used his actual name for the first time, because that didn’t make things any easier at all. “Maybe some things aren’t about the assholes the two of us are. Maybe some things go beyond that. Could you just get in the fucking car?”

“Oh, really?” Adam almost had to laugh. “If that’s true, and let me be very clear here, that’s a big if as far as I can tell, then that would be the first time I know of that something is not about the opportunity to be the biggest possible dick in the world for you.”

He sounded pathetic, way too hung up on Ronan and the few weeks they’d known each other. Way too sensitive to pretend like he was totally over them, which only made Adam angrier in the end.

“If thinking that makes you any happier,” Ronan shrugged, “whatever. You’re wrong, and if you don’t know it already, then you will. If you need me to be the villain in your story, be my guest. You wouldn’t be the first person to think so. It just doesn’t make you better than anyone else I know. And it doesn’t help Gansey with his big plans.”

“Wait. What does Gansey have to do with anything?”

“Remember when I told you we’d watch him change the world one day?” Ronan asked.

Adam nodded. He’d never understand what exactly was the deal with Gansey, only that there very clearly was one.

“I didn’t say that because he’s my best friend or like a brother or whatever. I didn’t say that because he’s the best person I know, which he is. I said it, because out of all the promises people make all day long, out of all the apologies I’ve ever heard, his are the ones I will believe every time. And today might be that one day that I was talking about.”

Adam had never been given any sort of explanation as to what it was that Gansey did, nothing. Now he was curious. Now he felt a new sort of excitement. Ronan’s talking about Gansey compared to nothing Adam had ever heard anyone say about another person, and to nothing that ever left Ronan’s lips in his presence. It inspired awe in him.

“What’s happening?” He asked, his voice barely above a whisper, the moment surreal and fragile and precious and brief.

“I’ll show you,” Ronan answered. “Not because I want you to be there with me. It’s because you deserve to be part of it.”

Adam didn’t know anything at all. He didn’t understand anything at all. He didn’t believe in anything, either, nothing that he would have ever admitted to, but in that moment, in spite of doubts and bad experiences and all the pessimism that had been beaten into him for all of his life, there was something he was holding onto, something he couldn’t quite put a name to, something worth putting hopes in, something making him curious, making him want to see.

Maybe some things were bigger than the stupid feud between two stupid young men for a stupid reason Adam had somehow forgotten.

“Don’t you dare think this has anything to do with you,” Adam hissed, because he was a liar. But Adam the liar still climbed into the passenger seat of a grinning Ronan’s car, and it was that that counted in the end.

The atmosphere was tense. Adam had questions he wouldn’t even have known how to put into words and he could only assume Ronan felt the same way. There was no talking about his leaving, and no talking about the time he’d left behind. There was only the sound of the engine and the music pouring from the loudspeakers. Somehow, Adam’s body felt way more comfortable next to Ronan like that than his brain was giving it permission to.

“What the hell?” Adam whispered, more to himself than to Ronan as the latter parked in front of the civic hall of Henrietta. It was a place not often used, at least not for decades, mostly because it had been built right at the town’s center, an area that nowadays belonged neither to the rich nor to the poor and was therefore, like everything that couldn’t be put into one category or the other, forgotten.

As Adam got out of the car, he found that the place was crowded. Crappy cars and bikes and smaller groups of people were spread all over the area around the massive building. There was an atmosphere going on that he could almost taste on his lips, but didn’t know how to interpret.

“What are all these people doing here?” Adam wanted to know.

“The same as you are,” Ronan answered with something like a smile, not dark this time but promising. Excited, almost.

Adam was confused as he took in the masses of people. He’d isolated himself from the community around him, so it wasn’t surprising he hadn’t known about an event happening. He was confused as he followed Ronan, who seemed strangely out of place and at the same time strangely right at home as he moved purposefully. He was confused as they entered the main hall and everyone’s attention was directed at a set up stage. He was confused as the crowd went silent and something began tingling in his guts.

He was so confused by it that Ronan’s hand wrapping around his wrist didn’t appear odd in comparison anymore. On the contrary, it helped grounding him.

What didn’t confuse Adam at all, although he’d had no way of seeing it coming, was Richard Campbell Gansey III with his ugly shoes and the typical sweater, pushing the wire framed glasses up on the bridge of his nose as he walked across the stage, gaze wandering through the room. For some reason, he seemed exactly right.

Everything is unrealistically silent right the moment before Gansey begins to speak into the single microphone at the front of the stage, and maybe a third of Henrietta’s population is listening to him.

“I had a whole speech prepared,” said Gansey, but there was no script in his hand, no notebook, no messy handwriting on faded paper. Adam could literally not have been any more curious. He held his breath for as long as his lungs could take it, then exhaled when Ronan squeezed his wrist.

“I don’t need a speech to say this,” Gansey then continues. “There’s been enough talking. For weeks, months, and years, there’s been nothing but talking. Arguments, discussions, excuses. None of them have changed a thing in any of our lives.”  

People seemed to be agreeing. Apparently, they were all in on some big secret Adam had no clue about. Gansey waited until they’d calmed down before he kept talking, voice calm and strong. Adam found himself wanting nothing more than to believe every word he was saying.

“Every single one of you who came here today is sick and tired of the talking that doesn’t bring us change. None of you have the time for more of that.”

It was in that moment that Adam realized that he couldn’t spot a single timer in the large hall that was blue. Only Ronan’s and Gansey’s, but they were covered by long sleeves. Like himself, everyone else had at least one short sleeve. Everyone else carried purple. Red, for quite a lot of them, actually.

“There is enough time in Henrietta for everyone,” Gansey declared, raising his voice. Adam’s heart started beating even faster than it had before. Ronan’s hand slid down until their palms were pressed together. Adam closed his fingers around Ronan’s, simply because he had to hold onto something.  

“There is enough time in Henrietta for everyone. Every. Single. One of you. This is a truth that’s been known for a long while now. And yet, none of you have ever seen any of those years on your timers.”

Gansey made a dramatic pause and Adam felt a little faint. The tension was so high, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the entire building had exploded.

What happened instead, was maybe equally powerful, maybe more.

“That ends today,” Gansey announced, his voice loud and clear and triumphant, his sleeve pushed up all of a sudden, arm stretched into the air. The digits were still blue, and from where Adam and Ronan were standing, he couldn’t tell what number they were, but the crowd was shocked and Adam knew that Ronan hadn’t been exaggerating.

There was a shift happening. Gansey’s smile shook the world as they’d all known it to the core, and what was left couldn’t be described in words of the same old language anymore.

“Adam,” Ronan whispered, and Adam realized that he’d said his name more than one time, but it was hard to focus on anything other than Gansey and the cheering masses in front of him.

“We have to go,” Ronan told him, smirking. “There’s one more thing to do before the world will change.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Adam watched as Gansey pulled up a time capsule and then another one, and another one, smaller ones than Ronan’s, distributing them among the people. He wasn’t sure what to think, how to process any of the recent developments, but Ronan’s hand pulled him back to the BMW, and the next thing he knew, he was looking at a trunk full of tiny little time capsules, each of them with a small, blue light blinking on its front.

Adam was speechless.

Because of Gansey, because of Ronan’s role in everything that was happening. Because for the first time, he was part of something truly big, and it was as scary as it was beautifully fascinating.

“I had no idea,” Adam repeated over and over again, his disbelief manifesting itself in the form of stupid rambling, staring at Ronan and the abundance of time capsules and then at Ronan again and not knowing what on earth to feel in that moment, or rather, what of the million different feelings inside him to concentrate on.

Ronan seemed amused as they got into the car, and he seemed amused as Adam reached for his arm to pull up the sleeve.

“Right,” Ronan said. “Look. There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you.”

They were sitting in the BMW in a parking lot and scenery was so normal that it didn’t make sense in the great scheme of things at that very moment.

“Can you drive?” Adam asked, because he truly believed that was what he needed to keep breathing in and out.

Ronan turned the key in the ignition and hit the gas a second later. Henrietta flew by in a blur, and none of it could touch them.

“I’m sorry,” Ronan suddenly said. Just those words, plain and simple, except that with every passing second, they developed more of an aftertaste, and Adam didn’t know what to do with them.

“What for?” He wanted to know.

“A lot of things,” said Ronan. “I’m sorry you grew up thinking the only time you deserve is the time you earn with your own bare hands. I’m sorry Noah had to die before what happened today could finally be made possible. I’m sorry for scaring you.”

Adam wasn’t sure how to respond, so he didn’t say anything at all. It was a good thing that Ronan was driving. That way, he had to look ahead and the words seemed easier to take.

“The Barns,” Ronan continued. “Remember? The place I took you to?”

Adam did remember. It had been the first time he’d seen a human being in Ronan. It felt like centuries had passed between then and now, but what did time even mean?

“It’s where I grew up. With my brothers and our parents.”

With every word Ronan said, his voice got a little more quiet, a little weaker.

“It’s also the place where my parents were murdered.”

Adam shook his head once. No. He didn’t want to hear this. He didn't want this to be true. He didn’t want to be the one who’d held Ronan’s bad coping mechanisms against him when the reason behind it all had been murdered parents. He felt suffocated.

“I’m-”

Ronan shook his head. He wasn’t done. There were tears glistening in his eyes, but he kept it together.

“I’m sorry you had to watch me trying to die after you’d fought for your survival every day of your life. It’s not fair.”

“What are you doing?” Adam asked. “You’re apologizing for things you can’t change.”

“I might have been wrong about apologizing,” Ronan shrugged. “I do feel sorry for all of those things.”

Adam nodded. “I’m sorry too.”

For a few moments, they were both silent, but then their emotions grew too heavy and Ronan stopped the BMW at the sidewalk of a random street in one of the poor areas of Henrietta.

He killed the engine and pulled another time capsule out from beneath his seat. It looked like this one was empty. Ronan played with the little item in his hands, seemingly nervous. When Adam was ready to stop him by taking his hands, Ronan suddenly spoke. His cheeks had a strangely rosy color.

“There’s another thing I regret a little bit,” he murmured. “I’m not sure if I’m going to get the chance to make up for it, or when, but I’ll try. I’ll really try.”

“What is it?”

Without looking at him, Ronan gave a little smile. “There’s a boy,” he whispered.

Oh.

“Nothing happened, but maybe it could have. I just fucked it up. Or, life fucked it up. It was all a little fucked up.”

“Life has a tendency to do that,” Adam whispered so quietly that his heartbeat was louder in his own ears than his voice.

“This boy taught me to be scared of red numbers, you know,” Ronan confessed. “I never minded them on my own arm. They didn’t have power over me. But the red on his arm, oh god, it does. It scares me so much. Which is why I gave him a lot of my time. Why I gave him access to all of my time.”

Adam’s heart skipped a beat.

“And yet, he didn’t take it.”

“Eternities mean nothing, right?”

“Right,” Ronan nodded. “But lifetimes do.”

With some pressure of his finger against the time capsule, he made it come to life. He looked up at Adam, just for moment, stealing his heart and soul all at once, and what felt like drowning in an ocean weeks earlier was more like being reborn this time, like Adam could breathe freely for the first time in his life as he resurfaced.

Ronan’s hand was placed around the little capsule, and a moment later, with a content expression on Ronan’s face, he let the digits begin spinning. Adam was in absolute disbelief the entire time until they stopped and Ronan smiled.

“Fifty years, right?”

Fifty years were exactly how many he’d kept.

“Right,” Adam nodded.

“Go ahead, then,” Ronan told him, holding out the capsule to him pointing it at Adam’s forearm.

“How much time is on all of the others?” Adam wanted to know.

“Fifty years,” Ronan replied.

“Gansey?”

“Fifty years.”

“Okay,” Adam sighed, brushing Ronan’s fingers as he took the time capsule from him.

“Okay?”

“Yeah. But only because I met a boy too.”

And then they smiled, both of them, while Adam transferred fifty years onto his timer, although he genuinely wasn’t sure whether half a century was enough time for him and Ronan to figure out their feelings and make them work somehow. But at least they could try now.

*

By the time it was midnight, Ronan’s BMW was empty of time capsules and Adam’s eyes were heavy, tired.

“Are you coming home with me?” Ronan asked quietly.

Adam looked into the rearview mirror and saw what they’d done to Henrietta, countless time capsules glowing in the dark like the fireflies that had once made Adam so sad. Like the little bugs with their light, the time stored on the capsules they’d distributed would pass. And at some point, it would be over.

But nothing, nothing ever lasted forever, and nothing ever should.

As long as the night was young, Adam could live with the certainty of the sun rising again. Nobody cried over fireflies.

They hadn’t changed the world. Although Gansey was indeed a hero, and even Ronan had turned out a lot differently than Adam had seen him for the longest time, the world they all lived in was still the same. What they’d changed were lives, though.  

Some of them would still end sooner than others. Not all of them would be spent in peace and safety and happiness. Not everything would be better from one day to the other, and nothing would ever be perfect.

All that was achieved was a first step in the right direction.

Adam nodded. “Yeah. Get us home.”

Ronan opened his hand and held it out. Adam entwined their fingers and savored the warm fuzzy feelings of one palm pressing against the other. Like that, they drove, only slightly above the speed limit and entirely at peace with another.

When Adam looked at his timer, he could see blue like the time with Gansey and Ronan had taught him, but he could also tell that the seconds ticking away weren’t nothing, weren’t meaningless, because they weren’t endless anymore.

Neither Adam nor Ronan nor Gansey would be alive forever, and the concept of an end to a life so precious to him was scary, but Adam didn’t want it any other way.

And with this, he was pretty sure, he was content.

And with Ronan, he was something else. And maybe, he finally had exactly the right amount of time to learn about happiness.