thatsallthereis | [For Adam] Don't forget I'll hold your head, watch the night sky fading red

It happened early Monday. Gansey stopped by before class to catch a few minutes of Ronan-time. He brought breakfast burritos. He let himself into the Cabeswater barn like any other day. He'd stopped to close his eyes into the sunlight and felt as he willed the temperature change. Nothing happened. Cabeswater was silent. Eerie. Still.

"Hey, Lynch," Gansey called when he didn't see his friend shuffling around the ground floor. He listened for Ronan's affectionate cursing somewhere else in the house, in the barn, and he heard nothing. His mouth turned down.

"Ronan?" Gansey tried again. Something gripped him in his chest. Maybe he'd gone out. That would have been troubling by itself. Maybe Adam forgot something and Ronan brought it to him. Maybe a chicken had the plague and Ronan was somewhere else in Cabeswater trying to fix it.

Gansey rounded the couch and saw him: fast asleep. For a quick second, he was relieved. He knew people (like Henry) who could sleep through anything anywhere. Ronan was a restless sleeper at best, unless he was in a certain place. The Dream Place. Still, Ronan could be roused, grumpy as hell and still Ronan.

"Hey, Lynch, get up, it's late," Gansey said, kicking the base of the couch in Ronan-like obstinate. He felt it then: he was scared. "Ronan, stop dicking around." There was a perfect opportunity for a play on words here, and nothing. Ronan slept. His body was loose, like a person who was able to rest. Not Ronan.

He called Adam three times. The last time, he left a message. I need you to come home, he said, panic edging into his voice. He didn't have to say it was important.

For a few moments, Gansey perched on the edge of the couch and ruminated. Something was wrong with Ronan, so something was wrong with Cabeswater. Or was it the other way around? He needed Adam to get back. He needed to not be alone with Ronan so still and so many questions. His thumb slipped over his mouth. He thought.

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It didn't take a lot to make Gansey worry but it took something catastrophic to actually get him to show it. Three missed calls during work was odd enough but the voicemail twisted in his stomach a little and Adam hadn't even bothered changing out of his coveralls. He'd just clocked hurriedly out and gotten on his bike, the Harley growling up the path to the farm.

The door was unlocked and Adam came in, calling Gansey and Ronan's names until he found Gansey sitting on the edge of the couch next to Ronan's prone form. The wrongness struck him immediately. Adam had spent countless nights next to Ronan, enough to know that Ronan didn't sleep like that. He was peaceful in his sleep but never so perfectly untroubled as this.

"What happened?"

"I don't know," Gansey said, though it came out a bit more like dunno because he didn't care how he sounded. There was a little white dent being pushed into his bottom lip. He sat at the edge of the couch. His leg bounced restlessly. "I came in here and he was like this."

From an outside perspective, it may have looked silly, two grown men panicking about a peacefully sleeping one. All Gansey could think about was --

"He hasn't even moved," Gansey said, twisting to look up at him. That panic was edging in. "He's breathing but he's not... doing anything." Feeling inarticulate was not doing much to help the way his chest threatened to cave in. Everything was out of his control.

He was wasting time being confused. He said, "Were the animals awake when you came up?"

He was so very still. Adam's mouth felt dry and he suddenly couldn't not notice the way Gansey jiggled his leg. That one little motion suddenly filled the room in the absence of Ronan's movement and felt too much. Adam tried not to pace or else grab Gansey's leg and push it to the floor to make the movement stop.

"The chickens," he muttered. "The chickens were being loud."

But so what. So what that the chickens weren't hurt when Ronan wasn't moving.

Yes. Yes, the chickens. Ronan was alive. If nothing had rotted away yet, maybe there was still time.

He was jumping to conclusions beforehand. It was all he could do. Gansey made it a policy to be ready for anything. Except bees.

"You can scry," Gansey said, his eyes up to Adam. "Please." Shit, he'd forgotten to be kingly. Seeing Ronan like that meant forgetting a whole lot of things he'd taken time to remember. Ronan was too close to Gansey's heart for him to think much sense at all.

"He could be lost in there," Gansey continued quietly. "We have to do something."

There was a desperation in Gansey that Adam was not often privy to. It made his chest clench to see him so vulnerable that he hated to admit that he was terrified to do what he asked. Adam hadn't scried in over a year now and the last time he'd done it had required Blue to stabilize and then stab him in the arm. There was still a scar on his left arm where she'd cut him with the switchblade.

But for Ronan? For Gansey?

"I have to get some things. I need...I need the bowl. Cards." The last one was a little nerve-wracking to say. "I need Blue."

For a brief, horrible moment, Gansey was angry. No, not quite; Gansey was frustrated. A part of him would die all over again if it meant he got to kiss her. Another part asked complicated questions, the kind that he could usually dodge, were he not in a state of near-panic.

When your true love rebukes you, exactly what comes after that?

No, this was about Ronan. This was about seeing Ronan's eyes open again, and hearing him bitch at his goats.

"We can use Cabeswater, can't we?" Gansey asked, hopeful despite himself that would be the answer.

Adam looked down at the two slender scars on his left arm. One in the forearm, newer, and one on the back of his hand that Blue had put into him back in the park. Then he looked up at Gansey. This was about Ronan. And for Adam to scry, he was going to need Blue.

"Cabeswater won't stab me if I wander too far from my own body," Adam said.

[For Adam] Don't forget I'll hold your head, watch the night sky fading red

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