4. Treat Him As They’ve Treated You | B.s.h

The Mirror

The Seeker

The Magician

The Dreamer

The Ghost

THE GANGSEY

blue sargent: if i kiss my true love he'll die

noah czerny: well...if you ever want a kiss i noahguy™

Can you imagine all the upperclassmen sitting around talking about Neil? Exchanging all the little things they learned about them that day? 

 like 

Matt slamming into the girls dorm hissing, “he hates vegetables, he told this to me, he hates vegetables but he loves fruit.” And all the girls gasp. 

“He sent me a TT A TT emoji from his English class.” Renee says. She’s been saving this information until just this moment when they’re all together. She’d seen it in the middle of her tutor session and delicately touched her fingers to her mouth.

“Nicky taught him that.” Matt snaps his fingers and points at her, excited that he knows another thing. 

“He hates his English class, it bores him to tears but he said it’d be useful.” Dan says. 

“Isn’t he taking a speech class or something? Maybe it’s for interviews?” Allison says, because being pulled into The Great Neil Josten Mystery is honestly the best thing to happen in weeks. The first time she laughed since, well, ya know, was when Neil ate a beet for the first time in the cafeteria and immediately stuck his tongue out far enough for the beet to fall off. 

 "What could his english class be useful for? What could he mean. Does he want to be a writer? Does he like books? What’s this about?“ Matt paces around the room and they just spend hours breaking down everything they know about their new fox. 

 Until the fox in question comes in to hang out with them before his practices with Kevin. And their heads just snap to him like “NEIL.” 

 And it startles him every time.

Imagine this: Ronan Lynch kisses with his eyes wide open because otherwise he is afraid he might be dreaming

It’s because they’re in his bed at Monmouth and he’s had this exact dream so many times. 

At the Barns it’s different. At St. Agnes it’s different. Hell, even naps in Cabeswater are different. Those are places he inhabits with wakefulness and awareness. The awareness that comes from being amplified by a place and feeling too big for your skin. 

But here he simply is. Here he is not a king or a god or a worshiper. Here he is a boy who dances with sleep, sometimes leading and sometimes following. Who knows the cracks on his ceiling like he knows the back roads of Henrietta. Who sometimes dreams of tangled sheets and tingling lips and the rush of blood to every point of contact. Who wakes up alone. 

Who just this evening had tangled sheets and tingling lips and the rush of blood to every point of contact and then passed into dreaming alone. Who woke up just now with sleep bleary eyes and a glow-in-the-dark clock (not a dream, a gag gift from Gansey) telling him that it’s just after 3:30 AM and Adam Parrish is still next to him. 

Here, amidst his haphazard collection of impossible things, an impossible boy. All those dreams and he had never once dared to hope…

But it has to be real, doesn’t it? That’s what waking up means, bringing yourself through to fruition, reborn every day with weight and want and need and. Being. Knowing. 

He knows. He thinks he knows. He traces his finger down the slope of Adam’s shoulder where the shine of pale skin in the light of the streetlamp bleeds into the shine of pale sheets. Dreams bleeding into reality. 

Hope is a form of dreaming, right?

Adam stirs and Ronan pulls his hand away. He doesn’t mean to wake him, would never mean to take him from sleep any more than he would mean to take him from anything else Adam finds important. 

Adam wakes anyway. He rolls onto his side so that he’s facing Ronan and looks at him with heavy lids. He yawns and stretches and settles again and reaches out to run his hand gently over Ronan’s head. The pleasant tug of his fingers against Ronan’s short short hairs is so satisfying. Adam’s hand comes to a rest against his cheek and Ronan tilts his head into it, body heavy with sleep but still drawn to Adam’s touch like Adam’s gravity and the earth’s gravity have equal weight. 

They don’t. The tug of Adam is so much stronger. 

“You’re awake,” Adam says, voice low. 

Ronan hums his reply.

“God,” Adam says. He takes a deep breath and then exhales, long and slow. “God, god.” And the word sounds different every time. 

God, the dark suits you.

God, I never knew there was touch like this.  

God, our bodies are a riot in the quiet night. 

Ronan agrees, but words are insufficient, so he kisses Adam instead. Because he wants to. Because he wants to prove that they’re real, that this moment is made of flesh and blood. 

Adam closes his eyes, already halfway back to sleep, but Ronan keeps his open and clings to this. 

Up close Adam’s freckles blur into one another. His eyelids twitch with the restless movement of his eyes beneath them. Ronan slides his hand around Adam’s lower back and pulls him closer. Adam’s eyelashes flutter, then still. They fan out large against the gentle slope of his cheek. 

He of impossible being. He of passionate boyhood. He of crackling magic straining against the frame of one of the people Ronan loves the most in the world. He, he, he. 

It was always going to be a he, Ronan knows now, but he feels lucky that it’s this he, that it’s him. That Adam wants him back. That he’s willing to tangle himself up in Ronan’s sheets and Ronan’s limbs. That he’ll give parts of himself to Ronan, parts he’d previously been holding so tightly.

So Ronan keeps his eyes open, watches for the threshold between asleep and awake, and makes sure to keep his promise to find Adam on either side of the divide. 

»we change each other« by shilpa gupta (+)

richard campbell gansey iii, master of smooth, once lay in bed hoping that his crush would call and then, when she did, immediately began telling her interesting facts about ducks.

the foxes → some of the strongest people i’ve known are women

ALL FOR THE GAME MOODBOARDS → DAN WILDS

“we’ve lost enough, don’t you think? it’s time to win.”