We All Got That Friend Who Think They Can Outwit The Gods And Evade Their Fate

Lucky Blue Smith in Interview magazine

Ph: Guy Lowndes Style: Anda & Masha

things adam parrish receives in the mail during his first semester at college:

six books from gansey about mythology, ley lines, and glendower, all sticky-noted with things gansey has noticed in his studies. most of these sticky notes have questions for adam on them. some of them have doodles of fast cars and girls with spiky hair. some of them have beatles lyrics. adam keeps all of them, replacing gansey’s sticky notes with his own before sending them back.

thirty-two letters from blue, all of which he has responded to and kept. they both have pay-by-the-minute phones now–a necessity, given the distance in the group–but blue sent adam a two-page letter during his first week at the dorms, and it made adam feel so much less alone that he just never stopped. they talk about a lot of things–what’s happening at fox way (told to blue, away at her own school, over the phone by orla and calla and her mother), how ronan and gansey are doing, whether or not adam’s checked in with the student disability center about accommodations for his hearing, whether or not blue and checked in about her dyslexia, how big and wide and vast the world outside of Henrietta is for two people who have never really left its boundaries. 

three mixtapes from ronan, along with various knickknacks and dream things that make adam’s heart squeeze in his chest and laughter bubble from his lips. a pair of headphones specifically for someone with single-sided deafness, a tin-can that works as a walkie talkie (one of a five-piece set), a bag of candy from that local place that adam likes. letters, but not long, like blue’s–short things, like tracklists or scraps of paper with “i fucking miss you” or “your roommate sounds like a dick” or “2 weeks” written on them in a messy hand

little notes from noah, stuck in with ronan’s mail–things that say “ronan wouldn’t let me put blink182 on your mixtape :(” or “ronan went red for like two days when those flowers showed up” or "we maybe kind of adopted your old dog and she’s the best??”

a small package from fox way that comes once a month–like the one blue gets–full of slightly burned cookies and magical advice and, on a few occasions, notes that calla or maura have found while going through persephone’s things that mention him. calla writes him, sometimes, and adam is getting better at knowing that it’s not just because he meant something to persephone. 

witches around the globe → new orleans the witches of new orleans are fiery, carefree creatures. they live in a city of dreams and music. nestled amongst the messy, noisy streets, the witches of new orleans give futures to anyone willing to sell them their secrets.

“that’s the spirit” i say as i gesture to the spirit that’s been haunting my home for years. when will they leave or start contributing to the household by doing something like helping with laundry. when will they pay rent

part 2 of that popular rich kids moodboard

🍁 Canadian male model Emile Woon

Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver except it’s playing from your neighbor’s radio that you can hear from your back porch, which you sit out on to relax in spite of the loud buzzing from the lightbulb and the hoards of moths that flock to it on summer evenings like this.

weird noises: happen in the wee hours

me, unaffected: the only supernatural and ominous force in this place is me and i was here first, so whatever and whoever you are you need to Go

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. 

5 things about the apocalypse

one.  after the sun is eaten, our shadows outgrow our bodies and the stars i took for gods go out. while i did not sleep i heard laughter—cacophonous, full of teeth. at the end i am eating tinned peaches and casting dice on the ground, in expectation of wings, of light, of anything but this stupefied cold, this silence which is an obscenity.

two.  the hungry are weeping as they walk. i have seen a man open another’s ribs like a pair of doors, unseal him where the chest is soft, harrow him for red. they eat only the heart, the first-formed part, cradled and chewed between two horrified hands. fed, they are hungrier. in this corrupt light, the gullet-red of appetite, their faces shine wet and without mercy.

three.  we send up prayers like the last of flares, phosphorus breaking upon midnight. the horizon is a hot wound parting: the dead climb out of their deep tenements, and we greet them, shaken. what does it matter that they are as pale as guilt, that their eyes do not seek us, that they shrink from us in dismay?

four.  yesterday, the words went from us. they left our books and maps and gravestones, emptied our histories and speeches and songs. they fled our throats, and made barren our mouths. in your bible genesis is a cenotaph; nothing is begotten. i hold your hands and i have no voice to speak your living name, to tell you that i am full of fear and relief.

five. it is written on a wall in jerusalem: τετέλεσται. the stars have already fallen, and she proclaims that she is the mouth of god. you go among the crowd to hear her speak, in the brick-husk of the chapel of the holy face. the look of her roars down your blood. men come for her at night, cut out her tongue and string her up by the neck in the muristan. you are kneeling in your kitchen as the earth shakes, and over that great distance you still hear her voice on the wind, causing the dust to rise. it is finished.

(six.  we held each other all night, deep in the rot, our arms helplessly tender. late was the coming of light, a whiteness so bright it seemed infernal, lifting us into a hollow morning, and what breath we were was shaken from us—

and we were dead a little while longer then, cool and adrift on the surface of the abandoned world.)