#and declan was a little computer nerd | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stareaten · 4 years

Text

pynch.

~5k words.

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Adam collects things. He clings to them; he hoards them.

You wouldn’t notice it at first, not with how logical and calculating he is, certainly not within the small space of Adam’s tiny apartment above St. Agnes filled with the mismatched, makeshift furniture, and surely not in the cluttered mess of the mismatched, makeshift desk where Adam is sitting, hunched over, and scribbling some shit about some fucking thing in one of his notebooks.

But because Ronan is Ronan, he starts catching up. He is lying sprawled on his back on Adam’s uncomfortable mattress, bored out of his mind. He left his headphones back at Monmouth and can’t be assed to go back to pick them up. Adam shows no intention on paying him any attention – at least not until he’s finished with whatever the fuck he’s working on – so Ronan decides to bother him just a bit. (It’s his philosophy notes he’s working on, Ronan knows it, because Ronan clings to everything Adam tells him. That’s why he knows it isn’t so important, because Adam knows it but still insists on being a giant, pain-in-the-ass nerd.)

Ronan rolls back onto his stomach and scoots closer to Adam’s desk, peering over his arm to try to understand Adam’s chicken scratch. He grabs one of the pens lying around and goes to write something – something stupid or sweet or rude or, considering he’s Ronan, all three at once – in the margin of the open notebook. He starts to write but the pen doesn’t work so he picks up another one. This time he manages to write one big letter before it runs out of ink. He scowls at the pen in an attempt to intimidate it into working, and then shakes it vigorously. When it still refuses to work, because apparently pens can feel no terror, he chucks it away and searches for another one. This one manages two more letters before dying out. Ronan frowns again, shakes it – again – and tries to press it more firmly into the paper before Adam’s hand comes up to grab at his wrist.

“Stop it,” Adam says without looking up from finishing his page, “you’re gonna tear the paper.”

“I wouldn’t have to tear your paper if you had a damn pen that works,” Ronan replies.

Adam says nothing, just flips the page and starts writing on the left side of the notebook, effectively stopping Ronan’s attempts at delinquency.

Ronan huffs. And picks up another pen. He manages to write a big capital A on the corner of the page before Adam elbows him in the face. Ronan rubs at his chin. “I was just testing to see if this one works.”

Adam hums. “They all work.”

“Like shit they do.”

“They all work in a pinch.”

“This is a pinch. And they don’t fucking work.”

“I would hardly call your attempts at desecrating my notes ‘a pinch’,” Adam says, nose still buried in said notes.

“It’s not desecrating if I make them more fun,” Ronan says.

Adam sighs. “Go be bored somewhere else.”

Ronan scowls, but lies back on the bed. He manages some good 10 minutes before picking up a crumbled up receipt from the floor and drawing more inappropriate things before the pen dies out.

***

Adam picks up empty yogurt cups Sargent leaves lying around the Barns and washes them out in the sink. He dries them with a kitchen towel, stacks them up and puts them in the cupboard above the microwave, where neither of them will actually be bothered to reach them.

“You can’t recycle them,” he says when Ronan tries to dump them in the trash. “Doesn’t mean you can’t use them again.”

“What for?” Ronan groans. “There are plenty of cups here. Plastic cups and glasses and cups that sing and cups that curse at you and whatever kind of cups your ass desires. Fuck, Parrish, I’ll dream you up another cup, just for you, which recites pluperfect of esse whenever you drink your gross fucking no sugar coffee out of it.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “We can use them for seedlings.”

“Right,” Ronan mutters. “Fucking seedlings.” But he sees Adam putting the yogurt cups up in the cabinet anyway.

***

Ronan visits Adam at college one weekend when Adam isn’t too busy studying and Declan is too busy to chew Ronan’s ass over one thing or another.

Adam wraps his arms around Ronan’s shoulders and releases a deep sigh.

“Fuck, Parrish,” Ronan says, rubbing his hand up and down Adam’s ribs. “You know freshman fifteen means you gain those pounds, not lose them, right?”

Adam huffs into his neck. “Guess you better learn how to cook then.”

Ronan groans and for a moment considers how difficult it would be to dream up a stove that makes any meal on its own. He would probably still end up eating pizzas anyway.

Adam’s dorm room is not big and Ronan knows which side of it is his as soon as he enters. There is a corkboard above his desk and Ronan leans closer to inspect everything that is pinned there while Adam changes out of his clothes.

There are receipts from the store and scrawled reminders for papers and homework and exams. There is a single black feather and a printed out picture of Gansey, Blue and Cheng standing in front of- some fucking monument Ronan didn’t care enough to remember the name of, Cheng’s ugly mug uncomfortably close to the camera. Gansey sent it to Ronan’s phone some time ago, but giving that Ronan only started actually checking his phone once Adam left for Harvard, it sat in the messages until Adam picked it up and grinned at it so hard that, one afternoon later, Ronan cursed and kicked and glared his old printer back to life in order to print it out. There is also a postcard Sargent sent him from Bumfuck, Nowhere just recently - Ronan can’t see the message on the back, but he knows who it’s from because he has a matching one sitting next to his computer, collecting dust so he can pretend it didn’t make his insides twist when he found it in the mail. (His personalized message only read ‘miss you, asshole – blue’ and he grinned before thinking better of it.)

And then there are… other pieces of trash. A bubblegum wrap and what appears to be a torn piece of post-it and one of those paper bracelets you get on those obnoxious student parties. There is a red solo cup right underneath it with two fugly red and white pens with Harvard logo sticking out of it. Ronan silently wonders if they even fucking work. There’s also a bunch of pamphlets stacked neatly on the edge of the desk and Ronan flips mindlessly through them. Fuck, he thinks, I’m in love with a hoarder.

He is quickly distracted from that thought by the aforementioned hoarder’s arms sliding around his middle. Adam kisses the back of his neck and then the soft spot under his ear, so Ronan has no choice but to turn around and kiss him senseless.

“Hi,” Adam breathes against his lips once they part, soft and quiet. His thumb gently massages the back of Ronan’s skull, while fingers of his other hand come up to trace Ronan’s cheekbone.

“Hi,” Ronan says, soft and quiet, because he loves Adam, loves him when he gets all pushy and hungry, loves him even more so when he gets soft and gentle and private and just for Ronan to see.

“I missed you,” Adam says and Ronan gets an excellent idea about moving Adam’s fingers closer to his lips but then there is a knock on the door and Adam’s hands fall away.

To his credit though, they don’t go very far. Adam takes a step back, but stays well within Ronan’s personal space, one of his beautiful hands resting on the inside of Ronan’s elbow. Ronan still scowls at the person knocking even before they enter the room.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Adam’s roommate says poking his head inside. “I just forgot to grab my notes.”

“No problem,” Adam replies, smiling politely. Ronan elects to stay silent this time.

The roommate leaves the door open as he moves to his side of the room, rummaging through his stuff, and Ronan almost groans when he sees another person standing in the doorway.

“Hey Adam,” the other boy says, nodding. “We’ll get out of your hair right away.”

Adam waves his arm dismissively. “It’s alright, really.”

Ronan would beg to fucking differ.

“Adam?” the roommate says and makes an apologetic face. “You wouldn’t happen to have some notes from the last Doyle’s class, would you?”

“From Wednesday morning class?” Adam frowns and lets go of Ronan’s arm to search through his own pile of notebooks. Ronan grits his teeth.

He doesn’t care to hear the rest of that conversation and instead turns to scowl at the boy at the doorway when he feels his eyes on the back of his neck. “What?” Ronan presses out.

The boy seems to remember himself as he stands up a bit straighter. “Sorry, just. You’re Adam’s boyfriend?”

“Yes,” Ronan say, frowning deeper.

“You’re the farmer?”

“Yes,” Ronan repeats and stuffs his fists into his pockets.

“Huh,” the guy says and leans on the doorway again. “Sorry, you’re just. Not what I expected. But that explains the jacket.”

“The jacket?” Ronan wonders how deeply he will have to twist his face in order to get this guy to leave.

“What do you grow?” the boy asks instead of explaining himself, in an attempt to be polite or rude or nosey or fucking annoying, see if Ronan cares which one. “On your farm?”

Ronan shrugs, feeling out of his depth and hating it. “Potatoes.”

“Potatoes?” the boy repeats, frowning like he’s never heard the word before.

“He’s Irish,” Adam suddenly says, grabbing at Ronan’s elbow. He looks at Ronan and there it is again, that private smile of his. Ronan has no choice but to deflate a little. “He thinks it’s funny.”

The guy at the door breathes out a short, fake laugh and Ronan hates him. But the roommate is already pushing him out and saying to Adam over his shoulder: “Thank you so much, Adam, for the notes, and sorry for bothering you again. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He smiles and then they're gone.

Ronan still scowls at the door.

“Sorry about that,” Adam says and he is already putting his hands back where they belong, kissing just under Ronan’s jaw. Understandably, Ronan loses the ability to think for quite a while.

It’s only when he is finally, finally removing his shirt over his head that he remembers to ask: “The jacket?”

“Huh?” Adam says intelligently, his sole focus on the button of Ronan’s jeans.

“The other guy. He mentioned your jacket.”

“Huh?” Adam repeats, but now he raises his head to look at Ronan. “Oh!” he says as his eyes light up with understanding. “I took your jacket. The old leather one.” He shrugs. “You were going to throw it away, didn’t think you’d care. Some of the guys were teasing me, said it didn’t fit my style – whatever they think my style is supposed to be – I told them I took it from you.”

“The one with the burnt sleeve?” Ronan frowns again. “Parrish, if you needed a new jacket…”

“I didn’t need it, okay?” Adam says and rolls his eyes. “It’s just a nice jacket and you didn’t want it anyway. Can we now stop talking about clothes and get back to removing them?” To prove his point, Adam lifts the edge of his own shirt and pulls it off, and every other thought Ronan might have had flies right away with it.

***

Opal runs across the pasture straight into Adam’s arms as soon as she hears his car coming around the corner. Ronan berates her for it (“Let him catch a breath, for fuck’s sake.”) if only because he didn’t get to do it first.

But Adam just smiles and lets Opal cling to him, crouches down to be at the same eye level. She pulls out a piece of colorful candy wrapper, half-eaten and sticky with spit and fuck knows what else, and holds it out for Adam to take. Ronan watches, amused, as Adam tries not to make a disgusted face and promptly fails at it.

“Thank you, Opal,” he still says, taking it from her. Opal beams at him.

And then Adam finally straightens up and turns around so that Ronan can wrap himself around him and kiss his temples.

“I have a trunk full of stuff to take upstairs,” Adam says in lieu of hello.

“You also have two perfectly working legs and arms to match, so I don’t know how that has anything to do with me,” Ronan replies into his hair.

Adam huffs a laugh. “Asshole.” He pinches Ronan’s side and Ronan pushes him away, feigning being hurt, before turning around and heading straight for the trunk of his shit car.

It’s much, much later that Adam drags him to the laundry room. Well. He doesn’t exactly drag him there. It’s more that Adam hoists up a bag full of dirty clothes and heads towards the laundry room and Ronan wordlessly follows him there, picking up a new box of washing powder from the pantry.

Adam starts talking about the last oral exam he had and it’s a testament to how much Ronan missed him that he doesn’t even make a crude joke about it, just leans against the washing machine and watches Adam empty the pockets of his pants, clinging to his every word. And for someone who is constantly giving Ronan shit about the state of his car, Adam sure does carry a lot of trash in his pockets.

He pulls out a piece of candy wrapper Ronan at first doesn’t even recognize as the one Opal gave him – its colors shifted now that it dried in Adam’s pocket – and he doesn’t even pause his story before straightening it and putting it in the back pocket of the jeans he is currently wearing. Ronan frowns, but stays silent.

***

It was Adam’s idea to clean out the closets in the first place. Ronan, understandably, groaned and rolled his eyes and kicked the floor and used very colorful language to express his disdain. He even promised to dream up a new closet, just for Adam and his bunch of shit, really, Parrish, you won’t even have to look at Ronan’s clothes ever again, he’ll make it so that it chews and spits out Ronan’s tank tops even if he puts them there by mistake, just please don’t make him spend another summer day holed up inside.

But Adam, ever the pragmatic, just shakes his head. “Where would you even put a new dresser? The room’s cluttered enough.”

Ronan considers giving him a very imaginative answer to that particular question, but realizes that he is still going to end up cleaning the closets anyway, only this way he won’t have to deal with both of them pissed off. Not that either of them ends up happy though. It’s an incredibly uninteresting and tiring chore, especially given the fact that ninety-nine percent of Ronan’s clothes is black – the remaining one percent being dark gray or somewhat lighter gray or, very rarely, deep dark blue – and it’s hard to recognize which of his tees are the ones good to keep and which ones are too tight or too ripped even for him to wear. After an hour or so he just ends up chucking them on two separate piles randomly.

He stays out of Adam’s stuff for quite a while, mostly because Adam has significantly less stuff than Ronan (not that anyone would guess it, given their respective fashion choices), but Ronan’s fucking boyfriend is as pedantic about this as he is about anything else. Adam holds up every item, squints at it for a second or two, and if he decides to keep it he folds it carefully on one of the piles he has around the room.

“Go find a box,” Adam says after Ronan sighs for the fifth time in a minute, idly pushing Adam’s stuff around.

Ronan frowns. “What for?”

Adam doesn’t look up from his pile of clothes. “So we can pack up some of the clothes you just tossed away and I can drive it to Goodwill on my way to Boyd’s.”

Ronan considers it for a moment and nods. Okay, maybe Adam has a point, so what. Doesn’t mean he won’t be difficult about it, since he’s still bored as hell. “What boxes?”

“In the small barn, bring the sturdy ones,” Adam replies, folding another t-shirt carefully.

Ronan stomps to the small barn, kicks some stuff around, comes back empty handed. “There isn’t one.”

Adam frowns. “There has to be at least a few. I left them there months ago.”

“Oh, those,” Ronan says, sarcastically, but is immediately hit with a flashback of one very boring afternoon when he and Opal decided to set shit on fire after Adam let him know he won’t be able to come that weekend after all, and Declan called to tell him he’s coming down for some shit or another and he and Ronan should get lunch. “I got rid of those,” he says, because he doesn’t lie but also isn’t too keen on explaining Adam what exactly happened to them.

Adam closes his eyes and sighs. “Well, there’s gotta be at least one box around here somewhere.”

Ronan shrugs. “I’ll check the long barn.”

He manages to find two cardboard boxes, similar enough in sizes. He brings them all the way to the porch before thinking better of it and bringing them back so he can dust them off first. When he finally hauls them upstairs, he finds Adam frowning at a pair of jeans.

“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt,” he drawls as he watches Ronan drop the boxes at his feet, “and assume you know what kinda clothes are good for donation.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan says, which roughly translates to I’ll go through all my shit again and throw the good ones in the shittier looking box, and then he gets to it with just as much enthusiasm as before. Adam says nothing, but Ronan sees one corner of his mouth lifting into a very rude smile.

It must have been hours, days, weeks, fucking years later that they finally manage to sort the old but wearable clothes into the donation boxes (it’s mostly stuff Ronan doesn’t want to wear and Adam doesn’t want to steal from him, and then some stuff of Adam’s that do not fit him right anymore) and the unwearable clothes into trash bags. It’s certainly been long enough that Adam decides they deserve a break.

“Come on,” he says, offering his hand to Ronan who’s sitting on the floor, his legs splayed out. “There’s some ice cream in the freezer.”

Ronan squints up at him, suspicious. “Since when?”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Since the other day when I came from Boyd’s while you were busy chasing goats away from the long barn.” He wiggles his fingers a little. “Unless you want to keep cleaning.”

“You kept ice cream from me for three days?” Ronan huffs, but still takes his hand and lets Adam pull him up.

“It’s not hiding it if you never think to check the freezer,” Adam replies, because he has to be a smartass about everything. Ronan forgives him as soon as the ice cream is out and it’s the kind that Ronan likes the best but rarely when buys because Adam prefers a different one.

Ronan fills two mugs – cause they have a shit ton of those, but no clean bowls apparently – with the ice cream and brings them out to the porch where Adam is already sitting on the stairs facing the pasture. He hands him his mug and Adam leans up to press a chaste kiss to his cheek.

They sit in silence broken only by soft clicking of spoons against ceramic and crickets singing in the grass. The sun is setting behind the woods surrounding the Barns, coloring the sky red and pink and orange. Adam presses his leg against Ronan’s wordlessly and Ronan leans into him until their shoulders brush. Sometimes Ronan thinks he could stay like this forever, just feeling Adam’s body calm and relaxed against his, sharing the quiet between them without a care in the world. He wishes he could somehow freeze the moment and tuck it into his back pocket to look at it later, when Adam’s away and his side of the bed is cold.

“You know we still have to put the clothes away, right?” Adam asks nudging his knee with his own.

And sometimes, Ronan just wants to fucking kill him.

Instead of dignifying that with a response, he leans forward and licks Adam’s cheek.

“Eww,” Adam says, pushing at him playfully. “Real mature.”

“You had some ice cream on your face,” Ronan replies. “Couldn’t let it go to waste.”

“Gross,” Adam says, standing up and rubbing his hand against Ronan’s scalp.

Ronan follows him inside begrudgingly.

Once the boxes are out of the way, putting away the clothes is going much faster than sorting it out, albeit it’s not any less boring – for one part because Ronan doesn’t care where exactly in the closet his clothes end up and Adam is too busy organizing his own to berate him for just bunching up a handful of tank tops and stuffing them on the second highest shelf.

Once done, Ronan looks around the room to make sure nothing is left lying around when he spots one of Adam’s tees lying on the bed. He picks it up and sees that it’s threadbare, with a hole in the front and pieces of thread hanging from the sleeves.

“Hey, Marie Kondo,” Ronan calls, “you forgot this one.”

“The fact that you know who she is takes a significant part out of the insult,” Adam says, returning back to the room.

“Everyone knows who she is.” Ronan glares for good measure, even though he knows Adam is immune to it, and balls the tee in his hand, already reaching for a trash bag with his other, before Adam stops him.

“No, wait.” He grabs at the hand holding the tee. “I’m keeping that one.”

Ronan frowns. “It’s shit.”

“So is a good portion of your wardrobe,” Adam replies. “Give me.”

“My shirts at least don’t fucking look like moths had a dinner party,” Ronan says. “I’m throwing this out.”

“It’s my t-shirt,” Adam says, frowning deeply. “You can’t throw it away.”

“Watch me,” Ronan says and raises his hand higher in an attempt to get out of Adam’s reach.

Adam doesn’t attempt to reach anymore, though. He just crosses his arms over his chest and now Ronan knows he’s really upset. “Why are you being such a dick about it?”

Ronan’s frown deepens. “You were giving me shit about tidying up all day and now you’re giving me shit about throwing away an old t-shirt?”

Adam’s jaw clenches. “Sorry we can’t all afford to have twenty Tom Fords in our closets, Lynch.”

“You have a wardrobe full of shit, Parrish. This one’s basically see-through.” Ronan raises the tee in front of his face to prove his point.

Adam snatches it away. “It’s mine,” he says and turns back to the closet.

Ronan watches him as he folds the old t-shirt, his back tense and shoulders up to his ears. “Whatever, Parrish,” he says and takes the last trash bag outside.

***

Ronan can’t sleep. Which is nothing new, to be perfectly honest. He kicks the covers to the foot of the bed and gets up to piss. On his way back he pulls his t-shirt off and throws it in some corner of the room or the other. He glances at Adam’s back before climbing back to bed next to him.

There is no way Adam is asleep while it’s hot as balls, not while the sheets keep sticking to their skin every time they move, not while his body is wound so tight he would probably jump out of bed and straight through the window if Ronan touched him.

Fine, Ronan thinks. If Adam intends to stay pissed at him for no fucking reason whatsoever, who is Ronan to stop him. Adam always does what he wants, when he wants, anyway. Leaves when he wants, can leave Ronan behind if he wants, leaves Ronan feeling like shit over something he doesn’t even know he’s done wrong.

Ronan punches his pillow into, truthfully, no more comfortable lump than before and turns to lie on his back. He can hear the owl hooting outside. There is no fucking wind. Ronan rubs the heel of his hand against his right eye, but doesn’t curse out loud.

“It’s what I was wearing,” Adam says suddenly, his voice carefully neutral, “back then.”

Ronan considers this for a moment. “What?”

Adam stays silent for a moment before curling into himself a bit more. “Nothin’,” he mutters. “Forget it.”

Ronan frowns, thinks back to the fucking t-shirt now lying somewhere in the closet. “You were wearing it when?”

He hears Adam exhale slowly. “When you first kissed me.”

Oh, Ronan thinks. He lets the words sink in, but he can’t find anything good to say. “That’s why you didn’t want to throw it away?” It comes out more as a question than an explanation.

“Yeah.” Adam swallows. “No.”

Ronan stays silent, at a loss as to what to do. He wants to reach for Adam, pull him close and kiss away whatever it is troubling his mind. He wants to hold his hand and feel at ease. But he knows Adam would only just pull away now. So he waits.

Adam takes a breath before slowly rolling over onto his back and staring at the ceiling. “I didn’t have much growing up,” he says, and, no shit, Ronan still remembers the meager backpack and a cereal box Adam carried out of that fucking trailer years ago, remembers carrying the duffel bag and thinking ‘this is Adam’s whole life here’, remembers being careful not to bang it against anything.

“I had to take care of things if I wanted to have them for longer,” Adam continues, “cause once they were gone, they were gone. And even if something breaks, you keep it, because you can always reuse it in a pinch. Like the pens.” He swallows. “I can’t write an essay with an empty pen, but sometimes I can write down an important phone number or a reminder. A broken thing is still better than no thing at all, right?”

Ronan sneaks a look at Adam and finds that his eyes are firmly closed even as he continues.

“And if you gotta spend money, you want evidence of what you spent it on, so it doesn’t just disappear one day without you noticing." He pauses. "You want to make sure that the thing was real, y’know.”

And oh. Oh, Ronan thinks, there it is. “Adam,” he whispers gently and slides his hand across the sheets to find Adam’s. Because Ronan would know a thing or two about wanting to stick to something so badly, about being so scared of losing the one good thing he has, about being terrified it wasn’t even real to begin with.

Adam rolls his head from side to side, rubbing at his forehead with his other hand, but he lets Ronan entwine their fingers. “I know it’s stupid,” he says.

“Kinda is,” Ronan says. Tries for humor: “Glad to know that I’m not the only stupid one in this relationship.” Fails.

Adam rolls his head again, doesn’t open his eyes.

Ronan shifts until he’s lying on his side. “Hey,” he says quietly and leans forward to kiss Adam’s shoulder. “You’re not planning on getting rid of me, are you?”

“No,” Adam answers and finally blinks his eyes open. “Of course not.” He sighs and turns to face Ronan. “It’s just-,” he stops himself, swallows, tries again. “I’m happy. I’m so impossibly happy, Ronan, and one part of me keeps waiting for everything to be taken away from me.” He kicks the cover off with his legs. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”

Ronan wants to say something. He wants to say you’ll always have me, and if it’s up to me, you’ll never lack anything ever in your entire life, and I don’t want you to worry ever again, and I want you to have everything, and I love you so much it hurts sometimes. But Adam is smart, the smartest person Ronan knows. Adam knows all this already. Some scars just take longer to heal. Some scars just never completely heal. Ronan would know a thing or two about that, too.

So Ronan just scoots closer, heat be damned, and lets Adam hide his face into his neck.

***

Ronan dreams up a pen that never runs out of ink and puts it in Adam’s messenger bag while he’s working at Boyd’s. He debates dreaming up a pencil case when he realizes Adam doesn’t have one, then debates buying one from Amazon like any other asshole would, but then decides that Adam wouldn’t let him get away with that. He got better at accepting gifts from Ronan, though. It’s more that Ronan would be compelled to buy something ugly or funny or ridiculous – like that disgusting one shaped like a dead fish – and Adam would refuse to take it to classroom.

Adam washes out yogurt cups and ice cream containers, and Ronan dries them with a kitchen towel before turning around and using it to smack Adam’s ass with it. Adam cusses him out and chases him around. They both somehow end up in a laughing heap on the floor.

One night, Adam takes a cardboard box out of the closet and sits it on the bed before beckoning Ronan over. He takes out pieces of papers and shit and tells Ronan stories for every single one. Ronan recognizes a few of the items instantly: scraps of candy wrappers and dry leaves from Opal, a flower Ronan took out of his dreams while he was still building Lindenmere, one half of a watch band with teeth marks on it, another postcard from Blue.

Then there is a piece of wrap from a chewing gum Adam’s college friend gave him on his first night there. There is a movie ticket from a screening of some boring ass movie they had to see for one of their classes, when Adam and his roommate were the only ones in the theater and they ended up laughing so hard they were sick. There is a safety pin one of Adam’s classmates gave him to temporarily fix a shirt when he accidentally tore it right before his big presentation in the class.

Ronan knows every one of these stories already, Adam telling him everything over the phone, but he still soaks in every single word Adam says. He never realized before that Adam kept mementos. He realizes that, yes, these little scraps make the stories a tiny bit more real.

There is also an old, beaten to shit notebook which Ronan recognizes as Adam’s old Latin notebook and, sure enough, when Adam flips the pages there are profanities written in Ronan’s handwriting on the margins of the pages.

Next time he visits Adam, he takes him out for lunch, and Ronan pockets the receipt before leaving the restaurant. Back in Adam’s room, he scribbles something on the back of it – having found a working pen on the first try – and stuffs it in Adam’s pocket while hugging him goodbye.

(Ronan also happens to leave his hoodie under Adam’s pillow. Adam doesn’t ask, Ronan doesn’t lie.)

Adam comes home for the winter break hauling more dirty clothes and a bookshop worth of notebooks. He spots Ronan’s addition to the room right away, but waits until he deposits the bags so he can put his hands on his hips judgmentally. “This is new,” he says.

Ronan shrugs. He watches wordlessly as Adam crosses the room to carefully slide his hand across the big wooden chest. Its honey color is still shining faintly, and its hinges are golden. (It’s the third one he’s made, but Adam doesn’t have to know that. The first two were so goddamn awful that all the evidence of them was quickly destroyed, this time no thanks to Opal.)

“And you didn’t think we have room for another dresser,” Ronan says, just to be a smartass.

Adam doesn’t fall for it this time. “It’s beautiful, Ronan.”

Ronan crosses the room to stand closer to him. “Figured you’d need something sturdier.”

“Hmm?” Adam hums, still admiring the chest.

“You know,” Ronan says, and stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Your box is good and all, but it’s cardboard. It won't last much longer, not if you keep adding shit to it, and you’ll run out of space. And I know Opal keeps giving you fucking rocks, whatever, it’s your fucking fault for enabling her, but she-,”

Adam cuts him off by grabbing his face with both of his hands and kissing him, deeply and roughly. “Thank you,” he breathes against Ronan’s lips before diving in for another kiss.

***

Ronan considers the possibility that his boyfriend has some weird ass tidying up kink (and then promptly considers the possibilities of using that to his advantage) because Adam’s barely been home for three days before Ronan finds him decluttering their room. But apparently it’s just, no, Lynch, we’re already hauling stuff out so we can repaint the room so it’s only logical to go through the shit we don’t need anymore. Maybe it’s pragmatism kink. Or competency kink. (Fuck, does Ronan have competency kink?)

Ronan watches as Adam dumps a handful of pens into a trash can, follows those with candy wraps and a broken pieces of plastic from fuck knows what. Ronan joins him by throwing out three empty glue sticks, a pair of broken scissors, more fucking yogurt cups (which Ronan won’t ever admit drinking out of because he couldn’t be assed to wash out any of three hundred glasses lying around the sink). He gets bored quickly enough, and he doesn’t want to throw out anything Adam might want to keep, so he settles on hauling furniture out of the room. Adam teases him about showing off, but Ronan doesn’t miss the way Adam checks him out, his eyes catching on Ronan’s exposed arms, so fuck you, Parrish, I win.

“Hey, what’s this?” Ronan says picking up a ball-up piece of fabric lying on top of a trash can, before he recognizes it.

Adam comes to stand next to him. “You were right,” he says, and some other time Ronan might have been smug about those words coming from him. “It’s shit. And I don’t need it anymore.”

Ronan looks at the t-shirt in his hands, pokes a finger through the hole on its front. “No, you don’t need it.”

“I can kiss you whenever I want now,” Adam reasons, and leans forward to kiss Ronan’s shoulder to prove his point.

Ronan turns his head to press a kiss to Adam’s hair. “Maybe you could keep this one, though,” he says, too nonchalant to be anything but. “It kinda grew on me.”

Adam smiles up at him.

Yeah, Ronan thinks, some things are worth clinging onto.

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