incognoscibilis | We’ll pour it in a cup, try to drink it up [Nov. 22]

It's been almost a week since she's been back in the normal, full-color Darrow, and in Blue's opinion, that should be more than enough time to be done feeling like shit.

Should be, but isn't. She's put a smile on her face for the clientele of Un Chat Gris, and she's slowly coaxing herself into eating a little, but her whole body feels tired, disconnected. She still feels like she can't get clean; still wakes up from nightmares and doesn't go back to sleep. And maybe that makes sense, because as nearly as she can figure they were down there more than three weeks, at least, she was. But she's impatient with it anyway.

So when Adam knocks, she's curled up on her couch, not really doing anything: she has something she'd meant to do but she's just thinking, and the knock startles her a little.

"Yeah," she calls, getting up. "Yeah, be right there." She pads over on bare feet and leans on the door. "Hey," she says, letting it sway under her and tips her head up at Adam, curious. "Come in."

She looked as tired, as emptied, as Adam felt. Maybe he'd come out of that version of Darrow with some of his demons put down but that didn't change the things he'd seen or the fearful self-hatred he'd felt. It amazed him that Blue and Noah were even still speaking to him after the things his other self had said.

The fact that he'd come home to an unfaithful Ronan when he'd needed him the most only let him hollower. Adam should have known better than to go home expecting safety in anyone's company. That had been his first mistake.

When Blue came to the door, Adam put on a smile and reached into his pocket, holding out a key. "For Hywel."

She manages an actual, legitimate smile at that and reaches for the key. She hadn't been invited into the boys' club that was Monmouth, back home, not properly anyway, and it means a lot to her to be invited to share space. She's been saying for a while she wants to stay here -- have her own space to retreat to away from gross teenage boys and drama -- but after the other Darrow, she's not sure anymore.

Things seem so easily taken away and if she's learned anything it's that she can only prevent that by doing, not by wanting.

"Thank you," she says, and tries to read him. "Come on in?" she repeats, this time a request. "There's tea and...stuff." Presumably there's stuff.

"Unless you've got to go, I mean."

Adam shook his head and allowed himself in, closing the door behind them both. "Tea would be great. I'm done for the day." Blue's company would be a thousand times better than going home to the painful quiet of his apartment, Ronan's absence a palpable thing. Hywel, still barely occupied, would have hardly been better.

Then he paused and forced himself away from those thoughts and tried to refocus. "It's not going to be...Fox Way tea, is it?" he asked, faintly pleading. Adam didn't know what he could handle, really, but he knew that neither footy nor fruity was among them.

"Sounds good to me," she says, and turns the key over in her hand, leaning past to lock the door behind him impulsively before heading toward the kitchen. "Make yourself at home," she says with a vague flourish at the living room, its mismatched, sturdy furniture and little table. Blue's been decorating, but her slightly-matured interior decorating began mostly with her bedroom and only just spills outward from there, encroaching on the bigger room like ivy.

"Well, I'm making it," she says, with a small smile, "so it's going to be a little bit Fox Way." Blue fills up a kettle and turns on the stove, wondering at how she can possibly miss that tea. "But no feet, I promise." She opens a cabinet and peers up at the brightly colored boxes. "We got...sleepy, good morning, immune booster, decaf peppermint, earl grey, lady grey, rooibos..." She peers, on tiptoes. "Red..."

"You might have to get it down if it's either of the last two, though."

It was all the charm of 300 Fox Way but with Blue left in charge. Her signature could be found all over in the deliberate mismatch that added whimsy to the purposeful and sturdy nature of the furniture. Somehow, Adam felt instantly better. At home and at ease.

All they needed was Persephone.

"Earl Grey," he said, going for the name he recognized. It sounded like it was the least likely to have in common with Maura Sargent's healing teas.

She stands up on tiptoes, sidling the periwinkle-blue box from the shelf and then a couple of thrifted, slightly chipped mugs; a teabag apiece goes in and Blue snags the kettle as it whistles, pouring water into each carefully and coming over with the mugs and spoons.

She might not get around to feeding herself properly, but she can make tea. Even sweet tea, if she put her mind to it, but it's cold.

"There's milk," she says belatedly, turning the mug handle toward Adam; the sugar's on the table. "If you want?"

"No, I take my tea plain." He'd grown up practically nursed on sweet tea, only it had been the cheap stuff, made and bottled by indifferent hands. It had made an avowed drinker of unsweetened tea from overexposure.

"I suppose I can't judge when I live with someone who wired a fridge into the bathroom, but are you eating enough?" He let Virginia into his accent with all of its neighborly concert and solicitation, which was to say he was being nosy but at least being polite about it.

She nods, curling herself up sideways on the couch, one leg tucked under her, so she's next to but facing Adam, her knee close to his but not brushing it. She's become a sort of field expert in these negative spaces, over the last half year, these gulfs and centimeters. The measurement of a hand between bodies, the space between a breath and a kiss. The lives and promises folded into an exhale, the wavering, uncertain edge between comfort and tease. The endless and invisible gaps between a friend and a boyfriend, between a boyfriend and an exboyfriend and back; the weight limits on bridges.

"I'm eating," she says a little defensively and dumps a spoonful of sugar into her tea, stirring it. At home she'd have said mom at him and it comes to mind just in time to be a little painful. "Enough is sorta relative, isn't it?" She goes for a smile and shrugs one shoulder. "I'm trying."

"What about you?" She looks up from her tea. "How are you doing?"

"I'm doing well enough," he said, hanging his words on what Blue had just said; 'enough' was sort of relative. Things weren't so bad, anyway. Adam figured that all of his limbs were in good working order and his lungs were still converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. Except for his ear, everything was doing what it was supposed to.

There was just the matter of the Ronan-shaped hole in his chest.

Scooting closer, so he'd be able to hear her, Adam shrugged. "Hywel's a big place once the plan for everyone to move in fell apart."

"Better than the alternative?" she asks, with a little crease in her forehead that it's not better than her own handwaving of the issue. But she can't talk, anyway; sometimes breathing is the best you can do, and she knows Adam's time in that other city wasn't any better than hers, with that other-him he kept apologizing to her for.

She's abruptly aware that she's been looking at her hands through most of what she's said as he scoots forward and she sits up a little. "I know I'm dragging my feet, over here," she says, self-conscious, "but I didn't think it had totally fallen apart." She tilts her head, questioning. Sometimes it'd be easier if she were Calla, could touch someone's hand and know without asking.

Even though he'd defeated that other self, Adam was always going to be afraid that he'd inherited some of his more volatile aspects. That was what kept him apologizing, kept him begging forgiveness for the hateful potential that he fought to control. Robert Parrish's anger was something that Adam had to manage quietly, just like his other disabilities.

"Noah has Krem's place. Or their place. I don't know exactly. But he's got Krem. Lynch has been camping." Truthfully, with Cabeswater's connection, it would be more than easy to trace and find Ronan, but Adam didn't want to.

"I was thinking about moving in," she says slowly in some sort of weird consolation, "and just keeping this place to escape you guys being, I don't know, guys." She also knows that Krem isn't to Noah what the others are: sure, they live together, but that's not a replacement situation. That's not what's bothering her; she frowns, her brow knitting at Lynch and the briefness. "What's up with Han Solo?"

"Yeah?" Adam knew he didn't really have a stake in whether or not Blue moved in. He missed having her around and for the calm and sense that seemed to follow her. He also knew that he was the last person allowed to make comments about whether someone needed to move in or not.

And damn her, Blue Sargent was too smart. "I guess he went to the Dark Side," Adam said, playing it vague and humorous, even if him fucking Kavinsky wasn't funny at all.

"Someone needs to keep an eye on y'all," she says, fond, comfortable enough to relax her generally neutral accent. She's not quite willing to unearth the whole truth, which is that since a month in that other city -- before, but certainly since -- things have felt very ephemeral and she's been a little uneasy about not knowing what's going on with everyone. (Maybe it's a side effect of hanging around Gansey, too: liking to keep her people all together.)

"You can't go to the dark side if you're not a Jedi," she says distantly, turning that metaphor over in her head. It makes her stomach twist. Ronan isn't always nice, or mostly, but he's usually honest and the choice of words is unsettling. She takes a long moment over her tea before looking back up. "I'm not Noah, or -- my mother, I'm not gonna dig out what's going on," she says, "but you can talk to me. If you want." He's trusted himself in her hands before.

"I mean, if you can handle being surrounded by Raven Boys. We're not exactly 300 Fox Way, you know," he said. For a second, Blue had him enough at ease to make the joke, even as he tried to put back the mental bandage he'd wrapped around the reality of how Ronan had spent his month.

Staring into his tea, Adam just shrugged. "I don't see what there really is to tell." That wasn't a lie, exactly, though it was a denial. He didn't want to talk about it was closer to the truth. "But while we were stuck in Evil Darrow he was living it up with Kavinsky. Or fucking himself up. Whatever."

"And it's a good thing you're not trying," she retorts with a small smirk. She's struck by a pang of homesickness, then, all the keener for having just watched Persephone die again (and her mother, and who knows what's happening to them all, and,) but that's not what Adam was trying for, and she appreciates their banter. "I think I can take care of myself."

Blue waits, because she'd just said he didn't have to talk to her: there's nothing to argue against. She's still not expecting what he says, her eyes going dark and sharp at Kavinsky's name. "What."

It shouldn't be surprising: she's lived through one iteration of Ronan Lynch tempting destruction with Kavinsky. But she's also lived through his fierce, vulnerable expression bursting into Fox Way with Gansey when Matthew was taken, and it's hard to remember this Ronan hasn't and won't ever experience that.

That anger and terror, and the way she feels instinctively defensive of Adam no matter what, and the slithering discomfort Kavinsky inspired even before that and she's just left with a sort of horror that overrides any logic behind what Ronan must have been thinking. "He told you that?"

Edited 2015-12-01 00:02 (UTC)

"I know you can. That's why I figure you won't yell at me for checking," Adam said, smiling a little crookedly. Then the joke lost all of its power as he second thing that he said sank in and Blue stared at him.

All of the anger that had fueled him in the confrontation fizzled out and Adam looked away again. Carefully, he turned his left ear toward Blue and glanced at his tea, at the floor, anything but Blue's eyes.

How could he say how obvious it should have been? If he retreated away from Adam Parrish, hid in the Magician and Cabeswater, he could see what it was. How foolish Adam Parrish had been to think he could have Ronan Lynch and keep him.

"I hope the sex was good at least."

She can see him pull away, shutter away inside himself, and Blue finds herself almost - almost - wishing she was facing the Adam she'd seen when they'd -- broken up, or whatever to call that. That at least would be anger, not this sort of retracted unspoken woundedness.

Blue isn't owed him talking to her though, and instead she looks at her tea and just lets him be.

"I don't," she snaps, because Blue is neither kind nor particularly prone to being passive-aggressive: her aggression is on the surface and ready to fight. And also because she can't quite handle a world where Kavinsky's talented in bed. "Being an idiot shouldn't be rewarded."

He could recognize Blue's anger on his behalf and recognized that he should be gratified for it. Mostly, he just thought he'd rather have Ronan, hidden and gentle. That was the Ronan he'd hoped to see again when they'd been trapped in that nightmare place.

"Well. Good or bad. It happened." It happened with Kavinsky.

Blue sighs and tugs at a loose thread on the upholstery of the couch, not knowing what to say exactly. "I'm sorry, Adam," she says, though the words are stupid, and not exactly like what she means.

Ronan, of both of them, had seemed the more obvious about his affections (though she's relatively certain he was trying not to be), and she feels like either her radar must have been completely off, or he's just being Ronan, starting fights where they don't exist because it's better charted territory.

Whichever it is, she's tired of it. Of it all, of Adam closed off and lonely, of her own longing for things she can't have; Gansey fighting his own mind, Ronan angry and sullen and strangely divorced from all of them. When Noah's the most content of them all coming out of facing his own murderer, there's a problem.

"I'm getting really sick of everyone hurting all the time," she says quietly, and leans against the side of the couch.

"He thought I was gone," Adam said, not sure if he was defending Ronan or just sketching in the details. "That I'd gone back to Henrietta and left him."

Adam didn't forgive him though, couldn't absolve the sin with his grief. Mostly, when he let himself feel anything, Adam just felt stung, a dull and incomplete hurt that came from stepping determinedly away from his feelings at all times.

"I'm not hurting," he said, which was sort of true. He wasn't bruised or bleeding, all of his bones were whole. In the world of Adam Parrish, what else could qualify as not hurting?

"We can't leave," Blue says, but she's heard from people that it happens, sometimes, and she's not sure, exactly, how. After the last few weeks, she'd be willing to believe almost anything. She can't decide how that makes her feel about the situation. Is it cheating if you think someone's gone? Maybe, but how long do you wait? But she can't not be angry, either.

"I guess people do anyway, though." She tries to separate her anger at Ronan doing this to Adam, at sleeping with Kavinsky of all people, out from her thoughts. "I -- don't know what I'd do, if -- How I'd feel." She hates this lying by omission. Or truth by omission. Adam's trusted her with this much. She doesn't want to make things worse, though, or to push them even more apart, not when they, when everyone are so tentative. "Just -- I can't believe he didn't try. You're worth more than that."

Is that fair for her to say? After them?
She's still not sure who was at fault there, who was worse. Right now she absolutely believes that, and that's all she can factor in.

"Good," she says, in a flat tone that she has absolutely inherited from her mother, and tips her head up at him. "What do you want to do?"

Adam just smiled, thinly and not at all effectively. "Maybe I'm just defective and it's not your fault. Or his." It was the Parrish in him. Ronan was a snake; if you got hurt, you knew it was coming. Adam was something else entirely. The kind of creature that looked harmless until it ruined everything.

"It's good of you to say that."

It really was. More than he felt that he deserved while he mulled in self-pity.

"I want to graduate early and go to Barton and move on with life."

Blue pokes him with her mismatching sock toes. "Hey. Last I checked it was my congenital defects that were the problem." It's light, but not quite a joke. Just because she'll defend her right to not have kissed Adam doesn't mean she's happy with the lack of choice.

"You're not defective, Adam Parrish," she adds, quiet but fierce. "And it's not good of me." Good implies some extra effort, some saintly quality or kindness. "It just is, you know?"

She curls a little closer as she drinks her tea. "Ronan's just --scared." She hasn't thought about it, before speaking, but it sounds good. Ronan likes to attack things he's scared of. Even himself, though usually that's a little metaphorical. It always takes her effort to remember this Ronan hasn't learned how to bend the night terrors to his will, hasn't even been with them for months.

"You could. You should. Study engineering or -- justice or something. God, I haven't even thought about college." She sighs and rubs her temple. "Pretty sure study abroad isn't an option here either?" she deadpans.

"But I meant a little shorter term, too."

Edited 2015-12-09 20:30 (UTC)

"What's to be scared of?" Adam had never thought of himself as frightening, aside from the times when he behaved too much like his father. But Ronan could take that. Ronan had to know that Adam never, ever wanted to hurt him. Never would.

And even he didn't hurt that much. Even in the other version of Darrow, most of his scars were intellectual, and those didn't bleed so they didn't count. Or maybe they counted more and Adam would never have the hindsight to understand that.

"Sometimes I think I could just sleep forever. Or just never sleep again."

Adam isn't frightening; even when he'd punched the wall Blue had only momentarily been scared, and then mostly just angry. "Feeling things, I guess," she says, and it's not a judgment call, because she's terrified of her own feelings most of the time. It doesn't take a psychiatrist to see that Ronan has a pretty big front going.

She nods. Maybe she hasn't been confronted by a major betrayal, but she's had nothing but nightmares or nights of watching the sun come up since she returned from that other Darrow. Sometimes both. "Do you want to sleep here?" she asks, and it's sudden enough that she didn't even think about it. "I mean --" She ruffles her hair, trying to think of a way to rephrase that doesn't sound awkward. "You can, shut your eyes if you need to. If you don't want to be at Hywel."

Adam closed his eyes and let Blue ruffle his hair. It still didn't strike him as fair, the way it was so much easier to touch Blue now that he knew they didn't have a chance. He didn't want to go back to the way things were with Blue, waiting for things to tick down to the inevitable eruption.

(He wanted to go back to Ronan but there was still a Kavinsky-shaped scorch mark on the whole situation.)

"It's not so bad, the part where I have my own room. We could set up a mattress for you."

It's strange, a little, the ability to convey affection without feeling as though there's more expected behind it. It's not that Blue isn't attracted to Adam, or to who he is. She might not be destined to love him, but that, at least hasn't changed. But it doesn't feel as urgent or as terrifying; like they understand each other better now that they're not trying to be something else. Besides, she's pretty sure that, as much as he wanted to be kissed by her before, it's not the way he wants to be kissed by Ronan. Or wanted to.

Everyone having almost died a few more times apiece, having had to physically drag Adam back into this world, it seems petty not to express affection.

"I'd like that," she says, smiling. "I like this place," she gestures, "having a space of my own, it feels sort of --luxurious -- but I miss everyone. Seems too easy for things to happen without me."

"I feel like Gansey would have some speech, you know, about how we need each other more than ever." They'd always been a unit, the most Raven of Raven Boys. Then they'd been Blue's Raven Boys, whether they meant for it or not. It had simply been but that was in Henrietta, where they'd been small and tight knit.

Darrow was different. Darrow was bigger. It had more people. More offerings for socializing. It gave them a chance to drift apart and expand their worlds.

Adam wasn't sure he liked taking that opportunity but knew that he had.

She smiles a little, because he's absolutely right. In fact it's possibly something Gansey has said. "I think your hypothetical Gansey is right," she admits, looking at her hands. "Especially since ... well, since the other Darrow." She chews on her lip, hating feeling vulnerable. She'd watched too many of them slip away from her.

"It's not that I don't like us having other people. Noah with Krem, they're happy, and I love that. Or other friends. Bitty, or Bay, or Beth..." She pauses. "I only make friends with people whose names start with B now," she informs him, trying to lighten the mood. "But..." She tilts her head. "I don't want us to lose each other. I don't know if we're all supposed to end up together forever, or something, I can't tell you that." Uncomfortably, she's also not sure what forever means for any of them: shouldn't it mean something that their destinies are tied up in each other? Or does it just mean they all don't last the year?

"But I don't want us to --not." She looks back up at him.

"Hypothetical Gansey is right a surprising amount of time, even if he doesn't always have any damn sense." Some people, Adam supposed, had an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Adam had a miniature Blue for practicality and morality, a miniature Ronan for temper, and a hypothetical Gansey for Ganseying. Pragmatism, he supposed.

"Blue, Bitty, Bay, Beth. You probably ought to just give Beth a more unusual name." He took Blue's bait for a joke and smiled back. They had other friends too, or other mutual friends. Krem, for instance. Adam's bosses weren't bad either.

Adam shook his head and then, thinking it would be okay, wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "I don't think we could ever do that. It's like that tapestry. We've been woven into part of this for a long time."

She smiles, fond. "Real Gansey probably has a hypothetical Adam for sense," she muses. "It can't be a hypothetical Blue, or he wouldn't still own boat shoes." The voices in her head were usually made up of the missing members of 300 Fox Way, but the boys crept in now and then. Usually they were there, though, and hypotheticals weren't necessary.

"I'll just tell her that we're renaming her," Blue says with a very serious nod and amusement in her eyes. It fades a little as she goes through people she's shared experiences with: Tris, Biffy, Dorian, Dean. "It's harder to decide who counts as a friend, here," she says quietly after a moment. At home it's easy; they're all self contained. She's friendly with her coworkers, but they're not her friends. She doesn't really have friends: she has family. And the rest don't have a lot of friends, either. Even Gansey, who has other acquaintances through research or rowing or his mother's political career -- they're more associates than they are real friends.

Here -- well, almost-dying in front of people, having them save your life without a reason to, that makes the lines a little more difficult.

She blinks at Adam's embrace, a little surprised, and after a moment, relaxes into it. It's comforting. "You believe that?"

We’ll pour it in a cup, try to drink it up [Nov. 22]

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