Are you home tonight? Are you laying in bed watching black and white movies? [Ronan and Gansey]

[incognoscibilis]

It feels important that they're here. It's not all of them, not yet, but it's Ronan and Gansey at the little farmhouse that they've built. It feels stupidly momentous, a first step in trying to put back together a friendship that's weathered so much. At the same time, it's funny how it feels like they're on best behavior for pizza and movies, which makes it all the more weird. 

That and one of the chickens has been following him everywhere and Adam's spent the last ten minutes trying to keep her out of the house like some kind of club bouncer. At least it's not one of the alpacas. 

"Start the movie without me. We're having a negotiation!" 

Comments

[thatsallthereis]

Now that they don't live together, Gansey doesn't mind the chickens so much. They're charming in the way that Ronan himself was charming, which was to say not very. The appeal was entirely person-by-person -- person-by-chicken, even.

It was no surprise that Adam showed the same care for Ronan's animals as Ronan did himself. The difference was that Adam showed that same sort of care for all beings. Gansey could almost relate. With every day that passed when he found himself sitting in their little farmhouse with a bag of popcorn or a box of pizza or Ronan's favorite bottle of beer came a new appreciation for things. Not things, as Gansey had no attachment to the microwave with no logical power source or the TV that looked nearly like no TV he'd ever seen. Even though they came from the same place the animals did, they were not living, breathing.

Gansey was losing his taste for things. As long as he had the Pig and a place to live, as long as he had a quest to pour his longing into, he was just fine.

"I'm not going to watch by myself!" Gansey called out to whoever might have been listening. It was just him, 2 sodas (one for each non-drinker), two boxes of pizza, and a bag of fresh popcorn. He eyeballed the TV and wondered if there was even a remote. He'd never been the one to turn it on.

"A little help?" Whoever came was fine. Gansey found he was just happy to sit in a home and be with his friends.

[incognoscibilis]

It took, at the very end, a bit of not-so-stealthy trickery. Adam grabbed a bundle of withered grapes that had been left by the door and waved them in front of the hen's face. He let her get a nibble of one before flinging the whole thing in the direction of the chicken run. She gave chase and he quickly slammed the run gate closed. Not the greatest show of ingenuity but it worked.

Pausing only to wash his hands, Adam finally joined Gansey. "Use your phone," he said, nodding toward the TV. "Or mine, doesn't matter." It was keyed to any of them.

[thatsallthereis]

The door slammed and Adam's entrance was met with quiet applause. Watching Adam play house with the animals was one of the more precious things Gansey had seen. It was clear that he had no natural experience, only an inclination that well could have been love for Ronan or love for all things. Or was it the branches reaching out from Cabeswater, commanding their hands to care for their livestock? Any way it was, Gansey watched it like it was a precious moment. Dutiful Adam. Ingenious Adam. Hard-pressed Adam.

"Oh," Gansey said, tugging the large, flat rectangle from his pocket. Darrow had seen fit to equip him with top-of-the-line cellular accessories and that suited Gansey just fine. It meant he didn't have to deal with the guilt of purchasing it unfairly. "What do I do? Find a movie and push play?"

[incognoscibilis]

As he settled, Adam felt as if Gansey was looking at him and searching for something. Did it have to do with the chickens or the thread that was woven between them from Cabeswater. Or was it the simple fact that he was, by now, almost twenty? Seeing his own face every day in the mirror, Adam didn't think he saw much difference between the eighteen-year-old who'd arrived here and the one he was now. Maybe Gansey saw it differently.

"Something should–yeah." Adam pointed out his own phone where a remote control-shaped menu had popped up of its own accord.

"It has every movie that's ever existed. And some that haven't."

[thatsallthereis]

Gansey worked himself up onto his knees and took Adam's phone carefully. He did not handle others' things with the same abandon he had once handled his own. Now, he had more care with those things, too. Darrow living was expensive. There was a part of Gansey that was beginning to enjoy that part. Having a budget. Not having a thing like money sitting between him and Adam like one of Ronan's snarling dream things.

"I'm thinking raunchy bro teen comedy," Gansey said, his eyes lighting up as he looked at Adam over his phone. "Something really gross." Why? Why the hell not.

[thedreamthief]

With a beer in one hand a half empty bag of Doritos in the other, Ronan caught only part of the conversation as he stepped in.

"Fuck that," he grumbled, stealing the phone straight out of Gansey's hand with the hook of his finger and expertly flicking through the screen to pull up The Fast and the Furious before tossing the phone onto the couch for Gansey to fetch. Of course, he could just as easily have pulled up the movie on his own phone, but that would have meant finding it. It was somewhere up on his room, probably. Ronan wasn't sure; he hadn't seen it since that morning.

He took a swig of his beer before dropping onto the opposite end of the couch and grinning up at Adam. "My house, my rules."

[incognoscibilis]

"I helped build this house," Adam reminded him. "I get a third of the rules. Only fair." He wondered what it meant about him that they'd become comfortable enough that Adam could joke about it, his need for things to be fair. It was a joke he could share with Ronan, who never gave a damn in front of him, even while he was furtively paying off church ladies to take a chunk out of his rent.

"But I vote Fast and the Furious too. Overruled," he said, nudging Gansey before stretching an arm along the back of the couch, fingertips stretched out toward Ronan.

[thatsallthereis]

Gansey rolled his eyes entirely for show. Anyway, a smile attacked his mouth and took away all possibility of malice beneath it. Of course Ronan wanted to watch Fast and the Furious. Of course Adam was on Ronan's side. Of course they were about to watch a movie about fast cars with a minimal amount of women and maximum overdrive. Gansey wondered why he'd ever thought there was a possibility of anything else. There was this documentary on universal geography he'd been hoping to catch...

"Far be it from me to stop you," Gansey said, his hands up in mock-surrender. It was hard not to feel good when two people that were so important to him were looking at each other like that. They touched so easily. Their viewpoints fit together like a lock in a key. It was like he could see Ronan's heart beating again.

It made him miss Blue awfully.

[thedreamthief]

It wasn't often Adam took Ronan's side on anything, particularly when it was the three of them together. He grinned wolfishly over at Gansey as he propped his feet up on the table, beer bottle nestled between his thighs.

Adam was less than an arms length away and he stretched that arm out between them, catching the tip of his pinkie on the outer seam of Adam's jeans.

"This the best pizza you could find?" he asked, nudging his foot against the nearest box as the movie started, music already blasting through the speakers though, exactly where those speakers were, Ronan himself wasn't even sure. He couldn't remember what dream had created them; there'd been too many in the construction of the Farms, each of them bleeding into one another.

[incognoscibilis]

Gansey rolled his eyes because he was supposed to but Adam could see the smile and knew Ronan did too. It felt good, not like 'the old days' because too much had changed for that but it was something like the nostalgic version they might have conjured.

"What would you do if Vin Diesel showed up in the city?" Adam asked of either of them. He reached over and snagged a slice and passed it to Gansey. "What would you do if Vin Diesel showed up with Nino's pizza?"

[thatsallthereis]

Gansey took the slice with eager hands and a grateful nod. "I'm not entirely certain I know which one Vin Diesel is," Gansey admitted. He was not at all ashamed of this fact. Gansey educated himself in the things that mattered to him and had the luxury of ignoring the rest. "I'd figure it out for some Ninos." That was more of an admission, and he took a sloppy bite, kicking his own heels up.

"Harry's is the best and Darrow and you know it," Gansey said to Ronan, tossing a piece of pepperoni at him over Adam's head. It fell a little short and he made an oops sort of face when it landed on Adam's pantleg.

[thedreamthief]

"Probably blow him," Ronan remarked with a shrug, not because it was in any way true, but purely because it was vulgar. And because he relished the reaction he might get from both Adam and Gansey.

He didn't bother pointing out Vin Diesel, more entertained by the idea of Gansey watching most of the movie without a clue. Though, in all honesty, he doubted Gansey would get through even half of it before pulling some book or journal in sheer boredom.

Out the corner of his eye, he saw a piece of pepperoni go flying through the air, smirking when it landed with a plop on Adam's pantleg, and he reached over without a thought to steal it off, stuffing it into his mouth. "Harry's is passable," he lied, sucking a stray bit of grease off his thumb. "Nothing beats Nino's."

[incognoscibilis]

Adam tried to look reproachful but it was ruined by a barely-suppressed snort. He filed the moment away to tease Ronan about whatever guilt-free fives they might come up with. "Going for him sounds a little narcissistic," he said, eyes drifting toward the shaved part of Ronan's head before looking away and taking his own slice.

"Nino's is pizza the way Harry's is pizza," he said philosophically. "We just miss Nino's more."

[thatsallthereis]

Gansey snorted, somewhere between unsurprised and amused. The sentiment was echoed in the way he his smile widened when Gansey put the denim-dusted pepperoni in his mouth. Two snapshots of Classic Ronan.

"I believe what Parrish is trying to say is that your heads equally resemble similar, related parts of the male anatomy," Gansey philosophized. He could have said "you both look like cocks" but there was a time and place for that sort of thing, and Ronan was sucking up all of the obvious teenage boy vibes in the room. It warmed Gansey like his favorite cardigan.

[thedreamthief]

"So you do know which one's Vin Diesel," Ronan replied with a pointed look before glancing briefly to Adam. "That dude's forearm is about the size of my thigh. How the fuck do we look alike? Unless you're implying all men with even a little bit of shaved hair look identical. Wouldn't have thought you so narrow-minded, Parrish."

He made not comment on Gansey's rather weak dick joke. Frankly, he didn't want to be thinking about how much Gansey had been staring at cock lately.

[incognoscibilis]

Gansey's delicate word choice just made it all the funnier and Adam grinned crookedly, lips pressed together in a way to try and suppress laughter. Mostly he looked a little pained, shoulders jerking a little before he sucked in a breath to steady himself.

Trying to imitate Gansey's purposeful syntax, Adam said, "I was attempting to imply that you're both good-looking–" The suppressed giggles turned his accent into a drawl and he looked between Gansey and Ronan before succumbing to his laughter.