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Adam decided that Ronan was the easiest person to plan a wedding with, and the most frustrating person to plan a wedding with. On one hand, Ronan seemed to have no opinions about how anything should be. On the other hand, Ronan seemed to have no opinions about how anything should be. It was infuriating to not have the choices narrowed down at all. No matter how hard Adam pushed, he had only gotten Ronan to weigh in on one thing: the cake. Apparently that was worth all the arguing that would have been spent on every other aspect of the wedding.
'Not everything should be chocolate on chocolate with more chocolate, Parrish,' Ronan had complained, 'For the love of God some people like to taste other shit.'
'You didn't like any of the options. We might as well go with a crowd favorite,' Adam replied.
'I'm telling you it's not a crowd favorite.'
Part of Adam was cheering to get a single straight opinion out of Ronan, the other part of him was going to strangle his fiancé.
They decided on red velvet. A week later. It was a southern wedding, after all.
That said, there were two things Ronan did insist on though it was more about complete control than giving an opinion. One, that they go to Mass as a family the Sunday before the wedding (which would be two days later) for a blessing since they weren't getting married in a church. That was no trial to Adam, nor a surprise. He sometimes went to Mass with the Lynch brothers these days when they were close enough geographically to do so. Usually though he met up with them afterward instead as Adam thought of Mass as not only a bonding activity for the brothers themselves (the reason he gave Ronan aloud) but also as a complete waste of his time as a heathen unbeliever (the reason Adam knew Ronan knew but tried not to think about as it worried his Catholic soul).
The second thing Ronan insisted on was he be allowed to decorate the ceremony space at the Barns as well as the outbuilding he wanted to use for the reception. Somehow this had expanded to cover much of what had to do with both the ceremony and reception in-general. They had chosen the colors together, Adam knew they were each writing their own vows, but otherwise a large portion of his own wedding was a mystery.
All of this Adam had a harder time with, as in he oscillated between being excited to see what Ronan came up with and being horrified at having absolutely no idea what was happening. Surprises were not something Adam tended to handle well, even if he did enjoy them in the end. He knew Ronan was planning to dream something, likely multiple somethings, for each area. Ronan had not-so-secretly been zealously guarding a particular sketchpad (Years ago, he had begun sketching dream objects before attempting them as to make the most of his time asleep.) for the past month and he often called Hennessy with it in-hand when he thought Adam couldn't hear the rough low-whispered tone of his voice. Hennessy meanwhile cheerfully refused to tell Adam anything about anything.
And so, this left Adam with much less to plan than he had expected. The guest list was small with less than twenty guests and location-based tasks like catering were left to Blue and Hennessy since he and Ronan were still traveling for work. They planned to wear suits they already owned since Adam was loathe to buy something they wouldn't wear again, even if they had the money to do so now, and Ronan had hated being measured for the suit he already had in the first place.
Adam had even known the design of Ronan's ring for years at this point, had researched the exact shop he wanted to make it ages ago. He held that very ring in his hands that very moment as he waited for Ronan to emerge from the shower, sitting on the bench at the end of their bed twirling the piece of metal slowly as if to will his racing heart to match its pace.
He'd had to wait for their return to Boston for Declan and Jordan's summer society wedding to retrieve the ring from the jewelers. He'd picked it up yesterday. He had to give it to Ronan tonight. Adam knew that. He did.
He gently ran a thumb over the band and felt the weight of his own engagement ring. Declan's wedding was tomorrow and Adam wanted his ring on Ronan's finger. An equal claim, an equal promise. It was important to him. He just had to...mention it. His breathing felt shuttered in his chest and he got up in a leap, walking to the front window of the bedroom.
The tri-floor brownstone looked out over the street but the lushness of the summer trees blocked most of the view this time of year. They had lived here for Adam's last semester at Harvard before he transferred to Georgetown to finish his undergrad degrees. Technically Declan owned it but he hadn't changed anything about it over the years since they left the city. It was always there, waiting for Ronan and Adam to return even if they didn't consider it theirs.
The hazy balls of light hovering along the ceiling were dream objects, as was the mattress of the bed and the fire in the hearth that gave off light but no heat in the summer. But the rest was real. It was important for them both not to be swamped in dreams and magic, to keep one foot in the reality of being human. Once, Adam might have considered himself uncomfortable with dream things on a logical level (like anyone when faced with the impossible) but then there had been Opal and Matthew. Eventually there was Jordan too. Dreams as real as any human, maybe even more so. His family was now made of dreams and dreamers, and whatever he was. And Declan, he supposed. Someone had to hold down the fort as ‘normal’ though he didn’t think of Declan as that nowadays.
Still, neither he nor Ronan wanted to make this city a home. It was impossible to see it that way for them both after all that had happened here. Boston was a city of bittersweet taste to Adam. It was what he'd left the Barns and Ronan for, to chase dreams he didn't realize at the time belonged to a past Adam. He reinvented a lesser Adam to live there. A liar Adam, an Adam who was ordinary, who didn't scry, who didn't feel the pulse of ley line magic, an Adam who hadn't left his heart and soul and happiness in a patch of Virginian soil with a boy more raven than human.
Adam thought of that first year at Harvard as his Lost Year. The year that he’d tried to bury his old self and his real self. The year that he been more miserable than any other time in his life, which was saying something. The year he’d had no idea who he was or where he was going. A terrible time, even if he’d learned from it in the end. He was glad to be in Boston in summer, to not have to think about all those frigid days of his worn shoes beating the cobblestones to the mantra of 'I will be fine, I will be fine, I will be fine' and not knowing how to stop lying to himself about it. Until he couldn't. Until Ronan's life had depended on him to stop.
Sometimes Adam thought they’d been through too much for only having a few years together, to be as young as they were and for neither of them feel like it. They had already lost each other once, they had already lied and betrayed and run away, but they’d also never left in-truth. They’d never wanted anything else or anything more than each other. Together, they were like a ley line themselves, a flowing hum of power beneath the soil's surface that was true and strong even when denied or unseen.
From his right, with his hearing ear, he noticed as the shower water turned off. Adam went back over to the bench at the end of the bed. He wasn't sure his knees would stay strong if he continued standing. He took a deep steadying breath.
Years of experience had made them better at communicating, not just in their uncanny, silent mental connection that meeting in the sweetmetal sea had allowed them but also with words out loud though they had both struggled for so long with it. Still did, on occasion, when the emotions overtook them. Even now, with the weight of Ronan's dreamt ring on his finger for the past month, Adam felt a tight seizing worry in his chest has he held Ronan's crafted one in his hands. A few years of being wanted, even so deeply as by Ronan Lynch, had not banished all of the memories of eighteen years of not being.
"Decided to finally go full witch did you now, Parrish? Darker than hell's asshole in here."
Ronan's voice made Adam jump. He looked up. Ronan stood in the doorway to the master bath, a towel tied low on his hips and another around his shoulders. He held it in both hands as droplets traced down his exposed torso and caught in the line of hair beneath his navel. The green snakeskin scales of his sleeve tattoo gleamed in the light. Adam guessed he had kissed each of the myriad of scales at least a thousand times, the fizzle of sweetmetal power under his tongue. He felt the need to do it right then, that very minute, but instead he responded.
"Just thinking," Adam replied, cupping the ring inside his palm. This was stupid, he thought. A regular old ring for an otherworldly dreamer, a trinket compared to the treasure he wore on his own finger. Such an ordinary moment with an ordinary man such as himself for such a glorious spectacular creature as the one before him.
Ronan stalked across the room to Adam, his movements languid, and Adam watched with unabashed appreciation. His Ronan was savage and handsome, unpredictable and full of marvels. He could wait on the ring, he thought, as Ronan came over and stood between his legs. Ronan looked down at him with those too-bright, too-saturated blue eyes, those of the human Adam loved and the ancient being he worshipped.
"What are you thinking about?" Ronan asked. He reached out and pushed some strands of Adam's dusty blond-brown hair back from his forehead, letting his strong fingers linger against the skin of Adam's temple and ear, grazing them featherlight across his cheekbone. Adam was as much a worshipper as an object of worship himself. This could wait, Adam thought, as he leaned his face into the touch.
But, it couldn't.
Adam placed his hands on Ronan's hips and stood. He always appreciated how fully Ronan accepted his touch with complete trust, how willing he was to be directed, sure beneath Adam's hands. Adam turned Ronan's body slightly to the side to open space for Adam and he saw the lascivious smile start to creep across Ronan's lips. It was a grin sculpted by a devil.
Not yet, Adam thought as his own daring smirk responded, but soon. Ronan was forever triggering and enjoying those parts of Adam that he himself considered twisted. His competitive combativeness, his ruthless stubbornness, his wickedly sharp tongue. But he brought out pieces Adam hadn't known he'd possessed at all, protectiveness and joy and bravery. He honed in on that last one now.
Adam went down on one knee before Ronan. His heart choked in his chest, stilling. He opened his palm to show the ring held there. Ronan stared at him, blinking, silent.
"I gave you a ring already," Ronan said, scowling. It was his confused face, not his frustrated face. There were many scowls to Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish was an expert at recognizing all of them.
"Yes," Adam said simply.
"I think you're doing it wrong," Ronan said, "I think one person gets the ring."
"Usually."
"Then," Ronan continued to scowl, "what the fuck is this?"
"This is me," Adam said, reaching out and taking Ronan's left hand, "asking you, Ronan Niall Lynch, to marry me." He forced his voice to steady, to say the words he'd been practicing for weeks, "Because I want you and always have. Because you are my world and my every happiness and I am yours, body and soul, as much as you are mine. Now, forever, and always, no matter what time or life we find ourselves in."
Ronan's hand shook slightly in his. Ronan always felt everything so big, so immediately and fully. He never held back his love for Adam. He never made it smaller. And yet, sometimes, Ronan still didn't expect it back. He didn't expect to be loved as grandly, to be desired as hotly, to be cared for as gently, to be wanted so completely as he gave to Adam. Adam never wanted him to think for a moment, not a single breath of time in all of space, that Ronan wasn't adored by every fiber of Adam's being. That he wasn't worth every drop of existence Adam was.
"So," Ronan said, his voice a little breathless, "You're proposing to me, Parrish?"
Adam nodded, "I am, Lynch."
And there it was. The smile that Adam would set the world and dream space on fire for, because he was not the hero in this room. The smile he would topple mountains for. The smile he would sell his soul for, lose himself again in the abyss for just a chance at witnessing. Bright and full and unabashed. Beautiful enough to weep over. Ronan's smile. The smile that was a gift for Adam, because of Adam.
"Then, fuck, put it on me already!" Ronan cried out with a laugh. Adam laughed too, a watery joy-filled sound, and slipped the ring onto his finger. Ronan pulled him to his feet and crushed his mouth against Adam's as they spun and kissed and laughed and kissed and kissed.
"I'm guessing it's a yes then," Adam said in a stolen breath, his lips gliding down Ronan's neck and across his collarbone. He thanked whatever gods there were that Ronan was already mostly-naked beneath his greedy hands.
Ronan's head lulled back to give Adam better access, "Would be weird if I said no after giving you one myself." He pulled his head back up, tucking his hand beneath Adam's chin then sliding it over Adam's neck to cup it, resting the pad of his thumb against the hinge of Adam's jaw. Adam looked up through his lashes. Only a couple inches of height separated them but sometimes Adam felt so far beneath, a penitent kneeler at the feet of a god, not because he was lesser or unworthy but because sometimes Ronan was so vast it took his breath away.
"A raven feather," Ronan said, inspecting the ring against Adam's skin. It was a design Adam had painstakingly perfected, the band's edges smooth but the ridges of the feather intricately detailed with thin slits of obsidian slotted into the dark gray silver. Adam nodded and turned his face to kiss Ronan's palm. He snaked his own hand up to lay again Ronan's chest, his vine-etched ring with its otherworldly blue glint and tiny bits of green catching in the dim light.
"It suits," Adam said, "Two creatures with souls of magic and all that. Greywaren. Magician."
Ronan leaned his forehead against Adam's, his eyes closed, breathing deeply. Adam closed his too. The world was silence and stillness in that mingled breath, in that shared heartbeat. Theirs was an intertwined soul that said 'yes, we found each other' and 'yes, we are wanted' and 'yes, we are happy' and 'yes, we deserve to be' and 'yes, we always will be, together'.
It was impossible to say who moved first, if it was Ronan who closed the space between their mouths or if it was Adam who tilted his head to the side, if it was Ronan who pulled at the back of Adam's neck or if it was Adam who pulled at Ronan's hips, if it was Ronan pushing Adam onto the bed or Adam falling onto it and taking Ronan with him, but they met in the center of the universe as lips and skin and teeth and souls pressed into one.
__________
Sometime later, Adam found himself in the massive claw-foot tub of their bathroom, Ronan's chest to his back. His hair was damp from Ronan's washing of it, a precious calm intimacy that he relished every time. Ronan stroked his fingers down Adam's arm beneath the steaming water. He'd gotten his own tattoo there, wrist-to-shoulder then snaking down his ribcage. A now completed work-in-progress over the past couple of years (all done by Hennessy herself), it told the story of Adam, of who he had made himself to be through the fight of every day.
Vines and trees, rain and mountains, tarot cards and a scrying bowl. Cabeswater was there, the Barns, Lindenmere, the sweetmetal sea. Noah was there in a hubcap inscribed with the word 'remembered', Aurora in a freshly blooming rose, Persephone in a latticed pie. A hair barret for Blue, a crown for Gansey. Adam's own infinity symbol and so many bits of Ronan woven throughout: a raven, a watch, a star, a flame. It was the truth of him, spelled in inked images. What made him and what he made.
Ronan let his fingers linger at the bracelet of curled stylized Latin that encircled Adam's wrist just above the knobbed bone: tamquam alter idem. Over and over until the words met and began again.
Adam leaned his head all the way back on Ronan's shoulder and closed his eyes as Ronan let out a contented purr, touching his cheek to Adam's temple. The scruff of his unshaven face countered the silkiness of his skin beneath the water, each inch pressed against Adam. A moment of domestic divinity.
"I want to take the Lynch name," Adam said into the silence.
Behind him, Ronan's body tensed for a moment, betraying his surprise. He relaxed again but a certain wariness remained. All these years and they both still did that sometimes, a coiling of muscles in the face of something they wanted but hadn't voiced, ready to deny for the sake of pretending not to be hurt. It had played into so many hurts in the beginning, including in Adam's going to Harvard because Ronan wouldn't ask him to stay at the Barns with him, and with Adam never saying he wanted Ronan to ask it in the first place because most of him had wanted to stay.
"You do?" Ronan asked, tentative.
"You don't want me to?"
"I didn't say that."
"No because you do want it," Adam said, careful to keep any heat from his voice. This wasn't a fight. It was something he wanted. "I do too."
Sensing the agitation, Ronan wrapped his arms around Adam under the water, pulling him impossibly closer. Touch was always their way to push through moments like these.
"Why would you though?" Ronan asked.
Adam considered. Though he knew (he'd thought about it long before Ronan even gave him his ring), saying the words aloud was always the hardest part. He closed his eyes as if it would help focus the meaning.
"I want all of it, Ronan. I want to marry you and be with you every day and wake up next to you. I want to sign your last name next to my first name and for it to be mine too. I want the family of it, the being a part of it all. I want to shed...," he breathed, "'Parrish' is something I've only ever liked when you say it. To me, the best thing it's ever been is a nickname from you." He shook his head a little, "It's stupid."
"Don't you dare," Ronan growled, low and insistent but not heated. Ronan took Adam's chin gently in-hand and coaxed him to turn to look him in the eyes. The water sloshed a little over the rim of the tub. "It's not stupid to say what you want. We both know that. We've learned it."
"Have we?" Adam replied weakly.
Ronan nodded once, forcefully, stubbornly, "Fuck yes we have. The fucking hard way." His expression went soft then, his eyes roaming Adam's face as if he had never seen light until that very second, "You are a goddamn wonder, Adam. I never...." He broke off and Adam smiled just a little, cupping Ronan's face in his hand.
"I never did either," Adam finished for him, "but we did it. We're doing it. We're going to keep doing it."
Ronan narrowed his eyes teasingly, "Are you talking about sex?"
Adam's smile went to a straight line, "Don't ruin the moment." He inspected Ronan carefully as he asked the question, trusting his ability to read whatever the expression showed him, "Is it alright if I take your name?"
It was as if Adam's heart restarted in that second between Ronan searching his eyes and Ronan's face brightening into a blinding smile.
"Only been dreaming about it for years," Ronan answered. He leaned forward and kissed Adam's cheeks, then his forehead, then his chin, then his nose. Adam laughed at the aching sweetness of it. The world missed out on so much by not seeing Ronan Lynch in moments like these, but he didn't mind keeping them for himself. "If I had known you wouldn't lose your shit over being 'owned' by someone, I would've asked you to."
Adam pressed a chaste kiss to Ronan's lips, "I'm not worried about that anymore." And it was true. The Adam of then hadn't learned yet that what Adam had with Ronan, with their made family and their friends, wasn't ownership. It was being claimed by freely-given love, not suffocating possessiveness. It was a sign that said 'this is my person, my love, my brother, my friend'. It was belonging. It was what he'd been searching for without understanding its truth for his entire life.
Ronan slid his lips down from Adam's to his neck, to the pulse point that sped up beneath his caress. Adam's breathing hitched.
"Do I still get to call you 'Parrish' when you're being an ass?" His voice was a rumble that shot down Adam's spine like wildfire, heating him from within.
Adam leaned his head back to allow Ronan better access for his ministrations as Ronan's touch fell lower and grew more insistent.
"It's already too much of a habit to call you 'Lynch' in those same moments to change it now," Adam said, growing breathless, voice darkening.
"Won't work if you have the same name." Ronan sucked hard at the skin where his shoulder met his neck and Adam hissed at the pleasurable pain of it.
"The tone makes it clear enough."
Ronan kissed his way to the other side of Adam's neck, then back up until his lips hovered a breath from Adam's.
"Tell me," Ronan said.
"It's not a dream," Adam said, "We're awake. We're here."
A promise, a mantra they had learned to use for each other in the years since the apocalypse. Even though they spent time together in dream space, even though Ronan's dreams could be so beautiful and lovely, nothing truly compared to this: skin-to-skin, soul-to-soul, alive and awake and together in every way.
Ronan brought his mouth down on Adam's in a crush. It was like kissing a war and Adam fought back with his own lips. They would worry about mopping the floor later.