Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

In any case, Matthew had once said that morning smelled like coffee, so now it had to continue smelling like coffee.

Adam Parrish was the person Ronan cared about more than anyone else in the world. If Ronan wasn’t calling him, he wasn’t calling anybody.

She pitied him. The feeling came so much more easily for Declan Lynch, who crushed all outward appearance of suffering, than for Hennessy, who detonated unhappiness in every room she entered. She couldn’t understand Hennessy, but she knew what it was to be the sibling keeping it together.

“You can play games with Ronan, but you can’t play games with me,” Declan said tightly. “You had him for a few months. I had him my entire life. I spent my childhood keeping him from danger, and what did you do with him? Ruin his life. Throw away everything he’d built.” Bryde said, “Tell me, older brother: Did you want to keep him from danger or to keep him from being dangerous?”

Ronan didn’t want to leave Bryde here alone. He was beginning to realize that he’d birthed Bryde into hell, a world he was designed to hate. Ronan had not dreamt any optimism into him, any simple joy, so happiness was a skill Bryde would’ve had to learn for himself once he was in the waking world.

He had just the two dreams he would never sell: this one, from his father, and the ORBMASTER, a golden little handful of light Ronan had given him months and months ago.

Look at that poor asshole lying on that packed dirt, look how lovingly tattooed his skin was, each mark a small confirmation that even though it felt like he hated his life and his body, deep down, he wanted to keep it, to redecorate the place to his own liking.

Elation overtook Ronan. Even before he put a name to the face, he was overwhelmed with a single thought: It is going to be okay. The second voice belonged to Adam Parrish.

“Do you have any idea why he’s sleeping?” Adam asked. He glanced at the body and then away. Ronan saw now that he was as far from it as he could possibly get, his own body turned as if he were already leaving.

He’d dreamt that watch for Adam when he left for Harvard. It was the closest he could come to a love letter; the language of affection had never felt right to Ronan. Clumsy. Overblown. False. Ronan speaking the language of another country, vocabulary learned from watching films on YouTube. But the watch—the watch told the time for whatever time zone Ronan was in, and it said exactly what Ronan meant to say. Think of where I am, it said. Think of me.

“Look,” said Adam, “Ronan chose his side. It wasn’t me.” This struck Ronan as profoundly unfair. The world had chosen for him. The black smudge all over Declan’s sleeve was proof of it. Left to his own devices, Ronan had chosen Adam, he was sure he’d chosen Adam. Hadn’t he come to Cambridge, even though he hated cities, even though he loved the Barns? Hadn’t he played cards with Adam’s new Harvard friends, even though he hated them? Hadn’t he had a list of apartments he was going to look at, hadn’t he tried?

“Post tenebras lux,” he whispered. Light follows darkness. Adam added, “Tamquam …” Alter idem, Ronan thought. But he had no voice.

She perched on Ronan’s boot and cocked her head at Adam. “Atom,” Chainsaw remarked in her deep, strange bird voice. Adam laughed a little. “Hi.”

Why is this making me cry

He drifted off again, and now Ronan was suddenly and fiercely reminded of praying. Not praying in a church, with a congregation, out loud, or reciting a memorized prayer. But instead the kind of praying he’d done when he was alone. Exhausted. Confused. Those prayers often faded into ellipses as he wondered if there was anyone on the other side of the line. Adam couldn’t know whether or not Ronan could hear him. I hear you.

“Do you remember when I asked you what you’d do if you accidentally dreamt another me?” Adam asked abruptly. “I thought about it a lot after that. What I’d do to that other Adam. Would I let him live my life with me, like Hennessy? Would I kill him before he could kill me? But you know what I got to thinking? That copy exists. I made him. I am him. There’s a real version of me that stayed with you, I guess, that went out to Lindenmere every day and just learned everything he could about the ley line, about the something else. Or maybe who went with Gansey and Blue. Or who went to school in DC and came home every weekend. But this Adam killed those Adams so this one could win, this one who came to Harvard to go to class and write papers and buy waffles with the Crying Club and pretend like nothing bad ever happened to him and like he has all the answers.”

You were, like, the place I stored all the reality in. Then I had to start lying about you, too, and it just all, it just all …”

A slightly more accented voice. This was his old accent, his Virginia accent, as warming to Ronan as the sun.

“Anyhow, so I can’t blame you that you lied to yourself about dreaming Bryde. ’Cause I made this fake version of me, right, and I was wide awake when I did it. We’re both liars. I don’t know what to do. I miss …” He closed his eyes. “I miss knowing where I was going.”

Tamquam, Ronan thought, furious that Adam was upset, euphoric that he’d come back. It hadn’t been that long before this that he’d been wanting to know what emotions felt like, and now he had all of them at once. Just before the door closed behind him, Adam said to the dark, “Alter idem.”

And yet when Adam’s consciousness touched his, Ronan recognized him. It was Adam’s footstep on the stairs. His surprised whoop as he catapulted into the pond they’d dug. The irritation in his voice; the impatience in his kiss; his ruthless, dry sense of humor; his brittle pride; his ferocious loyalty. It was all caught up in this essential form that had nothing to do with how his physical body looked.

The difference between this reunion and the one at Harvard was that there in Cambridge they had been false. They’d both been wearing masks upon masks, hiding the truth of themselves from everyone, including themselves. Here, there was no way to hide. They were only their thoughts. Only the truth.

Tying this back to the mask ronan dreamt and was afraid of in TRC

Ronan and Adam could not hug, because they had no real arms, but it didn’t matter. Their energy darted and mingled and circled, the brilliant bright of the sweetmetals and the absolute dark of the Lace. They didn’t speak, but they didn’t have to. Audible words were redundant when their thoughts were tangled together as one. Without any of the clumsiness of language, they shared their euphoria and their lurking fears. They rehashed what they had done to each other and apologized. They showed everything they had done and that had been done to them in the time since they’d last seen each other—the good and the bad, the horrid and the wonderful. Everything had felt so murky for so long, but when they were like this, all that was left was clarity. Again and again they spiraled around and through one another, not Ronan-and-Adam but rather one entity that held both of them. They were happy and sad, angry and forgiven, they were wanted, they were wanted, they were wanted.

They are literal soulmates im gonna puke

At that moment Declan understood that Matthew was unlike any of the other Lynches. The rest of Declan’s family members were knotted with secrets, memories, lives experienced behind masks. Matthew might have been a dream, but nothing about him was pretend. Matthew was the truth. Declan took his hand and held it tightly.

Declan’s understanding was dark with nightwash. Claws dug for his heart, only to find it gone.

“Find whoever killed him, Ronan,” Declan told him. “Find whoever killed Matthew and make sure they are never happy ever again.” He and his brother never hugged, but Declan put his hand on Ronan’s warm skull for a second. Declan said, “Be dangerous.”

“Jordan, it was always going to be this way. Our story was always a tragedy.” “Pozzi, it wasn’t,” she said. “Not yours,” Declan said. “The Lynch family’s. The Lynch brothers’. It was written before I was born.” “Mine was, too. I rewrote it. I saw the angel in the marble—” “—and carved until you set it free,” Declan finished the Michelangelo quote for her. “Yes, you did, Jordan.” But he was still trapped in stone.

Why am I like this? Ronan prayed when he arrived at church, knees aching on the kneeler. Show me a sign of what I’m supposed to do with myself.

Someone seized Ronan’s hand, firmly lacing fingers with his, and he looked down at this gesture, this claim of possession. It was a boyish hand, all knuckles and veins, and it fit perfectly against his. He heard a voice in his ear: “Numquam solus.”

He made up the task of guarding the world, which meant nothing to him, instead of guarding his family, which meant everything to him.

Declan had said Matthew wouldn’t want one if he’d seen a city rat. Matthew had replied the only thing that was different about a city rat was that no one loved it.

He texted Jordan: you were the story I chose for myself

Love had changed the situation. Niall didn’t yet love the strange, dangerous child, but he loved Declan, and Declan loved Ronan. So Ronan lived.

All this time, the biggest lie Declan had told himself was that he hated his father. What he’d really meant, every time he thought it, every single day, was: I miss him.

“Where’s Adam?” Hennessy asked, “What?” “Adam. My Adam. Adam!”

Even if Farooq-Lane had not known anything about the relationship between the two of them, she would have guessed it by the shape of the space between Adam’s motionless body and Ronan’s coiled one.

Maybe I underestimate you. Your head’s full of dreams. They must remember. Does any part of you still look at the sky and hurt?

He thought of how he would never again feel powerless, because he wasn’t going to lie to himself anymore, hiding from the truth just because he was afraid of taking on the decisions himself, afraid of being wrong. He was Greywaren, and he belonged in both worlds.

Ronan made reality, either through dreaming or stubbornness, both good and bad. Adam had recently realized Ronan was a weakness to his ambition, since it was harder to work with two moving pieces rather than one, but he couldn’t talk himself out of it. He tried each night he was alone in the apartment over St. Agnes, and he failed every time he saw Ronan again. He was in love with Ronan, and he was in love with this lonesome green valley, and although he could not work out how either dovetailed with his addiction to the future, for the summer, he put his reservations away.

Neither Ronan nor Adam had been trained in the difficult and nuanced art of having a future. They had only ever learned the art of surviving the past.

Adam, who had been sitting quietly all this time beside Ronan, grinned weakly as Ronan seized him around the neck in a crushing, desperate hug. Hennessy and Jordan watched the two of them kneeling in the grass, just clinging to each other. It was an enormous, extraordinary moment, surrounded by mundane, ordinary things.

For a moment, Hennessy hadn’t known if she’d managed to recover enough of Adam for him to be … right. But then he’d woozily come to and immediately looked for Ronan, so she’d known she’d pulled it off.

He’d told himself his father was hateful, his mother invisible, the Barns dreadful, the dreaming frightful. It had been the only way to bear losing it all. Declan Lynch had become such a liar.

This is a story about the brothers Lynch. There were three of them, and if you didn’t like one, try another, because the Lynch brother others found too sour or too sweet might be just to your taste. The Lynch brothers, the orphans Lynch. All of them had been made by dreams, one way or another. They were handsome devils, down to the last one.

“You want one of these?” Gansey asked. He gestured with his chin to indicate it. The all of it. The wedding. “Yeah,” said Ronan. “I think so.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Gansey said. “How do you figure?” “I asked Adam and he said the same thing.”

Without taking his eyes off the sky, Ronan reached out his hand to Adam to offer him something. It was a ring. Without taking his eyes off the sky, Adam took it and put it on.