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This was why the Zeds had to die. They were breaking everything.
It was hard not to blame it on the first three who’d gotten away, the ones on the banks of the Potomac.
Or it was possible she didn’t want to.
Farooq-Lane didn’t think Westerly Reed Hager was likely to end the world.
“The trees know your secrets.”
“Those three could end the world.”
Ronan used to divide his life into the time before his father’s death and the time after it, but now he divided it differently. Now it was Before he’d been good at dreaming. And After.
“Nightmares are chemical,” his boyfriend, Adam, had told him once. “Inappropriate adrenaline response to stimulus, possibly related to trauma.” “Talk dirty to me,” Ronan had replied.
Stop it
Ronan couldn’t tell if Bryde’s preference for the decrepit was grounded in secrecy or aesthetic.
It couldn’t be happiness, he thought, because he was far from his brothers and from Adam. He worried about them, and surely he couldn’t be happy if he was worried.
it felt as if a shapeless question formed in Ronan’s mouth.
Tamquam, Ronan had messaged, which was always supposed to be answered by alter idem. But Adam hadn’t replied at all.
The silence sort of made this—the being away—easier.
It had felt good to be needed. Trusted. He wished the process of dreaming it into being had gone a little bit more elegantly … but win some, lose some.
‘Over five hundred unique scents are piped into diverse’—Diverse? Really?—‘scenarios. Students fall back through time in a one-of-a-kind outing they’re sure to remember!’ ”
STOP APPALACHIAN HATE 2025
He would fight if he must, but he always preferred having his opponents defeat themselves.
Ronan didn’t care to think about this. It gave him the same vibe he used to get back at the Barns some nights, when he got trapped in one particular train of thought, where he imagined he and Adam had been together a very long time and then Ronan died of old age or bad choices and Adam found someone else and later they all three were reunited in the afterlife, and rather than getting to spend the rest of eternity together, Adam had to split his time between Ronan and this stupid usurper he’d fallen in love with as a widower, which completely ruined the point of Heaven. And that was before
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when he got trapped in one particular train of thought, where he imagined he and Adam had been together a very long time and then Ronan died of old age or bad choices and Adam found someone else and later they all three were reunited in the afterlife, and rather than getting to spend the rest of eternity together, Adam had to split his time between Ronan and this stupid usurper he’d fallen in love with as a widower, which completely ruined the point of Heaven. And that was before Ronan even got to worrying if Adam made it to the afterlife at all, with his agnostic tendencies.
Ronan my baby boy i love you more than words can express
“Dreamers!” Bryde said, silencing them.
He gives cult leader vibes
the bare minimum required to appear human.
I think this is a disguise
Everything smelled like real life, not one of five hundred scents piped in.
Ronan fell back in surprise; Hennessy threw a reflexive hand over her head.
Me and Alicia at any given moment of time
Ronan’s legacy was a destroyed Harvard dorm room, an invisible car, and a sword with the words vexed to nightmare etched on the hilt.
He liked being asked by a dreamer to think about her in the context of his dreams.
That enormous, warm feeling was charging up inside Ronan again, big enough now that he could tell what it was: Belonging.
All he wanted was to belong
That was the Lace.
There’s a word for someone who tries the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
Every wheel had a single word printed or burned into it: tamquam.
Now that I think about it, I think this is Adam trying to communicate with Ronan. It says later how Ro keeps shutting him out and pushing him away. Maybe this is one of those times?
“Aren’t you tired of doing this?”
He’d filled a thru-hiking shelter with bleeding rocks. Destroyed the living room of an abandoned rambler with a very small tornado. Busted out the wall of a cheap, cash-only motel with an invisible car. He’d trashed rooms with dead earthworms and hissing microphones, school textbooks and expired bacon. Every zip code they’d stayed in had been left with Ronan Lynch’s indelible mark.
Because as long as Ronan Lynch, the great Ronan Lynch, was fucking up at this level,
it made Hennessy’s inability to kick the Lace from her dreams n...
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No, you just ran your mouth and out this came.”
Man, that little rubbishy part of Hennessy was having a field day.
This was a thing Hennessy was learning about Ronan Lynch: He always thought he was keeping his secrets by keeping his mouth shut, but he ended up telling them in other ways.
But the idea of holding the weight of his drama on top of her own felt like too much.
They’d lived like Hennessy and they died like she was supposed to.
She was going to live as big a life as she could, for as long as she could.
The bartender looked up through her eyelashes. Her eyes were green. “Open bar, for you.”
The rules of the game had changed.
He was difficult to see in the bed because he’d made himself a sheet-blanket cocoon, the edges sealed against the mattress as much as possible to keep the smaller creatures from burrowing against him. They were not put off, though.
“I don’t have the capacity for your identity crisis this morning,” Declan said. “I’m trying to get us a car while remaining off the grid and avoiding getting completely screwed by our irresponsible father’s associates. So I’d appreciate you penciling it in for a weekend instead.”
Every time the ley line faltered, he went all … dazed.
Matthew was sort of drawn to it.
First off, where is Adam? TAKEN BY MODDRATORS???? Also my poor boy matthew.
In a voice-voice, in a language he felt like maybe was his real language.
“How do you feel about a trip to Boston?”
ADAM.... A D A M.... A D A M P A R R I S H
Ronan was uneasy dreaming anything that altered free will;
Catholic guilt but also you’re right
Before this time, I was a sinner, finding pleasure in wine, women, song, and, sometimes, cocaine and grand theft auto, living moment to moment, not thinking about the consequences of my actions on my own body or others, but now I have seen the light and I will instead worship at the altar of stolen fries. I will paint murals in their honor. I will rename myself Tuber.” Ronan
