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Killing Clysonymus was an accident, but that makes it worse. His father has always hated him - this, Adam has always known. He does not mourn it. There is no sense mourning a fact. But at least if Adam had killed Clysonymus out of honor - out of cold blood, even - at least then his father could respect him.
Adam mourns the fact of Clysonymus’s death all the same. He is his friend, he is a good boy, he is better than Adam could ever be. When his father sends him to Phthia, away from his bruising hands, Adam refuses to rejoice. There are always worse masters to be had.
In Phthia, no one knows the name Parrish. No one cares about Adam’s sunken eyes or all the bruises fading from his body by the day. Adam passes unnoticed by all, except for the king’s son. The youngest Gansey, who answers to his surname only, has sharp, intelligent eyes that watch Adam everywhere - in the shadows, from windows, across the sea. He is not like any of the other boys Adam sees in Phthia. He is taller, he is tanner, he has an older face. He strides everywhere, long sloping steps that seem like a dance. When he laughs, everything around him stills. In truth, Adam has been watching Gansey too.
They fall into friendship. That is the only way Adam can think to describe it. Gansey had started talking to him one day as if they had been old friends and Adam had only recently returned. Gansey speaks with a kind of comfortableness Adam is never prepared for. Adam’s words are always choked when he speaks, always sputtered out between gasps. It is one of many reasons his father had found him so disappointing. But Gansey is undeterred. He listens to Adam speak no matter how long it takes, the ghost of amusement dancing on his face.
One day, Adam confronts him about it. “Is it so amusing, when I talk?” he asks, hotly, his face growing pink.
Gansey laughs, shrugging his tan shoulders. “Is that so wrong?"
Adam cannot find a reason why it should be. “You might think,” says Adam carefully, “that everything I say to you is a joke. That you do not listen.”
Gansey looks thoughtful a moment, his clear eyes slanted toward the sun. “I listen,” he promises. “I smile because I listen.”
Adam has nothing to say to that. Gansey seems content to sit in silence a while. After a long minute, he says, “Come live with me.”
Adam gestures to the court, to the sea, to the fields and forests beyond helplessly. “I do live with you.”
Gansey laughs again. Adam would find it irritating if the sound wasn’t so wonderful. “In my quarters,” he clarifies, and Adam colors. He knows Gansey means nothing by it. They are young men. Young men do this all the time. But perhaps not young men who watch each other as often as Gansey and Adam do.
“Would it please you?” asks Adam, and Gansey’s brow furrows.
“Would it not please you?” he asks. “You live modestly at best. Wouldn’t you like to live alongside me? Everything I have would be yours.”
Adam clenches and unclenches his fists. I was once a prince, he thinks, but it doesn’t matter. There is no use mourning facts.
“It would please me,” says Adam, and Gansey’s face relaxes. Adam hadn’t realized he had been anxious. The change is almost imperceptible but it’s still there - the lines smooth over Gansey’s brow just slightly.
“Good,” he says warmly, and leaves Adam sitting there.
By evening, all his things are in Gansey’s rooms, which smell like mint. Everything is clean and glittering in Gansey’s room. Adam has a pallet set up across from Gansey’s bed. When they go to sleep that night, Gansey’s naked body stretched languidly in the moonlight, Adam feels like he is drowning. If Gansey finds it odd that Adam can look across and see him sleep, he doesn’t remark on it. Adam cannot sleep that night, rolling back and forth on his pallet, looking at Gansey in his bed on one side and the moon above the sea on the other. He longs for both in equal measure.
+++
Gansey doesn’t sleep that much in practice. Adam watches him toss and turn each night in quiet agony. He tries to stay awake with him, but he is only a mortal. He falls asleep every night as Gansey paces across the room, walking over to his desk to scratch something onto some parchment. They are fragments of stories, or prophecies, or myths, or legends. Adam can never understand them in full when he is rewarded a glimpse of them.
One one such night, as Adam watches Gansey’s back hunched over his desk, Gansey says, suddenly: “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Adam scrambles upward, sharpness in his chest. “What?”
Gansey does not turn around. All Adam can see is the curve of his neck, sloping and graceful. “They want me to train,” he says, calmly. “My mother especially. With Chiron, a centaur. He trained Jason and Heracles."
Adam is struck dumb. Jason and Heracles, he thinks. And Gansey is to be the best of them all. It seems fitting.
“Will I - ?” begins Adam, but Gansey stands abruptly, crossing the room to his bed.
“No,” he says, shortly, and pretends to go to sleep.
Adam waits in anxious terror for an hour before succumbing to feverish dreams.
In the morning, when he wakes, the room is empty of Gansey and all his things, all the scrolls he writes night after night, all his clothes, all the mint plants the servants replace every few weeks to keep the apartments smelling sweet. All of them are gone. Adam lies back, looking at the ceiling.
It is still early morning. Gansey could not have been gone for more than an hour.
It does not take Adam long to decide what to do. He packs a bag on his back, slips on his sandals, and begins to run the moment he reaches the palace walls. He runs faster than he has ever run, his feet slapping the earth, his muscles aching. He has always been decently strong - not as strong as Gansey, but strong enough - and he runs until he can no longer. He is about to take camp for the night when he sees a glimpse of a lithe body through the trees, a body he has watched steadily for many nights.
Gansey, sing his muscles, and he runs again, calling his name. Gansey. Gansey. Gansey.
Gansey turns to see him, finally, a knowing smile dancing upon his face.
“You came,” he says, and cannot hide his pleasure. “I had hoped you would.”
I would follow you until the ends of the earth, though I don’t know why, thinks Adam, but instead, he only bows his head in admission. “I came.”
Gansey looks at him, lips twitching into a smile. He places a hand on the side of Adam’s face. It is soft and warm. And then, with a measured kindness, he presses his lips to Adam’s cheek gently. Adam turns scarlet. Gansey’s eyes are kind and blue.
“Let’s go,” he says, with his magnificent voice.
They go.
+++
The next few months are a flurry of golden days that make Adam’s heart sing to think about later. Chiron is sage and disciplined; Adam has never had a father who hasn’t beaten him before. Every word of praise Chiron gives him, Adam stows away in his mind for later, savoring it. Pride is a furious drug, but one Adam doesn’t want to give up.
Gansey grows stronger by the day, but also wiser. His mother wants him to be a warrior. Everyone does. Even Gansey sometimes wants to be a warrior. But he wants truth more. Gansey spends more and more time writing each night, furiously consulting the scrolls that Chiron gives him. Adam watches him. Here, in their golden home, Adam is happy to watch.
When Gansey is happy, Adam is happy. When Gansey is anxious, Adam is anxious. It is an unfortunate, perilous equilibrium. Adam wishes he had more. He wishes he was more. Wishes he could ever be more. But that is not his fate; that is not his life to lead. Gansey is the one with the golden skin, with the flushed smile, with the sharp brain and agile body. Adam is the one with the dark eyes and the thick tongue. That is the way it is.
Gansey seems to sense Adam’s discomfort with their situation, but he is unable to stop the tides of destiny any more than Adam.
“You know I think the world of you,” says Gansey one night, when Adam thinks he has finally fallen asleep. Adam turns on his mat to look at Gansey across the room, his skin drunk with soft light.
“It is still good to hear it,” says Adam truthfully. Gansey sits up then. Adam can see the anxiety in his eyes, the sickly fury that overtakes Gansey sometimes. He has never known what to do with Gansey except to worship him.
Gansey stands, crossing to Adam, sitting on the end of Adam’s bed without asking for permission. Adam supposes it doesn’t matter; he would have granted it anyway.
“I would tell you every day if you would hear it,” says Gansey, his voice rough, and Adam’s heart slams up into his throat. Gansey looks at his feet. “There is so much I would tell you.”
Adam sits up himself, his mind drunk and his body on fire. “I am listening,” he says. He has never seen Gansey like this, his mouth set in defiance, his eyes sharp and twinkling, a frightening smile dancing on his face.
“I’m supposed to be the greatest,” says Gansey. Adam knows this. He has heard the prophecy. He waits. But Gansey seems to be deflating before his eyes, all the sick rage in his eyes dying. “I shouldn’t say anymore. You would - you would think less of me.”
Anger surges into Adam’s heart. “Don’t,” he says waspishly. “You always come close just to pull away. You know you are the greatest. You knew how I watched you, you knew I would follow you here. You could send me to Mount Olympus to be struck down by the gods and I would go, because I’m - ”
But Adam can’t say anymore because Gansey is kissing him, his hands seizing the sides of Adam’s face unceremoniously. When they break apart, Gansey looks ashamed.
“I should never have put you in this position,” says Gansey, desolate.
Adam tears away from him, gets out of his bed, seizing a cloak and draping it around his shoulders.
“No,” he says to Gansey, still sitting on his bed. “You shouldn’t have.”
It feels good to be the one leaving, for once.
+++
He meets Gansey’s mother that night. She has been watching them. She is always watching them. She appears before Adam on the sea, coming in from a wave. Her skin is the color of seafoam and moonlight.
“You are a fool, Adam Parrish,” she says. Adam says nothing. There is no use mourning facts. “My son is meant for greatness,” she continues, and Adam laughs angrily.
“That’s all anyone ever says,” he tells her spitefully. “But I have yet to see evidence of this greatness.”
Gansey’s mother looks at him pointedly. Scornfully. “Haven’t you?”
He has, of course. Gansey’s greatness is not in his deeds but in his blood. His very existence is great. Adam grinds his teeth.
“You are a distraction from something more important,” she tells him. “You are distracting him from his destiny. He is meant to be a god.”
Adam raises his eyebrows at that. Becoming a god is no easy thing - he doesn’t know exactly how it happens, but if Gansey is to become a god in his own right, he has to catch Zeus’s attention.
“All Gansey cares about is his destiny,” says Adam.
Gansey’s mother stares at him. “He hasn’t told you.”
“He hasn’t told me anything,” says Adam. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but he hasn’t told me anything about anything.”
Gansey’s mother looks bewildered, an unusual expression on a goddess’s face.
“You will die soon,” she says, more to herself than to Adam. “And then my son will be rid of the sickness you bring.” She looks at Adam again with reproach. “His love for you will be his undoing,” she tells him. “He’s going to die.”
Adam starts at that. “What? When?”
She turns her magnificent head. “I don’t know. Soon. He finds the man he is looking for. Glendower. He finds Glendower first. That’s all I know.”
“Glendower?” asks Adam, bewildered. “I don’t know who that is.”
“Has he told you nothing?” she snaps, and Adam raises his hands in defeat.
“I’ve told you, he’s said nothing to me!”
Both of them regard each other. “I will keep him safe,” promises Adam, helplessness overwhelming him. “I will protect him.”
Gansey’s mother sneers, as if he is incapable of doing so, and then she’s gone, a crest of a wave coming up high and spitting its spray onto Adam’s face.
+++
Gansey is still awake when Adam returns an hour before daybreak. He is sitting at his desk, writing like a man possessed. He turns when Adam enters, his eyes wild.
“I thought you might have left,” he says, and part of the anger Adam had been working to keep up dissipates. But not all of it.
“I had an interesting conversation with your mother,” says Adam, and Gansey closes his eyes in resignation.
“What did she say?” He opens his eyes again. “Did she tell you you were going to die soon?”
Adam nods. Gansey groans. “She’s a goddess - she can’t understand life like we do.”
Adam is rather unconcerned with the reasons Gansey mother might have had for prophesying his death.
“She said I’m distracting you from your destiny,” he says, getting to the point. “And that there was something you hadn’t told me.”
Gansey looks stricken. “She should have never,” he whispers, and it takes a great deal of self control for Adam not to stamp his foot in protest.
“Are you going to tell me what this is about?” he snaps, and Gansey swallows thickly.
“It was what I meant to say,” says Gansey. “It was what I wanted to say, when I was - when I kissed you.”
The mention of the kiss, which Adam had forced into the back of his mind, jars him. He gestures wildly. “So?”
Gansey stands again, coming to sit on Adam’s bed once more. Adam gives a long sigh of exasperation before joining him, his legs folded beneath him.
“My mother wants me to become a god,” he says. “She thinks if I become famous enough, the gods will make me one of them without her having to plead. She thinks if I am a warrior, if I am a hero, that all her plans will come to pass.” He swallows. “There’s a prophecy,” he says, quietly, and Adam’s heart leaps with something like fear and optimism. “There’s an old king who died many years ago. If you wake his body, you are granted a wish.”
“A child’s tale,” says Adam, and Gansey shakes his head furiously.
“Truth,” he says. “Chiron believes it.”
Things shift in Adam’s mind. “Glendower,” he says, putting it all together, and Gansey looks up, eyes hunted.
“She told you about the second part of the prophecy,” says Gansey, and Adam nods, overwhelmed.
“Stop looking for him!” says Adam, feverishly. “If you know you die after you find him, stop looking! Does a wish from a king mean so much when you have everything you’ve wanted?”
Gansey looks at him in agony. “Not everything,” he says, quietly. “I seek him not for myself.”
Adam wrinkles his brow. “What does - what does that mean - ”
“I’d ask him for your immortal life,” says Gansey, quietly. “My mother has told me time and time again you are going to die soon, so I thought - if I found him, I could ask him - ”
Adam stares at him blankly. “You would put your life in peril for mine,” he says, and Gansey nods slowly, eyes heavy and dark with something that makes Adam’s stomach chill. Adam moves toward him in the dark like a spirit. Gansey is there waiting for him, his arms warm, his mouth soft. He makes a soft sound of pain when their lips meet.
Adam is not content to kiss him. He explores the span of his back, the long, lean muscles of his torso, the shape of his hips. He touches every part of the miracle of Gansey that Gansey will allow. Their bodies grow sweaty, warm, flushed together. Adam thinks there is no more lovely a sight than Gansey’s face in the moonlight, rasping out sighs into Adam’s pillow that sound like Adam’s name.
After, they lie together covered in oil and sweat and the light of the rising sun.
“I wanted that,” says Gansey breathlessly, “for so long.”
Adam, tucked under his arm, his face on his chest, says, “You always get what you want.”
They rest in silence.
“Don’t go looking,” says Adam impulsively. “Not for me. Let’s just live our days here, content and happy. For as long as we have.”
Please, thinks Adam. Listen to reason.
Gansey smiles, light sparkling up his noble face. “What has Glendower ever done to me?” he asks, with a contented shrug. Adam kisses his chest.
+++
They don’t stay there forever, because that is the nature of change. That is the nature of life. A war comes, blowing in from the sea, but Adam is not afraid of it.
“As long as you don’t find Glendower,” says Adam, with a shrug, but Gansey’s eyes look sick.
“What about you?” he asks. “What will I do if something happens to you?”
“I am neither the best nor worst fighter,” Adam assures him. “I will hardly need to be on the front lines, and I am strong enough to fight everyone else. I will be fine.”
Gansey is unconvinced. But they go to fight anyway. It is a long, aching war. As promised, Adam is never on the front lines. Gansey is, of course. Adam sometimes watches from the encampment up on the hill, watches Gansey streak through the Trojans effortlessly. When Gansey returns, covered in blood, Adam helps him wash. Neither of them likes Gansey with blood on his hands. He becomes someone wrathful, dangerous. Adam doesn’t know what to do with that Gansey. He does his best to ease him into kind Gansey, wise Gansey, soft Gansey, the Gansey he knows. The Gansey that loves him.
This equilibrium cannot last forever, even if it seems like this war can. Adam has never been good at sitting still, at accepting the destiny coming his way. There is no point to a life spent sitting inside a tent, washing the blood of Gansey’s hands, he thinks. Besides, Gansey’s mother had only told him he would die soon. For a goddess, that could mean anything. Adam was not going to live his life waiting for an ax to unexpectedly drop.
He is more prideful than Gansey has accounted for. So is Gansey.
He wakes one morning in their shared tent to find that Gansey has gone.
“Gone where?” he asks Gansey’s page, but he knows where. To find a clue, to take one step closer. Just in case, Gansey had murmured one night, nose pressed into Adam’s skin. He has promised not to find him, but he won’t stop looking.
He’s a dead, mythical king, Gansey tells Adam time and time again. It isn’t as if I can just stumble upon him.
But what if you do, Adam had replied. Gansey never had anything to say to that.
Adam sits on their bed, fists clenched. Gansey has always been headstrong. His life means so little to him. It means so much to Adam.
He spies Gansey’s armor sitting in the corner of their tent. A voice dances along his shoulder, on the wind.
You are going to die soon, whispers Gansey’s mother.
But not today, thinks Adam, making up his mind and seizing Gansey’s helmet. He has always desired greatness, he is forced to admit to himself atop Gansey’s horse. He has had so little occasion for it that the men treating him as if he is Gansey feels like a drug. Is this how Gansey feels all the time, alive and reckless and honored and brave? He’s going to lead the Myrmidons into battle against Hector. No one questions it. No one asks, are you sure? Gansey is always sure, and now Adam is.
Pretending he is Gansey is intoxicating. He is faster on the battlefield somehow. Somehow stronger. Better. When he rides in, the Trojans flee his sword. He grants them no mercy. Adam is convinced he is half-god by the time he reaches Hector, laughing magnificently in his face.
It is not enough. Adam’s pride is never enough. Hector cuts him down.
There is blood, there is screaming, there are people stepping all over Adam’s body when Hector looms overhead, his sword in hand.
“Die,” says Hector simply, and runs his sword through Adam’s heart.
The last thing he thinks is: Gansey. And then he is dead.
+++
Gansey returns in the evening to an empty tent. His armor is missing. His Adam is missing.
“Mother,” he whispers, in terror, but his mother cannot bring herself to delight in the news. Gansey looks down the hill to see his men carrying Adam’s body up in Gansey’s armor.
“Stupid,” says Gansey aloud, his voice breaking. “So stupid.”
He runs at them, shouting. He pulls all the armor off Adam. He isn’t meant to wear such a heavy burden. He kisses his skin as the pieces come off. He pulls Adam off their shoulders, carrying his naked body back to his tent. He puts him in the bed. It looks like he is sleeping.
Gansey screams. He puts his face on Adam’s bloody chest.
“I warned you,” says his mother, sadly, and Gansey rounds on her, eyes dark and wild.
“Then help me! Help me find Glendower so I can bring him back!”
“It doesn’t work that way,” says Gansey’s mother.
“You know nothing, with your half-prophecies,” snaps Gansey furiously. “You have only ever wanted to see me famous, not happy.”
“I won’t give you the tools to end yourself,” hisses his mother, and disappears. Gansey strikes at the air where she had stood, howling like a wolf.
He strides out of his tent. “Don’t burn him,” he says to the guards outside. “If any of you touch him, I’ll kill you myself. Preserve him.”
“My lord - ”
“Did I misspeak? Have my words fallen on deaf ears?” shouts Gansey. Adam had always hated this Gansey the most. But Adam isn’t here to see him.
He rides out immediately. He’d come so close earlier that he could feel Glendower’s presence. He’d only returned for Adam, who would have been furious with him for leaving. He’d returned to explain himself, to kiss away Adam’s worries. It hadn’t been enough. This was his fault. He’d killed Adam trying to save him. It’s fitting; Gansey kills everything he loves.
He can feel the magic pulling at him in the woods the natives call Cabeswater in their strange tongue. The trees are dark and twisted here. Everything is colder.
“Mother,” he says aloud, voice raw. “Mother, I know you’re here. I know you know where he is.”
His mother passes behind him. “I can’t,” she says.
“I’ll kill myself,” he says in anguish. “If I can’t save him, I’ll kill myself. You only know that I die after reviving Glendower. You don’t know how long I have after.”
“I can’t,” she says again, her voice soft. She is crying. Gansey has never seen his mother cry.
“You cannot change my fate!” he shouts, whirling around to catch sight of her. She is hiding from him, dodging behind trees. He chases her like a madman. He runs through brooks and along dark, winding passages. The trees whisper to him in his mother’s voice.
He runs for an hour. Maybe more. He runs until he cannot remember not running, until all the trees morph together and there is only deafening quiet. He falls, tripping over a tree root. He struggles upward, ignoring the blood on his knee. When had he started crying?
“Mother,” he says, again, voice low. He closes his eyes. “I lost him. I’ve lost everything.”
He feels a cool breeze, his mother’s hands on his skin. “I love you,” she tells him.
When he opens his eyes, he is in a clearing. There is a large stone tomb ahead of him.
It can’t be that easy.
He approaches it tentatively. And there, on the side: GLENDOWER.
Gansey pushes the covering aside. It is surprisingly easy, or perhaps he is just that strong. Perhaps this is what he was made to do.
Gansey doesn’t know what happens next. There is a light, there is singing in the trees, there is his mother crying. Gansey is blinded by light and sound. His head aches. He is on fire. Every bone in his body screams for release, begs for the sound and the light to stop. It doesn’t stop. Gansey wishes he had killed himself. And then.
There’s a spot up ahead, somewhere in the light. Gansey walks towards it, his legs strong. He relishes the feeling of movement, of the light on his skin. He’s so strong, so fast. The spot grows larger until it forms the shape of a person.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” says Adam, and he doesn’t look angry. He looks better than Gansey has ever seen him. His eyes aren’t sunken, his muscles are strong and sure. He is smiling. Adam stretches out his hand.
“I would follow you until the ends of the earth,” says Gansey, and takes it.
+++