mitsubishievo | Run to me, lover, run until you feel your lungs bleeding

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Run to me, lover, run until you feel your lungs bleeding

The Ferrari that Kavinsky had won-stolen at the substance party did not purr quite like the Mitsubishi, but it was flashy and sleek and had a beautiful, long nose on it, and got shit for gas mileage. It was a good thing that Kavinsky didn't have anywhere to be, except for this piss-hole excuse for a town. It made heads turn, and was a dark, sleek, important gun-metal gray. In the couple days he had had it, he had already dreamed up better speakers, a finer tuned response on the clutch, his favorite CDs from the trip to Europe last summer. He did not normally work on such fine details; normally, he would have just dreamed himself a whole new car. But this was a special occasion. This was refinement and a point to be made. This not the the constant pull, pull, pull, wait for the reset, he did back in Jersey, back in Henrietta.

Ronan Lynch was in Darrow, and he had fixed the Pig, and he had not had a weekend of beers and pills and their hands brushing over a gear box as they tossed dream after dream at each other and into the back seat of an anonymous Mitsubishi that Kavinsky had dreamed into a rocket ship to make a point.

Ronan Lynch was in Darrow, and Joseph Kavinsky was in Darrow, and nothing was as it should have been. They two were dreamers, terrible creation locked in their heads, a dream place and energy locked in their heads and bursting out for years.

They were in Darrow, and the dream place was in Darrow, and so that was where Kavinsky looked for Ronan first. The Ferrari hummed and purred around him, not as lovely as the Evo always did, but it would be good for working with. He pumped angry Bulgarian rap through the speakers, singing along happily, as he quested in search of Ronan, in search of his double, in search of dreaming without sleep.

There was so much to teach Ronan. There was so much for both of them to learn.

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The trees start whispering long before Ronan hears the purr of an unfamiliar engine, vines curving in on themselves and winding, winding, sprouting thorns.

He pushes to his feet as the noise nears, feet crunching over dried leaves.

The terrain isn't smooth, but the Ferrari seems to glide all the same and Ronan spares only a second in thinking how wrong it is to see Kavinsky in any car but his white Mitsubishi. Wrong and unnerving, just like everything else about Darrow.

He waits til the car purrs to a stop, and arches an eyebrow. "Got bored with your shitheap?"

Kavinsky slid out of the Ferrari like an oil slick, carrying a crowbar from the passenger seat. He set it next to the drivers' side wheel well and smiled at Ronan with all the patience of a wild dog.

"Hello to you too, Lynch. How's the trip hang over treating you--don't answer that. I suppose it's been long enough for you to sober up." He leaned the driver's seat forward to reach into the back and pull out two six packs of cheap beer, and set them on the hood of the car. A peace offering.

He turned back around, a can in hand, and tossed it underhand toward Ronan. It was a brand he knew Ronan drank, had drunk, would drink. "I've decided to forgive you, Lynch. For that unconscionable comment about the dead the other night. I thought we could work out some of our aggression--" Here, he indicated the crowbar, as well as the Ferrari. "--and see if we can't get us both on the same wavelength."

Ronan's eyes stick on the crowbar, his blood turning cold for a moment. There's no reason to believe Kavinsky had anything to do with his father's death, but there also isn't anything Ronan would put past him. The idea is more than a little unsettling, gaze lingering until Kavinsky pulls out the beer, setting two six packs on the hood.

He catches the can Kavinsky throws his way, glances down at the label and then back up at Kavinsky. "You're the one who brought up Prokopenko, I just said what you already knew," Ronan points out, flipping the tab on the beer before glancing at the crowbar again. "What makes you think I'll ever be on your wavelength?"

Kavinsky pulled out a can of his own, opened it, and took two heavy swallows of the beer. It was still cold, even though he'd been driving around since he'd bought it. It wasn't a particularly good beer, as far as he was concerned; but then, he wasn't really for beer. But it was cheap and easy and nobody looked at you too hard when you got two six packs in the grocery store.

"We're not talking about Proko right now," Kavinsky said, half a sing-song, pointing a finger at Ronan. He didn't expect for Ronan to understand, didn't think he was capable of understanding. Maybe if dusty Adam Parrish, with his busted eyebrows and split lips, had been the thief--he would have as shitty at it as he was at everything else, though, and Kavinsky doubted he would have understood any more and Ronan Lynch was capable of it.

"You wanted to learn how to master it, right? How to pull whatever you want, whenever you want." Kavinsky took another sip of his beer. "Awful lot of wavelength involved in all that. Last I checked, you were nowhere near my level."

Ronan wants to spend more time on Proko, on understanding how. He wants to mention Chainsaw, wants to know how it is he was able to pull her out but, at the same time, he want's Kavinsky to have nothing to do with her.

So he takes a drink from his beer, gaze intent on Kavinsky as he swallows.

Without a word, Ronan steps toward the Ferrari to pick up the crowbar, testing the weight of it in his grip, swinging it gently as he turns. "Could use this on you," he points out, eyebrow arched. He won't. They both know he won't. Because Kavinsky has something Ronan wants.

Kavinsky has always had something Ronan wants.

He swings then, calm and controlled, nailing the driver's side mirror and sending it sailing a good ten feet.

Kavinsky kept Ronan's gaze, even, hungry, and drank his beer as well. As Ronan approached and picked up the crowbar, Kavinsky picked the beers up off the top of the car and moved them off and onto the grass. He stepped lightly, ignoring the prickle, the whisper of leaves overhead and underfoot. The dream place didn't like him, but he didn't have to listen to it not liking him. He wasn't dreaming. Not yet.

The threat, and Ronan's abject violence, sent a thrill up Kavinsky's spine. He whistled, high and shrill, like an old movie bomb flying through the air as the side mirror went through it's arch; when it landed, he made a mild ka-boom, then laughed sharply.

"Home run, Lynch. When'd you take up baseball?"

There's something about the approval in Kavinsky's tone that makes him pleased and angry both at once and he lets' the crowbar dangle from his hands, dragging it along Cabeswater's floor. It leaves blood-red blooms in its wake and the trees shudder.

"You know that's not my sport," he says, picking the crowbar up again and quickly smashing out first the left headlight and then the second. It's exhilarating, he can't deny that, his nerves singing as he looks up again, grinning now, wide and wild as he meets Kavinsky's eyes.

He hooks the curved tip of the crowbar in the front grill, kicks it in before pushing down slowly. "You dreamed this just so I could trash it? How fucking sweet."

Kavinsky watched Ronan, watched the slow unravel of his senses as the destruction moved him. He looked alive, exhilarated. Kavinsky wanted to know who's face he was imagining on the other side of that crowbar, who's body crumpling under the assault. Nobody menaced like that without an image in mind; Kavinsky knew that too well.

The smile Ronan gave him was a singing thing, a knife flash. Kavinsky threw back his head in triumph, swallowing more beer, and then approached Ronan, stalking around behind him as he tried to tear the grill off.

He wrapped around him, pressed his arms to Ronan's arms, his chest to his back, and tore at the car with him. "Just some of the details. Won it off a townie at the party." His voice was a breath of sin and temptation against Ronan's ear. "Hope you were looking when I drove up. We're gonna dream it better."

The metal and plastic creak deliciously, whining at the bend before the eventual shower. Ronan watches it until the breaking point. almost doesn't even notice that Kavinsky's moved until he's pressed against Ronan's back, all muscle and sinew and heat.

He tugs the crowbar free, letting it drop heavy on the ground again as he turns his head, finds Kavinsky's face so close to his own.

"What the fuck would either of us do with a Ferrari?" he asks, but his eyes take in the sharp edge of Kavinsky's cheekbones, the scatter of freckles, the dangerous scent of him.

Kavinsky grinned, stayed where he was for a moment. The scent of the forest surrounded them but under it was Ronan--sharp and visceral, boy-sweat, the tiniest sting of beer on top of his breath this close--and that was far more inviting than the earthiness of the woods. After a moment of the lingering closeness, he stooped and picked up the crowbar from the ground.

He climbed up onto the hood of the Ferrari. It groaned under him, the metal bowing a bit. "What would we do with a Ferrari?" he asked, rhetorical and bright. He swung the crowbar like a baseball bat, the way Ronan had swung it at the side mirror, at the windshield. The windshield splintered, a spider's web from the point of impact. "Any the fucking thing we wanted! That's not the point, Lynch."

Kavinsky climbed up onto the roof and turned. He pointed at Ronan with the crowbar and grinned at him, bright eyed though they were not dark, nor pin-pricked, nor hazed. For once, Kavinsky was stone-cold sober. "We can have whatever we want, Ronan. All we have to do is want it."

Even with the trees still grumbling their distrust, Kavinsky looks like a king atop his kingdom in this place. The Ferrari is already trashed, wrecked by both their hands, but it's Kavinsky that has the power still, the crowbar still hanging loose from his fingers, the roof of the car dented in under his feet.

"Not even you can dream up what I want, Kavinsky," Ronan says, part truth and part challenge. He steps up on the hood himself, boots making quick dents in the thin medal as the car sways slightly under his weight.

Sneering, he shoves the heel of one against the splintered windshield, grins at the scatter of glass that rains over the front seat. It's a beautiful destruction. "It's a nice show though."

Kavinsky grinned as Ronan joined him on the car. He wanted to tell Ronan about dreaming mud-grease-ichor onto his hand at the substance party while he was still perfectly awake and painting another boy beautifully with it, wanted to tell him about the constant, cosmic thrum of this place as if Ronan wasn't aware, wanted to tell him about the difference between dreams and creation. But more than that, he wanted to show him, and that was so much easier now, inside the dream place.

He looked down at the splintered glass inside the car, for only a moment, and it went from glass to frosty snow as he watched. Because he wanted it that way. Because he willed it so.

Ice spread across the hood of the car, and Kavinsky whooped, circling the crowbar and impacting it sharply into the roof of the car. It dented, powerfully, but it interrupted his thought enough that the frost halted. It did not recede.

The glass turns to snow inside the car, glistening in the hint of light before a layer of frost starts creeping up over metal. For a moment, Ronan almost believes its Cabeswater's handiwork, but then Kavinsky cackles and crashes the crowbar into the roof, the creeping web of frost shrinking to a stop at the impact.

"You didn't dream that," Ronan says, trying and failing not to sound impressed. Trying and failing not to sound alarmed.

Kavinsky grinned at Ronan, feral and wild, eyes eyes bright with the concentration that it had taken to pull that off. Bright with deliberation. Bright with pain, like the first time he pulled something out of a dream. His arms were all vibrations of energy, pins and needles. He breathed through his teeth.

"This whole place is a goddamn dream, Ronan," he said around the air in and out of his lungs, like the dream place was trying to undo him. He sat down on the roof of the car. It was at once infinitely easier and tremendously harder to pull that trick off, both here in the dream place and while sober.

When he had pulled ichor onto his hand and painted the kid at the party, he could excuse that for dreaming--the hazy negligence of alcohol and drugs dulled the senses, made it easier, and he was far enough away from this place that tore at him with thorns and claws that, half the time, he could or would not see. But the snow was right here, in the car beneath his feet and he'd managed it with nothing to dull himself or soften the blow.

"Shit, I need a drink."

For a second, Ronan isn't sure if Kavinsky means Cabeswater or Darrow. But Kavinsky is visibly tired, dropping down to sit on the roof of the Ferrari, legs draped over the hole where the windshield used to be.

Ronan considers for a second before jumping off the car to scoop up another beer, his own still in hand, and tossing it toward Kavinsky. "That doesn't explain shit," he says, taking another drink of his own beer, thumb hooked in the pocket of his jeans. "This place doesn't even like you."

Kavinsky caught the beer, cracked it open, and threw the drink back in one fluid motion. His throat worked, desperate, like he was drinking water after days in the desert. Overhead, the leaves rippled, multitudinous and loud. He tried to hear whatever it was that Ronan heard in the trees, but all he heard was the leaves, the aching quiet behind them, the steady, rhythmic pulse in his bones of all that energy.

He wiped his chin a little when he stopped drinking, just to make sure he hadn't dribbled any, then belched into his fist. Boyishly, he smiled, swinging his legs. He tried to think how to explain everything.

It had been so much easier to show Ronan a lot of a hundred new perfect replicas of the Evo, line after line, detail after detail. Here, there was none of that. But here, he could turn glass into snow while he was wakeful, and draw the ichor of the earth from the forest to his hand with only the slightest haze.

"Whatever this place is, however much it doesn't like me," Kavinsky said, "It'll listen. I've got a will, I know what I want, and so I can make that happen. And this place--" He gestured around at the trees. "--this is the dream place. We've got the same one. It's the pure magic shit, Lynch. The deeper you sleep, the stronger it gets, but it's strong in here. Wasn't like this, our weekend together. The dream place'd already been acting weird, but then we worked her too hard, trying to get that fucking Camaro..."

Our weekend together.

It sounds sordid and Ronan has no doubt that's completely intentional. Sordid and heavy with implications that make something dark and hungry and dangerous coil i his belly. Kavinsky's already made it clear that he wants more than a weekend this time. How much more, Ronan doesn't know.

A part of him wants to find out though.

Something else triggers Ronan's memory as Kavinsky keeps talking, something Adam had mentioned months ago in the same breath as Matthew and the dragon, something about Cabeswater running dry and Adam having to fix it with Ronan's help.

"If it's strong, you can take more," Ronan says, piecing things little by little. It's not unlike talking with Gansey or Adam these days, still two steps behind and trying to make sense of things he should already know. "For how long? How does it recharge?"

Kavinsky sipped at his beer more slowly. His breath was back now, but he was watching Ronan like a tiger or a vulture or a shark. Kavinsky, who was always moving back in Henrietta, was still here in the dream place that was not as it had been back home. He sat on the roof of the beat up Ferrari, contemplating further destruction, contemplating how Ronan would look with blood on his face and in his mouth. Contemplating having watched Ronan and dusty Adam Parrish fondling each other at and just outside the substance party.

He wondered how long Ronan Lynch had been playing him for a fucking dupe.

"Depends. Life takes more energy than not-life, big things take more energy than small, fanciful things over mundane. Sometimes, hell's just in the details."

He was going to have to talk about Proko, and he didn't want to. So he spoke about his father instead. "When it was dear old dad and I was just a kid, back in Jersey, I had to keep trying. I had to keep going back, because I couldn't get it right. Every night, three or four or six times. I got good at driving fast, getting rid of those things before mom woke up from the cocktails. I didn't know, then, what I was doing. But I had to make sure that nobody would notice he was gone. He had to be perfect."

He looked at the flowers that the dream place had made, and then at his snow and frost, and frowned. "Letting something come to you, and creating something are two very different tricks, Lynch. They take a very different kind of power. I'm not going to let something else define what I can do with all this shit in my head."

It shouldn't be surprising and, in some ways, it's not. Kavinsky's a fucking psychopath, it makes sense somehow that he dreamed his own father. He thinks of all those rumors back in Henrietta, wonders how many of them were true and how many barely even scratched the surface of revealing the whole story.

He's equally unsurprised that Kavinsky only bothers to half-assedly answer one of his questions.

He takes another sip of his beer and steps closer, resting his foot on the mangled front bumper and leans forward. "What'd you do with the ones that weren't right?" he asks, blood already going cold at the idea. "How many people did you kill until you got it down perfectly?"

Because there's no doubt in Ronan's mind that they were people. His own mother was a dream thing, but that didn't make her less of a person.

Kavinsky frowned a little, frustrated because Ronan didn't get it. He ran his tongue over his teeth and finished his beer, silent a moment, before he set the can down on the hood of the Ferrari. He balled up his fist, tapped it once, twice, on the top of the can.

The tab cut into the side of his hand as he slammed his fist down, crumpling the can in on itself with a satisfying crnk. He shook his hand a little, flicking a little blood off, then lifted his hand and sucked at the cut.

"I don't do anything half assed," Kavinsky said, getting back up onto his feet. "And he tried to kill me first."

Kavinsky scooped the crowbar up off the roof once more, shoulders stiff and proud. He moved across the roof, scraping the crowbar on the metal, letting it screech. He set his feet wide on the edge of the back windshield, contemplated it a moment, before he brought the crowbar down hard and fast on the place where he could see his own reflection.

The back windshield shatters, beautiful and dramatic, another contained ice storm. This Kavinsky's idea of a tantrum, Ronan thinks and then realizes belatedly that it's not that dissimilar from his own. More productive if maybe not as satisfying.

"You didn't answer the fucking question," Ronan sneers, staring at the backs of Kavinsky's calves, the breadth of his shoulders as he stands up straight again. "How many people did you kill, Kavinsky? The people you created not the asshole who fucked you into the world."

"That's an awful personal goddamn question, Lynch," Kavinsky snapped, and turned to look at him. He brought the crowbar up to his shoulder, standing there and staring at him evenly for a moment. "You're not my fuckin' priest."

Kavinsky hadn't seen a priest since he and his mother had left New Jersey. There were no Orthodox churches in Henrietta, and Kavinsky, after years in that ceremony, had refused to suffer Catholicism. It had seemed disingenuous, anyway, when he had all that potential at his fingertips. After his first successful forgery, God lost his appeal.

"Besides," Kavinsky said, and climbed down off the car. "It's a mercy when the thing comes out already half dead. I didn't know what I was doing back then."

Despite himself, Ronan has questions. Too many of them. There's a voice somewhere in the back of his telling him to turn around and walk away. It sounds a lot like Gansey. It sounds a lot like Cabeswater.

"How many people have you made since then? Your dad, Prokopenko... who else? Your entire fucking entourage?"

It's not the biggest of Ronan's questions. Not by a long shot. But it's all he's allowing himself right now.

"Is this doing it for you right now? Listening to my abortion stories? Guess it would, I've seen how much you fucking like charity cases."

He spat the last, visceral, heaving, an ember of anger low in his ribs that burned in the shape of dusty Adam Parrish and his hands and mouth on Ronan Lynch at the substance party. Kavinsky swung the crowbar at the back end of the Ferrari, sneering. It impacted hard enough that the trunk popped free of its latch.

His shoulders ached and his chest heaved and ached. He hadn't expected himself to be so mad about the thing. It had been days, though, and he was still burning about it. What the hell was so good about Parrish, anyway?

"Just the two," he said, low and tight. "Just those two. Everything else has been things."

It could be a lie. It could easily be a lie. Ronan knows he's never going to get a straight answer out of Kavinsky and, even if he did, he wouldn't know it when it happened.

Still, there's something about Kavinsky right now that strikes Ronan as... raw. He's angry, yes, but Kavinsky is always angry. That's one of the many things they share, one of the many things that keeps pulling at Ronan, tugging him in. There's more to this, though.

It takes him a minute and then Ronan's eyes narrow, lips curling into a smirk.

"Jealousy looks good on you, Kavinsky," he says, eyeing the dented and wide open trunk door in amusement. "Let's see how much can you destroy in one temper tantrum."

"I could make it three," Kavinsky said, looking at Ronan. There was a possessive, knowledgeable energy there. He contemplated the crowbar in his hands, then slowly brought it down, the head resting in the gross.

Thorny vines wound up it slowly, unbidden by him, and he frowned at him angrily. He let go of the crowbar, and the dream place held it. He snarled, walking away from it. Apparently, his tantrum was over, involving the car, involving the crowbar at least. At least the dream place wasn't ripping at him, today.

He walked over to the beers again and grabbed his third, opening it, before stepping toward Ronan. "I won't, but I could. And they wouldn't even know it wasn't you. How well do they even know you, Ronan?"

The implication makes Ronan's blood run cold, fingers twitching at his sides. Cabeswater is equally unimpressed judging by the angry curl of vines around the crowbar.

Ronan's surprised Kavinsky doesn't rail against them, surprised he hasn't dreamed up a machete yet to hack at them. Though he as a feeling Cabeswater would find a way to prevail and fight back. A sentient forest, after all, has to be more powerful than some fucked up teenager. Even one like Kavinsky.

Kavinsky steps in close, his breath smelling of beer and Ronan reacts without thinking, wrapping a hand tight around his throat and snarling. "You won't because you know I'll fucking kill you and it won't be quick."

He doesn't let Kavinsky's question get under his skin, doesn't let himself dwell on it.

He already knows the answer.

Kavinsky grabbed Ronan's wrist as soon as it was on his neck. He met his eyes and grinned at him without a single edge of fear in his eyes. Whether or not Ronan was going to let him under his skin, he'd already gotten there, even just a little bit. He'd sunk a nail in, under the surface of an old scab, and could pull back to see the raw flesh underneath. His pulse fluttered under Ronan's fingers. He could feel Ronan's pulse in his wrist. Slowly, he leaned in against the grasp.

"You could try," Kavinsky said, raspy with the grasp and an edge of calculated risk, and maybe desire. "How do you think I ended up with two in the first place? Though slow part'd be new, at least. Like to see how creative you'd get, shug."

He laughed though, Adams apple bobbing under Ronan's palm, and lifted his beer to drink from it. He swore in Bulgarian under his breath. Slowly, he turned his hand, and fit his fingers between his neck and Ronan's fingers to pry them off, uncaring if he scraped his own skin. "Does your lover boy know you like to grab people like this? After all those shiners, can't see him being into it rough like you and me."

There's something sick in Kavinsky's laugh this time, something twisted even for him.

Ronan's upper lip curls and he tightens his grip, relishing the feel of Kavinsky's Adams apple beneath his palm, the thrum of pulse. He grabs at Kavinsky's prying fingers with the other, pushes in to yank and twist Kavinksy's arm behind his back, effectively holding him in place and glaring down at him.

"Mention Parrish one more fucking time and I'll snap your neck right now."

Kavinsky was practically purring, even as Ronan twisted his arm back, hand still tight on his throat. The thrill was still in his spine, in his gut. The dream place felt electric around them, thrumming in his ears, in his pulse. The leaves in the trees rippled, loud and screaming at them.

They were still nearly the same height, but Ronan had pushed an advantage with Kavinsky's arm behind his back, was glowering and sharp. It was a good look on him, knife-sharp and deadly and threatening. Kavinsky did not believe, though, that Ronan was capable of more than surface blood on his hands. He would not be able to suffer the taste it left in the back of your mouth.

"Yeah, talk dirty to me," he growled. But with his free elbow, he shot back for Ronan's gut, aggressive and ready to fight, if that's what Ronan was going to be about right now.

"You wish," he sneers just before Kavinksy's elbow rams into him.

It's a solid hit, hard enough to loosen Ronan's grip, his teeth gritting in pain as he curls forward. He manages to keep his hand around Kavinsky's wrist though, and his lips are curled back in a sneer as he glares.

The trees rustle and bend, a chaos of whispers, though he doesn't take his eyes off Kavinsky. "This supposed to be foreplay, Kavinsky?" he asks, starting to get his breath back. "Really know how to charm a guy."

Ronan hadn't let him go, and Kavinsky was beginning to dislike that. He shifted and wiggled his fingers, twisted his wrist in the grip, too knowledgeable about the ways in which a dislocated shoulder could happen to test how much Ronan would press just yet.

He peered at Ronan over his shoulder, out of the corner of his eye.

"I brought you beer and a fucking car, didn't I? We're halfway to second base all ready." He sniffed a little, like he was offended or something, then knocked his weight back toward his shoulder, toward Ronan, in an effort to knock him off balance and get him to let go.

When it comes to Kavinsky, Ronan knows to expect anything. He makes missteps of course, can let down his guard at the worst of times, but he's on alert now, and Kavinsky's movement has little effect.

Practically growling, Ronan tightens his grip on Kavinsky's wrist and holds tight, leans enough that his lips nearly brush Kavinsky's ear. "I can get my own beer and dream my own car," Ronan says and even if it's not technically true yet, the hypothetical is. With or without Kavinsky's help, he'll get there one day. "Come up with something better."

"You asked me," Kavinsky said. He twisted his hand into Ronan's shirt. He wondered if, at some point in this, Ronan would shove him into the dented metal and splintered glass and get blood on his hands. He wondered if he would shove him into the grass and let the forest get blood for him.

But Ronan's voice is a sinking vice in Kavinsky's ear, a dark and overpowering thing, just as dangerous as the splintered glass or the potentially waiting wines. Kavinsky's fingers twist harder into his shirt.

"We could make anything," he said, and a half turn of his head nearly has their noses brushing. "It's not just dreaming, not just in this place. Outside of here, it gets trickier, but in here--Ronan--we can do anything."

Ronan can feel Kavinsky's fingers twisting in his shirt, keeping them close. He brings his other hand up, the one not still holding tight to Kavinsky's wrist, up to his throat again. It's a looser hold this time, less threat and more just to feel the thrum of Kavinsky's pulse under his fingertips, heat under his palm.

Kavinsky's eyes are blown dark. He has a scatter of freckles across his and Ronan pushes down the urge to bite.

"Like what?" he asks, and the whisper of the trees winds louder. "What the fuck is it you even want to do?"

"You know what I want, man."

There was no mistaking it, had not been, for weeks or months at least--the time and effort he poured into cultivating Ronan Lynch's attention in any way possible, in showing him that they were the same, that he knew what Ronan was, what he could do. Nobody else could do what they could do, this primal, magical thing. Every forgery, every trick and tactic and luring race since spring, at least, had been a desirous temptation for Ronan Lynch to notice. To know, to understand.

Now, with Ronan's hand on his throat and his wrist, it felt like he did. A low key, burning understanding like their dreaming together had been back in the field of a hundred Mitsubishis that Ronan didn't remember because he'd never lived that life.

Soft, under the noise of the leaves, Kavinsky said, "I knew about your horrors since the first time they crawled out of you and tried to rip you apart. I know what that's like. I know, not them. Having all that--all this--inside you." He looked at Ronan with an uncharacteristic, belying gentleness. "I can help you."

It's not a surprising revelation, another piece of the puzzle slipping into place. Ronan hadn't questioned how Kavinsky knew because he knew thanks to Adam and Gansey. There had been a conversation between Ronan and Kavinsky that Ronan doesn't remember and never will, a conversation Kavinsky will always have locked away.

Gansey and Adam have those, too. Memories Ronan will never share.

And Kavinksy...

Kavinsky isn't wrong. Gansey and Adam have memories but they don't know, they don't understand this power that ripples through Ronan's body, the terror of sleeping every night not knowing what it is he'll bring out and whether or not it will rip him to shreds. They don't know. They'll never know.

Ronan slides his hand down Kavinksy's throat, thumb brushing over the jut of his collarbone and then away. He lets go of Kavinsky's wrist. "You said you want more than two days," he says, his voice quiet, but not gentle. "How long then?"

His mouth was a whisper away from Ronan's. "As long as it takes."

Kavinsky turned, rapidly, as soon as his wrist was free. He didn't know why he'd bothered with gentleness and coaxing and subtlety in the field with the Mitsubishis, because it clearly wasn't the route with Ronan, wasn't what he needed, wasn't what would take hold and shake him loose and make him see.

He grabbed Ronan by the head, fingers digging in on his scalp, his thumbs tight against the crest of his cheekbones. They were not so far away from the decrepit Ferrari. Kavinsky pushed back toward it, intent, bullying, wanting Ronan's back against the door and his body against Ronan's.

He wanted to slide his hand down to Ronan's throat, to grip it the same way that Ronan had gripped his, and the thought of it sent the same spike of red hot want and searing intensity through his belly that having Ronan's hand on his throat in the first place had already done. Instead, he pressed his mouth there, teeth and tongue and possession leeching out of him.

Kavinsky's fingers dig into Ronan's scalp, beneath the shorn hair that he's let get too long recently. Ronan bares his teeth, but doesn't fight the push, doesn't stop until the mangled Ferrari is at his back, Kavinsky pressed close, smile like a snake about to bite.

Ronan knows that look well.

His hands drop to Kavinsky's sides, fists curling in thin cotton. Somehow the press of Kavinsky's teeth to his neck comes as a shock even as he knows it shouldn't. His breath catches high in his throat and his head falls back. He feels fire in his veins, anger and hunger mixing, and he shoves, hand pressed firmly to Kavinsky's chest.

"One week," he snarls, gaze dropping to the red and wet of Kavinsky's lips. "That's fucking it, man. That's all you get."

Kavinsky would have ripped at Ronan's skin, but the words out of his mouth were a triumph as any could have been. He released his lock willingly, took that shoved half step back and slapped the roof of the Ferrari by Ronan's left shoulder. His skin was vibrating, electric, thrilled all the way to his core.

"Hot damn. That's right."

He lifted his hand off the car and over Ronan's hair briefly before he stepped away. He framed his fingers in a square, considering Ronan and the car, the glorious destruction they both were.

"Let's get started, shall we?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Run to me, lover, run until you feel your lungs bleeding

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