Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

To put it lightly, Adam Parrish hates flying. He tolerates it, because he has to travel occasionally for work, but given the option, he much prefers to rent a car or take a train. Except the only other way to get to Dublin from Boston is by boat, so a plane was really his only choice if he wanted to seize the opportunity of speaking on a panel about sustainable vertical architecture at the annual conference of the International Union of Architects.

And right now, Adam is really hating this choice. Hating his selection of flights, at least. He should have booked the direct flight from Logan, but ever economical and trying to show his boss he wasn’t like his colleagues who book business class tickets without a second thought, Adam had selected the cheapest flight available. Which laid him over in Lisbon too early for stores to even be open in the airport so he could catch a relatively small plane to Ireland just after sunrise. A small plane with an arcing flight path that would approach Dublin from the west. A small plane currently facing a series of mechanical failures forcing it to make an emergency landing at a private airstrip outside of a town called Dingle.

Which is about as far from Dublin as you can be while still being in Ireland.

Adam assumes that, as far as emergency landings go, this one must go very smoothly, because the oxygen masks don’t drop from their overhead compartments and the landing gears deploy, so there’s minimal shuddering upon touch down. But that doesn’t stop him from gripping his armrests in white-knuckled fear as the woman in the seat beside him continues to make her way through saying the rosary, which had started as soon as the announcement was made that they would have to land in Dingle.

“But there’s no airport in Dingle!” the woman had wailed, and that’s when Adam had started cursing his luck.

While the pilot and flight attendants meet to speak with airline representatives about what to do with the roughly fifty passengers on board, Adam pulls his phone from his messenger bag and turns it on. When it finally connects to service, he brings up his map app and lets it find his current location. The blue dot appears on a peninsula on the western coast of Ireland and as Adam zooms out, he takes in the expanse of green separating him from his destination. Tapping on Dublin and then adding an additional few taps to get directions there from Dingle, it’s actually not as bad as Adam thought it would be. Three hundred forty kilometers, about four hours. He’s still got over a day and a half to get to Dublin for his conference. While landing in Dingle was bump in the road, it’s not insurmountable. He can make it to Dublin with plenty of time to spare for his panel.

At least this is what he thinks until one of the flight attendants announces the airline won’t be able to get a bus to take them to Kerry Airport, the closest commercial airport, until the next morning. That they’ll work on getting the passengers on flights to Dublin once in Kerry, though that may be an extra day. But the flight attendant says not to worry, that the airline will provide vouchers for food and accommodations, all passengers will get full refunds, and they’ll also receive a free round trip ticket to the destination of their choice, though some restrictions do apply.

After that, Adam thinks he’s screwed.

He’s not the type to complain. Adam will leave that to the guy sitting four rows back who starts yelling as soon as the flight attendant finishes. But Adam is the type to start methodically working through his options as soon as he realizes he has a problem. So as the guy in row nine screams his head off at the flight staff, Adam starts planning how he’ll get to Dublin.

Looking back down at the map on his phone, he zooms in on his current location. The plane landed outside of Dingle, but not terribly far from the town center. Walkable, if he needs to. Then from the center of Dingle, there’s a road that heads east off the peninsula and leads straight across the country, almost directly to Dublin. If he can rent a car or find a car service, or maybe even catch a bus, he can be to Dublin in time for dinner. Worst case scenario, he can get to Kerry Airport and find a flight to Dublin from there.

So Adam starts Googling car rental agencies and finds that the closest one is, not to his surprise, at Kerry Airport. Then he looks up car services, and the only one he finds is a local taxi company that proudly states Exclusively Serving County Kerry on their outdated Website. Adam almost doesn’t bother looking up the bus, but he does, and the next bus out of Dingle to Dublin doesn’t leave until the following afternoon. He searches for a train, but Dingle apparently is too small for even a train station.

Then Adam pulls up Kayak and looks at flights from Kerry to Dublin. There’s one in two hours, which he thinks he’s unlikely to make, and the next doesn’t leave until early the next morning. But if he can get to Kerry Airport somehow and get a rental car, then his problem should be solved, so he pulls up his Uber app and looks for local cars and… nothing. Adam goes back to the taxi company site and clicks on the Call Us button. He holds his phone to his right ear for only long enough to hear the Irish rendition of ‘Your call cannot be completed as dialed.’

It’s only then that Adam thinks he’s royally fucked.

Eventually, just before noon, the flight staff lets the passengers deboard and start to collect their luggage that one of the pilots has started pulling from the cargo hold. Adam retrieves his small suitcase and his garment bag, ignoring the calls of the flight staff to wait so they could guide him towards accommodations as he starts walking towards the center of Dingle.

About fifteen minutes into his walk, an old diesel Land Rover pulls over on the gravel shoulder ahead of where Adam is walking. As Adam approaches the SUV, the driver rolls the window down and asks, “Lad, were you on that plane that just had to land at O’Connor’s farm out there? We all thought he was crazy for building that air strip, but it looks like it was finally of use to someone other than himself.”

“It was better than a water landing,” Adam says wryly.

The driver chuckles at this. “Going into town? I can give you a lift.”

Adam graciously accepts, thanking the man and stowing his bags in the back before climbing into the passenger seat. The driver asks him what happened with the plane, and when Adam can’t relay any good gossip about fires or belligerent passengers, the man just hums and asks him where he’s heading.

“I need to get to Dublin, but it was going to be a few days before the airline could get everyone taken care of,” Adam tells him. “So I really just need to find someone who could drive me to Kerry Airport. I should be able to find my way from there.”

The driver hums again and taps his fingers on the steering wheel as he looks over at Adam. “I’ll drop you at The Greywaren. They’ll be able to get you sorted there.”

The way the man talks, Adam assumes The Greywaren is a inn or a hotel or some other sort of business that would have a car and driver at the ready, but when the Land Rover stops outside of a two story stone building just on the edge of downtown Dingle, Adam doesn’t know why he’s surprised to find The Greywaren is a pub. Adam thanks the driver again after he gets his bags out of the backseat, and then Adam stands on the cobbled sidewalk, looking up at the gold and green sign of The Greywaren. Maybe the guy who drove him into town knows something Adam doesn’t, and Adam has to have faith that this is the case, because Adam’s never gone into a bar or pub for assistance. So, shouldering his messenger bag and picking up his suitcase and garment bag, Adam steps into the pub.

The Greywaren is exactly how Adam would describe an Irish pub if asked. It's shabby in a well-used type of way, rather like how Adam still feels on the inside sometimes, his imposter syndrome still rearing its ugly head even after he proves time and time again that he deserves to be where he is in life. There's worn wooden floors, a number of mismatched stained glass pendant lamps hanging from the ceiling above equally mismatched tables, bench seating lining two of the walls. Directly across from the door, the bar runs most of the length of the back wall of the pub, dotted with two sets of taps, and shelves cluttered with liquor bottles loom behind it.

Though it's barely lunch time, at one end of the bar is a small cluster of middle-aged to elderly men, and they're all talking animatedly with the much younger bartender. Seemingly as one, as the door bangs shut behind Adam, they all turn to look at him, five pairs of eyes moving between Adam, his luggage, and each other.

The bartender stands up a little straighter, crossing his arms over his chest as he leans against the counter behind the bar. His pale blue eyes move down Adam and then back up again before he finally asks in a deep brogue thicker than any Irish accent Adam has ever heard, “What can I do you for?”

Setting his suitcase and garment bag beside the door, Adam makes his way to the bar. He hates asking questions he already knows the answer to, but maybe this bartender and these patrons at The Greywaren know better than Google considering the apparent non-existence of public transportation in Dingle, if the internet is to be believed. So Adam starts, “I was just on the plane that had to land at… O’Connor’s? I think it was O’Connor. O’Connor’s air strip. And I really need to get to Dublin. Is there a car service around here?”

The bartender cocks an eyebrow and an amused look tugs at the corner of his lips. “You realize Dublin’s a good three hundred kilometers away, right? No taxi around here is going to take you that far.”

Gritting his teeth for a moment, Adam takes a deep breath before continuing, “Then is there some other way? A bus? A train? Is there a car rental place?”

“Best bet would be to go to Tralee and get one of those from there, but…” The bartender trails off.

“But?” Adam asks warily.

“Train from Tralee to Dublin will have left for the day since it’s after twelve, and there’s only one. Won’t be another ‘til tomorrow at ten. And the bus…” The bartender waves his hand back and forth in a ‘so-so’ gesture. “Good luck with that. It’s unreliable on the best of days. And most days are not the best days.”

Adam is closing in on his wit’s end with this guy. He’s on the edge of laying into the bartender when one of the middle-aged patrons pipes in.

“Ronan Lynch,” the man at the bar says in a scolding tone, accent just as thick if not thicker than the bartender’s. “What would your mum do? I don’t think she’d take too kindly to you not helping a lad who’s in a bit of a spot.”

The bartender throws a leer in the direction of the man who had spoken. “My mum would have given him the keys to her car and told him to not bother returning it, Callahan. Is that what you’d have me do?”

“I’ll pay. Five hundred euro,” Adam cuts into the conversation and his stomach clenches at the amount he’d thrown out, even though he has more than enough to cover it. “Look, this is a huge opportunity for me, and I really, really need to get to Dublin. I can pay anyone who can help me get there. If it’s not you, just point me in the right direction.

Ronan, Adam assumes the bartender’s name is, assesses Adam for a long while, like he’s weighing, measuring, and finding Adam wanting. But he finally nods. “Fine. Give me an hour to get someone to watch the pub, then we’ll be on our way.”

Adam chooses to withhold the largest sigh of relief he’ll ever heave in his life. Instead, he holds his hand out across the bar. “Thank you. I really appreciate it. Adam Parrish.”

Ronan’s gaze falls to Adam’s extended hand. With that gaze, with his chilly blue eyes, Adam thinks Ronan can see every minute of manual labor Adam has performed in his life, every scrape, every grease and oil stain. The stuff Adam had tried to scrub away for so long. But Adam keeps his hand extended, and after a long, uncomfortable pause, Ronan reaches out and shakes Adam’s hand, giving him a formal introduction. “Ronan Lynch. Nice to meet you.”

Chapter Text

Almost exactly an hour later, Ronan comes down a set of steps tucked at the end of a short hallway at the back of the pub. He has a backpack slung over one shoulder and he stops at the bar to bump fists with a younger man who had entered while Adam had been waiting, “Thanks, Dick. I should be back late tonight.” 

Then he steps over to Adam, who had set himself up at a table and opened his laptop so he could review his speaking notes as Ronan made arrangements and packed his bag. Stashing his computer back in his messenger bag, Adam stands up. “Ready?” 

“The five hundred quid?” Ronan holds out his hand. 

Adam shakes his head. “How do I know you’re not going to just take my money and drop me in the next town? You’ll get paid when services have been rendered.” 

The men at the bar laugh at this, and the one who had ribbed Ronan into driving Adam, Callahan, calls out, “You might have your hands full with that one, Lynch.” 

Ronan throws a rude gesture in the bar’s direction before he stalks out of the pub. Adam grabs his bags and follows him outside and around the side of the building where an older model hunter green Mini is parked. Adam pauses for a moment, looking between the car and it’s supposed driver, who throws his bag in the hatch before stepping to the right side of the car. 

“What?” Ronan stares at Adam over the roof. 

“Nothing.” Adam shakes his head once again. “You just--don’t look like you’d drive a Mini, that’s all.” 

Ronan cocks an eyebrow. “And what do I look like I'd drive?" 

After thinking for a moment, Adam says, "Something fast. Something sleek. Something German."

"Maybe someday. But this'll do for now." Ronan pats the roof before climbing into the car. Adam tucks all his bags into the hatch before shutting it and going around to get into the passenger seat. Almost as soon as the door is shut, Ronan is peeling out of his parking spot and starting the drive out of town, which doesn’t take long, considering the size of the place.

“So, what do you do that has you in such a rush to get to Dublin?” Ronan asks as he navigates the Mini out of Dingle and onto a two-lane country road. 

Adam is so transfixed by the amount of green visible through all windows of the car that it takes him a moment to respond, “I’m an architect. In Boston. There’s a conference for one of our organizations in Dublin and I’m on a panel the day after tomorrow.” 

Nodding, Ronan shifts gears and the Mini starts going faster than Adam thinks it probably should on a narrow, winding road like the one it’s on. “Ah, so you build things?” 

“Not exactly.” Adam shakes his head and turns briefly to look at Ronan in the driver’s seat. “I pretty much design things and then other people build them.” 

“So you write the instructions, but don’t get to play with the LEGO set.” 

Adam laughs briefly. “That’s actually a fairly accurate description.” 

“But don’t you want to be the one to play with the LEGO set?” Ronan asks, glancing at Adam out of the corner of his eye.

“You get paid more money if you don’t,” Adam answers simply, hoping his short answer turns the conversation in another direction. 

But it seems to turn the conversation in no direction at all, because Ronan just makes a soft noise in the back of his throat before falling silent, and they stay that way as they wind their way off of the Dingle peninsula. Adam takes in the white cottages that spring up at the roadside every so soften, and the bits of coastline that appear every once in a while as they edge close to it and then turn abruptly away. They’re just past a town called Kilcummin when Ronan starts to slow, and after Adam tears his eyes away from the North Atlantic out to his left, he turns to look through the windshield at the road. 

There’s about half a dozen sheep spread out across the two-lane road, though their car is the only one in sight. And the sheep show absolutely no sign of moving.

“They’ll be gone soon enough,” Ronan comments, pulling up the parking brake and getting comfortable in his seat. 

Except they’re not gone soon enough. They’re not gone at all. As the minutes pass, more and more sheep keep joining the initial few in the road until the Mini is surrounded on all four sides by sheep of more colors than Adam knew sheep came in. They just keep coming, seemingly from all directions, until sheep are thirty or forty deep around the car every way Adam looks. And Ronan has burst into rollicking laughter. 

Wrenching his door open, pushing a ewe out of the way in the process, Adam climbs out of the car, gaping at the dozens upon dozens of sheep that are surrounding them. “Are you kidding me?” 

“Oh, Matthew will love this.” Ronan is still cackling with joy as he steps out of the car. He wades through the veritable sea of sheep until he’s about fifteen feet from the car. Then he pulls a phone, which hasn’t made an appearance before now, from his pocket and snaps a photo of the Mini and Adam surrounded by the flock of sheep. 

“This isn’t funny.” Adam stares at him, wide-eyed and incredulous. 

“You’re right. It isn’t funny.” Ronan taps out a few things on his phone before putting it away. “It’s hilarious .” 

Still staring at Ronan, Adam starts shaking his head, “You’re--I don’t even think there’s a word for it. You’re finding joy in my horrible situation.” 

“In my opinion, I think you need to lighten up. You’re in the most beautiful country on earth and you’re so focused on one thing that you can’t even take this as a sign you need to stop and smell the roses.” 

Adam drops his arms to his sides in defeat and sighs, but he does look around them, legs buffeted by sheep as he turns. Ronan’s unfortunately right. This is the most beautiful place Adam has ever seen, rolling, verdant hills as far as they eye can see to the right of the car, dappled with the occasional flock of sheep or herd of cows. To the left, the grey North Atlantic rolls in over a narrow beach. In the distance are the craggy peaks of low mountains that they’d just wound through. White clouds like cotton balls dot the clear cerulean sky. But all the beauty doesn’t diminish Adam’s need to get to Dublin, and he turns back to Ronan, who had moved back to the Mini. “What do we do?” 

“We wait,” the other man answers simply. 

“We can’t wait, it could be hours before they move.” Adam pushes a hand into his hair and pulls at it. “Can we try to move them?” 

“You can try. But you don’t look like much of a shepherd to me.” Ronan smiles at Adam beatifically. 

Rolling his eyes, Adam starts trying to shoo the sheep out of the road. When this has no effect, he starts trying to push them, which only has the effect of the sheep hunkering down in their places. Then he starts trying to talk to them nicely, asking them to move, until he goes so far as to try to pick one one and physically move it, but sheep turn out to be much heavier than Adam anticipated. 

“Good luck with that.” Ronan laughs gleefully and climbs onto the hood of the Mini, stretching his long legs out in front of him as he reclines back against the windshield. 

Adam pauses his attempts to persuade the sheep to leave the road and he looks at Ronan. “You have no faith that any of my efforts are going to work.” 

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of faith, but very little in your efforts and none in those sheep.” Ronan is smirking at this point, arms crossed over his chest in a pose Adam is starting to become familiar with. “They might not have free will, but what will they do have is going to keep them right in this road until that will decides otherwise.” 

Deciding to give one last effort, Adam puts his hands on a sheep’s rump and starts pushing with all his might as he asks, “Catholic?”

Ronan makes a noise of assent and nods. “Since the day I was born.” 

“Wouldn’t have pegged you for a Catholic,” Adam puts his full weight into pushing and then finally gives up, sighing heavily. “Or a Protestant, for that matter. I wouldn’t have pegged you for the religious sort at all.” 

“You aren’t the first and won’t be the last,” Ronan says plainly. “And what are you?” 

“Firmly in the realm of agnosticism.” Adam starts stepping back to the Mini, weaving around sheep. 

“Ah, a science guy,” Ronan says, his voice only slightly patronizing. “So, then what brought you into my pub today?” 

“Bad luck.” Adam leans against the Mini’s hood when he reaches his. He has his back to Ronan, but he looks at the other man over his shoulder. “Bad choices.” 

Ronan cocks an eyebrow. “Or it could be called coincidence. Some people might even call it fate. Or destiny.” 

“So you think I was destined to come into your pub today?” Adam laughs briefly. 

“Don’t know what I think yet.” The other man shrugs. “But God, or the universe, or what have you, works in mysterious ways.” 

Moments after Ronan says this, there’s a shout from over a hill that gets the attention of the sheep in the road. Slowly, they start to meander towards it, and after a minute or two the road is clear. Adam stares at Ronan in wonderment. “If you have some direct line to a higher power, could you just request he clear the roads the rest of the way?” 

“I make no promises.” Ronan grins sharply and he slides off the hood of the Mini. “Now, are you ready, or do you want me to submit some additional requests through my divine connection?” 

Shaking his head, Adam steps back to the passenger door and climbs into the car. “That one’s good for now.” 

As the Mini starts back down the road, Ronan’s phone buzzes a few times. He pulls it from his pocket and unceremoniously tosses it into Adam’s lap. “Can you see who that is?” 

“So you’re my chauffeur and I’m your secretary?” 

“Just look at the damn phone.” Ronan points to the iPhone resting between Adam’s legs. 

Adam makes a overly dramatic gesture of picking up the phone and clicking the power button to wake it up. When he looks at the screen, there’s three text notifications from a contact saved only as Matty. 

WHOA!
Where u goin?
Whos he? Cute!

After Adam reads them out, Ronan snatches his phone back and dumps it into the door pocket on his side of the car. His cheeks are furiously red and his grip on the steering wheel is noticeably tighter as he stares at the road ahead of them.

Adam doesn’t know if he should feel secondhand embarrassment for Ronan, or feel flattered that this Matty thinks he’s cute. But he decides to take the high road. “So, who is Matty?” 

“Matthew is my younger brother who comes down with a touch of stupidity every now and then,” Ronan replies through gritted teeth.

“Well, stupidity can interfere with objectivity.” Adam turns to look out the window, pressing his lips together to hold back the smile threatening to break his face open. 

Because Adam, from the moment he stepped into The Greywaren, has thought Ronan is handsome in a look, don’t touch kind of way. Though if the opportunity were to present itself, Adam wouldn’t mind touching, or being touched, by Ronan Lynch. Except for the fact that they’ll probably never see each other after Ronan drops him off in three and a half hours. So Adam pushes all thoughts of touching to the back of his mind and tries to keep the conversation light. “Is he your only sibling?” 

“I have an older brother, too. Declan." Adam notes the tone of Ronan’s voice and the slight sneer that turns his lips. 

“Are they in Dingle?” 

“No, they left.” Ronan shakes his head. “A few years back. Matthew for university, Declan to get a big boy job. So it’s just me in Dingle. Running the family pub.” 

Adam has never thought of a bar being a family business, but it makes sense in a place like Dingle, where it seems like people either escape while they’re young or never get out. “Oh, The Greywaren is your family’s?” 

“Technically.” Ronan nods. “But I’m the only one who really cares about it.” 

“Your parents?”Adam raises his eyebrows, looking over in the other man’s direction. 

After a pause, Ronan answers, “They’ve passed.” 

So much for keeping the conversation light. Adam doesn’t want to give Ronan the same old condolences he’s probably received every time he’s brought up that his parents are deceased. So, after a few awkward seconds, he says, “That sucks. You seem to be doing alright with the pub, though. It seemed nice."

The only response Ronan gives is a noise that Adam classifies as vaguely Neanderthalic, and then they fall into quiet again. Adam starts looking out the window once more, but all the green is almost overwhelming, so eventually, he closes his eyes and leans his head back against his headrest. He stays like that for a while, and he's nearly in that liminal space between awake and napping, when, suddenly, Ronan is downshifting hard and the car is shuddering to a stop. Adam tips his head down and opens his eyes, his jaw dropping as he looks out the windshield. 

"Are you kidding me?" Adam stares at a cow standing in the middle of the road, completely blocking traffic coming from both directions. "Do you people not keep your livestock penned up? Why are they all in your roads and not behind fences?"

"I can get around it," Ronan says confidently. 

"I don't think you can get around it," Adam replies, voice skeptical as he furrows his eyebrows, assessing the amount of paved road on either side of the cow and the stretches of mud that lie just beyond the blacktop. Because of course it couldn’t be grass. With Adam’s luck today, it has to be puddles of mud. He is incredibly thankful it’s not a ditch. 

Stepping down on the clutch, Ronan shifts back into first gear. "I can. Watch.” 

"You don't have clearance.” Adam shakes his head. “On either side.” 

"I think I know the dimensions of my car better than you," Ronan scoffs. 

"The start of that mud puddle suggests the ends of your axles." Adam points to the side of the road. 

"I'll be fine." Ronan waves his hand to dismiss Adam and turns the wheels to start to edge the car around the cow. 

Which is how they both wind up standing behind the Mini three minutes later, Adam's boots and the bottoms of his pants covered in the mud two of the Mini’s tires are stuck in. While the wheels of the Mini had spun, the cow had wandered away. 

Adam mirrors a cross-armed stance that Ronan had used multiple times earlier in the day. “I told you you didn’t have clearance.” 

“I’ll kindly ask you to not remind me.” Ronan throws a sneer in his direction. 

In his head, Adam flips through the catalog of knowledge he has about getting cars out of the mud. He doubts Ronan has cardboard in the hatch of the Mini, but he steps to the door of the car and looks into the foot wells. There’s a floor mat in each, which should work fine if they can manage to get the car elevated enough to slip the mats beneath the tires. Looking back at Ronan, Adam asks, “Do you have a jack?” 

"In the boot." Ronan nods, and he squelches through the mud to open the back hatch of the Mini. As Ronan finds the jack, Adam lets himself back into the car, pulling the floor mats from the passenger and driver sides. Then he meets Ronan in the mud on the left side of the car and they both stand there for a few moments, Ronan holding the jack, Adam holding the floor mats, like they're both trying to decide who deserves to get muddiest in this venture.

"It's your car," Adam says eventually. 

Ronan gives him a long, suffering look. "It's your trip."

In the end, they both end up equally covered in mud. Ronan from jacking up the Mini, Adam from laying the mats under the lifted tires. Ronan from lowering the car then stomping back through the mud to get into the driver's seat at the other side of the car, Adam from the splatter of mud that sprays from the tires when Ronan successfully maneuvers the Mini out of the mud and back onto the road.

Wiping his hands off on his already wrecked chinos, Adam looks down at himself and he is so glad he is an overthinker and an overpacker and that he has multiple extra sets of clothes and two extra pairs of shoes in his suitcase. 

“I’m not getting into your car like this. I have more decency than that." Adam turns to Ronan and holds his hands up to put all his mud on full display.

But Ronan's already a step ahead of him and hauling his backpack from the hatch of the Mini, yanking a new pair of jeans and a shirt from his bag. "So change."

Without hesitating, Ronan strips his shirt off and Adam gets a good look at the back tattoo, the top of which he’d caught glimpses of as the collar of Ronan’s shirt had shifted throughout their drive and getting the car unstuck. As Ronan kicks his boots off and starts shucking off his jeans in the middle of the road behind the car, Adam turns abruptly and stares off into the middle distance until he hears the distinct rise of a zipper. When he turns back around, Ronan's shoving his backpack into the hatch of the Mini, leaving it open so Adam can get a change of clothes from his own bag. 

Stepping to the car, Adam pulls out the worst pair of jeans he'd packed and a long sleeved henley, his most casual shirt, and starts changing as discreetly as he can. At one point, when he's pulling on his new shirt, he glances up and Ronan turns away hastily and stalks to the driver’s door, throwing himself into the car. Adam feels heat rising in his cheeks.

Once he's dressed, Adam tucks his muddy clothes into a plastic laundry bag he'd stashed in his suitcase from a prior trip and repacks his bag. He slides back into the passenger seat and there's an awkward moment of silence before Ronan starts the Mini again to continue the drive. At a gas station in the next town they pass through, after Adam paid to fill the tank and buy them both food, Ronan asks if Adam minds him taking the car through the drive-thru car wash to get rid of the mud, and Adam acquiesces, which leads to more awkward silence as they sit side by side in the dark while the Mini gets coated in soap suds and rinsed. 

Finally, after the car is washed and its tank is full, they start making good time. They skirt around Tralee, which Ronan had mentioned earlier in the day, and while it’s not much of a city, it’s certainly the biggest town Adam has seen since he landed in Ireland. Then they’re on the N21, curving north, and they skirt Limerick in much the same way they skirted Tralee, and finally they’re on the M7, which will take them all the way to Dublin. Adam should be able to check into his hotel by sunset if they keep the pace Ronan’s driving at, which is quite a bit faster than the other cars on the highway. While his bank account will be five hundred euro lighter, Adam would consider it a win that he’d managed to find his way all the way across Ireland after the horrific way he arrived. 

Except Adam can’t consider it a win, because as the Mini approaches a town called Ballybrittas, it starts to shudder rather violently. Ronan’s hands clamp around the steering wheel tightly and he turns his hazard lights on as he slows to take the exit for the town. He has to put extra effort into turning the wheel when they reach the bottom of the exit ramp, and the Mini doesn’t get far down the road that leads right into the center of Ballybrittas before it decides its had enough and Ronan has to pull over and park. 

And Adam is really, really cursing his luck.

Chapter Text

Ronan is cursing vehemently in the driver’s seat, and Adam hates to interrupt what almost sounds like poetry, but he finally does and asks, “Can you pop the hood?” 

Abruptly stopping his tirade, Ronan turns to look at him. “I thought you said you were an architect.” 

“I am, but I was a mechanic when I was younger. I should be able to figure out what’s wrong." Adam opens his door, climbing out of the car and stepping around to the front of the Mini. 

“You.” Ronan peaks his eyebrows as he gets out of the driver’s seat. “You were a mechanic.” 

Sighing, Adam tips his head back and gazes skyward for a moment before looking back at Ronan. “Didn’t I just say that?”

“But you. You.” Ronan jabs his finger in Adam’s direction, “were a mechanic.” 

“Is it so hard to believe?” 

Ronan nods once and says matter-of-factly, “Yes.” 

“Why?” Adam huffs out a laugh.

“Because if you look up ‘white collar’ in the dictionary, there’s no definition.” Ronan’s pointing finger turns into a flat palm and he waves his hand up and down at Adam's body a few times. “It’s just your picture.” 

Adam should probably take offense at this, but Ronan’s delivery of the remark makes him laugh. And projecting a white collar image was something he’d been trying to do for over ten years, so while he thinks he should take offense, he’s also somewhat pleased that he has somehow faked it until he made it. Shaking his head, he pushes up his sleeves, looking at Ronan. “Pop the hood.” 

Ronan lets out a distinctly Irish noise before he reaches into the footwell of the driver’s side of the Mini and pulls the lever to pop the hood. Adam wrenches the hood up and props it open before he pulls out his phone, turning on the flashlight app and using it as he starts looking over the engine. He looks for the large, trip-wrecking things first, the things that would keep the car in a shop for days, but when he finally finds the issue, Adam nearly sighs in relief. “It’s your fan belt.” 

“You act like I know what that means. I run a pub,” Ronan deadpans. 

Adam gently tugs the broken belt from around its maze of pulleys in the engine compartment and holds it up to show Ronan. “This. It’s broken.” 

“Well, that’s easy to see now." Ronan rolls his eyes. “And what do we do about it?”

“I can fix it pretty easily, if there’s an auto shop around here that has one in stock and can lend me some tools.” Adam turns his phone’s flashlight off and slips it back into his pocket, then he shuts the hood. 

Ronan gives him a skeptical look. “You can fix that.” 

Adam gives him a dry look right back, “Look, do you want me to do it or not? If you have to take it to a shop, you’re going to have to get it towed, when really it’ll take me an hour…” 

“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to fix it,” Ronan interrupts and opens the driver’s door again, finding his phone in the side pocket. He taps at the screen for a few moments before he looks up at Adam, “There’s an auto shop in the center of town. Five minute walk.” 

So Adam grabs his messenger bag and they walk. They find the auto shop in a small strip of stores that look more like cottages than stores, and the man working the counter is overly helpful, telling them he’ll lend them tools without them even having to ask, until he comes back from checking the stockroom with a frown on his face. 

“I don’t have one in stock, but I can call one in from Kildare right now and they can drop it off first thing in the morning, if that works for you lads,” the shopkeep offers. 

Adam and Ronan exchange a look and Adam shrugs. “I just need to be there sometime tomorrow.” 

Mulling this over for a moment, Ronan nods and turns back to the shopkeep. “That would be grand.” 

Ronan leaves the man his phone number, and then asks if there’s any place in town they can spend the night. The man directs them to the town’s only hotel, Delaney’s Bed & Breakfast, and after retrieving their bags from the Mini, that’s where Adam and Ronan go. Mrs. Delaney herself is as helpful as the man at the auto shop, until she’s clicking away at her computer and checking her availability and then a frown starts pulling at her lips, too. 

“Well, lads, I do have a room left.” She turns her frown into an apologetic smile. “But it only has a queen bed.” 

Adam and Ronan exchange another look, and this time it’s Ronan who shrugs. “You’re paying. I’ll take the floor. You get the bed. We call it square and that’s that.” 

Adam mulls this over for a moment and then turns back to Mrs. Delaney. “We’ll take it. Thank you.” 

He and Ronan graciously accept sets of keys from her and then follow her directions back outside and across the small parking lot to their room. Adam unlocks the door and leads Ronan inside, and they both stand just over the threshold, taking in the hotel room. 

It’s cozy, to say the least. A little dated, but it looks clean, and there’s a broad window letting in the last of the day’s light through open curtains. As Mrs. Delaney had mentioned, there’s a single queen-sized bed, which takes up a good amount of space in the small room. Other than that, there’s not much. A wardrobe, a tiny desk, two bedside tables, and a chair, and through a door, a small bathroom. It’s a place made for sleeping and not much more.

“Guess it’ll do.” Ronan finally steps further into the room, throwing his backpack down beside the bed and then throwing himself into the wingback chair tucked into a corner. 

Shrugging, Adam shuts the door and then opens the wardrobe to hang up his garment bag. “I’ve stayed worse places.” 

They fall into silence as Adam lifts his suitcase onto the bed and starts to rearrange the contents. He makes sure the bag of muddy clothes is secure and hasn’t gotten on anything else, pulls out clothes for the next day, packs and repacks, and tries to generally not be idle as the quiet between him and Ronan remains. Ronan seems to text someone for a while before he just stares out the window, considering the room doesn’t have anything else for entertainment, and his fingers toy with the intricate web of leather bands he wears around his wrists. 

Finally, it’s Ronan who speaks up, his gaze shifting from the darkening parking lot to Adam. “I’m beginning to think this is all your fault.” 

Coming out of nowhere, this confounds Adam, and he furrows his eyebrows. “What do you even mean by that?” 

“Look, all I’m saying is I’ve driven to Dublin plenty of times and nothing like this has ever happened to me,” Ronan starts and there’s a bit of ire in his voice. “Sure, I’ve gotten a flat, gotten speeding tickets, those things happen over the course of a dozen years driving between cities. But shite happening three times on a single, four hour drive? I’m thinking it’s you. You’re just bad luck all over.”

Without knowing it, Ronan has just struck a match, and Adam's tinder has been itching for a fire all day. Adam reels around to face the other man, and he can feel the hardness in his eyes, hear the edge in his voice as he says, scathing, “How can all this be my fault?” 

“You’re why we’re here. Not me. You needing to get to Dublin is why all of this has happened. The sheep, the mud, the car.” Ronan counts out on his fingers.  “If it weren’t for you, I’d be back in my pub, minding my own business. So, therefore, your fault.” 

Incredulous, Adam gapes at him. Everything Ronan had just named had been entirely out of his control, and now he was getting blamed for their entire predicament. He was why they were driving to Dublin, yes, but everything else has just happened. They were things he had absolutely no say in. He hadn’t asked for this. His scathing tone remains as he defends himself, “So I’m supposed to make sure all your Irish farm animals stay out of the road? I’m the one that’s supposed to take your car in for a tune up to make sure your belts don’t break in the middle of driving?" 

Ronan just cocks an eyebrow. “If I wasn’t driving you three hundred kilometers, it wouldn’t have broken, would it?” 

A short burst of near-maniacal laughter leaves Adam. “What happened to all your fate and destiny and God’s plan bullshit?” 

“Yeah, well, I don’t know what he planned, bringing you to me," Ronan mutters darkly.

Adam's eyebrows shoot up his forehead and he thinks what the hell , but his mouth says, “And what is that supposed to mean?” 

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing." Ronan pushes himself to his feet and stalks to the door, which is all of three steps away from him and would be laughable if their hackles weren't raised and they weren't on the verge of yelling. "But I won’t have you ruining my night, so I’m going down to the pub we passed. Join me if you’d like, or don’t, but I’m not going to stay here with your boring work shite and bad juju.” 

Studying the other man with narrowed eyes, Adam spits, “Just go.” 

And Ronan takes this as gospel, because he’s out the door two seconds later, slamming it behind himself. 

Sitting down heavily on the edge of the bed as the echo of the slamming door lingers in the room, Adam puts his head in his hands and then scrubs his hands through his hair. He takes a few deep, even breaths to settle himself down, and he can’t remember the last time he’d let his anger get the best of him. At the last time he’d directed that anger at anyone other than himself. 

After calming slightly, he pulls out his laptop and sets it up on the room’s small desk, getting out an adaptor and plugging the computer in to charge before he sinks into the chair in front of it. He needs to review his speaking notes, continue research on the other four panelists so he doesn’t make an ass of himself, check in with his boss, but the only thing he can do is stew over his argument with Ronan. 

They’ve known each other for all of seven hours at this point, and they’ve spent a good amount of that time bickering and fighting. Far more time than people who just met should be arguing. But there’s something enthralling to Adam about it. The way that they go toe to toe without backing down, the way they almost seem to be pushing each other’s buttons on purpose. It kind of makes Adam more attracted to Ronan, because Ronan seems like he wouldn’t let Adam win easily, if he let Adam win at all. Most people just let Adam win. They back down when they see he’s digging his feet in, but for Adam, most of the thrill is in the fight, the taunting, the antagonizing, even if it’s good natured. 

God, he needs to tamp down whatever this feeling is rising in his chest because this is not why he came to Ireland. To have a schoolgirl crush on an incredibly handsome Irishman who he had roped into driving him across the country. Adam’s plan was to come to Dublin, do his panel, go home, get promoted, and go from there. Everything that had happened since he landed had thrown a wrench in the gears of that plan, but he’d managed, and was managing through the bumps in the road. And while whatever he was feeling for Ronan wasn’t throwing him completely off track, it was complicating things, and Adam didn’t want to complicate things. 

Realizing he’s not going to get any meaningful work done while he’s in this mood, Adam shuts his laptop and gets out of the chair. He plugs his phone into the socket next to the bed and leaves it on the bedside table to charge, and then he heads out of the room, out of the bed and breakfast, and starts through Ballybrittas to the bar he and Ronan had walked past while they were heading to the bed and breakfast. 

When Adam steps into the pub, it’s livelier than he thought a bar in a small Irish village, a village smaller than Dingle, would be. A trio is in the corner, two fiddles and a bodhrán, and a few tables have been pushed to the walls to make an impromptu dance floor. On the dance floor are a middle aged couple, Mrs. Delaney, and Ronan, who is spinning Mrs. Delaney, stomping, and clapping to the jig the trio is playing.

Sinking into a chair at a table near the door, Adam watches as Mrs. Delaney delights in Ronan’s attention, her cheeks red as she positively beams while they dance. When the song ends, they part, and when Ronan notices Adam has come into the pub, he takes a few steps closer to where Adam’s sitting. He looks completely unphased by Adam’s presence, like they hadn’t fought less than an hour ago in the room at the bed and breakfast, and Adam finds himself letting it go, too.

“Come on. Up you get.” Ronan raises both eyebrows, waving towards the dance floor and extending his hand to Adam. “Dance with me.” 

This complete turn of events stuns Adam for a picosecond before he shakes his head adamantly. “I can’t. I have two left feet. You don’t want to see me out there” 

“You can’t come to Ireland for the first time and not do a set dance in a pub. Even if it’s only four people. Come on.” Ronan continues to hold his hand out to Adam and Adam doesn’t think he’s going to relent. 

“Okay.” Adam finally stands and steps onto the makeshift dance floor, stopping in front of Ronan. “Show me.”  

A smile twitches Ronan’s lips and he reaches out, taking Adam’s left hand and moving it to rest on his shoulder. Then he slips his right hand around Adam to rest on Adam’s back, just below Adam’s shoulder blade. Finally, he takes Adam’s right hand in his left and raises their joined hands to shoulder height. “Don’t worry about your feet, just turn about with me. The clapping and the stomping’s the important bit.” 

“I think you greatly underestimate my ability to dance,” Adam says flatly, but then Ronan’s nodding to the trio to start playing and they’re counting themselves down just before the wail of fiddles starts ringing through the room again.

Ronan starts guiding Adam in circles around the dance floor, his feet doing some complicated stepping that Adam can’t keep up with, so Adam stops bothering to look down as they rotate around themselves and the middle aged couple dancing, too. Instead, Adam focuses on Ronan’s face, watching as the other man’s mouth counts the beat of the music out sotto voce for the first few bars of music. He takes in Ronan’s long, dark eyelashes, the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and he’s so drawn in that when Ronan stops to drop Adam’s hand, clap three times, and stomp four, Adam misses it completely.

“I told you that was the important bit. Glad to see you weren’t paying attention.” Ronan has a shark-like grin on his face as he catches Adam’s hand in his again.

“And I told you I was no good at dancing." Adam smiles back, but he lets Ronan sweep him around in circles again, and then next time there’s the break to clap and stomp, he mirrors Ronan perfectly. 

One song turns into three turns into six, and Adam alternately dances with Mrs. Delaney and the wife from the middle aged couple and Ronan. Each time he’s partnered with Ronan, they’re marginally closer together, until by the last reel of the night, they’re almost chest to chest. The echo of the fiddles and the bodhrán linger for a few moments after the trio plays their last note, and Adan and Ronan stop on the dance floor, staring back at one another in silence. There's a look Adam can't put a name to on Ronan’s face, and Adam has the feeling a similar look is mirrored on his own. 

After a few long, taut moments, Adam finally steps back and awkwardly pushes his hand through his hair, catching a look at his watch. “Shit, it’s later than I thought it’d be.” 

“We should go. The belt for the car will be in early tomorrow and I’m sure you’ll want to get back on the road straight away.” Ronan keeps his eyes everywhere but on Adam.  

Adam just nods and as Ronan goes to the bar to settle his tab, Adam steps outside and leans against the wall of the pub, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths to calm himself down. He opens his eyes and pushes himself away from the wall when the door opens and Ronan exits the bar, pausing for a moment to look at Adam. “Ready?” 

“Yeah.” Adam nods, and he hesitates for a moment before adding, “Thank you for making me dance.” 

Ronan pushes his hands into his pockets and starts ambling in the direction of the bed and breakfast. “Just making sure you get the authentic Irish experience.” 

They walk back to the bed and breakfast in silence, sliding back into the cool detachment they’d been keeping between them instead of letting whatever had passed between them in the pub linger. Once they’re back in the room, Adam lets Ronan wash up in the bathroom first before he, too, gets ready for bed. By the time he steps out of the bathroom, Ronan has commandeered one of the pillows from the bed and he’s lying on the floor under a thin quilt he’d taken from the cupboard. Adam climbs onto the bed and mutters a quiet good night before turning off the lamp beside the bed. 

But sleep doesn’t come easy to him, and by the sounds of it, it’s not paying Ronan any favors, either. Adam stares towards the ceiling for a long while, listening for Ronan’s breathing to even out in the telltale signs of sleep, but even after what Adam thinks has to be close to an hour, there’s still the sounds of shifting and wide-awake breathing coming from the man on the floor. 

“Ronan?” Adam finally asks into the darkness. When he only receives an unintelligible noise in response, Adam turns over and pulls the cord on the light on the bedside table, bathing the room in a yellow glow. He props himself up on his elbow, looking over the side of the bed at Ronan curled on his side, facing away from the bed. “Ronan, I know you’re not comfortable. Get in the bed.”  

“I’m not getting in the bed,” Ronan says, still turned away from the mattress.  

Adam does his best to try to sound authoritative, but it just comes out tired and tinged with the Virginia accent that he always does his best to clip and hide. “I swear, if you wake up with a kink in your neck or a back so sore you can’t drive, I’m going to kill you. Get in the bed.” 

Ronan turns then and looks up at Adam, a furrow in his brow. “Where are you from?” 

Sighing, Adam falls back to lie on the bed. “I told you. Boston.” 

“No, where are you really from?” Ronan pushes himself up to sitting and peers over the edge of the mattress at Adam. 

Adam turns his head and meets the other’s man’s eyes. He’s quiet for a few moments, mulling over whether to allow his accent show itself again, and he eventually lets it, his vowels elongating and his consonants softening as he says, “Virginia. A little town called Henrietta.” 

“What’s it like?” Ronan rests his forearm on the mattress and sets his chin atop it.

Ronan’s question takes Adam aback slightly, but he answers, “It’s not much of a place. If anything, it’s a place made for leaving. Get in the bed.” 

“Fine." Ronan rolls his eyes harder than Adam thinks he’s ever seen someone roll their eyes before. Standing up, Ronan throws his pillow down on the mattress and he keeps his own quilt, wrapping it around himself as he lies down. He leaves as much space between them as possible and he turns so his back is to Adam. “Good night.” 

Adam watches Ronan’s back for a few moments, his eyes glancing over the tattoo peeking from under Ronan’s shirt, and then he finally reaches over and turns the light off before lying down. “Good night.”

Chapter Text

When Adam wakes up the next morning, he finds that he’s actually well rested. Which is atypical for two reasons. The first is that he’s normally awake before his alarm goes off, which has become a habit after years and years of paying off sleep debt from earlier in his life. However, today it’s his alarm waking him up for once, and he reaches over to the bedside table to turn it off, sleep still lingering in the periphery of his brain.

The second reason having a good night’s sleep is surprising is that Adam usually sleeps horribly in strange beds, at least the first night. Again, this is a big change from when he was younger, when he could fall asleep anywhere. But he’s become so accustomed to his bed in Boston that sleeping anywhere else, a hotel room or the apartment of someone he was seeing, however infrequently, is usually a trainwreck of tossing and turning and lying awake all night long. Apparently not today though. 

As sleep starts really falling away from him, Adam notices a third atypical thing. There are arms wrapped around his waist, holding him securely in their circle. And there are legs bent behind his, knees tucked into the backs of his knees. There’s warm breath against the back of his neck, almost near where his neck meets his shoulder. 

When Adam finally realizes where he is and who is behind him, he all but scrambles off of the mattress. There’s Ronan, waking up from Adam’s sudden movements, looking sleepy and soft, still wrapped in his quilt from the night before, but definitely on what had been Adam’s side of the bed, his head definitely on what had been Adam’s pillow. 

Adam doesn’t say anything, he’s heart is racing too much for that, but he stares at Ronan as the other man reaches up and rubs a hand over the night’s worth of stubble on his face before opening his eyes. He looks up at Adam, still looming by the side of the bed, and then when it dawns on Ronan that he’s not where he fell asleep, he sits up quickly and does his own scramble off the other side of the mattress. His face is blushing a deep red only pale Irish skin has the honor of turning, and he’s clutching the quilt to him. “Shite.” 

“Yeah,” Adam replies softly, moving his gaze to everywhere else in the room but Ronan. 

“Shite,” Ronan repeats. “Sorry.” 

Adam furrows his brows slightly, because he thinks that this is the first time Ronan has apologized for anything at all since they climbed into the Mini together the day before. So he nods a bit and then finally flicks his gaze to Ronan, who is still blushing fiercely. “It’s… alright.” 

“But…” 

“Really, it’s alright,” Adam says before Ronan can get any further, and it comes out more gently than he’s talked to anyone in a long time. 

Ronan must notice the lighter tone, because he tips his head slightly like he’s asking a question, and the two of them just stare at each other across the spanse of the bed for a moment before Ronan shakes his head quickly and the subject drops. They arrange use of the bathroom, pack up their things, and then on the way out of the bed and breakfast, grab muffins and coffee from the continental breakfast. That’s when Ronan gets the call that the belt has been delivered, and the two of them are off to pick it up. 

Something has noticeably shifted between them from the day before. Adam doesn’t know if it was the dancing or the sharing a bed, but even though they seem to be giving each other a slightly wider berth, the silences between them are less tense, less charged, more comfortable. After they pick up the belt and the tools Adam will need from the auto shop, Ronan sits on the curb, watching as Adam replaces the fan belt on the Mini. He’s watching Adam’s hands intently as Adam unbolts and removes the grill after popping the hood so he can better access the fan assembly, and Adam makes him hold all the bolts as payment for his observation. When Adam’s loosening nuts on the alternator, Ronan breaks this particular silence. “Why do you hide that you’re from Virginia?” 

Glancing at him briefly, Adam shrugs before reaching into the engine compartment to move the alternator back and forth to test that he’d loosened everything enough. “I’d wanted to escape there for as long as I could remember. It wasn’t much of a home for me. I left for college and I haven’t looked back.” 

Ronan nods in a way that makes it seem like he understands this on an elemental level. “So you cover up your accent?” 

“Why? Did you like it?” Adam teases gently, but when he steals a look at Ronan, he sees an expression on Ronan’s face that says he’s expecting a serious answer. So Adam continues, “I just think it makes me seem… less, to other people. Less intelligent, less educated, less worthy. Like I don’t deserve a seat at the table.” 

“So defy people’s expectations,” Ronan says simply. 

Adam pauses for a moment and he turns to stare at Ronan. This was advice he’d have paid therapists for, and here it was coming sagely from a bartender. Ronan just flashes him a sharp grin and then Adam shakes his head and turns back to the car to continue the repair. Another silence falls between them, but since it seems like today is a day for trading truths, Adam asks, “Where did you learn to dance like that?” 

“My mum. She taught us all.” Ronan shifts his seat on the curb, passing the bolts from the grill back and forth between his hands. “We used to have live music, Fridays and Saturdays, and before she’d bring us home, she’d make us dance with her and then her friends and then her friends’ friends.” 

Nodding, Adam loops the new fan belt around pulleys and the alternator, reaching far into the engine to fit it into place. “You don’t have live music anymore?” 

Ronan shakes his head. “Haven’t since they died.” 

“Why not?” Adam asks, genuinely curious. 

“It’s not the same.” 

“How’s it not the same?” Adam presses, beginning to tighten the nuts on the alternator and then checking the tension of the belt, repeating the action a few times until everything is situated just right. 

Ronan hesitates for a moment before answering, “My da and mum were big personalities. In different ways, but they brought The Greywaren to life. It wouldn’t be the same to have all that there without them.”    

“It might not be the same, but I’m sure it’d be just as good.” Adam sets down the torque wrench he was using and picks up the car’s grill. After he situates it into place, he looks over at Ronan and holds a hand out for the bolts, but Ronan’s staring at him now, much the same way he had been staring at Ronan a few minutes before. “What?” 

Shaking his head, Ronan tips the bolts into Adam’s hand before pushing himself to his feet. “Nothing.” 

Ronan drops himself into the driver’s seat, his legs stretched out over the sidewalk as Adam bolts the grill back into place. Once he finishes, he knocks on the fender to get Ronan to try starting the car, and when the engine is running, Adam watches to make sure everything’s in working order before he shuts the hood and picks up the tools to bring back to the auto shop. The tools are returned and the man working in the auto shop is thanked profusely, and then they’re finally back on the road, windows down as Ronan gets back onto the M7. 

They’re almost shouting over wind as Ronan starts asking about Adam’s conference, and Adam answers everything he asks, trying not to make it sound as boring as it’s probably going to be. He tries to explain sustainable vertical architecture, designing high rises and skyscrapers to not be drains on resources, as best he can without being too dense, too industry-specific, too nerdy. Ronan asks if this interests him, if he cares about the environment, and Adam admits that while he cares about the environment as much as the next guy, he’d initially gotten into the department because of the more lucrative salaries and that speaking at the conference is his opportunity to get a promotion back home. 

“So, what, you go talk in front of a room of people and then go home and start making more money?” Ronan questions in a plain way that makes Adam feel known.

“That’s oversimplifying, but essentially, yes.” Adam nods. 

“So, that’s what’s important to you?” Ronan cocks an eyebrow as he throws a glance Adam’s way. “Making more money?” 

Adam doesn’t think making more money is a bad thing. It allows for a comfortable existence, a small amount of luxury in a life that definitely didn’t start in luxury. So he responds, “I didn’t have much growing up, so money has been a driving factor in my career, yeah.” 

Ronan rolls his tongue over his teeth before he asks, “But what about other things?” 

“Like what other things?” 

“I don’t know." The other man shrugs, squinting slightly as he thinks of other aspects of jobs people should want. “Like job satisfaction. Liking what you do and who you work with and for. Being happy with what you do. 

Adam’s slightly incredulous. “Do you get all that from running a pub?” 

“Yeah, as a matter of fact I do,” Ronan answers simply.

“You pour drinks for a living.” Adam points out without needing to.

“Now you’re the one who is oversimplifying.” Ronan rolls his eyes, which Adam realizes is one of his default functions.  

“Tell me about it, then." He shifts in his seat and props his elbow up on the edge of the open window, resting his cheek in his hand as he looks over at Ronan. 

“Well, the actual business part of it is kind of shite.” Ronan smirks. “The ordering and the books and the like. But the rest of it makes that worth it.” 

“Like what?” 

“Just… The pub’s the place to be in Dingle. Doesn’t matter if it’s The Greywaren or Dick Mack’s or Neligan’s. The pub’s the heart of the town, especially in a place like Dingle where everyone knows everyone. You go there to get news. You go there to watch a match. You go there to see your friends, see your family. When people are having a good day, they go to the pub. When people are having a bad day, they go to the pub." Ronan has a wistful look in his eyes as he keeps talking. “Like Callahan, the bastard who bullied me into being your chauffeur. I’ve known him forever, for as long as I can remember, from back when I was a tiny lad and hanging out in the pub doing my homework after school. Most of Callahan’s days are good, but when they’re bad, they’re bad . And on those days, I just get him a pint and listen to him ranting and raving about his dick of a boss or his old lady. Mind you, though, when Callahan’s old lady comes in, she doesn’t hear a peep from me. And that’s just how it goes. That’s pub life.” 

This is the longest Adam has heard Ronan speak since they climbed into the car together the day before, and Adam wants to keep it going because the other man’s eyes have started gleaming. To goad Ronan to continue, Adam says, “You keep everyone’s secrets.” 

“I know all about everyone in Dingle and I don’t say a word." Ronan nods. “It’s what my mum and da did when they ran The Greywaren and it’s what I’ll do until I can’t anymore.” 

“What happened to them?” Adam asks gently. “You don’t have to answer.” 

“A storm and a cliff,” Ronan answers after a brief pause. “We had a farm, further out on the peninsula. They were coming back to The Greywaren and got swept off the road. Near on twelve years, now.” 

Adam maintains no connection with his parents or other relatives, but from what he’s gathered over the past day with Ronan, the Lynch family was once a close knit family. So he can’t imagine what it would have been like for Ronan, who he assumes is around his age, to lose both of his parents as a teenager. Adam’s voice is low when he speaks, “I’m sorry you didn’t have them around for longer.” 

Ronan is silent for a few moments, then he responds in a volume matching Adam’s, “Is what it is. Wasn’t easy, got a bit dark, but everyone in Dingle helped. Another reason why I love my pub. They keep my secrets as well as I keep theirs.” 

In what seems like a subconscious gesture, Ronan fingers at the leather bands around his left wrist and it draws Adam’s eyes. For the first time, he notices the faded pink lines of scars on the inside of Ronan’s left forearm. Letting his eyes move further, he sees a nearly matching set on Ronan’s right arm. Ronan notices him noticing and he shifts his hands on the wheel to turn his arms so they’re facing down. 

“Sorry,” Adam mutters, diverting his gaze out the windshield.

“Is what it is,” Ronan repeats and they fall into silence once more. 

The two of them stay quiet for quite a few kilometers, the signs they pass noting the decreasing distance between themselves and Dublin. The volume of cars on the road steadily increases as they get closer to the city, and when they slow down in a bit of traffic, Ronan speaks up, “You deflected earlier.” 

Adam furrows his eyebrows. “When?” 

“When I asked if you were satisfied with what you do. If you like your colleagues. If you like what you do,” Ronan reminds him.

Adam dips his head in a nod, answering, “I enjoy getting projects done. And I like most of the people I work with. There’s a few assholes, but I think that’s how it is in most offices.” 

“And?” Ronan makes a gesture with his hand to get Adam to elaborate.

“And what?” Adam asks in clear avoidance of the last part of Ronan’s inquiry. 

“You’re deflecting again.” Ronan rolls his eyes skyward briefly before casting a look in Adam’s direction and then looking back to the highway. “Do you like what you do? Overall, not just bits and pieces. So don’t give me shite about how you like to finish projects or talk on panels or whatever the fuck else you do. Do you like your job?” 

Adam has to pause before he can answer this. It’s something that has been in the back of his mind for the past year or two, whether he actually enjoys his job, but he’s pushed thinking about it further and further away. He’s never had to face it head on, never had anyone ask him if he likes his job expecting a serious response, never had anyone call him out on his deflection. But now Ronan has, and for some reason, Adam feels like he actually owes an answer to this man driving him across a foreign country to a conference so he can progress his career. 

He does like the things his job has allowed him to obtain. First, it was a shabby one-bedroom apartment that got him out of having roommates but was located in a tolerable albeit not great neighborhood in Boston. Then, it was a nicer, dustless apartment in a much safer neighborhood. Then it was buying an even nicer, even more dustless condo in a high rise downtown so close to the office that he could walk there in seven minutes. He has a nice bed. He has nice clothes and shoes that actually fit him well. He has a pantry and a refrigerator stocked with healthy foods. He has a gym membership that he actually uses four times a week. All things that put him miles and miles away from Henrietta, and not just by physical distance. 

Except Adam chose to study architecture because he has always liked working with his hands and solving problems, and when he entered college, everyone had been flooding the engineering department, so he thought architecture would be a way to set himself apart. He didn’t think that he would actually be building things, he knew he would always have to leave that up to others, but drafting blueprints and designs was thrilling at first. Now, it isn’t as exciting as he thought it would be when he graduated from college and accepted the position at Stantec because the company gave him the best chance at upward mobility and job security. At least in college he’d been the one actually building models for his designs, scrounging around hardware stores and craft stores and to find the perfect components for whatever the project was. Now, the company has a full art department that handles modeling after Adam turns designs in. 

These days, he’s in more meetings than anything. Meetings about the smallest of design changes. Meetings about what went wrong with those design changes. Meetings about meetings. And it’s only going to be more of that if he’s offered a senior associate position when he gets back to Boston. It’ll only be more of that for the next thirty to thirty-five years until he climbs off the corporate ladder and into retirement. Maybe there will be a partner, maybe some kids, but it’s all just going to be the same thing day in and day out until he gets off the hamster wheel keeping Stantec running. 

And Adam is absolutely sure this means he doesn’t like his job, but if he admits that to himself, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do about it. So he doesn’t admit it.

“I don’t think I can answer that,” Adam finally responds honestly to Ronan, and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ronan look at him for longer than is probably safe while driving before he turns back to the road.

Chapter Text

As they drive into Dublin, the noises of the city start filtering through the open windows. Car horns and music and emergency sirens mix together into the standard urban cacophony that Adam’s used to back home. Pedestrians clog sidewalks as they maneuver around outdoor seating at pubs and restaurants, and every other storefront is surrounded by flowers cascading from hanging planters and window boxes. It feels alive and so different than Boston. Old, in a way that Boston sometimes captures, but with more history and more myth behind it.

In the city traffic, Ronan becomes a bit more restless. At stop lights, his arm hangs out the window and he taps his fingers on the outside of the car. While driving, his fingers on the gearshift do the same. Ronan, with his sharp features, tattoo, and black clothes looks like he should fit right in in a place like Dublin, but Adam knows now his antsiness belies his desire to get out of the city as soon as possible. 

Eventually, Ronan speaks up, easing them out of the silence they’d fallen into as Adam had rubbernecked to see the city around him. “You’re not in any rush to get to your hotel, are you?” 

“Not really, no.” Adam shakes his head. “Considering I already missed check in by a day, what’s another few minutes?”  

“Do you mind if I stop by and see my brother for a moment?” Ronan asks after hesitating. “I’d go after I drop you, but not a big fan of Dublin and all, you know. So I’d just like to go after I leave you off.” 

“Yeah, that’s fine. Do what you need to do,” Adam acquiesces. "Should you call him first or something?"

Ronan shakes his head briefly. "If I call him first, he won't be there. And I don't like phones."

Adam throws him a flat look."You were just texting photos of us surrounded by sheep yesterday."

"That was Matthew. That's different. I want no business with anyone else," Ronan says dismissively. "Especially not Declan, if I can help it."

So this is Ronan's older brother he's stopping to see, Adam recalls, and the tone Ronan’s voice had acquired when he had talked about Declan the day before made it quite apparent they were on rocky footing, at best. Not wanting to dive into Ronan's relationship with his brother, Adam leaves the conversation there, turning his head to watch the city pass by out the window. 

Old brick and stone buildings stand right beside glass and steel ones in a way that reminds Adam of home. It's one of the things he's never like about Boston, the way that modern giants were built up to dwarf a lot of the city's history in their shadows. That was one thing he'd noticed in Dingle and in Ballybrittas. Everything was old, stone, short, and sturdy. Like it had been built to last and withstand the test of time. Adam has always been a fan of the old, the things built with purpose first and looks second, function over form. It's why he's always liked wandering the cobbled streets of Beacon Hill in what little free time he has. Everything is stately but still useful, and it feels like it has gumption.

Eventually, Ronan turns down a narrow, one-way street lined with a stone wall on one side and two-story townhomes on the other, and he pulls to a stop in front of one of the townhomes with a tan brick facade and well appointed window boxes. Jerking up the parking brake, he pushes the door open and then turns back to Adam for a moment, “This isn’t going to be pretty and I’m sorry.” 

Ronan doesn’t give him time to respond as he shuts the driver’s door and Adam watches through the open passenger window as he stalks across the sidewalk to the black lacquered door of the townhome. Raising his hand, he ignores the brass knocker completely, pounding his fist against the door so hard the noise echoes down the street. When there’s no answer within a few seconds, Ronan pounds on the door again. 

Finally, the door swings open and Ronan is standing toe to toe with his older brother, and Adam is struck by how similar but absolutely different they look. Ronan and Declan have the same straight nose and brow, the same fine complexion with dark hair, and they’re relatively the same height and build, but where Ronan is sharp, Declan is refined. Where Ronan is rough, Declan is polished. Adam almost sees what Ronan could have been if things had shaped up a bit differently when he was younger, though he can't imagine Ronan ever wearing a button up shirt and slacks like Declan is wearing. He can’t imagine Ronan with the curly, coiffed hairstyle Declan has that probably cost a hundred dollars. 

“Ronan? What are you doing in Dublin?” Declan quickly smooths out the look of shock that passes over his face for half a second and then a deep crease forms between his eyebrows. 

Ronan doesn't deign to respond to this. Instead, Adam watches him dive right in. “Fiona McLaughlin came round to take photos of the pub the other day. Said she was taking them for her real estate Website. Because the pub was going up for sale. Mind telling me about that?” 

Declan blanches but quickly recovers into what looks like his standard bland expression."It is going up for sale. It’s going to be listed next week. 

“You’re just deciding to sell it without talking to me?” Ronan’s voice rises in volume. Folding his arms over his chest, he stares at his brother. “Without talking to Matty? It’s not just yours, Declan! It’s my livelihood! It is literally my home. And you’re going to fucking sell to the highest bidder?” 

“It’s a financial drain, Ronan. It hasn’t been profitable in years,” Declan sighs.  

“It’s starting to make money again.” Ronan’s tone is as defensive as his stance.

“Not enough,” his brother responds shortly. “Look, you’re going to have time. It’s not going to sell quickly.” 

Ronan seethes, “I don’t want fucking time. I want my fucking pub. Da and mum built the place. It should stay in the family. It should stay with a Lynch.” 

Declan holds his hands up in a gesture that’s meant to appease, but it falls quite short. “Ronan, you don’t know who da really was. He was a swindler. A scam artist. He left us in debt up to our eyeballs when he and mum passed. Selling the pub let’s us finish the last of the payments to the bank and move on. So I’m selling the pub. I’m sorry, but it’s what we need to do. We can’t be letting him hang over us anymore. We can’t be living in his shadow.” 

“You might as well be killing me, then,” Ronan grits out. “First the Barns, now this? Give me a shovel, I’ll dig my grave.” 

“Ronan, don’t say that. We’ll find you something else to do. You can come up here to Dublin…” 

Ronan cuts his brother off by stabbing his index finger into the center of Declan’s chest. As he leans in to Declan, his voice is low and wrathful, “Fuck Dublin and fuck you.” 

He turns without awaiting a response and walks away from the door of the townhome. Tearing the door of the Mini open, Ronan throws himself into the driver’s seat and slams the door behind himself, pulling away from the curb without checking his mirrors for traffic. This earns him the blare of a horn from another driver who has to slam on their brakes, and Ronan just throws them a crude gesture before he starts driving much faster than he should through the narrow streets of Dublin. 

Adam stays quiet in the passenger seat for a few moments, letting Ronan blow off steam as he shifts through gears. When he finally speaks, his voice is soft, “I’m sorry he’s selling the pub out from under you. I know it’s important to you.” 

Ronan’s knuckles whiten as he tightens his grip on both the steering wheel and the gearshift. “Da didn’t have a will, so everything went to Declan. And Declan will do what he wants, so… I wouldn’t have much say in the matter anyway.” 

“Doesn’t make it less of a shitty thing to do.” 

“It’s money and appearances and social climbing with Declan, nothing more, nothing less. He’ll do whatever it takes to get to the top,” Ronan says through gritted teeth and Adam can’t help but feel like this is an underhanded comment towards him, too. “Getting rid of the pub cleans his hands of da once and for all so he can go back to being perfect Declan again without any family shite weighing him down. Doesn’t matter who gets taken out as collateral. And I get left with fucking nothing, just like always."

"You won't have nothing," Adam responds after a moment.

Ronan’s eyes flash with heat and he pushes his fist into the steering wheel. "The fuck do you know about it? You've been in the car with me for a day and you think you know me?"

"No, I don't. I never said that.” Adam keeps defensiveness out of his tone, but his voice is still firm. “And I think you're way too complex of a person to ever know in a day. Or a month. Or a year. But you won't be left with nothing." 

"And why is that, smart guy?" Ronan leers. 

"Because of what you said earlier." Adam looks at Ronan. "You won't have nothing because you've got all of Dingle."

At the next stoplight, Ronan turns to Adam and there’s something Adam can’t decipher on Ronan’s face. It’s close to the look he had the previous night, after they’d finished dancing, and Adam feels the atmosphere in the Mini change while he’s under the weight of those blue eyes. Blue eyes that are definitely not as hard as they’d been ten seconds before. 

They stare back at each other for a few long, heady seconds until the light turns green and the car behind them beeps to get them moving. Ronan shakes his head vigorously, as if to get whatever had just passed between them out of it, and he pulls away from the traffic light. There’s a few more tense moments between them, and Adam thinks there’s no way this has happened in the single day he’s known Ronan. Ronan has been intense from the start, but whatever that was last night, whatever had just happened, was not the same intense Ronan had been the other times. When they’d been dealing with getting the car unstuck from the mud, when they’d broken down, when they’d been in the hotel room, when Ronan had been arguing with his brother. 

So, finally, Adam swallows, clears his throat, and says, “I’m staying at the Spencer. It’s right next to the convention center. Do you want me to pull up directions?” 

“No, I know how to get there. It’s right on the Liffey. Easy to find.” Ronan waves his hand in a dismissive gesture. 

“I thought you didn’t like the city.” Adam has been impressed by Ronan’s navigational skills so far during the journey, and he’d figured that Ronan had known how to get to his brother’s townhouse from repeated visits, but knowing how to get around Dublin isn’t what he expected from Ronan, who made his distaste for Dublin very clear. 

“I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to get around it." Ronan flashes the briefest of smirks. 

The drive to his hotel is disappointing in its length, because it's far shorter than Adam anticipates. He wanted at least a bit more time with Ronan, but the Mini pulls to a stop in front of the Spencer not much more than five minutes later, the end of their tumultuous, insane cross country journey. 

And, suddenly, Adam doesn’t want to get out of the Mini. As awful as the start of his trip was, he’s had more fun as Ronan’s passenger on this road trip than he’s had in a long time. There were the sheep, the cow, the mud, the breakdown, sure. But there was also the dancing; the laughing, even though it was mostly at Adam's expense; and the company, and Adam is going to miss that. He’s going to miss Ronan, which is crazy considering they had just met the day before.

Adam has half a mind to ask Ronan out for a drink, for dinner, to come up to his hotel room. But he won’t. Because it’s crazy. And because Ronan has repeated over and over again that he hates Dublin. Because Ronan has a life and a pub he needs to return to in Dingle, four hours away, and he’d said he wanted to leave as soon as he dropped Adam off. Because he doubts Ronan would want to spend more time with boring old Adam Parrish anyway. 

So they sit there in a charged silence for a few moments, Ronan toying with the leather bands at his left wrist, Adam idly picking at the seam at the knee of his pants. When they finally choose to speak, it’s at the same time. 

“Do you…” 

“I should…” 

They meet one another’s eyes for a second, and Adam see’s Ronan’s throat bob before he nods for Adam to continue. 

“I should get my things. And get you your money,” Adam says delicately. “You probably want to go home.” 

Ronan takes a deep breath in through his nose and then exhales through his teeth before speaking “Yeah, that’s exactly what I want.” 

After he climbs out of the car and retrieves his bags from the hatch, Adam leans down and talks to Ronan through the open driver’s side window. “It looks like there’s an ATM just inside the door. I’ll be right back, okay?”

Ronan looks at him with something Adam wants to classify as sadness in his eyes, or maybe sorrow or regret. It’s not a look he likes, because he doesn’t want to be the reason Ronan’s feeling whatever he’s feeling, but finally Ronan nods and pats his hand on the outside of the car door twice. “Do what you need to do.” 

Adam just nods curtly after a moment, turning to head into the hotel lobby, and as he’s retrieving the money from the ATM, Adam makes a decision. He’s going to get the money, go out and give it to Ronan, and then he’s going to lean into what he’s feeling and he’s going to kiss Ronan. He’s going to reach through the window, grab Ronan by the shirt, and crash their lips together, and it’s going to absolutely be a moment straight out of a romantic comedy, but Adam doesn’t care. Once the ATM finally spits out the bills and his debit card, he pushes them into his pocket and strides out of the hotel after picking up his bags. But he stops dead in his tracks just outside the doors of the Spencer. 

Because Ronan’s not there. There’s an empty space at the curb where he’d been parked. Adam looks up and down the block, and the hunter green Mini is nowhere in sight. Stepping over to the valet parking stand, Adam asks the boy behind it if he'd seen the Mini drive away, but the boy looks back at him, wide-eyed and oblivious as he shakes his head. Moving away from the valet stand, Adam sets his suitcase on the sidewalk and sinks down to sit on it, dropping his garment bag at his feet and staring out over the Liffey, the river that splits Dublin in two. There's a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach and he feels like he's just missed out on something integral to his life.

Chapter Text

For the remainder of his time in Dublin and for the entirety of his flight back to Boston, Adam has one thing on his mind: Ronan. 

He doesn’t like how they parted, if what they did could even be considered a parting since Ronan had just vanished while Adam had gone to get the money he owed the other man for his assistance getting to Dublin. It eats at Adam that they didn’t have a proper goodbye, an exchanging of thanks, or even contact information. Not that Adam had expected the latter, but Adam was sure there was something between them, even though they had barely known each other for a day. The night dancing in the pub in Ballybrittas, sleeping in the same bed, and then their conversations the day after weren’t things that passed between people who were just acquaintances. Adam had thought Ronan was picking up the same thing, but as with most relationship cues, maybe Adam was wrong.

It doesn’t stop Adam from having Ronan on the brain, though. He feels like an obsessed, hormone-riddled fourteen-year-old. Walking through Logan Airport, he sees a girl in a light blue shirt and thinks that’s almost the color of Ronan’s eyes. When he’s at a happy hour with his colleagues, Adam watches the bartender and thinks Ronan looks so much better behind the bar. He sees a charcoal grey BMW M3 on his walk to work one day and thinks that is the car that Ronan looks like he would drive. 

He looks up The Greywaren on Google, and the pub doesn’t have much of a Web presence other than tags on a few photos by tourists making their way through Dingle. There’s not so much as a Yelp page or a Google page for the bar other than the typical address and phone number information. He searches for Ronan Lynch by himself and with a combination of keywords and finds no social media accounts at all, just a few news articles over a decade old about Dingle’s secondary school’s rugby team, which apparently Ronan had played on. Declan Lynch yields a few more results, mostly dormant LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, but then Adam remembers the youngest Lynch brother that Ronan had mentioned, Matthew, and Matthew Lynch yields a goldmine. 

The boy has profiles on every social media site imaginable, and Adam scrolls through each and every one of them deep into the night for multiple nights. It’s when he’s going through Matthew’s Instagram, about two years back, that he finally comes across a post of multiple photos fronted with a selfie Matthew had taken with Ronan on the cliffs in Dingle with the caption Back home for the weekend with my favorite bro. Adam scrolls through the other photos, mostly artistic shots of the town’s harbor and the rolling hills around it, but then the last photo is of Ronan behind the bar at The Greywaren, caught mid-laugh as he pours a pint. 

Adam can’t look away. He’s captivated by the contrast of Ronan’s dark, buzzed hair and the paleness of his skin, the sharp lines of Ronan’s cheeks, the bright blue of his eyes and the way the corners of them crinkle as he’s laughing. The very tips of his tattoo show from beneath his plain black t-shirt, and the short sleeve hugs his flexing bicep as he hand pulls a pint of a cask ale. He looks absolutely happy and Adam wishes he could go back and live in that moment forever, watching from the periphery as Ronan jokes with patrons and takes insults as well as he throws them. Adam clicks back and forth between this photo and the selfie with Matthew more times than Adam can count, and he finally takes screenshots, saving them to his hard drive for future reference. 

After he returns to work in Boston, he does his best to focus on his work, staying late in the office, logging in on the weekends, and taking additional projects into his already over-stuffed workload. He gets numerous congratulations for his presentation at the conference in Dublin, including accolades in the virtual town hall meeting for all US-based employees, and handshakes from two of the senior principles when he runs into them in the elevator on the way to a departmental meeting. Two weeks after he returns to Boston, on a Friday, Adam’s boss calls him into her office and offers him a senior associate position. He asks for the weekend to think about it. 

It’s on Adam’s mind all of Friday evening and all day Saturday. The thing that Adam keeps coming back to is his conversation with Ronan in the Mini between Ballybrittas and Dublin. Ronan had asked him what was important to him in a job, and Adam had been unable to answer. He makes decent money, just over six figures after having been at Stantec for close to eight years and steadily moving up the ranks, but he’s still left wanting at the end of the day. Having money, being comfortable, this is what he has been stretching for since he left dusty rural Virginia for college over ten years ago, but there’s no real satisfaction in it. All he has is a nice, sparsely decorated condo because no matter how much personality he tries to add to it, it still feels sterile. Yes, he gets a sense of accomplishment when he completes a project, but he doesn’t feel like he’s really contributing to the greater good or something that really benefits anything other than corporations. Each project is just another rung on the ladder he’s climbing. But climbing towards what? If someone asked what he likes about his life, Adam wouldn’t know what to tell them.

But with Ronan, his eyes lit up as he talked about working at The Greywaren. He became more animated, more alive. The way he talked about the regulars from the village who came by the pub every night made them seem like an extension of Ronan’s family. And the way he described it, he was essentially Dingle’s unpaid therapist, dishing out advice and platitudes, and whose only prescriptions were another pint or a shot of whiskey. He’s prickly on the outside, but he’s got so much heart. He thrives being the listening ear, the advice giver, the matchmaker, and could do it until the day he dies with satisfaction. 

And that’s what Adam wants. He doesn’t want a stuffy office job forcing him into a suit and tie every day until he retires. He doesn’t want to work and fit life in around the edges. He wants his life and his work to compliment each other, so one doesn’t take more than the other, so that things can be more relaxed, so he can be happy. And he wants to try to be happy with Ronan, no matter how crazy that may make Adam seem after having spent less than two days with him. But if he never tries, then he’ll never know, and Adam can’t stand the thought of not knowing. Maybe it will be a trainwreck. Maybe Ronan will laugh in his face. But maybe, maybe it could work.

Sunday morning has Adam looking The Greywaren up on Google again because he’d been up half the night with an idea running wild as a weed in his mind. He finds the link for the real estate listing of the sale of the pub and he opens it, letting the image on his laptop screen of the front of The Greywaren burn into his eyes as he lets his mind turn over everything, all the pros and cons, all the potential risks. Then he logs into each and every one of his financial accounts.

Adam has been risk averse his entire life; he has always gone with the safest bet, the option that would give him the most return on whatever he input, whether it was money, time, effort, social capital, or otherwise. But as he sits at his desk in his modern, dustless condo, looking at the balances of his savings account, his 401k, and his stock options, he gets a feeling that it’s now or never. If he accepts the senior associate position, it’s putting him on a path that is going to be harder and harder to escape from. One that is going to suck him dry, and then he’s going to look back on his life when he’s fifty, sixty, seventy, and see that he slaved away at a desk in a corporate office for over half his life with little to nothing to show for it except a hoard of money and maybe an even larger, even more modern, even more dustless condo. 

So Adam opens a new Word document, and he writes his resignation letter, a carefully crafted ‘thanks, but no thanks’ that would leave a door open for his return if this crazy, un-Adam-like idea absolutely fails. Powering on his work laptop, he pulls up his calendar and schedules a meeting with his boss for first thing Monday morning. After doing one last conversion of the dollars in all his accounts to euros, he sends an informational email to his financial advisor about what he’s doing, leaving no opportunity open for his financial advisor to try to change his mind. Finally, Adam pulls up the listing for The Greywaren again and emails the real estate agent, expressing his interest in purchasing the pub and laying out what he has to offer and that he wishes the sale to be anonymous. 

His boss says while she’s shocked, she’s not surprised, because she’s noticed a difference in Adam since he returned from Ireland. They agree on an end date, work through a plan to transition Adam’s projects to other associates, and then Adam bides his time through his last two weeks at Stantec. 

His financial advisor does try to dissuade him from what he’s about to do, but Adam is resolute in his decision. So his financial advisor just guides him through the steps of cashing out his 401k and setting aside the money to cover the penalty for early withdrawal, helps him sell his stock options, and gets everything set up in an escrow account for the purchase of the pub. 

To Adam’s surprise, dealing with the real estate agent is the easiest thing of all. When he wakes up the morning he submits his resignation, he already has an emphatic email from her and she’s elated that he’s interested in buying The Greywaren. She says she’ll talk to the seller, to Declan, about Adam remaining anonymous, but doesn’t think it should be a problem. Then there’s a series of conference calls, a number of legal documents exchanged, and finally, Adam signs the paperwork to purchase The Greywaren three weeks after his offer, and then there’s just waiting for the final governmental approvals for the purchase of the pub and transferring of the publican’s license for beer and liquor sales. 

Waiting for those would almost be grueling, if Adam didn’t have all the time in the world on his hands for the first time ever in his life. So while he waits to hear back about the licensing, he does all the things in Boston he never got the chance to do before. He goes to the Gardner Museum and sees the empty frames of the paintings stolen in the heist over thirty years ago. He does a Boston Tea Party reenactment and throws fake tea into the harbor with child-like joy. He takes in a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, complete with multiple hot dogs and overpriced beer. All the while, he packs up his condo and condenses his already few possessions down into fewer boxes. He offloads furniture and decorations on friends and through Craigslist, until it’s finally just him, his bed, and a few things in the kitchen. 

Adam gets the call from the real estate agent early in the morning one Tuesday that everything is a go. After he thanks her profusely, he hauls himself out of bed and grabs his laptop. He books himself a flight for the next day from Logan to Kerry Airport with a layover in Dublin. He’s going back to Ireland. He’s going back to Ronan. 

Chapter Text

Adam Parrish is an anxious flyer on a normal flight, but this time, his anxiety ratchets up to fifteen. Maybe in the back of his mind, there's muscle memory of the last time he'd flown to Ireland. The flight that, though nearly disastrous, was actually the springboard for his current journey. But ever the planner, Adam feels like his mind is racing and his gut is twisting because, for what is probably the first time in his life, he has no plan. He just has himself, his messenger bag, and a carry-on suitcase. 

He has no plan for what he’ll do if he shows up at The Greywaren and Ronan laughs him out of the building. He has no plan if Ronan turns him down. He’ll still own the pub, but he has no idea how to run a bar. He’s not even that big of a drinker. He has some modicum of business acumen, but he doesn’t know how to turn that into running a successful business in a country completely foreign to him. So all he can do is hope and cross his fingers and plead with the universe that everything will work out. 

When he passes through customs at the airport in Dublin, Adam’s slight panic must be evident on his face, because the Immigration Officer asks him so many questions as she reviews his passport, his employment permit, and the other documents he has for the pub. Finally, she stamps his passport and wishes him the best of luck, and he’s through to go to the terminal for his connection to Kerry, but not before stopping at an airport bar to actually have a drink to calm his nerves. 

The flight to Kerry starts descending almost as soon as it reaches peak altitude, and Adam doesn’t remember anything from the hour-long flight. Once he’s off the plane, he turns his phone back on as he makes his way through the airport to the exit, nearly balking at the fare from an Uber Black from the airport to Dingle. But he willingly accepts the hundred and twenty euro fare, because he really has no other choice, and shortly thereafter, he’s tucking himself into the back of a Toyota Camry and cutting through the countryside towards the westernmost part of Ireland in the waning afternoon. 

After the Camry pulls up in front of The Greywaren, Adam looks up at the bar for a long moment. The sign is just as he remembers, gold painted with some wear at the edges of the letters, the green background still saturated and rich, mirroring the rolling hills around the town. Adam finally thanks the driver and climbs out of the back seat, lifting his small rolling suitcase out with him and strapping his messenger bag across his chest. Standing on the sidewalk, Adam fortifies himself with a deep breath, and then he pushes the door of the pub open and steps inside. 

Just like the sign, the interior of The Greywaren is the same as he recalls from the few minutes he was inside the bar over three months ago. Shabby, worn, and well-used, but still good. There’s fewer patrons than the last time, taking up just a few seats at one end of the bar. And there, behind the bar, is Ronan, engrossed in conversation with one of the men posted up at the bar, nursing a glass of whiskey. He looks good, he looks at home, but Adam can see there’s a tenseness in his brow and around his eyes that wasn’t there the last time Adam saw him in person. 

Only one of the men at the bar turns when Adam steps into the pub, and Adam sees him do a brief double take before he turns back to the bar, waving a hand to get Ronan’s attention. “Isn’t that the lad you drove to Dublin a few months back, Ronan?” 

Ronan pulls himself away from his conversation and turns to look towards the door, where his eyes settle on Adam as he stands just inside the threshold. Adam watches Ronan’s jaw work back and forth a few times before Ronan leans back against the counter behind the bar, crossing his arms over his chest. He assesses Adam for an almost uncomfortable length of time. When he finally speaks, he sounds like he’s not in the mood to be dealing with this right here, right now. “Adam, I don’t have time for your shite. If you're back here to pay me because you have some weird obsession with it, I don't want it. The new owner’s about to get here and I just wanna say goodbye to my regulars.” 

Keeping his eyes on Ronan, Adam sets his suitcase down beside the door. “I'm not here about you not letting me pay you, and I’m sure the new owner would let you stick around for a while. I don’t think they’d just kick you out like that.” 

“Well, from what I hear, he’s some arsehole from the States, so not likely. Probably trying to turn this into some quaint little trendy pub and then turn around and sell to Wetherspoons. So kindly feck off so I can get out of here before he comes.” Ronan pushes himself away from the counter and steps back to his small group of regulars to resume their conversation. 

“And what if he’s already here?” Adam asks. 

Ronan looks over at him then, and a complicated mix of expressions crosses over his face. First, it’s a shade of resentment that Adam’s continuing to waste his time, but then it turns into something that hints at uncertainty. When it finally passes into the realm of realization, Adam thinks there’s a brief glint in Ronan’s blue eyes before Ronan says, “You’re the arsehole from the States.” 

“I’m the arsehole from the States, yes.” Adam nods. 

The regulars watch Ronan as he steps from behind the bar and moves closer to Adam, crossing his arms over his chest again. “Why?” 

Adam thinks over his response for a second. Taking a step towards Ronan, he drops his voice slightly, “You should have seen the way you came alive talking about working here. I hardly knew you. Hell, I still hardly know you. But I saw it. And when you were talking to Declan about him selling this place, you pretty much said he’d be sending you to your death. That’s how much you love this bar, this pub. And it made me realize that even though I was really, really good at my job, I hated it. That it wasn’t worth the money if I couldn’t feel good about it at the end of the day. So I quit and I bought a pub.” 

“You bought this pub.” Ronan meets Adam’s eyes for the first time as he waves one of his hands at the room around them. 

Adam nods, matching Ronan’s gaze, “Conveniently, I knew it was for sale.” 

The corner of Ronan’s lips twitches slightly. “And what do you know about running a pub?” 

“Not a single thing,” Adam admits.  

Ronan smirks then, and it takes on a shade of haughtiness, but he keeps looking back at Adam. “Seems like a right waste of money, then.” 

“It could be.” Adam lifts a shoulder in a shrug and he takes another step closer to Ronan. “But I happen to know someone who is very good at running a pub.” 

Leaning in to Adam, Ronan’s eyes narrow slightly before he asks, “And what makes you think he would want to stick around and work for some arsehole from the States?” 

Adam holds Ronan’s narrow stare as he begins to open his messenger bag. “I don’t know if he’d want to do that, but I wouldn’t want him to work for me. I’d want him to work with me.” 

Reaching into the front pocket of his bag, Adam pulls out a folder of papers, looking away from Ronan only long enough to find the document he was looking for. He holds it out to Ronan, who reluctantly takes it and starts to read. Long after he would have reasonably finished reading, Ronan’s continuing to look at the paper. When he finally lifts his eyes to Adam’s, his voice is low and incredulous, “You want to sell me half your stake for a euro.” 

There’s a soft ‘whoop’ from one of the men at the bar, which Adam ignores before he tells Ronan, “There’s two other conditions, but I didn’t want to bring them up with the lawyer.” 

Ronan works his bottom lip between his teeth for just a moment before he quirks an eyebrow. “And what are they?” 

Taking a breath, Adam starts going further down his already crazy path. “The first is that it’s my understanding Dingle is short on accommodations, so I would like to stay with you.” 

Ronan holds back a small smile as best he can as he responds, “I live upstairs and my flat’s tiny.” 

“It’s just the two of us,” Adam points out. 

“I’ve only got one bed,” Ronan counters. 

“We’ve slept together before.” Adam shrugs.

“We’re probably going to fight,” Ronan states. “All the time.” 

“I know,” Adam acknowledges. 

“You’re probably going to hate me sometimes because I can be a real bastard.” Ronan nods his head back over his shoulder to the men at the bar. “Ask them.” 

Adam just barely holds back a smile and a laugh. “And you’re probably going to hate me sometimes because I can be a real bastard.” 

Ronan’s quiet, but his blue eyes are twinkling. Edging closer to Adam, he asks, “What’s the second condition?” 

“Kiss me,” Adam says so quietly he doesn’t think it’ll make it to the men at the bar. 

Ronan closes the final gap between them, his voice just as low as Adam’s, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.” 

“You’re right, I don’t.” Adam nods minutely as he looks at Ronan. “But I have to try. I came all this way and I don’t have another plan.” 

“You don’t need one.” Ronan reaches up to cup Adam’s cheek, and then he’s pressing his lips to Adam’s. 

Six Months Later

Pulling a rack of clean glasses from the dishwasher in The Grewaren's not-quite kitchen but not-quite storeroom, Adam carries it out to the front of the pub and slips behind the bar. He starts putting glasses away, putting highball glasses with the stock of highball glasses, lowball glasses with the lowball glasses, and at one point pressing a pilsner glass into Ronan’s hands as Ronan instinctively reaches for one in the space they’re usually kept under the bar. He and Ronan move with ease around each other in the narrow space, because there’s always ease between them and they always seem aware of where the other is, and when Adam’s sliding wine glasses into their hanging rack, he feels Ronan’s large, warm hand on his arm and the other man’s leaning in to speak into his ear, "The Wicklow stout just kicked. Can you go down and swap it out?"

“Of course.” Adam glances at the customers waiting two-deep at the bar before raising his eyebrows at Ronan. "We need to hire someone.” 

"You remind me three times a week." Ronan squeezes Adam's bicep before dropping his hand. "I'll get to it. The Wicklow?"

Adam snags the dish towel draped over his shoulder in his hand and snaps it at Ronan's ass before he retreats into the back room. He climbs down into the cellar and changes out the empty keg of stout for a fresh one before joining Ronan back behind the bar, pulling down the tap for the Wicklow until the beer is flowing freely again. As Adam starts helping Ronan serve customers, the trio they've hired for the night starts playing on the riser Adam had built into a corner of the pub. Tables are pushed aside to clear the floor and people start dancing, and when there's a lull at the bar, Adam steps beside Ronan, resting his hand in the small of Ronan's back. 

"See what your little pub's become?" Adam looks out over the lively room, which has been more and more full over the past month or two since they'd finished fixing up The Greywaren's interior and started bringing in live music again. 

"Our little pub." Ronan winds his arm around Adam's shoulders and then turns to kiss the side of Adam's head. 

Adam smiles lightly and leans his shoulder into Ronan’s and they stand quiet for a few moments, enjoying their closeness and casual touch, until a woman steps to the bar for another drink and Ronan moves to serve her, dropping his arm from around Adam. 

"Hey, I got it." Adam grabs Ronan's arm gently and tugs him back from stepping towards the customer. "Take a break. You've been non-stop for hours."

“You sure?” Ronan looks at Adam and cocks an eyebrow. 

“Yeah.” Adam nods. “As your not-really boss, take a break. As your partner, take a break.” 

“Well, then, who am I to say no to my not-really boss and partner.” Ronan smirks, hand barely grazing the back of Adam’s jeans as he goes. 

Moving to the bar, Adam serves the woman and then a few others, mostly pulling pints but mixing an occasional gin and tonic. At one point, he briefly hears footsteps overhead in their apartment, but Ronan isn’t gone for ten minutes before he’s back behind the bar. The trio, two fiddles and a bodhrán, finish up one song, and then a few moments later start another, one that’s familiar to Adam’s ears, one that he's heard a number of times since Ballybrittas. 

"You slick bastard." Adam shakes his head as he looks over at Ronan, but a smile spreads over his face. 

Ronan grins sharply in response, holding his hand out. "Dance with me."

Adam reaches out and takes Ronan’s hand without any hesitation. He never hesitates with Ronan, because they’re in this not-making-plans thing together, they own this pub together, they’re building this life together. And Adam would choose this every single time without hesitation. 

He lets Ronan pull him around the bar to an open space on the floor, and Adam’s left hand slips familiarly around Ronan’s back as Ronan’s right hand finds his waist, and Adam takes Ronan’s left hand in his right, and they’re in a position they’re well accustomed to after late nights when Ronan had turned music on after they’d spent hours painting or fixing tables or planing the floor. Late night dances that hadn’t ended tensely, but had ended in a tangle of limbs in their bed upstairs or, a few times, behind the bar.

"You still don't know the footwork," Ronan criticizes tauntingly as he starts guiding Adam around the floor.

"I still have two left feet," Adam says dryly, but his lips quirk."And someone once told me the stomping and the clapping are the important bits, anyway." 

“They weren’t wrong.” Ronan grins, and Adam feels so light, so effervescent that he feels like if he didn’t have Ronan tethering him to earth, he’d float away. 

The song eventually ends and turns into something slower, but Ronan keeps Adam in his arms as they stand, stationary among the couples slow dancing around them, and he tips his head forward a bit to rest their foreheads together. “Do you like what you do, Adam Parrish?” 

“I do you, and I sure as hell like that.” Adam smiles, trailing his hand over Ronan’s shoulder to cup the nape of his neck. 

Ronan barks a laugh and holds Adam’s waist tighter. “Always avoiding the question. Should have expected that.”

“So then don’t let me deflect.” Adam’s still smiling as Ronan begins moving them in languid circles in time with the trio’s new song. 

“Do you like what you do, Adam Parrish?” Ronan asks again, eyes crinkling at the corners with a smile. 

“Yeah.” Adam tilts his chin forward so his lips are a hair’s breadth from Ronan’s. “Yeah, I love what I do.”