Work Text:
Adam is stuck on the last problem in his chemistry homework. He had tried to solve it three times now and each time he’d gotten an answer very different from the one listed in the back of the textbook.
He bites his lip. He must be approaching the problem incorrectly. He needs to re-evaluate his approach.
What am I missing? Do I have the wrong formula? Are the unit conversions wrong?
He carefully reads the question again, writing down every term listed. He flips to the front of the chapter to begin looking over the text. The scrape of his roommate’s key in the deadbolt distracts him.
Unlocking the door makes so much noise, but his roommate Hal steps quietly into the room. He sees Adam looking at him and gives a small wave and a smaller smile. Adam smiles back and Hal turns to his corner of the small dorm room. Adam drops his pencil and rubs the bridge of his nose.
Hal powers up his computer tower and its fans fill the room with a soft whir. Adam watches him open a textbook out of the corner of his eye. It’s his calculus textbook. Adam has AP credit for Calculus I and II, but Hal only has it for Calc I and has asked for Adam’s help many times for Calc II. Adam doesn’t want to deal with that now.
He picks up his textbook again, looking at the chapter preview. His eyes don’t want to focus on the page. He looks up at the dorm room.
It’s little more than a box, comparable in size to his old apartment above Saint Agnes. His desk faces the wall, the window to the left, his lofted bed to the right. Hal’s desk is catty-corner to him, underneath his lofted bed.
The click-clack of Hal’s keyboard is loud behind him, but Adam can’t just ask him to stop doing homework. The noise pounds at his brain. It’s so loud in the small room. He clenches his fists and reminds himself that Hal isn’t trying to annoy him on purpose.
He turns back to the textbook; his eyes once again slip across the page. His brain feels foggy, as if he’s used up all his focus and just white noise is left.
This wasn’t the first time Adam had felt like this. He used to feel it all the time back in high school, with homework shoved in between long work hours, snatches of sleep, and searching with his friends. Before he had pushed through. Brewed himself coffee and splashed water on his face to feel awake.
Now though, he was re-evaluating those methods. He had shared his homework frustrations with a counselor at Academic Coaching and they had told him that the best thing to do in such a situation was to take a break. At the end of the session they had gently suggested visiting a therapist at the Student Counseling Center. After a time of continued struggle Adam did. Homework problems were a safe place to start. When he confessed his woes to his therapist they said the same thing; take a break when he can no longer focus.
Adam swallows hard. He places a bookmark in his textbook and gently shuts it. He needs a break from homework. He had been at it for hours, only stopping for bathroom breaks and to refill his water bottle.
Those weren’t real breaks, he needed a real one. He needed to not think about homework for a bit. He wanted to finish all the problems before he took a break, but he gently reminds himself that it’s okay to take one now.
He stands up from his desk and stacks his papers. He glances around the room. Hal is now watching anime, his textbook abandoned next to him. Unlike Hal, Adam does not have electronic hobbies to immerse himself in. He didn’t even own a computer. He typed his essays on a small Chromebook Academic Coaching had lent him.
There’s plenty of daylight left so he decides to go for a walk. The fresh air would be good for him. He has to bundle up a little. It’s getting deeper into fall and a chill is in the air. He puts on a pair of heavy boots he was gifted from Ronan and a knitted scarf from Blue.
He puts them on numbly, as his fingers feel no spark. They may be physical reminders of his friends but they spark none of their energies. They are simple reminders, no more potent than the mundane sticky not on his desk.
He doesn’t say anything to Hal, he’s engrossed in his show. Adam leaves the dorm with just his keys and his phone. He locks the door and takes the stairs down to the exit.
He steps out into the autumn air onto the concrete outside the dorm building. It had rained in the morning and the air was heavy with mist. A gentle fog clung to everything and he could taste it in the air. It dampened the ground and circled the ends of his hair. It was a refreshing cool after the heat of summer. The air smells clean, and damp. He can smell the decaying leaves and the kicked-up dust. The temperature is a bit chilly for this time of year, but it’s a comfortable cool, not cold.
There are only really two directions to walk in, the direction of Adam’s classes and the other. Adam chooses the other.
He’s been on campus for a few months but has only seen about a fourth of it. He has only walked between his dorm and his classes, the library, and a few administrative buildings. There are buildings and quads dedicated to colleges outside of his own that he’s only seen on the map or the campus tour, or the one time he rode the campus circular bus in the wrong direction and had a small anxiety attack.
The leaves have begun to change color. The trees range from green, yellow, orange, red, vibrant maroon, and brown. The colors are vibrant in the wet weather. Fire bushes live up to their name, a gradient of white to orange to red. Oak trees create similar gradients of greens and oranges. Leaves flutter across the sidewalks and swirl in small vortexes. Adam takes joy in going out of his way to stomp on a few.
A student walking by in a leather jacket reminds him of Ronan. His heart aches a little. He misses Ronan fiercely. He misses all his friends, but Ronan is a special ache in his heart.
Adam had gone over his schedule and found it depressing. There was one Monday off and then there was Fall break, and that was it. He’d had homework that long weekend, but went down to visit Ronan anyway.
They’d spent too much of the break with Ronan sulking in the background as Adam raced through his assignments. He’d crammed as much as he could the Thursday and Friday before.
Ronan didn’t have assignments due every week. Adam understood the farm kept him busy, but he was sure that he could find the time to visit a bit more often. If Adam could sacrifice the short break he had, Ronan could make some sacrifices too.
Adam is broken out of these thoughts by the shine of a twisted piece of metal. It’s an art installation that towers above him in a spiral. It’s so strange and abstract, it makes him smile.
He really loves how beautiful the campus is. All the buildings are built from the same rusty red brick, so despite the decades between construction they all look like they belong together. Old building with sconces and pillars and new ones with large gleaming windows.
He finds a little sidewalk leading between buildings lined with bushes. Halfway through he notices concrete staircase leading down into a courtyard between two connected buildings.
It has a small brick patio and two wooden benches. It is full of stunted oak trees, and scraggly scrub bushes. Large overgrown bushes fight new samplings for dominance. Emergency exit doors without exterior handles lead from the basements of the buildings. Vines grow up one wall clinging to the small spaces in between bricks.
Adam is enamored. He descends into the hidden space. It feels like a different world, a liminal space. He’s surrounded by rich greens, turning into deep browns. The grass is overgrown. Moss pokes through the brickwork. He discovers a small statue of a woman praying at one corner of the patio, nearly hidden in an overhanging tree. He can’t read the dedication through the moss.
He sits down at one of the benches across from the statue. He looks around and breathes deep of the cool, clean air. The grass grows high. It is inundated with foreign plants and untamed. Tiny red strawberries are rotting in the dirt. He notices a small puddle in the brick patio and finds himself staring at it. After a few moments he shakes himself loose with a shrug of his shoulders.
Adam realizes he was almost scrying. The fog with doing homework and how easy he nearly fell in, it feels like when Cabeswater would call to him. A tug he misses like an ache in his bones.
Adam takes a deep breath to center himself. He is completely alone so he knows he must not go deep and lose himself. He looks into the puddle and he begins to scry.
It’s like wading through the dark waters of a large and still pool. He can feel the space around him, but it is empty. Devoid of the energy.
There is nothing around and he can still feel the bench pressed into his body. He goes in deeper.
He begins to feel something, some sort of vibration. Glowing in the distance like a faraway city. He opens up wide, like opening his arms for a hug.
There it is, in the distance. The Henrietta ley line, his ley line. A glowing band crossing the horizon. The more he focuses the more he can feel it. He can see bright dots gently dancing through it like dust motes in sunlight.
Realizing that he is beginning to stray away, Adam comes back to himself and returns to the dark pool.
All around him now he can feel energy where there was none before. His line still glows brightly, with a few stronger spots in the distance. Now he can feel others. All around him, far away other ley lines glow. They crisscross the globe, creating a network of energy, and Adam can feel it all.
Off in the distance, away from his line, he can see another bright spot gently shining in the dark.
He knows there are more glowing points out there, if he could just get closer to see. But he does not. Adam returns to his body in a rush, slumping against the bench with an powerful exhale of breath.
It’s so quiet.
Slowly he hears the twittering of birds, and then the wind in the leaves, and the patter of loosened water.
He breathes deep.
He could feel them. He could feel Ronan’s energy and his dream creations, all clustered together, with Matthew a little ways off. And then Gansey, that was him in the distance, his light. Adam was sure of it. Despite the long distance between them Adam could feel the love of his friends, the warmth they cast into his life.
He wait a long moment until he is ready to return home to his dorm. As he walks the world feels richer, more vibrant. Adam feels at peace. A deep contentment settles inside of him. The anxiety of life has melted away. The whole that the destruction of Cabeswater left in him is now slowly filled by these new energies, growing and flourishing in his veins.
He returns to his dorm and sits back down at his desk. He re-reads the problem he was stuck on the realizes what he was missing.