It was a coldblooded October afternoon, the sky was whited out by an oilspill of blue-grey clouds and soft rain tapped its little fists against the shivering bodies of windows and suburban rooftops. The shop smelt of fresh poppies and smiting marigolds, blushing lilacs and rum-red roses. Of course, that's what the shop always smelt like, but the rain seemed to aggrandize the sweet breath of the flowers.
Adam was bleary-eyed and bored, leaning against the wall and skimming through a physics textbook with the back of a pencil jammed in the corner of his mouth, playing a seesaw between his teeth. His shift at 'Moon's Flora & Fauna' would end at five-thirty, and at six he had to be at the auto garage. He still had a fat six hours of work ahead of him before he could finally go home and hit the pillows, and that was if he finished revising the four chapters he had left to rummage for tomorrow's exam, and that was if his insomnia didn't decide to rear its ugly head as it oh-so often did.
He was quite frankly exhausted. Of this lifeless life. working these endless shifts at these mediocre jobs. Of striving to earn that sparkling grade even with the possibility of some entitled Aglionby white-collar swooping in at the right moment and snatching it from underneath him.
The flower shop was perhaps a quieter and more peaceful environment than any of his other routine pit stops. He often got a good lot of reading and school work done on the shift.
The shop was small, larger than Adam's apartment above St. Agnes, but smaller than say, the average homeowners' living room. His boss, Margaret, (or Moon as she would ask you to call her), often stressed that it was important to keep the place highly illuminated and congenial at all times. The wallpaper was all canary yellow, a good portion of the shop was yellow. So much in fact that if you were to play the 'I Spy' game in here and say you spotted something yellow, the other person would have a hard time narrowing it down to whatever you were hinting at. Yellow, a cheery, non-violent color. And bright, like the sun! Moon would say, and then something about subliminal advertising.
The windows were large enough that daylight conquered every corner of the store, almost snaking its way to the very back. Bowls of dried herbs sat in every stray corner. Bright vines of gardenia and chrysanthemums and hanging crowns of potpourri were strung upside down from the ceiling. The flowers were all well adorned without looking crammed or out of place. Moon was immaculate and thorough with her interior designing. Adam had often thought that she should just close the flower shop down and start an interior designing business, which would probably earn her a lot more money than selling flowers ever would, even if it was a secondary source of income.
The flower shop didn't get much traffic, the disappointing truth remained that a lot of these caked up bouquets wouldn't ever get to see the light of day. Adam only kept the job because he was desperate and because Moon had promised him a doable paycheck at the end of every week. It wasn't even close to good money, but it wassomething . Despite Henrietta being a small town wherein there was enough of leeway in the markets to monopolize on a certain good or product, flowers just weren't that popular an item anymore. Not in the world of eBay and Amazon Prime. Not in the world of snazzy wristwatches and DIY Gift Ideas, Guaranteed To Impress That Special One!
Nobody wanted a handful of freshly-picked flowers anymore. Nobody wanted these brightly-painted creatures that were just as mortal as they were. Flowers shriveled and died. Flowers attracted insects. Flowers were temporary. Adam thought that that's what made flowers the ideal gift, they were in some ways, a metaphor for human life and that in itself was an ironically delicious concept, a few bucks well spent. Flowers made you ponder, made you stop and think. Plus, offering someone a crimson rose or a sun-dipped delilah, wasn't that the ultimate token of love? Wasn't that the old romantic notion popularized by the Renaissance poets and sixties' Hollywood movies? Marilyn Monroe with stars in her eyes and a lavender in her hair. James Dean posing for a fashion magazine shoot with a sunflower in his mouth.
A time of rose-tinted glasses and far less smoke in the air.
Adam ached for the good ol' days, back when a new flower shop down the block would've been the talk of a little bustling town. Back when these magical miracles of nature still held the weight of gods. Back when a primly embellished bouquet of dandelions would've been enough .
The new age was complicated, greedy and a materialistic disaster.
"It isn't that bad," said the ghost who hung out at the back of the store, with a few silhouetting shadows and last month's bouquets that stood on their last legs. "We have netflix and hoverboards now,"
Either Adam had been thinking out loud or Noah Czerny had just done that immensely creepy thing again where he'd practically read his mind.
"The segways don't even deserve to be called hoverboards, they don't hover," Adam pointed out. "And where did you come from?" he regretted his choice of words the moment they'd left his mouth.
You didn't just ask a dead person where he went after he'd died.
"The Underworld," Noah said teasingly, playing along. Adam was slightly relieved. Noah was a little bit terrifying when he wasn't feeling up to it, his jovial mood was welcome. "I was watching cat videos. We have great wifi down there."
Adam rolled his eyes as he glanced back at his textbook, wide and wordy and demanding to be read. "Another pop quiz? Mr. Saltzman is literally the hound of the century. Does he ever tire of torturing his students? Do you think he holds them up by their ankles and shakes the answers out of them if they fail his class?"
There Noah was again, with the strange humor. Adam wasn't sure if that was a side effect of being dead or if it was just his pre-mortem personality shining through the floodgates. Either way, Adam admittedly enjoyed having Noah around for company. He wasn't quite sure if he could actually use the term friends to describe what they were, but it seemed like the second best way to put it.
"Physics test," Adam sighed. "And its Mrs. Gupta now,"
Noah's smudgy face darkened as some kind of realization dawned over him.
Noah liked to hover from shop to shop, but the flower shop was one of his favorite spaces to haunt. Something about the breathy air (although in hindsight, he might've just been saying that to be ironic) and the uplifting colors of the bloomers. The first time Adam had seen the boy ghost, he hadn't known that he was a ghost. Noah could look real enough, sometimes. He had pale hair and pale skin and eyes that were almost alive when they twinkled in the right light.
Almost felt like the right word to describe Noah. An almost boy, an almost life.
Henrietta was just another one of those strange little Virginia towns. Suburban America was a beacon of bizarre happenings flittering right in between the ordinary if you looked hard enough. People here wouldn't blink an eye at you if you were traipsing down a street naked except for a pair of polka-dot socks and a feathered hat.
It wasn't that people minded their own business the way they did in big cities, people talked, but only in the silence and safety of their own homes. People here were lazy and heedless and wan.
Perplexing young boys who looked like they had had all the life sucked out of them, wasn't an outlandish sighting by a stretch. Adam should know, he was probably considered one of them.
Noah was definitely young, or at least, he appeared young. He must've been around Adam's age when he died, or perhaps a year younger. Either way, Noah was a disturbing reflection of what might be.
He never brought up his death, but Adam had done his own digging to find out. The result had been heavily disturbing, because Noah hadn't died, he'd been killed. Backstabbed by a friend.
Noah would never bring it up, so they never talked about it.
When Noah had first flickered in and out of reality, Adam had been two seconds from pissing himself and his heart had probably leapt out of his body. Slowly, he'd come to terms with it. Came to terms with the fact that his town was a little out of the ordinary, or that perhaps this was what was left of ordinary. He considered himself to be a man of science, but he could acknowledge that there were still a lot of mysteries out there that science hadn't managed to crack yet. He did firmly believe that it would eventually, though.
All rational things had an explanation.
Except sometimes, when Noah's mouth twisted into the grotesque shape that no mouth should ever take, when his eyes bled like oblivion and he choked out a sobbing scream, Adam wondered if perhaps he was witnessing his first irrational thing. If some things in this world existed outside of this safely constructed mold of pseudo-reality they lived in.
In whatever case, Noah was kind of Adam's only friend. It wasn't like he was socially awkward, or like he loathed all people with the fury of a thousand burning suns.
Adam just lacked… time.
Perhaps if he lived in a world where he didn't work three jobs and slog night and day for a gleaming recommendation so that he could leave this godforsaken little town behind. Then perhaps, he would've made friends. But if a social life was nothing but a wishful dream that he couldn't quite reach, then having friends were probably the same thing.
Not to mention that most of the boys he went to school with were bastards. Rich, pompous, tan-skinned and golden-haired beasts. The kind of boys who smelt like dollar bills and rode around in cars brighter than Adam's future. The kind of boys who spent their summers in Milan and their winters in Switzerland, the kind of boys who had hands smooth as silk from never having to work a day in their blessed lives.
The Raven Boys, they called them. Either you wanted to be them or you wanted to be with them. Adam just wanted to eradicate their type from the universe, create a killer machine robot of vast intelligence in his evil lab and send it after them all.
The path that had paved its way to Aglionby for Adam was one that was marked in his sweat and blood.
Then there was Blue, Blue Sargent, also known as his ex-and-only-ever girlfriend. They were still sort of friends, he supposed, although he'd been limiting his visits to her cafe ever since the break-up, because he seemed to be taking it much harder than she was. It wasn't that he wanted her to cry about it, well, maybe a little. He'd certainly had his fair share of tear-rimmed sleepless nights.
Blue had been a creature of great wonders. She was sensible and strong-headed, strange and snarky. She was never afraid to stand up for what she believed in, and whilst not as down-in-the-dumps as Adam was, she understood the value of money and often asked 'those upper-crust assholes' to put their cash where their castles were.
"Don't you mean money where their mouths are?" Adam had asked, once.
"I don't enjoy paraphrasing, unless I'm quoting Nelson Mandela or Maya Angelou," Blue had stated, simply. Adam had backed off. "Chops for creativity," and she'd grinned like a sunbeam.
"Thanks,"
She was nice. It'd been nice. Adam had lacked nice things all his life, Robert Parrish had made sure of that.
"Okay, I'm beginning to forget, which one of us is dead?" Noah said snidely, leading Adam away from his thoughts. "Because you're beginning to look as pale as me," he continued, before frowning slightly. "Is it as me, or as I? I'm getting a little crusty on my grammar,"
"It's an elliptical clause," Adam replied. "So either would be grammatically standard, really. Depends on you."
Noah shrugged. "Whatever. As I was saying, you look like something that's been left to rust in the back of a garbage truck. It's when people start looking deader than I am that I get worried. What's going on?"
"You don't look so bad," Adam sighed, in a lame attempt to make a dead person feel better.
"I'm definitely winning all of Casper's beauty pageants, that's for sure. Now stop evading the question."
"I haven't eaten in like six hours," Adam admitted, dragging his palms across his tired face.
His diet consisted 96% of coffee and 4% of actual food. His breakfast that morning had been a cold egg sandwich and hash browns from the McDonald's down his home block.
"Take a snack break," Noah muttered. "Jeez, it's not that difficult."
"I will, I'm just…"
"An overachiever? An idiot? A self-loathing, self-pitying brooder?" Noah derided.
"Waiting for Margaret to return so she can take over while I'm on break. Jesus. Rude much?" Adam finished, tightly.
Noah made a flippant gesture with his hand. "I'll watch over the shop, Margaret doesn't even notice when I tamper with the glitter and nobody's going to come in anyway."
"You can't. You're a ghost," Adam didn't say it rudely, only matter-of-factly.
"So are you," Noah replied, also matter-of-factly.
Ronan was going to bash someone's head in. Most likely, his own. Or perhaps this bubbly freshmen's would do, considering she couldn't fucking sit still for two goddamn seconds-
"Look, the pain you'll experience if you don't move will be nothing compared to what you'll go through if you're flopping around like a fish. Be still, yeah?" Ronan drawled irritably as he pressed the girl's wrist down and began to lower the sterile needle towards her skin.
"Maybe you'll have to find other means of getting me to sit still," the girl purred, blinking at him from under a fringe of fake lashes. He didn't even pretend like he was enticed. People who knew Ronan called him a lot of things: a drunk, a gutterpunk, a wild-flyer, but nobody could spite him for his lack of honesty, really, he would dare them to try.
Instead of playing coy, he offered her a dark smirk and leaned in so that his chin was almost touching hers, but not quite.
The girl closed her eyes and sucked in a breath.
"I like cock," he whispered faintly, surreptitiously.
The girl's eyes flew open.
Ronan had to suppress a chuckle as he leaned back into place and the girl's cheeks flamed.
"Should we get back to your tattoo now, sweetheart?" he asked, raising an eyebrow at her.
"Don't be an asshole, Ronan!" Matthew called, from somewhere behind them.
"I'm being perfectly fucking civil!" Ronan called back.
The girl broke into a smile, handling herself well under the thin roof of her humiliation. "That just makes me find you even more attractive, you know," Ronan simply scoffed, took the girl's arm and got back to work.
He couldn't even begin to imagine the kind of kinky shit she must be into, but he was tempted to check her browser history.
It wasn't like he wasn't used to flirtatious customers. As Ronan saw it, tattooing someone was an intimate art. It required skin-to-skin contact, it enticed and it was allowing oneself to be vulnerable in front of a complete stranger. Tattoos were immensely personal things, thus making Ronan feel like every client of his was sharing a secret with him. In return, he was promising to keep it safe for them and honor it by turning it into a mural. Sometimes, marking someone with his needles felt just like marking someone with his mouth, but Ronan wasn't one to mix business with pleasure.
Women and men alike certainly attempted to entice Ronan into blurring the lines of the steel-bars that were those boundaries of his. His looks were just as renowned as his skill. His eyes were fashioned like they'd drained the sky, his jawline was sharp enough to cut yourself on, his mostly-shaved head and tall, lean build burned itself into memory. The metal barbs and rings that pierced his ears and eyebrows drew even more attention to the incendiary lines of his face. He was a walking billboard lit in neon.
He also preferred to work shirtless, allowing his customers a full view of the dark and magnificent tattoo that snaked across the ridges of his back, starting from the nape of his neck carrying on all the way to his lower back. He wore an unmovable smirk at all times and his every movement felt like an innuendo of some kind. He smiled at you like he could read every dirty thought your brain had ever produced and his hands worked the needle just like a paintbrush.
Sometimes, Ronan wondered if starting his own little tattoo parlor had been the shittiest idea he'd ever had, which was a preposterous thought, considering the ratio of his shitty ideas to his eventual hindsight.
Perhaps hindsight really was 20/20.
The Snakepit was a fancy establishment. It was a red brick building stood in between other red brick buildings on the wealthiest block of town. All of Henrietta's mighty swans flocked to their doorstep. They tattooed the sons and daughters of Congressmen and oil barons, film directors and aldermen. Anyone who was looking to get inked knew that The Snakepit was the best tattoo parlor in all of Henrietta.
It was run by the three Lynch brothers, sons of the late local businessman, Niall Lynch. Each of the siblings were oceans apart from each other, but similar traits revealed themselves if one observed hard enough. They all had striking blue eyes, for example, and the sort of laughter that hung in the room long after it had died down.
Declan, the oldest sibling managed all the financial aspects of the business, he had a warm, charming smile and enough wit to talk himself out of a lobotomy. He was built like a building, tall, square shoulders, cheekbones like blades and his hair was as dark as the contentious and mysterious business he dealt with in the shadows. He didn't have a whole lot of tattoos, and the ones he did have couldn't be seen when he wore anything more than a bathing suit.
Matthew, the youngest and the most innocent of the siblings, didn't sport any tattoos, but he worked with them all the same. He used his apricot-sweet voice to schedule client appointments, play nice with the health inspector and promote the shop's superiority to all other places. His summer-warmed golden hair and flowery smile cleared up some of the storm clouds that perpetually hung off his older brothers.
Ronan, the remaining Lynch and the prized middle son, was perhaps the haughtiest of the lot. He was a self-proclaimed asshole who swore like a drunken sailor in a shipwreck and dressed in only two shades: black and blacker. Ronan's passion for artistry hummed inside everything that he touched. He was The Snakepits' main tattooist, painting the most intricate and inimitable tattoos anyone had ever seen. His secret, of course (and he had plenty) was that he pulled all of his art from his dreams. Filtering the good from the bad, the pristine from the vulgar. He would see something in a dream, and then he'd sketch it into his book to later mint into a full-blown tattoo.
All three brothers had their father's tendency to get into trouble.
They didn't do it for the money. Their father's last will and testament sealed their futures in crisp green wrapping paper, so theoretically, if they got fed up, they could just shut the whole operation down without wiping much of a sweat.
And yet, there was an electric and contagious energy to everything inside their little shop. From the brightly lit ceilings to the neon posters swathing all of the walls to the lava lamps and the ostentatiously segregated chambers ensuring the privacy of each customer, painted red to emulate the chambers of a human heart. The posters were all either black-and-white images of bands very few had heard of in concert, or half-burnt photos in frames of famous dead people, or twisted, horrifying paintings that Ronan had done himself, each one a portrait of the strange creatures from his dreams. They kept the place dark and neat, sexy and inviting. Electronic music pulsed through the black marrow of the shop at all times, and they kept the parlor open from eight in the morning to eight in the evening.
While Declan and Matthew handled simpler inks, gaudy infinity symbols and cheesy zodiac signs, common Latin quotes instilled for people who didn't even fucking speak Latin, Roman numerals (the whole stinking lot) and cartoon characters, Ronan strictly stuck to sleeves and backs and thighs. He tattooed people who were just as passionate about their body art as he was, who wore his masterpieces like stars. He was all about strange flaming skulls and geometric minimalism and chaotic images lush with hefty metaphors.
About an hour and a half later, Ronan wiped away the last few bits of blood and ink from the girl's arm and leaned back a little in his chair to survey the finished piece.
"Is that it? Is it done?" the girl asked, blinking in confusion.
"Yeah," he nodded, with a small smile that probably didn't look like a smile to anyone else. "All finished."
She'd wanted a heavily-shaded raven in flight, which was right up Ronan's alley. Ravens were a popular symbol among the people of Henrietta, they wore them on their posters and emblems, their mascots and jewellery. Ronan even had a pet raven named Chainsaw.
He began to explain the standard healing procedure to the girl. "Just grab our ointment and card at the register from Matthew, he'll give you the rundown."
He finished taping the inked area down with gauze and removed one of his latex gloves with a snap. "You're good to go," he remarked.
"Thank you! Thank you! I love it!" the girl blabbed. What was her name? Janet? Jenny? Jordan? He couldn't quite remember. Not that he really gave a damn, he was mostly just glad it was over. It was past lunch break and he was starving, plus, he was taking the rest of the day off. He had to make an errand run for the impromptu surprise party he and Declan had planned for Matthew's birthday the following day, and a meet up with Gansey and his amours soon after.
He rolled his stool over to the garbage bin and disposed of his gloves before pushing off it and shuffling over to Matthew, who'd just finished speaking with their latest client.
"How'd you manage to keep Dora the Explorer from bouncing off into oblivion?" Matthew asked, teasingly.
"A magician never reveals his secrets," Ronan replied, with a dark smirk, still clad in nothing but low-rise jeans and motorcycle boots and the multiple leather bands that clung helplessly to his wrists, but he never took those off, not even in the shower.
"Dora, really?" Declan said, emerging from one of the secluded chambers in a crisply pressed t-shirt and a backwards baseball cap. "She reminded me more of that Power Puff Girl, the one with the yellow pigtails?"
"Bubbles!" Matthew supplied.
"That one," Declan nodded.
"You two are so fucking gay," Ronan remarked.
"Look who's talking," Matthew muttered.
"What," Ronan shrugged, slipping his hands into his pockets. "It's okay when I say it."
"Hey bro, your groupies have left the building. Put some fucking clothes on." Declan snapped.
Ronan curled his tongue and shot his brother an innocent smile as he pulled his hand out of his pocket and shoved his middle finger in Declan's face. The two brothers didn't get along very well, but they were always attempting cordialness for the sake of Matthew. Some days went smoother than others. Still, they were trying, and that was the one thing they could agree on.
"So you're leaving me to hold down the fort all by lonesome again, aren't you?" Matthew mumbled petulantly in between chews. He was always chewing gum and smelling like strawberries. It was repulsive.
"I have exactly five minutes to get ready for a three-hour meeting," Declan said as he headed over to the sink to wash off his hands.
"Don't sink my ship," Ronan said simply, as he pulled on a dark grey muscle tee and grabbed his biker jacket from the coat stand.
"No promises but I'll look out for icebergs," Matthew replied.
"We'll raise your pay," Declan assured.
"You guys are the best!" Matthew grinned, as Ronan headed out of the shop, pulling his hood over his head to take refuge from the rain.
The first thing that he had to do was stop by the florist across the street and pick up a bouquet of roses or dandelions or some shit. They were supposed to be on Gansey's behalf, Ronan himself was planning on getting Matthew one of those remote-control helicopter things that he'd always adored as a kid, but Gansey preached that flowers were a vital token of love and that Matthew seemed like the type of kid who'd appreciate that.
He wasn't wrong, so a glorified pile of flowers was going to accompany the cool helicopter. The perfect blend of sweet and impish, which summed up his brother pretty well, all things considering. Gansey was going to fucking owe him, though.
Ronan had street-cred to maintain, and walking into a flower shop midday was hindering it in the most brutal of manners. Still, Ronan would steal the moon for his little brother if he'd asked, so he'd take the embarrassment, and then he'd find a way to wreck revenge on Gansey.
The amicable thought of torturing the shit out of his best friend was almost enough to keep him going for the rest of the day.