Heartwarming / The Raven Cycle

• Pretty much any time members of the main group demonstrate how much they care about each other.
• Helen giving Gansey an excuse to leave a tea party in The Dream Thieves, when he receives a... rather distressing text from Kavinsky, using Ronan's phone.
  Helen: You looked like you spent your last joy bill.
• Noah and Blue hanging out without the others, jumping on his bed, talking about Blue's tricky romantic situation, and kissing just so Blue can kiss someone without worrying about killing him.
• Ronan and Adam's relationship is seemingly made up of Heartwarming.
  • Ronan telling Adam he doesn't have to go home to his abusive father.
  • Ronan improving his grades enough to stay in Aglionby so that Adam sacrificing himself to Cabeswater, pressing charges against his father, and moving out of his home not on his own terms wasn't in vain.
  • Ronan paying part of Adam's rent and convincing a freaking nun to lie about it so Adam can continue to pay his Aglionby tuition.
  • The two of them racing a shopping cart together through a grocery store parking lot just for the fun of it in Blue Lily, Lily Blue.
• Gansey and Ronan showing up to court to testify against Adam's father. Ronan even tied his tie correctly for once!
• Ronan and Blue protecting and comforting each other in the cave at the end of Blue Lily, Lily Blue.
• In Dream Thieves, Ronan says he'll never forgive the Grey Man for killing Niall Lynch. About two pages later, he's providing a getaway car.

The Raven King (unmarked spoilers)

In spite of all the horror of the last book, it also contains an extraordinary amount of heartwarming:

• Orphan Girl. While she was already close to Ronan, she also bonds extremely quickly with Adam, and both boys seem to view her basically as their own child. The epilogue reveals that Ronan ended up renaming her Opal.
  • Adam and Opal's relationship is really just the epitome of heartwarming. They both quickly trust and like each other despite usually being hostile to new people (Opal doesn't even like Aurora at first), Adam gives her his watch to comfort her when she's freaked out over being part of the real world despite needing it for himself, Opal returns said watch (and kisses Adam's arm while doing so) near the end of the book because he's upset over being possessed, they hold hands while walking through the Barns—pretty much every interaction they have is overflowing with familial cuteness.
• The entire night of Ronan's birthday/Matthew's going-away party at the Barns.
  • Ronan finally works up the nerve to kiss Adam, and while Adam doesn't understand his own feelings, he accepts and enjoys the experience.
  • Ronan and Declan finally, finally put their issues to bed and demonstrate just how much they actually love each other. Declan even calls him "bro", and Ronan, understanding how much of an outsider Declan must have felt like in the family, gives him a magic item he dreamed. For once, they're not fighting or at odds with each other, and the genuine affection they show for one another drives home just how hard the years of hating each other must have been on both of them.
  • Gansey, Blue, Ronan, and Adam are, for once, completely and totally honest with each other about everything they've done and experienced. Every part of the conversation just reinforces the group's status as True Companions.
  ...to tell Gansey something was to tell Adam and Ronan and Blue. They were a package deal; Gansey could not be expected to be won without winning them as well.
  • While Blue and Ronan are in the kitchen, Adam and Gansey talk about Blue's curse, which leads to Adam questioning Gansey about how he knows he's in love with Blue and how he can tell love apart from friendship. Not only does Gansey get some absolutely beautiful lines about what loving Blue is like (saying that she makes him quiet and that he feels still and calm inside when he's with her, the same as he feels about living in Henrietta), but when he finds out Adam is asking because he and Ronan kissed, he only tells him not to break Ronan's heart. While the whole conversation is from Gansey's point of view, it's clear that Adam is starting to realize that he's in love with Ronan.
  • After Blue and Gansey leave, Adam and Ronan share a quiet moment just watching deer from the porch until Adam, finally understanding his own feelings, kisses Ronan passionately, and the two spend the next several hours making out on the couch. For bonus heartwarming points, the chapter in which this occurs is a deliberate Call-Back to the chapter with Ronan's homoerotic dream in The Dream Thieves—except this time, it's real, and Ronan feels absolutely no shame over any of it.
    • "Unguibus et rostro" literally means "claws and beak" (referring to the imagery of Ronan's tattoo), but rhetorically means "tooth and nail". As in, Adam and Ronan would fight tooth and nail to stay together. It even gets a Call-Back during the climax, when both of them are in danger of being killed by the demon.
  • The next morning, Adam wanders through the Barns considering his relationship with Ronan and his future, coming to the conclusion that he's actually serious about this, and while he does still plan to leave for college, he no longer wants to leave forever. His commitment, as well as the heartwarming-ness of the moment, are cemented when he considers the total silence of the Barns and how still he feels inside. Now, how did Gansey describe being in love, again...?
• The demon tries to play mind games with Ronan by telling him that Adam is going to leave, but since Ronan knows how much getting out means to Adam, he points out that he never asked him to stay—only to come back.
  • And similarly, Adam never changes his mind about leaving for college, but thanks to Ronan he does change his mind about leaving forever.
• Adam gets partially possessed by the demon due to the extent of its destruction of Cabeswater, with the control of his hands and eyes being ripped from him completely. After being forced to try to kill Ronan, he desperately scries into the darkness to try to find some guidance or solution, and ends up being rescued by Persephone. Despite being dead, she gives him the same firm and loving advice that she gave him in life—that Adam has more control than he thinks, and doesn't have to put up with being mistreated just because he thinks something's more powerful than him.
  • While possessed, Adam is begging his friends to punch him or even use him as the sacrifice to kill the demon so that he won't hurt or kill them. And every single one of them, even Henry (who barely knows Adam), refuse point-blank to hurt him, both because he's their friend and because they never want Adam to be hurt by someone he loves again.
  The choice was death or hurting Adam, which wasn't much of a choice at all.
• Noah, who has been fading into the background through the whole book, finally gets a POV chapter. It turns out that for him, time is nonlinear, and his very last action before slipping away is to tell the dead 10-year-old Gansey that he would live because of Glendower. That's right—Noah is the impetus for the entire plot of the series. Even when decayed to almost nothing, he still manages to have a profound impact on his friends' lives.
• Near the end of the book, Gansey (obviously) dies... only for Blue, Ronan, and Adam to convince Cabeswater to sacrifice itself and revive Gansey, which it does by using the characters' grief and love to essentially re-form Gansey's life.
• The epilogue, set just after the characters have graduated high school, is basically one big Heartwarming Moment. Adam is going to college in the fall, has made peace with his parents and offered them reconciliation, is still dating Ronan (and driving his BMW!), and no longer feels the need to leave Virginia and the last 18 years of his life behind. Henry, Blue, and Gansey are planning a road trip across the country in the engineless Camaro Ronan dreamed up, which he gave to Blue as a graduation present. Ronan is still dreaming and exploring, already planning for the group's future escapades and the future of the ley line. And the Adventure Continues...
• The short story published in the US paperback of The Raven King is basically one long heartwarming moment about Ronan, Adam, and Opal's lives before Adam leaves for college:
  • Ronan comforting Adam when he's rejected from his first choice college.
    You'll get into one of the others. You're not going to have to make another list. It won't be what you imagined, but it'll be just as good.
  • Opal and Adam's relationship is just as adorable as it was in The Raven King, with Adam teaching Opal how to swim, Opal being upset by the thought of Adam leaving for college until he tells her that he's coming back, and the two of them seemingly always being happy to see each other.
  • In Blue Lily, Lily Blue, Adam and Ronan get into a fight because Ronan says that Aglionby and college are useless and Adam is wasting his time by caring about them. At the end of the short story, Adam brings up the idea of not leaving for college and Ronan refuses to even consider it, even though the reason Adam suggested it was because Ronan was possibly dying. Ronan has gone from thinking Adam's aspirations are pointless to valuing them above his own life.