Chapter Text
Exam time. The peak of the mountain Adam had been climbing up all year. After the conclusion of each written exam, he left the room like he had planted his flag. Confidence ran through him with every sure answer he scribbled down. Year-long diligence let him reap the grades he had worked long sowing and tending.
Naturally gifted and studious enough, Gansey went through the exams easily.
For Ronan it was like pulling teeth. But the week leading up, he submitted to Gansey’s pushiness and crammed; he sat all of his exams.
“Chill, Gansey. I only need to a pass a few to get to my NEWT levels,” he had said, about halfway through exam week. Ronan, Adam realized, was confident enough in Care of Magical Creatures and Transfiguration, and could wing by with magical talent for charms and defense against the dark arts. He had no desire to be, didn’t need to be, the best in class, or even near the best, or even anywhere higher than scraping by with his family name and family money.
Sometimes life was unfair, but the edges of unfairness were blunted when that unfairness worked in the favor of friends. Or whatever Ronan was to Adam.
#
The balcony of the east tower was something different at the end of the school year, when the daylight hours stretched longer, and the air was warmer, and you could see straight over the shining lake to the peaks of the mountains. Against that view, Noah was a smudge.
“You still hang out around here?” Ronan asked. He pressed his hands the railing. Was this the spot Noah had fallen?
“Where else would I hang out?” Noah said, the fog on the corner of Ronan’s vision.
“I don’t know. Don’t you have a home?”
Maybe this was why Ronan came up here again, with no more mysteries to solve. He came up here for the old reason he had come here, to see his friend, to share his problems.
Noah blinked. “I have a sister.”
Something twisted in Ronan’s gut.
“I don’t think they’d be happy to see me,” Noah said.
“They’re your fucking family,” Ronan said. Family. It had meant something -- everything -- to him once.
“They don’t know I’m a ghost,” Noah said, his voice like the wind. “I haven’t seen them since… Since I was alive.”
Ronan didn’t say anything.
“Being a ghost it’s… it’s not the same as being alive. It’s like being a shadow, or an echo. I’m not me, completely. I’m just…” His eyebrows lowered. “An impression.”
Like a melted puddle of what I once was, Ronan thought.
“So it’s true what they fucking say,” Ronan said. “You can’t go home again, or some shit.”
“Ronan,” Noah said, present as the ground Ronan stood on. “You’re alive. You can do anything you want.”
#
It was roughly some time past noon and Blue laid in her bed, dressed, on top of the covers, sprawled diagonally. She wasn’t tired or ill, but if she tried to do anything but wallow at this moment she would combust.
Summer break had come.
A crueller person would take joy in the fact that this meant that the boys would no longer be seeing each other every day as she was left out. Blue didn’t feel this way. Not that she was highly enlightened. Blue was a sensible girl. She had been ascribed this trait all throughout her youth. She may have dressed outlandishly, but she worked a series of part time and temporary jobs, attended to her home school studies, and only ever dared to dream too big in private.
Blue was sensible, meaning she understood the reality of summer break -- a three month stretch in which her friends would be cast to the wind, spread across the country, and not neatly next door, scheming plans for the next Hogsmeade trip.
There were no Hogsmeade trips in exam month. Blue hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to them. She hadn’t seen Gansey since the morning after Noah’s confession, the morning after Gansey and she had shared their first kiss. And second. And third.
Downstairs, someone knocked on the front door. Three evenly timed wraps, muffled by distance, then the three wraps repeated, faster. Someone must be desperate for their fortune to be told.
A single set of footsteps creaked up the staircase. Not stompy enough to be Calla. Not clomping like Orla’s clogs. Too fast to be Jimi. Too easy to hear to be Persephone.
A knock on Blue’s bedroom door, and the culprit of the footsteps -- Maura -- called through. “Blue, you have company.”
Blue rose like a mummy from a sarcophagus. What possible company? The only company that would come calling for her was impossible, a concept of belief that made her chest ache, so she couldn’t let herself hope until she made it out of the bedroom and halfway down the stairs and could see for herself that her shaky faith had been rewarded.
Below, standing in the entry hall, which was no more that a squat collection of space inside the front door between the living room and kitchen, an accident of engineering, stood her three Hogwarts boys.
“How--?” she said, descending to the bottom of the stairs. Closer, she spied the beads of sweat trailing down Gansey’s forehead, Adam’s heaving chest, Ronan’s clothing in more disarray than usual.
“We wanted to wish you a good summer, Blue,” Gansey said. “So we rushed down here before the carriages left.”
Her entire life, Blue Sargent had felt out. No third eye. No magic. No Hogwarts. No true love. No friends.
Some of those were still true, but others had to be scratched out of the record book. You were never really left out when the people that mattered remembered to include you.
“One last chance to annoy you,” Ronan said. Blue pinched his arm, and he cuffed the back of her head in retaliation. It was only the dusting of a cuff, something a brother might do to a sister, more for show than vengeance.
Adam she swallowed in a hug, this part familiar.
“Don’t work too hard over summer,” he told her.
“Oh, you know me. I’m slacker just like you,” she replied, which was her saying ‘you too.’
This left her with Gansey last. It was probably not an accident. He was the hardest one to know what to say to.
“Noah sends his love,” Gansey said as the two of them came to stand face to face. It was strange, doing this with company.
“I send mine back,” Blue said. She didn’t blink. Gansey, frazzled, was a delectable sight.
Behind Gansey, Adam grabbed Ronan by the sleeve. “Let’s go outside.”
In the semi-private, because nothing in her house was truly private, Blue felt safe raising her hand to swipe away a strand of Gansey’s hair, damped down across his forehead.
“Oh,” he said, raising a hand to touch the spot she had just touched. This was how precious their touches were, so rare. Distance and hearts and fondness and all of that.
“I’ll come visit, over summer, if you’d like,” he said.
“I’d like it,” she said. In Gansey’s presence, defenses down, it was so easy to accept.
How was this so easy, when all of life leading up this had felt like fighting through an everlasting jinx. She almost thinked she was tricked.
With with short-term privacy -- Maura had not come back down the steps for an astute reason -- Blue pressed up on her toes and planted an efficient kiss to Gansey’s mouth. Something to last them over the summer.
#
“So,” Gansey drummed his fingers on his knees. “How are you feeling, Ronan?”
In itself, it was an innocuous enough question, a greeting that could be passed on along with a short and meaningless answer. But it wasn’t innocuous. Gansey’s tone came loaded, kind of humid thick. They were alone, like the school year had started. Ronan and Gansey, in the train compartment, sitting across from each other in the window seats. It didn’t help that there was new knowledge, unspoken, hanging between them, ripe for prodding and avoidance.
“Gansey,” Ronan said, growled. “Don’t.”
“I let you not talk all year,” Gansey said.
Ronan crossed arms tightened. Maybe he could turn into a statue right here, right now, and not have to do this.
“I know what it’s like to need… space,” Gansey said. “To need it just so you can breath. Just so you can… hold yourself together.”
“What do you fucking want from me here?” Ronan said. Outside their compartment, a group of girls passed in bursting laughter.
“You know it already,” Ronan said. “You know the truth.”
Gansey also knew, from observed experience, the evidence of that truth. He said seen first hand the destruction that had been done to the Lynch family, and the destruction that had been done to Ronan himself. What more words could be put to -- “I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m broken” -- than how Ronan acted and reacted and sliced through every day of living since.
Gansey rubbed at his temple, and said, “I know you can only do it alone for so long.”
Ronan drew in a breath. The train ricketed on.
“Gansey,” he said. “I’m not alone.” It was a bigger thing to say than it sounded like, but it was true. Gansey, Noah, Adam, and even Blue. Ronan was less alone than he had been a long time. After dad, after mom, after the sanctity of brothers combusted, Ronan hadn’t thought he could of ever allowed some much room for people in his chest again.
“Alright,” Gansey said, understanding at least enough. He was one of the better people at translating Ronan. “Just don’t forget it.” He held out a fist across the distance between their knees for Ronan to bump; Ronan did.
#
Here was the thing about being Henry Cheng... he was so much more than what people saw, what people heard, what people knew.
They all thought they saw, and heard, and knew, because Henry went out of his way to make himself seen, and heard, and known. But as anyone would know, you can say a lot, and loudly, and not be saying much anything at all.
“Cheng,” someone said as they walked by him in the train, patting him on the shoulder as he passed. Distracted, Henry only made out some vague details -- yellow and black tie, not who he was looking for -- and nodded in similar, fleeting greeting.
In his pocket was tucked the latest letter from his mother, only arrived yesterday, detailing who of her trusted associates exactly would be picking him up from the train station. It was in thin-inked hangul, the work of the deft, precise hand. His mother’s hand herself, not dictated, relegated, or magicked.
He went to school far away from home. Supposedly because Hogwarts was the best. Supposedly because Hogwarts was the safest. Supposedly because the ‘far away from home’ part would put him farther out of the reach of his mother’s enemies.
Also, because it put Henry in a strategic position. There were the children of a lot of powerful and interesting people who went to Hogwarts. Even though some of said interesting people were now deceased.
A boy, sticking up tall over the rest of the students, buzz cut, red and gold tie hanging loose and limp with disdain under his collar, stepped out of a compartment. Ronan Lynch.
He brushed past Henry without a consideration or excuse me. Henry picked a piece of lint off of his sleeve, checked over his shoulder that Lynch was far gone on his way, then started forward.
He paused outside the compartment Ronan had just exited, and inside was exactly who he was looking for. For where Ronan Lynch was, Richard Campell Gansey III was not far.
Henry wrapped on the compartment door to get his attention. Gansey was at the window seat, facing the back of the train, so he was looking from where they had come from. At the knock he looked up and then, seeing Henry, waved him in.
Henry Cheng could be accused of coming on too strong, but he knew what he was doing when it counted. Lay the groundwork and let people meet you halfway.
“How’s it fairing?” Henry said as he plopped down on the seat across Gansey.
“I’m well,” Gansey said, all manners. His nostrils flared as he took in a long breath. “Actually… all I can think about is how I already miss it.”
“Hogwarts? Or the girl who lives next door?”
“...Both.”
The train rocked over a bump in the track. Henry shifted forward in his seat.
“I have to admit something,” he said, “about you.” It was the type of sentence that got you all the attention of the person you were with, Gansey being no exception. “I’ve been curious about you since you first stepped into our humble little school. Although, I suppose everyone was, of course.”
“Of course,” Gansey repeated, measured.
“But not like everyone else, though. Not really. I wasn’t going to ask you to tell the story like it was some party trick, or ask you what it was like to die.” Henry folded his hands tight over his knees to control their slight, telling tremble.
“See,” Henry said. “I already know what it’s like to die.” The muscles of his face felt tight, as if they were resisting. As if they were trying to tell him: stop telling the truth, stop making yourself remember.
Gansey eyes flicked across Henry’s face, looking for some tell, for some lie, for some explanation.
“It’s just darkness,” Henry said. “And nothingness. Unstopping.”
“Henry --”
“I was kidnapped. When I was eight. For ransom.” He rubbed a spot behind his ear. He felt itchy. “The place they kept me…”
“You’re afraid of small, dark spaces.”
Henry ticked a finger in Gansey’s direction. “See. I knew you’d get me.”
The train barrelled onward. One or the other or both of Gansey’s velcro friends would surely be returning soon. And what else was there to say. Henry had said it, and Gansey had understood. It was a rare occasion for Henry Cheng, in all this attempts, to actually be seen, and heard, and understood.
He stood. “See you next year?” he asked. It was a genuine question. He had heard the rumors of Gansey’s educational background.
Gansey offered a hand for a shake. “Next year.”
#
Adam’s fingers buzzed with an energy, familiar and urgent, psychic power at work. He shook them out.
Flip the card, he demanded at them in thought. Flip the card, he thought again. It doesn’t matter that it feels like electrostatic under them, and that you’re a little anxious, and a little scared. Just flip.
He flipped.
Lovers.
Merlin dammit.
“So this is where your fucking hiding.”
Adam lifted his head. He was in an empty compartment at the very end of the train. He had been sitting with his friends, had got up to, ostensibly, go to the restroom, but ended up here. Alone. An itch had overwhelmed and he had needed some privacy to do a tarot reading.
Ronan Lynch stood in the doorway. So consumed, Adam hadn’t even heard the compartment door slide open on its rickety track.
Adam flipped the Lovers card back over, hiding it’s face, as Ronan stepped inside and drew the door shut.
Ronan plopped himself beside Adam on the bench. His cards were spread on the bench seat across from them with Adam hunched over to reach them.
“Doing your weird divination stuff?”
“If you think it’s so weird, you can leave,” Adam replied, but didn’t mean it.
He left Lovers were it was, and ran his thumb over the edge of the deck.
“Gansey said he offered to have you stay with him over the summer. He said you said no.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Adam said. Under his unwavering stare, Ten of Cups and it’s rainbow blurred.
“I’m sure Sargent’s already offered too.”
“Lynch,” Adam said, as sharp as the word could be made. “It’s my life. I’m going to get out of their on my own, and not with anyone’s charity.”
He heard Ronan scoff. “Fucking stubborn ass Slytherin. Don’t you know bull-headedness is supposed to be a Gryffindor trait?” Their knees bumped.
“I thought Gryffindor traits were being reckless and brash,” Adam said, turning his head too look at him. Ronan was looking right back. They were awfully close.
“You think I’m reckless?” Ronan countered.
“I --” He was at a loss for words.
Ronan leaned forward and kissed him. Mouth against mouth. The need for breathing gone.
It was like someone had scooped Adam up and thrown him into the Great Lake: a complete lose of gravity and then he was surrounded. And Adam didn’t know how to swim.
Ronan hand came up and wrapped around the back of his neck: a gentle, holding, pulling touch.
Adam leaned in, kissed back. He didn’t mind drowning.
#
Noah stood on the balcony, looking down.
The school felt different when it was empty, with all the energy of the swarming students gone. Each year passed liked the ebb and flow of the tide.
Below him, at the base of the tower, stretched out the lake. The water pulled and shifted, a mysterious thing filled with mysterious things.
It was the impact of the fall that killed him, as far as Noah understood it. And as far as he understood it, it was the merpeople who had returned his body to the school, too late for anything to be done but a proper burial.
He wasn’t fully formed back then. He had been too scared to move on, not ready for death, not realizing it was happening as it was happening, so his consciousness tugged free, and he existed, knowing, observing, confused, but not yet in the corporeal form of the ghost other wizards could see.
Noah raised his hands and set them upon his own chest. The only thing that felt solid under his fingers was himself: the texture of the wool of his robes, the smooth threads on the embroidered Hogwarts chest, buttons and button holes. He wore the same things now as when he had died.
All except one thing.
Noah ran his hand over his shoulder, where the dragon-hide strap should be. His school satchel was missing. When he had died, he had been wearing it; he had something in it he had wanted to show that girl that he thought he was meeting, something to impress her. The satchel must’ve fallen off of his as he had fallen. Fallen and sunk in the lake, unreturned, before the exact moment of Noah’s death.
They had found the treasure, Whelk and Noah. They had found Glendower’s hidden treasure. It was the best and most important of treasure of a lost king: his crown.
Noah had forgotten another essential part in his retelling, never told this part. It didn’t matter where they had found it. Gansey wouldn’t find it in the room that changed into what you want it to be, when you wanted it to be there. The treasure was gone. Noah had taken it. It was just the right size to slip into his satchel, carry undetected for a night.
He had planned to put it back. But the girl…
He couldn’t remember her name. Why couldn’t he even remember her name? He had died for a chance night alone with her. He had lost Glendower’s treasure in a strange hope that it might impress herl. Whelk hadn’t known. They had agreed to leave it in that secret room, where it was safeguarded from everyone else but them, until they could figure out what to do with it, how to use it.
No one had known.
This has the secret only Noah knew: the same night Noah’s life had been lost, so had Glendower’s crown, somewhere in the depths of the Great Lake, had been lost as well.