Work Text:
you are born from dust and someday you will return to it.
the dirt of henrietta recognizes you as its own. it clings to every inch of you, lifted by the wind to burrow into all your nooks and crannies. it finds the painful cracks in your dry hands and soothes them in its own stinging way. it worries at your eyes until they water and leave clean tracks down your face, and then it sticks to the newly dampened skin. when you shower every night you watch the dirt circle the drain and you feel some of yourself wash away with it.
some days you feel more dust than boy. some days you hardly feel boy at all.
the day you return to the dust gets closer and closer by the second.
all your life, henrietta has been where you live, but it hasn’t been home. you can’t call it home, not when you leave its borders with gansey and dread coming back. the henrietta exit sign fills you with misery if you aren’t watching it shrink away in the rearview mirror.
the others don’t have dust running through their veins like you do. ronan has the summer-hot wind that rushes through singer’s falls in his blood. noah has something mysterious in his, but there’s no way it’s henrietta soil. and gansey’s blood is potomac-blue, cool and contained beneath his skin. they’re nothing like you, whose dusty heart seems to puff its contents out with every beat. everywhere you turn, there’s more dust, and you can’t help but feel like it comes from inside of you.
and then you meet her.
she’s a local girl with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, and an attitude you could cut yourself on. she’s all razor blades when gansey tries to talk to her for you and he comes back bleeding that blue blood all over the table.
you stay behind to talk to her and you can tell there’s something in the way she looks at you. you’re very observant. you make connections most people don’t make, and the connection you make here is “she likes me”.
and she gives you her number.
whatever flows through blue’s veins isn’t henrietta dust, even though she was born in it same as you. she loves this dirty place, from the mountains on down to the fields, from the trees to the paved roads, from the churches to the highway to the gas station. she wants to be something more but her “something more” never means “something else”.
you go home and shower and you watch the dirt circle the drain, and when it washes away you are still whole.
next time you see her, you are going to hold her hand.
and the day you return to the dust gets further and further away.