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To begin, an apparent universal truth: there comes a time in every person’s life where they find themselves dead.
And as talking in absolutes has never done much good for anyone- except, of course, for when it has- it might be better to say that there comes a time in most people’s lives where they find themselves either dead or somewhere close, like half-dead or scuffing their shoes in front of death’s door or dead in body but going strong in spirit, making their living by haunting the family of four that lives in the small house on the hill. Gansey doesn’t have much faith in dying as a concept either because he’s found that sometimes it just doesn’t stick; maybe because the dying person in question is as slippery as an eel, or maybe because they had nine lives conveniently stocked in the backroom, or maybe because death was on strike that day. Maybe they found out after one very, very bad afternoon that they were able to regrow life and limb like a starfish; maybe they had one foot in the grave and then remembered that they forgot to feed their hamster, actually, so could they do this whole death thing later?
Or maybe, just maybe- as in the case of Richard Campbell Gansey III himself- they simply happened to find themselves lucky in the dumb way of a teenager loved very much by a number of very powerful forces.
Here is what it is to be Richard Campbell Gansey III, twice reborn and not dead yet, son of a senator and king of- well, something he’s sure, he’ll get back to you on that: tired. Neither death nor death’s bastard brother is anywhere in sight, and from the looks of it neither one of them will be making an appearance in his near future either. He’s too busy driving today to either sleep or die, travelling down the long and winding roads of Colorado with Blue Sargent and Henry Cheng beside and behind him and only a vague, blurry impression among them all about where they’d like to go next. It’s nearing nighttime and the sky is bloodred behind the mountains, bruised purple-blue-black high above them and shot through with light, wispy clouds. It’s pretty. Gansey can barely keep his eyes open.
He’s enjoying himself, has the window rolled half-down and the fingers of his free hand curled over the edge of it, has the wind tugging through his hair and his thoughts tumbling about his head in the slow, hypnotic drawls of a person who's been on the road for hours. There’s something about driving in particular that he’s loved more and more in these days after his second death; he’s found that lately he’s a little bit more in love with everything than he’s ever been, which is to say that he takes to the whole wide world with a wild, reckless adoration instead of the quieter affections he’d preferred before.
Before. Before. Gansey’s thoughts are aimless and drifting, and he finds that whenever he lets them run wild for too long they will without a doubt turn back to before like a moth to a flame or a ship to the north star or a child to the cookie jar on top of the fridge. It’s against his better judgement that Gansey’s drawn again and again to this soft, aching need to dissect himself, but though he’ll deny it to his death he’s always had something of a taste for impulse, so when things are quiet and he feels that he’s able he turns his thoughts back to before and then he forces himself to think and think until he feels sick enough to justify a break . And right now he’s feeling good and guilty about it, and Blue’s not talking and Henry’s not talking and the road is long and unbroken before him, so Gansey braces himself with his hand on the wheel and his back against the seat and then he casts his thoughts out like a net and begins to consider how he was before.
Gansey does not make it a habit to be an ungrateful person, but he sometimes wonders if he ever used to feel as he does now . He died first when he was ten, and then again when he was seventeen, and in the time between he lived and lived and ignored the creeping, crawling worry that liked to question if this half-life of his maybe wasn’t the height of it, if this was the only way that he’d ever feel ever again right up until his bitter end. Sometimes in those few months after his first death, when he was unmoored and and drifting through life in a haze that his parents often turned a convenient blind eye to, he had wondered if he wasn’t still dying; if this was meant to be his life reeled backwards, but there’d been a little glitch and now he was made to sit and watch it flash before his eyes in both directions, told to sit there and be silent as he observed all that he’d lived through and all that he was missing.
Even now he’s still made to ponder- in the idle, offhand way of a person who’s forgotten for a moment that they’re not the sort of person who can safely let their mind wander- as to whether he’s really alive at all or else just very good at faking it in the same sort of way that he forged through parties and school and casual hangouts with a series of phrases and topics he’d retroactively branded as good and then stuck to like glue. He wonders if he doesn’t just wake up in the morning and remember what a living person feels like from the ten years he’d been alive, wonders if he doesn’t just put on his best approximation on in the mirror in the morning and then go about his day, second skin and all; he is awake, he knows, and he thinks that he is alive, but if someone were to actually, genuinely touch him would they feel flesh and blood and a warm red pulse, or would they brush their fingers from nose to ear and think that this glass is of a rather poor make, that this silver’s got its shape all wrong?
Gansey knows one thing for certain, and that’s that he’s close enough to alive to love- and he is so grateful for that that sometimes he can’t see straight- but on slow and cautious days like this where he can let his mind wander and his guard come creeping down, he can’t help but wonder if Gansey never-dead would love in the same way as Gansey twice reborn.
But regardless. He comes back to himself for a moment and sees Colorado, with its mountains and its sunset and the trees smudged dark along the roads. Blue is beside him in the passenger’s seat, not quite awake but not quite asleep, and Henry is slumped over in the backseat very, very asleep. Gansey is driving, and Gansey is alive. He is also thankfully awake. He is happy, he thinks, or content; it's a little difficult to tell these days, to parse his emotions in any way that allows for a clear-cut and definitive name. He knows that he likes the feel of driving, and he knows that he likes the sound of the engine, and he knows that he likes the flash of color in the corner of his eye that comes from Blue trying to shift into a better position for sleeping, and he knows that- and this is, funnily enough, the thing that convinced him that this particular swoop that he gets in his stomach sometimes means love- he knows that he likes the sound of Henry snoring in the backseat, because it means that Henry is alive and that Henry is well, and that Henry feels safe enough to sleep.
They are all alive. They are all well. Blue and Henry feel safe enough to sleep; Gansey is driving through the sunken roads of rural Colorado, and he is awake.
This is not indicative of how safe or unsafe he may be feeling, he swears. Pinkie-promise, cross his heart. He’s only awake because if you are driving you cannot be asleep, unless you are dreaming of driving or sleep-driving or driving while only asleep on technicality, and maybe it would be better of him to say that if you are driving you should not be asleep, though if you are dreaming you are still free to dream of driving. Ronan often does. Gansey often does. His dreams of driving are different than Ronan’s though, because Ronan’s are fast-paced and frantic and sometimes so, so frightening (Gansey used to be so, so frightened for him), but Gansey’s are always syrup-slow and often look something like this:
It is not quite nighttime, but it’s getting close and the air is thick with end-of-day haze and the buzz of cicadas and slow-choked humidity. The sky is darker than it is light, deep blue and ink-spill black with a small smear of red still clinging to the horizon off in the distance where the sun is not quite dead and gone yet. There is no music playing and there is no murmur of a voice or soft shifting of someone’s clothes, none of the idle noise borne from any number of idle movements. The leather of the car seat is sticking to the skin of his arms, and he can feel the thrum of the engine somewhere deep in the heart of the car, pulsing and drumming and humming. Blue is with him, and Henry is with him, and the road is unfolding like a ribbon before them so he feels safe enough to turn his head to the side and stare.
First he looks at Blue with her hair as dark as can be, the coiled curls and hidden among them the haphazard hair clips in shades of neon green and pastel pink, candy-store red and glossy, glowing silver, and he looks at the curve of her neck and the bridge of her nose and dip of her collarbones beneath her shirt, and then he looks at her sweater that she knitted herself, chunky gray yarn done up with enough ease to fall in soft folds around her body. One of her sleeves is longer than the other in a way that was intentional, fuck you Cheng, and when he sees her move he feels like he can breathe again. The dream flows soft and sweet around him, shifting in swirls of dreamy blue-green as his mind wanders and he remembers the feel of her hand in his, her big brown eyes half-eaten by sadness and fear and the horrible inevitability of it all as they stand there on the road. He watches her flex her fingers, and the dream turns over as he remembers her breath in his mouth and the press of her lips into his own, the roll-up of his eyes and the buckle of his knees and the slow-motion blur of his soul from his self. This is all in technicolor. This is all in the very dull, dry shades of the end of the world.
So Gansey dies in his dream, over and over- but what’s one more, the third, fourth, three-thousandth time’s the charm- and then the world works its magic and he’s pieced back together, bit by bit from a shred of blueprint, and everything bursts into sharp and sudden focus around him, filled to the brim with life and living and living and life , and dream him sees everything and everyone and then Blue is right there with her arms around him, and he thinks: I love you, I love you, I love you.
Then the dream rolls over itself and he’s looking at Henry on that night with the toga party, feeling the brush of cotton against his shoulder as they sit side-by-side beneath the shine of lights so bright that they burn. Gansey is feeling brave, too big for his body and stripped of his second skin- the senator, the son, the king- and right now he is just a boy on the porch, and he is sitting next to another boy and he is growing bold. He lets his eyes wander with no small subtlety down to the cut of Henry’s cheekbones, drinks in the slope of his shoulders and the set of his torso and the tugging of his mouth at the corner, and Gansey leans in close and he thinks and he leans in closer and he thinks and he leans in close enough to feel the scrape of skin on skin and he thinks-
The dream changes, and suddenly he’s thrust into the fever-pitch of emotion he felt in that pit behind the school, standing straight and enduring the sharp cut of his breath through his lungs and the hitch of his lungs to his ribs and the prod of his ribs into his skin, his skin that is so fragile and thin and right, right there. He feels Henry folding his hands into his own with a warmth and a heat that felt like being seen or being known or any other number of raw, real things, that felt like someone ripped his soul straight from his body again; the dream shifts again and he’s back to that that night, that horrible, horrible night, standing on the cusp of something awful as Henry drapes his sweater over Gansey’s shoulders and tells him to take it, take it and go. Gansey looks Henry dead in the eye and sees himself in their dim, broken light, and he thinks: I love you, I love you, I love you.
And then he’s back in the car again, driving down a road- the road that must be in Colorado, the road that he’s awake on now- and he’s looking at the road as it unspools. It isn’t making itself fast enough and he’s nearing the end, foot too heavy on the gas for him to let up and the sharp drop down into nothing fast approaching, trees blurring into green-black-red-orange around him and the world curving and swelling and gathering to a sharp point at the nose of the car, and he careens on and on all alone now in the dead-silent car with its engine like a heartbeat, and he comes right up on the edge until he’s running on over, and for a moment the universe bursts into blank emptiness and he’s suspended head over heels next to nothing, and then he wakes up and that’s that.
This is indicative of no larger problem, he’s sure. For all this dream is, there’s not much surprising about it; he’s looked at Ronan and thought I love you, I love you, I love you, and looked at Adam and thought I love you, I love you, I love you, and looked at- well, there’s a hitch there, but someone else he’s sure, because Gansey has loved quite a lot and he has loved quite a few. On more than one occasion he’s found himself overwhelmed with a simple affection for the other people waiting in line at the coffee shop, for the blur-faced employees on their way home on the same evening bus as him, for the tired students also patronizing the corner store at two in the morning.
But Gansey these days isn’t too good at understanding that love, even if he’s good at feeling it. Gansey these days, Gansey twice reborn, isn’t sure who he is or how he feels, doesn’t quite fit right in his skin, like something got his measurements wrong. Shifted him to the left and said there, go out into the world and be great regardless of what you’re missing or not-missing or thinking that you’re missing or wondering if you’re missing. Here is what it means to be Richard Campbell Gansey III: human, with some caveats. Not dead. Very, very tired but awake all the same, not willing to die and not able to sleep (he’ll sleep when he’s dead, he supposes), puttering along a lonely road in Colorado.
Along a long and lonely road, but at least he’s not alone; Henry is now tipped all the way over in the backseat and he is snoring with vehemence, and Blue has finally found a way to sit that she’s deemed comfortable enough to fall asleep in, head pillowed on her sleeve. There is no music but there is noise, quite snuffles from Blue and then Henry who is still snoring loud enough to wake the dead, and someone’s phone is buzzing over and over, and even Gansey himself has found that on long drives like this he sometimes starts to hum, sometimes talks himself through a story or a theory for an hour straight. He is alive, no matter what that may mean and no matter what the implications; he is alive.
And there is as always that pull in his stomach, the insistent urge to try and figure this all out and not rest a moment more until the secret’s been unraveled and the feeling’s been pinned down or else until he knows everything that there is to know about everything under the sun. This is, he’d realized with a wry bit of humor a while back, that need he’s always had for a purpose in a slightly different shape, reborn just like the rest of him and just as out of place because reborn- Gansey has no Welsh kings to hunt down. Instead he has the urge to poke and prod at his insides until he can see just what a person like him is made of.
He has this bizarre and lonely longing to do the strange things that living people do, like to pull over on this gravel road in the middle of nowhere and stand outside in the cool night air, fling his arms to either side and tilt his head back until what remains of the sunlight has settled on the curve of his cheek. He’d like to breathe in deep and see if that makes him feel better. He'd like to sleep for ten hours straight. He'd like to eat a meal that has a lot of salt in it. He’d like to stop the car on the side of the road and sit with his head pressed against the steering wheel and let himself be wildly overwhelmed for a moment, because he’s been so busy driving down long and winding roads and cobbling together decent meals from vending-machine food that he hasn’t really had much time lately to feel.
So he’d like to do all of this and more. He’d like to sleep in a warm bed tonight in the same way that he’d like to share somebody’s else’s skin for a while. He’d like to try something new for a bit, stop being human and instead be the color green or the number two or maybe a rubber duck. And he’d like some sort of catharsis; just a little, just a table scrap, the bare bones or the marrow. He’ll take what he can get.
And then he’d like to raise his head back up and move on with his life, maybe curl up beneath a suffocating motel comforter and watch a shitty romcom that Blue is going to tear apart, maybe press against Henry’s side and thread his arm through Blue’s and drift off into sleep twenty minutes in. He'd like to feel safe and secure, tucked away beneath familiarity. He’d like to wake up in the middle of the night because someone fell off the bed and then spend the next ten minutes arguing about who’s going to sleep where because motel beds are not made for three people, even if two of those people aren’t particularly tall and the third is Henry, who curls so closely around anything or anyone that he sleeps near that he almost disappears entirely. He loves those little fights with all that he is, because they’re safe and comfortable and always end in the same way anyways, with Gansey in the middle, as Gansey gets cold easily and both Blue and Henry love him too much to leave him to that.
Because here is what it means to be Richard Campbell Gansey III whether he likes it or not, whether he’s twice reborn or never dead, whether he’s been killed twice over or never known either the sting of a hornet or the slip of his consciousness over the edge and into nothing: loved, as it were. Loved and loving, loved and safe. Loved, loved, loved.
And answers are about as possible for him as death or as sleep, and god knows that love’s pulled him through too much for him to stop putting stock in it now, so for now he shakes off the dregs of his dreams and his worries, and then he feels the burden on his back like a brand or a burn and he breathes in deep until it settles a little straighter. He chances a quick squeeze of his eyes shut, and then he opens them wide and looks at the sky that’s all dark but shattered through with stars, and then he lets his head fall back to where it’s meant to be. He watches the road snake off into the distance and feels the car all around him and listens to Henry and Blue and the sounds of their sleep and he thinks: I love you, I love you, I love you.