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Gansey hadn’t answered the first three times Declan called, and then he had.
It was less like annoyance and more like nostalgia when he saw the missed calls and texts from the oldest Lynch brother. Nostalgia—until it had bled a little into dread, remembering other instances of Declan’s relentless calls and nights full of looking for Ronan, finding Ronan, soothing Ronan, No, Ronan, You’ve had enough to drink, Ronan, It was just a nightmare, Ronan, You’re gonna piss off your brother, Ronan.
Ronan.
Ronan Lynch held a sacred and tender part of Gansey’s heart. He felt it bruise a little when he left Henrietta, and he felt it bruise when he’d looked at Declan’s number on his phone.
The conversation, too, transported Gansey directly back to tense negotiations under parking lot flood lights in thick Henrietta heat. Declan’s tight, flat tone—Gansey feeling, again, always, that he was somehow interrupting something.
He’s not doing well, Declan said.
It bounces around in Gansey’s brain even as he lay in bed between Henry and Blue, tuned out from their sleepy, easy chatter, Henry tracing his fingers absently down Gansey’s arm and Blue’s breath tickling his skin every time she speaks or laughs.
In what way? Gansey asked.
The fact was, Declan used resources efficiently. For years, he’d been using Gansey to deal with Ronan—efficiently. It would have bothered Gansey more if it weren’t so right. What could Declan say to Ronan, when he was like this? When Gansey would book a flight straight there to handle it instead?
He checked his texts with Ronan as soon as he'd ended the call with Declan. The last messages were from nearly five days prior, a photo of Blue in a giant chair, a stupid road-side attraction. Ronan’s flat response, first: lol. Then: having fun with fun-sized? Gansey hadn’t responded. He couldn’t remember why.
So he had booked the flight. As his breath had grown short, and his chest had grown tight, and a creeping guilt bloomed in his gut, he’d worried his lip with his thumb and purchased a plane ticket right on his phone with trembling fingers.
“Gansey?” Henry asks him, in the here and now. “Earth to Gansey?”
Gansey takes a deep breath and forces himself to remember where he is. He hasn't told either of them yet, not about the phone call or the plane ticket. It's only been a few hours since either, but he hasn't left his head since. Besides, it was easier to say big things in the dark, their bodies warm and comforting and nearby.
“Sorry,” he says. “Declan called, earlier.”
“How’s things?” Blue asks.
“I booked a flight back to Henrietta.” It doesn’t sound like a big thing, but it feels like a big thing. The core truth, Ronan needs me, feels bigger or just more complex than he cares to say out loud. “Just for a visit.”
Blue sighs against his shoulder and understands him anyway. She says, “Can’t leave him in the kennel too long. I get it.”
It earns a bright burst of laughter from Henry, who squeezes Blue’s arm, and Gansey feels something lift. Their levity helps Gansey breathe. They don’t ask any other questions.
Just a few days. That’s how long he decides to stay.
—
In retrospect, the anxiety he felt about arriving virtually unannounced is nothing at all in comparison to the way he feels as soon as he arrives at the Barns.
A vicious swell of joy and familiarity is dwarfed almost immediately by dread that begins to overtake him just a few steps up the drive, confusing and disorienting. The feeling turns dark and sour, a confusing and out-of-place horror unlike his usual spirals.
There are sudden flashes of memory and daydream-turned-nightmare: stinging, buzzing insects, his friends turning toward each other and leaving him behind, falling into death and not ever waking back up. The first time: Ronan if Noah never found him. The second: Ronan laying still on a pew, unresponsive forever.
Sudden terror is all that drives Gansey forward. He needs to find Ronan. Except—thinking of Ronan makes his heart pound harder with instant, unhelpful fear and breathlessness. He wills himself to keep moving anyway, up the drive and the porch steps and through the doors of the house. He can’t hear or think while he puts one weighted foot in front of the other to climb the stairs. When he’s finally at Ronan’s door, his voice comes out in a strained whisper.
“Ronan,” he says. His mouth is dry. He thinks of having to tell Declan, I tried. I wasn’t enough. It reminds him of before, of standing next to Declan in an emergency room, the only time he had ever seen a crack in Declan’s demeanor. Declan, with tears in his eyes and a clenched jaw, saying “Um—I’m going to keep trying to call Matthew. ”
Gansey says Ronan’s name again, louder this time, finding his voice. There’s a shape in the bed but his vision is tunneled and he can’t make it out. He can’t shake the image of Ronan still and unbreathing or the feeling of a fumbled chance.
He rasps a breath. The Ronan of the present stirs under the blankets.
In the space where Gansey can finally fucking breathe again, he drops his bag on the floor and collapses to a seat on the edge of the mattress.
“What the fuck?” Ronan says, sleepy but bewildered. “Gansey?”
Gansey doesn’t answer. Ronan’s voice soothes his adrenaline so immediately it makes him shiver. He closes his eyes and breathes in deep and even, the way Henry showed him. They’ve been practicing. He braces his hands on the blanket and lets his head hang while he attempts desperately to ground himself with the smell of Ronan, of the old, warm scent of the Barns—nearly the same, complementary and familiar.
Ronan reaches out to touch him, then doesn’t. He reaches again. Gansey feels his hand hover before, finally, he places a tentative hand on Gansey’s forearm. Ronan’s broad, warm palm on his skin offers an anchor.
Calluses. The pads of his fingertips, so gentle they raise goosebumps.
The reprieve allows Gansey to manage: “Ice.”
“Huh?”
“Do you have ice?”
“Uh, yeah. Hang on.” Ronan rolls away from him, out of bed. In just his boxers, he looks a little thin, a little like the boy that grieved Niall. He nearly trips over himself pulling on a pair of sweatpants and then curses under his breath. His tattoo looks as dark and sharp-edged as ever, and this time, Gansey can’t pick any shapes out of the jumble. It moves when he looks at it, a trick of the light or of his hyper-aware brain, so he glances away and closes his eyes.
The stairs creak gently as Ronan goes down them and as he returns. Gansey holds onto the noise and to the steadying rhythm of his own shaking breath. It feels like hours. Ronan hands Gansey an ice pack, and in a distant moment far from here but right next to it, Aurora hands him the same one, smoothing her soft hand over his hair after an injury from roughhousing with Ronan and Matthew.
He holds it to his face and exhales. He doesn’t try to fight the last of the tremors as they run through him. Hours turn to minutes. Time folds back in on itself, arranging neatly into an assortment of present bodily sensations: the melting ice against his face. Ronan’s leg against his.
When he finally opens his eyes to look at Ronan, Ronan isn’t looking at him, just pulling absently at a loose thread on the blanket. It’s quiet, save for the gentle tick of the grandfather clock in the hall.
Gansey tries to speak, but he feels his voice break before he can even make it work, so he looks back down and knocks his leg against Ronan’s.
Finally: “How are you?” It comes out near-whisper. His voice sounds raw. He clears his throat.
Ronan’s eyes are on him then, still disbelieving and wary.
“Gansey—“ Ronan takes a breath. “Jesus. How are you?”
Gansey wants to spend the next three days with his head on Ronan’s chest just to be sure Ronan’s heart is still beating. He wants to call Blue and Henry and Adam and beg them to come here so they can pile on top of the two of them in this bed. He wants none of them to ever leave. He wants Ronan to understand how desperate he feels, and then doesn’t, also.
Gansey says none of this and presses the ice pack against his eyes.
“I’m great,” he says, which earns a huff of laughter from Ronan. There’s something nervous about it, which makes Gansey feel another sort of unbalanced.
Ronan adjusts beside him and Gansey hears him breathe, in through his nose and out through his mouth. Outrageously, infinitely soothing.
“I would have warned you if I knew you were coming,” he says.
“Warned me?”
“The veil, or whatever. Like a security system. It’s meant to keep people away from the Barns. Makes you feel like shit.”
“Oh,” Gansey breathes. “Yeah.” It’s helpful to place this episode as an effect of a dream object, not a spiral so deep and sudden Gansey wondered if he was finally about to lose his mind.
Ronan starts, then stops. He sighs. Gansey registers the frustration. He doesn’t say anything else, but notices the warmth of Ronan’s body next to his, closer than it was before.
“It’s alright,” Gansey offers. “Easier now that I know.”
“It ends about mid-way. The dream. I haven’t seen someone bring it inside.”
“Oh,” Gansey says, weakly. He pulls the ice away from his eyes. “That was just a run-of-the-mill panic attack, I think. The last part.”
“Still having those? A lot of them?” Ronan’s still watching him. Gansey doesn’t look, but he feels it.
“They’re manageable,” Gansey says. That was true. “A lot” was relative anyway, and he isn't here for himself, at least not entirely. He's here for Ronan, whose hand falls just short of Gansey’s arm again. Puzzling. At present, though, everything feels woozy and strange.
He opens his mouth to reassure him when Ronan falls rather dramatically back down against the mattress and asks, voice toneless, “Tell me what brings you to town, then, geezer.”
Gansey finally looks at him. The familiar planes of his face. The careful way he’s set his features. Something quiet and insistent tugs at Gansey's insides. This whole circumstance feels so earnest now that he's sitting here on Ronan’s bed, now that he knows Ronan is safe, but he can't deny his relief.
“I texted,” Gansey says. “And called.”
“I was sleeping.”
“For twenty hours?”
“No,” Ronan says, but he looks away. “I was outside in between but I didn’t bring my phone. Declan won’t stop calling.” His brow furrows again at this. He glances to his bedside table, where his phone sits, face-down.
A self-conscious heat spreads at the back of Gansey’s neck. “Sounds like him.”
Ronan reaches for his phone then—unusual, since Gansey had never known Ronan to check his phone upon waking, or ever—and some of the tension leaves his face. There’s a beat until Ronan falls back against his pillow. He sounds a little more like himself when he says, “Want to hear something ridiculous? He made me an honest-to-God chore list.”
Gansey sees it then, just beyond Ronan, taped to the plaster wall. His own name in Declan’s curt handwriting at the bottom. He says, unconvincingly, “Wow.”
Ronan’s face falls. He says, flatly, “What.”
Gansey exhales and falls backward on the mattress too, but being face-to-face with Ronan doesn’t make it easier. He lets Ronan search until he says, flat and scowling, “Declan.”
“Declan,” Gansey agrees, truthfully, a little ashamed. Ronan pulls his pillow from underneath his own head and holds it against his face.
“I’m fine,” Ronan assures him, when he pulls the pillow away. His strange, far-away hesitation is mostly melted. Gansey can tell he's annoyed, instead. Even though he's sorry to have caused it, it feels warm. Familiar.
“Declan didn’t seem to think so.”
“Declan doesn’t know shit,” Ronan says, with bite.
Gansey doesn’t answer that, just hums and looks up at the ceiling. There’s a crack, a little to the left of them, that’s as familiar to Gansey as the moles on his own skin.
He doesn’t like conceding that Declan called him in on this. He doesn’t like that he hadn’t picked it up himself. It was as though he hadn’t been watching Ronan closely enough. When he thinks about it, the feeling is itchy. Heavy.
He’s not sure what to do with it.
“I—” Gansey starts, but I missed you dies on his tongue. Something about it thrills him, embarrasses him, and he doesn’t know what to do with that either.
There was so much he hadn’t stopped feeling, leftovers from before he’d died and the things that came after. On the road in a bubble with Henry and Blue, it became so natural to let words turn to touch when he didn’t know how to name it all. Until now, he hadn’t realized it felt so freeing.
In a place cemented as familiar, it’s jarring to experience this new context, his inability to reach out and touch. His fingers nearly twitch with it.
“But I wanted to see you, too,” is what he finally says, which is embarrassing anyway.
Ronan grunts and closes his eyes. After a moment of quiet, Ronan’s palpable annoyance simmering alongside Gansey’s overwhelm, Ronan says, “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Outside.”
He’s up and clambering over Gansey’s legs to get out of bed and pull on a hoodie from the floor before Gansey sits up. He waits for him in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his sweatpants and tension set in his shoulders.
Gansey follows. Now that he didn’t feel like his lungs were about to collapse, he has time to appreciate the familiarity of the house on their way to the door, comfortingly unchanged by time. And then, too, the landscape of the Barns is as wondrous as always. At this hour, it's sun-soaked splendor, as impossibly beautiful as Ronan. Gansey feels himself lift; he imagines this moment joined by Adam, or Blue, or Henry.
But it’s just Ronan here, alone. Melancholy makes a home next to the relieved happiness in Gansey’s heart.
They move forward. Gansey glances worriedly at the drive, unthinkingly, but Ronan swings around to buffer himself between him and the winding gravel, guiding them both past with a huff and a hand flat against Gansey’s back.
Gansey presses back into Ronan’s hand before he realizes he’s doing it, used to reassuring touch. Ronan stills next to him, presses his fingers in, and then lets go. It happens so quickly Gansey would doubt it at all if not for the way Ronan looks away from him when Gansey turns his head.
“It’s not gonna get you,” Ronan says, and clears his throat. “When you leave, I’ll show you the way around.”
“Oh. Sure,” Gansey says, equal parts comforted and uneven.
They walk through the impossible weave of wildlife, real and dreamt. Gansey always thought the several barns for which the property was named and the here-and-there pastures and gardens looked intentionally placed among the natural growth, as though they’d always been that way, worn-in from day one.
Ronan leads, but Gansey’s unsure if it’s real direction or Ronan’s need to move that propels them. He isn’t thinking of the walk anyway. He’s thinking of Ronan, of how he still looks as innate as any other piece of this environment, and of how he himself never considered anything otherwise.
Gansey could picture so many versions of him, like refractions in time. The wild boy who’d first captured his heart; the sharper and more savage Ronan who finally riddled himself back home; and this Ronan, here. He's only just beginning to realize what subtle changes occurred while he’d been away, how quickly Ronan Lynch evolved. Blink-and-you-miss-it.
Now, there's something quietly, insistently nagging at Gansey's periphery, an unsettled and suggestive feeling that could be equally attributed to anxiety or newfound intuition.
Ronan breaks the silence. Gansey finds they’ve stopped. His own reflections hadn’t permitted him to wonder whether Ronan had also been quietly in thought—but brooding was just as likely, maybe.
Ronan settles onto the ground directly in front of a stump. He pats the ground once and shrugs one shoulder, as if to say, Up to you. The grass is pressed flat in a circle wide enough for two, longer weeds and wildflowers growing in a near-perfect border around them. Gansey turns from him and looks out. Here, a bit further away and up a mild incline, there's a beautiful view of the property and a clearer picture of hazy blue and purple mountains in the distance.
A well-loved overlook, then. Gansey wonders if Adam and Ronan spent time here together, and if it was often.
“How long do you plan to stay?” Ronan asks, picking at blades of flattened grass. He sounds deeply neutral.
“A few days, I thought. If that’s alright.”
“Sargent and Cheng will be alright that long on their own?”
Something about the question feels wrong. Something about Gansey’s own startled, contrary reaction feels wrong. Gansey has no spoons left to sort through it, so all he says is, “Of course.”
Ronan only shrugs. Gansey settles next to him on the ground, reclines fully, and shades the late afternoon sun from his face with his hand. So much silence settles between them that Gansey thinks Ronan isn’t going to respond at all until he finally says, “Yeah. That’s alright.”
Gansey turns to him at the sudden response. Ronan looks handsome here, almost regal, the last remaining and willing sovereign of this valley's kingdom. Again: refractions in time. To Gansey, something about him—in this light, maybe, or just because of the strange day—feels familiar and new all at once.
It's not disorienting, but the rush of feeling is overwhelming. Gansey wants to touch him. He feels he suddenly doesn't know how.
There’s a slight smile at the corners of Ronan’s mouth, though, and it's nothing but familiar. Gansey smiles back, helplessly.
“Good,” he says, and means it.
For the first time since he’d seen Declan’s missed calls on his phone, Gansey feels some measure of peace.
—
Gansey wakes to noise. Something like a cabinet closing, the muffled clinking of dishware or silverware, a soft thump followed by a quietly hissed “Fuck.”
He thinks: Ronan. He briefly thinks they’re back at Monmouth. It only lasts until he opens his eyes and takes in the early, fresh slant of light coming in filtered through sheer curtains onto the living room of Ronan’s childhood home.
The night before, Ronan abruptly left Gansey on his own and returned a moment later, arms full of pillows and folded blankets.
“You can stay in here,” Ronan said, halfway to a question, nodding toward the couch.
Gansey had never once stayed on the couch at the Barns. He had been suddenly unsure of how to navigate further. It struck him as odd that he should sleep apart from Ronan, but then it struck him as odd that he would expect otherwise. Something slipped out of grip, a confusing misstep.
Any awkwardness between them was worse than any he might feel with a stranger, because he didn’t understand it. Their history and the trusting, friendly intimacy born out of it should have made that insecurity between them impossible. Instead, Gansey looked away from Ronan Lynch and to the couch and said, helplessly, “Okay.”
Now, there are blankets twisted uncomfortably around his legs and an ache in his neck from the awkward position he’d slept in.
“You’re still here,” Ronan says, rounding the corner into the room just as Gansey slides his glasses on. “Hey. Morning.”
“Did you think I’d flee in the night?” Gansey asks.
It doesn’t land. Ronan goes a little vacant, just for a moment. Gansey clears his throat.
“No,” Ronan says, and quirks his brow, effectively turning his expression back into something Gansey recognizes. “You even still remember how to get to town from here?”
It’s a little half-hearted, but Gansey grabs on. Normalcy is a relief. He follows the thread of it up off the couch and into the kitchen, into cautious but easy chatter with Ronan, mostly: Is there more coffee? You know where the mugs are, Gansey. He did. Is there breakfast? Canned beans, a bag of flour in the pantry, an old jar of pickles, and mystery tupperware. Are you feeling lucky? He's sorry to have asked.
It feels almost like Monmouth. For a moment, he doesn’t think about how badly he wants to call Blue and Henry, or why he feels guilty for it; he doesn’t wonder about Adam; he briefly stops wondering if he’s just imagining Ronan’s indecipherable glances.
They cobble something together, a lackluster but bearable breakfast of toast and assorted, unusual sides. They eat at the dining table, which feels too formal for the meal. Gansey notices an even layer of dust except for two places—just to the left of his current seat, closer to Ronan, and Ronan’s own—and it’s hard not to think of Adam after that, or a Lynch house emptied of almost all the Lynches.
It was becoming impossible to stop noticing changes, even in a place as untouched by time as the Barns. Gansey pushes his plate away, swallows the lump in his throat, and says, “Let’s go outside.”
They go outside.
Just as before, the aimless wandering gives Gansey the space to breathe. He doesn’t mention any dreams though until they run into one, a shifty creature in a color Gansey thinks maybe he’s never seen. It’s hard to tell, since he has trouble looking at it straight-on, but it nuzzles its nose against Gansey’s palm and flares warm breath gently across his skin. It’s an impossible animal with a strangely calm disposition, encouraging the same affection Gansey felt for nearly all of Ronan’s dream things.
It isn’t the first time he’s wondered if that affection was born from his own love of Ronan, or from Cabeswater’s, or both. More than once, he worked himself tired over trying to figure whether it was always Cabeswater that had drawn him to Ronan in the first place through the strange, circular way it was part of him before it was part of him—or if his love was built, earned, refined over time through the overwhelming events thrust upon them—and did it matter, really, if any path lead him back here, sitting next to Ronan now in the grass?
Gansey breathes in and out. He scans himself for any signs of impending spiral, and finds there are none. A breeze tickles his face and the dreamt creature is already wandering away. When he turns, Ronan is watching him carefully.
“I dreamt another Cabeswater,” Ronan says, as if he was now capable of mind-reading. As if it meant nothing at all. His tone doesn’t match his eyes.
Gansey’s stomach drops through his feet immediately. He exhales as though he’s just hit the ground. It feels like he has.
“Oh,” he breathes. “Have you?”
“Lindenmere,” Ronan says. Gansey’s face is hot where Ronan is looking at him, for some reason. The full effect of his gaze is intense, searching, a little guarded. The rest of his face, though, is curiously blank.
Gansey stares at him, dumbfounded.
“Do you want to see it?” Ronan asks.
Something within him tugs again, pulls him off-balance. Of course Ronan dreamt another. Cabeswater was part of Ronan, some otherworldly limb—and then Gansey took it with him, into his renewed life, and away from here.
He does want to see it. Badly. Walking into Cabeswater for the first time felt undeniably right, like pieces locking into place. He knew why now, but that didn’t change the magic of the feeling. It calls to him again. He nearly opens his mouth to say yes, but when he pictures walking into Lindenmere, he finds he can’t imagine it without the rest of them.
Once, Gansey thought Ronan was incomplete without access to the Barns. Once, he couldn’t imagine anything outside of their tie to Cabeswater, finding Glendower, the ticking clock at the end of his own line. Once, all of those things had been true. But the answer to those things was never the two of them huddled together, alone.
There's a sense of heaviness sitting with him now, present from his first step up the winding drive. Some of it's for Ronan, he knows. Some of it's for the understanding of inevitable change. There were so many pieces to come, so many things to fall into place.
Although it nags him, Gansey feels more at peace with this understanding than he had the first time he’d faced something like it.
He's not sure that Ronan does.
“Not yet,” Gansey finally says, quiet. “Not without Blue and Adam.”
Ronan looks at him, and looks away, and says, “Okay.”
When Gansey spent a year sure that he was going to die, he thought he’d experienced the full range of emotion, bitter and sweet and where both melded into one. But as he watches Ronan look away from him now, as he feels the empty space where the others should be with them, feeling rolls through him with intensity. Equal parts sticky and sweet, painful and indecipherable.
Again, he wants to reach out and touch Ronan—he couldn’t imagine a way to put this into words, but he wanted Ronan to know—but he’s stopped as the sky breaks open overhead suddenly, without warning.
The rain jolts them both out of it, cold water on sun-soaked skin, and by the time they make it inside they’re both soaked through.
“All those dreams,” Gansey says, biting back chattering teeth. “And you can’t control the weather?”
“Come on, Gansey,” Ronan says. “Be realistic.”
They make their way upstairs and exchange wet clothes for dry. Ronan keeps carefully turned away, a gesture so unusually considerate that Gansey’s nearly certain he’s making it up. Ronan has to lend Gansey a sweater, but based on the faded blue of it, Gansey thinks it must be one of Adam’s.
Before he can stop himself, or think about it, Gansey asks, “Has Adam seen it? Lindenmere?”
“No,” Ronan says. He doesn’t elaborate, and he’s still turned away, so Gansey can’t see his face.
He lets the moment lie while he pulls the sweater over his head and then asks, “Does he know I’m here?”
It’s a weird question, even as it’s coming out of his own mouth. Ronan turns and looks briefly stricken at this, which is possibly even more confusing than Gansey having asked the question in the first place.
“I just mean—I haven’t seen you talk to him,” he says, which is possibly even worse.
“No,” he says again. “I fucked it up.”
The admission is sudden, confusing, and unjustly nonchalant. Gansey feels a shift, but he struggles to place the cause of it. He says, “What? Lindenmere?”
“No. What? No.”
“Sorry. What’s happening?”
Ronan sits on his bed. Gansey intimately knows that particular set of tension in Ronan’s shoulders and the way he begins to absently pick at a scab on his hand.
“Adam. I fucked it up with Adam.”
There’s some mental resistance to this, like the urge to correct Ronan is on the tip of his tongue and he can't remember what he was going to say. His stomach drops. He feels terribly, guiltily out of sync.
“No,” he says, soft and careful. He sits down gently near Ronan. “I’m sure you didn’t.”
“Do you ever feel like—“ Ronan breathes out slowly, a near-hiss, like controlling air from a balloon. He deflates like one, too, falling back against the mattress with another sigh. Gansey holds the space carefully, like it’s something thin and fragile and unpredictable. Ronan continues, “Fuck. I don’t know.”
Here, again, on Ronan’s bed, there are a thousand things Gansey feels but can't begin to verbalize. This moment mixes with others, layered in his memory. Here as children, or at least younger than they were now, a tented sheet over their heads while they talked excitedly. Quieting themselves when Aurora came walking down the hall. Her admonishments were always gentle though, and full of humor. It was actually Declan they usually had to worry about, expression too somber on his young, tired face, and dedicated, for some reason, to absolute vigilance.
He follows the memory down onto the bed, reclining next to Ronan, as if Aurora could still come down the hall, as if Declan was still friendly enough to give a gentle tut instead of an SOS call from another state, as if it was still that casual. As if it had ever been.
“Talk to me. What do you need to do? Follow him?”
Ronan’s jaw works while he stares at the ceiling, arms crossed tightly over his chest.
“If you need to get away,” Gansey continues, “You’re still invited to come with us, you know.”
Ronan still doesn’t answer, or move, or look at him. It hurts Gansey to imagine Ronan here licking his wounds over a fight with Adam. Was that really what Declan had called him on? Gansey couldn’t moderate for them anymore, as much as the twinge in his heart says otherwise.
He’s never known Ronan, always untamed, to sit in one place like this unless forced. Gansey can’t wrap his head around it. Some yet-undiscovered understanding nags at him, again and again.
“It can’t be that bad,” Gansey says. Gentle. Not gentle enough. “With Adam. Is it?”
“You know me.” Ronan lets his head lull on his pillow and turns to look Gansey in the face. His expression is flat, but Gansey can see the flicker of something in his eyes. “Top marks in being a fuck up. That’s on my recommendation letter, even. Get it?”
“I don’t think you’re a fuck up,” Gansey says, softly, an ache radiating in his chest.
“Sure,” Ronan says. He shrugs, looks back toward the ceiling, and closes his eyes. “Mention that to Declan, next time you two catch up. You know, it wouldn’t hurt to mention it to Adam, either, if you ever get him on the phone.”
Words fail him, unhelpful as always. He can feel Ronan’s body heat, not quite flush against him. He wishes, again, for the freedom to reach out and touch.
“I’m still here,” Gansey tries. It’s inadequate. In some ways, he’d already proven he wasn’t. At least, not the way he used to be.
“I’m figuring it out, Gansey,” Ronan says, a new determination in his voice. “Okay?”
They all were. Each of them had already moved into some new chapter—except Ronan, here at home. There was no world Gansey could imagine where Ronan stayed forever in the limits of any one thing, even in a place made limitless by dreams. What did he need? Gansey had guessed at this often. He searches within himself and finds he’s just as unsure as ever.
“Okay. Yes. It’s your right,” he says. “But—if you need me.”
Ronan doesn’t respond to this with anything more than soft acknowledgement. Gansey, hyper-attuned to Ronan’s level of tension at any given time, holds himself still and waits for it to settle.
It does. Ronan’s breathing begins to slow; tight shoulders and folded arms relax. There’s no sound other than their mingled breathing and the rain still pattering at the window. Crickets chirping. The hum of the ceiling fan.
Falling asleep is nothing at all.
—
It’s late or very early when Gansey opens his eyes next. There’s an exclamation that he doesn’t catch, sleep-addled brain trying desperately to catch up.
The inventory is: soft, freshly-dawn light, diluted through fluttering curtains. Gansey, reaching for Henry and Blue before he remembers where he is. Then Ronan, sitting with his back toward Gansey at the edge of the bed, feet on the floor, hunched over himself with his head resting on folded arms.
“Hey,” Gansey says, rubbing his eyes. Awareness returns to him slow and steady, but noticing Ronan’s moods is pure muscle memory.
“Hey,” he says again. He sits up now. He hears an exhale from Ronan, who doesn’t immediately turn. When he finally does pull himself up, it’s one movement at a time: a slow straightening of his spine, another deep breath before he finally turns toward Gansey, and another beat still before he looks at Gansey’s face. It’s disjointed and unreadable in the surreal light of not-yet-morning. The look in his eyes is also alien.
Gansey lets him search, and then he asks, “Are you alright?”
“Is this a dream?” Ronan asks, quiet. His voice is low. He seems distant. There’s a lurch in Gansey’s belly, like he missed a step walking down the stairs.
“No,” Gansey insists immediately. A disproportionate panic rises in his throat, despite any logic. “Do you think it’s a dream?”
“No,” Ronan says, but slowly. He looks away from Gansey when he says it, and Gansey tries to make sense of the answer, like it doesn’t fit with what he knows about Ronan’s blunt honesty. He doesn’t have a reason to distrust him, he thinks, despite how off-kilter his time at the Barns was already.
It was all strange. Ronan’s expression now, his other strange and hesitant glances, a persistent, nagging sense that Gansey was missing pieces of the truth. Ronan could cultivate mystery, work his way around outright honesty, but there were very few things he’d ever truly kept from Gansey.
Except—anything that had ever been kept was about dreaming.
There’s an immediate physical reaction to the thought. A lump in his throat, something cold in his chest, sweaty palms, even before his mind could catch up. He remembers Ronan’s strange, hesitant glances, and his own nagging senses.
“Do you think I’m a dream?” Gansey asks softly, speaking it aloud as the realization comes forward. It’s akin to being dipped into an ice bath. He feels his limbs go cold and slow.
He watches Ronan go rigid and hears another forced exhale. When he turns to Gansey, the look in his eyes is so much like a younger Ronan. The same, deep, earnest fear Gansey saw in him immediately after Niall died, after he’d found out he’d lost his father and mother and home and oldest brother in one fell swoop. Gansey’s own reaction to this is so forceful and immediate that he nearly pulls Ronan toward him.
“No. Ronan.”
“Don’t say my name like that,” Ronan says, and he closes his eyes.
Gansey doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know what to say at all. How horribly had he failed, to shake Ronan’s trust in him after all this time? What led Ronan to doubt even this? By the time Declan had called him, Gansey was already egregiously late.
“Tell me what you need,” Gansey asks. He doesn’t even register the panic in his own voice. It’s a purely instinctual feeling, the need to comfort Ronan and resolve this guilt. “It’s not a dream. Tell me what you need.”
“I don’t know, Gansey.” It’s the most honest he’s been so far, maybe.
When they’d first met, before life shaped him otherwise, Ronan had been so naturally open and vulnerable. It enchanted Gansey, back then. Here was vulnerability again, only it isn't light-hearted as before, or rooted in trust as it developed during their time at Monmouth. This is exhaustion. Defeat. It threatens to split Gansey from the present. His hands are shaking.
Ronan says, “Hey.”
Gansey’s having trouble focusing on anything until one of Ronan’s hands closes around his, until the touch grounds him as immediately as it had during his first day at the Barns. Here, again, in Ronan’s bed. Here, again, panicking. Warm skin, firm grip. He leans into it before he can help himself.
“Man, you—just come here,” Ronan murmurs, and he still sounds defeated when he says it.
It had been awhile since they’d really and truly held each other. The last instances Gansey could remember were the immediate months after Niall died and a period of unbroken contact after Cabeswater revived him. Still, physicality between them isn't new. It feels strangely familiar to fold into Ronan this way.
Ronan slides his legs in between Gansey’s. Gansey pushes their foreheads together. His hands curl against Ronan’s chest, then one to his arm, and then to the nape of Ronan’s neck so he can curl his fingers against the soft, buzzed hair there.
There's a warmth first, in the closeness. Innocent comfort. Ronan opens his eyes—this close, Gansey can’t see much but a blur and the color of them—and something big and nameless shifts in the space between.
Gansey is suddenly very aware of their breath mingling and of the closeness of their bodies. He pulls back, but they don’t untangle. It feels like waking up from a fuzzy dream where he’d been so sure, acting on muscle memory he didn’t understand yet. Ronan squeezes his eyes closed and exhales.
Gansey’s throat feels dry. He feels a little panicky too, but that's not entirely unusual, lately. Again, he says, “I’m here.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not a dream.”
“Okay,” Ronan says. Gansey can’t tell if he really believes it. Once, Ronan told him something was starting, the quest that defined Gansey’s entire life. That feeling echoes again within him. Something starting. Maybe there always would be. Time felt like a circle, but it also moved forward.
Something relaxes. He moves his attention out of his mind and towards the press of Ronan’s body.
“I’m figuring it out,” Ronan says again, but it sounds different murmured against Gansey’s hair.
“Your Glendower, Ronan. So to speak,” Gansey says, after a moment. He keeps his eyes closed. “I’m the last person to tell you you shouldn’t look for it. Just—please don’t do it alone.”
Ronan breathes. He does not answer.
“I’m one call away,” he continues, insistent. “Maybe several texts. Jesus. I’m sorry. An impulsive plane ride, even.”
Ronan huffs a silent laugh. “Sure, Gansey. I got it.” He pauses, then, “I’m glad you came.”
Gansey measures his exhale and keeps his head squarely under Ronan’s jaw. Tears prick at his eyes, but he’s unable to assign them to a single cause.
The sun has only just started to crest the horizon. It’s still mostly dark, in Ronan’s room. Sleep welcomes them back easily.
—
Gansey’s final day at the Barns passes in easy companionship. They don’t talk much, or they talk about nothing when they do. Gansey feels tired, both from waves of alternating relief and reframing and concern. He knows Ronan feels it too, if his moody quiet was any indicator.
Some things are lighter. Many feel heavier. Some of his questions and fears were answered and soothed—but they already felt practically juvenile. If the visit proved anything, it was that there was no quick fix, and there never had been. One single action wasn't ever enough to sway Ronan. Gansey’s weight in this regard was only earned only through support and availability and patience. He knew that.
Again, comfort and nostalgia war against concern of the unknown and unending change. Puzzle pieces no longer fit as before. Gansey feels unsure of what the future holds for them, but he's learning to be okay with uncertainty. He's always sure of Ronan, at least, even if he's not sure where his path would lead. Only Ronan was ever able to make that choice.
As they’re saying goodbye, Gansey sees glimpses of moments stacked on top of one another: Ronan the boy, sharp-toothed and grinning; Ronan the shell, wasting and empty of anything at all; Ronan with unchecked claws; Ronan, who he would love for the rest of his life.
Everyone always thought he was Gansey’s to control. Ronan, even, often believed it. The truth was that it was normally Ronan who pulled Gansey into his gravity. Whatever path he was on, he would go. Gansey would try to lap at the shores of wherever he ended up.
“Come with us,” Gansey says, even though he means come with me, and he knows the answer.
“I can’t,” Ronan says, which is the answer.
“We can see Adam,” he says, and then regrets it, because it feels childish.
“Nah,” Ronan says. He rubs at one of his eyes. “Do your thing.”
“You’re okay?”
“I’m okay, Gansey.”
Gansey knows he isn't. Maybe he would be. He was going to figure it out, he’d said. He deserves the chance. Gansey believes in him and in his own instincts, too, as unclear as they were. He believes in their inextricable future.
It isn’t any easier, when he returns to Blue and Henry. It’s comforting to be back in their arms, but there’s still an ache for the past he misses and the future he doesn’t know. Maybe that was what growing up was. For a long time, he never thought he’d have the chance. His understanding shifted constantly now, though, while the people around him grew.
He was growing too, maybe. More than he'd ever felt possible.
—
Gansey’s at a rest stop off the interstate with Henry and Blue nearly a month later when he hears it.
They stopped for some mundane, insignificant reason—and the rest stop is mundane and insignificant too, and Gansey’s most pressing thought is which snacks to choose, and then he hears the clerk say Greywaren.
He pauses.
It’s possible that he’s misheard. It happens. The roundabout way he experiences time comes with surround-sound, sometimes. When he turns, slowly, Blue has her eyebrow quirked at him from where she’s across an aisle by the drinks with Henry. Bad sign.
The small box TV balanced among racks of lip balm and e-cigarettes and phone chargers and souvenir shot glasses at the register relays news of significant damage to private property, and the second person behind the register with the clerk says, in low tones not meant for other ears, “They say by a Greywaren? Is it supposed to sound so vigilante?”
Worse sign.
“Sorry,” Gansey says, too breathless for proper honey-voiced persuasion, “What did you just say?”
The clerk first shakes her head and pops her gum. Her eyes glaze over with guarded customer service. “Just gossiping, back here. Ready to check out?”
Henry says yes. Blue takes Gansey back outside. How long had it been, exactly, since he’d talked to Ronan last? There’s a sense of knowing that settles within him, sour and apprehensive.
By then, Ronan isn’t answering his phone.