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“It’s not going to show us the actual future though, right?” Blue sounds more hesitant than Adam expected.
“You’re literally surrounded by people seeing the future like twenty-four seven. You know that right?” Adam would have phrased it better, but Ronan has a point.
Blue bristles. “You can’t trust rituals like this. Normal people look at things that might happen, they think it’s all predetermined, and then next thing you know you’re changing your life to make it happen. You see a vision that your kid is going to kill you, you raise them up and never trust them, you treat them like shit, you set them up to want to kill you. It doesn’t end well.”
“It’s just potentials, right, Adam?” Gansey’s squinting behind his glasses, looking over the diagram drawn out on the floor. “Just possibilities. And if Cabeswater sent the vision to you, then Cabeswater has something to tell us.”
Blue still looks unsure, but she takes her place at the edge of the diagram.
Adam places the stones in the arrangement Cabeswater instructed. He takes a breath and speaks a few words in the odd language he still doesn’t understand.
They wait a long moment, looking around at each other.
Ronan says, “Is anything goin—” And then they are all slammed into darkness.
Blue opens her eyes to bright sun and her own backyard. She blinks and the yard is full of people. Everything happens in flashes, like frames missing from a reel of film. Her mother stands beneath the branches of Blue’s favorite tree, the Gray Man at her side. She blinks and Calla is at her side, tears sliding silently off her chin. She pulls Blue close to her and they hold on to each other. Blue feels the most painful joy, Maura’s face lighting up her bones with beauty. Calla looks Blue in the eye, and she sees her own broken heart reflected back at her. Light washes over her and she comes to flat on her back on the floor of Monmouth Manufacturing.
Ronan is half-running along a path in the woods. It’s not Cabeswater, it might not even be in Virginia, but he’s not lost. There’s a kind of glee bubbling up inside him, a foreign feeling that reminds him the most of running with Matthew as a child. Somewhere farther down the path comes a squeal. Maybe a bird, maybe not. He smiles wider—this is what he’s been waiting for. “I’m coming!” he shouts, though his mouth doesn’t open. It’s more that he hears himself shout from far away. The squeal turns into a laugh, high and full. He can almost see the movement ahead of him when he’s slammed back to reality, a grin splitting his face, panting on his own laughter.
Adam is very still. He’s looking out over an ocean, and far far out he can see the beginnings of a storm gathering. Wind whips at him, and when he looks down he can see that he’s standing at the edge of a cliff. His hair is standing up every which way, tossed by wind and damp with spray and the first few rain drops. He takes a deep breath and feels salt in his lungs, feels himself inflate like a balloon. Something bumps into his side, and he looks out of the corner of his eye. There’s a shoulder, strong and solid beside him. He can’t see anything else, just the broad curve of it. He closes his eyes and presses his cheek to it, and feels light and free and real. He opens his eyes with the smell of the sea still lingering, one hand pressed to the side of his face.
Gansey falls into darkness and stays there. He tries to open his mouth to take a breath, but he doesn’t have a mouth. He doesn’t have lungs, either, but that doesn’t stop him from panicking. There is something infinite about the darkness, and the longer he stays the more unsure he is that it actually is dark. One moment he’s sure it’s dark as a cave, the next it’s clearly painfully bright, blindingly bright, too bright to see. When he comes to his eyes are open, and dried out like he never had them closed in the first place. They feel red, and his cheeks are wet.
He sits up and tucks his face into his knees for a moment, reminding himself that he has a body. It’s like that moment in the cave surrounded by ghostly hornets, hanging in nothingness, but worse.
Ronan touches his arm and he startles. “You all right, man?”
Gansey wipes his face and nods. Blue is looking down at her hands with an odd, sad smile. Adam has his arms tucked around himself, looking off into the distance. Ronan’s cheeks are pink, which is enough to get Gansey’s attention.
“What did you see?” he asks.
Ronan shrugs. “Not really sure. It was like a dream. I was running, and I think I—” he laughs at himself and shrugs again. “I don’t know.”
“I think I saw my mother’s wedding,” Blue says hesitantly. “It was . . . weird.”
They turn to Adam, expectantly, and he snaps back to himself. “I saw the ocean.”
Ronan raises his eyebrows, waiting for him to elaborate, but he just shrugs with a small shrug. “It was cool.”
“Fascinating,” Ronan says flatly and gets up to find Chainsaw.
“What about you?” Blue turns to Gansey.
Gansey rubs at his lower lip. “Um, just Helen making a speech. Couldn’t hear the specifics. Not much of a surprise.” He grins at her, but it cracks in the middle.
“Mine felt weird, too. Kind of sad.” She squeezes his hand and he feels like he can’t breathe.
“Yeah,” he gasps out, rising and striding over to the bathroom. “Sorry.”
---
Adam leaves the others to clean up and slips over to the bathroom door. He knocks quietly. Silence.
“Gansey?”
“Yeah,” he replies, but it’s muffled. “Just a minute.”
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah, I just need—”
Adam can hear a long, shuddering breath and a muffled curse. He cracks open the door and looks in to see Gansey with his fingers knotted in his hair, siting down against the fridge. He crosses the room in two steps, crouching down in front of his friend
“Hey.”
Gansey takes another deep breath and tries to smile reassuringly at him. “It’ll pass,” he says apologetically.
“It’s okay.”
Adam sits with him for a minute in silence, two fingers pressing against Gansey’s knee. He doesn’t look at him, sure that if their positions were reversed he’d want nothing more than to be left alone. When he glances up, though, Gansey’s looking right at him with the saddest eyes he’s ever seen.
“Gansey?”
Gansey smiles at him.
“You okay?”
Gansey rubs at his face again. “Yeah. Just selfish.”
“What did you see? Really?”
Gansey is silent for so long that Adam thinks he’s refusing to answer.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I saw nothing. Emptiness. Non-existence.”
Adam’s heart stops.
“I don’t have a future.”
Images of Gansey’s body on the ground, Ronan’s fury, blood on his hands flash through Adam’s head.
“Not really, anyway. Not one that matters.”
“Gansey,” he gasps. “I’m not going to let that happen. I’m not.”
Gansey smiles sadly at him. “It’s okay. It’ll be good for you.”
“What?”
“I’m not going to be a dick about it. It’s what you want.”
“What?” Adam pushes forward on his knees, caging Gansey in against the fridge. “How could you say that?”
“Not needing me anymore, that’s what you’ve always wanted. Ronan too. I know I can’t— I’m not good at leaving things be.” His fingers are back in his hair, and Adam grabs at them, stilling them.
“That’s doesn’t mean I'm going to— Gansey.” He can’t seem to find the right thing to say, can’t figure out what to do with his body.
“I’m just being stupid, it’s fine.” Gansey shifts away from him, as much as he can. Adam moves back to give him space, his hands twitching against his own legs. “I just always thought Glendower was a step, you know? On the way to something. That there was something after. But there’s nothing afterward that matters, obviously, nothing worth showing me, not even a potential. And I— I was trying to figure out why. What I did wrong.”
“No, you didn’t—”
“But it’s you, isn’t it?”
Adam takes a harsh breath and his eyes burn. This is it, I’m going to tell him. I’m going to cry and then I’m going to tell him. He’s never wanted to cry in front of Gansey, not ever, but Gansey’s staring at him with so much . . . whatever that is in his eyes and it’s like being gutted alive.
“I’m going to be so proud of you,” Gansey says. “I know you hate that.”
“What?”
“You’ll get out of here, make a life on your terms. Ronan, too. He’ll figure himself out, straighten things out with his brother. Grow up.” He smiles down at his hands. “Blue never needed me in the first place. Noah’s bound to go wherever ghosts go. And I— I’m nothing without you, am I?”
He doesn’t know. It hits Adam like a blow and he has to sit back. It’s not death he saw, it’s emptiness. He doesn’t know about you. He feels like a coward.
“I’m sure it was a mistake. We fucked up the ritual.”
“We didn’t fuck up the ritual. Maura’s going to get married, Ronan’s going to be happy. You’ll see the ocean. And I’ll fade.” He rises, suddenly, brushing himself off. “Sorry. Sorry; I’m being a child. It’s better now. Thanks.”
Adam stares up at him and hears a voice in his deaf ear.
Adam.
It’s Gansey’s voice.
Goodbye, Adam.
He catches a glimpse of Gansey’s eyes going wide and then everything is dark.
He’s in Cabeswater and— no. No, he is Cabeswater, and he can feel every branch and weed and drop of water within himself. He focuses down, suddenly, on a figure standing within himself, in a clearing. Gansey.
There is a rustling somewhere in his gut, Cabeswater’s gut, the innards of Cabeswater. A rustling, then a humming, then a single, solitary buzz. Adam opens his mouth to shout a warning, and a hornet flies out of his mouth.
Gansey sees. Gansey smiles. Gansey reaches down and unbuttons his shirt, never taking his eyes off of Adam. Gansey peels back the skin of his chest, then the muscle. Gansey lets Adam see his heart, and Adam sees that it is bruised.
The hornet flies to him, straight to his heart. Gansey smiles.
One hornet becomes twenty and Gansey holds his arms out, beckoning. Adam-as-Cabeswater screams and lunges for him, tearing roots out of the ground. He wants to hold him, to shield him, but he doesn’t know his own strength and Gansey is crushed beneath him, neck broken and mundane, swallowed by hornets. Adam screams and screams, but it only comes out as a whisper.
When Adam wakes up, he’s in Gansey’s bed. Gansey is sitting at the foot, bent over his journal. Ronan and Blue are gone, and the sun is slanting in across the floor at an angle that says early evening.
“How long was I out?” Adam whispers, voice scratchy.
Gansey doesn’t startle, he just drops his journal onto the bed and grabs a water bottle off the floor. He holds it out to Adam and holds out a warning hand as Adam sits up.
“Careful, you’ll be dizzy.”
Adam takes a long gulp. It’s cold. It’s nice.
“How long was I out?”
“About two hours. You were twitching for about twenty minutes, but I think you were just asleep after that. Blue had to go to work. Ronan was pacing, so I kicked him out.”
“You kicked him out?”
Gansey shrugged. “He’s bugging Blue at work. I don’t know, I just thought we might . . .”
He trails off, uncharacteristically bashful.
“What?”
Gansey won’t look at him. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. For what I said, triggering whatever this—”
“This was Cabeswater.”
Gansey looks at him, moth snapping shut. “Right,” he says, ears going red. He rubs at his lip. “Right, of course. That’s— Yeah.”
Adam leans back on his hands.
“We should probably talk, though.”
Gansey picks his journal up off the floor, moves to the desk, then a shelf, then back to the desk.
“We don’t have to.”
“Are you going to hurt yourself?” Adam asks, deciding to go for blunt. Gansey’s avoiding his eyes, and Gansey never avoids his eyes.
It shocks him enough that he stops pacing and laughs.
“Me? No. No! Of course not.”
“Cabeswater showed me— it was a warning. The way you were talking, before, the vision.”
“I got carried away. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Gansey scratches his ear. His voice is solid, but his hand shakes.
“We can talk about it. We should, I mean.” Adam suddenly notices that there’s a sheet over him, that Gansey—or maybe Blue, or Noah, but probably Gansey—had covered him while he slept. He twists it in his fingers. “We should talk about what you said.”
Gansey smiles and runs his fingers through is hair. “We don’t do that, though,” he sounds like he regrets it. “Do we?”
Adam shrugs and takes another gulp of water. He drops the bottle off the edge of the bed and lays back down. He’s exhausted, in a Cabeswater way, like his body’s been working while his mind was asleep. When he closes his eyes for a second, he can smell the ocean and feel the echo of a strong shoulder under his cheek. That, more than anything, prompts him to scoot over on the bed and look up at Gansey.
“No. But. Come here.”
Gansey hesitates. After a second he takes a step forward and stops, like he’s waiting for Adam to laugh or change his mind. No, not like. He is waiting for Adam to change his mind. Adam stays very still. Gansey sits on the edge of the bed.
Adam raises his eyebrows and flicks his eyes over to the pillow. Gansey bites his bottom lip and then lays down next to him.
“We don’t do this either,” Adam says.
Gansey huffs a laugh.
Adam takes a second to put his thoughts in order. He doesn’t want to start a fight, but he has to be the one to push. “It sounds a little close to emotional manipulation, you know. If you’re going to stop existing without me. I’m not accusing, I’m just . . . analyzing.”
Gansey looks at him seriously and nods. “I can see that. It’s not just you, you know.”
“I know.”
“I’m not trying to be like that. I never wanted to control you. Own you. Anything like that. I know I keep throwing myself at you and it’s not—”
Adam puts a hand on his wrist and Gansey shuts up. He takes a deep, shaky breath.
“It scares me.”
Adam says nothing.
“I don’t regret what I am to you. To you, to Ronan. I’d never regret it. I just—” He presses his face into the pillow.
“I don’t get what you’re saying.”
“It’s like in the stories. You have to leave somebody behind in order to get to the last chapter. Don’t you? You need me now, but you won’t, soon. And then what’s the . . . point? Of me? I don’t think there is one.”
“It’s not a story. You’re not a fucking plot point. You’re a person. The ritual wasn’t about telling stories, it was about reality.”
Gansey rolls on to his back and says, in a very small voice, “Maybe I’ll just die, then. Be dead. Like a real person.”
Adam moves his hand from Gansey’s wrist to his shirt, twisting his fingers in the fabric. “You’re not dying. I won’t allow it.”
Gansey is silent.
“I mean it. I don’t care what I have to do. I’m not going to let that happen. I refuse.
“That’s the spirit,” Gansey says to the ceiling, still in that horrible, small voice.
Adam’s stomach churns at the sound of it, the very Gansey-ness of the words but the foreign, frightened tone. He’ll never know. He can’t ever know.
“You can’t—” He doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Give up? Despair? Scare me like this?
“I know,” Gansey says. He rubs at his eyes. “It’s just a day. I’m having a day. It’ll be done soon. I don’t usually...”
“What?”
“See you. When I’m having a day. You know. Spiraling. I’m no good.”
He means no good at this or no good for company or something like it, but the way he says it feels like a bruise. I’m no good. Adam’s never looked at Gansey and seen himself before, and it’s unnerving.
Gansey’s meeting his eyes, finally, a silent apology, and Adam suddenly realizes that he could do anything. He could send Gansey away and Gansey would go. He might not survive it, but he’d go. He could ask for anything—the Pig, his room in Monmouth, all the king’s favors in the world. He could touch Gansey, if he wanted. Ask Gansey to touch him, and he would. Ask him to want him and he’d try. There are no corners to this kind of love.
“What do you want, Gansey?” Adam whispers. If it sounds like a non-sequitur Gansey doesn’t seem to mind.
“Only impossible things,” he whispers back. There’s something very sleepover about it, facing each other in Gansey’s bed, whispering across the pillow.
Adam waits. He doesn’t hold his breath. He doesn’t wish for a specific answer.
“Glendower. Blue.”
It doesn’t sting the way it used to, the way that looking at his bank statement doesn’t sting. It simply is.
“You.”
Adam breathes out.
“I want to keep you.”
He could kiss Gansey right now, ask him to want him and he would try. He’d kiss back, Adam knows it. The sun’s fallen a little lower, and there’s a shadow across Gansey’s brow. Adam reaches out and runs his fingers over it, then down his cheek. Gansey sighs and touches Adam’s elbow with two fingers, just lightly.
“I don’t know how to promise that,” Adam says after a minute.
“I don’t expect you to.”
“I know you don’t.”
Gansey cracks a smile and this time it reaches his eyes. “Well then,” he says, and it’s such an empty, nothing phrase, such a formal, Gansey phrase, that Adam has to lean in and taste the ghost of it off his lips. It’s salty, almost salt water.
Gansey sucks in a quick breath but doesn’t move. Adam gives himself five seconds, five seconds before he’ll pull back and say sorry, but Gansey kisses back after four. They don’t touch beyond mouths and fingertips, Gansey’s on Adam’s elbow, Adam’s on Gansey’s cheek. When they separate they lay back on the pillows, breathing unsteady.
“I’m going to keep you,” Adam says firmly. “That’s how this is going to work. I’m going to keep you.”
Gansey smiles up at the ceiling, and suddenly he looks so much like Noah it almost makes Adam pull away. Something in his smile, the shadow across his face.
“I’m going to keep you,” Adam repeats, and Gansey closes his eyes and nods.