Chapter Text
Back of his footsteps as he journeyed fell
Range after range; ahead blue hills emerged.
Before him tireless to applaud it surged
The sweet interminable spectacle.
And like the west behind a sundown sea
Shone the past joys his memory retraced,
And bright as the blue east he always faced
Beckoned the loves and joys that were to be.
The Wanderer by Alan Seeger
~
When Blue thinks about the them Before and the them After, it’s hard to pick out the differences. But Gansey’s death and subsequent return leaves a hole wrenched in time that she can see through like a two-way mirror, and the differences are everything, obvious in the transmuted energy between the four of them with their missing fifth piece. Gansey's death seems to have torn away the last of the vestiges of the walls between them all, which had been in crumbling ruins for months anyway. Since that very first trip into Cabeswater, if Blue’s being honest with herself.
They’re more careful with each other now, grief and fear leaving them brittle and horribly aware of their own frailty. But at the same time, they’re less careful. Less frightened of how much they mean to each other. Less afraid to act. They’re too well-acquainted with how much can be lost in an instant not to squeeze all the juice out of every second together that they have left.
The slow burn of the thing that had been singeing their hearts for months as they all grew closer suddenly explodes, as obvious as the streak of a comet bursting the night sky into furious brightness. Blue feels like she can see everything clearly for the first time, between Gansey and Adam and Gansey and Ronan and Ronan and Adam and between all three of them and her, and the afterimage doesn’t seem to fade as they move into a new summer together.
It’s wonderful and terrifying and radiant, and more than anything, it makes Blue miss Noah even more fiercely.