And everything you've ever been is still there in the dark night

[thatsallthereis]

Gansey was dreaming.

He was in Monmouth -- no, he was in a hotel room. Monmouth stood empty in Henrietta, with Adam and Ronan tucked away at the Barns and Noah at rest. Gansey was only dreaming he was in Monmouth, but when he dreamed, he was never asleep enough to confuse it for reality. Much like in his waking hours, he kept one foot on the ground, checked in with himself to make sure he knew where he was. Tulsa, not Henrietta. Some hotel, not Monmouth. Home, but not those safe walls. After years of traveling and seeking, Gansey was relieved that he'd found a sort of peace that made him feel that home was wherever he, Henry, and Blue laid their heads for the night. Home was his Camaro, buzzing down interstate highways noisily despite the fact that there was no machinery to whir, no head gasket to blow every 45 minutes. Another thing he and his precious Pig had in common: a separation from time and the laws of the universe proper. Neither of them made any sense. No one Gansey loved did.

Gansey was awake. Calling what he was doing "dreaming" was a bit of a leap anyway. It was more like he was looking at Monmouth and noticing how empty it was. There wasn't even a ghost to haunt its empty halls.

Blue was gone. Henry was gone. A few moments ago, Gansey swore he felt Blue exhale a sleepy sigh against his neck, close enough to notice and far enough away to wonder if it had happened at all.

There was a vast expanse of a window spilling bright light into the room. Tulsa's forecast showed rain for days, heavy enough that Gansey had been able to convince Blue to let him get a hotel for a few days rather than risk flying off the road trying to flee the downpour. Gansey liked the rain. The sound of it on the roof had been one of his only companions in times of sleeplessness on his travels.

The sun was out and Gansey was alone. It sat wrong in his chest. Then, he looked around.

Books. Books he might read. A desk. A desk with knots in it the size of fists, all knuckle and no regard for bone. It made him think of Ronan, much the way gasoline smelled like Adam and the cold reminded him of Noah. This room was stark. The books were stacked in a way that felt familiar to him.

Then, he heard voices. The walls of this room didn't reach the ceiling and Gansey could hear the sounds of someone banging around in the kitchen, could smell their cooking. Occasionally someone would speak, and Gansey's heart was pounding too hard in his ears to find the voices familiar. What if he'd been kidnapped? What if Henry and Blue weren't safe? Some uninformed idiot might have traced some of Gansey's research and thought there was something to find, as Gansey once had. Though never, ever would he have tried to find it like this.

Still, the smell of breakfast was not very menacing. Gansey took the space of a few breaths to calm himself, work through some rational thought, and push himself to his feet. Distressingly, he was only dressed from the waist down, glasses still on his face. He looked around fruitlessly for a shirt. Unless he fashioned one out of a nearby book titled Questioning Darrow's History, that wouldn't change. He decided not to harm the book in any way and headed for the door. He pushed it open. He had no idea what he might find on the other side.

Ceilings, high as the ones in Monmouth. Maybe higher. There were several bedrooms, laid about a very open floorplan. There was some shuffling below that suggested activity beneath, a table set, some more ruckus in the kitchen. No one seemed to be guarding the door. This wasn't a kidnapping. What the hell was it then? His brows knitted deeply over the tips of his wire frames and he skidded a thumb over his lip as he rounded the corner to the kitchen.

Comments

[iwasmore]

Noah can feel it before he sees him. The energy is familiar, but it doesn't belong to anyone currently sitting around the table. It makes Noah look up, wide-eyed, heart racing. And then he hears the thoughts. Monmouth. The ceilings are higher than Monmouth.

The word spills from his mouth without him realizing, "Monmouth."

And then Noah sees him, bedhead hair and wire rim glasses, and he drops the pan he was holding to make another batch of pancakes with.

"Gansey?"

[thatsallthereis]

Gansey heard the word "Monmouth" and hastened his last few steps. The voice. It was the last thing he'd heard before he'd been remade, that voice. A voice he never thought he would hear again.

"Noah?" His voice nearly demanded; he felt stretched a little thin and things like breathing were taking up an unusual amount of Gansey's bandwidth. There, unmistakably, was Noah Czerny, more solid than Gansey had ever seen him. The pan dropped with a clang and Gansey stuttered a few steps forward until the thing landed safely on the counter. Could Noah get hurt? He was holding the thing. Corporeal, he thought, or very close. Curiosity got the better of him. He reached out and touched Noah's wrist. Heat. Mass. Real.

"How are you here?" Which raised a better question: "What is this place?"

[iwasmore]

This Gansey was different. Not just from the one who was here before, but from the one he knew back in Henrietta. This Gansey felt familiar and alien all at the same time if such a thing was possible, which means it worked. That's what it had to mean. It worked, it worked, it all worked.

Noah laughs abruptly, barely registering Gansey's touch. He throws his arms around Gansey in a tight hug.

"Magic! I'm magic, this place is magic, you're magic. Holy crap. You're really okay?" he pulls back enough to see Gansey's face, like he'll be able to see the changes.

[thatsallthereis]

"Oh," Gansey said, matter-of-fact and dumb as Noah's arms wrenched around him. Noah had not been a person Gansey could hug in Henrietta, had he ever felt inclined to do so. Now, he didn't have a choice and he was finding it was something that he'd been missing.

"I'm okay." That was the only part of what Noah had said that Gansey could comment on. "Are you? You're here. You were gone." He sounded lame, looped up like he was and still squeezed into an impossible embrace. Time was a circle but Noah was no longer in it.

[iwasmore]

Noah touches Gansey's cheek, and his hair, and he doesn't let his smile dim at the thought of being gone. He knew he would be. He knows that's what his future is back home. It isn't news and he isn't going to let it ruin this.

"It's different here," he says instead, trying to think of the best way to explain it. Himself and everything else. "Adam and Dorian-- he's like a wizard? Sort of like Gandalf. It sounds crazy. But anyway, they created a way to tie my soul to an object instead of the ley line, to keep me from decaying. This place is like a parallel universe and people come from all over."

[thedreamthief]

It hadn't been Ronan's idea to invite fuckin' Henry Cheng to breakfast, but something about seeing his face in their kitchen hadn't been all that surprising. He'd even managed to grunt an acknowledgment which he thinks clearly shows his ability to grow as a person.

Not that anyone else has noticed.

At the moment, he's busy digging into his second pancake, licking a drop of maple syrup off his thumb when something catches out the corner of his eye. Noah's still by the stove, Blue beside him helping with the batter. Cheng's near the fridge, rested against the counter and Adam's right beside Ronan, shoveling into his own stack of pancakes.

Everyone's here -- everyone plus one.

Anxiety spikes in Ronan's belly as he turns, spike and then freezes as his eye fall wide.

It's like being stuck just after a dream, aware but immobile as the creations of his brain form matter. He can't move.

[thatsallthereis]

Ronan's gaze froze him. Gansey had built up an immunity to Ronan's particular brand of alienation. If this had been Monmouth, if it had been any other morning that he rolled up from his naked mattress and trudged into the kitchen to find Ronan growling over a plate of food, Gansey is sure he wouldn't have stuttered in his step. He hadn't expected to wind up in a strange place or see Ronan. That was all troubling, but not at the top of the list. There was something else nagging at Gansey.

Ronan was surprised to see him, too.

"Hey," Gansey said, sort of a question. His eyes settled on everyone around the table, scattered about the kitchen, and he kept coming back to Ronan's chilly stare. He looked mistrustful. What reason would Ronan have to look at Gansey that way? The more he thought about it, the more it left him feeling unsettled.

"Does anyone have a shirt I could borrow?" He tried not to look at their faces, all of them. This was a dream. The first thing Gansey could call a dream since... he couldn't even remember. And it was terrible.

[thedreamthief]

Gansey spoke and something rattled loose in Ronan's chest, freeing him from his frozen state. He sucked in a breath and blinked, waited as everyone else in the room turned to stare.

Ronan didn't think before moving. The chair scraped across linoleum flooring, nearly toppling over entirely with the speed of his movements and in three strides he was pushing into Gansey's personal space. Or the personal space of whoever this was pretending to be Gansey.

"You some trick?" he asked, tone venomous. "Some fucking Darrow hallucination or goddamn hologram or something? What are you?"

[thatsallthereis]

Ronan was in Gansey's face fast enough that a flash of annoyance seized him. He hadn't seen Ronan in weeks; it figured that this would be the kind of greeting he'd get on the other side. Ronan had given his blessing on the trip, provided their getaway car, but of course he was upset Gansey had left. He'd created and destroyed an entire magic forest and still nothing had changed.

Upon further (silent) inspection, Gansey saw another Ronan. Not just lost or abandoned but scared. Gansey's line of a mouth took a new shape. This was a Ronan Gansey had hoped he'd never have to see again.

"Lynch." His tone said look at me. No, see me. And then, as if accused, he embellished: "I don't know what's going on here. I don't know where I am." Some panic crept back in, something he loathed and something he needed to survive.

"What is going on?" He could see it as a challenge, if he liked. It wasn't a command but it had the potential to be. Gansey needed answers and he preferred them sooner than later.

[thedreamthief]

It's only when Ronan hears that voice again, hear's his name in Gansey's firm fucking Dad voice that Ronan pulls up. It could still be a trick, he knows. Darrow's fucked up enough, his own dreams are fucked up enough that there's every possibility he managed to pull a version of Gansey from Cabeswater.

Except he'd know. He'd know if this Gansey was one of his creations.

He'd never get it so perfectly right.

Ronan stays where he is, this Gansey, this version of Gansey, trapped between Ronan and the wall with only a foot of space to the side to duck free. "What's the last thing you remember?" he asks, but his voice is quieter now, not nearly so threatening. Hopeful and scared all at once.

[jeongbro]

Henry hadn't slept for about twenty-eight hours, and so, when he received a text from Blue and from Noah saying there was breakfast at Hywel, he decided that was enough work on the RoboBee program for now. He could leave it to compile and come back to it after he'd fattened himself up on coffee and carbs.

He'd never been in the warehouse, but Adam and Noah and Blue had all told him about it; the animals living in the lower level and the upper level occupied too much by clumsy bachelors and Blue's occasional effervescence. Henry brought orange juice, left over from the Fourth of July, and smiled politely that he was invited.

He was standing in the kitchen when it happened. Chatting with Noah over his coffee mug when he looked up at saw him. Henry stared, breath caught in his throat. no, he hadn't been breathing in the first place. No, he was breathing too fast.

Maybe he should have slept instead.

[thatsallthereis]

Nothing was making sense, like the coffee cup Gansey found in his hand. He didn't remember picking it up. Chances were it was Noah, fussing up a storm about him and being solid enough to touch. Yes, he remembered the exact moment. Through all of the pleasantries (hah) and questions and the fact that no one had yet produced a shirt for him as he'd asked kept him steadily off-balance. Henry looked to feel the way Gansey did.

No, worse. Gansey had seen that look before. It was one of the last things he had seen before he was remade. He thought then and he thought now: this was what it was like for Henry to panic. Gansey had almost seen it once, just before they'd left, and only for a second.

"Cheng. Concentrate on breathing," Gansey reminded, setting his coffee down untouched. Henry was the last person Gansey was able to approach: he was the farthest away, and by far the quietest. An unusual dynamic. Henry always had something to say.

[jeongbro]

Henry let out an only slightly hysterical bit of a laugh. There was a space, a chasm, in this kitchen. Henry watched Gansey's hands, Gansey's wrists, Gansey's eyes.

The last time Henry Cheng had seen Richard Campbell Gansey III, they had stood outside Borden house, going their separate ways after Henry had imparted onto him every secret he had to give. This--this looked, this felt, like a boy reborn. Something in him was shifted. Henry remembered Gansey handing him a coffee one time; Henry remembered handing Gansey an iced water at Raven Day.

He crossed the chasm and gripped Gansey's shoulders, brief, assurant. This was so, so real.

"...you weren't here," he said. "But--here you are."

[thatsallthereis]

Everyone was watching him. He could feel it prickle in his neck, the eyes of the entire room. Without context, Gansey was a passenger, and that was not something he could find a lot of comfort in. Everything was strange, but not Henrietta-strange. Nothing so familiar.

"Here I am," Gansey echoed, more patient than he thought his nerves would allow. Henry was palming his shoulders, too desperate to call it a passing curiosity or just-one-of-those-Henry-things. Henry needed reassurance and Gansey gave it to him, ducking his head to meet his eyes. Maybe he could get some idea of what was going on there.

Something said "magic." Real magic. Something they had all shared before. That answer hadn't been good enough for Gansey before. Since he was all that was left of a magic forest, he supposed he could understand that.

Yet, it wasn't enough. Cabeswater had done a fine job of recreating Gansey, down to the taste for mint and a yawning, gaping sense of dissatisfaction with the answers he'd been given. Already, Gansey itched to know more. That would come later, if there was a later.

"How did I get here?"

[jeongbro]

"Ah," Henry said, because there was no smart, smooth way to explain the hows or the whys, to explain where Darrow was or how it worked, or, really, any of it at all. And for Henry, being able to deftly explain the situation, even though he was not always the best with words, was important.

"No one really knows," he finally settled on, because that was the truth. And then, it came spilling out. It was like there was a dam, and he'd opened the floodgates. All he could hope was the the words coming out made any sort of sense at all--and he couldn't even be sure of that.

"We're in a multidimensional pocket universe? There are people from all over, from time and space, and--fiction, made into reality, because they are reality in theirs, you know? But nobody really knows why we're here, or how. Some people arrive by a train, others just--they just appear, like you. Not here one moment and--that's how I came. Stepped out of Litchfield and then, was standing on a street corner."

Henry left out the part about how he'd arrived with no pants on. Maybe he shouldn't. Gansey didn't have a shirt, after all. "You were asleep? At Monmouth?"

[formicine]

"Monmouth," Noah says, out of nowhere,

and Blue looks up from where she's pouring batter into the pan. This is how this goes: Noah makes batter, she helps pour, he serves: pouring is the easy part, but it still feels like helping. (Also, she can do what she's doing right now, which is turning the pancakes into shapes.)

"Wrong city," she says, turning, smiling but her stomach already tightening around the out-of-context, unplanned-ness of the word.

Everything after that seems to happen at once, or slowed down, out of order in Blue's consciousness. A pan is dropped, Ronan at the table goes stiff. Someone laughs, or has already laughed, too loud.

Gansey walks into the kitchen, shirtless and pressing a thumb to his lips because of course, and because he's Gansey, as if she hasn't spent the last four months figuring out how to fill the gap he left behind.

Unbidden, the way she signed off on the last letter she dropped in the Mailbox comes to mind. Find your way back to me someday -- Jane. It sparks a sort of weird panic, as though everything she's said to that box has made it to its recipient.

There's something different about him than the way she last saw him. (Besides lacking a shirt, sort of adorably like he just rolled out of bed for breakfast.) He's different; a little tanner, very slightly more relaxed around the eyes even though right now he's calculating and anxious.

"You look different," she says out loud, and shakes her head because it's stupid, it's stupid, and all of a sudden her eyes are filling with tears.

[thatsallthereis]

Either some of the tension had eased or people were giving them space because they were suddenly alone in the kitchen. Maybe it was just  like being alone. From the moment they met, Blue had a way of making the rest of the world melt away. First, it had been in horror; she had made him feel smaller than he ever had, just for a moment. Maybe that was when she got in his head. That first night she got behind the wheel of his Camaro, that was the night he knew she was there to stay. Blue Sargent had buried herself in Gansey's consciousness. And now. Now she lived there.

So when Blue started to cry -- almost started -- Gansey felt it. This wasn't a result of the piece of her that Cabeswater had used to rebuild him, but the part of Gansey she had earned. The one that sat up not sleeping, waiting, hoping for his phone to ring and for her voice to be on the other end.

"Jane." He didn't admonish her or pity her or scold her, he just said that, quiet. There with her. He wanted to touch her, to wrap his arms around her and bury that broken look in reassurance. Instead, he touched one little tuft of hair at her forehead out of the way. He smiled when it settled right back into place.

"It's me." He didn't add I promise because those were just words. Blue would know. Nothing got by her.

[formicine]

Her head is full of noise; the buzz of what's going on this is this some sort of Darrow trick some fucked up trap is this something we did/Cabeswater did/Ronan did and will it go away -- will you go away again -- what does this mean why now do you even know how long it's been -- I can't I can't --

But she can, she is, because she's a Sargent and anyway what else would she do.

He says her name -- not her name, but the name he'd given her -- and touches her hair. It's so unfair, she thinks, the way her whole being sort of takes a breath, like something inside her turns toward the sun.

Blue looks at him, searches his expression for something that's not quite Gansey there.

She doesn't find it.

"I know," she says, unevenly, and crosses her arms. Against, maybe, how much she wants to throw them around his neck.

"How?" she demands, because that's the bigger question, and more paralyzingly, why. "You were gone for four months," she says, half-accuses, and when tears drop onto her cheeks they're hot and she hates them.

[thatsallthereis]

Blue was gone as quickly as she had come on. He watched her retreat at the chest behind folded arms. At least she knew. No matter what else happened, Blue knew what was real.

"What? I wasn't here," Gansey said, so taken aback that his tone betrayed his defense. He tried again, "I've never been here, Blue. I don't even know how I got here, but I've never seen this place before." Or after. Or ever. Which brought up another point: if time was circular, how come Gansey didn't know this place? Nearly everything he'd experienced since his second resurrection had come attached with a strange sense of deja vu. Not that morning. Everything felt new. Perhaps it would be exciting, once the shock wore off and some questions were answered.

"What happened?" His voice was soft, private. He stepped in a touch, not too close; Blue might've needed her space. Gansey was scared. That wasn't something he wanted to broadcast. No one needed to be any more alarmed than they already were.

[formicine]

His tone's defensive, flickering a little hint at that other Gansey that comes out sometimes when pushed or tugged, and then deflates into confusion. She takes a breath and blinks. I don't know how I got here, but I've never seen this place before.

It feels dreamlike, like she's the one not really here. Like time's shifted. Blue's not sure if it's the suddenness, the sudden normalcy of Gansey's reappearance, or the eerie deja vu of having heard I don't know how I got here, in not so many words (and sometimes those exact ones) from other people here. At the train station. In the middle of the street. Pantsless, sometimes.

Shirtless, apparently.

It twists something inside her; something about this whole situation feels slightly wrong, like a dream inside a dream that she'll wake from after enough times around, or like magic that might go wrong at any moment. People don't come back when they disappear. Everyone here knows that.

Except they do. Daryl the other day. That guy Neil that everyone but her seems to know.

She raises her eyes back to his. "You were," she protests, defying reality to contradict her. "Here in Darrow. In Hywel," she gestures to the apartment. "Before I was. Before Adam or Henry. This place, it grabs you out of where-ever you are," she starts the speech and trails off.

"We were here for months, together, all of us, and then you just -- weren't. We thought you'd been kidnapped or something, but Adam scryed --" Blue looks down a little. "This place does that, too." He doesn't remember any of it: she can see he's not lying. The other city, the ghost woman; any phone call or barely-avoided kiss or brazen touch in the last year, nearly; it's gone like the books Ronan had destroyed.

Gansey's eyes are a little wide with restrained anxiety, fixed on her. She can see it; she knows it, she can feel it in her chest, and she lifts her chin. "Well, you'll find out," she says, abruptly shoving her own emotions back into the box she keeps them in. "What was the last thing you remember?"

[incognoscibilis]

Even with the smell of food and the sound of chatter, Adam was slow to get out of bed, just because he didn't have to. From his watch, he knew it was early in the day and he didn't have work until afternoon. The bed still smelled of Ronan, even if he'd left it and Adam felt perfectly content just to lie there for a little while.

It was the dog that nudged him out of bed. Someone had been good enough to walk her but she was prancing around the room in an effort to earn a treat and some affection. "Okay, okay, girl," Adam said, rubbing her nose and following the dog out to the rest of the warehouse.

Blue, Noah, Ronan, and Henry (???) were all accounted for and for a half-unbelieving-second Adam's brain couldn't comprehend the person he was looking at.

"Gansey?"

[thatsallthereis]

As Gansey sipped his coffee -- bewildered but holding it down for the moment -- he heard animal footsteps surging toward him. He spun, regarding the creature curiously, and found a much more familiar one. Gansey smiled.

Now it was home.

"Parrish," he greeted, bizarrely understated. In the space of the last gulp of coffee, the smile dissipated, but his amusement remained. Ronan had assaulted him with questions, Blue had shut down, Henry and Noah had greeted him much the way this dog had, excited and curious. Adam just looked surprised. There was something sweet, something charming about Adam's face slackened like that.

"I heard there was breakfast. Thought I'd join you." He bent to give the dog a tentative pat, moving slow enough that she could change her mind about allowing it if she wanted.

[incognoscibilis]

"Well," he said, trying to process what he was seeing. "Noah's gotten pretty good at making pancakes." Copper had none of Adam's reticence; she knew Gansey's scent and was going wild from him being here. Her tail wagged a heavy drumbeat, occasionally whacking Gansey in the thigh.

"So did they tell you?" It seemed important to begin at the begin when they had the luxury to do so. "You and this city and...everything."

[thatsallthereis]

If Gansey had disbelieved any of them -- all of them -- about his having been there before, this dog was pretty good proof. She wagged and skipped for attention like he was a companion that had returned. Gansey couldn't help but smile as he patted her gently. There was an empty coffee cup in his right hand and the sleeves of Henry's jacket slipped down past his elbows again. With his hands full of dog and coffee, he let it.

"I think so," Gansey said, straightening to regard his friend. Adam looked tanner, unusually well-rested. Gansey found himself hoping that Darrow was kinder to him than Henrietta had been, that maybe he was only working two jobs instead of three. That he and Ronan were where they'd been when Gansey had (apparently) left the world.

"I was here before and it wasn't me, we can't leave, none of you remember anything after about November," Gansey counted off. He finished the last of his coffee with a look over the rim that said something like did I miss anything? He didn't think he had.

[incognoscibilis]

"That's what I get for sleeping in," Adam said. Somehow, all of his shock had translated into a mess of understatement.

There was a cup of coffee waiting for him, covered by a coaster to keep it lukewarm. In the back of his mind, Adam puzzled over the mundanities while he tried to accept that this was real. At the moment, it was easier to puzzle over who had had the foresight to buy coasters among them. Too much of that and they would look civilized.

"I was scrying for Persephone," he said at last. "That's where I left from. Ronan was here already. You and Ronan."