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

[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?"

[thatsallthereis]

"I wasn't," Gansey reiterated. This conversation had already happened with Ronan (not that Gansey understood it), and he wasn't interested in having it again. Still, he understood where she was coming from. There was no reason to believe he had been here but it wasn't him. No reason except for that it made about as much sense as anything else they'd seen in the last year -- in Blue's entire life, he was sure.

Blue's Blueness surged and subsided again. Gansey could imagine what was going on within her: an even smaller, even fiercer Blue strong-arming the things that confused her into a little box, as decorated and eccentric as any part of her. Maybe she'd mislabel it and leave it on a shelf she never looked at. That was where Gansey came in. This was part of what made up the dynamic they called us. There was nothing in the world Gansey didn't want to examine.

"We were in Tulsa," Gansey said, nearly automatically. His mental Rolodex spun and provided a reminder. "Ah, you may not remember the road trip. Tell me what you remember and I'll see what I can fill in." What he'd want to fill in. If she was from far enough back, there might have been things Gansey would elect to leave out. Just for the moment. She didn't need to know about Persephone yet, and a deep, shameful part of him wanted to omit the part where he'd be wrong about Glendower, too. That was just pride, though, and that wasn't a good enough reason to leave something out.

[formicine]

She rubs her nose with one finger. It stings at the bridge in a way that's either a headache or tears coming on, and she dislikes either option. It sounds to her like the same argument she has with Ronan about how the boy who gave her his light isn't the same as him, or when Kavinsky's alluded to how he didn't kidnap Matthew. Blue doesn't think those things make a difference, and this doesn't seem any different, just sort of less fair.

"A Gansey was," she concedes, tiredly and looks up at him. She can see him trying to work her out, what she's thinking, and normally that's adorable. Right now she doesn't even know what she's thinking.

He says you may not remember the road trip as though it's a thing they can just do, and she feels a little dizzy. Tulsa. Tulsa, Oklahoma? She has a sudden vision of them in his car, driving through desert or stretches of plains broken by horses or wildflowers. Blue has no reference for if this is even slightly correct. She has no idea why they would be in Tulsa.

But they're not in Virginia. They're -- on a road trip, and her chest fills so suddenly with longing she can't breathe.

She laughs, a voiced, incredulous thing that aches. "We weren't in Tulsa, though," she reminds him with a tinge of bitterness. She wants it, so badly, to be that Blue with the future spread out before her. But by his own argument, she's not.

This is too much.

"It was August," she says, words she's repeated before. "Persephone just died. We were in the cave under Cabeswater, looking for my mother. You'd woken up the skeleton animals." She runs a hand through her hair, leaving it spiking up between her fingers. "I walked into a lake, and then I was here." She looks up.

"You've got about a year to catch up on here." She picks up a dish to start cleaning up. "But there's nothing outside of Darrow, so I guess we've got time."

[thatsallthereis]

To study micro-expression meant to have an intrinsic knowledge of it. From a young age, Gansey's parents hadn't allowed a look to breeze past without acknowledgement. From that, Gansey learned to read between the lines. A little flash of something was often not lost on him. So, he caught Blue's little gesture, just one slender finger at the bridge of her nose and his heart ached. He'd worked hard to make sure he was never the cause of that (admittedly sort of adorable) little stress action. Back home, he'd have folded her into his arms and held her until that little pain subsided. His fingers twitched toward her, a micro-expression of his own. He did nothing.

"Ronan said." Gansey thumbed at his lip, just so he had something to do with his hands. He'd been here the way she and Henry had been in Tulsa with him; in the way that they hadn't. The last thing Blue remembered was further back than Henry, but not as far back as Ronan. She didn't know the end -- not a single one of them did. Piper's irresponsible magicking, Ronan's unmaking, Cabeswater's sacrifice. How was he supposed to tell Blue all of those things?

"You've got a lot to catch up on, too." His hand found her shoulder; a tentative, testing action. He wanted -- needed Blue to know that he was there, that he wanted to be there more, but Blue tended to trip him up. There wasn't usually any anticipating what Blue might do when backed into the corner. The familiar shape of her slight shoulder under his hand was worth the risk. How could he feel like he missed her when he'd been laying with her hours ago?

"What do you mean 'there's nothing?'" Context couldn't inform him of the meaning and that was a feeling he never liked. Moreso because Blue looked stricken by the idea that there was nothing else. Whatever that meant.

[formicine]

Blue doesn't miss the way his hands spread toward her for just a second, or the way her lungs fill, unfairly, with wanting him to reach out. She wants to press herself against his chest and tuck her face against his collarbone and breathe him in.

She also wants to break something, a little bit.

Blue manages a little smile. "Yeah, he -- kind of fucked up your room when you disappeared." She nods at the room he'd come out of. "And some other stuff." Other stuff, in this case, was mostly Ronan. She assumes Gansey will know that.

She closes her eyes when his hand fits to the curve of her shoulder, takes a breath and allows it. There has to be a way through this chasm, a way back to normal. He's here, and it's not fair to blame him that he doesn't remember all of this or that she hasn't lived the part where she was just with him. That she's spent months learning how to stop crying over a giant hole in the middle of everything and start living with it. It's not his fault.

But it sucks.

"What month was it?" A road trip could be Christmas break, she rationalizes, especially somewhere warm like Tulsa. It just sounds more like the thing you do in summer, but maybe it's because it's summer and she wants it. That's impossible. Gansey doesn't live past April, back home: he can't. Can he?

"I mean there's nothing," she says, and looks up at him. "You go to the edge, and you always end up driving or walking or swimming back to the beginning somewhere. Like a video game. No Wales. No Venezuela. No way back through the magic portal. Just this."

[thatsallthereis]

Gansey winced. This, this was not the kind of thing Gansey would do. He would never leave Ronan alone like that, not by choice. This place would have to have taken him. Not a single part of Gansey would leave any of them behind. They stayed together. Period.

Suddenly, he was touching her. He was touching her and she was allowing it. Something wavered in him and he thought about holding her hand, or the comfort he might get from hunching over to bury his face in her neck and hide. Just for a bit. Just until he could figure some of this out.

He removed his hand. Gansey always wanted to be near her, to touch her. If this Blue didn't before, he was sure she could see it, now. She'd close the distance when she was ready. That was something Gansey would hold on to.

"August," Gansey said, twisting his wrist to look at a watch that wasn't there. He felt oddly naked without it, and he wondered why he'd been able to keep his glasses in the transition but not his watch. He wore the damn watch more than he wore his glasses.

Anyway, he knew why Blue was asking. Not being able to leave, that wasn't something he could deal with. It would get cataloged away and Gansey would examine it no further until it sent up a flare and demanded his attention.

"It happened, Blue. On the ley line." He meant his death. He meant the kiss. He meant months of living after it and how she'd ended his life with her lips and he'd lived to kiss them again. A strange calm overtook him. "Ronan was dying. There was no other way.

"Cabeswater remade me. Because you all asked it to: Ronan and Adam and you. Because of what each of you means to Cabeswater." What he meant was you saved me. What he meant was things are different now.

[formicine]

There's something very Gansey about the way he winces, the way he knows all about Ronan and what was going on in his head to react that way. And it means something, regretting being in some sort of way the cause of that, but it also firmly reminds Blue that there's no way he can prevent it happening again.

He picks his hand back up and she looks back at the dishes. She's rinsed this plate a lot. It's about as clean as a plate is going to get, and she sets it down in the rack and turns back toward him.

Then he starts talking, and nothing makes sense. "August?" she echoes dumbly, and he goes on. But August is impossible. August puts him at -- almost -- the same time as her, here, now, only she was there (is there, will be there) for them.

He goes on, and all that information at once hits like a punch in the chest. No: a mortar, exploding through the center of a building and out the other side, leaving the outer walls intact, but ready to collapse at a breath.

It's so much: you kissed me/you killed me/Ronan was dying/I died for Ronan/You killed me to save Ronan/I was remade/I am actually your true love/You mean enough to Cabeswater to beseech it?/Cabeswater can recreate me/I am not the same/We are not the same.

Nothing is the same.

Blue's eyes are stinging, and when she blinks tears don't spill but they sit on her eyelashes anyway. She puts her fingers to her lips. As though it's her who kissed Gansey, who killed him, and it was, somewhere, somewhen, but not here.

She pitches herself forward and throws her arms around his neck, pressing her head down against his shoulder. This should be everything, it should be amazing, and relieving and -- it is, but everything should be perfect now, and instead she feels like she's going to shake apart.

He smells like mint. He still smells like mint.

"This is just so much. It's so much," she says. "I don't want you to think -- that I'm not happy to see you, it's like it's not even real, it's not that --"

But it doesn't matter, really, how glad she is for him to be back, because he was never gone. She holds onto him for a long moment and lets go, stepping back, face wet.

"I just don't know how to do this." He doesn't know -- he doesn't know so much. Silent Darrow, the cat cafe, the disappearances, KIRIN -- any of it. She doesn't know why Ronan was dying or what happened in the last year or what kissing him feels like. And she'd thought he was gone forever. The part of her that's been wondering what it's like to not be destined for someone, to not have every move preconceived, has imagined unplanned unfated kisses, has never been around Gansey before and it feels like a traitor.

"I don't know how to be the Blue you know."

[thatsallthereis]

All of his breath rushed out of him when Blue slammed into him. As her arms looped around his neck, he jammed his around her waist, tugging her as close as he could, nearly up onto her toes. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted her comfort. He wanted to stay there for weeks and hope when he came out, everything would make sense.

But she was scared. He could feel it. He let himself bury his face into her neck for a just a moment, just long enough to feel helpless, and he let her go. She'd been crying. Her eyes were stunning after she cried -- something beautiful from something chaotic.

"We don't have to do this now." He didn't know exactly what she meant, but whatever it was, it could wait. Gansey found himself bending so easily to her will; he thought it was because in the time they'd known each other, she'd never asked for a single unreasonable thing. That didn't matter, either. No matter what she asked, Gansey would find it for her. For any of them.

He took a chance and swiped his thumbs gently under Blue's eyes. Maybe he was pushing it. He didn't want to. It was so hard not to touch her when back home, they never stopped touching.

"You already are." He let his hands fall away. There was only one Blue Sargent, and may God have mercy on the planet if there should ever be two.

Should he give her space? He felt like he should. So he said, "I'd like to give you my new phone number." He had it written down, and he wanted to know that she had a way to reach him. She could through any of them, but Gansey wanted to know there was a direct line. Maybe it would feel like it had back in Monmouth, crouched in the dark, hoping she'd call. It had been agony, and it had been anything but.

[formicine]

Blue closes her eyes and lets herself be tugged close. It feels good, it feels safe. He does: like she could quiet the million stresses in her head if she just let herself forget them. About weird crushes, about the things her friends are going through, about the store barely scraping the black, about what to do with her life -- if she just surrendered to apparent destiny, to feeling good. Maybe it would be all right.

He tucks his head against her neck and she can feel his heart racing. She could be the one to listen to his heart slow, to run her hands through his hair and talk him down, and she knows how to do that. It could be so easy.

But that isn't Blue, just accepting things, and under the safety Gansey feels terribly transient . Is it better, to let him hold her, to risk kissing him or indulging any fantasy she might have ever had about permanence with a boy meant to die, and know that tomorrow he could be gone -- again -- where she can't follow?

It's not. She can't. Hell, he could not even be here through today; this could be a Darrow trick, though she doesn't think it is.

Blue nods. It doesn't feel better, not to do whatever it is they're supposed to do. It just feels more necessary. She chews on her lip as he reaches to brush her tears away, following the gesture with a self-conscious roll of her eyes and a utilitarian wipe of the palm of her hand against her cheek.

His offer is so gentlemanly and so Gansey and also so remote. He steps back from her space so easily when she asks, and she hates asking. He always managed to respect her limits, even when it was agony to have them. "I'd like to have it," she says, pulling herself together.

Part of her is glad he has a new phone number. Gansey -- before, the Gansey who had been here before -- if you called the number, you'd get a this phone number is disconnected message. But it had been his phone from home; it just ran on Darrow signal. If he didn't have a number, she thinks she might have lost all the texts that still sat, saved on her phone, and she wants to remember that he'd been here, texting her at 3 in the morning.

She finds her phone where it's charging in the kitchen. "I've got a new phone too," she says in a mock show-off tone, waving the little cell phone at him. She'd never had a cell back in Henrietta, though who knows now.

[thatsallthereis]

The smile that came across Gansey's face blindsided him. Blue Sargent had a cell phone. Would wonders never cease?

"Welcome to the 21st century, Jane," Gansey teased lightly. He dug the paper with his new phone number from his pants pocket and programmed it easily into Blue's phone. Darrow had supplied Gansey with a phone that suited him: sleek and and large and capable of multitasking. It seemed Darrow had the foresight to match Blue's phone needs, as well. Hers was simple -- minimalist and still largely versatile.

"There." He handed it back to her. "Call me anytime you need." Or wanted. Or could. As much as she was comfortable with.

"Do you live here?" It dawned on him that maybe they all did. That, or this had been an organized breakfast. One at which Gansey had become an accidental guest. Hopefully, not a guest at all? He added, "Do I?" He hoped he did. If this was the way it was in Hywel, Gansey had everything he needed right there.

[formicine]

His smile is brilliant and wide and a little on the real side of charming (vice presidential, maybe, she thinks).

"Thanks, Dick," she drawls, smirking, and lets him handle her phone, watching him deftly program his number in with only the slightest flip of her stomach. "Never had one and I still use it more than Ronan."

"Thanks." She takes it back and just looks at the number for a moment. Usually, she just texts straight back to have hers in their phone, but their conversations have always been at odd times, and it's even odder right now. She's not sure what she's feeling. What she needs. She doesn't know what the last phone conversation she had with him was, back in Henrietta. She can guess it wasn't just thoughts said out loud, at 3am though, because there, they're together. Back home, he could kiss her goodnight.

She feels abruptly, terribly guilty.

"Yeah," she says and nods. "Both of us do. I mean, sort of. I have my own place..." She looks up. "This city gives you an apartment, and money, even. So I just kept up the rent. In case. If I want to go work on something, or if Adam and Ronan --" She pauses halfway to a joke and frowns, measuring. "They're. Together, here..."

[thatsallthereis]

Well, he guessed if she lived in Hywel that Gansey hadn't necessarily needed her number, but he was glad to have it anyway. It was good to be able to contact someone in case Ronan had a self-destructive episode or the Pig exploded. Not that she could help him with the last part, except maybe to give him Adam's number.

It was strange, he thought, that with all of these people here, he didn't seem too alarmed by all of the eerie goings-on. None of it was really any stranger than any other thing he'd witnessed. Or felt. Or been promised. Or lost.

Gansey choked a little laugh, raised a hand in pause. "Please don't finish that sentence." His humor was light. It was easy with Blue. "They were together at home." Though Gansey couldn't think of a reason that might bother her, he observed her a bit closer, though not in proximity. Time being the thing that it was, Blue having not experienced what Gansey had, it was possible that things had changed for this Blue.

[formicine]

He interrupts to sputter a laugh, and she laughs too, and it's so so easy to fall into, even as much as the inside of her feels a little hollowed out. Because it's Gansey. It's not a Gansey she knows everything about, not yet, and it's not the Gansey that knows this version of her the best, but it's still Gansey and it's painfully easy to relax around him.

Besides, it's abruptly relieving for his own laughter to reassure her that of course he doesn't care, why would he? Raised on red tie affairs Gansey might be, but he's not churchy, and his loyalty runs deeper than just about any trait that could be assigned to somebody. It's just that -- well, it's not always something you can predict, about people. If they'll be okay with someone's sexuality. In Virginia, it's much less fraught to predict that they won't, no matter how well you know them, and she's sure that's one reason why Ronan never said anything.

He looks at her sideways, and she looks at him back; he's clearly wondering the same thing about her.

"Well, good," she says, defiant of his querying eyes, "at least eventually they finally admit it there too."

She looks at the floor and chews on her lip, glancing back up. "Me, too," she says after a minute. "I mean, I like girls too, sometimes. As it turns out." It feels like a confession. It's not that she thinks Gansey will judge her; it's that she's had feelings for anyone else that knots up her stomach. Even with Krem and Hild's advice in her head; even with her own stubborn will to do and be only what she wants raging in the back of her skull: it still feels like she's betraying him.