thatsallthereis | [For Henry]

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henry

[For Henry]

Silence, Gansey had told himself, was the thing that kept him up at night. When everything stopped, all that was left were questions, and when he was too tired to think of answers, it was (for lack of a better term) a shitstorm.

Great. Two weeks with Ronan and he was already thinking compound words with no Oxford English equal.

Silence, however, was hard to come by in Hywel. The animals shuffled and bleated below. There was a goat that Gansey swore was being bribed to keep him tense. The damn thing screamed, fainted, and the first time that happened, Gansey'd nearly had a heart attack. Strange city, no way out, weird things happened, and the thing that bothered Gansey the most was a goat with a name from the Greek pantheon. The whole thing, really, was quite unsettling.

But Adam was happy. Ronan was happy. Noah was happy and he was there. He couldn't tell if Blue was happy, but she was there and he hoped he could have a stake in her happiness. Hywel was incomplete without her. Without Henry.

Gansey sat up. It was nearly 4am and that meant that he'd missed his chance to sleep. Usually he was up around 6 regardless of variables. This was a time of night that made him tense when he saw it, because he could anticipate the fatigue of the next day. Not that he had anything to be doing other than what he was doing: pacing the corridor around his bed, stepping over books and recently-purchased-and-carelessly-discarded clothing. Those things made him want to check his bank account balance. He was afraid to. That was not something he'd ever done before.

Are you awake? Gansey fingers hesitated over the new keyboard and he had to pause to remember how to find Cheng in his contacts.

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Henry nodded, because here, here was the crux of the question, really. Gansey didn't want to know about Darrow. He just couldn't approach this situation directly. And that was alright. Except that something went tight and uncomfortable in Henry's chest that he didn't really know how to explain. He wasn't sure he could be impartial to any of this.

He sank in the water until it was just over his chin but not quite touching his lips. He watched Gansey carefully.

"Is that her name?" Henry asked carefully. "Blue and I have had a brief talk about things, but--I mean, I gave my congratulations and then politely excused myself from the discourse. I can't have stock in something I haven't been invited into being invested in."

That was, maybe, more honest than he needed to be. He milled his arms under the water uselessly, just to feel the resistance. "Is that why you brought me here, Gansey boy? To talk about Wendybird's new belle?"

Henry's knowing nod stung just behind Gansey's sternum. Gansey had ignorance his all, but he knew why he wasn't sleeping. He knew why he needed the water and this person's company and an empty room. From within the castle walls, Gansey's heart was breaking. Each time he remembered, he built up a new wall with empty words and doubled the guard. Cabeswater made no effort to protect him. She was one of the trees, after all.

"Not to my knowledge," he answered, rubbing a thumb absently against his mouth. In the thick of this stupidity, Gansey remembered why he'd only asked ancient questions with ancient answers: because they had answers. While he was on the subject, how had cyclical time changed its direction?

His contemplation almost caused him to skim over the middle bit, but the words echoed hollowly, finding nothing relateable to stick to. "Wait, what do you mean?"

"You don't know if you brought me here to talk to me about Blue?" Henry asked, and snorted a little, because then, they were going about this all wrong. This was a Gansey domain, and the whole event was more Ganseylike than even climbing into that hole under Borden House had been for Henry. Henry just tried to smile around everything, the thicket of emotion in his chest.

"What? Oh." That made him shrug, when he realized what Gansey was picking out and prying on. After a moment, Henry hummed and then said, "I decided when I came to Aglionby and watched the Vancouver crowd in all their trappings of relationships and what have you that, unless I was involved in something, it was none of my business. I'm there for listening. I'm very good at that. But--well, if I'm not invited, then I don't get to have an opinion, do I?"

That was a lie. Henry had a lot of opinions. He and the Vancouver crowd had had a betting pool on Ronan and Adam getting together. He had watched how Blue and Gansey looked at each other at the toga party. Henry had more opinions than he knew what to do with. And not a single one of them meant anything, when he lived on the outskirts of things.

Gansey raised a brow wryly. "You expect me to believe you don't have an opinion, Cheng?" He smiled quietly to himself; on Ronan, it would have been a smirk, but Gansey's victories weren't so crudely celebrated. Gansey had caught Henry in a lie, and one so thin that any Aglionby student would have barked a laugh. Henry Cheng, who always had a cause, didn't have an opinion? Please. Maybe when Ronan Lynch finally got his Perfect Attendance award, Gansey would believe Henry didn't get to have an opinion.

That wasn't the point. He chose his words carefully, licking his lips in the ensuing silence. "Blue had a life before I got here." After he got here. Between when he was here and he wasn't. Whatever. "I had a whole life she doesn't know about." A life with her, but not with her. And that was an important distinction. Gansey would not hold her to the promises she never had a chance to make. This was also the hardest part: the most Blue Sargent thing she could have done was rebel against destiny. Here she was, doing that, being so purely, truthfully Blue that it made Gansey ache for the Blue that he could pull close and remind how absolutely perfect she was.

If Gansey was going to chose a time to start drinking, this was it.

"Am I supposed to move on?" He was about at the halfway point of the pool now, treading water autonomously, not raising his voice too much because it was quiet and it was just them, and the king needed his adviser.

This time, even though Gansey was drifting away from him--Henry didn't know how to draw him back, he could only go so deep in the water--Henry splashed at him for the assault on his character. He was very selective on his opinions. He could not have an opinion on this. At least not a vocal one. At least not a vitriolic one.

But Gansey was making a point, one that was obvious, but painful too. Painful more for Gansey than for Henry. He, after all, still did not fit in this place, with these people.

"We all have lives before we got here, man," Henry pointed out. Gansey had layers of that shit now, more than Henry knew how to sift through in one pool-bound heart to heart. "And I don't know if a few months is a whole life. Don't get ahead of yourself there. I think you're both out of each other's loops just as much as the other one. Maybe that's the problem here. You're just not in sync. You've gone back to you and me, and not we."

It was universal, in this sense. Not when he'd accidentally flubbed on the beach, talking to Blue, and implicated himself anywhere in this tangled web of romance. He wasn't even sure he belonged anywhere, yet, in this tangled web of friendship. Except when he did.

The question seemed rhetorical for a moment. Henry didn't want to give bad advice, either way. Finally, what he said was, "I do not have a lot of experience in relationships, bro. In fact, none. Zero. I can't tell you how you're supposed to do this. But I can tell you that we are all very young."

Gansey was silent for a few long moments, considering Henry's words carefully. He nodded and waded back toward Henry, just to prove he wasn't being ignored.

You and me, and not we was a good place to start. While Gansey understood that things were different, Blue felt the same in his heart. She looked at him the same. Knowing they were destined to be together and being together were two different things. They had been before so they could be again. That certainly made sense with what Gansey knew: that time was cyclical.

Gansey took Henry's arms and began slowly wading him toward the center, where he'd just been. "Speak for yourself, Cheng," he said with a small smile, more focused on keeping calm so Henry would. "I'm a timeless forest." He grinned and continued his pull back.

Henry let himself be drawn deeper into the water. He was not nervous, not like when they'd been in Borden House. At least, he wasn't nervous for any of the same reasons he'd been in Borden House. Swimming did not make him anxious, because he had no structure to evaluate why it would. Gansey's hands, though.

"You could probably do with being a little less old and wise, bro," Henry said with a smile. But that was a lie, or at least not the truth. Gansey would not be Gansey if he were not a little timeless, a little ageless. A boy with the soul of an old man; or an old man with young eyes; or something in between.

The water enveloped them. Gansey's hands were very warm. Henry thought of the water more than anything else, how it supported him, how it made him feel strangely safe despite that he didn't know what he was doing.

Gansey just smiled because Henry was right. For reasons related to and despite his first death, Gansey always felt a strong sense of responsibility. There was never room for him to be a child growing up in the public eye. His parents were watchful and his sister was vigilant. Not even being overseas changed that. The world was a monitored place and it didn't stop Gansey from reaching incredible heights, nor did it escape him how hard the fall would be.

Old and wise was the only game in town even before Cabeswater, before Ronan and before Blue. Gansey had never been a child. He couldn't afford for anything to be outside his understanding.

Needless to say, Darrow was puzzling.

"Keep kicking your feet when you can't touch down anymore," Gansey instructed gently. He'd already backed himself out of where he could stand, but his presence above water was smooth. "You can use your arms if you need extra buoyancy." When he let go, of course. He let go with one arm and kept the other on Henry's. He looked pleased. "You've got this."

Henry did not believe that he had this. In fact, the moment that Gansey fully let go of his hands and treaded back from him, Henry bobbed down under the water a bit until his toes brushed the bottom of the pool again. He hurried back as best he could once he'd come back up, legs and arms spinning to get him back to a point that wasn't so deep.

He felt a damn idiot for it. But he laughed at himself. His hair, wet, flopped against his forehead, showing the style of the cut without all the product he had in it during the day, without the sleepy ruffle he'd had to it when they'd started this.

On safer, more solid ground, he smiled at Gansey. "Is that it then? Are we moving on?"

Gansey did not laugh, did not posture, did not comment. He let Henry get back to a level more matching his comfort and stayed where he was, a few feet out, treading water gently. He liked not being able to feel the ground under his feet, the freedom of knowing he was holding himself up. There was also something to be said for giving Henry some space.

Henry's smile was brilliant and unafraid and Gansey forgot about space. He submerged himself and swam closer, popping back up beside Henry.

"You want to get out?" Gansey didn't, but he would take Henry home if the need was there. He could always come back.

In the brief moment of Gansey's disappearance, Henry breathed. He hadn't realized he'd been doing it so shallowly, or for how long. And then, Gansey reappeared again, right at his side. This was a magic trick, to Henry, not dissimilar from all the other strange magics that Henry knew of in the world. But this one, unlike so many others, was one he might be able to do someday.

"I didn't say that," Henry protested. He was enjoying this, even if he didn't really know what he was doing. "I meant, are we moving on from talking about Blue? I don't want you to think you have to talk to me about it, Richard, but I--I'm here. Now, and generally speaking."

He splashed Gansey gently. It was much easier without so much space between them. But now that Gansey was back up--slicked wet and looking so gently concerned for Henry's comforts in this place--Henry could not breathe again.

Henry was flustered. He kept coming up breathless and his gaze was keen. At first, Gansey read it as guarded but that wasn't what it felt like in his chest. It felt quite the opposite of that.

In Henrietta -- Charlotte, Nashville, and most recently, Tulsa -- moments like this had come to pass. Sometimes Blue was there and sometimes they were alone, being young and (moderately) reckless. They'd spend their time talking about renting yachts on the west coast, at which point Gansey hoped he'd have known that the other boy could not swim. Often Gansey wondered what might have happened if he hadn't been here. Sometimes he wondered things he had never before thought to wonder. And sometimes the things he'd worked at in Henrietta were the same as the things he wondered while splashing at an extraordinary boy in a pool in a pocket universe.

"When I think of something to say, I'll let you know." It wasn't strictly the truth, but they were playing now, and the rules were looser. He struck out with a hand and captured Henry's risk, tugging him in closer to be more adequately splashed; the first attempt had been ineffecrual and not quite satisfying. He hauled him closer and swooped his arm under.

Henry let it slide. He wanted to push, to press. Maybe he didn't know any of them as well as they knew each other, but he knew when people were having him off, trying to distance themselves from something that didn't want to think about. Henry did a lot of that, after all; he was well versed in the shielding faces of avoiding discussion.

Whether or not Gansey was diverting him temporarily or permanently didn't matter. He was touching him, pulling him by the wrist. He was grinning and being playful. Henry squawked and splashed back at him again. The noise of the churning water filled up the space of the pool room, echoing off the walls and the high ceiling. This, Henry thought, was Gansey as youth, not the ageless forest he claimed to be.

They were awfully close together. Henry tried not to think about it. It was a task easier said than done, at the moment. He wasn't sure how he was going to keep this all out of his head.

The next natural course of action would be to dunk him under, but that was a dirty thing to do to a boy who couldn't swim, even if they were in shallower water. The only fair way to compensate was to keep Henry where he was. He curled his arm around Henry's shoulders and splashed him thoroughly, holding him there.

It wasn't that he didn't want to talk about Blue, because he did -- eventually. Henry and Adam were the people from whom Gansey gained the most insight. All Gansey could do was hope that Henry trusted him enough to know he wasn't quite hiding.

"You've started a fight you can't win, Cheng." He grinned.

Henry could see the moment where Gansey considered being rude, and the moment that he put it aside. At once, Henry was both grateful and deeply offended. Just because he couldn't swim didn't mean he was incapable of keeping up with this playful tussle. And besides, there was no sense in letting his discomfort control him.

Under the water, he poked and prodded at Gansey's ribs, looking for ticklish weakness.

"Says you, man," Henry said with a grin and a laugh as well. He felt just a little winded from working against the water, but he did his best to keep it part of his laugh rather than a sign of weakness here. After all, Henry was used to rumbling with siblings. He could absolutely keep up with this battle.

There was a tiny recoil that Gansey couldn't control. He wasn't embarrassingly ticklish, but certainly far more than he would like. He wasn't a person who was often poked or prodded. When people entered Gansey's personal space, it was for a handshake or a fistbump or a boyish shove. From someone else, it might have bothered him, not that anyone would have known. Since it was Henry, it was okay.

He swatted at Henry's arm above the water, springing back a step or two, taking care to splash as he landed. This felt something like flirting and Gansey was suddenly struck by that. This kind of horseplay was par for the course in crew, in any teenage boy's endeavors, but this was different. It was the two of them in the pool after hours, splashing around together and building something that, to Gansey, had already been constructed. Together, they could reinforce.

He submerged himself to the shoulders again and let himself float around. Maybe they should go home. Gansey didn't want to. The water and the company had him feeling comfortable. Tired, even. Maybe he would finally sleep when he got home. That was a comforting thought, too.

"Tell me about your internship." He smiled placidly, lacking pretense, and looked forward to Henry's diatribe. Gansey didn't feel like talking anymore, but he wasn't done with Henry's presence. A lot of time, there was silence in Hywel. Gansey preferred this: all quiet but the sound of the water displacing and replacing around them and passionate, loquacious Henry reminding him that home was all around him.

Henry was pursuant of Gansey, even when he pulled back, splashing a bit and trying to tickle him some more, now that he'd found a spot on his ribs to dig at him. It made him smile. Gansey, the ageless king-boy, was still Gansey, the person, and that came with all the pitfalls and trappings of humanity such as this. It was good to be reminded of it.

He could not go very deep, though, and so Gansey could easily escape him. Still, Henry smiled. He wished that Gansey would come in further again, but he would not ask for it. That wasn't his place.

"Business," he corrected. "I'm a business partner, in the think tank. My name is on the corporation documents and everything. It is...going, certainly. Things are, as ever, a maze of red tape, but they are in the works. And Mr Stark has been working hard on trying to make me a RoboBee. It won't be the same, but it will be something."

Partner. Of course. Gansey nodded his apology, his recollection. There was a distinct difference for more than one reason. Having a title like meant organizing oneself into the much-sought-after Young Professional category. To his parents -- to Henry's too -- this had been everything. Gansey was expected to uphold his family's standard, and Henry was expected to set it, to exceed it. Each of them knew well what it was like to work hard for something that was just to the left of what they wanted.

Here, though, they could be anything. Henry Cheng -- student activist and resident brightly-colored genius -- was choosing to be upwardly mobile, no matter where he was. Gansey was continuing with his planned gap year, and without the partner in it. For a moment, he wondered what his parents would think, how long into that impossible phone call it would be before his mother clucked her disapproval and said something like, maybe you could talk to that Economics professor and see if you can get a late start.

Excelsior, Dick, remember? He remembered. What was onward without upward?

"Oh," Gansey said, shaken out of his self-flagellation by this surprising piece of news. "Wow. That's quite an undertaking." He would imagine. Could he create something effective that had only existed through dream magic?

"Is it safe?" Underneath, there was a gnawing jealousy. Gansey had thought more than once about how to convince Ronan to produce that part of Henry that was missing. The boy was the same, but Henry didn't feel the same. Gansey could see it. This was another part of Henry's upwardly mobile life that had begun without Gansey and could very well have continued on without him. Maybe Henry was upward, and Gansey was just onward.

Something about what he'd said and what Gansey wasn't saying chewed at Henry for a moment. He felt cut loose and lost, incapable of pulling himself into the orbit of this boy when, really, that was all he needed. All either of them needed, perhaps. But, no, perhaps and definitely just him.

The worried speculation calmed the anxiety in a way. Henry could talk about the hows and whys of Tony Stark's ability to put technology into his head, into someone else's head, because he knew all about it. Comic books had been a backbone to his existence for so many years, and to have the man in the flesh was a startling revelation.

"Safe as life," Henry said with a shrug. He wove his hand through the water and, unthinkingly, moved himself closer to Gansey. The space between them felt like a thousand miles, a lifetime, and all Henry wanted was--well, something more. Something normal, or as normal as any of them seemed to have. Something like what Gansey had been having before he'd been brought here.

When they were close, Henry meekly reached for Gansey. He wasn't sure if this was allowed. He wished they were just two boys, heading out with a girl on a roadtrip for the year. None of that was a thing they could have here. It ached in Henry's chest, a physical thing.

His thoughts were spinning, spinning, and he was at a loss for words to explain anything going through his head. So he stood there, the water deep on his chest, until his fingers caught Gansey's under the water.

The turn of phrase caught Gansey. His mouth quirked into a half-smile, something perfected by a younger Gansey to serve a purpose that afterward, became a part of him. He looked at Henry sidelong. This boy belongs with us, he thought. Us and not me because if they were intact here, they belonged together. He'd known Henry's place in it for a while and even without the connection of finding Glendower together, Henry was a missing piece and he didn't even know how perfectly he fit.

All at once, a hand was in his. Henry's hand was in his. They were swimming (sort of) and talking and considering and now Henry's fingers were tugging Gansey's into a messy little knot. He didn't look. The view of it would be obscured by the water and he didn't know what it would mean to look. What was happening? How had they gotten there? Gansey retraced the steps.

They'd been talking about RoboBee, and Gansey asked if it was safe. Henry shrugged. Gansey had been so lost in some tiny loop about a few words that he hadn't considered Henry. The boy might have been scared. There was no way to fit something to him that was completely safe, was there? RoboBee was a thing made possibly by magic; it was a thing that wasn't meant to be duplicated in that way. Yet, it was a part of him that was missing, and Gansey could understand how the desire to be whole might outweigh the risk.

He squeezed Henry's fingers to let him know he was there. If this made him feel better, that was something he could do.

"School is starting soon. Are you ready for it?" It was a small-talk type of topic, something Gansey might use to get a stranger talking. With Henry, the difference was that Gansey was especially interested in the answer.

Gansey did not retract his hand, and so Henry did not either. This was a point of contact that was allowed. It felt hallowed, for a moment. Quite possibly, this was the most romantic thing to happen to Henry in--ever? Just this: brushing his toes on the bottom of a pool and touching another boy's fingertips like it meant something when Gansey's heart belonged to someone else.

"Yes," Henry said, because that was the right answer. Then, more realistically, Henry said, "Not at all. I wasn't planning on school, the year after graduation--well, you know. We were in--what was it, Tuskegee? But, without you, and with Blue working, I thought--"

Henry was quiet a moment. In the water, he drifted a little nearer Gansey. His heart felt percussive in his chest. He was amazed it wasn't causing ripples.

"I'll get used to it, quickly enough."

"Tulsa," Gansey interjected with a gentle chuckle. He let Henry continue only for the boy to cut himself off shortly thereafter. Gansey felt for Henry. This uncertainty wasn't something Henry had gone through at home, but Gansey sure had, and in the end, Henry had brought him over to the light side. This wasn't the place for that. Henry needed a different kind of support.

"You will." His hand moved from Henry's to sling over his shoulder where he gave him a reassuring squeeze. "Things are different here." There was a lot less to fear in the way of failure.

"Tulsa, yes," Henry corrected. And then--then Gansey was drawing him close, and everything was water-slick chest with a firm core and wiry, strong arms, the warmth of skin touching skin and the slight ruffle of breaths too close together.

Gansey's words were calm and reassuring, but Henry knew Gansey well enough to know that sometimes he spoke those reassurances even when he was not himself reassured. Henry wondered what a disappointment he might look like in Gansey's eyes, settling into his education because of lack of any other option.

The thought didn't last very long. His toes were scraping the bottom of the pool, and he, all casual, slung his arm around Gansey's shoulders as well to support himself. Their noses nearly brushed. It would be so easy--

Henry leaned in and pressed his mouth to Gansey's in a gentle kiss.

Somewhere, Gansey had miscalculated.

The hand-holding had probably been the first clue. This was not an Aglionby boy thing, but Henry was not a typical Aglionby boy. Gansey had known that from the moment he'd changed into a toga at the most civilized party he'd ever seen a bunch of teenage boys (and Blue) attend. RoboBee was the next clue, the magic robotic creature that had given Gansey something of a new lease on that shape of creature. Bees still terrified him, but RoboBee wasn't the kick in the stomach he had been that first day. So much had changed since then.

Like the way he thought about Henry. There was no one else in the world like Henry Cheng; that, a fierce sense of loyalty, and the incredible ways he proved himself were the things that landed him in Gansey's circle. Like Adam, his insight was worth the world to Gansey. Like Ronan, he was a power, a force that could not be understood by a layperson. Like Blue, he had wriggled his way into Gansey's heart by being unabashedly himself, by making Gansey question everything, and by wrapping himself so completely around Gansey's heart that his lips were a ley line, sparking up energy that rustled the trees in the forest within him.

He didn't pull away and he didn't quite kiss back. He told himself that he didn't want to spook Henry, that the progression of hands to mouth had been something designed to sooth Gansey into the idea. It wasn't working. At home, Henry and Gansey had a literal roadmap, things they'd done to get to a place where Gansey thought about something like this sometimes late at night when Blue and Henry were both sleeping and Gansey wasn't. This Henry didn't know the things the other Henry knew, so how could he be at this place? What had Gansey done to earn this kind of trust?

He cleared his throat finally, pulling his neck back just a touch, just enough to let Henry know that they weren't on the same page. Gansey's heart ached, but it had to be sympathy for Henry.

"We should go."

Henry had read the moment wrong. Of course he had. He'd spent months, years, working himself into the frenzy of giving Gansey himself. It had been steps and metaphors and quiet understanding in the dark where no one could see or hear them. It had come with the knowledge that Richard Campbell Gansey III was a part of a whole, over and over again. It had never been completed, but it had been a slide toward something more that was colored by observation and knowledge.

But Gansey had only been here a few weeks. This was not the careful building of something more. This was an attention that prayed on Gansey's sadness and frustration and loss.

Gansey was pulling back, clearing his throat. He had not disentangled himself, but Henry did. He put a bit of space between them and cleared his throat as well, looking around at everything--the water, and far edge of the pool, the walls, the ceiling; everywhere but at Gansey. Gansey said something, but the words didn't register for a moment, a breath, one nervous but made-calm inhale and exhale.

How stupid of him. It would figure, of all the people he could start to develop feelings for, it would be a girl that was finding herself and carving out her identity, and a boy that wasn't interested. Henry felt he had never read a situation so incorrectly in his life.

The words processed through him. Henry had so ruined the moment, Gansey's joy of this place and having Henry with him, that it was impossible to move around this disruption. Henry took another made-calm breath.

"You shouldn't let me spoil your good time," Henry said. He was impressed to hear that his voice was calm and reassuring. "You wanted to come swimming."

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thatsallthereis - 2016-10-08 23:33 (UTC) - Expand

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