[For Ronan] I'm a little bit rusty and I think my head is caving in

[thatsallthereis]

No matter where Gansey was -- in a bed, on a couch, on the floor, at home, in Darrow -- sleep could never find him. Somewhere between Cuba and Scotland (or was it the Ukraine?) it had abandoned him and never returned.

It was 9pm when Gansey pulled up to Hywel. He parked himself neatly next to its twin and tried not to imagine what sort of conversation was waiting for him upstairs. He was exhausted and all he wanted was to lay down and sleep, which was self-sabotage at its finest. Sleep wouldn't come. Even if he hadn't been chewing on the inside of cheeks thinking about how to find Henry peace, he still wouldn't be sleeping.

Instead, he did what any sensible bachelor would do: put on a pot of coffee. He was too drained to think about poking at the fat question mark that was Darrow and fiction seemed like it might hinder more than help when what he wanted was a miracle.

The coffee was brewing and Gansey's legs were rubber; it was the familiar sting of sensory overload and not enough sleep. In a moment of pure genius, Gansey remembered they had a TV with an infinite number of channels. There had to be something. After 15 minutes of clicking around blindly, Gansey found a documentary about the history of Halloween. How festive. How simple. And to top it all off, the coffee was ready. He couldn't be unafraid, he wasn't going to make it all the way to "afraid and happy," so he settled for vaguely nervous and temporarily okay.

Comments

[thedreamthief]

When Ronan emerges from his room -- his own since Adam's been up studying and Ronan had decided to not get in the way -- he isn't empty-handed. Though, to anyone else it might appear that way.

The little wiggling ball of fluff meows up at him as it blinks its bright blue eyes. Ronan hasn't thought up a name for him, yet. That'll be up to Noah.

He stops just outside his door when he spots Gansey on the couch, sipping from a mug. Judging by the smell, it's coffee. The fact that Gansey's drinking coffee at nine o'clock at night doesn't register as remotely strange, but the fact that Gansey's here at all, does.

"I see you've decided to return," Ronan says, not bothering to hide the attitude at all as he carries the pseudo ghost cat into the room and drops down onto the opposite end of the. The kitten's tiny, razor-sharp nails dig into skin, but Ronan barely flinches as he extracts them and forces the ball of fluff into the cradle of one arm.

[thatsallthereis]

Ronan was carrying a cat. It was a little grey thing, sort of ghostly and feisty. Gansey regarded the two of them and said, "you have a new animal every time I come home." This wasn't a weighted comment, it was just a realization. Ronan liked animals more than people: fact. Ronan could dream things: also true. Ronan dreamed a lot of animals: a logical syllogism. It didn't seem to be making him any happier. Gansey wished he knew how to change that.

"I left you a note telling you exactly where I was," Gansey said patiently as he got to his feet. But the time he was upright, he'd sipped at his coffee and looked at Ronan placidly from over his glasses. "He's home, now. Settled as much as he can be."

[thedreamthief]

"No, I don't," Ronan replies because it's the truth. This little fur ball is the first living thing he's dreamed in months and Noah's the only reason he tried. After all, like Adam had said, there are plenty of animals already in this city that need homes; there's no need for Ronan to dream up more.

But this one's special.

"You just don't always notice the shit that's right in front of you," he adds with a shrug. The added, Or, don't want to goes unsaid.

The little grey kitten starts gnawing on Ronan's finger, needles like little pins though it lacks the muscle to even slightly break skin and Ronan keeps his finger exactly where it is as he regards Gansey cooly. "And I saw the note."

He doesn't say a word about Cheng.

[thatsallthereis]

Apparently Ronan wasn't in the mood for hyperbole. Apparently Ronan wasn't in the mood for much, including telling a kitten to stop eating him. God, Gansey was tired, and he told himself to remember patience. This place was terrible, and Ronan was a person a few too many terrible rattles away from burning Hywel to the ground. Up in flames; that was the Ronan Lynch way.

"Was there something you wanted to talk about, Ronan?" It felt necessary to ask, since he was just sort of looking at Gansey like he'd missed his curfew, cradling a (very cute, admittedly) fuzzball. Another sip at his coffee revealed that he'd forgotten to put any sugar in it. That was okay. No one drank coffee for the taste, anyway.

[thedreamthief]

"Was there something in particular I'm supposed to talk about, Dick?" Ronan shoots back, the kitten still happily gnawing on the pad of his finger.

If anyone is fully aware just how much Ronan fucking detests talking, it's Gansey. Not that it's ever stopped Gansey from trying anyway, of course. And he isn't stupid, he has a pretty good feeling what exactly it is Gansey wants Ronan to talk about. It's the same fucking thing both Noah and Adam have tried to get him to accept, the same thing Blue tried to get him to accept before she ditched their entire group for someone else.

And Ronan's tired of pretending like he gives a shit.

[thatsallthereis]

Ronan's hate-on for talking was positively exhausting sometimes. How was he supposed to find this perfect amount of truth that he was seeking if he wouldn't talk about anything? There used to be exceptions, even in Darrow, but it didn't seem like there were anymore. Maybe there were. Maybe Gansey just wasn't one of them, anymore.

"You could start with why you're standing there. If you have nothing to say," Gansey said, fully aware of the incredibly childish turn this had taken. It wasn't the first time tiredness had caused this kind of shitty interaction between these two friends, these blood brothers.

But this wasn't about tired, was it? They were both tired, but not like that.

"Are you mad because I stayed over there? Is that what this is about? I'm not going to read your mind, Ronan, so if we could skip the guessing game." He was there, sipping his coffee mildly, willing to talk. What else was there to do? If there was a way to resolve this without talking, Gansey would do it. Not for himself. Talking was just fine by him.

[thedreamthief]

For a moment, Ronan's tempted to just keep walking. Because Gansey isn't wrong - there's no use in standing still just glaring at each other. The only reason Ronan's out of his room right now is because he has a cat to deliver. A cat who's still busy gnawing on his fingers, paws grappling clumsily.

But Gansey doesn't let it go. Of course he fucking doesn't.

"Do you actually care?" Ronan asks instead, turning to face Gansey more directly. "You're just going to tell me I don't have any right to be pissed off, right? Cheng had a fucking seizure and needed someone to hold his dick for a few days. I get it. Glad you could be a good boy scout, Gansey. Real proud of you. Now fucking leave it."

He doesn't wait for a response this time, turning to head for Noah's room.

[thatsallthereis]

There had been far too much of that. Helen asked him in regular intervals and all different kinds of ways if he was into boys. His boys. Ronan, particularly. He hadn't lied. It wasn't something he had ever considered. Allowed himself to consider.

"Of course I do," Gansey said, patience blessedly returning to his voice. It was fleeting. Gansey was getting very tired of comments about Henry's genitalia and all of the speculation about his proximity to it. Darrow was supposed to be different. Everyone went around acting like it was Pleasantville and Gansey, right then, thought maybe he was in Hell: a place he didn't even believe in.

Gansey let Ronan go where he was going. He waited by the doorway, just at the corner of where Ronan's vision would be when he walked by. When he did, Gansey regarded him for a few moments.

"You'd have been there in three seconds flat if it had been me. Wouldn't you? And don't tell me it's different. He's one of us. He belongs with us. Why are you having so much trouble accepting that?"

[thedreamthief]

Noah's room is unsurprisingly empty and Ronan carefully deposits the kitten atop the crumpled bedsheets. He stares up at Ronan with wide grey eyes and lets out a plaintive meow.

"I'll get you some food, alright?" he says, holding up a finger like that might actually get him to stay and turning to find Gansey lingering by the doorway. He's still frowning, an expression that matches Gansey's, and he doesn't say a word as he tries to push past him.

But then Gansey keeps talking and Ronan feels the simmering rage under his skin boil over. "It is fucking different," he snaps, turning abruptly, the sound of his voice sending the kitten running to the other side of the room. "When the fuck did he become your best friend, Gansey? Because I don't remember him being there when my dad was killed. I don't remember him being around when we found Noah's fucking corpse. I don't remember him giving a single solid shit about Parrish's shitheel of a father and I don't remember seeing him giving a fuck when I--" That one he doesn't finish. It's not something he and Gansey talk about. It's not even something Ronan and Noah talk about. It's a thing that's known, a thing that happened. And Ronan made a promise.

"When the fuck did you all become so goddamn eager to welcome anyone with a Aglionby emblem on their sweater?" he says instead "You gonna go out and make nice with Kavinsky next? Huh? Maybe visit him the next time he wraps his car around a goddamn tree?"

[thatsallthereis]

"When you what?" Gansey asked, somewhat exasperated. There were times that Gansey felt like a caregiver, when he wanted to set a hand on his hip and tap his foot impatiently and see him on the other side of this temper tantrum. Why attempt to reason as an adult until Ronan was ready to converse like one?

Because then I'd be waiting forever. If Ronan talked to people, Gansey didn't know anything about it. They'd spent time together, pleasant time, even, but Ronan hadn't just been a cold front, he'd been a white-out. Because Ronan didn't like to talk. Very few people liked to talk (Gansey was an obvious exception), but they did because that was what people did.

"That's ridiculous." It was a simple statement of fact. Aglionby had nothing to do with this and Ronan knew that. The statement about Kavinsky so was so absurd that he didn't dignify it with a response. He fully waved it away, as if it were tangible and he could.

[thedreamthief]

"When I tried to fucking kill myself!"

Ronan's never said it in so many words. None of them have. Back when it happened, when Noah found him, neither of them knew what Ronan did, that it hadn't been a razor clutched between shaking fingers but a night terror's claws that had ripped his arms into ribbons. Except that isn't true, is it? Noah knew. Noah always knew.

But Gansey didn't.

Later, Ronan had insisted he hadn't done it on purpose. And maybe he hadn't, not consciously. He hadn't gone to sleep the night before intending to never wake up. But he'd let the terror in, he'd let it take him. And it was only Noah shaking him awake that had made them stop.

And just like that, Ronan's done. He shoves past Gansey without another word, stomping across the open room to grab the keys of the Pig off the table.

He's fucking done with all of this.

[thatsallthereis]

Time being what it was messed everything up. Back home, time had been a thing that was hard to hold onto, but Gansey had the benefit of having more information than he could process. In Darrow, Gansey had endless questions with no answers. Ronan was a retreating back, Adam was what was onward and upward, Henry was an incomplete being, and Gansey was... what?

Gansey was. At least Gansey was.

"Ronan," Gansey said, and he was shouldered out of the way. So much was bubbling up and over. When he'd come back like this, he'd thought there would be more calm, less obliviousness. Cabeswater made him well, as Ronan had made Cabeswater perfect.

"Ronan!" Gansey called, catching the other boy very gently by the wrist, so he could not be mistaken. "I'm sorry. Okay?" He was. There was a lot he didn't know about this Ronan like there was a lot this Ronan didn't know about him. Deep things. Things that could be discussed, but not with someone who was unwilling to talk.

"Stay." Not a command, but a request, from one friend -- one best friend -- to another.

[thedreamthief]

The key's teeth bite into his palm as Ronan ignores Gansey entirely.

Ignores until he can't at least, until familiar, slender fingers are wrapping around his wrist. Ronan tugs free of it like nothing at all, Gansey's hold barely anything at all. Definitely not enough to keep him. Gansey's tone isn't quite pleading and it isn't commanding either.

It still vibrates under Ronan's skin as he turns to face Gansey head on again.

"Why?" he asks instead. "Tell me why I should give one single shit about Henry fucking Cheng." He pauses for only a second, for no time at all, his chest still heaving. Still aching. "I've been here for a year and a half, Gansey. Eighteen fucking months. And it happened again, you know that? The terrors. I fell asleep in the Pig and they almost ripped me to pieces. Noah wasn't here yet, only you. A different you," he clarifies because that feels important. This Gansey isn't his Gansey.

He's everyone's Gansey, but Ronan's

"You gonna be here when it happens again?"

[thatsallthereis]

Ronan freed himself of Gansey's loose grip and for a moment, Gansey saw something older than this moment, but younger than Ronan was, then. Two years by linear time, longer by Ronan's clock. The hours following Niall Lynch's death were etched in Gansey's brain like Ronan's Latin etched into the Cabeswater trees. Time had brought many things to (and from) Ronan since then. So many of those things happened within the last year. Ronan hadn't lived that year. Ronan had come here in a lull between tragedies, and the ones he had yet to experience were the ones that brought the Ronan in Henrietta peace. This Ronan -- the hunch of his shoulders, the edge in his voice, the snarl at his lips that waited for a reason to creep across the rest of him -- was not that boy who lost and rebuilt.

"I will," Gansey said, staying firm over that touch of heartbreak that came when he'd earned Ronan's genuine doubt. "You know I will." He had to, didn't he? What was Gansey without Ronan?

[thedreamthief]

"I don't know," Ronan snaps right back. "That's the whole fucking point, Dickface."

He wants to hurl the keys across the room, to smash them against the wall hard enough to dent, but he keeps them in his fist, the point of one nearly breaking skin. It's more satisfying than the bounce of keys of brick would ever be.

"You left before," he says, a furious accusation. "You'll do it again. Everyone here does, right? Or-- shit, maybe Blue will kill you again. Do you think the Cabeswater here will listen to me? It's not mine like it is back home. It's not the same." And he knows Gansey can't argue that much, that he can feel it as well as Ronan can. "Or maybe you'll just be too fucking busy with Henry Cheng to even notice."

[thatsallthereis]

This both was and wasn't about Henry Cheng. On the one hand, Henry was a symbol of moving on: a person from a life full of peace that Ronan would never have a chance to live like it was. On the other, there were the conversations he'd been having with Adam. Gansey's obliviousness had robbed him of many things, and it seemed like this was another example. How were there so many things that had gone unnoticed to such a watchful eye?

"I came back," he pointed out, shamefully wounded by the accusations that Gansey could distract himself so easily from someone that meant so much to him. Ronan tended to see what he wanted to see, and in Gansey, he saw another retreating back, another dead hero. Another smiling, charismatic creature who could make or unmake Ronan's world in a few words. The weight of that responsibility was hefty, paralyzing.

"Time isn't like it was in Henrietta. We're on ley line rules, so there aren't any. I had some trouble with time after Cabeswater remade me, but time moves one way here. Forward. People don't come back, but I did. Again." And Gansey was a person who -- three times, now -- tended to come back. It was what he did. Ronan knew that.

"You made Cabeswater. Cabeswater remade me. For you." Gansey gave his life for Ronan's, Ronan gave his greatest magical gift back, and now Ronan was halfway out the door and insisting that Gansey didn't care enough to stay.

[thedreamthief]

Gansey isn't raising his voice, though it isn't without effort, Ronan thinks. He's never argued with Ronan in the same manner as Declan, there haven't ever been punches thrown or words too sharp, too cutting to take back.

Even if Ronan's come close a time or two.

However different this Gansey is to the one Ronan remembers, there are still elements that have remained the same.

"I don't want you to come back," he says finally, some of the fire under his skin banking though he remained tense, muscles drawn tight. "I want you to stop fucking leaving."

And he wants more than that, more than he'll ever say, at least to Gansey. Ronan's greatest fault is wanting the impossible. He can't claw this piece of himself out any easier than he can stop being the monster that he is. He can't stop people from changing, from drifting, from leaving him behind. He can't make them care and want the same things he does.

All he can do is watch them go.

[thatsallthereis]

In the past week alone, Gansey'd had a great many revelations. Three months in and he was beginning to wonder if he'd never find anything out about Darrow at all. He was thinking about going back to school, about finding a job, about shredding the little black card Ronan gave him and putting his lack of money where his mouth was. He'd thought about his friends and how they were together and what any of that might mean. He'd thought about Ronan: faithful, passionate, endlessly angry Ronan who knew so very little love anymore and had all of his. All of theirs.

"I'm not going anywhere," Gansey promised. A life for a life for a life into eternity went those Raven boys, and the cycle would continue until time eked them all out of out existence. Without Ronan, there would be no more Gansey. Without Gansey was... this. This version of Ronan who couldn't chance taking a step forward because another blow asunder might knock him down for good.

"I know it." They belonged together, all of them. Cabeswater whispered this through him. That beautiful, perfect entity gave him life, but without his court, the people he loved, Gansey felt like nothing at all. Without Adam and Blue and Henry and Noah and Ronan, that was all there was.

[thedreamthief]

"Well, I'm glad one of us does," Ronan says, tone low still laced with uncertainty, but not quite as sharp.

His palm remains indented with the teeth of the keys as Ronan loosens his grip on them and he takes a step back. There's still a buzzing under his skin, still an ache he knows won't evaporate under Gansey's assurances. Gansey hasn't seen what Ronan has just as Ronan hasn't seen what Gansey has.

The fact that fucking Cheng knows more, understands more about this Gansey than Ronan does sits like poison at the back of his throat.

"I'm going out," he says then, already turning on his heel. He doesn't bother grabbing his jacket on the way, voice back to biting. "Goes without saying, but don't wait up."