[For Henry and Blue] I see your progress stretch out for miles

[thatsallthereis]

For a week, Gansey was on fire. It wasn't the kind that Ronan liked -- the one that sparked out from his eyes and the curled corner of his lips -- it was more urgent. Numb.

For a week, Ronan laid unmoving. Things were changing. Things were dying. Gansey wished he hadn't seen it before, but if he hadn't he wouldn't know what to do.

He needed an amplifier. Check. Blue sat thrumming in his front seat, as anxious and scared as the rest of them. He needed an EMF detector, and he needed his watch. Check and check. There was one thing missing now. Not a thing at all, really. Having Henry by his side meant working as efficiently and cleanly as possible. He was distraught; there was a small margin for error and a large chance of the error itself. Gansey had spent the last week all but shaking. He was a man on a mission. Were his eyes not open, he'd seem to be in some kind of coma of his own.

He asked Henry to be waiting when he arrived and he was. The Pig sputtered up, stopped, and Gansey slammed it to life again. There was no time.

He reached back to unlock the door for Henry. He'd wanted him up front, but he couldn't well tell Blue to get in Driving Miss Daisy position until they picked his boyfriend up. Gansey was mad at himself for taking this time to think such a trivial thing. For all they knew, Ronan's time was running out.

"Get in," Gansey said through the open window. It didn't need to be said, and Gansey didn't like the way it sounded at all -- harsh and distracted. He apologized with a little twitch of his lips. Henry looked good. He wished he could find the brainpower to think about anything else but Ronan.

"We're going to Cabeswater," Gansey said once everyone was settled. "We have to find a way to save Ronan."

[Order: Gansey, Henry, Blue]

Comments

[jeongbro]

Henry knew what was going on in fits and starts, bits and pieces. It was a little like it had been before he'd given Gansey his secrets in Borden House, viewing the copse of Gansey and his Magical boys--and girl--from an outside vantage. There was no Seondeok to report to here. Now, it was just a mechanism of Gansey being the only one that remembered Henry being a part of it all, including Henry.

The Pig slid up to the curb. Getting in was a fit. The Pig was a two-door, which meant Blue had to vacate because Gansey could not while the engine was running. Henry oozed into the backseat as quickly as he could so they would not lose momentum.

When the doors were shut and the seatbelts were done, Henry let himself breathe for a second. The news was not news--no news, he supposed, was maybe good news. Henry hadn't been prying into things; this was not how one won confidence. But he was curious, wondering.

"No Adam?" This was a stupid question, but seemed vital, if they were going out to Cabeswater.

[formicine]

Blue's belatedly glad that Gansey hadn't asked her to sit in the backseat when she first got in -- it'd have been strange in a number of ways, him looking like a chauffeur and she feeling unable to speak properly or look out the front.

They hadn't spoken that much, anyway, running on nervous energy and aware of all the same things, but there was something calming about the rhythm of the Pig under her thighs, her fingers worrying at the trim at the edge of the seat, Gansey driving with one hand at the top of the wheel.

With Henry in the car, though, she feels again out of place forcing Gansey's boyfriend to the backseat. A third wheel, maybe, or an inconvenient truth. This is a road trip, but it's not the same sort of road trip as a gap year that sees all three of them carefree and laughing; she's not the same sort of Blue that gets to have that.

Henry doesn't seem too put out by the arrangement, though, and Gansey takes command the way he always does. "Adam's with Ronan," she says, glancing back over her shoulder. "In case."

In case he wakes up? In case something changes? She doesn't want to entertain the possibilities too much. It strikes her that Ronan could have killed himself in a thousand different ways in the time they've been fighting and she hasn't been this scared about it; the thought just makes her feel guiltier.

[thatsallthereis]

Henry shimmied his way in. Gansey watched through the rear-view and gave him a little smile that took great effort. Their last conversation was still in Gansey's head. It hadn't been much of a conversation, he supposed, since Gansey had talked and talked and talked and talked and Henry had listened all of those times and more. He hadn't said much, but it had been significant.

And Blue. For a second, Gansey felt peace. It felt like he had everything he needed to think clearly. At one point, that was singularly Blue's claim. Now, he wondered if maybe her heart was an amplifier like the rest of her.

Something shot up his spine, just sharp enough for Gansey to know it was there. Resolve.

In case, yes, Gansey supposed. The reality was that Gansey had tried to get him to come, but Adam had shut it down quick. Gansey knew Adam wasn't going to leave his side. That ached, too. In a hundred ways.

"I kept thinking we had to wake Ronan up," Gansey said. He gripped and twisted restlessly on the steering wheel. "If I could find something -- the right thing -- he wouldn't be dreaming anymore. He might be in an unspeakable place, fighting anything. At any moment, he might wake up with something awful. If he wakes up at all." The words were excruciating. Speaking of horror was much worse than just feeling it.

"But no, we need to figure out why he's sleeping." Gansey nodded. "We're going to ask Cabeswater."

[jeongbro]

Henry thought of all the rough, terrible things that Ronan could be dreaming of. He remembered the Fourth of July that Kavinsky had thrown, the dragons and the destruction, and all the chaos that had come from it. Ronan's terrible thing had been a defense, Henry knew, but in the face of fire and vitriol, living in the shadows of it, it had seemed like just as much of a monster.

Henry didn't know if Ronan could make something like that happen in Darrow. He didn't really understand how the Lynchs and Kavinskys of the world worked, and he didn't know if they worked differently in Darrow.

He supposed, in the end, it didn't matter. Henry understood very little of how Cabeswater worked, either. Gansey had explained it, a little, but mostly he had explained Cabeswater as it was in Virginia, not in Darrow. Could they speak to it? Would it listen to them? Would they understand it? Henry didn't have any answers.

He reached up and squeezed Gansey's shoulder briefly. Then he settled back in his seat.

"I suppose we have an adventure to go on then, don't we?"

[formicine]

"We do," Blue says, turning sideways in her seat in defiance of her seatbelt to look at them both. She has it on, but even en route to Cabeswater, it seems impossible that they would crash. The Pig might die (though not this dream-thing, probably), but Gansey feel like too good a captain to let them founder.

(It would be Darrow-like, though, to make it through a hundred crazy things only to die in a car crash, wouldn't it? But she can't believe it will happen.)

The thought of an adventure is at least, some sort of silver lining to the anger and fear under her skin. "Hopefully it'll talk to us even though we're not Adam or Ronan," she says with a wry sort of smile. "If we yell at it about the Greywaren. Sometimes it sort of likes me, even. I think."

She sets her chin on the plush shoulder of the chair. "Do you do better in Latin than Gansey does, Henry?"

[thatsallthereis]

Comfort came like a flood with a touch of Henry's hand. Gansey reached over with his far hand to squeeze his boyfriend's. He wanted to take a moment more to think about the comfort Henry had provided. Time may have not been a luxury Ronan had. Everything else had to wait.

"Cabewsater remade me," Gansey reminded her. He thought she'd known that, at least. Hadn't they talked about it? Jesus, Gansey couldn't remember. All he could do was thinking about Ronan's all prone and too calm. Ronan in his dreams screaming and screaming and screaming and no one could hear.

"He took French," Gansey answered automatically. They'd had French together, in fact. When Gansey went back to it in his senior year, he remembered not remembering Henry had been there before. Maybe that was the Cheng-from-before - the one that wasn't even on Gansey's radar screen.

"It is me. It knows you." It knows you're one of them, he wanted to say, but in the chaos, he couldn't remember if he'd told her that, either.

Taking one last moment of self-pity, Gansey exhaled. His shoulders came up and squared out. The Pig sputtered to life and they drove.

[jeongbro]

"I did indeed," Henry agreed. He could figure some Latin because it was the French root. It was the same way that he could successfully tell people in Italy and Spain and Brazil that he didn't speak the language, so sorry, but English? The fundamental kissing-cousins knowledge was there. He did not make a kissing-cousins joke, but it was hard.

"I do alright with languages, though," he said with a shrug. Then, he had to talk above the rumble of the engine, and it mostly involved leaning in between the front seats. "Better when I am drinking, and when I am not talking to ostensibly inanimate objects. But I'm sure, between the three of us, we can figure something out. And RoboBee might be able to help. It is Lynch-adjacent, after all."

And it was. A product of Niall, rather than Ronan, but Henry imagined that it could be of some help, if for nothing else than interpretation. Henry didn't imagine that a forest--even one that sort of spoke Latin--understood syntax and colloquialisms. RoboBee was good at translating those things into Henry-speak.

[formicine]

Blue flushes a little. They had talked about Cabeswater remaking him, of course; it was one of those things that Blue thought about and didn't think about. Something she held always in the back of her mind: that this Gansey wasn't quite her Gansey, the one she had first met. (And, in some ways, maybe he was a little more her Gansey, because what she knew of Gansey had had some say in remaking him). It's a little eerie and existential to think too hard about, what makes a person and what it means to be remade.

But it balances something, him not being the same Gansey and her not being the same Blue. At least who they each are here is something they've been learning at the same time.

Right now, the important thing isn't that she should have known about Cabeswater, anyway. It's that Gansey's link to Cabeswater makes this all easier, or hopefully it does. That they have some sort of in where they might not.

He says it knows you and she feels a little better, taking a breath and trying to expand herself outward in her mind, as though she can reach out Cabeswater by thinking about it. Blue doesn't know what she's doing, exactly, with that. She's never been a psychic, or a magician. But sometimes she has a grasp on her own power.

She smiles a little at Henry's Lynch-adjacent, too. He's not wrong. Maybe they're all a little Lynch-adjacent.

She says that, out loud. "I don't want to have the last thing I said to him be some bullshit," she says, not a reply, just bursting free of the thoughts she's been trying to keep under her skin.