Work Text:
The sun is low and simmering on the horizon, bathing Henrietta in the sort of light that flatters every angle and unfastens every frown.
They’re blasting down the highway, two identical camaros, furiously orange and louder than anything. Henry is laughing in the passenger seat, shaking out polaroids and balancing them on his knees, juddered by the engine’s endless snarl.
He keeps looking at Gansey, and Gansey keeps looking into the rearview, where he can just make out Blue hollering joyfully with all the windows down. Her hair whips about her face, and Henry reaches over Gansey’s arm to blare the horn. The road is utterly theirs.
He ponders that this kind of joy might be what street racing is made of, and he understands Ronan a fraction more.
“Heyo, Dick!” Henry shouts over the gusting in the cabin of the car. Gansey tilts his head in waiting, ever polite.
“It’s Lynch.”
He glances from the scorch of road in front of him to his phone, dangling from Henry’s fingers, lit up with Ronan’s name.
“Answer it, would you please,” Gansey says, and Henry obeys, smiling like phone privileges are a medal bestowed upon him from a king. He’s looked that way about a lot of minor acts of trust, and it’s as bewildering as it is endearing.
“Richard is frightfully busy captaining his ship right now, can I take a message?”
Gansey can hear the tinny response, measured and polite, very un-Ronan.
“Tell Adam his speech was inspired,“ Gansey starts.
“You’ve told him that 3 times—“
“And tell him we’re 15 minutes out from the Barns!”
Henry repeats this exasperatedly into the phone, and Gansey can just make out the drawl of an answer.
“Parrish says- wait, what?” Henry’s brow furrows.
Gansey quells the startle of unease in his chest. The bad days are over, he reminds himself.
Henry’s eyes flicker over to Gansey’s and hold. “He says to go to Cabeswater instead?”
Gansey swallows his excitement, thinks better of it, and lets it show on his face.
“Cabeswater is dead,” he says, with the particular timbre of someone who dearly wants to be proven wrong. Henry repeats this down the line.
“Huh. Lynch wants us to meet there anyway. Nostalgia?” Henry hazards a guess, brows now encroaching upon his glorious hairline.
“Magic,” Gansey corrects, firmly, feeling like all his thoughts are sorted into the right piles for once. “Call Jane.”
Henry exchanges hearty goodbyes with Adam and hangs up, pulling up the number for Blue’s new cellphone (her graduation present from the collective of Fox Way).
“The lady Blue!” Henry greets her, “change of plans.”
____
“Jesus Christ,” Gansey says, halfway out of the camaro in front of the sprawling magic of the ley line, now reorganized into the spitting image of Cabeswater.
“Lynch!” he calls, near manic, the least polished and most Gansey version of himself. He spins from the still ajar door to where the BMW is angled into the swaying shade of the trees.
“You brilliant thing, you madman!” he tramps through the grass and over to Ronan, who’s lazily propped up against his car. Gansey imagines he can see the flush of magic on him, the residue of creation.
He takes Ronan’s face in both hands and shakes him, a little.
“How?”
Ronan grins at him, a harmless sort of smile that jerks on something inside him.
“Dreamer,” Ronan jabs a thumb towards himself. “Dreamed,” he twists it towards the forest.
“New and improved,” Adam adds, his smile matching Ronan’s all the way down to the pride in his eyes.
Gansey looks between them, thrilled. “What have you done, you cretin?” He asks, laughing. He is the picture of clearheaded fondness. He doesn’t feel quite so much like he’s shotgun scattered through time when he’s with all of them like this, he’s too focused on the depth and breadth of his joy.
“It’s more firmly rooted now. More defended. I’m guessing you’ll be able to understand it, too, I gave it an english software update.” He looks at Adam. “Still speaks latin best, though. I thought that was important.”
“Of course,” Gansey rolls his eyes, a bit. Latin is another thing Ronan and Adam seem to be tied together with. It makes sense, he supposes, that something old and beautiful — the language of ancient magic — would apply to the two of them.
He looks over his shoulder at the growl of the second camaro skidding into view. Chainsaw caws in response overhead, the sound of a motor programmed into her like a second language.
Blue is out of the car and bounding towards the trees in seconds, her hands outstretched to the leaves. Gansey feels his chest pulse painfully at the sight of her, turning and turning with disbelief, her eyes wide.
The breeze rustles them, and voices hiss overhead. Blue’s face breaks open, and she laughs, “It’s good to see you too!”
Gansey watches her, then watches Henry approach with the hesitancy of a guest.
“Cabeswater 2, return of the Cabeswater,” Henry jokes, skidding a careful hand over the gnarled trunk of an oak.
“More like Cabeswater: continued,” Gansey calls, “seems it wasn’t dead so much as it was interrupted.”
Adam shoots him a look. “It felt pretty dead to me.” Which is code for, you felt pretty dead to me. Magic felt pretty dead to me.
Gansey hmm’s, curious. “And now?”
Adam tilts his head in that vaguely inhuman way of his. “There’s… something. I’m not bound to it anymore but. I felt it come back. Like a door unlocking.”
Gansey nods, thoughtful. “Did you dream Adam’s connection back into being?” he directs this question towards Ronan, who shrugs.
“I dunno if I can do that. I mean, Adam was there. In the dream. But so were a lot of things.” His voice goes black, “So was my mom.”
“Look, it’s like memory. It’s giving new form to something old. I dreamed it as it was, the shape of it, but I can’t bring back the fucking dead.” Ronan sounds furious at the truth of it. “It’s not gonna be exactly the same.”
Adam takes his hand and Ronan’s shoulders fall. He’s been easier to defuse, since Adam.
“It’s amazing,” Blue says gently. She had rejoined them sometime in the middle of Ronan’s explanation, and her eyes have gone soft and doughy. Gansey slips his hand into hers, and they stand that way, Ronan-and-Adam, Gansey-and-Blue, Henry standing a little ways away, stooped down to speak to Opal.
Cabeswater roars with energy beside them, and Ronan suddenly pushes off from his car, pulling Adam behind him and nodding towards Gansey. He tugs Opal away from an earnest conversation with Henry by the collar of her sweater, and she snaps at his dangling bracelets.
“Let’s explore this dump.”
Gansey smiles at Blue, secretive, and then thumps Henry on the back as they pass.
“What he meant to say was, excelsior.”
____
“You don’t think Noah…” Blue starts. She sounds hopeful in a remote sort of way, the resurgence of Cabeswater’s magic extended like condolences.
“No,” Gansey responds, looking suddenly drawn and tragic in that kingly way of his. “I don’t.”
The absence of Noah was more haunting than his actual haunting had been.
It’s been months since Glendower, months since the psychics explained Noah’s sacrifice, months since Ronan disappeared for 2 days and grief and fear met in a sloppy crescendo. They haven’t contacted him from 300 Fox Way yet, but they haven’t given up either, and the memory of Noah (a memory in himself) is like a lump in their throats.
They wind through the tree filtered sunlight for what might be hours or minutes, drowsily exploring both the familiar and the repurposed. They had all whooped with dumb excitement when their watches hovered over 7:36 PM and refused to budge. Opal had proudly thrust her wrist up for analysis, though she couldn’t, strictly speaking, read the watch face.
It was startling how much the forest looked like Cabeswater, clearings breaking open in front of them as soon as they cross someone’s mind, the pond or the vision tree or a wall of roses shimmering into view. It seemed as if they were creating it as they walked, which is to say, it was identical to its predecessor. The seasons hovered on the edge of changing, but Ronan willed the trees to maintain the summer in lazy latin.
Adam kept drifting, his eyes closed and his grip slackening on Ronan’s hand.
Gansey can sense him feeling out the forest now, his brow tense with concentration. Ronan pulls on his hand until he stumbles, and there’s fondness in Adam’s muttered “dick”, as his mind logs back on.
“Anything, Adam?” Blue calls. It’s reassuring to have her in the same headspace as him, always twirling around or ahead of Gansey’s hunches.
“Just that feeling. Like I can tell that it wants us here, but it’s not asking anything of me. It’s like the magic is awake but the sacrifice is moot,” he looks unsettled. “It’s… just right actually. I still feel like me.”
“You’ve always been you,” Ronan says, gruffly. Adam quirks a smile at him, pleased.
“I’m more me now than I ever was then.”
Ronan looks at him so softly that Gansey averts his gaze over to Blue, who is worrying her lip and swinging their hands between them. She catches his eye.
“‘Sup Dick?”
“I just think I’m. Happy. Utterly,” he says, a little helpless. Her face goes completely slack, then resolved, and she slips an arm around his waist.
“Let’s keep it that way.”
“Guys, look at this!” Henry’s voice comes from surprisingly far off, and Gansey whips around to find the source.
“These mushrooms are walking! They have little mushroom feet! Do you have my camera, Dicky boy?”
Gansey laughs. “You have a phone, Henry. An expensive one. Use it.”
Henry shoots him a look as the gang rolls up to meet him. “Will an iPhone camera capture the elegance of true magic? I didn’t think so.” He stoops down to press curious fingers to a mushroom cap, and it springs away from him on it’s spongy stem legs. Its frantic, uneven hopping reminds him of Opal on unsteady hooves.
“Real elegant,” Ronan says, eyes rolling.
Gansey watches Henry snap photos and he slips his travel notebook from his pocket, slimmer but just as well loved as his journal.
“Do you think they’re sentient?” He asks, absently, to no one in particular. “Do you think the physical manifestation of energy has any bearing on its ability to adapt, or move, or feel? Is everything in Cabeswater made of the same stuff, does it even matter if it’s a fish or a tree or a mushroom or a child?” He scribbles notes as fast as he can speak and Ronan and Blue exchange a glance over his shoulder.
“You’re overthinking it, man. It’s a magic forest.” Ronan pick at a scab on the base of his thumb and watches the scrabbling mushrooms, feigning boredom.
Gansey thinks, mildly, that Noah would have loved these little creatures, the sheer unnecessary fun of them. He closes his notebook.
“Oh well. As puzzling as ever. Shall we?” He indicates the path on which they arrived, and the five of them deflate a little.
“Reality beckons,” Henry says morosely and Ronan and Adam share an amused look.
“Thanks for the graduation present, Ronan,” Blue says, and it’s obvious she’s not talking about the car. Or not just about the car.
He shrugs. “Henrietta was getting boring.”
Adam leans in close to Ronan’s ear but it’s still audible when he says, “don’t let Gansey hear you talking about his wife that way.”
They smirk at each other.
“Speaking of the camaro, did I show you the pictures of Blue in the car? She barely comes up to the dashboard, it’s phenomenal.” Henry lopes towards Ronan and produces a polaroid from his back pocket.
“Jesus, Cheng, you’re going to have to be her adult supervision.”
Henry laughs with his whole body, Blue protests loudly, and Gansey feels warm in his palms and his chest.
The walk back is sunny and cheerful, the trees keeping them whispering company and school seeming more and more like a faraway dream. Opal keeps trying to run ahead and put things in her mouth, so eventually Adam hoists her up on his hip. Chainsaw is installed on Ronan’s shoulder, and Gansey, Blue, and Henry have their heads tipped together, talking about the future of Cabeswater and the road trip, adventure moving swiftly back into the foreground of their lives.
It feels very much like a beginning: the five of them, the raven court, back in their impossible kingdom.