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Fate is a bit like a well-polished mantle piece—it is something certain and predictable. Unnoticable as it stands in the background, pale in comparison to a crackling fire. But when it is missing, when it has been broken on the floor, there is nothing else to think about but that broken centerpiece. How, despite everything, it brought the whole room together. How, when guests come in now, they notice a shift in the air first. An unease in their very step. A mantle piece is not so easily replaced—the vases are too bulky or too fragile and to break another piece would be a travesty, really.
So it remains empty. And the guests remain off. And there is nothing to draw his eyes above the crackling flames.
He took another sip of the terrible tea—dandelion root and other properties. Gansey knew better than to press what those herbs were. He would rather not spit Blue’s mother’s tea out, thank-you-very-much.
His notebook sat at the edge of the table, overstuffed and held shut with the leather cord he assumed had originally been for aesthetic purposes. Now, it was integral to the structural integrity of the notebook.
“It’s over,” He commented dully. He didn’t know why, here of all places, he seemed to say all the things he never meant to. He wanted to blame the patchouli smoke, but Jimi had cleared the house out two days ago. Only the faint scent clinging to the draperies remained.
Maura did not stop her endless pursuit of the top of the cabinets. She was not a short woman by any means, but she was standing atop the counter to reach. “Things end, time moves. It rarely waits for us.”
Gansey took a sip of tea and grimaced into his cup. This was not the type of conversation he wanted to be having with her. With anyone, really. “I—I apologize, I don’t know what’s come over me.”
Maura laughed and it sounded so like Blue. She reached up behind the cabinets, grasping a dirty sock and throwing it to the ground, muttering how in the fuck— before addressing him again. “Having second thoughts?”
“That’s not how most people ask if you’re suicidal.” Because it slipped out, because, if they were going to talk about this. Slip all into a conversation that Gansey would, if anyone else asked, blame it on the patchouli and whatever concoction he was drinking, then he was going to make her want to back away from it.
“You’re not most people. You all—you were a part of something big, bigger than you ought to be.”
“That sounds terribly clique,” And he sounded like a child stamping his feet. Pretending he could take it all back, shove it away and forget it had even happened. Maura Sargent was an exceedingly odd woman outside of the psychic connection and her readiness to splunk for her ex. Her eyes twinkled like she knew something, like she knew everything and was waiting for Gansey to catch up. Which, perhaps she did, considering the former. Though based on the latter, he thought this trait in particular was outside the realm of psychic ability and had more to do with Maura as a person.
Or, really, Maura as a person was her psychic talents. She was a psychic, in craft and in career. It was hard to expunge that factor from her and come out with a whole person. He tried anyway, but all that was left were half-formed ideas, waiting for their nerve endings.
Maura shrugs, “Shit sticks.”
She did not ask again if he was tipped off the edge, and perhaps that was his greatest skill. That even someone as odd and eccentric as Maura Sargent fell into the trap of his ease. The flicker of a well-placed smile.
Ronan Lynch had always tasted a bit like gasoline. He thought it was part of his design, that when Ronan’s God made him, he poured a bit over him. It kicked something into action, it let the pieces of him slide together and fuse.
Gansey would not realize this fact until Ronan was burning with it. And all those cracks, those fissures where he was held together, came apart in a roaring flame.
But this, of course, would not be for another year. And now, at the barns, it was impossible to think anything bad could happen to anyone. They were barely sixteen and there Gansey could pretend he had never died. There, he could believe anything could happen.
Ronan rolled over in the grass, long hair getting caught in the dandelions. Their clothes were soaked from jumping through the sprinkler—a distinctly childlike thing to do, in hindsight. But Ronan brought that out of him.
“Declan keeps asking me what I want to do when I grow up. It’s such a stupid question, I told him to shove it.” Back then, there was still love in his voice when he spoke of Declan. That, too, he would not notice until the absence of it. “What do you want to be when you grow up? ” Ronan mocked, it was not Declan’s voice exactly, but an imitation of everyone Ronan found annoying. Which—to be fair—was everyone, but especially the pompous boys in their first period. “Fuck off.”
Gansey rolled his eyes. The sun was burning his cheeks, but he didn’t suggest they go inside to reapply sunscreen. He didn’t want to break the moment, he didn’t want this all to shatter because of him. Because he had a friend for perhaps the first time in his life. “Your dad hadn’t asked you?”
He knew immediately that this was the wrong thing to say. But it seemed only logical. Richard Gansey II had pestered Gansey about his life choices every chance that he got. It didn’t matter that the answer was always the same, the question was still presented. A test, fill in the blank: lawyer, politician, doctor.
Ronan tipped his head back to laugh, a clover got caught in his curls, “Course not.” Gansey smiled at that. It was nice to think that Ronan got a choice, that he was unbound by expectations.
“Do you, though? Have an idea of what you want to be, that is.”
He expected another laugh or perhaps a hasty yeah, to shove it up you’re— but he was met with a long stretching silence. Dragging on. The wind blew, giving him a moment of relief. “Does it matter?” He spat.
Gansey shrugged, sitting up. “It’s the future, of course it does.” This was a blatant lie, of course. Gansey had never focused too much on the future, he was too flighty to stake his claim on anything. The past was his kingdom, something already set in stone, just waiting to be uncovered. Unchangeable, immovable. He dove back as far as could, he dove back to being ten years old and dying. Back, back, back.
“I don’t want to be anything.”
They were barely sixteen and clumsy with their words and their bodies, so he said, “That’s depressing.”
“No. No. I mean—urgh. I mean that I don’t want to be something, I want to do something. It’s different.”
Ronan had never cared much for the grammatical, semantic intricacies of the English language before. Gansey hardly thought the difference between be and do mattered. But looking at him now, with his brows scrunched together. Hands balled into fists, in frustration or incomprehension; he knew it mattered a great deal.
“What do you want to do then?” Gansey asked, quieter now. Something lit up in Ronan, a curved smile overtaking his face.
“I have no fucking clue.”
Gansey shoved his shoulder, “Piss off.”
Ronan cackled, and it was bright. So, so very bright that Gansey thought he was burning with it too. Laughter spilled from his own lips, because it mattered. The difference mattered so Gansey would remember it for as long as he lived. “You sound like an old British man. Oh croaky biscuit. ”
“Mallory does not sound like that.” It was a terrible impersonation, the worst he’d ever heard, but he was still laughing.
When the laughter died with time—and oh, how it took time to die—Ronan got quiet. That was something else unfathomable about him, his ability to oscillate between laughter and seriousness in a second. “What are you going to do when you get old?”
They both knew the answer to that. Gansey could not decide if it was kindness to be asked, or cruelty. Neither changed the answer, Ronan knew that. “Oh, you know…Dad’s looking into Yale. Mom has her politician connections.” He waved his hand as if to say fill in the blanks because this is the only way he’d known to answer the question before.
There was a flicker in his eyes. A match just dropped, starting to catch on the gasoline that held him together. “What about you?”
“I—” Truthfully, he’d never thought of it before. Everything seemed so obvious. He would find his king and then…and then this would end. He would go to Yale. He would be a politician or a lawyer or a doctor. He would die. There had never been a choice in what he wanted. Not outside of his king and even then…what choice did he have besides looking? Where else was he to turn?
But he couldn’t say that yet. He couldn’t explain the importance of Glendower—or he could, but Ronan had not understood it for what it was. Because he was everything and then it was over. Gansey was nothing without his king.
So Gansey told him about death instead. About bees crawling in his ears, how it felt like the mud when he’d slipped jumping over the sprinklers that afternoon. About their stings—numbing at first, then on fire. How it felt to collapse in the woods and look back on that moment again and again. So much so that he’d gone outside of it. That now when he thought about his death, he saw a ten year old boy convulsing on the ground instead of stepping into his body. Now, he saw the dramatics of it all.
Gansey had been dead for several minutes, there was no coming back from that. And yet, and yet. The stings were gone and there had never been any bees. Everything had changed and Gansey had nothing to show for it.
“Did it hurt?”
“No. No. I was a little like…floating. I wasn’t in my body, or I wasn’t aware of it anymore. Everything was on fire and then there was…just me.”
“But everything did hurt?”
“At one point, I think. I don’t know, I don’t remember it clearly.” He did, of course he did. But the pain dulled with time, into something a bit more palatable. Into something he could examine instead of hide from. He couldn’t look at Ronan then. If he did, he thought it’d all show through him. It was impossible to hide from him, out of everyone. It hurts, it hurts more than anything you can imagine.
Ronan cocked his head to the side and the liar tumbled right along with it. “It hurt. Too much. Unbearably.” He did not even have to look him in the eyes. He wanted to squirm away, calves seizing with the urge to jump up and run.
No. That’s how it started, the subtle ache. The physicality of leaving, as though he had already been running and the muscles beginning to untwist. It was not linear, not normal, but this was how it started.
“I wouldn’t have let that happen,” He said quietly, as illogical as the whole thing was. He was terrible at being serious, Gansey could already feel it slipping from them. The way Ronan kept looking straight at the sun, as if he could take the words back if only he blinded himself first. The catholic urge for divine punishment, he supposed.
“I know.”
Ronan was a lot of things, but in that moment Gansey really believed that he would fight death for him. If he had been here, if he could change things.
“The ceilings are higher,” Gansey said carefully, ready to take it back before he ruined everything again. But Adam only chuckled, jumping up to touch the plaster. His palm went flat against it for a moment before gravity pulled him back down. Landing with a loud thump against the floors.
“Yes, they are.”
The dorms at Harvard were a bit like the ones at Aglionby. Separated rooms with a communal common area and kitchenette. Something Blue had informed him was rare, especially for incoming freshmen.
He did not ask why Adam had called him, of all people, to help him move in. It might’ve made sense if it were Blue or Ronan, who were bursting at the seams with things they couldn’t bear to part with. Who, in all their lives, had never moved from their homes, not really. Gansey was good at packing his life away in as few boxes as he could. To shed a life like placing a coat on a hook.
He had two boxes of things—his old mattress had belonged to the church and he’d never gotten around to buying furniture to bring. Everything he owned could fit neatly in two boxes shoved under the backseat of his car. He could’ve easily made two trips to get both. Or shoved one on top of the other, bracketing them with his chin.
There was no need to invite him.
Silently, they spread out everything Adam owned over his mattress. They didn’t cover the whole thing, taking up about half. And it was only that much because of his blankets. Silently, they began to put everything away.
“This feels impossible,” Adam whispers and it is perhaps the first vulnerable thing he manages to utter in front of anyone. But especially in front of Gansey. Gansey, who is too quick to jump to pity. Gansey, who can never understand, never gets it right.
He looks up at the white popcorn ceiling, higher than the church’s. At the bed, now clear of everything Adam owned. At his hands, rough after their summer. He had scraped them when he died.
“It does,” Not Harvard, per say, not for Adam. But this, just… this. To be alive was impossible and fleeting and Gansey didn’t think he knew how to contain it. He never had.
He had not slept for two days and he was alive.
Adam looked at Gansey. Gansey looked at Adam. They had meant different things, but they knew where the other had darted to. All roads lead back to their worst memories, they always would, and it was impossible that they had escaped them. Impossible that Adam was out of the trailer park, never to return. Because even if he tremendously failed at Harvard (another impossibility, but they were dealing in those so often these days that it was hard not to think about, if only for a moment), Ronan or Blue or the women of Fox Way would catch him before Gansey ever had the chance to offer. Impossible that Gansey was going to live and live and live when he should not. When his King was still dead and had always been dead.
Every morning he slept, he woke up thinking he was dead. It is a strange sensation. He had half the mind to ask if Adam still woke up in the double wide with a spring digging into his back. If he too felt the phantom bruises ringing his eye socket like bees on skin.
It was to say that neither of them had expected to live to eighteen. It was to say that they were still dealing in impossibilities.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving again,” Adam said, tucking his knee under his chin from his place on the bed. Gansey took the desk chair, spinning idly as though they were back in Monmouth, the air conditioner whirring like a tank in the corner and Ronan’s shitty music creeping out from under his door.
“Me either,” He admitted. He hadn’t meant to, or he didn’t think he’d meant to. It was just pouring out of him, tripping on his own faults as though they’d already erupted and left craters in their place. “I don’t know where to go from here.”
Adam pursed his lips, “My whole life my goal was just to get here. Now…”
“What are you supposed to wish for?” His lips curled in that old joke and Adam rewarded him with a grin. They were more forthcoming these days, but no less valuable.
“What are we supposed to wish for?”
And what was left to ask for, when you had everything? The Ganseys had always had everything, always. It was never a question, so death decided to carve out a piece of him and hold it up just out of reach. Something to miss, something to chase after.
When that piece is put back Gansey is just a boy who has everything and nothing left to run after.
On his eighteenth birthday, Richard Gansey III smoked a cigar in his father’s study. It was a right of passage for young Gansey men. He should have known that was what Richard did in the study—smoke and paperwork. The smell clung to everything—earthy tobacco and the rich smell of burning. But it seemed so…distasteful, perhaps. Something only a stuck-up man with far too much money would do.
He had forgotten, for a moment or a decade, what the Ganseys were.
Two days later he was in Costa Rica with Blue curled into his side and he remembers all the things that Ganseys are not and perhaps, all the things that he is.
“I never actually thought I’d get to see it,” Blue said, almost to herself. Tracing the outline of the Carina Nebula with her pointer finger. The hazy blob in the sky wasn’t much without a telescope, but it had been enough just to see this.
Neither of them could bear to wait another day and privately Gansey thrilled that this moment was just theirs. It was a selfish thought, one he hated to have cross his mind. But it beat in tune with his heart— ours, ours, ours. The fact that it beat so perfectly nagged at him.
Gansey had gone to more countries in the last four years of his life than most people could conceive of. He had met all kinds of magic folk, following the ley line because that was all they had. That was all they could be and back then there was kinship—a special kind of bond between two people that only took a glance to cement something far larger than any friendship could be: you get it.
“Do you think it brought us here?” There was no need to specify what it was, there was nothing else he could be talking about. If Ronan were there, he would’ve laughed it off until he had no choice but answer with something sharper and cruder than necessary. If Adam were there, he’d need empirical evidence, even in his tarot, in his travels between dream and reality, he needed something grounded to make it real.
Blue just hummed and stayed silent for a long moment, covering the splotch in the sky with her beautifully articulated thumb, bent as though she were God measuring angles before painting the sky.
She was practical in all things, but she was also raised by a horde of psychic women who knew these kinds of things better than Gansey ever could. “Probably,” She said, then after a moment. “But does it matter? Does it have to be magic this time, can’t it just be—can’t it just be ours.” Blue had battled against the cosmic force of the universe since she’d been born. Tangled in a curse that had never been superimposed on her by an evil entity. Tangled in stars and a DNA sequence that ended halfway through.
If anyone else would’ve said it, he would’ve flinched. As it was, Blue Sargent was a strange creature that he understood too well. She meant: I don’t care what led us here, we are here. She meant: I have spent too long being held by the universe to pretend I am not my own person.
“Fuck fate, this is ours.”
“Fuck fate,” He agreed and still wasn’t sure if it was right, but in that moment, they could break it. They could pretend the ley line wasn’t guiding them on, even if it brought them back to Adam and Ronan and home. They could pretend they’d walked to the car in unison and decided to see the Carina Nebula early all for themselves. They could pretend and maybe that’s what things made real, maybe that’s what broke fate to begin with.
A boy tells him about death.
His death or the boy’s death he can no longer tell. Dreams are not his kingdom—it is perhaps the only place in the universe where Gansey is not a king. But he does not know this. To separate the words is like cupping a running river between the palms of his hands. All of it spilling out where his fingers laced together.
In the end a boy tells him about death. His own or Gansey’s—and he will never remember it. Maybe it doesn’t matter, there has only been one circle, one spiral to go down, but it seemed important at the time.
So the boy leans down again and again and again and whispers in the way only dead things can, “In the end, you are going to die and it is going to mean something. It is something to hold onto, despite everything. And then you live.”