Who: Gansey & Ronan What: Reunion wonder When: Saturday December 23rd Where: Fort Neill Military Base Status: Complete
______________
It had taken less effort than Gansey had expected, for Ronan to be on his way. Not that he expected Ronan to delay in seeing him per say, but only that Gansey would have needed to go through someone, Adam most likely. Someone else who knew Ronan, if Adam were working or studying or otherwise occupied. So he stood in the hotel room, its neutral decor reminiscent of many a party, those not given to saying they were political in nature. Just then, his sister would step out of the bathroom or his father would knock at the door and share a story about his youth before they… something, somewhere.
Antithetical to Ronan Lynch, certainly. Gansey brushed one finger along the side of the window, a reminder than Ronan Lynch would not be in this room (what was a few more days of it? With no company, who was this smile for?). Gansey brushed a speck of dirt off his sweater; it was dirt, good Central American dirt, after a lunch out of doors. They hadn’t done laundry again, yet.
Perhaps the transition to Texas, what was promised to be Texas, should have felt more jarring. But Gansey had trekked across the globe, flown from one extreme to the other, too often for that to bother him. They had driven through Texas, and he could not be certain it took no time at all to come here. It simply could have been the same second, the same minute, over and over until he set foot here. Until he had been here before, or he had always going to have been here.
But it had been months, however he counted it (and for Ronan to be here, some... time too). He wanted to see Adam too, but Gansey could wait until it was a good time for Adam. He had two days in this room. In which he was not sure he would figure out presents. But that… Gansey set that aside. No advice, no words of wisdom, came to mind for no one had fathomed a Gansey without means. So none had been given.
Which were all ways not to wonder how Adam and Ronan had changed; they had known they would be apart, and Gansey had trusted then in them, in each other. So he had to trust it now. Now that it was something more than college. Not that he doubted them or thought less of them. Just possibly, they were less known. They hadn’t made the trip together, but they had, the three of them, all made this trip.
--
It was really just luck -- either good luck on Ronan’s part, or bad luck on Adam’s -- that Ronan had seen Gansey’s post first. When Adam wasn’t around, and Baelfire wasn’t around, and there weren’t many chores to do, Ronan actually looked at the network, even if it was just to scroll through it and scoff at the dumb ways people used it, and contribute nothing himself. Sometimes, however, there was something worth seeing: Gansey’s appearance, for instance.
His first thought was holy shit, Gansey’s here.
His second thought was, Santa is real.
He wrote a very quick reply just to tell Gansey that he was on his way, and then he was in the car, driving back to the base. It wasn’t until he was halfway there that he remembered to feel bad about not going to pick up Adam, not calling him, not making sure he knew what was happening. But he didn’t turn around. He could give Gansey Adam’s number here, to call him, and Adam would find his way there. Right now, the need to see Gansey in person, with his own eyes, was too great for Ronan to be able to do anything else. It was really Adam’s own fault he had not been at the Barns and able to jump in the car with Ronan right away.
He ran to the desk to get Gansey’s room number, and then he ran to Gansey’s door. He arrived slightly out of breath and pinked with cold from the air outside -- he hadn’t even stopped to put on a jacket. He pressed his cold hands against the glass and looked in at his best friend.
“Gansey,” he said, and then he remembered that he had to push the button for Gansey to be able to hear him. He pressed it, and in that brief moment, composed himself enough to change his greeting to, “Hey, Dick.”
It was meant to be dry and sardonic, but it was too breathless and wistful. He was only slightly annoyed with himself for that, and followed it up with, “Where the fuck have you been?”
--
His eyes closed for a moment, his smile shifting at those two words. At Ronan’s voice. Gansey only paused a moment - he expected Ronan to walk through the door, he expected slouching posture and Chainsaw on his shoulder, vocalizing her own greeting, he expected not to be alone - but then it passed. Gansey stepped the foot or so closer, again, to the door, to Ronan’s breathing giving away more than his words.
“Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras…” Gansey listed in reverse order, amused because they hadn’t gone dark, not completely. But he knew Ronan hadn’t meant that, not exactly. He meant, why were you not here? Something Gansey had little more answer to than Ronan. “I really haven’t been here before?” Gansey asked, but it wasn’t much of a question. Ronan’s face said as much. Even as everything had felt familiar.
He rubbed his bottom lip. “I am here now,” he said simply. A few years late or early, if it were really 2017.
--
“Better not have been,” Ronan answered. He didn’t like the idea of Gansey here alone - or at least, without Ronan. Then again, he supposed that Gansey might not particularly appreciate the idea that Ronan and Adam had been here for ages without him. Or maybe this jealously protective streak only belonged to Ronan -- certainly, he expected it to be a suppressed feeling in Gansey, if it existed at all.
It was a more protective feeling than a jealous one, though. Ronan knew what kind of shit went on here. He didn’t like the idea of Gansey going into a black hole. Or, worse, having his powers stripped away… which in Gansey’s case might actually mean that he would be dead, if the hole took away his ley line heart or his Cabeswater-made soul. No, God, Ronan couldn’t think about that.
“It’s about damn time,” he said. And then, with more raw, honest feeling than he was accustomed to using with Gansey, not hiding it behind a snarl, he added, “I fucking missed you.”
--
Gansey nodded. This moment was not the first to feel this way, familiar, relived, happening more than once. He knew why, to some extent, he understood where the feelings came from. But it did not answer all the questions. And he doubted it would make complete sense, if he had asked one of the psychics at 300 Fox Way to explain it. If somehow it was not his first time, if he simply wasn’t remembering, then in so much as he did what he would do, it was that he had just gotten there. That he hadn’t worried about Adam or Ronan, not like this, because he had not known to worry about it.
His mind blinked. Gansey had heard such feelings before, in moments and actions, in the way Ronan greeted him when he returned from a family visit, in many many ways. But not, no, not those words in that voice, together. He didn’t stare - Ganseys didn’t stare - but Gansey brought one arm against the door, against the window, hand lightly set against the glass like its touch reached through the other side to his best friend. “I have missed you too,” Gansey said simply. Parting had caused such sweet sorrow; expecting Ronan’s absence hadn’t made it better.
He turned slightly, looking Ronan straight on. Curious. Asking. Needing to know. “How long has it been, for you, since you saw me?” Even after months, he hadn’t expected that. To know, to feel. That would have been enough. Ronan standing there was enough.
--
There was something strange about being so emotionally honest with Gansey. It had been a long time since Ronan hadn’t had at least a little bit of a pretense up around his friend, and that had been when there weren’t such vulnerable sentiments to share. The words had a recoil effect, like the kick of a gun after it had been fired, and somewhere deep inside of Ronan, he flinched. But he still couldn’t summon any anger to use as armor. It would have taken too much energy, and he didn’t really feel motivated to try. It was just awkward, when Gansey was in formal, polite mode, and Ronan was a fucking mess.
It was a sign of how much had changed for him since they’d seen each other last. Even before Ronan had arrived here, there had been a lot of space and time between them. Gansey had left on his road trip with Blue and Henry, leaving Adam and Ronan in Henrietta by themselves until they, too, had left for Boston and Harvard, and they’d been there for a while before the portal had snatched them up.
And then… they had been here over a year. Ronan had not even noticed the year anniversary go by, but now that he was thinking about it, here it was. They had been here for Christmas last year, although it had been so soon after their nightmares had come to life that the celebrations for it had been somewhat halfhearted.
It occurred to Ronan, then, to be extraordinarily grateful for the fact that the portal had not also waited this long to bring Adam, too. He was suddenly terrified of the idea of being stuck in this world alone.
“A year and a couple months here,” he said, voice rough. “And a little less than a year before that. So… two years.”
It seemed even longer when he said it out loud, and yet the hollow ache in his heart made him feel like it had been even longer still.
--
Gansey’s face fell. Slowly, softly. He hadn’t been keeping track of time, of the days and the weeks, that it had been. But it had not been a year, years. They had left, Gansey had left Henrietta and Virginia and a multitude of expectations (none of them, none that he had meant to leave, from Ronan or Adam; he truly hadn’t been in a place to apply for colleges, and Henry had made a wonderful case for Venezuela)... But it wasn’t meant to be that long. It shouldn’t have been that long. They had said goodbye, a better leaving than many Gansey had made before Henrietta. It had not been forever.
But too long. Gansey didn’t know if he would have, if he could have, done it, if he had known it would be two years. No, he was better than that. There had been plans. He had made sure. He hadn’t been abandoning them to… His mind caught on just what exactly because he didn’t know what here meant. Only that he had let Ronan down, let Adam down. His brows furrowed because he hadn’t expected that answer. And he didn’t know how, entirely, to understand it.
At one point, Gansey had imagined what Ronan would be like without him, a future where Gansey wasn’t there. But death was a far more acceptable excuse than most. And Gansey hadn’t ever imagined coming back to a world where Ronan hadn’t had him. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, forgetting the door between them. “I never thought that would happen.” He wouldn’t have let it, he wanted to say, to promise. But he already had, and Ronan deserved better than lies.
--
Ronan almost immediately wished that Gansey’s composure was back. No matter how awkward it had made Ronan feel to be the vulnerable one, it was better than seeing Gansey actually get upset.
“Christ, no,” he said immediately. “It’s not your fault. I mean - it hasn’t actually been that long, you were around for Christmas, at home. Just - that almost doesn’t feel like it counts, because you haven’t even existed here until now. And that’s--” he gestured with his hand, vaguely in the direction he remembered the room with the portal had been-- “Some weird time and space and alternate universe shit.”
--
Gansey didn’t say anything immediately. His mind rebutted it, immediately, with a hundred reasons why it was his fault, how Ronan was right and the holidays did not count as seeing them, not truly, not when there were also visits to his family and to Fox Way and to other people, when his time wasn’t going to be only his own. Which was to say, it was awful what had happened. It tore down some progress Gansey had thought he had made. But he also wasn’t inclined toward publicly flogging himself either. That didn’t help matters.
“Weird time and space… sounds a little familiar, to some extent,” Gansey offered. Which wasn’t an insistence on his having done something wrong. It was not Ronan’s responsibility to reassure him, to grant permission to abdicate responsibility over his actions. His choices were now, were here, and he had to make them, no matter what failings had already happened. “I do feel I was supposed to come here,” he shared. Because it had felt right, not like Henrietta. This place could never be that. But something that he hadn’t known to expect but knew, afterward, it was going to happen. Better late than never.
Unless Cabeswater was caught up in this in its own right, then Ronan and Adam were why, why it felt right. “So I’m glad I’m here now, however that happened,” Gansey could not take credit for his standing there. He had been open to whatever came, whatever felt right. And this did.
--
Ronan wasn’t sure what to say. He felt like he should tell Gansey how shitty this place could be, but he’d already made Gansey feel bad for not being here. It didn’t feel like a good time to tell him about the shit they’d been through in his absence. But thinking about that also made it hard to be glad that Gansey was here, that Gansey being here felt right. Even if Ronan felt that way, too.
He took a moment to absorb all of that and put it behind him. Then he managed to quirk the corners of his mouth up in a small smile. “You got here just before Christmas,” he said. “I actually asked Santa for you. He must have decided I’ve been really good this year.”
--
Gansey’s eyebrows rose again, at the way Ronan spoke about Santa. It was not in the way adults spoke to children, expecting young Gansey to believe a stranger entered his home (and not via the door) to provide presents. Because Ganseys were always good. He had not taken the idea so literally as a child, when the gifts spoke to his mother and his father. And Ronan had always been more religious than him, but whatever the holiday decor promised, St. Nick as he was colloquially known was not what Santa was promised to be. Cabeswater listened to its favored, and intentions mattered there. Whether that had drawn Gansey from one time and one place to another, it was not ruled out. But Santa?
He didn’t touch that. Instead, amused, Gansey asked, “Have you been good this year, Ronan?” Gansey had no way of knowing. But he liked the smiles that filled Ronan’s face, the extension to himself that felt right, too, and natural, something farther along than Gansey had seen. Gansey cared for each Ronan, no matter what shape they took. But it made him happy (his own Christmas present?) to see Ronan doing so well. Gansey was no dream thing, but he quite liked the idea of Ronan pulling him here.
--
Ronan smirked. “I’m always good.”
This was, of course, factually untrue on the face of it. But Ronan actually had been fairly well-behaved this year. Aside from accidentally dreaming up a ley line not long after his arrival, and therefore messing with the ghosts that were wandering around, he couldn’t think of anything he’d done that Santa wouldn’t approve of. Unless Santa was homophobic.
He raised his eyebrows. “Have you been good, Gansey?”
--
Gansey laughed. Ronan was Ronan, and by most people’s standards that and good were anathema. And yet, he was good, then. And Gansey believed the sentiment behind the idea, the smirk not pushing him off. It was good, it was good that Ronan could be so good without Gansey there. Less pleasant questions niggled at that thought, but Gansey set them aside. He and Ronan were best friends, but as the last few months (years) had gone, they wouldn’t be together always. It wasn’t good of him to want anything less than Ronan’s independence from him. And Gansey was pleased with that. He was.
“I certainly haven’t been bad,” Gansey replied first, then thought about the criteria through a few different lenses: Blue’s, Henry’s, his family’s, Harvard’s… Some skated nearer the edge than others. But even on facing his fears, even by Henry’s mark, yes he had been good. But he looked over at Ronan, supposing that honesty was the mark by which to judge it, for him. His eyes sparked, and his smile shifted. “Yes, actually, I have been good.”
Heavens knew the road had made it easier to find privacy with Blue than Henrietta had. But he wasn’t about to discuss that in this context.
--
Ronan’s grin widened a little when Gansey laughed. It was good to hear that laugh again, and see his eyes sparkle. God, Ronan had missed him.
“Yeah, we’ll see,” he said. “If there’s coal under our tree, it’s definitely not gonna be for me.”
He was feeling a lot more enthusiastic about Christmas now. They’d gotten a tree already, but Ronan now felt that he should get proper stockings for all of them. If only for the gratification of seeing Gansey’s up there along with his and Adam’s and Opal’s.
Then he realized something. “Hey, you’ll actually get out on Christmas Eve.”
--
“Coal was useful back in the day,” Gansey countered. Honestly, it was not as immediately satisfying as chocolate or oranges, but when it was burned to keep people warm, it was something. “Even today, we get much of our energy from burning coal,” he quirked his mouth up again, knowing the irony of his choice of words, of his we including Ronan. Gansey had spent far too long taking turns driving the Pig that needed no gas, that left no footprint on the planet, to forget how much energy Ronan used came from his own soul.
But the point stuck, and he was far too pleased to josh around with Ronan to care about much else. His head turned slightly, as Gansey tried to think about time, what time it was (given what day it had been, not December for starters, it was difficult to think of Christmas in a matter of days, of hours. The snow outside was a bountiful reminder of winter, but Christmas, Christmas was something else.
“Should I inquire as to an appropriately sized box?” Gansey asked, “One with holes?” On Christmas Eve, on Christmas, heck being anywhere that had Ronan and Adam, Gansey had nowhere he’d rather go when he got out. “Perhaps they have someone with a red suit, to deliver us new arrivals.”
--
“We’ll just get you a giant bow to put on your head,” Ronan said, amused. “Or maybe a whole bag of the little sticky ones, and just--” He gestured at Gansey in a way that mimicked sticking bows all over his chest and face.
He grinned crookedly, highly amused. “There’s room for you at the Barns, of course. Not just for Christmas.”
--
Gansey laughed. It sounded ridiculous and wonderful. And he had no doubt it very well could happen, and he certainly held nothing against it happening. After so long away, being together was worth celebrating. Heck, after everything they had been through, any day was worth celebrating still being together and alive and well. “Sounds like one of those ugly sweaters, only three dimensional,” Gansey grinned. And it was awfully better than sitting in a box, much as he had joked about it.
“They said homes often… pop up after people arrive,” Gansey started. But he’d had trouble imagining what would come. He certainly did not wish to live in his family’s residence. It would only be worse without them, not better. And Gansey certainly didn’t need the space. “But I would like that,” Gansey sighed, nothing sad about it. He had longed for some place that felt like the Barns, when he had first visited it. And it was pleasant, the thought of living with Ronan again. An unexpected return.
--
“They do,” Ronan said. His smile turned a little wry. “Monmouth popped up for us at first. Then we went into space and came back and the Barns was here.”
He knew that was an oversimplified explanation, and yet, there wasn’t really a whole lot more information that he thought Gansey needed. He wasn’t entirely sure why it had happened, himself. Maybe just because he had been heartbroken and homesick after the black hole had taken his soul away. Maybe somehow the portal or whatever was behind it had known that it was what he’d needed. He loved Monmouth, but it wasn’t the Barns.
--
Then they went into space and came back, as casual as that. Gansey had kept up with his post, while Ronan had been on his way, and it was not the first downright shocking statement Gansey had heard that day, even excluding everything about portals and alternate universes and traveling between them. But Ronan was the one saying it, so there was no question to be asked, to be confirmed. Gansey felt sad, briefly, that Blue had missed it. She loved the stars more than any of them. So it felt like a minor injustice she would miss out on it.
“You’re always welcome at Monmouth,” Gansey replied. Whether he was there to invite them or not. They didn’t need Gansey to do as much. But he, too, was glad that Ronan had the Barns. Ronan belonged there, and Monmouth hadn’t been Gansey’s for months. A mistake, certainly, and financial the least of it. But there wasn’t anything to be done about it now. It had helped him, that Ronan had had the choice.
“I suppose both the Barns and Monmouth now have something more in common with Cabeswater then,” Gansey suggested. Cabeswater, they knew, manifested and disappeared and manifested again in another place in another time. It was not impossible that someplace else would do the same. Especially not the Barns. It was nearly a dream itself. If Gansey’s soul were made of Cabeswater, Ronan’s was the Barns.
--
“I know,” Ronan said, and he meant it. Monmouth was home to him, just in a different way from the Barns. He wouldn’t mind if it showed back up for Gansey, although he’d be pretty devastated if the Barns disappeared as a result. Whenever he had access to his family home, he was going to choose it over everything else. He knew Gansey understood that and would not be insulted by it. “Same with the Barns, for you.”
He still remembered bringing Gansey to the Barns for the first time, and how Gansey had somehow been able to appreciate it in the way that it was meant to be appreciated. Ronan had never expected anyone outside his family to see the Barns for what it was. It had immediately cemented his love for Gansey, and it had been fun, too, to see his home through someone else’s eyes.
One corner of his mouth quirked. “Yeah, I guess they do.”
--
“Thank you,” Gansey meant it. He was homeless, truly, when he had come here, in any world anyone wished to ponder. Not without a house, if he needed one, but a home. That had been fine, for the time. But it left Gansey grateful to have somewhere to stay, a place that meant something. Though Ronan would have been enough. “I am sure I will take you up on that, and for some time, I expect,” Gansey admitted. He was in no rush to build something separate from Ronan. Much as he had planned to buy something for Harvard, this wasn’t Harvard.
“The image of the Barns following you… it’s a good one,” Gansey didn’t know how much wandering they did, whether indeed they usually stayed here in this place, this formerly Monmouth housing, Barns generating place. Well, it was likely more difficult to manifest the Barns in outer space. “Did you… bring it?” he asked. Someone who could dream a forest, even one whose magic already existed, certainly couldn’t be ruled out as having dreamt their home.
--
Ronan considered that. “No. I don’t think so.”
He hadn’t dreamt about the Barns at all. He hadn’t dreamt about anything but black holes and darkness, and all of his creations comatose before he was even dead. And besides, he didn’t have as much power here, without the boost from the ley lines. He’d been able to dream the go-karts and the orchards, but each of them had tapped him out for a good week. But he didn’t want to disclose details like that when others might be able to overhear - especially people who had rooms that took all of his power away.
--
Gansey nodded and accepted that as that. Not everything was Ronan Lynch. What was remained a wonder, no less for not being all. Thinking about it was incredible, and Gansey could no more take it for granted, than he had when Ronan had first told them, when Ronan had told them about Cabeswater, the moment later when Ronan had told them about Matthew.
He leaned against the door, just next to the window. It was only two days. They often felt like less. And yet all the kind work to make the room hospitable added to the effect. “I understand why it’s necessary,” he motioned toward the environment. Even from a similar time, from a similar to earth, it was not the same. And they needed to be careful. “But I’m greatly looking forward to getting out of here.”
It had only been… an hour? Gansey wasn’t sure.
--
“Oh, yeah,” Ronan said. “When we went back into the past, there was a space pox outbreak. You probably don’t have it, but they’re real paranoid about it still, almost a century later.”
He knew he was throwing a lot of shit at Gansey, but also, he knew Gansey could take quite a bit. Maybe not completely in stride, but he’d make his best attempt at it, at the very least. “They’ll let you out. And I’ll come back to take you home.”
--
Into the past, a century later. Just what hadn’t Ronan been up to in the last year? And how far had that year stretched? Gansey did not ask just then. It was quite enough, just then, standing in a hallway, to know that it had happened. His imagination threw enough in there for the moment, and the rest would come when, perhaps, they were sitting down. Or doing something on the Barns, something grounding.
Part of him wished he could have been there. It was before his father’s stories, more his great-grandparents’. But Gansey had heard them plenty, passed down over the years, his father an excellent steward for them. But he hadn’t, and that wasn’t anyone’s fault, as best he could tell.
“Mmm, we can share stories. I had thought ours fairly remarkable, but we may have a new metric for that, here,” Gansey was perfectly all right for that. He had been searching for adventure. And found it.
--
“Little bit,” Ronan agreed. “Weird shit happens here.” His mouth quirked again. “You missed the time when I turned into a girl, too.”
He tried to remember if there was anything else super remarkable that Gansey would want to hear about. Nothing in particular came to mind, but he had a feeling he was forgetting something. So much shit had happened here, it was hard to keep track of it all.
--
Gansey watched Ronan again, not that Ronan needed to be watched. He was always honest. It simply wasn’t the sort of statement Gansey expected to hear from most people. Certainly not his friend he had known so long. So he paused, eyebrows again coming together. Somehow the image of Blue in Ronan’s clothes came to mind (they both had tempers), but honestly, his mind couldn’t imagine anything more… realistic? than that, even turning it over a few times.
“I really hope you guys have been taking pictures,” Gansey exhaled. Pictures, maps, journals, anything collected all together, something which supported it all. Perhaps he was in need of starting a new journal. It wasn’t Glendower anymore. But it was something. He brushed his bottom lip, without thinking about it, and looked up again at Ronan. “Whatever comes next, it’ll be us together,” he declared.
--
“Adam probably has one,” Ronan said, shrugging. “There’s also a chick here who looks a lot like I did, that might be even better.”
He was looking back at Gansey, equally scrutinizing, or maybe more so, because Gansey was harder to read. Gansey had his furrowed brows of concentration; he was trying hard to put all the puzzle pieces of this place together. Well, if anyone could manage to figure it all out, it would be Gansey.
It was impossible not to be uplifted by Gansey’s declaration, even if this place had given Ronan plenty of reasons to doubt that it would work out as well as Gansey’s tone and words made it seem. “Good,” he said. “No running off without me this time.”
--
He nodded. Ronan nearly died making something to track you, Adam’s words, underground, on their way to Cabeswater. Gansey couldn’t stand to think about Ronan doing something like that again, not when it would be Gansey’s fault he needed to. Gansey didn’t know what they were going to do, what they would look for, what they would find. But Ronan had always joined him for Glendower, and Gansey had always done the same for Ronan, whenever Gansey knew there was something.
Better together. They were better that way, and Gansey really couldn’t imagine wanting to go off without Ronan. He didn’t know what kind of place it was. But they were together. And there were the Barns. It couldn’t be all bad. Gansey smiled again. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.