blue "stabs as a warning" sargent (notjane) wrote in valloic, @ 2020-04-15 14:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, the raven cycle: blue sargent, the raven cycle: richard campbell gansey, ₴ inactive: henry cheng |
But by the time mornings rolled around, everyone was each other’s spoons of varying sizes, and Blue’s arm, this morning, had snaked its way across Henry’s chest and her fingers were brushing the soft underside of Gansey’s face. The sun was being ultimately bothersome, and Blue made a grumpy noise burrowing and twisting around Henry’s side and trying to pull Gansey closer because her arms didn’t quite reach enough of him. If she could just not wake up for at least another ten more minutes, her brain would be happy.
Her hand dropped from Gansey’s chin, to the side of his neck, to his shoulder. A little warning went off in the back of her mind that something was not right about the feel of Gansey under her fingertips. Yeah, self, it was too early to be awake. But it didn’t stop sending those signals and Blue made another noise before pulling away from both of them and sitting up all at once, rubbing furiously at her eyes.
“No one get up,” Blue said in a soft, rough-from-sleep voice, knowing her shifting and moving woke one (or both) of them. “I’m just going to—” Well, she wasn’t going to finish that sentence. There was a beat, then another, as she stared at this strange, older man in her bed where Gansey was supposed to be.
Blue did not normally scream, but she yelled wildly in surprise and abject horror. It was too early for this.
Gansey was the lightest sleeper of the three - and the one prone to getting up in the middle of the night for various reasons. It had been a few years since he needed to get up for childcare related reasons, and a few more than that since he spent half of every night as an insomniac. But habit was habit.
And he enjoyed the feeling of someone’s arms being wrapped around him. He wasn’t ashamed of that, but more than a little alarmed as those arms flailed behind him, a hand hitting him on the side of his shoulder at the same time as the yelling happened.
This Gansey was well trained in many things. Swords, bows, some martial arts. He was quick on his feet and built far more solid than his 18-year-old version. But he still yelped as Blue’s voice startled him out of sleep, and fumbled with an uncoordinated edge right out of the bed, falling with a heavy thunk to the floor. It took him a second of disorientation before he sat up, rubbing his shoulder and blinking in the direction of the bed with blurry vision. “What’s wrong?”
Henry slept like the dead. He’d stayed up too late the night before - invested in Animal Crossing and setting up a waterfall garden. He could’ve curled up behind Gansey, but if they made him state a preference, he’d always pick the middle, so he’d carefully wedged himself in and passed right out.
Now, with Blue yelling and a body thumping to the hardwoods, Henry inched awake far too slowly to be useful.
“Hrm? Wha--” He squinted one eye up at Blue and then turned to do the same over his shoulder at Gansey. Seeing an unknown man there at least helped the other eye open, even if his brain was still uncooperative. “Oh! You’re...shirtless. And tattooed. This...dream is very strange.”
Blue didn't let a moment go unchecked. She should have been more sensible, taken a moment to assess the situation and look a little harder at the person who fell onto the floor. But she was still not quite fully awake, and now her body was pumping her full of adrenaline which was a vicious cocktail to her emotions and to her sense of logic. So instead of answering what's wrong, Blue scrabbled for Henry to pull him closer, as if this shirtless tattooed man (and subsequently the floor) were made of lava coming for them.
"Not a dream! Very much awake!" Blue was yelling, just all one volume of loud. And then as quickly as her scream before had come and gone, a new fear rocketed through her. "Where's Gansey!" Blue hollered accusingly at the stranger. Because Gansey had very much been in the bed last night—Blue vaguely remembered him sliding in at an odd hour and reaching for him. What had happened? Was he safe? Was he kidnapped?
That was when Blue grabbed for one of the pillows and threw it violently at the intruder on the floor. Then she went for another. "What did you do to him!"
“Wait- what- ow!” Gansey had gotten hit with the pillow right on the side of his face, causing him to lose his balance and stumble on his way up. He’d just reached for his glasses when another pillow hit him. This time he ducked down, below the side of the bed and reached up with one hand to snag the nightstand where his glasses were.
He slipped them onto his face, now hidden by the bed frame, and … something wasn’t right. The glasses weren’t quite right. Gansey took them off again and looked at the frames. Old frames, that he remembered from many many years ago. Oh no. He slipped the glasses back on and tried to blink away the change in prescription.
Even though he knew better - that his other third was a force to be reckoned with and could take his head off if he so much as gave her access - he poked up over the side of the bed to look at both Blue and Henry, now so so young to him. “I can explain!”
Henry blinked rapidly as pillows flew by, one of them yanked from right under his elbow. Consciousness was still a vague concept, but he was starting to pick up details. The way the stranger reached for the glasses on the nightstand and put them on his face was certainly noteworthy, for one. Henry just wasn’t sure if the familiar shape of the man’s mouth was Henry’s sleepy brain being unhelpfully horny or not.
He reached up to wrap a hand around one of Blue’s forearms, trying to dodge any extra swinging going on. “Hold on, Bluebird. Hold on. If someone got past Lynch’s security, spirited Ganseyman away, and then got all the way back up here into our bed without anyone the wiser, we should probably let him live long enough to deliver his kidnapping demands, yes?”
Blue was absolutely ready to keep going. But she was dangerously low on pillows, and Henry's hand on her arm only kept her from whacking the (annoyingly handsome) intruder when we popped back up with glasses on. There was that warning again saying something was off, but she couldn't place it. She just wanted to know where Gansey was and keep Henry safe. Her chest was heaving, her grip white-knuckling around the pillow in her hand, and she was leaning hard into Henry's side.
Henry had a point, which was why her attention went from fearful and wild to narrow and suspicious. It gave her a brief pause to assess this—why was he so familiar looking?—stranger and what his abilities might be to sneak into their bed.
"You have ten seconds to make your case, or I'm throwing something heavier at you." Her eyes darted to the metal lamp at the nightstand—a bad tell if he really meant them harm, he was closer and could get to it first—but Blue was scrappy. She was not against throwing elbows to snag a bedroom weapon. Blue started counting down, "One."
“Thank you, Henry.” Gansey was probably wasting his seconds left, but he had loving eyes directed at Henry’s form beyond Blue. He still remembered them like this, but it was something else to see them like this again. Even Blue, with her barbarian rage, about to come at him with a heavy lamp. He backed away from it, hands up in the air as he stood and took a few steps in the opposite direction.
“You remember how weird stuff happens around here all the time? Uhhh,” He struggled to remember all the early things from the first year they were here. There had been a lot, since then. “The honesty thing - right? I’m Gansey. Either I’ve woken up in the past, or you both woke up in the future--” He glanced around the room they were in - their old room, at the Barns. It was similar to their one at home now, in that Blue had thrown all of her festively colored things over Declan’s boring walls. “... I’m fairly certain I’m in the past.”
It wasn’t a smiling situation, but Henry still had to smother a little one. Blue’s fierceness was just so attractive. So buoyed by love. So her. It was enough to pull Henry the last few inches towards fully aware and he watched the man speak with sharp eyes and a little tilt of his head. The claim that he was Gansey made Henry’s eyebrows arch high and he sat up to get a better look.
“People feeling a little truthful and time travel are too very different things, Mr. Intruder.” The man did have hazel eyes though. Undeniably warm and familiar ones. Henry inched a little closer, lifting up onto his knees. “I suppose those glasses do look like they were picked for your face…Pop quiz. What’s my favorite song?”
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve! She was a split second away from diving for the lamp, but Henry spoke before she could do something regrettable.
Blue instead followed Henry's motion, lifting up on her knees beside him—unconsciously going for tall when she could. "Yeah, Mr. Intruder," Blue parrotted with equal distrust in her voice. But she didn't sound convincing. It was like some of the wind got knocked out of her sails when he said: I'm Gansey. Was he? Was that supposed to be an option? Morning brain only gave her two choices (stranger or her Gansey), but here this person—this maybe-Gansey—was offering a third.
She shot a super impressed glance at Henry on the pop-quiz move. Blue could kiss him right now, but she would save that for later. Her attention was back on Gansey—no, the maybe-Gansey. God, she couldn't let her brain get tripped up yet. "Answer him, what's his favorite song?" If he wanted to prove his legitimacy, he should know something about Blue too, so she added, "And true or false, I love the fruit at the bottom of yogurt."
It wasn’t really a smiling sort of situation. It was a mind-fuck and Gansey was worried about a dozen things, but … he couldn’t help it. The questions made him smirk, just a little. It was so like both of them, Henry to be the even one that managed to be the best of both of them, and Blue the one on the edge of doing something rash. “Into The Groove.” He didn’t even have to think on that one - but he did leave out the part where they’d all danced to it at their wedding. One of his fondest memories, that was better of being spared from their young brains.
Gansey could’ve hoped that the fondness on his face was enough to show through fifteen years of aging, and he also knew that going a little too hard might backfire, but he couldn’t help it. He glanced between the two, and settled on Blue. “I’ll eat the fruit at the bottom of your yogurt for as long as you’ll let me, Jane.”
The song would’ve been enough for Henry. He didn’t advertise anything that specific to anyone but Blue and Gansey, after all. Anyone might’ve guessed Madonna, but she had a very large discography obviously. But coupled with the yogurt answer and hearing the man say Jane, and suddenly Henry could see all the little things that were so clearly Gansey. The eyes, the slope of his nose, the way his mouth was shaped at the corners, the way he held his shoulders.
The fact that they were very nice shoulders.
“I mean, I think I’m convinced, Bluebird,” Henry shrugged, tension easing out of his posture in a rush. “But if you want to be extra sure, we could make him do a spin…” He spun his finger in the air for emphasis. “...Show us his birthmark.”
Every joint went tense at Jane. She wanted to rationalize away why Gansey knew all those answers about the song and the yogurt, but her brain wouldn't quite let her. Her frown only deepened, not in anger, but in sadness. Gansey was old, older. It was unmistakable, and she hated how she missed it in her morning-reactionary aggression.
Now she wanted to throw something at him for an entirely different reason. Maybe because he still managed to look at the both of them like they were the world, and how much she wanted to give him the same look back.
Blue nodded, a lot, at Henry's suggestion, not trusting her voice to say anything more than: "Turn around." But she already believed him, this was just extra proof. She was sure that Gansey would be proud of Henry and Blue's combined efforts to fact-check. Maybe he was right now. She wanted to ask him, but she just crawled closer to the edge of the bed, to their Gansey.
Gansey was on the edge of laughing at Henry and showing the birthmark off - it was easy to show off a little with these two, even if he was sure he wasn’t being objectified. Or, reasonably sure. Not that it bothered him when it was coming from either of them normally.
But then he faltered. Maybe it was the look on Blue’s face, or her lack of speaking outside of agreement. Worry settled into the back of his brain, wondering if he’d said too much or looked too open and honest. It’d taken them longer to get to the marriage part of things than it did some people, but he didn’t usually wonder if they might not.
“Alright.” He turned on cue, slowly, hands still up in an innocent gesture. “The tattoo is Ronan’s art, if you were curious.” Anxiety was the only thing that kept him from mentioning the one representing them on his thigh.
Henry shamelessly plopped down on the bed edge closest to Gansey, laying on his side with his head propped up by a hand. Anxiety about how they’d get Gansey back to his right age or if this was permanent was starting to percolate in the back of his mind, but he wasn’t awake enough for that yet so he willfully buried it under thoughts about how Gansey looked at….thirty?
“You look very good. Am I allowed to say that?” He looked over his shoulder at Blue. “It feels weird to say that but I’m going to say it anyway.” He turned back to Gansey and flashed a brilliant smile. His crazy hair was sticking up in wild disarray but thankfully there weren’t in mirrors close by. “You look very very good. The artwork too. Even if it’s not tied to us.”
Blue was quiet as Gansey spun around. She was quiet when Henry spoke, and glanced at her for affirmation. She didn't say anything for a very long time. For once, Blue was trying to think very carefully about the next words out of her mouth. Gansey said he thought he was in the past, which meant he was from the future? They had already played the time-as-a-circle game before, Blue didn't think she could handle it again. It was too early for paradoxes.
Her whole face soured, but comedically, dramatically, almost laughably so. "You're old. You're old-old." Blue reached out without asking, and she pinched his side. "But Henry is right. You look annoyingly good." She slid off the bed and crowded into his space. It would be intimidating, but Blue was not angry, just vividly curious. Gansey was still the same, still real, still taller than her.
"But how do we—" Blue poorly mimed shoving something into a small box. "Put you back?"
“Ouch,” Gansey winced with both the pinch and the dig at his age. He was just starting to feel the blush creeping up from Henry grinning at him in a way that had always made his stomach flip flop. He lightly batted away her hand, and backed up to the dresser so he could snag a shirt from there. A shirt that was likely going to be a little too tight, but Gansey slipped it over his head and down his shoulders anyway, making a little noise of annoyance as his fears were met with uncomfortable banding around the arms.
“Usually these things right themselves after a few days, in my experience. We’ve been through other things before-- just never this.” A number of the weird and crazy things had cropped up over the years, and always it was righted just as before. “We should go see if anyone else is affected and warn them, though.”
Henry wrinkled his nose at Blue but reached out to press a comforting hand to her back anyway. She was the practical one, even if she hated to admit it some days. Henry very much was not. “He’s not old. He’s only, what, ten years older? Fifteen?” He squinted at Gansey like he could decipher how many years had passed. The shirt’s snugness was distracting, but it didn’t stop Henry’s gaze from snagging on the dark titanium wedding band on Gansey’s left hand.
If asked to recount this moment later, he’d dramatically announce that his heart stopped. But really it was just that his eyes grew a little wide and he held his breath. After a beat, he stuttered out an exhale.
“Is this, I mean, you said this stuff happens. Is there any danger to you? The you we know? And you you, but...you know.” He was losing the thread. “Sorry, that was a lot of yous.”
Blue stepped back, still frowning. She did not like the sound of it affecting other people. Even if Henry was right, and Gansey was only ten or fifteen years older than them, Blue was not ready to see anyone else that way yet. But she did hear Henry go quiet for that brief second. She looked to him, concerned, then down to where his attention was. Blue slowly canted her head to one side as she also eyed the ring.
"Huh," Blue said louder than she intended, as she tracked Gansey around the room in his tight shirt. This was all very confusing. Blue swiftly followed up Henry's questions of yous, with her own. "What if this isn't like the other times, and you—" Get stuck never made it out of Blue's mouth.
One of the doors from the bedroom next to theirs opened, which meant someone else was up. Probably after all the yelling. Blue shot them both a wild look that seemed to ask, okay, now what?
“We’ll figure this out, for me and him.” Gansey was always willing to take point and be the optimistic leader that liked to sort things, even if they’d long since given up finding a way home. This would right itself. It had to. Not seeing his son again, along with his own Blue, Henry, Ronan and Adam -- that was a non-option as far as he was concerned.
“Go- uh,” He wasn’t really sure what to do. And maybe needed a moment to just gather his thoughts on the matter before he faced Ronan’s intense stare, in case Ronan was the same as these two. “Head Ronan off, warn him, if he’s not like me. I’m going to go to the bathroom, and I’ll meet up with you guys in a minute?” It was worded as a question, but he already had one foot on the way.
Gansey’s instruction made Henry wince and look to Blue. “You head Lynch off. I’ll be right behind you!”
His head was still spinning at the thought of Gansey being stuck like this, but if Henry was good at anything it was tucking his anxiety in a neat little corner and barreling forward with whatever he could see right in front of him. He rolled quickly out of bed and went in search of clothes, making a quick stop on the way to press a kiss to Blue’s cheek.
“We’ll get through this, Bluebird.”