Listen I just want my kids to Talk About Things and Be Happy okay?

Chapter title is from The Kids Aren't Alright by Fall Out Boy, which is so Gangsey that it hurts.

P.S. in case it wasn't clear, I obviously do not own the characters or world of the incredible Raven Cycle series. That honor belongs to the genius car nerd known as Maggie Stiefvater.

Gansey was glad he'd called Henry and invited him to eat gelato for breakfast with them. After the revelations of that morning, it was a relief to slide into a booth that was already full to bursting with the force of Henry's exuberance. It was a relief not to have to talk because Henry filled all the silences. It was a relief to simply scrape at the gelato in his bowl and smile quietly while Henry leaned over the table, regaling them with stories about the various devious ways he'd utilized RoboBee to its fullest potential.

"And then," he finished triumphantly, "I had RoboBee steal Cheng Two's boxers while he was in the shower and drape them over the ceiling fan in the kitchen. He had to run around in his towel for three hours before he finally found them."

Blue squinted at him with her good eye. Her other eye was squinting anyway. "Why didn't he just get a different pair of boxers?"

Henry grinned. "My dear lady, you obviously did not spend enough time at Litchfield House during our magnificent toga party. I cannot remember the last moment that Cheng Two possessed more than a single pair of clean boxers and one dubiously pressed uniform shirt at a time."

Blue's mouth twitched. "Now that you mention it, he did smell a little strange. I figured it was the toga."

"It was not the toga," Henry announced. "It was the fact that RoboBee stole his current pair of clean boxers five days ago, Litchfield Laundry Day is tomorrow, and Cheng Two is incapable of working a washing machine without assistance."

Blue's mouth twitched again. "And you are?"

Henry gasped at her, alarmed and aghast. "Blue Sargent, I thought we were friends. Surely my friends know that I would never allow my Madonna t-shirt to wallow in a dirty pile of laundry for days at a time. My clothing must always match the crisp perfection of my hair."

"Ah, I see." Blue nodded sagely. "Whereas Cheng Two—"

"His hair," Henry said, "is sadly incapable of attaining crisp perfection."

"Good thing too," Adam mused, "or it would be taller than yours."

This was apparently something Henry hadn't yet considered. He gaped at Adam with such open horror that Ronan choked on his gelato.

Orphan Girl snapped her head up at the sound. Her gelato was untouched, but the handle of a silver spoon dangled out of her mouth. Gansey was pretty sure he'd seen her eat the lid of their salt shaker earlier. He made a mental note to leave an extra-large tip for their waitress, and then he watched as Orphan Girl offered her spoon handle to Ronan, dripping with saliva. The top of the spoon had definitely been chewed off. The sight of it just made Ronan choke harder. Adam thumped a hand against his back, trying his best to look resigned but ending up amused instead. Eventually, Ronan stopped choking, and then he saw Henry — who was currently measuring the height of his hair between his index finger and thumb and frowning at the result — and started laughing instead.

This was a relief too — hearing Ronan laugh. After the events of the past few days, Gansey had been rather worried he would forget how.

As they finished off their dubiously-nutritious breakfast, Blue announced that she wanted to return to 300 Fox Way, and the rest of them agreed to follow. The rest of them except for Henry, anyway. Henry signed his check with a generous flourish and then launched himself out of his chair, glancing at Gansey with a question in the way he quirked his eyebrows. Gansey barely had time to open his mouth before Blue rolled her eyes at Henry and looped her arm through his elbow as if to say, Like I'd let you get out of this so easily. Gansey looked at them and smiled. His smile only widened when he looked past Henry and Blue and saw Ronan casually dropping an arm over Adam's shoulders, and Adam letting him. Nothing was right in the world, except this.

And 300 Fox Way. Blue's house was filled with that same sense of rightness, a feeling that enveloped Gansey as soon as he stepped inside. Jimi and Orla had come back as soon as they'd heard the news, and between their arrival and the smell of one of Maura's strange teas steeping and Ronan and Adam and Henry and Orphan Girl doing something absurd in the backyard and Blue holding Gansey's hand in the kitchen, the house felt almost full again. He felt like he could live in this room, in this moment, in this house, one day, or like he already had, and for once the feeling of time slipping didn't scare him. It was normal. It was almost . . . safe.

"I think," Gansey said, and then he didn't finish.

Blue squeezed his hand. "What?"

"I think it's okay if Ronan doesn't want to go back to school."

Gansey could see from her raised eyebrow that it was not what Blue had expected him to say, but she took it in stride. "Why now?"

"Because . . ." Gansey hesitated, gathering his thoughts. He wanted to articulate this properly before he brought it up with Ronan, and he had a feeling Blue understood that. She sucked yogurt off her spoon while she waited for him to finish. "There is too much magic in the world, and Ronan has so much of it. He even has the Barns now. It isn't fair of me to ask him to go back to Aglionby when he has a raven and an orphan girl and a home already. He doesn't need Aglionby."

Blue eyed him carefully. "Well," she said, "I think it's up to Ronan, and it's always been up to Ronan. I think you should really be talking about this with him. And I think that isn't really what you wanted to say."

Gansey blinked at her. Even after everything, it was still hard for him to remember that he was known, sometimes. "Do you think we can come back from this?"

And there it was, out in the open.

More words rushed out of him before Blue could answer him. "It's just that you've been scarred by a demon, and Adam learned what it feels like to lose control of your own body when his free will is what's most important to him, and he lost his magic, and Ronan lost his mother and his forest and almost his goddamn soul and Glendower is dead and—"

He cut himself off abruptly.

Blue set her spoon down on the counter. "You can say it, you know."

Gansey heaved a ragged breath. "What?"

"You can be afraid for yourself, as well as everyone else," Blue said simply. "You can worry about all of us and still be hurting. You're allowed."

You're allowed.

"But all of you have had so much worse."

Blue frowned. "Gansey. Grief isn't a competition." Then she pulled him into a hug before Gansey quite knew what was happening. "And anyway," she said into his shoulder, "even if it was, you wouldn't be losing."

Gansey was acutely aware of the way her fingers felt against his ribs. Her hair smelled of mint and sharpness and spring, all at once. He spoke into that hair. It felt safer than melting into her touch. "But that'd be selfish. I can't be allowed to mourn for myself."

"You are," Blue said fiercely. "You are."

And somehow Gansey believed her, and then he melted into her touch after all, and nothing was right in the world, except this. "It's just that I don't know where to go from here," he admitted, the jagged edge of his voice lost in the tufts of that sharp minty spring hair. "I spent the last seven years with a single purpose, and now that purpose is dead, and I never expected it to matter because I always figured I would be too. And now I'm not."

Blue inhaled sharply. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"No! No, of course not. It's just that I've lived the last several months trying to make sure that you all would be okay after I died. I . . . did things. I made preparations. I wrote . . . I wrote letters." The words were knives on his tongue, and he felt bad for giving them to Blue. "But now Noah is gone, and Cabeswater is gone, and I'm still here, and I spent so long getting ready to die that I don't remember what living is like. I . . . I keep thinking this is a dream, and all of this will be taken away again."

Blue held him tightly, and he held on just as hard. Sunlight slanted through the kitchen window, making Gansey feel like his skin was on fire. When he pressed his face against the top of her head, it pushed his glasses out of place. They dug into the bridge of his nose. Gansey focused on that — on how real it was — and tried to remind himself. This is not a dream. You are not Ronan. You are not dreaming. You are alive.

Eventually, Blue pulled back, but only far enough for her to look into his eyes appraisingly and run her fingers through his hair. "Well." She paused. "You're the one who suggested gelato for breakfast."

"So?"

"So that's living. That's how you know this isn't a dream. You don't have to plan your whole life out today. You can do whatever you want. You can eat gelato for breakfast and pizza for dessert. You could sell the Pig and move to New Zealand. You could bring the Pig to New Zealand with you. You could join Ronan the next time he pulls some stupid stunt." Blue spread her arms out wide and grinned at him. "You could hike to Zimbabwe with me and Henry."

"Zimbabwe?"

"Henry says we could do Venezuela on the way."

And suddenly, the future was possible. "Blue Sargent, I could kiss you."

And just like that, the future was impossible again. Blue's arms dropped. She looked at him with something close to panic, and Gansey's eyebrows furrowed. "What's wrong?"

Her breath came out in a shudder. "You could do anything but that."

Gansey's stomach settled somewhere near his shoes. "But I thought—"

"I want to," Blue interrupted, voice tinged with exasperation or anger or longing. "But the curse said that if I kissed my true love, he would die. It did not say that if I kissed my true love again, he would not die. And you've already died twice, and I've run out of things to sacrifice."

The sunlight cast strange shadows on her face, and Maura's strange tea filled the air with its strange scent, but Blue was unwaveringly sensible anyway, because of or in spite of the strangeness. In a world of magic and impossibilities, Blue had the presence of mind to wonder if her curse had an expiration date. And Gansey loved her, he loved her, he loved her for it.

And now that he was alive, he saw no reason not to say it. "Jane," he said firmly, "I love you."

Air hissed out of Blue in something close to a laugh. She stared at him, and then laughed again. And then she said, "Jane?"

Gansey brushed away a tuft of Blue's wild hair. It immediately fell back into place, covering three of the stitches over her eye. "Blue," he said. "Jane. Blue Jane Blue Jane. I love you." He let his fingers cup her cheek. You're allowed. "You're right," he told her. "We can wait. And on the next St. Mark's Eve, you can go to the church with Maura and watch and wait some more. And when my spirit isn't there, you'll know it's all right."

Now Blue smiled, and the strange shadows danced on that smile instead of dulling it. "When it's not there?"

Gansey nodded. He had been afraid for too long. "You're not really human," he told her, matter-of-fact. "But neither am I, anymore. Not really. I think we'll be all right. But," he added, "I would rather not risk it."

Blue nodded back at him. "Me neither. If this really is a dream, I don't want it to be taken away."

Gansey took her hands. "This is not a dream," he insisted, with intention. "We are not Ronan, and so this is not a dream."

Blue nodded again and then rested her forehead against his. She was still smiling, and for a moment the world was full of beauty and color and possibility and things that weren't death. In spite of all the magic he'd seen, that might have been what awed Gansey the most. "In a few months, we'll know for sure," she said. "And until then, we can still pretend."

Gansey lifted her hands and pressed them against his cheek, leaning into the feel of her skin. "We can pretend," he agreed.

The last few months had been agony, full of so much pretending that Gansey had thought he would burst. But that had been different. That had been pretending that would lead to death, pretending that would never end unless it ended in death. This was pretending with an expiration date, pretending with a possibility of something more.

Gansey did not really mind this sort of pretending.

Minutes bled into hours, and Gansey wasn't sure he'd ever spent this long at 300 Fox Way without either leaving or getting kicked out before. Even ordering pizza for lunch had a certain vibrancy to it — all those colorful women ordering a colorful variety of toppings in combinations that sounded only vaguely edible to Gansey. After it was delivered, Gansey politely took a slice from each of the three varieties and then wandered out to the backyard. Surprisingly, there were no new deep gouges in the grass or holes in the fence. Gansey had expected the absurd things his friends had been doing to leave their mark on Blue's backyard, and now that they hadn't, he couldn't tell if he was relieved or disappointed. It was hard, he thought, to leave a mark on a house that was already so sure of its identity.

"If I were you, I'd take the anchovies off of that slice before it's too late, man. Even Chainsaw refused to eat them."

Ronan sat down on the back steps next to Gansey, and Gansey tried his best not to glance over and observe his mental state. Instead, he shot him a rueful grin. "Is that what these rubbery triangles are supposed to be? I couldn't tell."

Ronan shrugged. "They smell like fish. Well, they smell like shit, but all fish smell like shit. And as far as I know, anchovies are the only fish that they put on pizza. Although — Calla did order that one, so I wouldn't put anything past her."

Gansey offered up a better smile and pointedly flicked the anchovies off his pizza before taking a bite. He ate in silence — Ronan didn't have a plate in his hands, and Gansey hated not knowing if it was because he'd eaten fast or because he hadn't eaten at all — and then he set down his paper plate and tried to figure out how to broach the subject of Aglionby.

Before he could, Ronan inexplicably beat him to it. He had been eying Gansey's pizza-grease-laden fingers for the last few minutes, and as soon as Gansey set the plate down, Ronan handed him a napkin and blurted out, "About Aglionby."

Gansey gaped at him. "Did you just . . . bring up school? Yourself?"

Ronan scowled. "Asshole. I was just going to ask if you wanted a ride tomorrow, seeing as the Pig is going to be a useless pile of scrap metal until Parrish gets a chance to look at it, but if you're going to—"

"Wait. Are you . . . going to school tomorrow?"

"Are you?"

"I . . . yeah."

"Then I am too. You don't have to make a big fucking deal out of it."

Out of all the ways Gansey had expected a conversation with Ronan about Aglionby to go, this hadn't been it. "But why?"

Ronan answered the question in the most Ronan way possible. "Why didn't you ever tell me that you were going to die?"

Gansey knew that he was outside, but he still felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the air. "Well. To be fair, I didn't tell anyone."

Ronan's perpetual scowl deepened. "I think that's probably worse, Gansey. Why the fuck wouldn't you tell us about it? Why would you keep shit like that to yourself?"

"Because — how the hell would I have brought it up? 'Hello, everyone. Now that Persephone's dead, it seems like a good time to tell you that I'm going to die too.' Yeah, that would have gone over well."

"Well, fine, but it's not like you had to mention it at fucking Nino's or some shit like that. We're fucking roommates, Gansey. You could have told me."

Gansey turned and examined him then. He couldn't help himself. Ronan was glaring at him with the kind of anger that meant he felt betrayed — and Gansey tried to, but he found that he couldn't blame him. "Ronan, you are the last person I would have told," he said finally. "But not," he continued, before Ronan could interrupt, "because I don't . . . I just didn't want you to have to deal with it until you had to."

Ronan made a sound like he was choking. "Until I had to?"

Gansey tried very hard to keep his voice even. "Do I have to spell it out for you, Lynch? You were just getting to the point where I thought you could be okay, finally, without your dad. You got through junior year somehow, and you got the Barns back, and you were powerful and you were magic and you were actually happy sometimes and — and then Greenmantle showed up, and everything happened, and how could I have told you the truth then? I couldn't be the person who made things even worse for you. That's why I—"

He cut himself off. Maybe he won't notice, maybe he won't think I had anything else to say, maybe—

"Why you what?" Ronan's eyes narrowed. "What the fuck did you do, Gansey?"

There was no point in keeping more secrets. "I talked to Child. I traded Monmouth for a diploma."

"But you don't need . . ." Ronan trailed off. He stared with Gansey with such open horror that the non-anchovy pizza shifted uncomfortably in Gansey's stomach. Ronan didn't show open anything. Not anymore. Which meant this was bad. Gansey braced himself for shouting, for unadulterated fury, for a string of painfully true accusations that would sting for weeks.

"Well."

Gansey hunched his shoulders.

"Good job, Gansey. Now I fucking have to go back."

Gansey stared at him, startled. "What?"

"You couldn't have planned this better if you tried," Ronan scoffed. "I'm not going to let you lose Monmouth for a fucking piece of paper and a shitass graduation robe."

Gansey felt the world drop out from underneath him. He leaned against the side of 300 Fox Way and closed his eyes like it would help. It didn't. "That's not what I wanted," he said. It felt like Adam all over again — Adam's father, Adam losing hearing in one ear, Adam pressing charges. It is the end of the world. It doesn't matter how you say it. It's what you wanted, in the end. He felt sick. "Losing Monmouth wasn't supposed to matter. It wasn't supposed to hurt you. I just wanted you to have a choice."

Ronan shook his head. "I can't believe you. You think I care about whether I have a diploma or not? It's not like I'm going to go to college. I'm going to stay at the Barns, and I'm going to find a way to wake up Dad's animals, and I'm going to make it into a proper fucking farm, and the last time I checked, I don't need a fucking piece of paper from a fucking private school for that. You don't just get to decide things like that for people, Gansey. You don't get to decide what would have helped if you had actually died. Did you forget that I live at Monmouth too? That maybe it's a lot more important than a piece of shitty stationery? Jesus, Gansey. I can't believe—"

The sound of Gansey's cell phone cut Ronan off just before he was about to stand, just before he was about to storm off, just before Gansey would have had to worry about finding him again.

"Sorry," Gansey said quickly, fishing his phone out of his pocket. "Sorry, I can let it go to voicemail. I can—"

"No, take the call," Ronan said. "It's probably your parents, and they'll probably mobilize the entire state police force if you don't answer." Ronan muttered a string of creative cell-phone-related expletives under his breath then, but Gansey couldn't pay attention because he didn't want his parents mobilizing state police either. He coughed, lifted the phone to his ear, and then focused on being polite. The fact that the politeness took so much effort was probably a sign that he'd spent too much time around Ronan and Blue.

"Hello?"

"Dick."

Gansey frowned. "Helen?"

"There's something I didn't tell you yesterday." Her voice was even crisper on the phone, professional and in-control and powerful. "With you being missing and then being found and the way you left the house at the speed of light, I didn't get the chance."

Gansey winced. He wanted to apologize for that — for a lot of things — but he didn't have the energy. "What?"

"I talked to Child."

Gansey stiffened, his fingers clenching around the phone so he wouldn't drop it. Very carefully, he avoided looking Ronan in the eye. "What happened?"

"I destroyed him," she said frankly. "Brought up a whole list of reasons why that deal was incredibly irresponsible on his part and how he had no right to agree to such a major trade with a minor and also how it was illegal blackmail and I could easily destroy him in court while keeping you from appearing culpable in any way."

She paused, clearly waiting for a response, but all Gansey could think to say was, "Could you really?"

"Probably not," she said. "But Child didn't know that. Anyway, he backed off Monmouth."

Gansey exhaled slowly, closing his eyes again. The ground underneath him steadied a little. "Helen—"

"Don't thank me yet," Helen warned. "Child backing off means that the deal you made is void now. You can't get the angry one his diploma anymore."

Gansey imagined Ronan at the Barns, diploma-less and hard-working and happy. It wasn't a bad image. He didn't know why he'd once thought it was. "That's okay. That's good. I . . ." He cleared his throat. "Thank you very much, Helen. I'm sorry again for all the trouble."

He could practically hear her frown over the phone. "One day," she said finally, "I hope you'll stop thinking that you always have to be polite around me too. And maybe then you'll finally tell me the truth about what actually happened to you while you were missing."

Something swelled in Gansey's chest, hopeful and unexpected and as powerful as Helen's voice. "I hope so too," he said. Then he hung up.

Ronan was eyeing him again, less angrily than before. "Trouble in Gansey paradise?"

The thing in Gansey's chest burst, and he looked at Ronan and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Ronan narrowed his eyes and poked Gansey's shoulder. "Gansey. What the fuck. Are you okay?"

"That was Helen," Gansey explained, still laughing a little, even though he knew Ronan knew. "She talked to Child."

"Oh, great," Ronan spit. "I suppose she got me a college degree too?"

"No," he said cheerfully. "She cancelled the deal. You don't have to go back to Aglionby ever again."

Ronan blinked. "What the fuck?" he said again. "Since when have you sounded happy about that?"

That, finally, sobered Gansey. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for making you feel like you had to go."

"Shut up," Ronan said, looking away. "You didn't force me to do fucking anything."

"Then why did you tell me that you're going to school tomorrow?"

Ronan's fingers tensed around the leather bands on his wrist. "Because." His voice was furious and challenging and certain. "Do I have to spell it out for you? You were fucking dead, Gansey, and you fucking did it for me, out of all fucking people, and I didn't get a fucking say, and I wanted to show you that it wasn't a fucking waste."

Gansey stilled. "Ronan. Jesus Christ. You can't — you can't actually think—"

Ronan's words spilled out of his mouth in a hard line. Each vowel was clipped, every word precise. Gansey felt sick again. "You wouldn't have let Blue kiss you if I hadn't been in the middle of being fucking unmade. You can't sit there and tell me that it wasn't my fault."

Gansey took one painful, shuddering breath, and then he turned to fully face him and forced his voice to come out strong. There were a million things that he worried would break Ronan Lynch one day. He couldn't let this be one of them. "I would have done that for Blue or Adam or Henry or Helen or anyone," he said severely. "You are not allowed to blame yourself for what happened."

Ronan looked so tired. All the fight was gone from his voice when he said, "Maybe. But you actually did do it for me, in the end. So if you want me back at Aglionby, I'll go."

This felt important, so monumentally important. Gansey was terrified of ruining it. Of ruining Ronan, who had only recently stopped being ruined. "I want," he said carefully, "you to be happy. That's why I didn't tell you when I realized I was going to die. It was just after I realized that you had a chance to be happy again. I didn't want to be the reason that you weren't." He dug his fingers into the fabric of his khakis. "I'm sorry I made that deal with Child. It was stupid. I just wanted you to have something left."

Ronan stared at him. He stared for so long that Gansey thought he might not have said anything at all — that he might have imagined making his whole speech, and Ronan was still waiting to hear that Gansey wanted him to finish school. Then he said, "You're right. That's pretty fucking stupid, shithead."

Gansey grinned. "Ronan," he said, "don't go back to Aglionby if you don't fucking want to."

Ronan stared at him again, this time in astonishment. "All right," he said with raised eyebrows, like he was still asking permission. "I don't fucking want to."

"Good." Gansey clapped him on the shoulder. "You don't need it anyway." He thought about that for a moment. "None of us needs it, actually. But Adam wants it, and you need it even less than the rest of us."

Gansey didn't think he had ever seen Ronan's eyes so wide. It felt empowering, entertaining, and triumphant to surprise him. Usually Ronan was the one with the surprises. "Who are you, and what the fuck have you done with Gansey?"

"I figured it out a few weeks after I'd already made the deal with Child," Gansey admitted, waving his hands around somewhat foolishly. "It was dumb of me not to figure it out sooner. How could you need Aglionby? You have the Barns. You have dreams. You don't need anything else."

"No, that's not true. I need other things too." The look Ronan gave Gansey was so careful, so serious, that for a moment, Gansey was afraid that Ronan was going to get sentimental, and then the world would probably end. But what came out of his mouth was, "I still need you to tell me I can drive the Pig, so I don't have to dream up another pair of keys every time I want to crash it."

It was maybe a sign of how wild the last few months had been that Ronan's words struck Gansey as amusing rather than insensitive. He threw back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed again, and after a moment, Ronan joined in, and nothing was right in the world, except this.

But that was fine. This was an astonishing amount of rightness, more than Gansey could have wished for. And right now, sitting on the back porch of 300 Fox Way with an empty greasy plate on the ground beside him and Blue and Adam waiting somewhere behind him and Ronan Lynch laughing in front of him, it felt like enough.