Disclaimer: I do not own The Raven Cycle.
Dedication: to Evie and Sara. I write to crush hearts and they did their best to stop me, but the former is satisfied with promised happy road-trip!AU and the latter has declared war. Oh happy day! Quotes from "Novacaine" and "Fourth of July" by FOB.
Notes: I hope I didn't fuck things up short of gloriously. I guess this is pretty BLLB compliant? Maybe? And I didn't mean to not have so much Ronan and Adam - they are so much a part of the group love dynamic - but the plot bunny staked its claim and it said, "BLUESEY," and I daren't disagree.

.

"I'll be as honest as you let me."

.

"Jane, I -."

She shushes him and glances behind her, even though she can feel 300 Fox Way sigh around her in sleep. Perhaps she does not have any sight other than her own two eyes (they're 20/20, so she'll take them), but she doesn't have to be psychic to pick up his restlessness. It resonates within her like it has come home, awakening her own.

"Breathe. Just… follow me."

Blue inhales the static rattling through the telephone line, a tumbleweed through the ghost town called A Brief Reprieve. When he does the same, it is a near-echo.

Mist shadows the window. As if reminded of possible geriatrics freezing in the snow beyond the pane, Blue cradles the phone beneath her jaw so she can drape her blanket higher on her thin shoulders.

She likes these moments with Gansey best, when his words are not his shield, when they are not brick and mortar cast around the skeleton framework of his tone and easy-going smile. They box him in to leave the glorious prodigal son with careless hair and grin like good intentions, waiting for applause as if he is the greatest act.

In other words, they shut away the best part of him.

Gansey, when it is just Dick and Jane, bleeds white teeth and sass until he is just a breath on the other end of a line. He is so much everything to someone that she thinks he's relieved to be allowed to be nothing.

Wordless begging ricochets off miles high satellites and through the atmosphere before winding up curly-cue red so she can hear it. She refines it to, "Strip me down."

Let's be lungs together.

Corners of blanket clutched over her heart, she wonders if his family has ever known him.

.

"You are my favorite 'what if'."

.

Cabeswater in winter.

Dick and Jane went up a hill to get the lay of the land.

Halfway up, Blue turns around to see how the rest of their group plan on spending the afternoon. Without a thought, she grabs Gansey's hand so he looks back, too.

Ronan, Adam, and Matthew get creative down at the bottom of the hill.

Creative: noun - Matthew makes snow angels while Adam chases Ronan as dignified as he can manage after Ronan

1) made snowmen a la Calvin and Hobbes, and
2) stuffed snow down the back of Adam's shirt.

Black ink peeks up Ronan's neck as Adam catches him and pushes him face down into the snow. Fragile magic sits on dream ember genesis for a fraction of a second, leans over to snark -

Blue and Gansey watch them roll into the trees. Her hand is still not empty, but it is the way matryoshka dolls are singularly not themselves when they're lined up. They are only whole, only more than just dolls, when filled with one another.

No one is around to see. She grips tighter even though she knows death, like water, slips through fingers the harder you hold it down. She no longer checks to see if he is a kiss away from death because there is Glendower on the horizon. Wake up sleeping magic with a kiss for a request. He had beaten death away once, so they are not going to ask him for anything more than he'd been willing to give before.

The stories speak in the language of heroics and rewards. Everything is free; what is this 'price' you speak of?

Snow crunches underfoot - Gansey skids on hidden ice and she catches his arm and the warmth in her hands is real, it is present. The oak trees are silent. Bees sleep through the chill, dreaming of flowers. Wasps hide.

Blue makes the gravest error: she dares to be happy.

.

"If you knew, knew what the bluebirds sang at you, you would never sing along."

.

More dead than alive in the cave system and she's not counting the mortuary menagerie from their first trip.

Gansey is more stung than boy, his head in her lap and hair soft against the inside of her wrist. She wishes she had the time to enjoy the closeness, but his eyes are swelling shut and his lips are bee-stung, and not in the way Orla's lip plumper advertised.

Adam and Ronan stand in front of them, facing the man Gansey had dedicated his life to finding.

"We woke you," Adam says, sounding more hollow than he usually does.

"We did what we were supposed to." Ronan is a growl, more energy coil than human.

Glendower is a shadow bearing down after centuries of slumber, but nothing is heavier than his sympathetic resignation, both ceremonial and habitual. Blue thinks she hates him for it, for making Gansey just another in a long line of desperate, desperate fools.

"What are you willing to give?" he asks.

His voice reaches through them and crashes upon them like drowning on lungs in his age and power. Blue feels tissue paper flimsy by comparison. She can see how Adam and Ronan tighten under his influence, appearing smaller and denser than they are. She thinks her bones have curled to crushing all of her organs around the eaves of her heart.

Blue doesn't need to see their faces to know their answer - and her's - is everything.

"Nothing," Gansey says. It is more of a gurgle than a word, but they should've - they know him -

It is he, half a corpse lying on the crown, that dictates the price.

And Glendower is walking away like life and death matters are so easy, his steps muffled by the thick red robes, and Ronan is after him, ready for violence.

Adam crouches by Blue, silenced by the fury in his hopelessness.

"Gansey - " Blue curves her hand around the contours of his face, torn between strangling him for his goddamned good guy complex and screaming that she isn't made for grieving.

"No one - " he sucks in desperately, "dies for me."

He makes it real, no delay; death approaches and no matter how many times they say, "Not today," today arrives and so nothing stops Blue from kissing him.

This is what she learns:

True love isn't magical. It tastes like mint, his blood, and her tears. Their lips don't fit perfectly together because he's growing into death. It tastes like goodbye and, raising her head, she wishes around swallowed hiccups and the thickness crowding her throat that she hadn't waited so long.

His body is slowly suffocating into a blackout as he gazes into her face and gasps, "Breathe. Don't follow me."