Blusey Week #3
When they arrive at the church, Gansey still feels peculiarly close to Blue. She’d been frightened that it would only be a moment, that after a little time passed they would go back to the way things were before, her always feeling awkward around Blue and Blue seeming a bit standoffish. But somehow the small talk between them is easier than it’s ever been, light and bantering the way Blue is with Eve and with Leah and Gansey feels like this group is going to be whole again soon, that all the strange sharp edges that have come to the surface as Blue becomes one of them are going to be worn away and fade entirely. Once, when she calls him Tom, he calls her Robin, and when she says, “Please don’t,” he realizes his mistake and retracts immediately. Somehow, this only makes her feel closer to him.
They talk about the usual things, Glyndower and the ley lines, and somewhere along the way she realizes how nice it is to talk to someone who has always lived in the world she stumbled on and introduced Ronan and Eve and Leah to. A world where time folds in on itself, where death is negotiable, ancient queens still hold their power deep beneath the surface of the soil. Blue was born into such beliefs. Everyone else Gansey knows has had to work for them. And then Blue tells her, “My mom’s told me, ever since I was born, that if I kiss my true love, she’ll die.” Gansey, half thinking it’s a joke, chokes out a laugh, but Blue’s eyes when he looks at her are cold and serious and pissed off. “Don’t laugh, you --” Blue doesn’t finish the sentence.
Gansey’s still grinning a little when she says, “Well, it’s just a very precautionary sounding sort of thing, isn’t it? Don’t date or you’ll go blind. Kiss your true love and she bites it.”
“It’s not just her! Every psychic or medium I’ve ever met tells me the same thing. Besides, my mom’s not like that. She wouldn’t just play around with something like that. It’s not pretend.” Blue sounds actually offended and it’s only now that Gansey realizes how real and serious this is to him, that this is something that defines him and his life. She feels like an asshole for not thinking about that before.
She brushes her bottom lip with her thumb to settle herself a little before she says, “Sorry. I was being a dick again. Do you know how she’s supposed to die, this unlucky gal?” When Blue only shrugs, she continues, “Ah. Devil’s in the details, I guess. So you just kiss nobody, in a precautionary way? That seems grim, Tom. I won’t lie.”
“I don’t usually tell people. I don’t know why I told you. Don’t tell Eve.”
Something goes cold inside Gansey, though she can’t say why. It shouldn’t matter to her that Blue wants to kiss Eve. She’s seen how Eve is around him, she should be happy for them, but instead she feels an inexplicable sense of loss. “It’s like that, is it?”
Blue denies it ferociously but clumsily, and they move away from the topic with Gansey only saying, “Well, if you killed Eve, I’d be quite upset.” It’s such an understatement as to be absurd. Quite upset is what she’d be if she flunked Latin or got a dent in the Camaro. If she thinks too much about how she’d be if she lost Eve, she begins to lose her words, so she turns her mind away from the thought as forcefully as she can and says, “Thanks for telling me.”
And then Blue asks her why she’s looking for Glyndower and it takes her a moment to respond, because though she’s told dozens of people about her quest, hardly any of them ask why. She’s always been obsessive, one of the more manageable symptoms of her autism, and no one really questions the source of this one. Her closest friends know, but no one else. But really, it’s past time for Blue to know. And so she finds herself telling the story of the night she died. Maybe, she thinks, if she told this more often, it would stop hurting so much. But the memory of the hornets, the pain of each sting, the sensation of her heart stopping, seems too important not to be painful. When she gets to the part about the voice telling her that she will live because of Glyndower, and that somewhere else, someone was dying in her place, she feels again that relief at knowing that Blue will believe her implicitly.
And Blue does believe it. He accepts the entire story without question, though he seems quieter now than before. The simple product of hearing someone talk about their own death in the past tense, she thinks. Soon enough, they’re distracted by the fluctuation of the EMF reader. They’re in the forest behind the church now, walking steadily deeper into the trees as the sky above them darkens with the threat of rain, thunder already rumbling in the distance. For a while they mess with the reader, stepping back and forth, handing it between them in the hopes that Blue’s amplifying abilities will put them back on course. But then Gansey looks down and sees what looks like a bone between Blue’s feet, and her heart goes still. It’s irrational, she knows, probably just an animal, but all the same, she says, “Step back. There’s --”
Gansey kneels on the forest floor and carefully, carefully, keeping her hands as steady as she can, she sweeps away the leaves covering the bone, and now her heart is picking up at double its usual rate because the more she uncovers it, the more obvious it becomes that this is a human skeleton.
Above her, Blue says softly, “Gansey, this was a kid. This was a kid from Aglionby.”
And it’s true, undeniably, because nestled in the ribcage is the Raven crest sewn into every blazer and cardigan worn by the girls of the school, and seeing it there raises an unformed sob in Gansey’s throat, a grief that comes from whoever this girl had been being too much like Gansey for it to matter that they hadn’t known each other.
“We should report it,” Blue says, sounding only a little steadier than Gansey feels.
“Wait,” Gansey says, because she’s spotted a wallet settled against the pelvis. She lifts it and pulls out the driver’s license to see whose it is, and she stops breathing. For a moment she thinks she’s going to hyperventilate or black out because she doesn’t need to even look at the name, the face on the card is more familiar than Blue’s. It’s Leah. She looks at the name just to double check, and there it is, as impossible as it is undeniable. There’s a long moment when Gansey thinks she’s never going to breath again, because Leah is dead, Leah is dead and it’s many, many years too late to save her.