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There were a lot of words Gansey could use to describe Blue Sargent and Henry Cheng.
Two of his closest friends was an accurate one.
The loves of his life was also true.
His soulmates, though perhaps sentimental, was one of his favourites.
Trouble was, unfortunately, the most accurate.
They had been in Florida when Gansey had first realised it. Of course, he had always known that Blue would never back down from a challenge, he just hadn’t realised before then that Henry was always ready to challenge her, and accept her challenges in turn.
The day he realised it had been an adventure, though perhaps not in the usual sense of the word. They’d ended up in Fort Myers when they’d been headed to St, Augustine, allegedly America’s oldest city, which was no doubt full of a rich history, but Gansey would never know, their map having flew out of the window as Blue and Henry made a paper airplane out of it.
So, here Gansey was, in Fort Myers, having spent the whole day walking around asking for directions, the humid heat prickling at the back of his neck the whole time. It was dusk until he found directions that he trusted, and then another hour or so until he found Blue and Henry again, and it turned out that they had not found directions, but had, somehow, discovered a full bottle of whipped cream flavoured vodka.
“How,” Is all Gansey had to say when he finally met up with them on the roadside.
“Charm can get you a lot of things, G-Money, especially when you’re as charming as me,” Henry replied jokingly.
“I don’t doubt your charm, Henry, I’m just wondering what you expect us to do with a bottle of whipped cream vodka,” Gansey said, though he was pretty sure that he already knew the answer was undoubtedly to drink it.
Henry just grinned and slung his arms over both Gansey and Blue’s shoulders, nestling them both into his side. Gansey ignored the way the contact sent a spark that felt oddly like fondness through him, telling himself it was nothing but the warmth of Henry’s skin.
Henry took them to a cliff overlooking the beach, the waves lapped gently against the rock below and the stars shone above as they sat themselves just a little away from the edge.
“I’m not sure that getting drunk at the edge of a cliff where we could quite easily fall is the most sensible idea,” Blue said, but she was already pulling blankets out of her backpack and getting comfortable, so it seemed she didn’t mind too much.
“Maybe not, but the view is beautiful,” Henry responded, gazing into the distance with a slight look of wonder. “Right, guys?”
“Right,” Gansey answered, but his eyes hadn’t left Henry’s face even for a moment.
“Right,” Blue echoed. Gansey shifted his eyes to meet hers, a pang of guilt aching in his chest, but when he looked at her she was staring at Henry’s profile just like Gansey himself had been doing moments ago. When her eyes did meet his, she smiled, crooked and knowing, and the pang of guilt in Gansey’s chest faded away into fondness for her, for Henry, for both of them.
Henry, seemingly unaware of the exchange that had just taken place, dug the bottle out from where it had been bundled in his jacket and took a swig before holding it out for either Blue or Gansey to grab. Gansey hesitated, he wasn’t unfamiliar with alcohol by any means, but somehow this felt different than a flute of champagne in his hand at a Gansey family function. Before Gansey could make up his mind, Blue snagged the bottle from Henry’s hand and took a sip with a shudder and a smile before offering it straight to Gansey again.
This time Gansey only hesitated for a moment before his fingers clasped around the bottle and he pulled it to his lips, he took a long swing, savouring the taste even as it burned. He passed the bottle back to Henry and they passed it around, each of them slowly heading towards being drunk.
Gansey lay down on his blanket, relaxed by the alcohol in his blood and the two warm bodies at either side of him as they joined him on the blanket. He stared up at the sky, allowing himself to feel everything, he settled into the bodies next to him, looked up at the twinkling stars, listened to the rush of the ocean, and revelled in the feeling of being alive, alive alive.
They had to move eventually, as tempting as falling asleep under the stars was their alcohol addled minds had retained enough sense not to do so, or at least Gansey’s had.
Standing up made him realize just how drunk he really was, and it seemed to do the same to his friends as they wobbled to their feet. They’d left the car parked...somewhere, they just had to find it.
Finding the car was easier said than done. Gansey didn’t know how long they’d been walking for so far, he just knew that he’d ended up with Henry’s arm over his shoulder and Blue’s around his waist on the other side. He wasn’t sure if it was a show of affection, them getting him to help hold them up, or them holding him up, but whatever it was he liked it.
Henry was slurring something that Gansey vaguely recognised as a k-pop song, Blue humming along, when suddenly he stopped in the middle of the road, causing Gansey and Blue to almost fall to the sidewalk and possibly their deaths (in his current state the sidewalk seemed very, very far down and he wouldn’t like to die again, thank you very much, not today, not lost in a strange town, more drunk than he thought he may have ever been before.)
“Woah, look at that,” Henry breathed.
Gansey followed Henry’s line of sight, frowning when all he found was a rather large orange tree in someone's backyard.
“...It’s a tree,” Gansey said, curious as to if he was missing something.
“It’s amazing,” Henry said, still staring up at the orange tree in apparent awe.
Gansey stared harder, going so far as to clean his glasses on his shirt and plopping them back on his nose (if he almost missed then that’s really not the point), but he still couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“Henry, it’s a tree. There are trees everywhere! There’s a tree in that other garden over there, Blue’s a tree, I’m a whole forest of trees!” Gansey whined. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the tree, in a way it was rather nice. It was just that the sober voice in his back of his mind told him he’d like it a lot more when he wasn’t lost in the middle of the night.
“Maybe that’s why I like them so much,” Henry said softly, but before Gansey had time to figure this out Henry said, with the determination that only a drunk teenager with no adult supervision could have, “I’m gonna fucking...climb the tree guys.”
“Henry, no!” Blue piped up, but she was laughing and Gansey knew that she was secretly all for it, and he briefly wondered what had happened to his girlfriend being sensible .
“I’ma do it. Oranges, we need the oranges,” Henry replied, and before Gansey could even argue his friend was hopping the fence.
Except as Henry hopped said fence, his pants snagged on one of the pickets and he crashed to the ground, only to stand up on the other side of the fence a minute later in his underwear, because his pants were still hanging off the picket.
“Success!” Henry cheered.
“I question what you consider a failure then?!” Blue yelled back cheerily.
“Gansey’s taste in polo shirts!” Henry replied, grinning.
Gansey huffed, thinking to himself that Henry had no room to talk when for (at least) the second time in his life he was standing in a dark street wearing only underwear and a Madonna t-shirt (albeit a different one, how many did he even have? )
Gansey was torn between firing back this (very witty, if you asked him) retort and telling Henry to, quite frankly, get down before he hurt himself, for a few seconds, and by the time he’d decided on the latter Henry had already spanned half the trees height.
“Henry, please get down from there,” He called, trying his best to sound authoritative rather than pleading.
“Oranges, Ganz! We need them, they are literally all we need, they’ll fix everything, ever !” Was Henry’s only reply as he continued to climb.
“But-” Gansey started to protest before he was cut off by Blue smacking her hand over his mouth.
“Shhhh, I wanna see where he’s going with this,” Blue whispered, and oh, she looked so beautiful under the starlight that he forgot what they were even talking about.
That is, until he heard footsteps approaching and Henry was stumbling back to them, and amazingly enough his arms were filled with at least a dozen oranges.
“You did it!” Blue cheered.
“Henry Cheng, prince among men, master of the oranges.” Henry took a bow, dropping a couple of said oranges as he did it.
“Henry, we really don’t need all these oranges,” Gansey protested, but he knew it was hopeless, so they continued their search, oranges in tow.
They found the car as the sun was beginning to rise, sky splashed with pink and orange, beautiful in a way that raised his spirits despite his burning muscles and the last dregs of alcohol swimming in his veins. Gansey could do nothing but collapse onto the hood gratefully, staring at the sky above him.
Blue and Henry were having a whispered conversation a few feet away, but Gansey barely noticed until he saw Blue slipping into the backseat in his peripheral vision and felt Henry slide onto the hood next to him.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Henry said, hint of a smile in his voice.
He slid his gaze over, finding himself gazing at Henry’s profile just as he’d been gazing at the sky. When Henry finally turned to look at him, an eyebrow raised, Gansey finally remembered he’d been asked a question.
“I’m just thinking about,” Gansey paused, struggling to get his thoughts together “life, I guess.”
“Life?”
“Yeah, life,” Gansey said, more firmly “Life, love, the world, all of that.”
“And how is life?” Henry asked.
“Absolutely wondrous,” Gansey replied.
“Mhm, and the world?”
“Still waiting for us to explore it.”
“And...and what about love?” Henry asked, and Gansey wasn’t sure if he was imagining the sudden uncertainty in his voice.
“Confusing,” Gansey answered honestly.
“And why’s that?” Henry sounded upbeat, but there was something strange in it, like a string pulled too tight and ready to break any minute,
“...It just is,” Gansey said.
“You love Blue, right?”
“Of course I do,” he replied. “God, I couldn’t imagine a world where I didn’t love her.”
“Then what seems to be the problem?”
Gansey went silent, just letting himself think. He wasn’t confused about his love for Blue at all, he wasn’t lying about being in love with her, he was desperately in love with her...it was just…
“Gansey, I’m going to do something now, and I’d really like if you could promise not to hate me for it…” Henry said, the string was pulled far too tight now.
“I could never hate you,” Gansey answered.
Then Henry’s face was just an inch from his.
Their lips touched.
The string snapped.
There were so many feelings pouring out of Henry, straight from his soul and into Gansey’s mouth. There were so many feelings pouring out of Gansey . Gansey had always been pure emotion, carefully controlled to the very best of his ability, but oh so filled with it.
For a few moments he let every single thing that he’d ever felt out into that kiss.
Then the world came back to him, and he pulled away.
“I-Henry,” Gansey started, trying to just focus and breathe “ I- you- Blue...I can’t do this to Blue…” He whispered.
“You aren’t doing anything to me.” Came a sudden voice. Gansey whipped his head around, realizing that at some point Blue had got out of the car without him noticing and was now standing by them, “Gansey, I asked Henry to do that.”
“You...you did what, Jane?” Gansey wasn’t sure what he was hearing, he wasn’t sure what was happening.
“I asked him to.” Blue repeated firmly. “Though admittedly not quite so...forwardly.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste, but she was smiling.
“I’m afraid I still don’t understand,” Gansey said after a moment, still staring at his girlfriend dumbly.
“I want this. So does Henry. We want...all of us, together,” Blue explained. “We were talking about it earlier, and we were pretty sure that you wanted it too, so Henry was going to ask you...which I suppose he did, in a way.”
Gansey didn’t say anything then. His head was on fire with everything that has just happened. He needed to think. He just had to think. He was always thinking, hiding, he had to...but right now he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
He knew exactly what he wanted; who he wanted.
And apparently they wanted him too...both of them.
Henry and Blue were both staring at him, expectantly awaiting his answer, or maybe just expecting something, anything .
“So...you two planned this?” Gansey asked, allowing himself to catch up with everything.
Blue and Henry nodded, looking sheepish but the edges of their lips were quirked in slight smiles.
“Pretty much.”
“Guilty.”
“Why do I get the feeling that you two will be nothing but trouble together?” Gansey sighed, but he could feel himself grinning.
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing that we’ll have you around to keep us in line?” Henry said after a moment, he was smirking but he still sounded uncertain.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Gansey laughed softly.
That morning, sitting on the hood of a car with no engine, with one hand in Henry’s and one hand in Blue’s, under an orange and pink splashed sky, Gansey was certain that this new chance at life was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Without it he never would have experienced this moment, and this was possibly the most beautiful moment in his life, no, in any life.
“I’m hungry,” Henry said once the sky had resolutely turned pale blue,
“Well, we have plenty of oranges,” Blue said, voice laced with amusement,
“Oh my god, I don’t even like oranges,” Henry sighed despondently.
Gansey had, unsurprisingly to him, been right, Blue and Henry were trouble personified, but even he was surprised by just how right he was.
In the year they had spent travelling America, here’s a list of things that had happened:
I.Blue and Henry finding an entire box of slightly battered roller skates in a thrift store in Colorado, and immediately buying three pairs. For three weeks they rollerskated absolutely everywhere (they tried to get Gansey to join in, but there was only so long that they could let him trip over himself every three seconds). This only came to an end when they decided to skate through the local department store, and managed to knock down three different displays despite their skills on the skates. The three of them had ended up hiding in the vegetable department for three hours until security finally gave up and it was finally deemed safe to come out.
II.A snowball fight in Times Square that turned Christmas eve into an all out war. Gansey had been half sure that they were all going to die of hypothermia, but after rolling into a warm diner at three in the morning and filling up on far too many pancakes it seemed like they’d survive. By the time they got back to their motel and buried themselves under a pile of blankets, limbs tangled as they cuddled for warmth and whispered voices wishing each other merry christmas, Gansey had forgotten all about potentially freezing to death because his chest was bursting with warmth.
III. The snowball fight lead to water fights and so much more. Food fights were narrowly avoided after Blue’s five minute rant on wasting food and the rates of world poverty, but while Gansey didn’t have to fear suddenly being hit in the face by spoonfuls of yogurt he was still on alert for any projectiles 24/7 at this point.
Once they returned to Henrietta for the last couple of weeks before people headed off for college, they seemed to mostly calm down. The three of them spent about a week just lounging around 300 Fox Way, because they knew that Blue had missed her family and they’d missed her in return, and though Gansey and Henry had planned to stay somewhere else, that idea was immediately vetoed by the house's inhabitants.
But on their last night in Henrietta things had gotten out of hand. It had started in Nino’s, Adam and Ronan and Opal in tow, laughing and eating and reminiscing about old times while reminding each other that the future was still ahead, and no matter what they’d be together for it. The mood alternated between excited and more somber, when their reminiscing accidently lead to things that they didn’t want to remember, like almost losing each other, like actually losing Noah and how much they missed him, like blood and the voices of the possessed and dream creatures that were more nightmare.
But they were together, that was what mattered.
“We should do something,” Blue suggested.
“We are doing something, maggot,” Ronan said, gesturing around them, but his voice was light and teasing.
Blue rolled her eyes good naturedly and they all went quiet for a moment until Aadam spoke up.
“Like what?” He asked.
“Something fun. Y’know, something that normal kids our age would be doing, not monsters and magic, just something fun together that we’ll always remember,” Blue answered.
“You? Normal? Since when is that your thing?” Ronan snorted, but he looked intrigued by the idea.
“I’m not suggesting forever,” Blue laughed “But, just for a while, it would be nice, maybe.”
The table fell into silent agreement. The world was full of magic, and they loved it no matter how much it had hurt all of them in turn, but maybe they should take advantage of the normalcy while it lasted.
Their version of normalcy was (apparently) this: a rooftop a couple of blocks away from Nino’s, the door to said roof broken in by Ronan in a matter of seconds. A pile of nerf guns, most likely pulled from a dream because Gansey was pretty sure that they hadn’t been carrying those with him before. If Gansey had thought that the snowball fight had been all out war then that was only because he hadn’t seen this. This was war, full of taunting and fighting dirty. Gansey had to admit that it was some of the most fun he’d ever had.
Ronan and Adam had returned to the barns at around midnight, Adam tired from all the work college had given him over the summer, but thankfully nowhere near as tired as he used to be. They’d carried Opal into their car and started to drive away, and Gansey already missed them but he knew, as always, that this wasn’t goodbye.
The rest of the night was a blur. Gansey, Blue and Henry had decided on a late night stroll, but that somehow lead to an entire series of events that Gansey was still trying to process, including a three feet wall of moss graffiti that read ‘ Blue + Gansey + Henry forever’ that Gansey secretly loved but really didn’t want to get in trouble for defacing public property, eco-friendly or not.
Gansey had started explaining just how much trouble this could get them in on the way back to 300 Fox Way, but Blue and Henry had promptly started smothering his neck in kisses.
He refused to let them make him forget about this.
...But maybe he could let himself be distracted, just for a little while.
As Gansey let them pepper him in kisses, returning some of his own, he decided that, yeah, Henry and Blue were definitely trouble.
But right now, he really couldn’t find it in himself to mind.