Gansey walked through the giant archway slowly, careful not to make a sound.
Everything was ivory marble and white gold, a mosaicked ceiling above him. He took a moment to study the artwork, not unlike from Michael Angelo's works in the Sistine Chapel, except for the fact the angels that were engraved on the roof in striking, vibrant colours bore the faces of demons and devils.
Gansey wore a heavy crown on his head, but did not question it. He walked with his hands in his pockets, bare footed steps making no echoes. Gansey felt like he was being followed, which he was, but because he was dreaming, he didn't care.
He couldn't see the paintings along the walls. They were smudged and blurry and he realised that he was not wearing his glasses or contact lenses, but it hadn't seemed to matter with anything else besides the artworks. He rubbed his eyes, and the portrait faded into view. It was Ronan's face on the Mona Lisa, or maybe it was the Mona Lisa's face on Ronan? Gansey thought somewhere deep inside him this should be funny, but right now there was nothing hilarious about it at all. Whoever had painted it was very talented, to have captured all the deep, etched lines that were Ronan Lynch.
He saw a large oak door a few feet away, sunken into the milky white walls, etched with patterns in black iron. The door-knockers were in the shape of Ravens, the wings forming the circle and the beak poking into his skin painfully as he reached for them, sharper than he expected.
The beak drew a line of a cut on the inside of Gansey's wrist, fatal, if it had been real. Golden ichor seeped from the wound, splattering on the floor and becoming flowers, blue as the summer sky. He pulled open the door finally, its weight both immensely heavy and feather-light.
He stepped into a meadow, small and beautiful, running water trickling over his feet, small smooth rocks below his toes. He had walked directly into the middle of a tiny stream, the bottom of his flannel pyjamas soaking through not uncomfortably. The oak doors stood behind him, but they were no longer attached to the building, just doors standing alone in a glade. Blue birds flew overhead, singing a familiar song. The sky was cloudless, and the trees swayed in a warm breeze and shed their azure petals. Everything was blue, he realised with little shock.
His mind immediately jumped to Cabeswater. Could that be where he was? In an eternal summer filled with blue things that he so desired? But he knew he wasn't. He was not in Cabeswater and this was just a forest.
He walked around the perimeter of the glade, careful not to step beyond the fringes of the trees, for there were snakes and spiders and hornets and rats itching to get him, but not being able to step inside his blue spot of safety.
More paintings hung from branches or were nailed to the trunks of the trees, all beautiful and contrasting.
"Blue" Gansey said quietly, turning, and as he said it, there she stood. It was his willing her to appear that made her appear, making Gansey's mind reel back to his Cabeswater theory.
"Gansey"
She said it softly, like his own voice. The glass bubble of sunshine that kept out the night creatures was fragile, and a too-sharp word or a wrong step could shatter it.
"I've been waiting here for so long, why didn't you come sooner?" Blue asked fondly, tilting her head to the side and scrunching up her nose.
Gansey felt wildly underdressed in his pyjamas, while Blue wore a bright yellow sundress, leaves sewn into the bottom half of the skirt, so she looked like a giant walking daffodil. Strange, quirky, but beautiful, nevertheless.
"I didn't know how to find you" Gansey answered, finally, stealing a glance at Blue's dark eyes.
"I missed you" she said, floating towards him, her bare feet not touching the ground as she walked, as if she stood on an inch of glass.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, smiling warmly up at him from her place below. She stretched up on her tippy toes, and planted a small, cherry tasting kiss on his lips. This is when Gansey realised he was dreaming, for Blue couldn't kiss, or rather she wouldn't, just in case she killed someone.
He wrapped his arms around her waist, hands gripping his own elbows. Tilting his head to the side, he kissed her like he would kiss her if she could be kissed. Dream Blue kissed back, slipping her tongue over his bottom lip and making his mind short-circuit.
It was wonderful, but wrong. Gansey knew this, he knew that if Blue could kiss him it wouldn't be like this and it wouldn't feel so much as thrilling and sexy and more like passionate and meaningful. He knew thinking that sounded like an insult, but of course if he could kiss Blue it would be thrilling and sexy but it wouldn't mean nothing. It would be a kiss between two people who were made for each other.
True loves kiss, Gansey thought with sarcasm.
He opened his eyes and he was sitting in the driver's seat of the pig, the cracked vinyl cold against his arms, despite the fogged up interior of the car. It was heavily raining outside, thundering against the roof and hammering into his brain. Blue straddled his waist, and he began to half realise that this dream was rapidly becoming more of something he couldn't talk about in the morning. Richard Gansey III didn't have many dreams like this. He usually dreamt of mountains or fields or bees or antique stores full of objects that made up the house he'd lived in as a child. He hardly ever, ever, dreamt of girls.
Now he was though, and his dream had her hands up his shirt. Blue's - or rather dream Blue's - hands roamed all along his chest and sides, cold fingers against the warm skin of his toned stomach and back. It seemed this version of Blue couldn't kiss him, which put Gansey into a confused state of wondering if it was real.
"Gansey I-" she said, but then didn't finish. She rested her chin against his shoulder so their cheeks touched, breath tickling behind Gansey's ear.
"Blue can I...would you let me...may-" Gansey mumbled, his glasses in the way of everything at that moment. In this wedge of his dream, he seemed to need them.
Blue, reading his thoughts, hunched her back over, already so close to the ceiling, and tugged at the hems of all her shirts and singlets, pulling them over her head and almost elbowing him in the nose.
Gansey's immediate thought was to look away. He had an older sister and knew when to look away from a girl changing to be polite, but Blue didn't want him to be polite, he could tell. Blue wanted him to be a stupid teenage boy for just a second, to be controlled by something in his gut and to stare unashamed at the skin she'd so charitably decided to show him in the dim 2 am light.
"Jane, I don't know what to say" Gansey said, his neck going hot and his glasses fogging up.
"Maybe this time, Richard Gansey, don't talk" she whispered in his ear half angrily, half something else.
Her hands slid up out of his shirt and along the clothed part of his waist, up to his shoulder and down to the crook of his elbow. Gansey stared at the soft, smooth part of Blue's neck he could see, illuminated by a street light outside that was already quite dim, so really he couldn't see a lot of it, but he wished he could kiss it. It only seemed fitting the mark she was leaving on his insides should be returned with marks on her outside, maybe in the form of dark purple bruises, or possibly sweet pink blemishes that were raised and tender.
Blue's grip tightened on his forearm, and he thought about how real it all felt. The heavy breathing, the touches, the heat, the cold.
She used her small hand to slide down his arm, making the golden hair there stand on end with goosebumps. Blue stopped her hand at his wrist and put her palm on the back of his hand, and put it on the top of her bra.
Gansey had touched a boob before, this wasn't the problem. He'd had girlfriends, this also wasn't the matter. It was a fine mixture of the fact he so achingly wanted it all to be real and that he also kept slipping in and out of knowing it wasn't, and, because it was Blue.
Blue was the only girl in the group of four boys, but no one looked at her like that. Not even Adam, or Gansey himself, who both were actively (sort of) dating her or had once (sort of) dated her.
Gansey gave an involuntary squeeze. Blue laughed. Gansey's legs shook with the force of his jaw clenching.
Words were Gansey's strong point, he needed to say something, something smart, something witty to impress Blue, he needed to do something.
"You're very beautiful, Jane" he said, and immediately regretted it. Blue, dreaming or not, would probably think he was saying that only because she's taken her shirt off for him, but that wasn't true. He wasn't even looking there.
"So are you" she sighed. Blue's hands came back to rest on the skin just above his belt, and he grunted a little bit and turned his head away, coughing.
"Am-am I too heavy?" Blue asked, raising an eyebrow. She thought that he'd made a noise of pain, so she tried to adjust her weight onto her knees and not his thighs, Gansey swallowed another noise and cupped her shoulders.
"You-" his voice broke, he cleared his throat "- you aren't too heavy." The very idea was absurd. Blue was tiny, he could probably pick her up with one arm.
"Then what happened?" She demanded. Blue was like this. One wrong word or noise or twitch of the finger and she could become angry enough to rival Ronan.
Gansey ran his thumb along dream-Blue's collarbone. Blue was waiting for an answer, and he knew he had to give her one, but instead he reached behind him and slid his shirt off over his head.
Something Gansey could never get over was how much a delicate, tantalising process girl's taking their shirts off was. They would reach down and pull it by the hem, slowly revealing more and more skin and then finally with their arms above their heads, the shirt would be gone, but with men it was just a duck of the head a pull and the shirt was off. There was no ceremony.
But Dream-Blue seemed to like it, though. Which was strange, but not awful.
"You looked so hot when you did that" she confessed.
Now my brain is pushing it, thought Gansey, Blue would never admit I'm hot.
She rested her hands on the sturdy, strong muscles of his chest, and then began to slowly rock her hips back and forth on top of him.
He wrapped his arms around Blue's tiny waist and rested his head on the bottom of her ribs, squeezing his eyes shut. It felt amazing, every touch of skin and every caress of fingers or ghost of breath was like a symphony orchestra playing in his head, slowly building tempo and going faster.
"Jesus" he said, making circles with his ankles.
"Oh" Blue said, confusing Gansey immensely.
Was she saying oh! like wow,or oh? like she was pleasantly surprised or oh. like disappointment?
"I just, God, Gansey! I just want to kiss you! How can we do this without kissing?!" Blue burst out, dark eyes flashing.
"I wish I could kiss you too" Gansey said, curling his hand behind Blue's ear and playing with the soft hair at the nape of her neck. "But I know that with you, I have to make the best of everything I can get."
"How do you always know what to say?" Blue demanded, shoulders slumping so suddenly her chest was in Gansey's face. "You're so calm and collected all the time while I'm up here freaking out."
"Um," Gansey started, moving his face so he was looking up at Blue. "I wish you knew how wrong you were when you said that."
"It's just, so many thoughts are going through my brain and I feel like my head is going to explode and there you are with your pecs and your stupid watch and I just-"
Blue collapsed against his chest, resting her cheek on the top of his head.
"What do you want, Blue?" Gansey implored, fighting his indomitable need to press his lips to where the swell of her breasts started.
"I want you to kiss me" Blue said, and Gansey shook his head sadly.
"What else do you want?"
"I want you to touch me" she answered. As a way of demonstration, Blue squeezed the top of Gansey's thigh hard enough to earn a deep, quiet, groan from him.
"See?" Gansey asked. "That was easy." It was not easy. It was impossible, he felt like he couldn't move his arms.
"If it's easy why aren't you doing anything?" Blue asked, arching an eyebrow.
"I am doing something," Gansey answered back smartly, calm and collected on the outside and panicking on the inside. "I'm breathing aren't I?"
Blue scrunched up her nose and sneered at Gansey, before trailing a fingernail across his collarbone. Light at first, then sharp.
"If I could kiss you" Blue said, in a very un-Blue way, which made Gansey snap back into realising that he was very much dreaming.
"I would kiss down here" she said, nail digging into his skin in a surprisingly delicious way. She trailed her finger down his chest, past his rib cage and onto the washboard flat of his stomach.
Gansey remembered how dream Ronan had written on a rock that real Ronan had seen in real life, and wondered, vaguely, if maybe this was happening right now. Somewhere, in a pit stop off the henrietta highway in the rain while thunder boomed outside Blue sat on his lap and told him where she wanted to kiss him.
"But I can't" Blue sighed, flopping her arms by her sides.
Gansey didn't know what to say. He wanted to kiss Blue ever so badly, but he also wanted to touch her, as well as do something about the tight, hot feeling in his stomach that wouldn't go away.
The rain pummelled away at the roof, making Gansey worry about possible rust or leaking or maybe even it caving in somewhere. He realised he had Blue sitting on his lap and he was worried about his car.
Gansey put his hands carefully on her waist. He leaned forward and pressed his cheek to the flat of her chest, and sighed.
Blue took his chin and looked down at him with big eyes, dark enough to be black coffee, to be the night sky, to be... oh, Gansey wished he didn't think about things like this all the time. Something that didn't have to be complicated was always something he made complicated in his mind. Overanalysed it, obsessed over every detail. It was who he was. But he wished this one time he could just grab a boob, damn it, and not ponder it's philosophical meaning.
"Gansey I feel like this is real" she said, and he was struck by how it wasn't all over again.
"Are you here too?" He asked softly as she ran the back of her hand across his cheek, rough with as much stubble as he could grow.
"I don't know" she answered honestly. She was warm on top of him and he felt like he was as cold as the arctic, his toes freezing and bare down by the pedals.
"I wish you were" he told her. He meant it, too.
"You're shaking" Blue noticed, suddenly.
Gansey's whole body shook, his hands trembling as he bit down on his top lip. Blue looked concerned, and he shook his head, pushing his hair out of her face with a shaky hand.
"I..." Gansey began. He was good with words, just not now. He looked up into Blue's galaxy eyes and swallowed.
"I just think I love you, Blue"
Blue opened her mouth and Ronan's voice came out.
"Well that's fucking sweet"
Gansey's eyes opened, and he was greeted by Ronan.
Ronan had the special talent of looking amused and unamused at the same time, his arms crossed over his intimidatingly muscular chest.
Gansey lay in his bed, covers strewn around him and his shirt laying next to him on the floor. Rain lashed against the windows, harsh and demanding, as if it was trying to get him. Gansey was shaking.
"What happened?"
"You were fucking murmuring and shit. I got up to pee and heard you mumbling so I came over to check up on your sorry ass" Ronan explained.
"Oh. Well, I apologise profusely. You can go back to sleep now" Gansey said, shaking his head and reaching for his glasses.
"Night, man" Ronan sighed, striding back to his room and slamming the door shut to prove some kind of point to the universe. Gansey wished he knew what the point was, but then his phone rang.
He dove for it, rolling off his bed and falling on a stack of papers.
"Blue?" He whispered, rubbing his back.
"Gansey?" Blue's voice sounded on the other end of the line breathlessly.
"I just...I...I was thinking of you" Gansey told her, his brain replaying the precious dream. Blue on top of him, the proximity of their skin, how he'd told her he loved her.
"I just wanted to say," Blue said "that I think I love you too."