"Wake up"
Gansey took a shuddering breath. He opened his eyes. His friends stared back in disbelief.
"Gansey?" Blue asked tentatively. Her hair was dripping with rain and her face was shining with tears and she was beautiful.
"That's all there is."
Blue threw herself at him then. Arms around his neck, face buried in his (or rather Henry's) sweater. The tears were flowing again, but different than before. Not the dread of something horrible happening anyway, but the relief of something wonderful barely hoped for coming true.
"Did it work? The demon?" Gansey threaded his fingers through Blue's hair and peered between Adam and Ronan and Henry in concern. "Ronan, are you?"
"I'm fine." He wiped his face with the back of his hand, but he was smiling now. "Gosh, Dad, stop worrying so much."
The tension broke and they were laughing. Blue was shaking against his side and Adam doubled over against the ground and everything was going to be alright.
This is what he remembers of after: hugging and holding and pulling each other closer. He took comfort in the touch, every salty tear and gasping breath meant they were alive, alive, alive. Next to him and Blue, Adam pulls Ronan into a tight embrace and he smiled for them.
That was what he remembers of after. Logically, he knows they went to the hospital. There were new stitches for Blue and bandaged hands for Adam and a medical exam for him that found nothing wrong at all. As if his death hadn't even happened. But Gansey knew that wasn't true. He felt different, in a way that he couldn't even explain, let alone show through a medical exam.
Adam had tried to explain, in that objective, scientific way of his, about how Cabeswater had sacrificed itself for him. A part of Gansey felt guilty for being so relieved. Yes, he had been saved, but they had still lost so much: Cabeswater, Aurora, Noah.
Gansey somehow knew, in that moment when he came back, that Noah was gone. He didn't say anything until that night at 300 Fox Way where the psychics felt it too. He let Maura break the news to them, and held Blue as she endured another round of hot, fresh tears.
He thinks faintly that he called his family, to let him know that he was okay. He knew he would have a stern lecture waiting for him before his family left town, but that night they were relieved to know he was alive and unharmed, and he was relieved that he didn't have to lie to them just yet.
He was exhausted. He knew that tomorrow there would be things to explain and messes to clean up and cars to retrieve from who-knows-where on the side of the road. There would be mourning and remembering. But for tonight it was just this. Just them, sprawled out across 300 Fox Way and each other. Surrounded by his found family, he felt quiet.