It stings, but Gansey just looks at him with a slow flutter of his eyelashes over his hazel eyes. "I know that," he says, voice softening just a little, a knot that twists in his chest of all the things he can't say to anyone. Declan's words might be petty, but it's nothing he doesn't already know, that he hasn't told himself a dozen times or more.

He can't fail Ronan, he can't get this wrong, and he isn't even entirely sure that there are right answers here at all, maybe just better and worse ones. Gansey just had to do everything he could to make sure he still had a life left, to give Ronan enough time to find something that could do what he can't.

He watches the way Declan moves, because he can't quite help it, that way his shoulders move with his hands in his coat. The gesture is so intently evocative of Ronan that it twitches a hint of a smile to his mouth, even if he shockingly manages to keep himself from saying it outloud. He's not arresting in the way that his brother is, sharp in different angles, but you can see their shadows in one another.

The truth is that Gansey doesn't want him to leave, which is a terribly reckless desire, that leads into worse ideas. But it's why Gansey doesn't find a nice smile and a question about his girlfriend and murmur polite well-wishes.

He cants his head to the side, and there's something in his eyes when he finally asks the question- "Do you have a date tonight?" Someone else could have mistaken it for the exact sort of line that he had been expecting. But it's a careful sort of flirtation, and he shifts a little, the way his head tips to the side.

This will end in fire, but he does it anyway.