Chapter Text
Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.
- Tara French, Broken Harbor
The first time Noah and Whelk kissed was in the oak grove by the abandoned church.
The two of them were friendly at Aglionby, of course; they had shared classes and a dorm room for years. Teachers gave them messages for one another; other boys assumed that if they invited Whelk to a party, Czerny would come, too, and vice versa. When Noah’s mother called, she always asked ‘And how is Barrington?’, and Whelk’s mother would do the same. But that closeness was functional, institutional, in a way that maintained a distance between them. It wasn’t that they were spied on by any particular person, but even in their dorm room at night, both felt, in some nonspecific but powerful way, watched.
It wasn’t like that when they went out looking for the ley line. The outskirts of Henrietta—all snaking two lane roads and fields and looming mountains—felt like their own private country, unimaginably distant from school and family. Noah, in particular, relished their shared isolation. Before Aglionby, his outings were all crowded affairs, supervised by teachers or coaches, or else his parents and relatives. He was the oldest of the children, and thus in high demand amongst the small cousins and his younger sisters. Not that he minded, but all the same, being with just Whelk, out in the open, was new. The lack of supervision was exhilarating and latently erotic.
That morning, Whelk had laughed at him when he tucked a giant, folded picnic blanket in the back of his Mustang, along with the dousing rods and the maps, but he wasn’t laughing now. The two of them were sprawled on that blanket, on the incline of a gentle hill, faces turned up towards the sky. It was a Tuesday, but neither of them remembered that. Classes didn’t start back up for another two weeks. Soon, their lives would be complicated by Trigonometry and tutors and club activities, but for now, there was nothing but sun on their skin, an array of just-emptied fast food cartons, and the scattered cans from a six pack of beer that they had almost finished. It was simple, but together, they felt as hedonistic as emperors.
The rest of their equipment was still in the car, but they weren’t in a hurry. The ley line wasn’t going anywhere. Noah felt warm and full, his limbs heavy and a pleasant haziness buzzing away in his head. He was just thinking he might go to sleep, when a leaf landed on his face. He assumed it had fallen from a tree, until it was followed by a second, and a third and fourth, these ones unquestionably thrown. Noah, too comfortable to remove his hands from behind his head, just tilted his face to the side and let the leaves fall.
“God, you are lazy.”
Noah smiled, “I’m not lazy, I’m chill.”
“Lazy,” Whelk repeated, as if they meant the same thing to him. He’d always been the more assertive of the two of them. The leader. Noah knew that, and he was okay with it. Whelk might have gotten him into some trouble now and then, but he got him into a lot of fun, too. The truth was, he liked being egged on. It was nice to have a friend who ignored his placid nature and, occasionally, made him wild.
He didn’t know it yet, but this was going to be another of those moments.
“Too lazy to make a move.”
At first, Noah thought Whelk must be talking about the ley line, but then the red glow of the sun coming through his closed eyelids was cut off. He opened his eyes and Whelk was looming over him, on hands and knees, a thin, meanish grin on his face. Noah stared at him as if he didn’t understand, but his throat had gone tight. Shit.
“I mean, come on, how long have you been pining for me, Czerny? A fucking year?” There was a looseness in the way Whelk spoke that gave away how drunk he was. He’d had most of the beer. “Grow a pair already and do something about it.”
Whelk wasn’t wrong, of course. Noah had been, as he put it, ‘pining’ for quite some time. But he’d resigned himself to it. As far as he was concerned, being friends with Whelk was enough. It wasn’t any particular torment, hiding the part of himself that was attracted to his roommate. He was used to it. Saying anything about it, much less doing anything about it, was not his style. Too many variables, too much potential embarrassment. It would go the way of all his crushes, unspoken, unacknowledged, eventually forgotten.
His face felt hot from beer and sun and awkwardness. Whelk wasn’t moving away. He was goading Noah to either deny it, or kiss him. It would be so simple to just kiss him. But was this a prank? Did Whelk really mean it? Noah’s eyes flicked down to Whelk’s lips, back to his eyes. Was this a test? Some ploy to get ammunition against Noah? Or did he really— could he possibly— ?
“Jesus Christ, you’re hopeless,” Whelk scoffed, and a second later he was kissing Noah, practiced and a touch aggressive. He smelled overwhelmingly of beer. After a few seconds of unmoving surprise, Noah kissed him back. He traced his fingertips through the very fine hairs on the back of Whelk’s neck. It sent a shudder through him, which was very gratifying to Noah, who grinned against Whelk’s mouth.
“Fuck you,” Whelk muttered, and then, low, “do it again.”
Neither of them said another word all afternoon, and they didn’t get around to looking for ley lines, either.
Later, Noah wished it had been somewhere else. Someone else. It would have been nice, to have his first kiss be a bright, idyllic memory, untethered to anything that had happened before or after. It ought to be something he could turn to in the middle of the night, when everyone around him slept, and there was nothing left for him but the past. But when he thought of that kiss, the memory was like a reel of double-exposed film. On one exposure was the scratch of the picnic blanket on his bare back, the roar of the cicadas and the smell of the hot grass, Whelk’s nose bumping his too hard, their little gasps of self-deprecating laughter. But the second exposure was a coldish spring night in that same grove, where kneeling, he tried with broken fingers to block his face, as Whelk stood over him, skateboard gripped in both hands, silently, methodically beating him to death.
“What are you doing?” Gansey asked, leaning with elaborate casualness against the refrigerator. It was what Ronan liked to think of as his ‘dad voice’. Ronan, perched on the edge of the tub, was dabbing antiseptic onto a cluster of long but shallow gashes on his upper arm. They were clearly fingernail marks. There wasn’t much blood, but there was some.
Since it was pretty damn obvious what he was doing, Ronan didn’t bother to respond. He knew that that wasn’t the question Gansey really wanted to ask. Without even looking at him, Ronan was sure Gansey thought he’d scratched himself, and not by accident, and now he was gearing himself up to Say Something. He’d never known Gansey to have a hard time talking about anything, but Gansey had a hard time talking about this. It pissed Ronan off that he wouldn’t just let it go. It wasn’t the idea of being thought suicidal: if that had bothered him, he’d have done something about it by now. It was the fact that Gansey didn’t trust him. Even if Gansey didn’t know the real reason Ronan had had to go to the hospital six months ago, Ronan had given him his word it wouldn’t happen again. That ought to be enough. Did Gansey really think he was a liar, like Declan?
The silence was heavy as lead. Ronan looked up, readying a sarcastic comment about finding Gansey staring at a hornet the other day. Which one of us is supposed to be suicidal, again? But as soon as he saw Gansey’s face, the words vanished. Gansey looked tired. He’d always been an insomniac, just like Ronan, but since he’d found Noah’s bones with Blue, Gansey had barely slept at all. Ronan wondered if Gansey had ever seen a dead body before. He remembered what it had been like, right after finding his father. Probably, he should be the one trying to offer support.
But Ronan had already tried to convince Gansey that drinking hard liquor until you passed out was an effective sleep aid, and a lot more fun than it sounded, and Gansey had glared at him. What else was he going to say?
“It wasn’t me,” Ronan said, pre-empting the entire conversation, bored with it already. He unrolled a bandage and started wrapping it around his arm, hissing softly in pain.
“What?”
“I woke up like this.” His Beyoncé reference was lost on Gansey, which shouldn’t have surprised him. It was Gansey, after all. With a small shake of his head, he added, “I’m pretty sure it was Noah.”
Gansey stood up straighter at once. They hadn’t had seen or heard sign of Noah since the night before, when he’d sent a stack of Gansey’s notes and books hurtling to the floor.
“Are you sure?” It wasn’t really a question. Gansey was reaching for straws, and Ronan knew why. It was hard to reconcile the shy, docile Noah they’d known all this time with the bright beads of blood standing out against Ronan’s skin.
Ronan’s mouth was tight. He’d woken up before with injuries that were a gift from his own nightmares, but this was different. The pain had jolted him out of a—for once—dreamless sleep.
“I’m sure.” Then, after a pause, “Can’t really blame him.”
Gansey raised one eyebrow in surprise. Ronan could generally blame anyone. It was one of his specialities.
Ronan taped down the end of the bandage, his jaw tight. “I’m glad he’s angry. Anger’s what—” But he stopped, because he’d been about to say anger’s what keeps you alive. They were both still getting used to this. “You weren’t there. You should have fucking heard him, Gansey. He kept making excuses for him.” Ronan put on an affected voice, whimpery and pathetic, an unkind mimicry of Noah, “You don’t get it, he was my BFF, he probably wouldn’t have murdered me except he was having a really really bad day, plus he didn’t really mean to do it, so let’s just forgive and forget, guys!”
The cruelty of the impression didn’t faze Gansey; he knew what it sounded like when Ronan was lashing out, trying to mask his pain.
“Three years,” Ronan said, quiet and bitter, “we’ve been in his classes, listening to him talk about declension, and we didn’t have a clue.” He couldn’t stop picturing it. The woods at night, Noah on his knees, pleading. Whelk, in shadow, except for his moving arms. Without meaning to, Ronan slipped, imagined the weapon as a tire iron.
Ronan let his face rest in his hands, just for a moment. He felt brittle. “I don’t know, Gansey. Sometimes, it feels like the whole fucking world is one big nightmare.”
Gansey didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t like the knotted tension in Ronan’s shoulders, or the blood that had gotten on his fingers. He didn’t like this whole mess.
“We’re going to stop him,” Gansey’s voice was firm, more confident than he really felt, “And then we’re going to get Noah back to normal.” Ronan glanced at him, then shook his head in incredulity. No doubt he’d stopped thinking about the rottenness of the world and started thinking about what a naïve idiot Gansey was, which was exactly what Gansey had wanted.
The last thing Noah’s father ever said to him was that people who dwelt in the past often missed their opportunity to have a future.
Mr. Czerny was all about seizing opportunity. Just look at my life, he would tell his son, over and over. During that final call, Noah had known he was about to launch into a slew of examples, so he cut him off, lying that he had another call before hanging up. He had memorized all the inspiring anecdotes a long time ago and didn’t need to hear them again.
If he’d known it would be their last phone call, he would have listened for hours.
The upward trajectory of Noah’s family had never really interested him. He’d been faintly embarrassed by it, while he was alive. The Czernys might live in a big house, with bricks and columns and symmetrical lines, but the devil was in the details. They weren’t comfortable in their money yet, hadn’t had it early enough in their lives for it to sink into their speech, their limbs. Not like the Whelks, or the Ganseys. This came out in all sorts of little ways: his mother’s anxious obsession over appearances and small habits, his father’s restlessness and frequent lectures about potential.
(Later, there were times when Adam reminded Noah of his father so much. His father’s accent was a different accent, his father’s fears were different fears, but their agitation was just the same. Ambition? Noah had never been much good at telling the difference between the two. Whatever its name, he saw it in them. Now and then, Adam would get a look in his eyes, and Noah could tell he was staring straight into the future: not with clairvoyance, but hunger. Noah had learned that look on his father’s face, first.
Noah considered telling Adam sometimes, when he would hear Adam’s thoughts, tortuous with self-doubt and discouragement. He still remembered a lot of those inspiring anecdotes. But fathers weren’t a topic to be broached with Adam lightly.)
It was different for Noah and his sisters, who had been born after the move to Henrietta. They had never lived any other way. Maybe that was why whatever fire burned in Mr. Czerny, spurring him to ever greater heights, did not burn in Noah. Since a young age, Noah had been a malleable substance, settling into patterns determined by the people around him. When he was living at home, it was easy enough to mirror his father’s drive, to mimic his fire by reflecting it. Once he started Aglionby, though, things changed, and Noah’s father began to worry. Noah was becoming a man. It was time for him to decide what he wanted to make of himself. He needed to draft a battle strategy for the life ahead. After all, hadn’t that been the reason why Mr. Czerny had worked so hard? To give his children more than he’d had, so they could wade into the war of life with whole armies at their command?
Mr. Czerny spent so much of those last few months conjuring up outlines for his son’s life. Medical school or law school? He preferred medical, but Noah had always been such a tender boy, such a clumsy boy. Would he grow out of it in time to be a surgeon? Or there was business, or fame? While Noah had only had a nebulous, college-shaped idea of his life after graduation, his father had charted out multiple elaborate paths. He imagined careers, accolaides, courtships, weddings, grandsons. When Noah went missing, it seemed impossible to him. Noah’s future was a thing that already existed so many times over in his mind. It was inconceivable that Noah would not be there to live at least one of those lives.
Noah sat cross-legged at the foot of Ronan’s bed, watching him. He didn’t know if he was visible—it was hard to tell sometimes, and harder at night—but it didn’t matter. Ronan was asleep.
Noah wasn’t sure if it was creepy to sit with him like this. He worried that it might be. He was trying to get better at not being creepy. It was never something he’d had a problem with when he was alive, but, like so much else, his ability to tell the difference had slipped away from him.
At least when he did something creepy around Ronan, he got angry or made fun of him for it, as if Noah were a normal person. That felt a lot better than Adam’s fear (he’d already been scared enough in his life), or Blue’s sadness (making her happy was all Noah had ever wanted to do), or Gansey’s guilt (it wasn’t his fault, it had never been his fault). With Ronan, Noah could pretend, now and then, that he wasn’t what he was.
Which was funny, since Ronan brought up the fact that Noah was a ghost so much more often than the others. But the fact that he did made it somehow mundane. Like making fun of Blue for being short, or Gansey for being so obsessed with Glendower.
Ronan was starting to have a nightmare. Noah knew the look of it. Would it be better to wake him up now, or to leave him be? If he left him, Ronan might have time to turn the dream good again, or fight whatever horror he was faced with. But leaving him felt like standing idly by while his own brain tortured him. Noah set a hand on Ronan’s shoulder, shaking very faintly.
“Ronan. Ronan.”
It worked. Ronan’s eyes shot open, his breath coming in harsh gasps. He seemed paralyzed at first, but his eyes quickly darted to the shadowed corners of the room, looking for monsters. He looked down at his hands, saw that they were empty. He heaved a sigh of relief, feeling returning to his limbs.
Only then did he notice Noah, who had gone back to sitting at the foot of the bed. He had his arms wrapped around his legs and was watching Ronan over the tops of his knees. Ronan’s lip curled in a snarl, “What’s with the Edward Cullen shit, Noah?”
Noah could tell Ronan wasn’t actually angry. He was clearly relieved to have been awoken before the nightmare could completely engulf him. He ran a hand down his face, untangling himself from the damp sheets.
“Sorry,” Noah said chagrined. He’d been right, it was creepy, “I get bored when everyone is asleep.”
Ronan hauled himself out of the bed and started rummaging around for a fresh shirt. “Yeah, well, read a book.”
“And I don’t know who Edward Cullen is.”
Ronan looked over his shoulder to check if Noah was kidding him. When Ronan saw that he meant it, he shook his head. “I guess it did come out after you shuffled off this mortal coil. But being dead’s no excuse not to get pop culture references. Bad enough with Gansey around…” Ronan pulled off his tank top, was about to lob it at the hamper when he saw that Noah was still looking at him.
“What, you want a fucking show?” The sudden venom in the words didn’t surprise Noah. He knew Ronan’s secret, the one he still wouldn’t even tell himself. This was one area where it was not a good idea to tease. So Noah covered his eyes with his hands, waiting while Ronan changed.
“At least you didn’t claw the hell out of me this time.”
Guilt surged in Noah. He felt distantly sick. When his hands started to go translucent (it was so hard to stay opaque, when he was upset), he lowered his eyes to the ground. “I’m so sorry.” His voice sounded hollow. Neither of them had dared to talk about this – Noah had thought Ronan might let it slide without ever bringing it up.
“What was that all about, anyway?”
Ronan had a right to ask. Noah had done a lot of uncharacteristic things at that time, but Ronan was the only one that he had hurt.
Noah wanted to tell him, could tell him just enough to make his actions make sense, without telling him everything. But the thought of all that explaining was exhausting. If he started it right now, he’d probably disappear out of sheer gloom halfway. Better to not even try.
“I have no idea,” he mumbled, bleak, “I wasn’t in control right then. And now, I don’t remember. At all.”
Silence. Then, “You are a terrible liar, Noah.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever. Just don’t do it again, or I’ll kick your sorry Casper ass.” The words might have been threatening, but when Ronan peeled Noah’s semi-transparent hands from his face, his touch was very gentle.
“Deal.”
Ronan flung himself onto the bed. “It’s hotter than Satan’s taint in here!” He twisted around in an attempt to find the driest, coolest patch. Gansey had never quite managed to find a way to air condition Monmouth Manufacturing properly, and with the recent power outages, sometimes it went out altogether. Tonight was one of those nights, and the air was a muggy 80 degrees. To Gansey, this flaw made the place charming, the same way all the Pig’s breakdowns were charming. Ronan did not agree.
“Hey,” he said to Noah, “C’mere.”
At once, Noah was standing by the head of the bed, without ever having walked there. Ronan was either too tired or too hot to make fun of him anymore. He reached for Noah’s wrist, pulling him down towards the bed. Confused but obedient, Noah let him do it, laying down, giving Ronan plenty of space. But Ronan clearly didn’t want space. He pressed his chest flush with Noah’s back, draped an arm on the dip of his waist, flung his leg nonchalantly on top of Noah’s.
“There we go,” Ronan sighed, pleased with himself, and Noah understood.
“So I’m your personal A/C now?” Noah joked. He had to joke. If he had been alive, his heart would have been pounding in his chest, his stomach full of butterflies. But he didn’t have a heart or stomach anymore, so instead Ronan’s closeness made him more solid, more here.
“Hell yeah.”
Noah could feel the sweat from Ronan’s skin. To someone else, it might have been unpleasant, but it wasn’t to Noah. For a few minutes, neither of them moved much, except little adjustments to align their bodies more perfectly. Noah didn’t want to say anything that might make Ronan pull away. He understood that this wasn’t just a question of convenience. Ronan had forgiven him, even if he couldn’t bring himself to say something so cheesy. So this was his way of showing it.
Very quietly, Noah said, “I used to run hot.”
“What?” Ronan was half-asleep again. Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything.
“When I was alive. I was always too hot.”
Ronan made a soft hmm sound, pressing his face to the back of Noah’s neck. If he were more awake, if there were anyone else to see him, Ronan would not have dared this. There were some things he was clearly still coming to terms with about himself. But since they were alone, suspended in the dark and the quiet of the very early morning, it was possible to touch like this. Noah pulled Ronan’s arm against his chest, lacing their fingers together. Ronan mostly asleep, sighed in approval.
Noah listened to the rain starting to fall against the windows. At some point, he realized that Ronan was sleeping, his breaths deep and even. Noah wanted to stay like this as long as he could. He waited until he felt Ronan shiver before he got up.
Of course it couldn’t last forever, but for the first time in a long time, Noah had felt warm.