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Noah knew about every night Ronan refused to sleep. He could hear it, usually, and if he couldn’t then he could smell it; liquor always left a sour taste in Noah’s mouth. It tasted like death, actually. Maybe that’s why he got used to it. Sometimes, when Ronan wouldn’t sleep and Gansey wouldn’t speak (it’d happen more often than you’d think- Noah was good at not talking too) Noah would stomp up on the roof as loud as a ghost boy can, which unfortunately never really worked, so really he would just start throwing things until Ronan got mad and followed him out of a window. Best part of living in a warehouse? It’s the fire escapes. Definitely the fire escapes.
On nights where Ronan wouldn’t sleep, he would sit on the roof with Noah and talk. It didn’t happen often, because Ronan was awfully and terribly fickle, but every time it did Noah felt like smiling and blinking until his face dissolved into the sky. It made him feel a little bit more real- a little bit more corpo-real- than normal, and that felt good. Feeling good didn’t come often.
Secretly, Noah liked to think that he and Ronan were alike. He was dead on the outside, and Ronan was dead on the inside, and depending on how you look at it, that made one very whole and alive person. Was it selfish to leech realness out of someone with so little of everything to give? Probably. But to a dead person, (or as Noah imagined the dead-but-still-politically-correct-people would say, “persons who are no longer alive,”) everyday morals don’t mean much. If he was going anywhere like hell, he figured he’d be there already.
Instead he was on the roof, legs dangling off the edge like those boys in old movies who go fishing with their grandfathers and sit on the pier and learn life lessons about fair play as they reel one in together. Ronan wasn’t next to him- that would be too close, Noah decided that Ronan thought- but he was there, bare back to freezing cold concrete. It made Noah jealous.
“Do you think if I jumped I would feel something on the way down?” he asked out of the blue.
“Hell if I know,” Ronan drawled (annoyed-drawled, not sleepy-drawled), “Jump and find out.”
“Nah,” Noah mused, “Don’t wanna climb back up again,”
“Fatass,” Ronan said.
“I’m weightless, actually,” Noah answered, like Ronan didn’t know that already. Actually, Ronan probably didn’t listen for an answer, but Noah kept talking anyway because moonlight and heights always made him rambly; he couldn’t help it. “Or maybe I transcend mass. I’m not matter, I don’t think.”
“Fuck physics,” called Ronan.
“Fuck physics,” Noah agreed.
Eventually Ronan got cold and Noah got dizzy and they both ended up sitting on the roof, not touching, but not far away, either. It reminded Noah of warmness- warmth is the right word?- except that just like everything else, it wasn’t quite right. It was more the memory of a memory, which is to say that he couldn’t remember much of anything at all.
The ghost boy rolled silence around on his tongue and decided he didn’t like the flavor, which of course means he was going to talk, regardless of whether Ronan wanted to or not. “I guess the question is,” Noah began, hazy hesitance dripping from his lips like silk, “what’s it like to remember?”
Ronan’s trademark smile-scowl gleamed brighter than it ought to in the dark. “Now why would you think I’d do that?”
Silly, loopy, disbelief swirled in the dead boy’s head, and a little bit of the laughter spilled out. “Nobody forgets on purpose! That’s impossible.”
“All I do is impossible shit,” Ronan crowed with arms spread wide, “I forget whatever the fuck I want!”
The smile-scowl got bigger and louder and worse, worse, worse. It always made Noah feel icky. If he still had a stomach, maybe it’d be rolling. He couldn’t explain why- it just felt like bad news and giving up and being meaner to yourself than everyone else. Ghostliness was a disease with perks; feelings made more sense, but also no sense at all. Nonsensical was the word. But then again, ghostliness made words weird too.
“Why, though?” Noah asked, head cocked and left eye rolly-polly.
“Why not?” Ronan replied, unsurprisingly. He was in a mood.
Noah didn’t mean to sound underground as he spoke, but, well, that is where his vocal cords remained, so it wasn’t exactly his fault. “I don’t...remember things like I used to. Everything is happening now, or never happened, or happened so long ago it doesn’t matter at all. I jump around sometimes, but it’s all empty now. Like reruns, I guess. And it sucks. A lot.”
“Tough shit,” Ronan said, which was the Ronan-equivalent of “you’re being weird and you should shut up probably.”
Noah had the sneaking suspicion that most of his social skills died not long after he did.
Wooziness snuck up on him, or was it there all along? He never felt particularly steady, to be fair; it’s difficult to feel grounded when you’re not, you know, real. But this didn’t feel very good. It felt like mean jokes and betrayal and lambs led to slaughter, yucky gloopy everything was bad, bad, bad. It took him a moment to realize that he was falling apart. Flesh peeled from bones and sinews met starlight, shiny and slick with blood that hadn’t been shed in years. He rotted and revived very fast, and in between his teeth falling out and the new ones coming in he managed to slur, “Ronnnnan? I thinnnk I’mmmmm dyyyyying agggain.”
Ronan was always a little bit mean- maybe that’s why Noah felt so comfortable around him. It was familiar the way hot showers are comforting; it hurts on purpose, which makes the hurt good. Sometimes, when Ronan was angry and ill and very very desperate, he looked like someone Noah used to know, and he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. The thing that made them different was the look on Ronan’s face when Noah declared his untimely demise. When Noah died the first time, he looked up at a man with eyes full of bitterness and sadism. It hurt almost as much as dying itself. As Noah’s almost-body hit the concrete, as the ghost boy relived his death, (re-died?) for the umpteenth time, he looked up at a man whose eyes were bitter, too. But for a moment, for less than the smallest fragment of a second, there was grief.
And that, Noah remembered.