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Noah knew about Gansey.
He knew a lot of things people didn’t give him credit for. He knew what Ronan wanted when he looked at Adam, what Blue thought she’d never get from Gansey, and why Adam tried so hard not to need anything from anyone who was paying attention. He knew why Ronan barricaded his door at night long before anyone else did. He knew the reason Blue fed him like a power surge, and he knew, deep inside him, in a way that he couldn’t form into words, that Gansey was going to die.
~~~
He’d heard his grandma say the phrase “it feels like someone’s walking over my grave” when he was alive, and he always thought it sounded strange. Now, though, he knew. He couldn’t rest for a moment without feeling the ley line run through every inch of him. Every step taken on the corpse road was a footprint on his spine. It would hurt, if he had nerve endings enough to feel it.
He’d felt Gansey’s steps on it at the same moment Blue was seeing him in the graveyard that St. Mark’s Eve. He had been standing in the kitchen, and Gansey, the flesh and blood and still alive version, had been offering him a slice of pizza.
“Noah, are you hungry?” he’d said, offering the box up to him, his face calm and open, just a boy offering dinner to his friend.
Noah hadn’t said anything, because the graveyard was pulling at him, and there was a Gansey there, too: wet and tired and sad and not corporeal. Noah had felt for him. He knew what that was like. He’d seen a girl, too, and his pulse had jumped. Blue, he’d thought, and he tucked her name like a secret into a pocket in his heart. Soon.
Back in Monmouth Manufacturing, Gansey had been waiting for Noah to answer, not remembering that Noah’s answer was always no when it came to food. Gansey’s mouth had been turned worriedly down at a corner, his collar straight and his hair falling soft near his eye. He was clean and beautiful and not wet or dying, not at all. Noah felt sick in the place where he remembered his stomach being, and then he fell into the deep, yawning void that stretched out underneath him. He flickered out of the room, out of his body, and became a jagged line of nothingness and energy, cluttering the ground under an angry forest.
Noah knew, also, that this was not the first time he’d felt Gansey’s spirit, in life or in death.
He remembered the first time, when he felt his personhood ending, draining out of him and into the dirt. He had not thought that bleeding to death would feel like a million tiny stings.
In the kitchen, Gansey had looked around, and then shrugged. “He must’ve already eaten,” he’d said, shutting the pizza box and stowing it back in the fridge, which he closed with a graceful nudge of his hip.
~~~
Now it was different. Now, Gansey knew about Noah, which was comforting in some ways, but in others it made it harder. He could see the guilt in Gansey’s face every time they were alone together. Gansey had so much guilt. About being somehow both too much and not enough for Adam, about what he wanted from Blue, about not being able to fix things for Ronan. And, Noah could tell, about him.
After Noah spilled his secret to Gansey all over the forest floor, Noah had thought it might be easier. But instead, Noah could see the agony and the shame written in the bright smile painted on Gansey’s face, in the tiny lines between his dark-lashed hazel eyes. And, more than that, Noah could feel it, in the place where he could still feel the wooden thud of a skateboard, and the sharp sting of a bee, under his eye. Gansey was thinking it should have been me.
Noah did not like being dead. He hated the vile, squirming pull at his body and his mind every time he felt himself shifting out of concrete space. He hated the fact that only four people in the whole world could see him, and even then only sometimes. But he preferred the company he kept now to how it had been when he was alive. Whelk had looked at him like he was useful, and that had been enough for him, then. He’d ached to be useful, to be anything to Whelk. It hadn’t been enough. Remembering that made his cheek hurt.
When they were alone, Gansey always looked at Noah like he cared about him, like was curious, and like he was sorry. Noah believed him. Noah didn’t care to know why he was like he was, but he was flattered that Gansey tried to understand it. That was better than Whelk, by the longest shot.
And Gansey had promised him one night, his face close and his eyes on fire, that he would ask Glendower for his life back. Noah knew it wouldn’t work, and he knew Gansey wasn’t sure it would, either. But they believed in it anyway, together. The fact that Gansey would try, for him, was more than enough.
~~~
When Noah flickered into Monmouth in the middle of the night, Gansey was awake. He was in his silk pajamas and slippers on all fours, gluing a chopstick lightpost into its rightful place on the streets of cardboard Henrietta. He didn’t even jump when Noah started existing, all of a sudden, right next to him. Noah was glad.
“Evening, Noah,” he said, and kept working.
Noah watched him, calm. The precision and care he put into this, into everything, was soothing. Gansey was deliberate and good. Noah was happy that he was alive.
Eventually Gansey ran out of chopsticks, and he pulled himself up to standing. He winced and reached down to rub at where his knees must have been sore from being ground into the old wood floor for so long.
“God, that floor is not made for kneeling on.”
Noah giggled, thinking about the joke Ronan would’ve made if he’d heard that. Gansey smiled at him, confused.
Noah shook his head, dismissing his unspoken question. “I think it’s comfy enough,” he said, but he stood up, too.
Gansey’s face got serious, suddenly, and his spine got straight. “Noah, I’ve been meaning to say something to you.” He knew how to deliver a speech, Noah thought.
Noah stayed slouched, pulled in on himself. He knew how to listen.
Gansey took a shaky breath. The line of his eyebrows was straight. Noah knew what Gansey was thinking, and he knew he didn’t need to hear it, but he thought Gansey still might want to say it, so he tried to keep still. Gansey stepped closer to him.
“I wanted to apologize. I didn’t know I was taking your life. I don’t know how to say it, Noah. I can’t begin to--
“You didn’t take anything, Gansey,” Noah said simply, shrugging his shoulders. “Whelk did.”
Gansey looked at Noah, the thing Adam called his “Gansey mask” long gone from his face.
Noah flickered himself closer to him, only a few inches from his face. Gansey didn’t flinch.
“And Cabeswater just…recycled it. Gave it to you.”
He could see the pulse jump in Gansey’s neck. He ran his fingertips along where the vein pulsed under his perfect skin. Gansey’s eyes fluttered shut.
Noah knew things. He knew that when Gansey’s breath caught like that, when his mouth opened just the slightest amount like it just did, that Gansey wanted to kiss him. And Noah knew plenty about himself, too, so he closed the distance between them. The time for words was over.
The kiss was soft, and it stayed that way, even as it shifted to be deep and open-mouthed, too. Gansey lifted his hand up to cup the back of Noah’s head. It was nice, he thought, being held. He’d never been on that side of a kiss, not really. He wrapped his arms around Gansey, who only shuddered a little at the cold touch of Noah’s fingers along the base of his spine.
Noah felt a tear trickle down Gansey’s cheek and onto his own, and he pulled back for a moment to kiss it off of him. He wondered, absently, if he would ever kiss anyone again without them crying. He pictured kissing Adam, his forehead furrowed but his eyes calm, his teeth sharp against Noah’s lips. Noah filed that idea away for later consideration.
Kissing Gansey didn’t make him feel more real, like kissing Blue had. But it felt good, because while he could only barely feel the wet pressure of Gansey’s lips on his, he could feel every goddamn inch of the feeling behind it. Gansey was shaking with love, and sorrow, and fear. Noah swallowed all of that down into him, and it filled him up. He ran his tongue against Gansey’s lip and Gansey shuddered into him.
Noah remembered what it was like when he felt himself drain out of his body. He remembered the dimming light, and the surprising warmth of his own blood, and the deep, solid thrumming of the heart of the forest connecting him to another boy, whose own life was leaking out of him too. And all around them, the sound of buzzing.
Noah didn’t know where the apology began and the absolution ended, but he knew that Gansey’s hands on his skin were almost warm as he sat down on his bed and pulled Noah into his lap. They made soft sounds into each other’s mouths until Gansey had to pull back to breathe. Noah forgot about that part.
When Gansey opened his eyes, they were wet, but brighter than before. Noah kissed him on the nose, and Gansey smiled, his chest rising and falling as he caught his breath. It was good.
Gansey stared at him, and Noah could see the wonder reflected in his face. Noah liked being a wonder. They laughed.
Gansey nudged Noah down until he was lying on his back, and then pulled his sheets up around them both. Noah never slept, but they both knew that. It would be nice, though, to hold on to physicality until Gansey drifted off.
They lay there, wrapped up in each other, until the quiet sounds of Gansey's breathing evened out. His arm was a solid weight against Noah’s side, and his leg was hooked around Noah’s thigh. Noah could have extricated himself if he wanted, but he’d spent seven years attached to nothingness, and this, fleeting as it was, was something so much better.
So with the boyish warmth of Gansey’s limbs sprawled on top of him, and the soft, minty metronome of Gansey’s breathing on his smudgy cheek, Noah Czerny settled his flickering body into the mattress and pulled Gansey’s blanket up around his chin. There were, he knew very well, many worse ways to spend a night.