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Depending on when you end this story, it is all about Noah Czerny.
—
He is not forgotten all at once. He slips from time, but time is finicky like that—it exists in a different way for everyone. Noah is there, and then he is gone, and even a ghost leaves an echo.
They visit his grave. Only once; right after, when they are high on joy and achievement and life as a whole. It is a horrible contradiction—feeling so alive while the makeshift grave they have made for Noah is withering back into the ground. Cabeswater is gone, and with it, parts of all of them are decaying—Noah most of all.
Blue kisses the top of the little grave they have created, made of only sticks and stones. It is less than Noah deserves; it is more than he ever got until that day they found his bones in the forest. Adam sits down there, on this little patch of grass that is the closest to a goodbye they can ever get. Ronan clenches his fist, and when he closes his eyes, he can remember the feeling of condensation on his finger as he writes remembered. He scratches it here, too, into the dirt; a final offering that Noah will never be able to see.
Henry does not know Noah in the same way they all do, but he is here, his arm wrapped around Gansey’s shoulders. He feels as if he is intruding, but he stays anyway, quiet for once.
Gansey is the last to walk to the grave. He rests his hand on it. “Hello again, old friend,” he whispers. It is such a Gansey phrase to say that Noah probably would have laughed. Instead, they are silent. Everything is silent. Here, without Noah to fill the gaps between them, Gansey wonders how the world could ever be loud again.
“I miss him,” Blue says. She does not cry easily, and even now, her face is clean from tears. “I know he’s been dead the whole time. I know. But…”
She doesn’t need to explain.
They know. They all know.
“He’s gone,” Adam says. Noah’s bones are beneath them and he has been dead seven years but this grief still feels visceral between them all.
“He’s gone,” Gansey says.
Ronan is silent. The carved remembered on the ground is louder than anything he could ever say.
This is the first and last time they will visit him.
–
Adam is the first one to forget. Without Cabeswater—without the magic swirling within his veins—he is only human. Noah fades from his memory like water drains from a sink. It is not all at once. It is slow, until he cannot remember Noah’s hair, or his face, or the way he had watched Ronan and Adam fight until there was nothing to fight about. He remembers until he doesn’t, and then he forgets there was something to remember in the first place. Ronan looks at him, sometimes, when he starts to speak and then trails off. At first, he can feel that there is something empty that should not be; something forgotten that should have always been remembered. But he is frail, and he is human, and he forgets.
Sometimes, when he thinks about his father late at night, he thinks about a boy too. The boy is pale and shivering, but he smiles in a way that reminds Adam of the home he didn’t have. Here, late at night, they are the two secret-keepers of the world.
(“It’s not my job to tell other people’s secrets,” the boy had said, and they had understood each other in a way that not many people ever would understand Adam in his entirety.)
Adam will forget him come morning, as he always does. Even magic cannot stop that. Still, time leaves its impact on all of them, in some way or another, and Adam will forever be keeping the secret of the boy who died before he ever got a chance to live.
—
Gansey is next. In his determination, he finds every photo of Noah that he can and pins them up next to Glendower. The photos are different in a way that hurts. In them, Noah is bright and happy and smiling, all tan skin and freckles. He has no blemish on his face. He is alive in a way Gansey never got to see; in a way he will never know. Noah was alive and then he was something in between and Gansey will not forget the boy that sacrificed everything for him. Surely, the world is not that cruel. Instead, he says Noah’s name over and over like a prayer; hears his last words like they are some sort of twisted salvation.
“You will live because of Glendower,” Noah had said, but that’s a lie. Gansey lived because of Noah.
He forgets anyway.
The pictures are old, and he figures it was a lead that didn’t pan anywhere, so he tears them down. Something deep within him tells him to keep them, so he throws them into a box to be forgotten about.
Sometimes, just before he goes to sleep, he can hear a voice murmur to him.
It says: “Goodbye. Don’t throw it away.”
—
Blue’s forgetting is more gradual than anyone else’s. One day, Noah was there, and then he was not. In the same way: one day Noah was alive, and then there was a skateboard raised and a friendship broken into glass pieces, and he was nothing more than a body spilt in hope of a solution.
(Sometimes, Blue worries that Noah was always going to be their sacrifice.)
Gansey gives her a photo of Noah one day. She doesn’t ask why, but she sees the indifference in his eyes and she is terrified. In the photograph, Noah’s blue eyes are deep and all-consuming—nothing like the pale icy blue that they had been before he left. Blue wishes she could have gotten a chance to drown in them.
Blue forgets like she forgets everything. One day she passes over Noah’s room and expects to see him there; the next, she wonders why Gansey and Ronan never had a third roommate. She is thinking of how they could have worked, and then she is losing her train of thought. She is kissing Gansey, and she thinks of Noah’s cold lips, and then she thinks of nothing at all.
Like the apparition he was, Noah faded into the background, becoming less and less in her until it was as if he was never here in the first place.
(“I’d ask you out,” he had murmured, wrapping his cold arms around her. “If I was alive.”
“I’d say okay,” she had whispered back. It is a confession too dark to hold, and Blue wants with all of her to remember him. She would have said okay. Most of all, she wishes she had met the Noah she never got a chance to.)
On the day she finally forgets, she thinks of a brush of lips on her temple and something like wind against her back. When she thinks of childhood crushes, she will always remember a boy with moonlit hair and dying eyes, and she will never be able to place him.
She will love him all the same.
—
Ronan is the last to remember, and the last to forget.
The memories fade like the condensation on his hand all those months ago. For a horrible week, he forgets Noah is dead, and tries to call him. There is no voicemail when he does so. Eventually, he stops.
Sometimes, he remembers so much he thinks it is killing him. Noah is in front of him, and he is not alive but he is there and he is remembered and that is enough.
(“I want you to know,” Noah had whispered, “I was…more…when I was alive.”)
Ronan knows grief better than anything else. He is grieving for the boy he was and the life he should have lived, and he is grieving for his mother, and he is grieving for what he could have been if not a dreamer. Most of all, he is grieving for the ghost of someone, and that is somehow the most horrible of all.
Everyone else forgets, and he is left. The final one to remember. He remembers crossing Noah’s murdered from the old car windshield; remembers replacing it with remembered.
Ronan Lynch does not lie, but this time, he doesn’t think he has a choice.
He forgets.
Ronan is a dreamer. That is what he does best. And so he dreams of a boy he never met in full, and he dreams of a boy who was his best friend, and he dreams of a boy he promised to remember. He dreams, and it is not remembering, but maybe it is good enough.
(“I can’t remember when I stopped being alive,” Noah had whispered, and god, Ronan wishes he could have done the remembering for the both of them.)
He has forgotten, but somehow, even now, he is still grieving.