Work Text:
Gravel crunched beneath the wheels of a car as it lurched awkwardly to a halt, the engine and the music blaring tinnily from its speakers dying in unison. A moment later, the door creaked open and a girl stepped out. She was wearing a grey collared shirt with a Nino’s logo on it over equally grey pants, and had put her hair up in some sort of complicated bun contained by a claw clip. The claw clip was not up to the task; the front half of her hair had escaped and hung, slightly limp, around her face. She blew a stray strand out of the way and shut the door.
It didn’t catch, but she didn’t notice until she tried and failed to lock it—opening it again, she slammed it shut. This time, it stuck. She huffed out a laugh and, pulling her crocheted bag over her shoulder, crunched over more gravel on her way to the farmhouse at the end of the road. It was sprawling and beautiful, and had a lazy, dream-like quality to it, which was because it (and most everything in and around it) was the product of a dream.
The girl knocked, but that wasn’t important; time stretched and slipped and then she was in the kitchen, leaning heavily against the countertop and joined by a tall, sharp young man with a shaved head and ink snaking up to the back of his neck. This was important. He opened the fridge and took out a plastic container of yogurt, which he tossed to her carelessly. That was important, too.
“Dreamed?” she asked, fiddling with the cover.
“No,” said the boy. “Parrish said I needed actual groceries. Made me make a list. Busybody.”
The girl opened drawers at random in search of a spoon. “He’s right, you know. But these are good, they mix the fruit flavoring in instead of having all the chunks clump up at the bottom.” Her search was successful; she spooned some yogurt into her mouth and closed her eyes in joy.
The boy didn’t like yogurt. He had added it to the list anyway, both kinds, along with mint seedlings and orange juice and frozen pizza.
“Ronan,” said the girl, squaring her shoulders. “Have you noticed…” She trailed off.
Ronan slouched in front of the sink and waited. He was much better at slouching than waiting. “Noticed what, Sargent?”
“That there’s something missing?” He shrugged. She persisted, “I’ve been having this feeling since October.” She meant since we defeated the demon . She meant since Gansey died and came back . She meant something else, too, but she couldn’t quite hold on to what it was.
He sunk further into the counter. His stance was now better described as “lounging”, which he was also very good at. “Been stewing about it for a while, have you?” It was an otherwise nondescript weeknight in mid-June, nearly nine months since the culmination of their search for Glendower.
“I didn’t know,” she said through gritted teeth, “if it was a feeling worth bringing up.” The adventure had ended and she hadn’t been certain, those first few months, that she wasn’t just inventing a reason for it to continue.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. Ronan listened to the dry summer wind rustling the leaves on the trees outside, the clattering of hooves against loose bricks and shrieks of childish laughter, Chainsaw’s kerah! kerah! following. He loved the Barns and everything in it, a love that filled him up and permeated every word he spoke, every action he took. It was rather like her love for Cabeswater, for the trees and the world.
“I’ve felt it, too,” Ronan admitted. Blue set her yogurt down on the counter at once.
“I tried talking to Gansey,” she said animatedly. “And he—he believed me, but he didn’t agree.” He was ready to move on, had accepted it more easily than anyone had accepted. He didn’t say it, but she knew how he felt. “If he feels anything, he’s chalked it up to restlessness for next year.”
Ronan opened a window and shouted after Opal. Blue had learned to spot the signs of when Ronan was going to talk and when he wasn’t, and waited out this show of disinterest. Sure enough, after he had loudly called the waifish girl a number of rude names, he said, still facing the window, “Parrish thought maybe it was Cabeswater.”
He didn’t see it, but Blue was shaking her head. “I miss Cabeswater,” she said. “But it’s not something missing . It’s just gone.” Ronan sighed. Blue lost her temper. “Oh, come on, Ronan, you can’t get out of acknowledging it! You know this isn’t the same!”
“I know it isn’t the same,” he snapped, turning. “But I’ve got enough to do here, I haven’t got time to go hunt something else—”
“Ronan, I’m not asking for years, or months,” she interjected earnestly. “I’m asking for two days. Just help me look around for two days.” He looked at her. “I can’t let it stay missing,” she added, resolute. “Not if there’s a chance we can find it.”
Ronan shook his head and shut the window. But then he walked to the kitchen table, an old, worn thing that was perfectly stable and balanced despite one of its legs being visibly shorter than the others, and he sat down. Blue joined him.
And because she was a sensible girl, and Ronan knew it, he said, “So, what’s your plan?”
Blue’s plan was, apparently, to bundle Ronan, herself, a few bags, and Ronan’s pile of CDs into the engineless Camaro that had been her graduation present and drive east, away from Henrietta. The bags had already been in the backseat of what Ronan had mentally dubbed the Green Pig when Blue had driven to the Barns, because she was a very confident young lady. After an hour on the road, Ronan had second doubts about the sensibility of her plan. He also had second doubts about her driving. Gansey had been teaching her how to drive the (orange) Pig since last fall at least, and she had gotten her license just after she had graduated. But the way she drove was so utterly alien to the way Ronan did; she kept both hands firmly on the wheel unless she needed to change gears and drove a consistent four miles per hour above the speed limit. Sometimes the speed limit would change, and she would take the car from fifty-nine up to sixty-four, then up again to sixty-nine, then eventually back to fifty-nine.
In point of fact, she drove as she did most things: sensibly. It was only to Ronan that this registered as bizarrely overcautious.
They were driving along a long stretch of classic Virginia mountain highway. Blue hills clustered with trees rolled steadily away from them, and the road curved and meandered through farmland, a few lone mailboxes attached to houses, the occasional tiny town center, and more farmland.
Ronan had one elbow on the side of the door and was staring moodily out the window. He didn’t like leaving Opal and Chainsaw behind, even if only for a couple of days, but they would be better protected at the Barns without him, courtesy of the protections he had dreamt, than on the road with him. He’d left a note for Adam, and was reasonably certain that Blue had texted him their plans.
Blue, for her part, was trying to train the entirety of her focus on the road. This was not entirely necessary due to both a lack of other vehicles in the near vicinity and also the fact that they weren’t bound by things like “a destination” or “a GPS”. It wasn’t this uncertainty, the uncertainty of where they were going, that worried her. But she was worried, and the silence was making it worse, so she said, “Should we put on some music?” A factory 1970 Camaro did not come with a CD player, because they hadn’t been invented yet, but this was not a factory 1970 Camaro.
Ronan grunted.
Blue said testily, “You’ll have to do it, Prince of Darkness. I’m driving.”
Ronan grunted again, but reached for the pile of CDs and began to thumb through them. He selected the third case from the top and, with a sudden grin, pried the disc out and began to load it into the slot.
“That isn’t—” Blue began, suspicion coloring her voice.
“It’s not.”
And it wasn’t. The speakers produced a wavering, tremulous note, followed by electric strumming. Muted drums filtered in, then muted, shouted singing—and this was almost too many sounds for any version of the Pig to handle, but it bore nobly under the strain, and soon enough Blue was nodding her head in little movements and Ronan was tapping his fingers on his shredded jeans with his eyes closed.
It wasn’t—but somehow, the air in the car felt heavier. More intentional. Blue felt the gap and tried to grasp onto it, but it slipped away. Ronan felt the gap and ignored it, but there was a persistent ache in his chest.
The song changed. Blue said, “Oh!” and began to hum along. Ronan said, with no small amount of surprise, “What, you know it?”
“Know it? Pshaw ,” said Blue. She hummed some more. “I heard it live.”
“Shut up,” said Ronan. Blue smiled. “ Shut up . You saw Municipal Waste live?”
“A couple of people from school invited me in sophomore year. Mostly I just wanted to see Richmond, but I liked the music well enough.”
Ronan spent the next several minutes imagining Blue Sargent at a hardcore show and then surprising himself by imagining the two of them at a show together. The hardcore scene was one he was absolutely certain Gansey wouldn’t like, and reasonably certain that Adam wouldn’t either. He hadn’t expected Blue, but then, she had pretty consistently upended his expectations in the time he’d known her. Then he imagined Blue’s offense at his surprise, and laughed.
It was a New Ronan laugh, one that was bright and helium-like, expanding to fill up the interior of the car. Blue laughed a little, too, though she wasn’t totally sure at what. Maybe from the quiet delight of hearing it.
Silence of a different, lighter quality filled the Camaro. Blue kept her eyes on the road. Ronan kept his eyes on the field. Occasionally, he would spot a cow and say, “Cow.”
After seven cows, Blue complained about the unfairness of not being able to see them, on account of watching the road. Ronan remarked that he was shocked she was able to see the road, because he had forgotten to dream her a cushion to place upon the driver’s seat so that she might lift her eyes above the top of the steering wheel. This was so effective a provocation that Blue, for the first time, took a hand off the wheel not to shift gears, but to swat at Ronan, who squirmed out of the way. He described the next cow in elaborate and unhelpful detail, then aimed a shit-eating grin her way. She thanked him primly.
They had left the Barns near five in the evening; now, at nearly eight-thirty, the sun dipped low on the horizon, setting the mountains ablaze with orange light. The sky was smeared with pink and purple wisps of cloud.
Blue said quietly, “How do we know we’re on the right track? That it isn’t back in Henrietta?” Where everything else has been , she didn’t say. She risked a glance sideways and saw Ronan frowning slightly.
After a moment of silent struggle, he finally said, “It’s not in Henrietta.” She shot him a look. He amended, “It’s not just in Henrietta. We’re not moving away from it.”
Neither of them wanted to say it, but they both thought it, separately: they weren’t moving towards it, either. It was almost as though the thing, the missing piece, was packed neatly in the backseat of the Camaro with the bags. As if it was following them.
Blue gripped the steering wheel tightly enough that her knuckles turned pale, then loosened her grip with a conscious effort. The CD ended with a crash of symbols. She didn’t notice Ronan swap it out for another.
“Squash one, squash two, squash three—”
“ RONAN ,” Blue bellowed. Ronan laughed, a loud and joyous whoop.
The air became heavy and sorrowful again. Neither of them noticed.
Blue refused to keep driving for long after the extended affair of summer sunset ended. She had strong opinions about the dangers of drowsy driving, and also about potentially hitting deer. So they pulled into the parking lot of a Waffle House off the main street of a Henrietta-sized (which was to say, small) Shenandoah town.
Inside, they placed their orders and sat at a corner booth next to a window. Blue gazed worriedly at the car, sitting lonely in the parking lot, and Ronan stared unnervingly at the single employee until he ducked in the back. The light flickered, but that was normal. The air tasted stale and sticky, but it was a Waffle House. Blue was very, very cold, but it was—the middle of summer. She caught Ronan’s eye and worried at her bottom lip. Suddenly, she couldn’t think of anything other than the wrongness of it, the two of them sitting here, without Gansey, without Adam, without— what? she asked herself. Cabeswater? But they had ruled that out. She cast her mind out further. Henry? The chasm, if anything, widened. She wasn’t supposed to be able to feel the weight of absence so acutely, but it was pressing down on her chest—it was difficult to breathe—and she was so cold.
“Sargent,” said Ronan sharply, and she came back to herself. Her eyes were drawn to where his hand was clutching her wrist tightly. It retreated as he said, more flippantly, “Food’s here.” She dragged her eyes up to see the bored teen waiter, holding two plates. He set them down, went back to the counter, and returned with more.
The intensity of the feeling lessened.
“Thank you,” Blue managed to call at the waiter’s back. He didn’t respond. She stared down at the table, thinking furiously. Some part of her brain catalogued her single chocolate chip waffle and Ronan’s spread of scrambled eggs, toast, hashbrowns, sausages, and plain waffle. The other part was trying desperately to hold on to what had just happened, to slot it against every other strange feeling of something missing she’d experienced. She couldn’t get further than grasping onto the cold.
“Sargent,” Ronan repeated, more quietly, and Blue’s concentration slipped. She sighed and thunked her head down on the table; if it hadn’t worked before, it was unlikely to work now. But she had hoped. Ronan rapped the table sharply with his knuckles, which sent vibrations straight through to her ear. She lifted her head and glared tiredly at him. “Earth to Sargent,” he said, uncaring. “Don’t put your head down, this table’s disgusting.”
“Ronan,” she started, but he shook his head once and pushed the syrup dispenser in her direction. It got stuck on some sticky residue, a spill from who knew how long ago, closer to her side of the table. He left it there.
She drenched her waffle in syrup. They ate.
Later, outside, Ronan surveyed the parking lot. “Are we sleeping here?”
“There’s a motel a block down,” said Blue, and unlocked the car. On the way, Ronan learned that Blue had taken the next two days off from her various jobs. This, more than anything, cemented in his mind how serious she was about this; she hadn’t called out once the entire rest of her senior year, because she was saving up as much as she could for the traveling she was planning to do with Gansey and Cheng this fall. She had called out for this.
They checked in. Ronan paid, because Blue had paid for their Waffle House. It was a single room, because Ronan figured that Blue might be frightened (Blue was thinking the same thing about Ronan) with two beds. The beds were a decent length for a Blue-sized person, and slightly small for a Ronan-sized one, which he complained excessively about. Blue took a shower and emerged with her soft, damp hair twisted up into an old t-shirt. Ronan took her place while she stepped outside. When he emerged, she said merely, “Gansey and Adam say hi.”
“Hanging out without us,” Ronan said with an ironic lift to his mouth.
“Homewreckers,” Blue agreed, which made Ronan snort.
There was nothing for it but to attempt to sleep. Ronan Lynch, king of dreamers, drifted off right away, easily. Too easily, he would realize after he woke up, but that had not happened yet. Time did not speed forward; it marched steadily onward. Blue Sargent spent a while lying awake, listening to Ronan’s heavy breathing, staring at the inside of her eyelids. The clerk at the check-in counter had told them the AC was broken. Ronan had kicked the thin motel blanket off of himself. It was eighty-six degrees. None of these things stopped the cold from seeping in.
She didn’t remember falling asleep, and she never quite remembered waking up, either. Ronan wasn’t awake to see her twitch, to see the tips of her fingers tinge purple, to see her lurch upright and her hands fly to her face. He woke up, clutching something in his palms, when she screamed.
It was a curious scream, and Ronan was half-convinced that he’d imagined it, because she hadn’t made a sound. Or she had, but not one they could hear. What? he demanded. The whole thing had the misty logic of a dream. No, she had screamed, because he had been woken by it. What had she screamed? Two syllables—mouth rounded, then released—
He remembered suddenly that she had screamed , and tangled his feet in the sheets in his hurry to reach her. She hadn’t moved. Her shoulders were still hunched, her knees drawn up into her chest, her head buried in her hands. Ronan half-kneeled on the edge of the mattress and reached out a hand to hover above her shoulder, unsure.
“Sargent?” he asked. His stomach swooped terribly and he hated it. Hated this. He settled his hand onto her shoulder. “Sargent, are you—”
She looked up. He swore once, then again, with feeling.
Her right eye was weeping blood.
“What,” she tried, then, clearing her throat, “Ronan? What—”
“You’re fine,” Ronan said roughly, then moved jerkily off the mattress. Blue, seeing red in one eye and a swaying, doubled version of him in the other, made a hurt sound as he slammed the door open and disappeared. He had said she was fine, and Ronan didn’t lie. He left, he left, he left , chanted the part of her that was frightened and in pain. She quelled it. She was fine.
Ronan burst back into the room like a firecracker, holding a plastic cup. He swept into the bathroom and returned with a hand towel and water in the cup, which he brought to Blue. “Sargent, don’t panic,” he told her. “I’m gonna lift up your head and wipe off the blood, okay?”
So it was blood that was reddening her vision. She nodded, closed her eyes, and lifted her chin. The first cool, slightly rough touch of the towel to her skin made her startle against her will. Ronan waited until she stilled to try again, pressing it carefully against her cheekbone and swiping under her eyelid.
He worked methodically, careful to avoid scraping the shitty motel towel against where he figured the wounds from back in October had been. Something itched in his mind like a physical sensation. He redoubled his focus on cleaning Blue’s face. The cuts hadn’t reopened; the blood seemed to have come from behind her eye. A burst blood vessel, maybe.
Somehow, he doubted it.
He changed out the towel once he’d taken care of all the blood, soaking this one with warm water and doing his best impression of a routine Aurora had done whenever Declan had gotten sick, pressing it gently to Blue’s forehead, above her eyelids, the sides of her nose, her cheeks down to her chin.
She was weeping, he realized after a while, tears leaking out and then wiped away. Ronan set the towel down on the table between their beds and hugged her ferociously. She pressed her forehead against where his knobby collarbones met. He tucked his chin over her hair and stared at the wall. He didn’t pet her hair, even though it was soft and very good for petting; he didn’t even think of it. His thoughts were black—he couldn’t stop remembering her scream. There was something important about it, something he had been on the cusp of understanding…what had it been?
Her arms hesitantly snaked around his back and returned the hug. He couldn’t remember.
“For someone who gets so up in arms about stereotypes, Sargent, you seem dead-set on this one,” he said, because it was comforting to fall back onto assholery. She made a small, inquisitive sound into his shirt. “Demonic psychics?”
She pulled back, and he let her, scooting back on the mattress to give her some space. Her expression, when she looked at him, had something other than exhaustion in it. “It wasn’t just demonic, though, was it? It wasn’t just the demon.”
“Huh?” said Ronan eloquently.
“Ronan.” Blue took his hand. It was triumph, he realized, the other part to her expression. “How did I get this injury? What actually happened?”
“You…” This stumped Ronan. His mouth tried to round out the word demon , but she was right. It wasn’t just that. “I don’t remember. I can’t remember,” he corrected, because suddenly the distinction was very, very important.
“I can’t remember, either,” Blue said. She looked over to where the room’s singular window filtered weak pre-dawn light through slightly opened blinds. Then she turned to Ronan, and, for the first time, asked, “What now?”
Without pause, Ronan answered. “Henrietta.”
They were packed and ready to go in fifteen minutes. Blue made them wait for twenty more because the motel checkout technically started at six. Ronan, whose card it was on, thought privately that they could have just left the damn keys outside the door and driven away.
At six, they returned the keys to a different beleaguered clerk and got in the car. Blue insisted on driving, too. Ronan allowed this because there honestly seemed to be nothing wrong with her eye, and he suspected that occupying her mind with driving would play out better than sticking her in the passenger seat for a couple of hours.
Now with a clear destination, Blue had pulled up the GPS on her phone and set the marker to 300 Fox Way. Their previous meandering had worked in their favor, because three hours of driving had—through a combination of random exits taken and fortuitous double-backing—turned into being only an hour and a half away from Henrietta, if they followed the map. Blue followed the map.
Once they hit the highway, the sun striving upward, Blue slipped on a pair of huge, hand-bedazzled sunglasses and hit the knob to turn on the CD audio. Silence. Ronan glanced over: the display blinked DISC ERROR , then switched over to RE LOAD .
Wordlessly, he hit eject and swapped it out for another, a Niall Lynch original of dreamt Celtic folk tunes. A dreamt CD for a dreamt CD player in a dreamt car.
DISC ERROR , read the display. RE LOAD .
His mouth twisted. He checked the time and it was, reassuringly, 6:47.
Blue kept her eyes on the road, but she took a hand off the wheel to switch the mode to FM. She turned the knob through the stations, but the Camaro’s speakers only produced a sharp, squealing static. Ronan slammed the button and turned it off.
“Did you forget to dream up a working radio?” Blue asked, because she had to be sure.
Ronan shook his head. His frown deepened. Blue sped up a little, like they could escape the feeling. It followed them, as it had been.
So no music. Blue drummed her fingers on the wheel and abruptly switched tracks. “Trying to run at it head-on isn’t working. It’s like we just hit a mental wall. Like it doesn’t want to be known.” Unbeknownst to her, the energy in the car surged for the briefest of moments. “What if we look for more absences, instead? More gaps?”
“Like your eye,” said Ronan.
“Like my eye,” she agreed. “There’s got to be more.”
And slowly, over the course of that hour-and-a-half drive back home, they pieced it together. They started with the ending, with Gansey’s second death and rebirth, and traced their way back to before Blue had even joined them—all the way back to when Ronan and Gansey had first met.
There was Blue’s eye, to start with. There was the third, unused room in Monmouth manufacturing, fully furnished long before Adam’s brief stint as a resident of the apartment, to end with. And in between, a hundred moments of absence, retroactively erased. Something missing began to take on a distinctly human form.
They entered Henrietta proper. Blue pulled off onto a side street downtown, shifting the gear and turning the key in the ignition.
By this point, the Camaro was used to somber silences. Blue kept her hands on the wheel, closed her eyes, and acknowledged the curious grief she was feeling at the person-shaped hole in their lives. A newspaper cutout who had once been a person. Who they had somehow forgotten. Or, rather, been made to forget. That was what Ronan was fixated on, with a contained sort of anger, if only because he didn’t know what to direct it at. He stared balefully out the windshield at the limewashed brick of the unfortunate building they had parked in front of. His hands fiddled unconsciously in his lap.
Without opening her eyes, Blue cleared her throat and said, “I don’t think we’re done.” Ronan grunted. She turned to look at him, then caught sight of his hands—or, more importantly, what he was holding—
“Ronan, what is that?”
He glanced down and opened his fingers up, revealing it to her. It was a compass. “It’s a compass. I took it out of my dreams last night.”
They looked at it, then at each other. Blue started the car.
The compass led them back out of Henrietta, down a twisting, single-lane gravel road that ended in a wrought iron gate and a field of gravestones and flowers. It was just past ten in the morning on a Thursday—the place was deserted. Deserted, but not silent; wind rustled through the grass and birds chirped on trees that were dotted throughout the graveyard.
Blue parked the Camaro in the grass on the side of the road, and she and Ronan got out. He held the compass in front of him and pointed the way forward to Blue. They picked their way through family plots and lone graves. She had a strong feeling of déjà vu. He had a strong feeling of wanting to get the hell out. Nevertheless, they persisted. On the far side of the field, approaching the fence and the forest beyond, was a sizable cluster of graves, each marked with the same surname.
“Czerny,” Blue said aloud, expecting to find it difficult to pronounce. Instead, the name rolled easily off her tongue, as if she’d been saying it all her life. Ronan frowned over the compass, whose needle had begun spinning wildly, casting his mind back through a list of the gaps. Where had he heard it before? A raven cawed in the sky above them; a glance at Blue showed she’d heard it, too.
“Coincedence,” Blue said wryly, because it wasn’t. And then, after a moment, she said, “We were at a funeral here. Last year. Right?”
“Right,” Ronan confirmed.
“Okay.” She struggled for a moment. “Okay. So… a fresh gravestone?”
Ronan pointed at her, the way Gansey did whenever one of them had a good idea, and she laughed. Then they began to search. The Czerny plot wasn’t very big, and there hadn’t been any more recent deaths in the family than last June.
It didn’t take very long for Blue and Ronan to find your grave.
Blue read your name off the stone, and her mouth rounded, then released. No-ah. Noah . And now, finally, a name to fit this something missing . To the someone missing .
Blue touched her eye. “He did this,” she said slowly, testing the words. You were only energy, but you pushed that energy into the energy that was Blue, and she shuddered. “He was made to do it,” she corrected. “Gansey… brought him back.” And, she suspected, he had been part of what brought back Gansey.
Ronan didn’t hear her, because he was busy remembering that his Monmouth room’s window had stopped latching shut sometime within the last year for unknown reasons. He had a pretty good idea of the reason now. You nudged him, and he muttered under his breath, “You’re already dead.”
“What?” said Blue.
“What,” said Ronan, but he was half in thought. He reached out a hand, uncannily close to where you were, if you could really count as being anywhere. But you were only energy. He couldn’t touch you.
They stood there for a while, staring at your name on the gravestone. The wind picked up and the birds stopped chirping, and all around them, static rose up from the grass and prickled the hairs on their arms.
“He’s not here, is he?” Ronan’s thought had reached its conclusion.
Blue picked up the thread, waded back through memories like molasses. “We moved his bones.”
The compass point stopped abruptly, then swung around to point west.
On a strange, chilled day in October of last year, you had closed the loop, saved Gansey’s life for the last time, and quietly slid from time—
Except.
Part of you, the same cowardly part of you that had always fought against fading away, clung desperately to the ley line. As Cabeswater folded its form into remaking Gansey, you clung to them : the king, the magician, the Greywaren, the psychic’s daughter.
A year ago, the four of them had moved your bones to the ley line, and saved you twice.
You knew you couldn’t stay forever. You didn’t want to. But even the last remnant of your spirit couldn’t bear being forgotten by them.
Gansey, Adam, Ronan, Blue.
Gansey, Adam, Ronan, Blue .
Come on , you tried. But your strength was fading. You could draw on Blue, but you didn’t want to. You had scared her badly last night, when you had tried.
You had loved them for an eternity, and loved them still. All you could do was trust that they loved you, too. That they would find you. That they would remember.
Gansey, Adam, Ronan, Blue.
You settled into your bones and waited. You had been waiting for a very long time, and it wasn’t so very hard anymore.
It was a fine, slightly cloudy day towards the end of June when they reburied Noah’s bones. It only felt right for the four of them to do it together, the way they’d done it a year ago.
They met at the old church on the ley line where Blue had first seen Gansey on St. Mark’s Eve. Some things were the same. Adam operated the backhoe Gansey had rented for the occasion. Gansey transferred Noah’s bones to a duffle bag. Some things were different. Ronan shouldered the bones. Blue had connected Gansey’s phone to a bluetooth speaker and was loudly blaring the murder squash song, which none of them had known was available online before. They spoke as they worked, remembering Noah, putting together the pieces on who he had been to them.
Gansey and Adam told the other two about Raven Day and Noah’s sister. Blue remembered his clammy hands petting her hair. Ronan wished quietly that he could speak to him one last time, to shout at him or laugh with him or throw him out of another window, to see if he sunk underneath the asphalt.
Later, they drove back to the Czerny family’s plot in that remote valley graveyard, and carefully reinterred him. Afterwards, they stood around, waiting for a voice that didn’t come. For a rumpled, smudgy boy to reappear.
The wind around them was only wind. The air was warm.
After a while, Ronan said, “Let’s go back to the Barns and have a drink.”
“To Noah?” Blue asked, cheeks dimpling at the suggestion.
“To Noah,” they agreed.
You let go. You quietly, finally, slid from this time and this place.
But they kept you. Gansey, Adam, Ronan, Blue. They held the memory of you and the living thing that was your friendship. And in that way, you never died.