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“I don’t think this is really doing anything for me,” Noah says, making a face down at the bottle in his hand.
Ronan snorts. “You’ve had half a beer,” he says, draining the last of his third. “Keep going, I guarantee it’ll do something.” He tries not to wonder about where the beer is actually going, gets a mental flash of beer leaking into soil from a duffel bag propped up like a tent around a scaffold of pilfered bones, and then really tries not to wonder. In a civilised world, the buzz should always come before the headache.
Sitting on the bed next to him, Noah doesn’t exactly look enthused, but he takes another sip anyway, then busies himself peeling the label off the bottle. Ronan watches as he holds it out to Chainsaw, wiggling it between his fingers until she hops over. Noah smiles as she plays tug of war for the curling paper, then practically beams when she wins and settles into shredding the thing into tiny pieces and scattering them across the end of the bed.
“Nice. You’re picking that up,” Ronan tells him, but without real heat, reaching over to unstick a scrap of label from Chainsaw’s beak.
“She likes me,” Noah says, smug and delighted, settling back against the headboard.
“She likes ripping shit up,” Ronan tells him, ignoring Noah’s mumble that sounds a lot like I wonder why that is.
“You have church tomorrow,” Noah says after a minute, making Ronan eye him.
“You’re not consistent enough to be my day planner,” he says.
“You’re not consistent enough to need a day planner,” Noah returns. Then he asks, “Can I come with you to church?” in the out-of-nowhere way people always ask questions they’ve been waiting a good while and worked through whole other conversations to ask.
He turns to Noah with an eyebrow already raised. “Not happy with your afterlife service provider?”
Noah gives him a pinched look. “Is that a no?”
“It’s a ‘why the fuck would you even want to?’,” Ronan says.
“I just want to go,” Noah says, which has a strong scent of bullshit to it, but whatever. People go to church for a lot of reasons. Ronan’s reasons might not bear a lot of scrutiny if he was ever drunk or idiotic enough to try and explain them to anyone. Maybe Noah just wants to demand some answers. It’s not like Ronan could blame him.
“Fine,” he sighs, taking a swallow of beer. “On your best behaviour though, Casper. It’s not the right crowd for your kind of party tricks.”
Noah makes a cross my heart gesture with a finger on his chest, the validity of which Ronan questions since Noah isn’t lugging around any actual internal organs, but he looks painfully earnest in a way that reminds Ronan too much of Matthew to call him on it.
“Is Gansey coming back tonight?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Ronan says. He doesn’t so much put the bottle in his hand down as he does send the base of it to the floor by the bed like a gavel. Chainsaw squawks indignantly at him. “He went to see Parrish, so I guess it depends on who out-stubborns who first, and then how angry they get with each other about it.” He scoffs. “And then which one goes moping to not-psychic girl about it. The usual weekly bout. Place your bets.”
There’s a quiet moment as Ronan drinks and Noah tries to interest Chainsaw in a silvery button that either came off Ronan’s jeans or out of a dream, he can’t remember right now.
“You know, you could always just talk to him,” Noah says, poking the button towards an unimpressed Chainsaw with a fingertip. She jumps away and starts nipping at Ronan’s sock. “Sometimes that helps.”
On the impressive list of nonsense he’s heard from Noah, Ronan thinks he has to rank that right up near the top. His heart leans over and viciously kicks his stomach in an unprotected spot. Chainsaw goes still and eyes him, head cocked. He mirrors the angle until he starts feeling dizzy.
“Gansey and I talk every day,” he says into the mouth of his beer before taking another swallow, the last foamy dregs crawling vine-like along the glass as he watches, cross-eyed.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” Noah huffs, like he’s disappointed. Why he might have expected anything else, Ronan has no idea. Optimist seems like a poor career choice for a corpse. Entropy and all that.
“Noah,” he says pleasantly, looking at him with a smile that involves a lot of teeth and not a lot of anything else, “I don’t have the slightest fucking clue what you mean.” His insides writhe and constrict around themselves. His fingers creak against the empty beer bottle, and the urge to throw it at the far wall just to watch it explode, just to hear the ringing sound of it shattering is like a fiery itch in his fingers. He grinds the base of his skull into the headboard instead. The flung-apart cry of the glass would sound too much like an admission.
“You don’t need to keep doing that,” Noah says, too gently.
“I just happen to like beer, but thanks,” Ronan says, pulling the cap off the nearest fresh bottle, letting the empty one drop to the floor with a dull thump and a clink as it joins the others.
Noah sighs heavily – and very convincingly, Ronan thinks. Verisimilitude is important when you’re playing the role of something living. “That’s not what I meant either.”
“Clarity seems to be a real problem for you today, man,” Ronan says as he lifts the bottle to his lips. “Maybe you’re getting interference from some power lines or something.”
Noah puts his hand on Ronan’s before he can take a drink. Cold seeps along Ronan’s forearm as Noah tugs his hand down towards his lap. Chainsaw takes her eyes off her food and makes a disquieted kind of noise from across the room. Noah waits for Ronan to look at him before he says, “You deserve more than that.”
Ronan doesn’t have to reach very far for the cruel expression. The smirk hangs across his face like a hatchet. “I’m getting a lecture on who deserves what from a murder victim?”
Half of Noah’s mouth quirks up sadly. The cold is creeping past Ronan’s elbow now, and his fingers are going numb, like he’s shoved his arm through a layer of ice into a winter lake. There’s something red and burning behind his sternum, a heart or a war or both, chasing each other around his ribs.
“An outside perspective is nice, some of the time,” Noah says with a shrug that’s looser than the smile. He takes his hand off of Ronan’s and brings it to his cheek. The chill sends gooseflesh radiating down Ronan’s neck and back; a shiver curls between his shoulder blades, and he suppresses it with clenched teeth. “I know I could hate him,” Noah says, and Ronan knows he means Whelk, even if he won’t say the name. “Maybe I should hate him. But it’s not worth it, what it does to me.”
“Big of you,” Ronan says. He’s not quite sure what to do about Noah’s fingers on his cheek; he’s drunk, and he’s angry, both of which he has plenty of experience with, but people don’t really touch him like this often enough for any kind of reflex to have grown up around it.
“It’s not worth hating yourself either,” Noah tells him, as if Ronan hadn’t spoken, as if Ronan might have conveniently forgotten who the enemy is. Noah’s palm moves to rest on Ronan’s neck, somewhere between a fact and a suggestion, a hypothesis of a touch. The shiver escapes and runs wild. Noah’s eyes are dark, but not skull-dark, more like ocean-dark – dark at the point just above where sunlight can reach, and everything that lives beyond it has no idea sunlight exists at all.
Noah gets closer without actually moving, and it’s hard to tell if parts of him are more distinctly real than others – his hands, his eyes, his mouth, like parts of a sketch the artist paid more attention to, the rest of him flickering faintly and open to interpretation – or if Ronan’s blood alcohol level is fouling up his eyesight.
“You’ll figure it out eventually,” Noah says. “I can’t do anything about what’s in there.” He taps on Ronan’s temple. “I can’t make you believe what you refuse to know.”
“You’re a disconcerting little shit sometimes,” Ronan replies sweetly, and Noah smiles.
“Look who’s talking,” he says, and kisses Ronan at more or less the same moment Ronan realises that that’s what’s going to happen.
It’s a kind of stop climbing and realise the mountain is beneath you moment that starts with Noah’s breath slipping over his face and stalls out somewhere around the feeling of Noah’s mouth on his, cold and alive but not in the traditional sense, buzzing faintly with an energy that seems more urgent than anything about Noah ever does. A smell like wet earth and a forest in summer ebbs and drifts around him. The air can’t decide what temperature it should be, and sweat trails to the small of Ronan’s back as more goosebumps climb his arms.
Noah’s hand keeps Ronan from bumping his head on the headboard. Noah’s lips keep Ronan’s from touching. Ronan doesn’t remember wrapping his fingers in Noah’s perpetual Aglionby uniform, but there they are, clenched around the fabric that doesn’t really feel like fabric, his knuckles bumping the chest of a boy who doesn’t really feel a boy, as he clumsily responds to a kiss that feels more like a series of dots he can’t connect, like something deprived of what it needs for long enough that it’s forgotten everything apart from the needing.
He doesn’t know anything. He knows he kisses back. He knows who the enemy is. You can’t have an enemy if you let yourself surrender.
It’s all about as tangible as a dream belonging to someone with less tangible dreams than Ronan. When Noah sits back, Ronan can’t account for how breathless he is or the way he feels broken open, aching and neatly dissected, everything all laid out in rows and ranks of soldiers: Here’s the fear and here’s the rage and here are the softer parts you don’t know what to do with at all.
“I hope you didn’t kiss like that when you were alive,” he says, because the need to say something has its hand around his throat, slowly squeezing, and silence just makes the blood sound louder in his ears and the shame span out farther in his chest with its back to the sun and its fingers in his guts.
“I don’t think I kissed like anything when I was alive,” Noah tells him, and then pulls a face. “You taste like beer.”
“Yeah, well, you taste like the grave,” Ronan says, “so don’t start with me, okay?”
Noah rolls his eyes, and not exactly thinking at full capacity, Ronan gets tangled up looking at him: the strange, outward blur of Noah, the open question of Noah. The persistent, tragic lie of Noah. What’s a ghost, if not someone alive who can’t admit they’re dead?
Sometimes the lie is all you’re left with, and sometimes it’s all you had to start with. Sometimes you just glue together what’s left and move on. Ronan isn’t capable of admitting when a lie is enough, of settling for it. He can’t live with the truth either. It’s all the same fight.
Ronan looks away, reaches for a bottle, frowns at its emptiness.
“You want the rest of mine?” Noah asks.
He grimaces. “Is it warm?”
“I wouldn’t expect it to be, no,” Noah says, and Ronan huffs as he takes the half-empty beer with its scab of torn-away paper. The glass is colder than when he’d retrieved it from the fridge. It is, he’s suddenly sure, the exact temperature Noah’s hand was on his cheek, as Noah’s lips when they’d brushed across his mouth. He takes a drink, and savagely ignores the tingling along his skin.
“Don’t worry about your dreams tonight,” Noah says.
“What the hell does that mean?” Ronan asks, rounding on him, but there’s nothing on the other side of the bed, no clue at all from the sheets that anyone was sitting there.
“Coward,” Ronan mutters, not unkindly.
Somewhere else in Monmouth, a door slams, and Ronan smirks around the bottle.