the end is unknown but I think I'm ready (as long as you're with me)

He quietly slid from time.

Darkness. Stillness. Timelessness.

Something tugging at the edge of his consciousness.

He’s nothing more than a whisper, an incorporeal voice that’s more thought than sound. Somewhere.

Noah opens his eyes.

He knows there’s something wrong when the blackness shifts, giving way to a less solid darkness. There’s no light but there seems to be something. He’s nowhere and then he’s under the Virginia night sky, his feet firmly touch the ground and the frost-covered grass crunches beneath his sneakers.

What’s going on?

The words never make it out of his throat, but the air shifts around him as if they did.

“Noah?”

Blue’s voice makes him turn around. As he does, he realizes he’s more than a thought, more than a whisper of a voice lost in the darkness, he’s a body, he’s Noah. He’s Noah Czerny and he’s somewhere and Blue is there with him.

The phantom of his beating heart speeds up.

“Blue? Are you okay?” he’s scared about what it means that she’s here, wherever here is. Is this the after-afterlife? Is Blue’s form there because time has passed? Is Blue there because she’s dead?

She comes closer and his heart beats faster in his chest.

His heart beats faster.

He hasn’t had a heart in seven years.

Blue extends her hand towards him and before he knows it, his fingertips are grazing the back of her warm hand. The feeling of her lips on his cold, dead mouth buzzing in his skin.

“How are you here?” Noah’s voice sounds the most like his own voice it’s sounded in years.

“I thought I was asleep,” she says. Then she reconsiders, “I am asleep.”

A dream, a memory, a sliver of life in somebody’s head.

“How am I here?” he asks next, unsure of what it means to be in someone else’s dream.

“Ah, I think we fell asleep on the ley line,” but she sounds uncertain, tilting her head to the side, as if trying to see something better. “I told Ronan it wouldn’t work. I’m never going to hear the end of it.”

“Ronan?” Noah’s mind swirls with the smell of gasoline and the feel of stubble growing against his ghostly fingertips. There’s a loud song in the back of his head and blue petals on an unmade bed. Black ink twirling in feathers, beaks and curving lines down a muscular back.

“Long story,” she intertwines her fingers with his, swinging their joint hands back and forth. “He should be here already. This is his domain.”

“I don’t understand,” he admits, there’s a pounding in his ears that’s not his heart. It can’t be.

“Shhh,” she places one of her chubby fingers on his lips and a soft gasp escapes him. “What do you want to do?”

The question makes his ribcage ache with longing. He wants to lie down, he wants to feel the grass under the palms of his hands, he wants to go down a flight of stairs with his skate, he wants to ride the Pig, he wants to smell car grease and orange juice and mint leaves, he wants to feel Blue’s touch on his skin, he wants, he wants, he wants.

“What day is it?” Noah asks instead.

“January 1^st. Presumably. I hope we didn’t freeze to death in Ronan’s car or I’m going to be upset.” But she doesn’t sound upset. In fact, she sounds as if she’s having the time of her life.

“Are you guys seriously sleeping in the woods right now?” he shakes his head, a small smile tugging the corners of his mouth upwards.

“Come on. What do you want to do?” Noah is sure that the feelings he has for Blue have never been stronger than now. Her smile could bring down a king to his knees.

January 1^st, he thinks. The needles on his face as the cold Virginia air gives way to DC gives way to Philadelphia gives way to New York. There was something about the merciless cold surrounding his nights at home, the heater turned all the way up, hot chocolate on the bedside table, Blink-182 blasting from his headphones.

Noah looks up at the sky, wondering if the stars in Dreamspace form the same constellations he used to try to make out from his room in the Aglionby dorms. Somehow, he doubts it. He closes his eyes and breathes in, truly breathes in as he hasn’t done in years, exhaling with a relief he didn’t think possible.

When he feels the first snowflake hit his face, it’s as cold and soft as he remembers.

“Snow?” Noah looks down at Blue, at the contrast of white specks on her raven black hair, at her soft brown eyes, at her well-worn green sweater, and smiles.

 “You know, you were supposed to wait for us to find our way here before doing anything, Jane.”

Gansey.

He looks away from Blue guiltily, as if he’s been caught with his hand down in the cookie jar, his mother’s stern but warm voice calling his name behind him. Gansey looks as regal as ever, the long brown coat making him look older than Noah ever saw him. Behind him, Adam approaches cautiously, his boots heavy on the ground as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Noah thinks he might be carrying the weight of the dream all by himself.

“Hey, guys,” his stomach feels uneasy with the realization that he never got to properly say goodbye to them. He was there, hanging in the background of their lives one moment and gone the next. Before he can apologize, Gansey’s arms are wrapped around him tightly, squeezing a very substantial body unlike the immaterial Noah Czerny he met sometime.

He hugs him back one-armed because there’s no space to do anything else, his left hand still tangled between Blue’s. When Gansey lets go, his eyes are bright with unshed tears. He says thank you and those two words carry so much sincerity, so much conviction, they make Noah’s own eyes prickle.

“I should’ve worn a thicker sweater,” Adam mumbles and Noah laughs, wet and happy and whole for the first time in a long time. Adam’s satisfied smile is blinding in the starry night.

“Jesus, Parrish, your head might not be filled with night horrors but climbing a fucking hill was not in my plans tonight.”

Noah’s head turns as if pulled by a string. Ronan’s steps barely make a dent on the light coating of snow covering the grass, but Noah can still trace them as far as his eyes can see.

“Hey,” Ronan says with a nod in his direction, it feels like any other day at Aglionby. “You can’t just leave, man. That’s not how things work around here.”

Later, if there is a later, he will think that it was extraordinary of him to not break down the moment he saw Blue. Now, his shoulders shake with a sob that can no longer be contained in his perpetually 17-year-old body.

“Hey, hey,” Blue’s hand tightens around his own as Ronan comes closer and stops him from falling to the ground. His strong arms hold him up firmly, as Gansey and Adam move around him as well. Noah’s head dips below the curve of his chin, resting on his chest, listening for a heartbeat. They have to be okay, he thinks, they have to.

The tell-tale thump under his ear lets him breathe a sigh of relief.

“Noah,” Gansey’s voice is close, so close that he can feel the warmer air around him. A hand on his back and then another one where Blue’s hand clutches his. They’re here. They’re all here.

“Noah,” calls Ronan, one of his hands guiding his face up, their faces closer than they ever were when he was around. He lets a moment pass with his forehead against Ronan’s, eyes closed, breathing him in. Breathing them all in. This is a moment he wouldn’t mind being trapped in. The snow falling on them as they stand together under the immensity of the dark sky. He is solid enough to feel every nerve ending on fire, his ghostly heart hammering inside his chest.

“Noah,” Ronan whispers again softly, all his edges smoothed by the closeness of his face. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”

For a long minute, there’s nothing but the rise and fall of his chest, tears silently rolling down his face. He doesn’t want them to go. He wants this, whatever this is, for as long as the universe will let him.

“I think it’s my turn to throw you out of a window,” he says, finally breaking the eerie silence of the Dreamspace. He hears Adam huff a laugh, the kind of laugh he’d only ever heard in response to Gansey’s stories. It rings in his ears as the echo of a memory.  

He opens his eyes to look down at where Adam and Blue’s hands are holding his and he laughs as well. Once more, for old time’s sake, his brain supplies.

He’s still laughing when something wet and cold smashes on top of his head.

Noah looks at Ronan as he grins down at him.

“Oh, it’s on,” Noah says, unwrapping himself from them, kneeling to grab a handful of snow and throw it in his direction just as Blue does the same.

“Hey!”

“Come on, Noah! We’re not letting him get away with it,” Blue’s wicked smile as she says it makes his breath catch.

He starts gathering more snow between his hands. The snow is perfect for it: wet and heavy, great packing snow. It makes him miss Adele and their snow fights in upstate New York. He doesn’t get to think much about it because Ronan is retaliating with heavy snowballs the size of a grapefruit.

“Hey! Dreaming up snow is cheating!” he says.

“You dreamt it into being,” Adam reasonably points out.

“Details.”

Ronan gets a particularly big snowball thrown in his direction that stops the attack momentarily. Ronan stares at Gansey with his mouth half-open. Noah thinks he’s about to witness Ronan murder Gansey, but the other boy is faster and runs to his side, grabbing his hand and pushing him to run.

“Let’s go, Noah! Let’s go!”

They run hand in hand, laughing maniacally as they avoid Adam and Ronan’s throws, not always successfully. Ronan’s too focused on the assault to notice Blue running behind him, jumping higher than should be allowed by physics, a snowball as big as a watermelon hitting the back of his head.

“Maggot,” he bites, the threat is left unsaid. It’s not necessary.

There’s a shriek when Ronan lifts her up, effortlessly throwing her on his shoulder. She’s kicking her legs in the air, but she’s laughing, loud and melodic and beautiful.

Sometime later, when they’re lying on the ground thoroughly worn out and happy, Noah whispers, “this is what life should be about.”

The sky is as clear as a summer night, no sign of the clouds that brought the snow to this clearing because they were never there. He thinks he can make out Orion in the sky, but astronomy was never his forte. When no one speaks for a long time, he risks a glance to the side and finds Blue staring at him.

“What?” Noah asks.

“You’re something else, Noah Czerny,” her smile is the same as it had always been, yet her face flickers between the Blue he knew in Henrietta and an older, wiser Blue with laugh lines around her mouth. He doesn’t know how long he looks at her face lit up by the moon and the stars, but it feels as if all time passes between one breath and the next.

“Don’t think,” she whispers, her fingertips brushing the side of his face. “What do you want, Noah?”

His eyes go back to the sky as he says, “Gansey, what’s the story behind Orion?”

Noah listens to his voice as Gansey tells them about a giant huntsman whose deeds were great enough that they guaranteed him a place in the stars among the gods. Gansey’s always been good at telling stories, his honeyed voice a divine gift itself.

Once he’s done, Adam tells them they’re not really looking at Orion, but at Ronan’s memories of the night sky, as he’s the one who wove the dream they’re sharing now.

“So this is not how the sky looks?” Blue asks.

“It’s how it looks in his mind.”

“Can we bring Orion like Noah brought the snow?” she asks then, hopeful.

“We can do anything, bro. That’s the point,” Ronan’s voice is tired in a way that feels vaguely familiar. When Noah looks at him, he sees the dark circles around his eyes that used to be a permanent fixture on his face when he met him, then they’re replaced by a fresh-faced Ronan that looks healthy and whole and alive.

Noah yearns in a way that makes his ribcage constrict. He wishes for one more moment under the cloudless sky, with Ronan’s pale face illuminated by the reflection of the moon in the snow. One more moment with Adam’s southern drawl dragging the words as he and Gansey have a half-hearted argument on the names of the stars. One more moment with Gansey’s passionate storytelling, his feverish gestures as he expands on the tale. One more moment with Blue’s hand around his own, firmly grounding him to the here and now.

“I want this night to be longer,” he says, willing the tremble out of his voice. “I want to stay just a little longer.”

“You can have as much time as you want,” Blue says, placing a hand where his heart used to be. He feels more solid than he ever was, her hand is enough to ground his soul to the Dreamspace a little longer.

He feels simultaneously 17, 24, 10 and then 17 again. His Aglionby uniform soaked by the snow is sticking to him uncomfortably, so he wills the dream to give him a pair of jeans and another sweater, green like Blue’s.

“You’re too good at this. Are you sure you weren’t a dreamer?” Ronan jokes, but there’s a hint of amazement in his voice, as if he can’t believe someone else can shape the world with a well-placed thought.

“I’m still cold,” Noah says.

“You’re lying on 4 inches of snow, Noah,” reasons Adam.

Faster than he can think it, the snow melts away, to be replaced with a bed of blue petals similar to the ones he’d seen on Ronan’s bed once.

“Show off,” Gansey mumbles with a smile.

Noah felt the laughter build in his chest and let it bubble out as he grabbed handfuls of the petals and threw them upward. Instead of falling swiftly to the ground, they stayed suspended in the air, impossibly bright under the moonlight. The rest of them join him throwing fistfuls of blue around, an explosion of confetti, laughter and wonder.

There’s warmth, there’s laughter, there’s love.

Dawn is rapidly approaching and with it, the soft pull of something else, the sound fades around him and light fills his vision. He gets a glimpse of Ronan’s shaved head, Gansey’s bright smile, Adam’s boyish hands, Blue’s spikey hair.

His heart beats one more time.

Noah closes his eyes with a smile on his face.