due to the fact that time works differently for noah, even after finially going to rest at the end of book four, there are still moments in the future of the gangsey that he appears, at important moments in their lives, but never for long or in the way he used to.
it’s always fleeting and never explainable like gansey glancing in the rearview and having to double-take because he could have sworn he saw noah squeezed in the backseat just like he used to be, or adam seeing him in a crowd only to run after him and have to apologize to someone for mistaking them for someone he once knew. but it always seems to happen when they miss him or need a familiar face most.
like, once the gangsey all leave after helping adam move into his college dorm, adam sits on his new bed and has a moment of melancholic strangeness as he notes how quiet it is in the absence of his friends. suddenly he feels a chill head to toe, and he looks up only to notice that the window is fogged up despite it being a hot august day. when he gets closer, he sees himself in the glass’s reflection and the fog is curiously located over where his reflection’s cheek would be. he rubs it at it, but the fog doesn’t go away. for a second he swears he could hear a familiar laugh, but then decides its his imagination.
another time on their year off, blue, gansey and henry pull into a small family-owned motel in a tiny town just west of Death Valley for the night and they send henry in to ask for a room. when the elderly woman behind the desk is handing henry the key to the room, she looks at henry very intently and says “thank you for looking after them for me” in a strange hollow voice. before he can ask what she means, the woman seems to snap out of it like a trance, smiles, and pleasantly asks if he needs any extra toiletries as if it never happened. henry is sufficiently creeped out, and forgets to ask for extra shampoo and conditioner bottles. henry never vocalized it but it had come on a day when he’d been feeling insecure about how he fit in with the magical world blue and gansey seemed to belong to, and he felt so oddly comforted by the weird mystery of the moment that it was like he finally understood the mysticism that surrounded his boyfriend and girlfriend constantly.
noah’s also there when blue is getting ready and putting on her earrings before her wedding to gansey and henry. she was already in her dress and it was right after the groomsmen ronan and adam had come in to get a glimpse at her and wish her luck before the ceremony. she had just been thinking about how cleaned up ronan and adam had been in their suits and how unfortunate it was that noah wouldn’t be standing at the end of the aisle with gansey alongside them. she thought she saw a flash of a white suit in the corner of her eye and he was there just long enough for her to feel him press a chilly kiss into the back of her neck and hear the barely there words, “you look beautiful” but as soon as she turns to look, she wonders if she heard them at all.
he is usually not physically perceived by the original gangsey members, but mostly by their children. you know that old myth that children are most sensitive to paranormal energy and therefore are most likely to see ghosts.
it begins really with blue, henry, and gansey’s firstborn child, a boy who is clearly biologically henry’s son but who is named richard campbell gansey the fourth anyhow. all three parents were of course overjoyed, but blue and gansey had felt a little bittersweet about how noah wasn’t there to meet the baby. a few nights after he’s born and comes home from the hospital, gansey gets up in the middle of the night once when he hears the baby crying, but by the time he gets his glasses on and hobbles to nursery, the baby is no longer crying, but quietly giggling and the rocking chair beside the cradle is rocking gently as if it recently had someone sitting in it. he walks over to the cradle and the baby is perfectly content, waving up towards the mobile, but the mobile isn’t moving. suddenly gansey is tearing up, and he doesn’t know why, because he isn’t particularly sad but he almost feels the way you feel when you see an old friend for the first time in a while.
these strange moments happen every once in a while, but it isn’t until gansey IV is old enough to talk that anyone makes sense of them. one day, gansey IV sees a photo of noah and asks his mom who that is. Blue is surprised for a moment, but smiles sadly and says that it’s his uncle noah. Gansey IV asks when uncle noah will visit again, because he misses him. Blue asks him what he means, after all, noah was laid to rest long before gansey IV was born. How did her son remember and miss a boy he never met? Gansey IV doesn’t have an answer really, as young children rarely do.
over the years when asked questions about noah from the photographs by her younger cousins and siblings, opal begins to tell them that that noah is their families guardian ghost. it’s like how other families have guardian angels, theirs has a guardian ghost. this is evidenced by other weird moments with the kids.
once, blue and gansey’s daughter while being babysitted by ronan spends a few hours running back and forth through the sunflower fields at the barns laughing and talking to herself. ronan lets her cause shes not hurting anything. after a while, she tires herself out and ronan asks what that was all about, fully prepared for her to answer in psychic babble about the future or dead people as he’s come to expect from the children of blue sargent who seem to have picked up some of the 300 Fox Way psychic sensitivities that must have skipped blue’s generation. what he isn’t ready for is for the little girl to very matter-a-factly say that she had been playing tag with uncle noah. ronan is suddenly very serious and orders her to tell him exactly what shes talking about. she says she liked playing tag with noah but that it was never fair because every time she almost caught him he would disappear and appear somewhere further away or behind her. from the way she talks about it, it seems like this isn’t the first time they’ve played this game together. (after this, ronan may or may not have to excuse himself to the bedroom to cry for a moment away from the prying eyes of children).
ronan of course relates this experience to adam when adam gets home from his day job of being a superhero family attorney who helps domestic and parental abuse victims find justice and loving homes. adam is as shook up by it as he is, but says maybe it really was noah. maybe at the end he had projected himself into these little moments before he disappeared totally their senior year. after all, he had been able to project himself back in time seven years to commune with gansey as he was dying, maybe he’d been able to do the same but in the future. when blue, henry, and gansey show up to pick the kids up, they mention it to them causing them to all sit down and seriously question all the moments of paranormal weirdness they’ve encountered since noah said goodbye (you know the ones that arent otherwise explained by their general existence as a dreamer, a mirror, magician, reincarnated magical forest, and such. after glendower gansey never gave up searching for the unknown and magical, so magic is part of their lives anyway). it’s just noah’s parting gift to them, a way of him being with them and part of their children’s lives even if he can’t be with them all the time like he used to be.
