Work Text:
Thomas doesn’t know how Newt’s scarf ended up around his neck.
Everything has been blurry, so blurry, ever since he woke up, head on Teresa’s lap, in Marcus’s dreadful mess of a party. Driving to the mountains, finding the Right Arm, getting his blood drawn; it feels like he was asleep while all of this was happening, a spectator of his own life, watching but not really processing anything.
It’s only once he’s by Brenda’s bedside in the large tent that serves as an infirmary that he realises what has happened since, and remembers what has happened before. He hasn’t done anything for this sudden awareness to appear however, it just springs on him when he notices that his fingers are nervously playing with a piece of fabric, something that is not usually there, and when he looks down at his hands, he is surprised to find the red piece of cloth he has come to associate with his friend, right there, hanging loosely from his own neck.
Nothing changes, but everything does. All at once his nape is bathed in a welcoming warmth, and it has probably been the case for the past few hours, but Thomas wouldn’t know. He only knows this now, and he knows only this. He knows he’s been carrying a piece of Newt with him, and that this piece of Newt has kept him warm and kept his frail skin from the desert sun. He knows the singular scent of Newt has merged with his own, and that his shirt and jacket are probably soaked in the perfume of both their essences, and that thought alone gives him goosebumps. He knows Newt’s smell a little all too well – a faint whiff of freshly-cut grass, a little something from the Glade that has lingered with him as a last souvenir. He hopes his own smell doesn’t tarnish it too much.
And to be sure of it, he dives his nose in the crimson fabric that circles his neck, and closes his eyes in satisfaction when the memories of home come rushing back to him, like that one morning, when he woke up closer to Newt than he remembered falling asleep, and the sun was just warm, not yet scorching, and the imprints on the sand betrayed fingers that had unconsciously gone looking for another hand in the dark but had never reached their destination, collapsed from exhaustion barely an inch away from Thomas’s fingertips.
“Thomas?” a voice speaks out and he opens his eyes, half-expecting Newt to be right beside him, but when he turns around, it’s once again Brenda’s dark eyes that meet his.
“Huh?” he simply utters, still half-lost in his memories.
Judging by the look on her face and her position, lying on her side, her head resting on her elbow, she has been watching him long enough for him to be embarrassed by it.
“Do you know why I kissed you at the party?” she asks, a bit too casually for Thomas’s taste. The unexpected feeling of her still lingers on his lips, a misplaced ghost that he can’t quite get out of his mind.
“Because you were drunk?” he suggests innocently.
“Oh, please,” she snickers. “That stupid thing they made us drink to enter? That was barely alcohol.”
And yet, Thomas’s throat still aches from the bitterness of the liquor. He can’t imagine that kissing him could have been any pleasant for Brenda, between his lips chapped by the dryness of the scorch, his stomach trying to process the sour drink and his guts twisted by the fear of having lost his friends.
“No,” she resumes. “I kissed you because I wanted to, simple as that.”
“Okay…?” he replies, hesitantly, sensing that there is more to it.
“You see, Thomas, you didn’t grow up in this world, but I did. Out there in the Scorch, you’re dead before you’re even born,” she scoffs, and her gaze drifts away from Thomas to end up on the conical flasks and test tubes heaped up on Mary’s desk, only to glare at them in disgust. “Your days are counted before you even know what days are. From the second you are born, you’re already living on borrowed time, and everyone knows it. It makes people depressed, it makes them angry. But most of all, it makes people afraid.”
Brenda spits each word with an uncanny combination of rage and weariness that unsettles him. Maybe it’s just that, fear, that is making her so upset. Fear of finally facing death after a lifetime of getting ready for it, but without having any idea of what it would be like. Frustration, too, of having been promised a place in paradise that evaporated between her fingers, all because of a simple bite.
“They’re afraid to leave the zones,” she continues, “because what if they cross the path of a crank? They’re afraid to explore the scorch, because what if they get lost and die of thirst? They’re afraid of exploring what’s left of cities, because what if they get hurt in a world that doesn’t have hospitals anymore? They’re afraid to trust, because what if they get betrayed? They’re afraid to hate, because what if they don’t get the time to forgive? They’re afraid to love, because what if the other dies, and they have to keep living without them?”
Her sudden clairvoyance makes him gulp. Thomas has learnt through his short life that the wisest words are the ones spoken by the dying. Brenda’s are no exception to the rule.
“I’ve seen so many people die with regrets, Thomas,” she shakes her head slowly, and scrunches up her nose, which only makes her look younger than she already is. “So many people wishing they had lived more, experienced more, tasted more, felt more, cried more, laughed more, dared more, kissed more and gotten their hearts broken more; and I promised myself I would never be one of those people. I promised myself that I would live and not only survive, you know why?”
“Why?” he hears his own raspy voice asking.
“Because dying without having lived means you survived for nothing.”
It’s a simple statement, one that seems almost too obvious to be made, yet it appears to wreck Thomas’s world entirely.
He has lived two lives, one that he doesn’t remember, one that has just started, and he’s never tried to find the meaning of any of them. From the moment of his second birth, his only goal has been to survive. Survive the Maze, survive Janson’s facility, survive the Scorch. Run first and think later, feel later. Sitting on a camp bed under a tent in the middle of the desert, he realises he’s never even thought about why he’s been wanting to survive so much.
“When you live on borrowed time, you can’t waste it,” Brenda sums up, and her eyes come back to meet his, and he feels them staring right into his soul. “So, do me a favour, okay?”
He tilts his head to the side and frowns. “What kind of favour?”
“Do that same promise to yourself and tell him.”
A single shiver runs down his spine. It’s quick, and it makes him sit straighter on his cot. He suddenly feels naked under her scrutinising stare. She has understood words he hasn’t even spoken, words that never left the comfort of his heart.
“Tell who what?” his voice cracks.
And Brenda chuckles, moved by his childlike innocence. “You know, at first I wasn’t sure who you were talking about. It could have been any of the boys, really. They’re all nice and good-looking, I have to hand it to you. I didn’t know you well enough to guess which one it was. But then they found us and rescued us from the party, and just like that, it became obvious.”
“He was so worried about you. I told him not to be. I told him nothing had happened to you, that you had just drunk a little and that you obviously weren’t used to it and that you would wake up soon, but he worried. Everybody was watching Jorge and Marcus, but he kept glancing back at you, watching you laid on the floor, with your head on Teresa’s lap. He watched you, and his eyes were both incredibly happy and incredibly sad. Both relieved and worried. And then you woke up, and the look on his face– gosh, it was like the world was okay again.”
With each word of Brenda, Thomas feels his world shifting on its axis a little more. He must be looking pretty stupid, mouth agape and eyes open wide, but there is nothing else he can possibly do than hold his breath, praying, praying , that he understands correctly what she is trying to say.
“I mean, in hindsight, I should have guessed right away,” she thinks out loud to herself. “As soon as he saw you on the ground, he immediately took it off and tucked it under your head. I thought it was pretty romantic,” she smiles, eyeing the soft red fabric, and when Thomas’s eyes sprinkle with epiphany, she adds, “What, you thought Teresa’s lap was made up of wool?”
In a slow and visibly painful motion, she shifts to a sitting position, her feet dangling from the camp bed, and puts her hand on top of Thomas’s.
“So please, grant a dying girl’s last wish, and tell him,” she concludes, staring right into his eyes. “Tell Newt that, when I was kissing you, you were thinking about him.”
Click.
Just like that, the Earth has settled on its new axis. The planets are revolving backwards and the seasons are all reversed. Clocks are turning back time; and there he is again, opening his eyes to the sight of Newt – him, only him, aglow in a crowd of moving bodies. Chocolate eyes rendered amber by the light, that never lose sight of his own. Flushed cheeks, and the lips to go with them, beautifully parted and still moist from Thomas’s own.
The most gorgeous sight he’s been blessed with, cruelly made up by his imagination.
“To be honest, I’m relieved it was him,” Brenda admits with a knowing grin. “I probably would have been more upset if you had pictured Teresa instead of me. But Newt? I can live with that. He will treat you well.”
Thomas can only blink in response. What do you say to this? How do you reply to the girl who tells you you’re in love with your best friend? She’s probably right, right? Thomas has never taken the time to put words on it, on the pull he has felt toward the boy from the moment they met, but those seem quite fitting. He had the foolishness of calling it friendship, but it had never been quite it, had it?
He can’t hold Brenda’s gaze anymore. Dumbstruck by this sudden turn of events, he feels weak and helpless, on a scale he never has before. It’s too much, too much at once, and all he can do is stare down at his own hands. Brenda’s left one is holding them protectively, like one holds a wounded bird that’s too scared to fly.
“There is no shame in being in love, you know?” she says, squeezing his fingers with an almost sisterly affection. “It’s actually pretty heartwarming, to see that love still exists even though the world has turned to shit. It’s the best thing that can happen to someone, I think. You’re lucky.”
Lucky.
He has never thought he was lucky. His life has been nothing but trouble so far, but maybe he should lower his standards on what lucky means in the middle of the apocalypse.
When Brenda’s right hand comes to lift up his chin, he shudders. He knows his face is red and his eyes wet, but he follows Brenda’s lead and reconnects their eyes. She cups his cheek and isn’t afraid to touch the damp spot on his cheekbone.
“Life’s too short to be lived in fear, Thomas,” she whispers to him. “And you’re too smart to waste your borrowed time out of fear, you hear me?” he nods frenetically, and spots a couple tears beading her lashes.
“Great,” she says with the biggest grin he has ever seen her wearing. “So, now, get the fuck out of this stupid tent and go kiss the hell out of him, okay?”
And as her voice breaks, he nods again, even faster, and the lump that has been building up in his throat for days is finally swallowed, and he breathes, he breathes, and the air passing through his lungs has never made him feel so euphorically alive.
Outside the tent, the air has turned crisp. Thomas doesn’t know what season they’re in, he doesn’t even know if seasons exist at all anymore, but he likes to think they’re in spring. Spring is all about new beginnings.
He’s barely out of the tent when Jorge comes crushing him with a hug. He jumps at the sudden contact, perfectly unaware of what to do. His arms just hang there awkwardly, pathetically, surprised by the unexpected sign of affection.
“Thank you,” the man mutters with a shaky voice that surprises Thomas.
“You don’t have to thank me,” he simply replies.
“You’re a good one, hermano,” Jorge says, letting go of Thomas’s tired frame, not without giving him a strong tap on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of her now. Go find your boyfriend, he needs you.”
His heart skips a beat. It’s feeling like you’re falling when you’re asleep, except you are perfectly awake, rug pulled from under your feet. His soul trips over something that isn’t there.
“S-Sorry, what?” he mumbles.
“Blondie,” the man explains. “He’s been all quiet ever since you and Brenda got separated from us. It was hard on him. I think he needs a little cheering up, you know? So you go take care of him, okay?”
By the time Thomas comes back to his senses, Jorge has already slipped inside the tent.
Thomas isn’t quite sure how he feels about the new axis of the world; his head keeps spinning. Has the universe always been this way and he has simply been too blind to see it? Each step he takes feels like a life-changing event now, while, around, all seems unfazed.
Aris and his two friends are not far from the tent, catching up lost time. From what Thomas can overhear, he’s telling them the story of how they escaped the facility. He hopes Aris is not diminishing his own role in their escape plan. After all, they would all be dead by now if it wasn’t for him.
Aris is lucky too, he thinks. What were the odds of him ever reuniting with his small family of friends? Close to none, probably. Had they taken a little more time to reach the mountains, none of them would be here anymore and they would have travelled all this way for nothing. Maybe Brenda is right, there are some truly lucky people out there.
It doesn’t take Thomas long to find his friends. Frypan, Minho and Teresa are all sitting on a rock looking over the camp, wrapped up in large coats that the Right Arm was kind enough to offer them. There are smiles on their faces, for the first time in a long time, and their laughs float up in clouds of vapour, defying the chill atmosphere.
“So, how’s Brenda?” Frypan asks as Thomas gets closer to them.
“She is stable,” he sighs, and crosses his arms. “There’s no way they’re letting her come with us, though.”
“Shucking hell,” Minho curses, running a quick hand through his hair before looking away.
“I’m sorry, Thomas,” Teresa says with compassionate eyes. “You two must have grown close.”
“Yeah,” he scoffs at the understatement, and bites his lip nervously. “Hey, where’s Newt? Have you guys seen him?”
All three share a worried glance, a wordless conversation Thomas fails to understand, and Frypan points at something behind Thomas, toward the sky. He turns around, and that’s when he sees him. Sitting, on the edge of nothing. He’s up on a cliff that overlooks the camp, his back straight and his legs dangling from the edge.
“He’s been sitting up there ever since he arrived,” Frypan explains to him, while Minho keeps staring at the former second-in-command with concern. “He said he needed time to think, alone.”
He seems so tall up there, magnificently bathed in the afterglow, and much like a magnet, Thomas feels the irrepressible yearning to get closer and closer. So despite Frypan’s words, he goes.
Climbing the rock, Thomas recalls the party in all its details. It’s hard to put everything back in order, to get a good picture of it all, but eventually, it always ends with Newt, or what he thought was Newt, and the blissfulness of lustful eyes.
Then he had blinked, and dreams had morphed into nightmares. Newt’s eyes had gone black and so had his veins, as if death had selfishly claimed him right before Thomas’s eyes. His touch had grown cold and cruel and his face heinous, everything that Newt wasn’t. The very image of the one he cared about the most, being stripped away of all his life. The very idea of such a thing ever happening, well, it had been enough for Thomas to lose it all. His already weakened body had shut down, unable to cope, unable to go on, and he had sunk to the floor, wishing to never recover and let death claim him too, if it was the only way out of this hell of his own making.
The brain works in funny ways. It likes to fool itself, often to protect itself from things it doesn’t want to acknowledge. It builds walls, draws curtains, closes doors. Thomas realises that now, as he stands a few feets behind Newt, and sees him, properly, for the first. He had never noticed before how, while his hair was golden under the rising sun, it somehow looked entirely different at twilight. It has the warm colour of sand – not the burning one of the scorch that gets everywhere and makes his whole body itch, but the one he pictures the beaches of the safe haven to be covered in, a mattress of sand he could spend days and nights sleeping on.
As he gets closer, he sees the traitorous signs of tiredness on the boy’s face, dark circles that have nothing to do under such bright eyes, and Thomas gets the sudden urge to wipe them away with a stroke of a thumb, wipe them off as if they were but smudges of make-up. Newt’s milky complexion has always looked prettier with small hues of pink than of black; they compliment his cheekbones much better and match the tenderous shade of his lips.
He wonders when he has started to notice the shade of his lips.
“Hey,” he breathes out, almost stupidly as he settles down next to Next.
“Hi Thomas,” Newt mutters without sparing him a glance. His eyes are empty and tired, nothing like they were the first time they landed on Thomas, glowing with hope.
“You’re okay?” he still asks, despite the answer being obvious.
“Yeah.” It’s barely audible, and Thomas’s stomach twists at how wrong it sounds.
“What are you doing up here by yourself?”
“I needed some space.”
“I– Do you want me to leave? I can go–”
“No!” Newt’s body jolts, but it lasts only for the blink of an eye before his statuelike stillness returns. At least, he is looking at Thomas now. “No, you can stay,”
“Are you sure you’re okay? I mean, we’ve had a rough day so–”
“Did I ever tell you how I broke my leg?”
And even though Thomas is surprised by the sudden change of subject, he tries not to let it show. He doesn’t bother to answer, because both boys already know the answer. There have been long nights in the scorch when they were the last two awake, and Thomas had simply taken Newt’s ankle and massaged it, without Newt asking, without Thomas proposing. It just happened in a common agreement, a secret gift that, by essence, needn’t be spoken. Thomas always did the same pattern, starting low on the heel, the weakest spot, and back up the calf all the way to the knee, and once Newt was lulled by the calming, circular pressures on his leg, he would fall asleep, knocked out by the endorphins of a pain finally gone, even if only temporarily. Thomas didn’t even know why he had felt the need to relieve Newt of this pain. Perhaps it was because of the guilt he felt, having led almost all of Newt’s long-time friends to their deaths. Perhaps it was the thought that, since he had once been part of WICKED, he might have been the very reason for this injury in the first place. Perhaps, in the end, it was simply the desire to take care of the one he loved – because Brenda was right, it’s always been love.
Regardless, they never spoke during those times, not a word. They listened to the quiet of the desert and to their breathings that always instinctively synched. Newt never told him, and Thomas never asked, because he didn’t need to know. He didn’t need to know in order to care.
“I used to be a Runner, you know? Just like you,” Newt starts. “Every morning I would wake and run through this bloody maze, map it, try to understand. I did so for two years. Every single day, for two years. And I was so sure at first that we would find a way out, I mean, what kind of maze doesn’t have a way out, right?”
“I think I was the first to realise it, that it was all an illusion, that there was no exit. It took Minho a bit longer, but after all he’s always been a glass half-full type of shank. But it was the truth. We were stuck in a maze with no exit.”
“I spent entire nights laying on the grass in the Glade, staring at the stars, trying to find it in me to wake up the next morning and pretend. Pretend that I still believed in it, that I hadn’t completely given up. Put on my running shoes and my harness and keep looking for something, for a solution, for a plan, for a way to escape. And one night, it just came to me. I found the way out.”
Beatitude glows on Newt’s face as he speaks those words, and it makes Thomas shudder with fear. He’s never seen his friend with such an expression. There’s something twisted in what is unfolding before his eyes, he knows it, and he’s afraid to know exactly where this is going. Even though he never asked, he always wondered, what had happened to Newt, and he couldn’t bear to learn that his darkest theories may just be proven right.
“I woke up early, and as soon as the Doors opened, I walked into the maze. It was funny because I had never walked in the maze. It’s such a peaceful place to walk through. There isn’t a single sound, just your breathing. And the early sun hits the walls just the right way. It’s beautiful, in one of the most awful ways.”
“I stopped at the highest wall I could find and I climbed it,” he announces, and Thomas closes his eyes in pain as he swallows heavily. “I climbed all the way to the top, and I took a minute to look around; To find something that would make me change my mind. I wanted so badly to change my mind. But the maze, it spread everywhere. In all directions. It never stopped. There was nothing but the maze, nothing at all. And so I jumped.”
Thomas used to think that heartbreak was simply in image, that it was impossible to feel a sorrow so deep it could in any way resemble the pain of a bone breaking. But he’s pretty sure now that there is no greater suffering than what he’s feeling at the moment, as he watches the broken smile on Newt’s face following his revelation. It’s not just a bone, it’s his whole body, his whole soul, shattered to pieces at once, left there to be scattered away by the now freezing wind.
“I was laying on the floor, tangled up in ivy, my whole body broken, and all I could think was: ‘This is it. This has to be the most pain a person can feel; this has to be the most pain I can feel’. Not the fall, but realising that I had failed. That I had found the way out of the maze, and that I had failed to exit, and that I could never try again, because the Gladers would make sure not to ever give me the chance.”
“But I was wrong,” he declares, and Thomas feels himself getting sick.
Newt has never sounded so fragile, so vulnerable. He is the perfect opposite of what Thomas has always known him to be, the brave, cold-headed, down-to-earth second-in-command who bosses greenies around and calls him out on his half-baked plans, who isn’t afraid to use his fists when he has to. But sitting here on this cliff, he is suddenly the young boy he is supposed to be, that he would be if WICKED hadn’t forced him to grow up too fast and hide his emotions to the world. He’s Newt, nothing but Newt, stripped down to the core.
“When we escaped Jorge’s building with that zipline, I waited for you,” Newt resumes. “Teresa came and I thought you would be right behind, so I waited. But you weren’t coming. She told me you had to go get something, that Brenda held you back to go get something, but that you would be here soon, so I waited.”
“I waited and you still weren’t coming and then…and then the building exploded.”
“You know those moments when it feels like time freezes?” Newt asks. “It felt exactly like that when the building collapsed on itself. One of those moments when you think to yourself: ‘No, this is not real. These kinds of things don’t happen. It cannot be happening; it’s not real’. But it’s very real and it’s very much happening and there’s nothing you can do to change it.”
“I had only felt that way once before, the day you ran into the maze,” Newt recalls. “Because it was just so unreal. It couldn’t be happening. The doors closed behind you, and you and Minho and Alby were gone forever and it couldn’t be happening; and I stayed standing there in front of the wall waiting for it to open again because it’s impossible that things can go that wrong because what is the point of anything at all if things can just fall apart in one snap of a finger?”
“And I managed to pull it through that time around, because you were just a greenie. You were just...just this guy I had met two days before and that I barely knew so why in hell was I so wrecked by the fact that you were gone? But I managed to fake it through one night and the morning came, and you came back.”
Thomas feels his face falling slowly as emotions overcome him. He doesn’t know what’s more striking, between the surprise, the sadness, the worry, the confusion, the awe. It’s all packed together in the distraught expression he sees on Newt’s face, and he knows his own is progressively starting to mirror it.
“You came back, you were there, and you had saved them both, and everything was okay. You had rewinded time back to before the doors closed. You had defeated all the statistics, you had reshuffled all the cards. You had beaten WICKED and you…you awoke something in me. All the hope that I had lost, all the purpose and all the meaning; it all came back to me, all at once, because of you. God, I loved you so much in that moment.”
Thomas inhales sharply at those words. They’ve been spoken so fast, so messily, he isn’t even sure Newt has realised what he said. Yet Thomas knows they are now etched in his brain, forever glued to his memory, and that no matter what happens next, no matter how much he meant it, there was once a moment when Newt had described what he felt towards Thomas as love. Love.
“But the explosives went off, and the building crumbled on itself, and you didn’t come back,” And the tears Newt managed to hold back so far start to break free from his lashes. “We had to run away, and I ran, but all I could think about was you. You…being blown by the blast, you choking on the smoke, you trapped under all the rubble; Tommy, all I could see was you dying .”
“Minho, he tried desperately to convince me I was wrong. He said: ‘Hey, it’s the shank that survived a night into the mazer we’re talking about. The one who killed a griever. You really think an explosion can take him down?’, and I tried to believe him but…But you’re only human, Tommy; and humans, they are so fragile.”
“I’ve lost so many people before, Tommy,” Newt struggles to say. “I’ve lost pretty much everyone I’ve ever known. I’ve lost my friends, my family . I’ve lost Ben, I’ve lost Chuck, I’ve lost Zart and Jeff and Clint and Alby and Winston. I’ve lost everyone. I can’t lose anyone else. I can’t lose you . ‘cause the way I felt when I thought I did…”
“Tommy, the thought of you being gone, it was unbearable,” he painfully confesses. “I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe . There was this…this void in my chest and it…and it kept getting bigger and bigger and I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t want to breathe. I felt so hollow, and the pain just wouldn’t stop! It wouldn’t stop!.”
“I wanted to run back in. I wanted to run right into the flames, follow you into the smoke and the fire and the rubble, and either get you out of there, or just…or if it was too late, just hold you and…and let myself die by your side because… I couldn’t bear the idea of being alive while you weren’t.”
“How could I–” he chokes on one more sob, “How could I go on and wake up and go to sleep and walk and eat and talk and laugh and feel and breathe while you were gone? How do people just do that? How do they just keep on existing when they lose the one they lov–”
The one they love.
He doesn’t need to say it, Thomas knows. He knows. Fuck, how could he have not known? Looking back, he should have. Newt has been living on this axis of the Earth for a long time it seems, watching Thomas fooling himself on the other side, patiently waiting for him to find the escape of the maze within his own mind.
And Newt mourned him silently for hours, mourned the boy who saved him from himself, and mourned his own self too, knowing he would never be the same again. And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.
“I’m sorry, I’m– I’m being ridiculous,” Newt mutters in what could only be shame, before burying his face in his hands. “I’m so sorry, I’m…exhausted. I’m sorry.”
He feels so sick, seeing Newt hating himself this way. He wants to tell him a million things, that he hasn’t ruined their friendship, that he is sorry he had to live through all this, that he will never leave him, ever, that he loves him too for heaven’s sake. But nothing comes out of his mouth. He feels so helpless, as words leave him all by himself to do the hardest thing he’s ever done.
“Newt?” he asks, as softly as he can.
“Tommy, please, just go.” And he wishes he’ll never have to hear those words again.
“Newt, look at me,” he insists, but the only answer he gets is a half-muted sob and a shiver. Only now does Thomas realise that Newt is only wearing a thin jacket, something that can’t possibly keep him from the cold.
He unties it, the scarf that’s been hanging around his neck all day. He unfolds it and carefully covers Newt’s shoulders with it, in a desperate attempt to make the other boy understand that the words he has spoken haven’t made Thomas hate him, quite the contrary.
“Please, Newt,” he ends up begging, and grabs Newt’s wrist tenderly. “Please, look at me.”
And something in his voice or in his touch must have convinced Newt, for he lowers his arms slowly, unveiling his reddened eyes. They’re tired and defeated, but in them lingers still the faintest glimmer of hope; a quivering, pleading eyebrow that is begging Thomas for acceptance at best, for mercy at worst.
Thomas probably doesn’t look much better. He has felt each tear that streamed down his face and knows his eyes are probably rimmed with the same shade of red as Newt’s; and it is here again, the desire to take care of the one he loves. Take the pain away. Take all the pain away.
His hand quickly climbs from Newt’s wrist to his palm and fingers finally meet, slide in empty spaces, find their forever home after a lifetime of looking for it. And when his lips choose to follow the lead, they are welcomed home by the sweetest sound of surprise.
It’s a million emotions at once, like dying and coming back to life endlessly. It’s the sun and the moon and all the goddamn stars. It’s everything. Everything, everything, everything.
Newt gasps under Thomas’ lips, under his touch; exquisite whimpers of bewildered joy that taste like euphoria on his tongue. And it’s addictive, fuck. If only he had known before, he would have kissed Newt the second he met him; he wouldn’t have wasted a single second of his time. He would have devoted all of it to loving Newt, and making him feel loved.
His drunken kiss with Brenda is nothing compared to this. It’s poetry, the way Newt’s fingers find their way to the collar of his shirt and drag him closer, both shyly and bravely, the tip of his fingers deliciously burning his chest with desire. There’s a yearning within him, and Thomas feels it when Newt finally lets go and throws his hands around Thomas’s neck, and kisses, kisses, kisses like he would die on the spot if he ever stopped. Thomas is pretty sure he would too. But when his breath runs short, he has no choice but to let go.
They don’t part, they never do. Thomas stays right there, lips hanging over Newt’s, unable to tear himself away from the treasure he has finally uncovered. If he had any doubt left about the way he felt, it’s all swept away now, kissed into oblivion by the lips of his lover.
His soul had fallen first, his body second, and his brain, as always, had been the last to know.
“You’re an idiot,” Newt breathes against Thomas’s lips, his eyes still closed.
“Why?” he frowns.
“Because you’ve just doomed yourself to living forever,” Newt declares, and when his eyes gloriously open again, they look brand new, purged from any form of sorrow. “I cannot lose you. Not again, not after this. I wouldn’t bear it.”
“I’ll be careful,” Thomas whispers.
“Tommy, have you met yourself?” Newt chuckles, and he’s pretty sure that’s supposed to be a reproach, but who makes reproaches with such a wide grin? “You're the furthest thing from careful.”
“I’ll make an effort?” he promises with a cheeky smile, and it makes Newt laugh, and before he can say anything else, a loud applause erupts from down under.
Thomas looks at where it comes from, down the cliff, and he finds Minho, standing on the rock he previously sat on, clapping like there’s no tomorrow. Fry quickly follows with a wolf-whistle, and Teresa offers him a knowing smirk.
“What? You’re jealous?” Thomas shouts playfully at Minho, and is answered by a “In your dreams, you ugly shank!”
Newt buries his face against Thomas’s shoulder, hiding from the little spying crowd, but he can’t hide his smile for very long. Thomas feels it against his chest, and it’s radiant, and he still can’t believe he is the sole reason for this.
“...You came back,” he hears, muttered against his chest, and there is still disbelief in Newt’s voice, utter disbelief and relief, and so much joy in only three little words.
“I came back.” Thomas repeats, running his fingers in Newt’s golden hair. “I’ll always come back.”
And he must have spoken just the right words, because Newt cups both his cheeks and kisses him, desperately, whole-heartedly, like it’s the first time and last time at the same time. It’s Thomas’s turn to be taken by surprise, and he lets himself be taken. He lets Newt cradle him, take control of him, and he falls in love ever so slowly with the way Newt tightens his grip here and there, squeezing delicately his shoulder, his hair, the back of his neck, anything he can get his fingers to grasp. There are moans and giggles coming out intertwined from both their mouths, ready to be echoed down into the valley and up to the mountain tops.
Paradise, that might just be it.
Until Newt pulls back and furrows his brow in confusion.
“What?” Thomas worries.
“It…it smells like stew?” Newt says.
With a quick glance down the cliff, Thomas sees the members of the Right Arm rounding up around the fire, plates and bowls in hands. He spots Fry, who has already downed half of his portion, and Minho and Teresa in a deep conversation.
“You’re hungry?” he asks Newt.
“I’m starving,” he chuckles, and his tired smile is brilliant, painted on top of the wet streaks his tears have left behind. Thomas wipes them again, and his thumb leaves a pink trail behind.
“Let’s go, then,” he takes both Newt’s hands in his and stands, and Newt follows, like he always does, like he always will.
They are offered two bowls of stew, nothing as good as Frypan’s but good enough, and they squeeze on the log next to their friends. When they sit, Minho wiggles his eyebrows at them; and while Newt rolls his eyes with a smirk, Thomas shoves the Runner hard enough to make him fall off the log.
They are offered a tent for the night too, and they quickly settle in, exhausted by their day. They lay in each other’s arms under a heap of cheap sheets, and for the first time in his life, Thomas isn’t scared of what is to come.
He feels Newt falling asleep. It’s a funny thing, to feel someone else falling asleep. They go limp in your arms, almost merge into you. Their head finds the crook of your neck, the missing puzzle piece filling up the gap. They’ve given you all their trust. In a world where you can wake up to the blade of a knife pressed to your throat, it’s the truest form of affection, to choose to swim the unknown waters of slumber with someone else, and give yourself up entirely to their protection.
Thomas feels his own heart, beating a lullaby for Newt to fall asleep to. It resonates within both their bodies as though they shared the same.
And it’s under a tent in the desert, somewhere by the mountains, that Thomas realises why he has been wanting to survive all along.
One day, he will bury Newt. He will lay his body down on a bed of flowers, the prettiest he will find, and he will sing him a song from the Glade, one of those they sang during bonfire nights. He will light one, a bonfire. Their story began with one, it only makes sense for it to end with one too. He will lay a last kiss on his forehead, for luck, for protection, and he will let him go.
One day, he will bury Newt, because burying their dead is the Gladers’ tradition, and too many of them were denied a grave. Newt’s tomb will be for all of them.
And one day, someone will bury him beside Newt, under the same stone, in the same soil, so his soul won’t have to look too far to find Newt’s.
Their bodies will decompose, only bones remaining. They will feed the earth from under, be part of that neverending cycle. They will become grass and flowers. They will become trees.
They will never die, not truly. Nothing ever really does. They will live forever, atoms of them returning to the world, becoming part of something else, something new. Life is never given, it’s merely lent, and like all lent things, it ought to be given back.
Thomas likes to think he is using his borrowed atoms wisely.
One day, he will bury Newt, so Newt won’t ever have to bury him. It is the most beautiful gift he can give to him, the incommensurable relief of never having to know a world where the other is no more. He will suffer through this immense pain so Newt won’t have to. He will bury Newt, and he will walk away, wrapping Newt’s scarf around his own neck, so that Newt can keep following him in death like he did in life. And when the time comes, he will be the one following Newt, knowing he won’t only have survived. He will have lived.