Chapter Text
Minho watches Thomas pick at his food; he’s anxious. He’d like to be able to tell him that there’s nothing to be worried about, but he can’t do that. He doesn’t know how Vince is going to react.
He wasn’t supposed to bring six people back. He was barely allowed to go in the first place. Vince worked with Gally, before, and he knew of Thomas, Sonya, and Harriet. When they could, he and Frypan had talked about them.
Aris and Brenda are the newcomers. Brenda has Jorge to vouch for her, but Aris has… no one.
He can’t call it a mistake, though. Not when it means they’re safe. Thomas is here, and he has some of his friends back.
It doesn’t heal all the hurt, it doesn’t soothe the grief away the way he wants it to, but it helps. Because they’re here, and they’re alive, even if none of them are quite the people he used to know.
(He’s not the person they used to know.)
Vince probably won’t see it that way.
Vince will be upset he brought outsiders in at all.
They have the rules for a reason.
“Minho, come with me.” Vince doesn’t take him far, just out of earshot of the others. “What were you thinking, bringing six new people here?”
“They were taken, Vince, and they got out.”
“Of course that’s what they’re going to tell you. What if they’re spies?”
“They’d die first. Thomas nearly did.”
“Jorge raised Brenda, I know that much.” Vince says. “But the rest of them?”
“Thomas is my husband. Sonya is his best friend, and Newt’s little sister.” Vince… probably doesn’t know who Newt is, actually. “We all grew up together. Harriet and Gally, too. You worked with Gally.”
“That I did. And what about the last one? Aris?”
“He was there with him. I don’t know him, but he was in there, same as the rest of them.” That has to count for something.
“I’ll have to talk to them individually. After breakfast, they’re not to have contact with each other or you until I’m done.”
“I’ll tell them that.” He already knows he’ll be next to impossible to work with all day; he won’t be able to stop worrying.
“Do you really think this has to take all day?”
“Vince is going to drag it out, hermano.” Jorge pats him on the back. “They’re fine. He’s a cautious man, and for good reason.”
“We’re all cautious.”
“He’s the man in charge around here. He’s got more to lose than most if he’s wrong about them. It’s not just trusting our judgment.”
“I know. Does he really think they’re spies?”
“No, I don’t think he does. There’s Gally now, see?” Jorge nods in the direction of the cabin..
It gets a little easier to breathe each time one of them comes back.
They’re not allowed to speak to each other when they leave. Thomas is the last to go in, and he can tell immediately that Vince is not pleased with them. The set of his face is very similar to those of guards he’d pissed off over the years.
“Why should I believe that you don’t mean to lead WICKED right to us?”
In response, Thomas starts counting his scars—he’s got a fair number without taking off his shirt.
“They took my older sister. They killed my younger brother.” He knows his voice still cracks when he talks about Chuck—Teresa had been older, grown by their standards. She’d known what she was doing. She’d known what she was dying for.
Chuck was just a boy. A child. He’s never going to forgive them for killing him. He’s never going to forgive them for taking away his childhood.
“They killed most of my friends. Almost all of the rest of us were kidnapped. Can you give me a reason I would work with them?”
“You make a point, kid, but I can give you a few. Protection in the future. Food, medicine, other necessities.”
“Minho knows where you are, though. And he told us that the first night. Why wouldn’t we just take him back to WICKED and let them get it out of him?”
“Even better point. You didn’t do any of that, though. Instead you followed him back, and you just happen to have Jorge’s daughter with you. Gally, who I was training. You, evidently Minho’s husband, and Sonya and Harriet, his friends. Aris is the only unknown variable among you. Certainly seems planned, doesn’t it?”
Thomas knows it looks bad. Of course it does.
They’re not with WICKED, and from the slight shift in Vince’s posture, Vince knows that. He knows that they’re safe.
He’s grilling them anyway.
But he’s not going to lock them up.
They watch each other for a few tense minutes. Thomas doesn’t know what Vince is waiting for. What else does he want? A blood oath? For Thomas to beg and plead to stay? He didn’t do that when WICKED was torturing him, a staredown isn't going to break him.
“You’re dismissed, kid. Go back to your little friends. You can stay, for now.”
For now?
They don’t have nearly enough people here. It’s a small camp. They need numbers. They need people who know WICKED—their operations outside of the cities they control have stayed small. It’s not worth it, to them, to track down small groups.
If Thomas knows this after one night, there’s no way Vince doesn’t.
He has to let them stay.
They’re his ticket to getting back in.
The others surely will have figured out the same thing, but Thomas doesn’t bring it up over dinner. He doesn’t even want to think about going back there. It’s too much of a risk; they don’t probably don’t have the weaponry needed to manage a siege on a whole city.
They might have some now-outdated weapons, maybe a few guns, which haven’t been in regular use since before WICKED’s takeover, but he and the others have been the test subject for several new weapons before mass release to the public—but not for self-defense or even the militia WICKED maintains.
Control methods, is what they really are. Say the wrong word, and you’re zapped. Step in a place you’re not authorized to be, and you’re zapped. Take too much food, and they know. Most buildings are controlled by sensors, and things that are too sensitive for the new technology are under heavy guard at all times.
Getting out had taken them so long. Getting back in? They’ll have adapted already. Increased security, removed blindspots. It will be impossible. Things will be different. Their knowledge will only help so much.
“What did Vince say?” Minho pulls him close. “Did you threaten you?”
“No, not really.” He didn’t have to say it. Their time here is based on their cooperation.
Right now, it just feels like another kind of cage. “It’s just a lot to adjust to. I’m grateful to be here, but it’s a huge change.”
“Yeah, of course. Do you want to go to bed early?”
The darkness in the cabin—no windows, because he doesn’t think they have glass here—reminds him a little of their cell. But it’s far more open, and it’s got an actual bed, and Minho.
So it’s okay. He’ll get used to it.
Once they’ve had a few days to get their feet under them, they’re all put to work. Gally doesn’t take up with Vince, though, instead staying with Frypan. Harriet joins up under Minho, and Brenda works mainly with Jorge.
If Vince wanted them to split up, they’ve handled that for him already. Thomas and Sonya take their time deciding—no one seems to mind if they work with them for a few days to figure out what works for them.
Aris seems to be doing the same, but he’s struck out on his own. Thomas is kind of glad, actually. He doesn’t avoid Aris on purpose, but he doesn’t really like talking to him. Teresa’s voice sounds a warning in his head whenever Aris gets a little too sketchy.
In the end, though, they take over the nearly-abandoned greenhouse, once Gally shows it to them.
“Fry’s the only one who really comes in here anymore. There are the gardens and the woods as food sources.” He explains. “They don’t have to rely on it the way they used to.”
“But an additional food source is never a bad thing.”
“You won’t be helping us with this one?” Sonya looks over at Gally.
“All you really needed my help with was building it. You guys did most of the designing.” It’d been a siblings project. Newt and Sonya, Thomas and Teresa. “And this one is already built. If I know anything about you two, it’s that you’ll have it up and running within a few weeks.” Frypan has some leftover seeds from planting, so they start with those.
In the privacy of their greenhouse, they have many breakdowns. Some of them involve throwing old, useless things at the wall. All of them involve crying. Between the crying and throwing, they repair the walls and the roof. It’s hard without glass windows, but Sonya finds large plastic sheets that can handle the rain and wind and they make it work. Gally helps them add on a stone fireplace to heat it, and Thomas maps out empty sconces to hold coals in the winter.
Their first plants are fully grown by the time they’re done, but the finished greenhouse sees the worst breakdowns yet.
Their birthdays.
It’s when they realize that Thomas is now a year older than Teresa ever got to be, and Sonya is the age Newt was when he died.
It’s been years. Years where they didn’t even know what day it was–they missed Teresa’s, Chuck’s, and Newt’s birthdays already this year–years where their ages didn’t matter. Either they would escape and hopefully find someone they knew alive, or they would die there.
Thomas splits his knuckles on the stone wall.
“I just—I didn’t realize it’d been that long.” Thomas whispers to Minho that night. Time had been a difficult concept, while they’d been in their cell.
“I know.” Minho’s lived with this for longer than he has; Alby was the oldest of them, and he’s been older than that for a couple of years now. “I won’t say it gets better, it really hasn’t, but it gets easier to deal with. You know what works.”
“I hear that that husband of yours has been dallying off with one of those girls in the old greenhouse.” Vince says it like he thinks Minho has no idea what Thomas does with his day.
“You know as well as I do that they’ve got it functioning better than we ever did.” No amount of WICKED torture, it seems, could have dulled their minds. They’ve even managed to piece together solar panels. They only work about half the time, but it’s better than nothing, and it’s more than they had before. “And you wouldn’t have left them to it if you thought it was a useless project.”
“I always thought it was a shame we couldn’t manage the upkeep of the gardens and the greenhouse at the same time. They’ve gotten us another source of food, and it will only become more fruitful each year.”
Vince makes it so easy to hate him, sometimes. “Anything else you wanted to talk to me about?”
“I suppose your friends have all proven themselves well enough. But I was wondering if they’d be willing to offer up a little more information.”
“That’s something you need to ask them.”
“They’ve all become quite good at dodging me, it seems.”
“They don’t like talking about it.” And why would they? Minho doesn’t know what Vince’s end goal is here. It’s not like he's going to make his friends talk about their time being tortured. Not unless they want to. All he knows is that they have monthly sleepovers, during which he goes and spends the night at Frypan’s to give them their space.
(This is also why he knows, in detail, how Gally kisses. If you give him half a chance, Frypan will turn into the sappiest person ever. However, he also gets his turn to be sappy about Thomas, so he can’t complain too much.)
“He wants us to lead a mission back in.” is Thomas’s grim response as soon as he tells him. “I’ve been wondering when it would happen.”
“What?”
“We have knowledge no one else does. He thinks we can get inside the city, into their main building, even.”
“We can’t.” Harriet says. “We’d be crazy to go back. It’s been almost a year. They’ll have updated everything. We don’t know shit anymore.”
“He wants you to go back?” Jorge’s voice is low, almost dangerous. “No. I’m not letting it happen. You are all children.”
“Not to Vince.” Gally shrugs. “We haven’t been kids since the war started, if you ask him. And we’re all adults now, anyway.”
“No. You’re not. You’re children. Children born and raised in times of war are still children, despite how much they have seen. Despite their apparent maturity. You are children. And you’re not going back there. I don’t care what he wants. He seems to forget that this is not a dictatorship.”
Jorge fixes all of them with a firm look. “None of you talk to him alone, you hear me? If he wants to talk to you, you come get me or send someone to get me. He’s not sending you back there. Any of you.”
That night, Thomas’s nightmares return in full force—and Minho is just as helpless to stop them as he was the first time around.
The next few weeks are miserable—and not just in terms of the weather. Gally, Harriet, Sonya, Brenda, Aris, and Thomas disappear into the greenhouse together quite often and Minho begins to worry that the place Thomas and Sonya have made into their sanctuary is becoming just another form of prison. He and Frypan are constantly looking over their shoulders in case Vince is there, waiting to pounce.
“You’re not going back there.” Minho knows his words aren’t as reassuring as he wants them to be.
“We’re going to tell him no, if he asks. None of what we know will still be good, anyway. And who knows what’s been happening in the city.” Thomas mutters. “The look in his eyes sometimes, Minho, it scares me. Reminds me of some of the guards at WICKED, or Janson or Paige.”
This isn’t something Thomas has mentioned before.
“We can leave. We know enough to survive on our own. Run away.” Especially if Jorge comes with them. He’d kept Brenda alive when she was young, managed for years before she was taken and he found their camp.
“You really think Vince will let us go that easily? He’s got power here, Minho. And he’s not afraid to use it.”
“We might be better off on our own.” Sure, they won’t have the cabins for shelter, or probably even a steady food source for a while, but they’ve handled that before. They can get through that.
“I’m not worried about whether or not we can make it.” Thomas admits, turning his face into Minho’s chest. “I’m more worried about WICKED finding us. I know it’s been a year, but if I know them, I know that there’s no way they’ll believe we’re dead if they don’t have our bodies. They don’t bother places like this as long as they’re not causing trouble. We’re not. We’re not pulling city kids from the streets, or trying to get in, or anything. So they’ll leave us alone. But they probably knew you were here almost as soon as this place was set up. They have aerial technology, Minho.”
“So as soon as we leave…”
“They’ll track us down.”
“Exactly. That’s why we all opted out of patrols. We’d notice if they were flying drones directly above us. But in the woods, with all the tree cover? It’d be hard to spot. They might think we’re here, but since they haven’t done anything to attack, either they’ve decided we’re not worth it or they don’t actually have enough information to justify sending someone to get us back.”
“You really think they’d go to those lengths to get you back?”
“Minho, they had years-long experiments running on most of us. They lost their subjects and potentially years of data they could have gathered. If they thought it was possible to retrieve us, they’d do it.”
“Okay. We’ll stay here, then. And maybe Jorge can talk sense into Vince.” Or someone else. Someone who works with them regularly. They have people who can vouch for them, it’s not like they’ve been hiding away from the others, except for very recently.
“I’m going to talk to some people tomorrow, okay? So if you can’t find me, don’t worry. I’ll see you at every meal.”
“Just so long as you stay away from Vince, I don’t care who you talk to.” Thomas can’t hide the yawn that engulfs the end of his sentence. “Love you, Minho.”
“I love you more.” Minho allows himself a few minutes of peaceful mental silence as he holds Thomas close.
He’s not getting a lot of sleep tonight. He has too much to think about, too much to plan.
It’d be easier if he knew exactly what he was planning for, but he’s worked with less before.
They work out a schedule so none of them are ever alone; for Sonya and Thomas, that’s easy. They’ve recruited a few more people to help in the greenhouse, and they’re always together. Harriet can stick with Minho, Brenda with Jorge, and Gally with Frypan. Aris is the one who is hard to figure out.
“I’ll just switch groups every week or so.” Aris finally suggests. “I do it often enough anyway, it’s not like it’d be weird.”
“Just as long as we make sure you’re all accounted for.” Jorge picks up his cup, but doesn’t drink. “A few of us have been talking about ways to calm Vince down about this. Sending you lot back in might well just start the whole damn thing up all over again, and that’s the last thing we need.”
“Jorge,” Brenda’s sitting on the floor at his feet, and it reminds Minho of the kids who sit at their parents’ feet at their big bonfires. “Are you trying to tell us you have other friends?”
“I think it’d be stranger if I didn’t, hija.” Jorge ruffles her hair; she’s cut it short recently, and seems not to mind it as much.
“Why are we so scared of Vince?” Gally asks. “It’s not like he could force us to go. Most of us could probably overpower him.”
“Don’t bet on that. He’s got his own share of friends.” Thomas says, and he just sounds so tired. Minho knows he hasn’t been sleeping well; he keeps waking to the other side of the bed cold and empty. But so far, Thomas has been doing a pretty good job of hiding it. “And it’s not overpowering him physically that we need to worry about.”
“The Psychs.” Sonya whispers. “That’s what you mean, right? He’s gonna try and twist our thinking if he can.”
“If he gets and can keep any of us alone, he’ll certainly try his best.” Harriet agrees. “That’s why we all need to stay away.”
This is one of those things they don’t talk about. Minho, Frypan, and Jorge all exchange looks—it’s a rare day that they actually get new information about WICKED.
“Not just the Psychs. I told Minho this a while ago, but something about him reminded me of Paige and Janson. And the guards. The look in his eyes…” Thomas trails off.
“Vince had his head on straight during the war.” Gally says. “He was one of our best. And now I’m not even supposed to be in a room alone with him?”
“The problem isn’t that he’s a war leader, Gally.” Jorge takes a long sip of his drink. “The problem is that he’s forgotten what it means to lead in times of relative peace. His ways haven’t changed; he likely still considers you all soldiers rather than victims or even prisoners of war. He forgets that this isn’t a militia hastily thrown together for our own defense, but a community of survivors and their children.”
The nightmares only get worse as they get closer to the anniversary of their escape. Part of Thomas still thinks this one of WICKED’s mind tricks, but there are things about Minho they’ve never gotten right that are present here.
The scars on his back, for one. The way one of them bisects one of his moles into two almost-perfect hemispheres.
So he knows it’s real.
He knows Minho knows he’s not sleeping, but neither of them have brought it up yet.
“What do you say we take a lazy day tomorrow?” Harriet throws her legs over his lap. “We deserve it.”
“I don’t know, Harriet.” If he sits still, it’s going to consume him. He needs to stay busy.
“It wasn’t really a question. If you’d been paying attention to Sonya, you’d know we’ve already got it all planned. Frypan is going to give us some extra chocolate, we’re stocking up on logs tonight, and we’re going to bring our bed down and all squish together all day.”
“I can’t, Harriet.”
“I like it about as much as you do, Thomas.” She says. “You and me, we keep busy and we keep ourselves from thinking about any of our shit. Well, that’s most of us, I think. Just how we were brought up, I guess. That’s what tomorrow is for. So we can scream and cry and get it all out and hopefully go back to sleeping at night.”
“I wish it were that easy.” Thomas mutters.
“Why can’t it be?”
“Is anything ever as simple as it sounds for us?”
“Is there anything we haven’t figured out together if we try?” Sonya squeezes in between him and the wall. “We can get each other through our nightmares too.”
“Minho told you.”
“He didn’t have to. You’re having trouble following conversations, you look dreadful, honestly. But this time WICKED’s not forcing you to stay up for days.” Harriet pokes his forehead.
“It was that or your survival. You should know I’d choose your lives over something like sleep every time.”
“That doesn’t make it healthy. Talk to him. He might not get it in the way we do, but you know he still gets you in ways we don’t.”
“I know.” He doesn’t know why he hasn’t.
Maybe because if he talks about it, it means it really happened. He can’t avoid it or dismiss it as a bad dream.
He wants to forget it all.
It would be so much easier if he could just forget it all.
But he knows his friends won’t let him pretend like that, not when they were there with him.
“I’ll talk to him.” Harriet and Sonya don’t look convinced–for good reason, he knows. “I will, tonight.”
“We’ll go to Fry and Gally’s for the night, then. And you better not forget about our lazy day tomorrow!”
“Harriet and Sonya tell you about their plans?”
“To take over the cabin tomorrow? Yeah, I’d heard. You’re not going to try and bail, are you?” Minho’s teasing, but that doesn’t mask his concern.
“No. No, I’m not.” Thomas has done much harder things than talk to his husband. He can do this. “They’re spending the night at Fry and Gally’s so we can talk. I’d–I’d like to tell you about some of my nightmares.”
“You know you can tell me any of it.” Minho promises, taking his hands. If he could hold Minho’s hand for the rest of their lives, he would.
If only the man-made apocalypse would stop getting in the way.