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When it’s late in the evening and everyone’s asleep except for Brenda who’s taken Gorge’s place at the wheel, the berg is dreadfully quiet. The distant buzz of its engine has become so familiar that it’s blurred into the background of his hearing almost naturally. He could only hear it when he concentrated hard enough, but he didn’t want to. He liked the silence.
Minho dipped the washcloth into a bucket of ice-cold water, only distantly aware of its muddy color. His hand was numb, but he held the cloth tenderly, gently, like he was afraid that if he wiped too hard he’d break something he wouldn’t be able to restore. There was a slight tremble to his finger as he scrubbed dry blood from Newt’s eyebrow, trying very much not to pull too hard. Despite his efforts, sometimes he was just a fraction too harsh with the skin, and Newt’s lifeless eyelid rode up to reveal a glassy white nothingness.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, and then chided himself for talking to a corpse.
A corpse. That’s what Newt was. He looked almost alive, but not quite. They strapped him to a chair and left him in an empty room, because they couldn’t leave his body out there, where it would have gotten burnt, or maybe eaten. They were yet to decide how to protect it from decomposing, but it didn’t matter. This wasn’t Newt. Newt was asleep.
Minho got up, tore a piece from one of the white bedsheets stored in the room and tied it over Newt’s eyes. It was better this way. Newt was asleep.
The cuts and veins on his inhumanly pale face made him look like a marble statue. For a second Minho imagined himself a sculptor and the limp body in front of him — his finest masterpiece. It was easier to look at him now, with his eyes underneath the white stripe of fabric. Suddenly, Minho desperately wished that he had any way to preserve Newt’s face, even like this, even half tortured and blackened and dead. Would he really forget what Newt looked like, one day?
Minho furiously rubbed his cloth on a greenish vein, trying to peel it off, but he only tore the skin of Newt’s cheek. He dropped the towel, panicking, and tried to fix it, tried to squeeze it back together. He expected his hand to be flooded with warmth like it always was when he touched Newt’s face, but it was ice that he touched now. He jerked, realized that his whole arm was shaking. It took him a minute to regain his composure.
This wasn’t Newt, he reminded himself. Newt’s in a better place.
Minho picked up his washcloth and dipped it in the water.