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The first time it happens, it just makes sense.
The world is gone. Only a few hundred of them are left here, at the edge of a corroding planet. There are enough to rebuild, but it’s slow going when most of them have to repair themselves before they can think about log cabins, farming land or laying down roots. They survived, but the cost was high and many of them never thought they’d have a future to look forward to. They don’t seem to know what to do with one.
Gally can’t help them.
He never really thought he’d live beyond the Maze, let alone through the spear that punctured his left lung. Maybe he shouldn’t have. But he did. And then he lived through the Scorch as well, and the destruction of the last city. He’s one of those people who ended up in this spartan camp and isn’t sure what comes next.
So they’re on the beach when it starts. The bonfire is slowly dying down, casting a warm amber pool of light around the two of them left there. It burns up, the moonless night vast and black beyond the reach of the embers. The stars were shattered from their constellations years ago when the Sun Flares hit and with that, the world lost its oldest navigation system. Maybe the world is as lost as they are.
“It’s stupid,” Brenda says, and Gally turns his head to look at her.
She’s angry. They all are, but right then, the flames glowing across the set lines of her face, she’s especially angry. It was a bad day for arguments. Gally joined her a little over two hours ago, feeling wrung out from his own battles with the slowly forming building crew. The small group around the blaze were just dispersing then, but despite Brenda’s bad mood, she hasn’t made him leave. This is their normal; both of them struggle to ask for help or company, and it’s easy to lash out to make people walk away, so this became theirs.
Gally has learned how to tell when Brenda wants to be left alone and when she wants someone to stay even if she’ll never say it.
There’s a bottle between her hands, the glass discolored and holding the dregs of Gally’s latest attempt at moonshine. It’s nothing like the stuff from the glade. Its awful. There’s nothing fermented in it that could be coaxed to alcoholic, but the piercingly bitter taste is so bad it’s almost as good as getting drunk.
For a lot of them, it’s good enough right now but Brenda barely seems to notice it. She tips the last of it back like it’s water then casts the bottle aside, still glaring darkly into the dying fire.
“So stupid,” she repeats. “I don’t know why Vince thinks he can set all this up so fast. It’s been a month. Aris had a panic attack just two days ago. No one cares about which way the mess hall faces.”
Gally couldn’t agree more.
Haven may be safe, but it isn’t peaceful. Gally knows from the years in the Glade that peace can be a hard ask when everyone is scared. Vince is trying to establish a community, and they need one, its true, but its too much too soon for so many of them.
There are the Scorch survivors who just want to get back to normal. They want order, routine, roofs, leaders, roles and to be able to move on. Then there are the WCKD survivors, and for them, moving on is still a very distant concept. Most of them would just like to have one night they don’t wake up screaming with needles piercing their memories.
“I’m not ready to just…pack up and move on,” Brenda says, throwing a handful of sand at the fire. The grains flare up as they pass through the lick of flames. They sear and scatter into the night sky like tiny glowing meteors. “I want to be angry. I want to hurt, to feel like I can actually bleed again over the people I lost. I want-”
Her breath snags and she looks away, far out of the wash of amber light to a stretch of beach where a solitary figure sits, silhouetted by the torch lights from the camp, his back to the ocean. Gally’s laying in the sand but he turns his head to follow her line of sight and his chest draws tight.
“I want him to find a way to be okay,” Brenda murmurs.
“He will,” Gally says. It’s kind of automatic now, blindly trying to reassure, and it’s only when he’s said it that he realises he just doesn’t know.
“Will he?” Brenda replies, and it doesn’t sound like she’s seeking assurance. It sounds like she’s challenging him.
Gally likes that about her. He always has. She’ll call anyone on anything if she thinks they’re bullshitting the situation. Its refreshing. It’s something that helped her survive. It’s also hot as hell if someone really sets her off but that’s not the point.
Some of the others here are wary of him, and Gally can’t blame them for it. He did go rogue, technically, when working with the rebels, and that was after he went rogue back in the Glade. There’s blood under his fingernails and he can still feel the scar tissue in his chest where one of his closest friends aimed to kill. Maybe he is someone to be afraid of; he’s killed people he shouldn’t have (and some he should) and lived when he wasn’t meant to. They’re all trying to heal and he knows he’ll have to earn their trust back. Its something he’s made peace with.
Brenda has never been afraid of him in that way.
Even when he had a hand in kidnapping her, Gally remembers the way she’d looked almost exasperated as she was thrown into the back of a van and held in place with the barrel of a gun.
Maybe it was because she hadn’t known his betrayals, or maybe it was because a different world had raised her.
“I don’t know,” Gally redecides. He turns from the shrouded shape of the boy far down the beach alone and looks back at Brenda. She didn’t reveal this worry to him for false reassurance, she shared it because she wants his honesty when she knows Jorge or Vince won’t give it, either out of concern for her, or because of their own denial. “He’s been through a lot,” Gally says, “but the Thomas I knew wasn’t ever beaten by much.”
Brenda’s eyes are sad and sharp, like broken shards of glass. “Nor was the boy I knew,” she says evenly, “but he’s not the same one any more.”
Gally can’t deny that, but he also doesn’t know how to agree.
He’s pretty sure he and Brenda never knew the same Thomas to begin with and the one they brought back to Safe Haven is neither of them.
“Be angry,” Gally says instead, and he can feel the curious warmth of Brenda’s gaze shifting over him. He talks to the broken stars and tastes woodsmoke when he inhales. They leave Thomas to the shadows “You’ve earned it. We all have. Be angry, be broken, let it hurt. Just don’t let it win.”
“Said with wisdom,” Brenda says quietly.
She knows about his time in the tunnels, before he found Lawrence. She knows about the gun he put to his own throat.
“I was alone,” Gally tells her, though she knows that part too. “You aren’t.”
Brenda gives him a tiny tipped nod of acknowledgement but Gally isn’t even worried about her.
He knows better than to think of her as fearless; he’s seen her afraid, seen her terrified, but in this she’s always been something far stronger than anything Gally knew before. The Glade had only worked if they could all get along. It wasn’t big enough to handle animosity; something that quickly became clear when Thomas had arrived, but for Brenda, the Scorch was a huge place.
It had raised her, and then it had tried to kill her. It didn’t realise it had raised a girl with sand in her blood and survival in her bones. It didn’t realise until too late that it raised her not to break.
She proves it, a humorless smirk crossing her features a moment later as she exhales into the fire.
“You know, this is usually the part where you’re meant to offer to take my mind off of it or ‘help me feel something’,” she says, and Gally can hear the air quotes in it. He can also hear the careful insinuation layered between the words. “You’re disappointing the ruins of Hollywood right now.”
Gally snorts.
Hollywood can get fucked.
His heart twists though, reckless abandon flooding hot through his bloodstream as it ignites a kind of wanting that he’s just simply not had the time or care for in months. He sucks in a breath, shoulders pressing into the sand at his back, and turns his head to look at her properly. He wants to know if he’s alone, if he’s reading into it.
He’s not.
“If that’s an offer I’d be stupid not to accept it,” he says, “but it doesn’t have to be to take your mind off it. And you’re already feeling something.”
Brenda’s eyebrow raises, another challenge. “Then what’s the point?”
Gally’s smile this time is the humorless one. “Ever just beaten someone up and felt better afterwards? Sometimes that’s the point.”
Brenda’s fingers curl and release, her wrists soft, eyes distant and Gally thinks she’s remembering punching someone, probably long, long before he ever knew her.
“If it was an offer?” Brenda asks. She focuses on him, glowing embers in her eyes.
Gally swallows. There’s electric in his nerves and his pulse is humming. He’d forgotten what it was like to want something like this, to feel it blaze to life and take root deep at the base of his spine, low in his stomach. “I’m not stupid enough to say no. Just tell me when.”
She can control it, he doesn’t care.
He’s not angry the same way she is, at least not today and it doesn’t matter anyway because now that it’s been said; now that this has been laid in the sand between them, he wants her in whatever way she’ll allow.
Brenda wouldn’t have asked the question if she hadn’t already decided, and she doesn’t pretend to consider. Gally likes that about her, too.
She gets up, crosses to him in two strides and sits down in his lap, knees sinking into the sand either side of his waist.
“When,” she says flatly, and then, “This okay?”
He’s already reached up to grasp her hips in his hands. It’s a little bit to balance her but mostly it’s to hold her there. He feels heavy, laying back in the sand, feels like he’s sinking and she’s fire-warm, her slight weight enough to make him feel pinned with the way her legs close in on him.
“This is tame,” Gally says, aware he’s goading her, aware that she wants to be goaded.
Neither of them are exactly shy, but right now they’re hurting and self-destructive. They’re not thinking about next week or consequence, and this; teasing each other in this way is familiar ground. Brenda pokes at his ribs and Gally knows that however this ends they’ll both be okay tomorrow. Gally cares about her a lot, but she’s his friend entirely separate to the way she feels like kindling in his hands and if they were strong enough to survive the city, WCKD, the losses and the mood swings of starting again, they’re strong enough to survive a morning after.
There’s a sudden, burning freedom in that; being with someone you got to know when a world was crumbling down.
“By the way, your moonshine sucks,” Brenda says, before she folds forwards and kisses him.
It does suck. Gally knows that, but only because he tried some before handing out a few of the bottles. He can’t taste it on her now even as he slides a hand around the back of her neck and licks into her mouth. She tastes like stolen blackberries from Frypan’s collection, like firesmoke and rage borne of grief. She feels better than anything he’s touched in a year.
He presses his thumb into the side of her neck, absently wonders if she’d let him bruise it, and tugs her from the back of her knee so she loses her balance. To the rest of the world, she’s usually all sleek, honed muscle; cut from sharp edges the way shrapnel metal is, but right now she’s soft, her body yielding as her weight falls into him. She makes a sound at the back of her throat, keening and bitten, and Gally’s fingers tighten around her leg as he swallows it and chases another.
She bites his tongue.
It’s a reprimand of sorts, not quite hard enough to hurt though the sharp sting of it makes his bones molten and his vision wash out. Brenda’s fingers span out over his stomach and she presses down as he inhales. He can feel the pressure like a hot brand against his ribs expanding and she fills his lungs. Her legs close in around him. She kisses fiercely, pouring out anger and helplessness and Gally can’t help groaning at the rich taste of it as she holds him down in the sand just with her fingertips and the deliberate press of her hips.
The hint of strength in it is sexy as hell. He’s wondering if, after everything he lived through, he’ll be able to survive her.
Brenda pulls away and holds still, suspended above him and haloed in fiery golden light. She’s breathless, and cracked open in a way she never lets people see. The earlier look in her eyes has gone blazing, tempered with charged recklessness. Gally lets his hands fall into the sand, the same destructive yearning hollowing his bones and cauterizing his nerves.
“The moonshine does taste like shit,” he tells her, and his voice is wrecked already. He can barely breathe. “It’s not meant to taste good. But you do.”
Brenda makes a coarse sound that’s disbelieving, but she’s still too raw to be amused. “Liar,” she accuses, without heat.
“I don’t lie to you,” Gally says.
That makes her scoff. “Bullshit.”
Gally rolls his eyes, amends, “I don’t get away with lying to you.”
“Getting closer,” she says.
Gally sets his hands on her legs, coasts them up to her hips with purpose and surges upright, pulling her forwards in his lap. Her sweater is seared with fire heat and it seems fitting that she can burn him literally too. He hears her breath catch, just, over the crack and snap of embers on the logs.
Brenda’s fingers curl against his stomach, her eyes slide along the seam of his mouth and she bites at her own lip.
“Close enough?” Gally asks her.
“No.”
He treads fingerprints up the arch of her back, and then around her neck gently canting her head to the side. It’s not nearly so absent minded now, the question sitting low in his throat like molten gold, of whether she’d let him mark her, but he pushes it down. Both of them have been bruised enough.
(Gally remembers the ones long-gone on himself; a purple and blue map of brutality across his heart that took long weeks to properly fade. He thinks new ones the shape of Brenda’s mouth and fingers would actually be welcome, might lessen the way he feels like half of him is scar tissue, but maybe she feels differently and he won’t leave any trace of himself on her body without her permission).
He twists his fingers into her hair, tugging gently to tip her head back, and then skims his other hand up the side of her waist. His thumb traces over her ribs, then higher, knuckles brushing feather-light (far too light for her) under the gentle swell of her breast. This part of Brenda has no harsh edges but it still feels vividly like she can break him. She shivers under the barely-there touch, bites back a gasp before it can truly wash into the sky. He feels it trap in her lungs under his palm instead.
Gally asks, “Now?”
“Tame,” she says, takes his word to provoke him. “I don’t need seducing.”
He knows that.
She is the first person he’s done this with in a long time. The last was Minho, but that was before the Scorch, before Thomas, before a lot of things. They aren’t those people any more. Gally isn’t thinking of anything that came before as Brenda rises up on her knees over him, fingers lacing at the back of his head. She kisses him again, once only but not chaste and then pulls back, still balanced where she’s just a little taller than him. Gally isn’t used to many people being taller and he’s quickly finding it somewhat addictive when its her and when the promise it offers burns hot under his hands.
“Your place, or mine?” She asks.
“Mine.”
Gally brings both his hands back down to her legs, wrapping them around the back of her thighs. He stands up, lifting her with him and relishing just a little in the way she holds her breath for a moment at the display of strength. She’s not weightless; toned muscle, a core of shrapnel steel and the weight of survivor’s guilt all have indefinable mass, but she’s far lighter than the logs and tools he’s used to carrying. She weighs less than the memory of a gun in his hand and less than his own nightmares.
Lifting her is easy.
He’s not stupid enough to try to carry her, though. She would probably cripple him and he has better things to do tonight than curl up in a fetal position. So he sets her on the sand and she goes to kick some of it into the fire.
Gally sucks in a breath, anticipation itching in his veins as his lungs fill with ash, smoke and salt. He doesn’t want to be a cliché, and he knows she wouldn’t react well to being asked if she was sure; like she’d have started any of this if she weren’t, but he also has to know, so he asks carefully into the blanket of darkness around them, “Still tame?”
Brenda’s fingers curl around his wrist in the dark, and she squeezes in a way that’s both tender and brisk. This is the version of her that’s his friend; that he got to know over blueprints of the WCKD lab, the one he handed off a bunch of immune kids to because he knew she’d get them out or die in the attempt.
She knows him better than to think he’s having second thoughts. It’s a nice place to be in. Gally likes the honesty of it.
“Very,” she says, because she’ll never be a cliché either, and Gally exhales as she tugs on his wrist.
He’s not worried about their choices tonight changing anything.
(Maybe that, on its own, is reckless).
- x -
Gally wakes up the following morning in scavenged sheets that smell like her, with her taste still on the roof of his mouth and at the back of his throat.
Brenda is already gone, along with all physical trace of her even though she fell asleep beside him the night before.
She’s probably gone straight back to raid Frypan’s harvest stores before the others are up, and knowing her well enough that he’s sure of that almost makes him smile to himself in the lax emptiness of the hut. He feels sore in ways he’s unused to, but it’s a welcome change, a better kind of muscle-weary and tired than the kind that sets in after long days of working on building the camp. He feels somehow more free; like she’s burned rage and frustration out of his bones.
He lays there as the pale morning sun slowly leeches through the gaps in the branch-woven walls, shifting threads of pastel light over the packed earth floor. There’s the distant hum of the camp waking up eventually, and he knows if he doesn’t get up, someone will come looking.
So he pulls on some fresh clothes from the little pile he’d claimed from the communal laundry and ducks out of the doorway, headed for the bare bones of the Mess hall Vince is trying to get built.
Frypan’s breakfast is laid out down the length of their driftwood dining table. It’s a warped, kind of shapeless thing, worn smooth by the ocean and propped on cut logs then lined with benches, chairs and other items passable as seating. People from all over the camp mill about; some claiming spots at the table with their plates and others filling bowls before meandering away – back to bed or down to the beach.
Gally leans across a steaming platter of scrambled eggs to lay up his plate with crisped bacon strips.
Brenda is already there, arguing with Frypan over what looks like a huge bowl of some kind of fruit.
“Hey,” she says to Gally from across the table, shoving the bowl under his nose. “What do you think this is?”
He rears his head back to focus properly. “I- fruit?”
Frypan throws up his hands. Brenda isn’t dissuaded.
“What kind ?”
Gally frowns. “How should I know. Why is this even an argument?”
“Because it’s taking up space on the table where blackberries could be.”
Gally presses his mouth closed, eyebrows raised, and focuses back on his helping of bacon. He happens to know about Brenda’s love of blackberries but Frypan, evidently unaware she’s been stealing them even when they’re not on the menu rotation, reaches out to snatch the bowl from her.
“This is good breakfast food,” he insists, putting it back down.
“You don’t even know what it is,” Brenda points out flatly. “It could be poisonous.”
Three feet behind them, Aris spits a mouthful of the bright pink fruit out across the table. They all wheel to look at him as he freezes over his plate, eyes huge and round, looking at the pile of discarded black seeds in pale juice from the serving he’s already eaten.
“It’s probably not,” Brenda offers.
Frypan scrubs at his head with a hand, heaving a huge sigh. “Its not,” he promises, leaning around her to speak to Aris. “Its fine. Its pomegranate. I think.”
Aris gulps slowly and nods, but he doesn’t reach to pick up any more fruit.
Frypan lets out a worn sigh and gives Brenda a deeply dry look. “Can you stop scaring people and go….find a hobby or something.”
He rolls his eyes, not truly annoyed, and heads off. There’s a tiny crew of people who are decent cooks that he gathered together to help form a new kitchen of sorts. It’s not nearly the close-knit group of boys who worked seamlessly back in the Glade to feed them, but it’s something.
Sometimes it’s just too much for him. Loss hit them all in different ways, and for Frypan, who lost all of his team before they left the Maze, going back to the routine hurts more some days than others. On those days he kicks everyone clear of the makeshift kitchen and barricades himself in with the ghosts of the boys he knew to fill the empty space.
It’s probably that kitchen he’s headed to now, though, checking to make sure nothing has burned or spoiled because meals run in shift patterns, what with so many of them to feed, and there will be more batches coming out for a while yet.
Brenda turns to him instead and Gally raises an eyebrow at her.
“Suggestions for hobbies?” she asks, picking up not a plate of her own, but one of the half empty plates of crudely made waffles for the table. She bites into the corner of one, just a touch on the side of vicious.
“Croquet,” Gally says, deadpan.
She throws the waffle at him. “I’ll consider it.”
Which means she won’t, but they both knew that before he said it.
Before Gally can open his mouth again, Minho sidles up to them.
He looks exhausted, pulled at the seams and undone. His hair is on end in a way that speaks of restless sleep and there are bruises underneath his bleary eyes.
“Hey,” he offers, in a voice that scratches his throat.
“Don’t eat the fruit,” Brenda says.
Minho blinks, casts his eyes along to the bowl in question and then nods slowly. “Where’s Fry’s bacon?”
Gally hands him the plate he’s been filling. “Go back to sleep after,” he suggests.
Minho’s night terrors are far from waning. They still happen most nights and sometimes he’ll wake more than once, Gally hearing him scream from the edge of the trees where he set up his tent away from the others. Even Vince knows better than to ask Minho to pitch in on the routine he’s trying to set in motion.
Minho nods absently, then lets out a low sigh. “It wasn’t me,” he says. “It’s- It was just a rough night.”
There’s a fractured look in Brenda’s eyes that wasn’t there five minutes before. It wasn’t there six hours ago either. Even if Gally didn’t know who Minho was sharing his tent with, he wouldn’t need the name to know who they were talking about.
Brenda said this last night, but here, in the brightening wash of sunlight along the coast, pouring across the planked decking that might eventually become an actual mess hall, the truth of it is all the more real.
Thomas isn’t the same boy they knew. That boy had been impulsive and wilful with more courage than sense. This one is shattered, barely a shadow. It makes sense. He lost one of his best friends in an effort to get the other back, and then he lost the only person who’d known him before he even knew himself, and all of it in one night. He never had a chance to grieve any of it before he thought he might die as well, and a month isn’t enough time to fix that.
Minho needs him, and some days, Gally thinks that’s the only thing holding Thomas together. The knife in Newt’s chest might as well have killed them both.
Minho is different too, though in his own way. The horrors he suffered are just as brutal and twisted and trying to leave them behind is draining even though it’s the only real choice. They’ll never be the same, not any of them, but they don’t have to be.
“You both need time,” Gally says. “You should take it.”
There’s a deep ache between his ribs, hollowing the space beneath his heart. He hates to watch it; to see people who were his world try to put themselves back together when all they have are broken pieces. They’re all a mosaic of the things they’ve suffered, held together with the few good things they got to keep.
He glances over his shoulder, casting his eyes around the group.
Sonya and Harriet are just sitting down at the far end near the pitchers of water. Three younger boys – too young to have been part of WCKD’s experimentation – dash up to the table, grab a roll of bread each and run off again. Jorge catches his eye, stood far down the deck, out of reach of the table or its shadow, and he tips his head in a nod.
Gally desperately doesn’t think about anything that happened last night for fear Jorge might read it on his face. He keeps looking.
Vince is nowhere to be seen yet. Good.
“Head back,” Gally says, turning back to Minho. They’ve known each other long enough that Minho will read this as a suggestion only and know he can simply ignore it. “I’ll keep them off your case.”
Minho seems distant and glazed as his eyes rove over the plates, unseeing, and then he nods. “Yeah. Probably a good idea. Thanks, Gal.”
Gally nods. Minho stumbles away from the table, fingers in a white-knuckled grip around the edges of the plate. Gally looks up again in time to catch Brenda’s turbulent expression, cast off vaguely towards the distant treeline. Somewhere between being pressed in the sand underneath her as the sky burnt black and this very moment, he’s decided he really won’t lie to her any more, so he doesn’t offer any words that he knows are meaningless.
There’s a creak of wood beside him, and a young blonde girl approaches the table, giving Gally a careful berth as she reaches for the bowl of fruit.
Aris leans in. His eye twitches and he says, “I wouldn’t eat that.”
The girl looks between the three of them in confused shock, hesitates and then snatches a slightly stale bagel before running off.
“You really are scaring people,” Gally remarks, staring after the girl. Brenda will know he’s talking to her.
When he looks around again, she’s pushing a plate into his hands. It’s one that she’s picked up and piled with the different things he’d put on his own before handing it to Minho. There’s a particularly generous serving of bacon on the side. Her expression is half focused on the dubious bowl of fruit and half on making sure he doesn’t drop the one she’s passing him.
Gally knows that the softness of Brenda’s heart is something hard-earned, that she’s learned to guard it fiercely. He knows she’s observant, and that she cares for people even if the ways she shows that aren’t always conventional. So none of this should be a surprise, but he still feels his own heart twist as he takes the offered food.
Brenda just shrugs as she scoops up the stolen waffle plate again, this time moving away from the table with it. She doesn’t even look to see if Frypan might catch her. Gally can’t help it; the way something inside him lifts, weightless, as he watches it.
“That’s their problem, not mine,” she says.
Gally shakes his head. “Maybe you really should get a hobby.”
She gives him a look over her shoulder that’s just as purposeful as it is careless. “I already have one.”
Gally turns back to his own breakfast as she leaves, trying to decide what to do next. He’s still torn between drifting off down the beach or slipping into the kitchen to check on Frypan when the sun blinks out under the cast of a shadow that appears beside him.
His head snaps up, startled, and then he back steps to see Jorge properly, sharply aware that he’s a fair bit taller than most of the others at the camp.
“Jorge,” Gally greets him. “If Vince sent you-”
“Vince didn’t send me,” Jorge interrupts, waving him away. “I just wanted to thank you.”
Gally freezes, the plate in his hands suddenly weighed down with a kilo of chaotic questions on top of the food.
“Uh- for…what?” he manages, swallowing hard.
Jorge barks a laugh. It’s not really out of humor, but nor is it mean. He looks up at Gally and then pointedly off in the direction Brenda went. She’s gone from sight already. Gally bites hard on his tongue and tries not to think about the fact that he can still, even now, just barely taste her there.
Jorge holds up a hand even though Gally has made no move to speak.
“I don’t know what happened, and I don’t want to,” Jorge says clearly. “I have suspicions, but a father doesn’t like to suspect these things about his daughter so….” he tails off, eyes pointed as he lays them on Gally. “Please just accept that I’m grateful. I know how angry she is, how much it’s hurting her that she can’t help all of you. I know she’s spoken to you about the things she lost, so you know that she has a lot to grieve for as well. But we passed the time where I could carry her through it. Maybe once I would have been enough, but that’s not true any more.”
Jorge nods to himself. He sweeps his thumb over his fingertips, a considering, quiet motion Gally has seen before.
“Thank you,” he says finally, “for caring about her and for being able to help.”
Jorge turns to move away, but Gally grasps his arm before he can get further than a step. Its an automatic reaction, something that lashed out inside of him, bone deep, and for a split second he thinks it was foolhardy, but then decisiveness settles white hot in his chest and he turns a solid look on Jorge.
The thing is…it’s a very long time since Gally has felt cowed or numbed by a voice of authority, or even by someone, anyone, older than he is. And he’s not about to let this go right now.
“Don’t thank me for that,” Gally says, quietly. He’s not angry, but he’s serious. He’s aware of Aris a little further down the table, just out of earshot (he hopes). But Jorge’s face is focused and intent. He’s listening. “I don’t care about her because of what she lost, or because of what I lost. Nothing that she is to me or that we’ve done for each other is anything to do with anyone but us. Don’t thank me for helping her when I’m not doing it for you.”
Gally lets him go, steps back and tries to pull in a breath even though he feels unexpectedly shaken.
“And no offence,” he adds. “But I wouldn’t tell you a thing anyway. That’s her business.”
He’s half expecting Jorge to scowl at him, to dust off his arm where Gally’s hand wrapped around it and storm away. Gally has spent a lot of time with Brenda and Frypan in the month since the city while Thomas and Minho were both too remote and broken to reach, so he knows her, but Jorge he never learned in the same way. He’s still waiting, just a little, for Jorge to take back all of the sincerity and tell him he has an attitude. It wouldn’t be the first time Gally’s been accused of having one of those.
But it doesn’t happen.
It takes a slow moment, and then Jorge’s face breaks into a smile that lacks any kind of amusement but shines with something much richer. A kind of hopeful relief.
He says, “That was the right answer, Hermano.”
Gally is still trying to process that when Jorge reaches the edge of the decking and turns back one last time. He doesn’t have any food; he never came here for breakfast.
“Gally?” he says. Gally draws his brows down in prompting and waits. “It’s not just Brenda I’m grateful for. You deserve to move on, too.”
Jorge leaves, stamping through the sand with the rising sun blazing over his leather-clad shoulders. He doesn’t look back.
Gally doesn’t bother to tell him that neither he or Brenda are interested in moving on right now.
- x -
The second time it happens, its because they need it to.
Gally is making his way for the latest building project when the argument falls into earshot.
“It’s been weeks!” Vince is saying, waving his arm in the air.
He’s stood in the shade of a yucca plant near where the back of their temporary medical hut sits at an angle on the slope to the beach. It doesn’t have proper foundations; the people responsible didn’t pack the earth right, or dig deep enough to root the branches when they put up walls, so its failing. They also could have used better twine to keep the plastic sheeting roof on, but that’s just Gally being picky. He’s not being picky to say their infirmary is going to flatten if one more tide hits it wrong.
The point is that Vince’s wild gestures seem to be designed to indicate the surrounding camp, which is very slowly taking shape between everything else.
It’s midday, the air is muggy and uncomfortable, the sun pitiless and even the ocean isn’t much of a reprieve. It’s a work day, and Gally doesn’t protest that much himself; it’s good to do something, especially when its mindless, something he knows. Work days aren’t as easy on everyone, though.
Gally gets back to the building site of their replacement medical cabin when the argument is already in full swing. Frypan, Harriet and three other boys working on the build are watching it go down.
“Seven,” Brenda retorts. “It’s been seven.”
“And I know that’s not long for you,” Vince says, plaintive and frustrated. “I’m not trying to make it sound like you need to just….”
“Get over it?” Brenda asks, her voice acidic, into the space of Vince searching for the right words.
“No!” He spears his fingers into his own hair. “No. I know you’re dealing with a lot. But I also know that I have over three hundred people here who need a better way to live. There’s a boy – Sol – who is ten months old. I’m not even sure how he made it here alive, but he is, and he’s going to need-”
“Hey,” Gally interrupts, cautiously, shooting looks between the two of them. “This isn’t helping.”
Vince wheels around, blowing out a breath. Gally gets the feeling he’s more frustrated with himself and the situation than with either of them. Brenda looks furious. Her expression is set in a deep scowl and she’s flushed with the sheer amount of rage she’s funnelling.
“Maybe…” Gally suggests, glancing over at Vince, “check up on some of the other projects.”
Somewhere behind him, Frypan snorts. Gally opens his mouth to tell him to knock it off when Brenda beats him to it, flipping him off with a violent, stabbing motion.
Frypan silences at the same time Vince turns around. He scrubs at his beard with his fingers, shoots a strangely defeated look Brenda’s way and then nods. “Good idea.”
He heads off, slipping around Gally’s shoulder to head back for the heart of camp. He’s ceded this way before, if Gally offers to step in on a project or repair job, and it’s usually accompanied with a wan but grateful pat on the arm. Vince knows better than to do it this time, though, like this argument is something he’s handing across.
Vince is halfway up the track and just barely out of earshot before Brenda turns to Gally.
“You’re the one who told me to get a hobby,” she says. She’s entirely unfazed by Vince’s quick retreat or Gally’s sudden appearance.
Gally raises an eyebrow at her. “You’re the one who told me you already had one,” he remarks. “And technically Fry told you to get a hobby.”
“Don’t bring me into this,” Frypan calls.
“So fuck off then,” Brenda shrugs, not taking her eyes off of Gally.
Frypan snickers, a short-lived sound of its own accord, and purely for the purpose of making it clear he doesn’t take offence. “Alright,” he says. “Everyone up.”
No one argues. They all get to their feet, dusting off and following after Vince.
“You are the one who suggested beating people up,” Brenda says, voice hard. There’s something like kinetic energy snapping in prickly lashes around her; she’s almost painfully focused, razor sharp at the edges.
“Go ahead,” Gally replies, opening up his arms. He stands there, not even knotting up his muscles to brace for an impact. She won’t do it.
Brenda’s hands shake as she curls them into fists. Her eyes look like broken shards of glass held over burning coals. Gally hugged her just yesterday; folded himself around her in the dying light of dusk at dinner. It was just because he could, because Frypan couldn’t reach her, and because he could see the way she had looked sadly exasperated at Jorge’s empty seat at the dining table. There had been too many meals taken away from them or skipped entirely as he worked to fix the downed berg. She had accepted the comfort in it then in a way he knows she won’t now.
“I’m not gonna hit you.”
“Did you have someone in mind you were going to beat up?”
There’s a pause, and it isn’t long but it cracks the air before Brenda says, voice torn, “I don’t want to beat anyone up.”
Gally turns away, stretches down to the pile of tools in the doorway of the shack that’s half built and then hands her a hammer. Maybe someone would usually question the intelligence of handing this kind of weapon to someone clearly irrational, but Gally doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t feel even the tiniest sting of uncertainty as she holds it in a white-knuckled grip. She’s stopped shaking.
“Use it,” he says, nodding towards the shack. “Just find one of the panels and secure it down.”
He doesn’t offer to show her, and she doesn’t ask. He moves to pick up another batch of branches to start filling in partition wall while she navigates her own way around the task.
For a few long, stretched minutes Gally assembles a weave for the inner wall to the somewhat soothing soundtrack of Brenda maiming the outer one as she drives nails through the wood. The steady bangs go erratic; staggering and then frantic before there’s a hollow, heavy sound as she throws the hammer to the ground.
Gally holds his breath.
He can hear her breathing hard, the pinched gasps of both exertion and possibly crying, and then the slow way she silences herself before-
“This is tame.”
His heart turns over and his blood rushes backwards. His lungs go tight, breathing becoming sharp and shallow. Wanting scrapes down his spine without any warning, lighting up nerves as it goes.
He swears under his breath. “Very.”
He’s as self-destructive as she is, still, and they already both know how this goes. It helps, and it’s not hurting anyone.
He turns around, just in time to pull her down in his lap as she crosses the tiny space towards him and then she’s holding his hands down at his sides, keeping them off of her as she kisses him, pouring out the rest of the frenetic rage that she somehow couldn’t unleash on the wall.
Gally groans, goes pliant under her, lets her swallow the sound from him. She still tastes like berries, but different now; blueberries, perhaps, something else she stole from Frypan’s store, but she also tastes like hurt and helplessness.
It’s a good thing the medical shack is so far down the beach, not that either of them particularly care about that, either.
Gally only learns later, his breathing slowing down and the packed earth of the shack warm under his back, why Brenda was so angry.
“Brandon passed out. One of the kids from the bus that day,” she says, more sad than furious now. Gally's heart staggers, belated dismay spilling through his veins. Brenda’s fingers curl around his arm and squeeze gently. “He’s fine. Or so he says. Aris was there, made him drink something and sit down then ran for Sonya. But it’s not the point. The Scorch survivors are still asking too much too fast and next time he might not be okay.”
Brenda got those kids out of the city. Gally may have had a hand in breaking them out and getting them to her, but she’s the reason they’re alive. Her and Frypan. Gally makes a mental note to check on the kid himself later and absently wonders exactly when Brenda started thinking of herself as one of them; as a WCKD survivor instead.
- x -
The third time is when Gally’s been up all night with Minho, neither of them able to sleep.
He’s exhausted, more emotionally than physically, because he’s slept less than this in his life, but it’s enough of a catalyst. One of the Scorch faction (because the camp is slowly splitting into factions over what they think is best, and the growing attempts to establish leadership or order are tumultuous at best) picks the fight, but Gally feeds into it even when he knows he shouldn’t.
What he told Brenda months ago on that beach is true; sometimes he just felt better after punching someone, and knowing that it’s not smart or wise or going to fix anything doesn’t stop the impulse of wanting to.
He’s just about to take a full on swing at the guy, in the middle of what is now half a mess hall; they have a canopy, at least, even though there are only two walls and a full view of the coast along the driftwood table. His head is pounding, fury searing cold through his veins like liquid nitrogen and the yells of people on both sides of it have dissolved into a pulsing hum.
That’s when he gets a face full of cold water.
“You,” Brenda snaps, and it takes a second, but then Gally realises that she’s talking to the other guy and not him. “Why don’t you back the hell off?”
She slams an empty glass down on the table. There’s sudden, ringing silence in the dining hall that almost drowns out the distant shushing sound of the ocean. The water is a shock, but the residual burning anger is corrosive in Gally’s bloodstream, eating away at him.
“You realise you came from the Scorch too, right?” the other guy throws back at Brenda.
Gally sees red. “How about you don’t tell people where they came from?”
The guy wheels back on him but Brenda moves between them. She suddenly seems so tiny, placed in the bare four foot gap, but she lights up, looks like the fallout of a dying star, cold and remote.
She says, coolly, “I came here in that berg on the hill that won’t fly any more, from a city that burned to the ground because of WCKD. One of my best friends nearly bled to death before I could stop tasting the smoke, and another one was dead before I could reach him with a cure in my hand. I drove twenty eight immune kids from the basement of the WCKD compound that same night.”
The guy’s face is puce with either shame or anger, Gally can’t tell.
“I may have come from the Scorch,” Brenda says. “But I’m not one of you.” She turns her back on him without a care, and more gently than Gally was expecting, says to him, “Walk away.”
He knows he can refuse. This is their honesty agreement, their respect for each other’s ways of coping, however damaging. He can refuse and she will step aside and let him throw the punch that was etched in the tendons of his wrist just moments ago.
But he doesn’t.
Gally doesn’t want to punch him any more.
It’s not until they’re clear of the mess hall by a long way that Brenda speaks again. They weren’t followed; it’s just the two of them and she stops when they’re steps away from his hut.
“Hey,” she says, still more gentle than he expected because somehow she always surprises him. “You and me; it’s not just for me, you know. It’s your deal too.”
Gally has to bite on his tongue, pressing a breath down until his lungs ache. He turns to her, left over adrenaline still prickling under his skin.
“I’m pissed,” he says, the only warning he can offer.
Brenda shrugs. “So am I.”
He’s already decided, though, and he doesn’t lie to her any more.
So this time he presses her into the hemp mattress in his tiny cabin, covers her body and kisses her until he can breathe again. She lets him; she doesn’t resist the grip of his hands on her wrists, holding them flat, and arches up into the pace he sets. Her eyes glitter, not fractured but ignited and reflective, promising that the next time (because there will be one) he’ll be the one on his back.
Gally doesn’t even realise he wants that until long after.
“You should have punched him,” Brenda says two hours later. She’s wearing his sweater, which swamps her small form, and she’s sitting cross legged on the bed, watching him idly as he fishes a new shirt from a basket.
“I was going to, before you threw the water at me,” Gally shoots back, no longer angry, or annoyed, or much of anything that isn’t just….placid.
He pulls the shirt down over his head and feels the fibres snarl at the fresh rakes down his shoulder blades.
“Told you it’d sting,” Brenda says then.
She had. She’d warned him when he asked her, whispered the words into the hollow of her throat, to do it.
“Worth it,” Gally shrugs.
And that’s true as well. The burn was really nothing compared to the way it felt like she had scoured angel wings into his back, letting trapped fury spill out between her fingers.
“Anyway,” Brenda says, moving back to the point. “You still should have. He laid into Aris last week. Harriet said he was shaking for an hour.”
Gally punches him an hour later.
- x -
Minho notices the raked lines down his back four days after that.
They’re in the surf, washing up and trying to drown out the noises of camp because for once they both slept more than two hours and under the high sun, there’s an illusion of things one day being sort of okay.
There’s also the fact that Sonya said salt water would be good for the scratch marks, even though they weren’t exactly deep.
(“We’re not using what little saline we have on you,” she says, when Gally frowns at her suggestion of the sea. “That’s for people who get scratched up doing work. Whoever you’re doing that with, it was one hundred percent willing-” her words catch and her mouth twists, suddenly alarmed. “it- it was-”
“It was definitely willing,” Gally assures her.
Sonya sucks in a relieved breath. “Okay. Good. Yes. You-you deserve the sea.”)
So they’re in the sea, and Gally isn’t even thinking about it; he’s lived through far worse than the faintest sting of salt water against the raised scrapes. Getting them in the first place he’d felt more, in the best way. Somehow that memory makes the one of choking on his own blood around the hole in his chest more distant, more bearable.
But water sloshes around him, dispersed rapidly as Minho jolts upright from where he’s been floating idly.
(Aris won’t go near the water. Harriet has said its because some of the things they put him through were simulations of drowning. But Minho was always hunted by things on solid ground. For him, the water must be some kind of solace).
“Gal-Wh-” Gally is already turning to him when Minho aborts, eyes clouding over. “Oh.”
“Oh?” Gally asks, frowning, uncertain. He wants to ask if that’s a good Oh or a bad Oh, but also doesn’t want to admit exactly that he’s concerned about Minho’s opinion on it. Because he’s not.
He knows just as much as Brenda does that this isn’t sensible or clever, but it’s what they each need for now, and its working. He’s not interested in anyone telling him how they think it’s going to end.
But Minho shakes his head, sinking back into the lapping froth of broken waves. “Nothing.”
Gally raises an eyebrow. “Nothing?”
Minho nods, eyes closing against the glare of the sky.
“I think I know who,” he says, a moment later. “But either way, it’s not my business. I’m just glad.”
And all at once, he’s frustrated, kind of annoyed that of all people, Minho, who should have known him the best out of anyone left alive in this world, has shrugged it off like this. (He’s annoyed, though he knows it’s unreasonable, that Jorge noticed something different about Brenda and him the very first morning months ago and it’s taken Minho until now).
“Glad?” he asks, trying to keep the hard crack out of his tone and not sure if he’s succeeding. “Of what? That I’m-”
But he doesn’t know how to try to explain when he doesn’t want to bring Brenda’s name into it.
Minho seems to get it regardless. His hands float up and he wafts at the water, spinning ripples out in wide arcs around them. “I’m glad you’re coping better than some of us. I thought I killed you a year ago. I’m not saying that you’re moving on or starting a family – Shuck, Gally, none of us are anywhere near ready to think about next month, let alone a year from now. But I’m glad that you have something, someone, you can turn to when it gets too much.”
The snap of annoyance dissipates as quickly as it arrived, leaving Gally somehow strung out and tired.
He knows better than to lie to Minho and say that he can turn to him. Minho knows it isn’t true. Minho is still one of his closest, oldest friends but he’s also been destroyed in a way Gally can’t help with by everything that happened. Minho and Thomas keep each other going, still, and Thomas doesn’t look so much like a ghost inside a boy’s body any more, but he’s still a long way from okay. Gally can’t put his own nightmares onto either of them.
Brenda, though…. It doesn’t matter that their lives are completely different, that they were raised by different worlds. They can hold each other’s demons in a way Gally doesn’t truly understand.
“So you’re glad,” he repeats, flat, not entirely a question.
Minho hums. “No one has a right to judge our ways of coping.”
That, Gally definitely agrees with.
- x -
It doesn’t exactly become normal, but it doesn’t exactly stop happening either.
Gally loses track. Life carries on.
Minho sleeps a little more, slowly, a day at a time. Thomas appears more around the camp, still edging away from groups, still unbearably thin with haunted eyes, but seeing him more than once every two days is an improvement. Frypan’s new kitchen staff improve, and the food quality gets better as they learn. The camp takes shape slowly. More huts are finished and built, first for living, and then bigger ones, centralised for communal recreational spaces.
There is still unrest. People from the Scorch start venturing out further, taking trips, establishing more things, like farmland and bringing back scavenged goods from the nearest towns, long left vacant. The WCKD groups stay in Safe Haven, unwilling to step too far from the sanctuary it provides. They’ve been running for too long, many of them, it’s still a novelty that hasn’t worn off to be able to stand still.
Brenda isn’t so angry any more.
There are still times, of course – for both of them. There are the times that she will storm away, scattering campers into the wind to avoid her and Gally knows she needs to be left alone. There are times when she will seek him out and he’ll kiss her without question until he feels the rage soak out of her.
There are moments Gally feels almost numb with horror over Chuck’s absence, when he’ll be unable to breathe around the phantom agony of splinters driven through his lung. He’s gotten better at walking away, so he does it. There are the days he remembers other lives he took, or ones he couldn’t save even if he hadn't pulled the trigger himself, and nausea mixed with clawing doubt makes him lash out. He’s gotten better at seeking Brenda out when he can’t find a way to bleed out the hopelessness on his own.
And it works.
- x -
The first time that Gally hears Brenda really laugh, it’s because of him.
She’s laughed before. Before Safe Haven, before the city, back when they’d planned the escape in Lawrence’s camp, he’d heard her laugh. It had been a little strained, but genuine; the kind of laugh of someone who’s learned to live life between the suffering and enjoy the slivers of good they get in it. After WCKD, the only times Gally hears her laugh it’s humorless, derisive, or simply to fill space, even though her expression is distant. It’s the kind of laugh that is for other people, to convince them she’s okay or to help them feel okay.
Adjusting to life after has been hard.
If things were normal, perhaps it would be strange that the only times Brenda will stay all through the night are the times when they are doing no more than literally sleeping together. But things aren’t normal, so this isn’t strange either.
Gally wakes up to a banging on his door.
“Jesus,” he mutters into the threadbare blankets (the weather is slowly turning, after the longest summer and now the mornings come with a slight chill even though the days are still thick and hot. “Open it. There are no locks.”
The door swings in with a grating sound and beside him, Brenda swears violently into his shoulder.
“Rise and shine,” Frypan says, from the doorway, far more gleeful than should be allowed.
He makes no fuss over the fact that Brenda is there. Gally honestly isn’t certain how many, if anyone, in the camp does know that he and Brenda just have sex on a mildly irregular basis, and he doesn’t much care. It’s not their business, and he’d never tell anyone, but neither of them have ever exactly prioritised keeping the secret over the catharsis of it. The point is that, even if Fry doesn’t know, seeing her in his bed is a normal enough occurrence anyway. Nightmares come easier when they sleep alone.
Fry raps his knuckles on the door frame three times over. “On account of being my favorite people, you two get to witness this first. Come on, let’s go.”
“What is ‘this’?” Brenda asks, muffled. “And is it worth the effort I need to go to in leaving this bed?”
“Probably,” Frypan says, undeterred. “It’s not your bed anyway, so I lack a more appropriate amount of sympathy.”
“It is my bed, though,” Gally points out.
He can practically hear Frypan roll his eyes. “The both of you are useless. Fine. Don’t come and see the harvest. I’ll just hand out all the blackberries to the first people in the mess hall.”
“What.”
Brenda bolts upright and it almost pitches Gally to the floor. He grapples for the thick weave of the hemp mattress at the last second and anchors himself. Frypan looks vindicated and Gally contemplates groaning again just for good measure.
Brenda ignores all of it. “Blackberries?”
So they all head for the kitchen before the sun is even really up.
Brenda sits up on one of the counters they’ve erected in the low-ceilinged space and Frypan hands her a bowl of fresh-picked dark berries while employing Gally to help make bread.
“There’s a reason I was a builder and not a cook,” Gally says, grimacing as he tries to knead the dough in a chipped ceramic pot.
“Yeah,” Frypan agrees. “I’m seeing that.”
Gally looks over at him, and Frypan’s expression is dubious as he peers into the bowl.
“If it doesn’t look right why don’t you do it yourself?” he demands, not truly annoyed.
“Because I have eggs to make and I don’t trust you to get them right.”
Gally raises an eyebrow. “The eggs are already made, you just have to crack them.”
Frypan sniffs, scooping up a handful of flour from the counter. “There’s an art to it.”
Gally feels the way something bright and gold bursts inside of him and the way it washes through his nerves, sharpens his vision, all just an instant before he decides.
He reaches out, picks up one of the eggs in question and cracks it over Frypan’s head.
The slippery yolk skis straight down his nose, splattering on to the counter and the gooey translucent white smears into his hair, dripping balefully down over his ears and cheeks. Gally holds still, the crushed egg shell in one hand, his other buried in the bread dough, his heart crashing inside his ribs.
Brenda laughs behind them.
The sound of it in its real form; amusement and hilarity behind the surprised exhale of it, stuns Gally for just a second, just long enough for Frypan to reach up and shove his handful of flour down the back of Gally’s shirt.
Gally tears off a lump of bread dough, all set to fling it back, even though he knows in the back of his mind that they shouldn’t waste food, when Brenda’s laugh turns into a sharp, cutting sob.
Its so fast that Gally’s heart seizes, turning over and flooding him with a frenzied feeling of panic.
The cloudy itch of the flour completely forgotten, he turns from the work bench, wiping his hands off on his pants as much as possible before reaching to take the blackberry bowl from her.
Her eyes are large, stricken, and her hand shakes as she covers her mouth, the other trembling as it catches mid-air.
“Oh, Bren,” Frypan murmurs, face crumpling, absently swiping at the egg on his head with a rag.
Gally catches her hand, squeezing gently and steps forward so she doesn’t slip off the counter when she curls in on herself.
She doesn’t sob again. She’s gotten so used to being strong and never cracking that the single one is all she releases, and Gally knows she only let that much out because it was only the three of them here.
“Too many blackberries,” Frypan murmurs, both aiming for some levity and trying not to detract from how she’s clearly suffering.
Brenda doesn’t react though.
Gally sighs, letting go of her hand in favour of pulling her to the edge of the counter so that he can fold her into a hug. He knows she’ll let him.
“Its okay to laugh,” Frypan says, voice low and soft in the sudden stillness of the kitchen. “It doesn’t mean you’re forgetting.”
There’s a beat where she just tremors against him, and then, even though she doesn’t physically go stiff, Gally can feel the way she braces for the world again, steel setting under her skin.
“It just seems cruel,” she says after a second, drawing away from him and raking a hand through her hair. Its longer, just touches the line of her shoulders and Gally knows she’ll want to cut it again soon. “Being able to just laugh when-”
Her voice dries up but the names hang in the air anyway.
Frypan pats her leg gently before moving away, focusing on rescuing the half-kneaded bread dough Gally left behind. He’s all too aware of how much Brenda doesn’t like to be watched like they’re worried she’ll break.
Gally gives her a frank look instead.
“Maybe it is cruel,” he says, ignoring pointedly the way he can feel Frypan’s head snap up to look at him in incredulity. Brenda looks stabilised though, and maybe Fry sees that, because he doesn’t interject. “But even when you’ve been at your worst, have you looked at any of the others – at Sonya and Harriet? At Alice and Riley? - and wished they weren’t happy at that moment?”
He pulls two names from the kids on the bus from all those months ago, and he knows Brenda knows them; he can see the recognition in her face. It’s a rhetorical question anyway.
“You haven’t,” he continues, the truth of it a rush on his tongue as he says it, realising it for himself, fully, in the same moment, “because you know they’re still suffering in so many ways too. And even when you’re so angry you could throw a hammer through a wall-”
“You gave me that-”
“-you would never want them to be unhappy. This is the same.”
Brenda releases a quiet breath. Gally watches it slip through the soft part of her mouth as her expression settles, the stricken horror of it easing.
He leans forward slowly and kisses her gently on the forehead. It’s somewhat impulsive but she’s still and quiet as he draws back.
“You’re allowed to be okay again, Brenda. There’s no betrayal in that.”
“There was a high price to get here,” Frypan adds, voice gentle, almost apologetic like he’s interrupted. “The least we can do is not waste it.”
Gally ducks out to shake all the flour from his clothes and by the time he gets back to the kitchen there’s evidence of a blackberry massacre across the counter tops of the room.
Frypan is deflecting them with an actual frying pan, holding it up like a shield in front of himself in a way that reminds Gally unexpectedly of another time, in another world, with another girl. He shakes it off, happy to leave the memory in the past where it belongs. Brenda, though she looks unready to laugh again just yet, is smiling in a way that’s for herself and abundantly real as she pelts the unripe berries across the room, aiming solidly for Frypan’s face.
- x -
The first time she stays all through the night it’s a little bit of an accident.
Specifically, they’ve been sampling batches of moonshine, and it’s still not anywhere near alcoholic, but using fruit means there’s a lot of fructose in it and the sugars leave them both buzzing in the way a child gets on a candy high. It also results in a crash as they metabolise all of it out.
They started drinking in the first place because it had been a long day and Brenda almost murdered a woman over something she hadn’t even been able to fully explain around the sharp, jagged scowl on her face. But they didn’t exactly push for questions, it was part of their working system. So Gally hadn’t asked why she looked like thunderclouds and tasted like a storm when she had shown up in the distillery far back into the treeline.
He had just lifted her off the ground, pressed her back into the wall and taken her apart.
He leaves a mark that time.
“Are you any good at hickeys?” Brenda asks, a half-gasp into the side of his neck and Gally’s vision momentarily swims white. Wanting and understanding stab through his bloodstream and he tightens his grip on her, fingers digging into sleek muscle and soft skin.
“Very.” He presses the word into the arch of her throat.
“Good,” she says. “Make it last?”
He’s not stupid enough to refuse. He opens his mouth over her pulse, tasting salt and sand, and sucks hard enough that he can feel her heartbeat under his tongue.
(He thinks of the scratches she raked into his back months ago and the way they’d made the very real scar over his heart ache less, and now he thinks – knows – that she’s the same. Maybe covering up the memory of old wounds like this is therapeutic).
It went as it always did after that; breaking each other apart and then putting the pieces back, pulling clothes back on. She steals his sweater as the days have been dropping slowly colder and then she’d frowned at the latest concoction of moonshine.
She had asked, “Is it better than the last lot?”
So they’d tested it, and the sugar had left them both somehow feeling free enough to vent away all the things that had aggravated them lately, by which time they were back at Gally’s. The bottles were almost empty, the sky dark and moonless, and there had been no thought of Brenda making the trek back to the shack she owned.
So it wasn’t immediately after, and Gally is a little unsure if it even really counts, just that it feels kind of like it should.
It’s not until the second time that he knows it does.
Being angry is a state neither of them are living in so much now. There are times that something will anger them, but time has dimmed most of the piercingly sharp edges of constant rage, the same way that the sea will slowly smooth even the deadliest pieces of glass.
Gally gets annoyed with Vince for suggesting Thomas and Minho need to sort new living arrangements.
They’re still sharing a tiny shack (it has, at least, improved from the original tent over the past several months) out by the trees. The distance still proves necessary thanks to Minho’s continued insomnia and Thomas’ night terrors, even if the both of them are improving. They’re helping each other in increments, the only way they know how, even if sometimes Gally thinks they’re living with the ghost of a third, missing boy between them.
He has no room to talk. He’s somewhat irregularly having sex with one of his best friends when either one or both of them are (passably) pissed off.
But it sets his nerves snapping when he hears the idea that Minho and Thomas should move.
“It’s been months,” Vince says. “I know they went through a lot, but it can’t be helping being way out the back of the village on their own all the time.”
It at least warrants being called a village now; there’s enough of it.
“I think you were the one concerned about others being able to move on, and I’m not seeing that as very likely if either of them are screaming in the middle of sleep street,” Gally points out, edged.
Vince pulls a face.
Sleep street is a row of many shacks that runs almost the full length of Haven, from the hillock by Gally’s cabin all the way to the medical unit at the other end. It consists of tiny huts erected for sleeping and little more. So many of the living spaces are still communal, though there are enough established spots on the coast now for different factions to gravitate to which has lessened some of the infighting. (The mess hall is still the worst; like a water hole at high noon in the animal kingdom).
Vince is worried, Gally knows that, but he’s also sure this isn’t the way to help. Dragging his two friends into the thick of a population still split down the middle over the events of the last city, and perhaps splitting them up too is a sure-fire way to cause more problems than they’ll fix.
Vince doesn’t want them to do nothing. Gally thinks that allowing them to heal in their own space, if it’s even something they can do, isn’t doing nothing. They disagree, the volume climbs and Gally takes a time out. He’s lots better at it now.
Brenda finds him just fifteen minutes later and she looks annoyed, too.
“What set you off?” Gally asks her, still spoiling for a bit of a fight himself.
Brenda kicks the door closed on the gauzy color of dusk just outside. “Same as you,” she snaps. “Vince thought I could talk you around. When I asked what on I told him there was no way I was going to try. Harriet and Sonya stepped in to calm it down. I came here.”
“Good.”
Gally tugs her forwards, pressing her down onto his bed without a second thought. He recognises the nuances of her words and the invitation in her simple presence here so easily now. He doesn’t need coded words; doesn’t need to check its okay before he kisses her. She opens his mouth with her tongue and he rocks forwards into the soft cradle of her body. They’ve evolved their own language for consent.
Brenda allows it for just a minute then curls her leg around the back of his knee, fingers splaying around the side of his ribs and pushing.
Gally tucks down into his shoulder and rolls, lets her flip them the rest of the way. She’s not strong enough to actually, physically move him, but it’s never mattered.
“The way I figure,” she says, already breathless, voice bitten and rich, “I’m more annoyed than you, so my turn.”
“How do you get that?” He’s actually amused underneath the spiky edges of his nerves.
“Because Vince thought he could use me to change your mind,” Brenda shrugs. She sits up and pulls her shirt off over her head, casting it aside without ceremony. “Its insulting.”
“Hmm. Sounds it,” Gally agrees, barely listening, pulling her down over him.
They just fall asleep afterwards, and it doesn’t even occur to Gally until he wakes up beside her that this is the true first time it’s happened. The only difference right now is that they only have the worn blankets on their bare skin to ward off the morning chill.
There’s something about this, though; something that he wants to keep, which is a lot considering he doesn’t want to think as far as the fast-approaching one year anniversary of the city.
(He figures maybe that’s progress; improvement of some kind, to know for sure that he wants this at least. He likes the version of himself that he is with Brenda, and he hasn’t liked any version of himself, not really, for a long time).
(He doesn’t stop to consider that neither of them were angry any more by the time the world fell away to the feel of her in his hands. He thinks maybe it wasn’t the first time).
- x -
“You realise you’ve been finding excuses, right?”
Gally turns to look over his shoulder at Frypan.
“Excuses for what?”
He looks back into the cupboard he’s trying to anchor to the wall. It’s a little lopsided, but Brandon did a good job with it for someone who’s only been doing carpentry for four months. And they need more storage in the kitchen as the shack grows (via repeated wall destruction as extensions are added on) and scavenger trips yield new appliances and equipment.
The snick and thud of Frypan’s knife as he hacks through vegetables is loud in the quiet space. He sounds almost bored when he says, “Excuses to be angry.”
Gally has to work hard not to freeze up, instead biting hard on the inside of his cheek and soundly punching the cupboard into place.
“It’s okay,” Frypan continues, and Gally can picture him waving the knife airily in the momentary pause of rhythmic chopping. “Don’t say anything. I know you won’t. And I’m not asking you to. I’m just saying…Its a while since you’ve been the Gally from the first month or two of Haven. You were so volatile all the time and you’re not any more. You and Brenda. You don’t just…I don’t know. Catch light and lash out at the small stuff any more. I know you both did for a while, and that knowing you were both dealing that way helped. I’m just glad you’re not that angry any more.”
It takes a second for it to sink in that even if Frypan really does know about him and Brenda, none of this is about her. His oldest friend is actually genuinely glad that he’s…what? He’s not moving on. He’s not ready to do that yet; he still wakes from nightmares of sending a bullet into Chuck and shakes until he falls back to sleep, feeling he deserves it. But Frypan is glad that he’s not on edge all the time any more.
And Gally isn’t sure when that part happened, exactly.
He scoops up a hammer from the box beside him and knocks a nail back into the wall, embedding it in a single strike.
“Maybe you just don’t see that we’re still angry because we have each other to take it out on instead,” Gally shrugs tightly. He wants to be obstinate, a little for the sake of it.
(A little to protect his own realisations).
“Or maybe I don’t see it because you’re just not as angry,” Frypan says again, exasperated and unswayed. “It’s exhausting to keep that up. Not feeling that way all the time doesn’t mean that you’re okay the rest of it.” He sighs, and his voice lowers, shifts into something that carries weight and makes Gally’s fingers go stiff and still around the hammer. “I’m not saying you don’t still get pissed, Gally. We’ve seen it, okay? I’m just saying that sometimes you’re picking fights for the excuse; like you think you need to be that mad, or like you want to be.”
Gally presses out a fixed breath. “I don’t want to be.”
The steady cutting of the knife on the woodblock, dicing up carrots resumes behind him.
“It’s not just you,” Frypan comments idly. “Brenda’s looking for them too.”
Gally drops the hammer. He can practically feel Frypan’s smug side-smile boring into the back of his head.
“I’m still not saying anything,” Frypan continues. “And not asking. Whatever kind of coping mechanism you guys have is clearly doing you both some good. Perhaps one day you’ll be able to admit it’s more than that.”
- x -
Brenda doesn’t like the shack she was assigned as her tiny space in Safe Haven.
It’s somewhere in the middle of Sleep street, boxed in between other villagers. They’ve tried to keep the Scorch and WCKD factions separate there too, and Brenda treading a line between them, belonging to both and neither at once, has never liked being vulnerable enough to sleep in the midst of it. There were only ever a small handful of people who could have understood this about her; the way she falls between two worlds and carries the scars and traumas of both.
One of them is dead. Two others are still trying to rebuild themselves from the foundations up around the hollow space he left. This is partly why she’s so often seeking refuge in Gally, Frypan or Jorge’s company and cabins. They were there when she chose to stay for the rescue, for the destruction of the city, and for everything after.
“You could just stay, you know,” Gally says, two weeks later when she scowls out of the window at the bitter turn of the weather.
It’s dark, and cold, and Gally isn’t even sure if the planet can produce snow any more, but being so close to the sea means it’s not really necessary to achieve that same brittle, frozen climate. Sand blows up around the village like powdered glass; fine particles that turn skin raw and shred into clothes.
Brenda turns from the window, engulfed in another sweater she’s stolen from him, but wearing nothing under it (Gally happens to know), and pouts.
He’s struck as he lays in the bed, by a golden, bright fondness. It’s a feeling that’s been slowly growing in his chest, largely unnurtured, unfurling and always twisting towards Brenda the way a sapling reaches for sunlight.
“This is the best time to get into the kitchen,” she says.
Gally laughs.
Its very early in the morning, at a time that even Frypan is not up and preparing for the first breakfast shift. Other than the gradually lessening number of villagers who wake with night terrors or just can’t sleep at all, everyone is curled under their ration of blankets and fast asleep. Which would make it the ideal time to steal from the pantry.
Of course that’s something that she’s long worked out a system for.
“Go ahead then,” Gally shrugs, entertained, and turns to fold himself back into the sheets. They still smell like salt, sex and her. “You should probably also bring your clothes here next time. So you stop stealing mine.”
Brenda’s only ever borrowed his sweaters, but that’s not the point.
“I’ll consider it,” she says, and there’s a howl of chilling wind that claws around the opened door before she leaves.
She’s back before Gally manages to fall asleep again.
She throws a pile of clothes over his own in the basket at the end of the bed, flings an extra blanket – her own, the one she’s clearly stripped from the mattress in her own cabin – over Gally’s, and then prods him to move over. He goes, and she cuddles into his back.
“You’re cold,” he says into the pillow.
“I brought you an extra blanket,” Brenda replies, words spilling across the back of his neck.
Gally breathes out that golden fondness that’s rooted underneath his heart. He says, “Fair.” and falls asleep with her curled around him.
- x -
The thing is, Gally’s not an idiot.
He knows this is more than they started with. Brenda is his best friend and months ago they started seeking each other out to burn out rage and frustration when they didn’t know how to contain it any more, or when they knew other people couldn’t handle the fallout.
Time wore those jagged edges down, and it became less and less about destruction and demons and more about having someone to turn to, to go back to.
Once that might have been Minho, but neither of them can be a safe place for the other right now, maybe not ever again. Not that Gally would trade this, whatever it is, with Brenda anyway.
(Happiness on its own is still a distant and foreign concept, but on the good days he feels at least settled, that maybe, perhaps being content might be possible).
“You know you’re basically in a relationship, right?” Minho says when the worst of the cagey winter is over and color is leeching back into the heather grasses up on the hillock. It’s not really a question.
Gally sighs. Brenda, laying back in the sand just out of reach makes a sound at the back of her throat that’s the equivalent of ‘And?’
“We know,” Gally says.
They do.
Brenda stays with him most nights. There are nights that she stays up with Jorge, working on the hollowed out husk of unresponsive charred metal and loose electrics that is the downed berg. They managed to land it (read: run aground) after the city was destroyed and it hasn’t moved since. Jorge had claimed it as a project to fill his time and the empty space in his head, and Gally couldn’t help but be glad; somehow, the idea of it never running again felt like a cruel metaphor.
Then sometimes she stays up with Frypan, talking in the kitchen until the early hours. She might joke to both of them that it’s for the easy access to the food rations, but both of them know better. He still struggles, too, though less as time slips away from them. Sometimes neither of them can sleep and there is something to be said for not suffering alone.
Other than the way she’s so firmly rooted in his life that Vince reassigned her cabin to someone else, nothing much has changed.
She picks on his building skills, pressing dubiously on walls and telling him one good kick will take them out. He rats her out to Frypan for raiding the pantry. It’s almost always berries; something she grew up entirely without, but he’s caught her with other things too. They scream at each other when the rest of the village can’t take it, and she’s the first person he seeks out when something makes him laugh.
They’re also still sleeping together, so there’s that.
But-
But the point is that Minho is sitting across from them, around the flaking ashes of last night’s bonfire on the beach, and he’s shooting a look between the two of them that’s two parts smug and one part sceptical.
They are basically in a relationship.
“It just works,” Gally shrugs. “We know what we’re doing. We don’t want any more than this right now.”
Minho rolls his eyes. “There’s not really much more you could have.”
Gally shrugs that off, too.
The thing is, neither of them set out to be the cliché of falling in love because of this. He already loved her when it began. It never mattered that he didn’t know who Brenda had been before the city, he knows who she is now; a girl with eyes like broken glass, sand in her blood and shrapnel in her bones, already scarred by the world. He still doesn’t even know who he was before he woke up in a box so the concept of before doesn’t much matter.
He loves her in a way that’s fire-forged, tempered with grief and turned resilient with the trust they placed in each other’s hands.
He’s just not in love with her, not yet. It’s enough that he feels like one day, maybe he could be, when eventually they’re ready to think about a future in more than days. Right now, that’s all either of them needs.
- x -
A year and three days after the city, Jorge gets the berg working.
Half the village flood out onto the beach to watch it blot out the sky over Safe Haven, casting an enormous violet shadow under the glaring sun.
Brenda flings herself at Gally with elation and he spins her around before Frypan crashes into them, and then Harriet, and Sonya, followed by Aris. There’s a cheering crowd in the sand, even people who had no idea of the berg’s significance seem willing to celebrate it. Vince is laughing as he punches the air, stood in the downdraft from the rotors. Sonya is crying, holding tight to both Aris and Harriet as the cargo plane wheels around above them, stirring up gusts of sand.
Gally kisses Brenda on the edge of the violent swarm.
He’s glad he got this; not just being the one to absorb her anger and shoulder her pain, but also being the person who gets to know what she tastes like as she learns to laugh again. He has a front row seat to watching her find herself after everything that the shouldn’t have lived through.
And if anyone is watching, or even surprised, he doesn’t care. It’s still no one’s business but theirs.