Archive of Our Own

The lantern in his hand gutters, making the shadows stretching themselves up the arched stone walls flicker and sway.

The sudden scrape of claws and the commotion of wings at the window makes his shoulders jump, and Thomas lets out a breath, shakes himself.

There’s something about being down here, the ancient smell of old books and decay, or the way the dank air moving in a constant draught bristles the hair on his neck and forearms, that sets him on edge. He should be used to the Ravens by now. They’re everywhere after all, always. Watching.

Who it is they answer to when they make their flapping, hunchbacked way off into the night like a telltale fleet of dark-hooded whispering monks, isn’t something he has figured out yet. But he is starting to lose count now, of the number of nights he has been down here, and nobody has come to stop him. So far.

Of course it’s not as though Thomas is breaking any rules, strictly speaking. It is after hours in the Archives, yes, and the key to the book cage housing the Rare and Restricted spellbooks collection resides in a box clearly labeled Staff Only, sure. But even if Thomas might not be paid, he does work here. Technically.

He stops at the study carrel where the stacks begin, tugging his tie a little looser around his neck. His everyday Academy uniform feels suddenly stiff and restrictive, as if he will need freedom and the full range of his movement for what comes next.

The shadows flicker again as he sets down the lantern, and the window ledge is empty now, but Thomas still has to try not to imagine he can feel eyes in the dark of the stacks as he hastily shucks off his blazer, lays it over the back of the carrel chair. It wouldn’t do to forget it here, but then he won’t. He is always quite careful, even more than most people, probably, to be discreet about the words – or lack of them – that ought to appear emblazoned into the inside of his forearm.

It had been a blessing and a curse, being born un-Marked. Not the worst of it watching the way his parents had worried themselves ragged as he grew, dragging him to countless physicians and mediums, shamans and clerics; their hushed, careworn voices carrying up the stairs to his bedroom at nights as they worked so much longer and harder than Thomas would have ever wished on them or anyone, to look into what was wrong with him. Why their son? What it meant for a soul to be left out, of the supposed great cosmic plan.

And then Thomas met Newt, and he knew. He wasn’t alone in this. Thomas knew then, even if it had taken him some years to figure out how, what it was he needed to do.

It wasn’t just him. It wasn’t just his family, or his best and truest lifelong friend; or even all the people like them – the mistakes, the misfits, the people the Prophecies forgot. Or saw fit to exclude.

They weren’t the problem. It was the whole system that was broken.

That was the trouble with a Matching system that promised perfection – an end to loneliness and neglect Nation-wide, a chance for each Citizen to be at last entirely whole, and complete. One singularly perfect companion ‘for this life and the next’.

The catch? The only clue to finding them consisting of the very last words you would ever hear them speak.

Everyone had heard the stories. So many old wives tales of those who had been driven to madness, or destroyed by grief. They were legends, ghosts, names whispered in every playground in the Nation where kids rolled up their sleeves in huddled circles, hidden away from the vigilant eyes of the teachers.

This wasn’t about Thomas, it was about freedom. It was for everyone. It was just what was right.

It had been a slow process, none the less. Finding excuses to be here after hours, working his way through the aisles of foxed, musty volumes and motheaten tomes, bound perilously in threadbare cloth and crumbling, dilapidated leather; and now and then what seemed to be some kind of skin Thomas didn’t want to think too hard about.

He hadn’t had as much luck as he hoped with Alchemy and Astral Projection, and admittedly skipped over Bestiaries and Blood Magicks altogether, but he had since been making his way dutifully right through the occult alphabet to Love Spells and Mysticism, just in case.

It would just figure if tonight of all nights, were to be the one Thomas finally finds what it is that he needs.

He starts on a whole new aisle tonight, after all.

Thomas can feel the tension draw tighter across his shoulders, the prickle of anticipation and adrenaline in his skin and fingertips, as he rounds the corner of the next row. The Raven has settled itself watchfully back in the window.

He swallows against the dryness tickling in his throat as he lofts his lantern to light up the titles on display, the wondrous and macabre and the deathly dull alike, sitting stoically and silent in their places down the long row of shelving.

“Happy Birthday, Thomas,” he mutters to himself as he forges ahead, moving into the aisle and past the placard marking the subjects that await him:

Planes of Existence
to

Temporal Disruption
(Time Travel)

The last few bars of Take on Me are still dying away into the air, only to be replaced with the first unwelcome notes of the most terrifying tune known to any man, woman or person otherwise gendered on his/her/their particular given day such as this one. And Thomas limits his urgent desire for immediate escape to trucking the wheels of his skates back and forth a little under the table as he makes a point of staring stoically straight ahead into the burn he can already feel painting his cheeks and topping the tips of his ears.

Brenda is singing at him already, elbows draped over the edge of the rink wall next to the table and her fingerless lace-gloved hands dangling over Minho’s shoulders. Who is jangling gaily along with her before the others have even traveled into earshot, parading their way humiliatingly loudly through the forest of curiously turning heads seated at the snack bar tables. Teresa is leading and Frypan’s unironically impressive operatic warbling provides adequate camouflage for the fact that Gally might just be mouthing the words from where he trails along behind them as they come, bearing their basket of curly fries with a single sparkler stuck obnoxiously in the middle of it high overhead.

Thomas claps his hand dutifully down over Fry’s in thanks when it comes to land on his shoulder – after the basket has been plopped ceremoniously down in front of him, and his hair has been deemed sufficiently ruffled, that is. And once the godforsaken sparkler is finally dead and the singing, now naturally including the voices of strangers from a smattering of nearby tables, has come to a merciful and cacophonous conclusion. Teresa raises a thumb high into the air in thanks for the benefit of Zart way across the rink in the DJ booth, who had obviously been complicit in the egregious display. He nods back absently and cues up Danger Zone, from the Top Gun soundtrack, and the world resumes turning.

“So?”

Of course that’s their first question. No ‘hey Thomas, nice to see you, cool Back to the Future jacket’. Not ‘hey, Thomas, happy birthday, what’d your parents get you for your Coming of Age?’ It’s all about the Letter.

Thomas shakes his head, grinning, as he reaches for a fry. The grease burns his fingers but he takes a bite anyway, sucking air through his teeth to cool it off as he does.

“He hasn’t opened it,” Minho answers for him from where he is lounging sprawled in the corner of the booth like a smug and enviably muscular cat in his form-fitting Save Ferris t-shirt; arms stretched out along the back of the rink wall behind him and one leg kicked up along the length of the bench. “Thomas is boycotting on the grounds that some poor shank is out there somewhere getting a blank letter, and thinking they’re alone on the planet for all eternity or some klunk."

“Seriously?” Gally asks, and it’s unclear whether he’s responding to Minho’s statement, or the fact that he said it in Gally’s very own made-up breed of slang. Which in all fairness did make sense in the context of four younger siblings and a set of strict, if not slightly puritanical, parents who took a pretty hard line on ‘swear language’ in front of them.

Minho must have been spending too much time hanging out at the house, lately.

Gally reaches out and sets the wheel of Minho’s outstretched skate spinning with a pointed flick, and Minho promptly lets it clatter heavily to the floor, leaving room for Gally to flop down beside him and lean across him to attack the basket of fries. Thomas does nothing to cover his grin as Gally burns himself too, cursing quietly – in real live ‘swear language’ no less – but without relinquishing his handful as he settles back into the booth. Where Minho could move the arm that is still stretched out behind him, too. He doesn’t.

“You mean you haven’t been subjected to his diatribe about being the guy who settles down with a wife and 2.4 statistically appropriate kids only to have it all fall to shit because some bank teller you never met blurts out some nonsense about humongoid armadillos, seconds before being squished to death in a freak giant anvil-dropping accident or whatever?"

Thomas flips him the finger, and reaches for a fry. They’re still too hot.

“Sorry. ‘Ginormous anteaters’,” Minho corrects himself.

“It’s ‘gargantuan aardvarks’,” Gally puts in, going for the basket again and sharing Thomas’ twice-burned fingertip fate. “Honestly it’s like you never listen when your boy here talks.”

There’s a noise from under the table that sounds a lot like a roller skate ‘slipping’ across the floor and into an ankle, and Gally’s hand jumps a little on its way to his mouth.

“It’s a personal choice,” Teresa defends primly, and Thomas tips his head gratefully back into the way her fingers are combing the top of his hair straight again where Frypan mussed it up, in appreciation. The tips of her day-glo Lee Press-On Nails send tight little shivers over his scalp.

Brenda’s gum pops sharply from next to them and her accompanying eye roll is just as emphatic.

“INDIGO NOT CERULEAN,” she interjects, wiggling spooky fingers at them.

Thomas hears Teresa gasp subtly behind him, and everyone in the booth turns toward Brenda in mild surprise at her brazen and public pronouncement of this trademark combination of unusual vocabulary that marks what is clearly a Match Phrase. Brenda’s Match Phrase. It’s not like there are any rules about keeping the words a secret or anything of the sort, of course. It’s just that it’s… kind of private.

Everybody goes through it, sure. But it’s pretty personal – and, Thomas has always thought, kind of freaky – waking on your eighteenth birthday to the delivery of your Match Letter. The one that would contain the final words you would ever hear from your supposed Soulmate. Your destined ‘one true perfect companion, for this life and the next’.

There were a lot of superstitions and old wives’ tales about it too, of course. That it was bad luck to share your Phrase. Old ghost stories, some more chilling than others, about what happened to people in the moments after they heard their last words.

Then there were the sad ones. Spirits broken badly enough by the thought of a life with anything less than the perfection that had just walked out of it, to end it all tragically. Names every Citizen grew up knowing – Alby, Winston… Chuck.

Then again, Brenda was a newer addition to their little social group, true, but up to now Thomas had never known her to be scared of much.

“I never got it dude,” she is saying now, checking her large pink hoop earrings are fastened tightly. “What’s the big hairy deal?” He likes Brenda. It takes all kinds, after all.

On the rink behind her, Sonya and Harriet are gliding expertly by to the dulcet tones of Pat Benatar. Thomas points them out with a nod of his head and everyone turns to see them go by, hand-in-hand under the flashing lights. Who better to illustrate, really?

He waits until they have rolled past, Harriet yelling something over the music that makes Sonya’s head fall back in laughter and her long blonde hair go streaming out behind them like fluttering gold. And when everybody has turned back to him – and the basket of fries, which Teresa is reaching her fluorescing fingertips over his shoulder to help herself to – he puts his hands up to make his point.

Sonyarriet opted out, Thomas signs, a little more carefully than usual. Did you know they have a pact to burn their Letters?

“Ugh, slow down!” Brenda wails almost immediately, despite his best efforts. You know I’m still learning, asshole, she adds, her lace clad hands moving in awkward, stumbling signs that none the less get the message across. “I’m always missing stuff!”

Thomas shakes his head. You’re doing great, he signs, moving even slower this time, but Brenda frowns, looking a tad panicked between him and Teresa, whose hands are a bare flash of movement in the corner of Thomas’ vision.

“Do you guys have to talk at the same time??”

“They’ll do that,” Minho says from his corner, finally lifting an arm from behind Gally’s shoulders just long enough to sign good thing they’re always saying the same shit.

Teresa and Thomas both flip him off in unison this time, getting a laugh and a sigh of “radical” out of Frypan, next to them.

You’ll pick it up really fast, Thomas promises. I told you, Mary’s the best teacher.

She taught us all the swearwords on the first day, Brenda signs choppily back, popping her gum again with a grin. “So… did you sign ‘fire’? Who’s burning what now?”

“Sonya. And. Harriet,” Teresa says, pointedly separating the names like she’s concerned Thomas may have forgotten they are two strong, independent people with minds of their own or some junk.

“Right?” Gally puts in, pulling another fry from the rapidly-shrinking tangle inhabiting the basket. “Not your fault this lazy shank is basically just making up his own language.”

Look who’s talking, Brenda signs a little smoother this time, from behind his head, making Teresa’s lips twitch in a way that says she would laugh but she’s not done being miffed with him.

Thomas shrugs. Never needed to refer to them separately before.

“You’re impossible,” Teresa chides him, slapping his hand away from his own basket of birthday fries as the two of them reach in tandem for the same one.

Thomas smiles, softer now, and helps himself in turn to a fry from the dwindling pile that tastes a lot less like burning this time. Teresa can think he’s being a dickweed if she wants to – and okay, maybe he is a little – but the truth is Thomas thinks it’s kind of romantic. Sonyarriet aren’t letting anyone or anything tell them what to do. They have made their own choice and they are so sure of it they are prepared to go a lifetime never knowing what the Matching System has to say about what else could have been.

So sue him, but Harriet giving her letter to Sonya for safekeeping until the day that Sonya gets hers, and the two of them can set fire to the entire thought of anybody else for either of them once and for all is more than just super cute. It’s pretty damn inspiring.

The way Thomas sees it, his options are pretty limited as it is. It’s hard enough meeting new people when you’re physically incapable of speaking to them. If Thomas ever finds what he’s looking for, he’s going to be a lot more concerned about making it work than he is about whether or not it’s ‘perfect’, he thinks, as Sonyarriet go swaning gracefully by under the disco lights again, singing along with Boy George. If he doesn’t want to play the System’s game either, then that’s his deal.

The opening to Bon Jovi’s Bad Medicine begins to play over the speakers.

“Oh shit,” Brenda squeaks, “that’s our cue!” She ducks down past the wall of the rink to dust down her stirrup pants and tug fitfully at a hot pink leg warmer. “How do I look?”

Teresa is already up and gliding over to her instantly. She hops up to sit on the rink wall, a cyclone of netting and crinolines in her Material Girl skirt, to peer over the edge and give Brenda a proper once-over.

“Hot,” she concludes, reaching out and fussing with the slouch of Brenda’s Frankie Says Relax jumper so that it falls artfully down over a shoulder. “Totally badass. How about me?”

Teresa takes her hands back to herself, adjusting the oversized bow gracing the top of her crimped hair.

“Oh please, like a total babe as usual.” The colour sitting high in her cheeks might be nervous energy, but maybe there’s a chance it’s also something else.

Brenda and Teresa take their Derby matches pretty seriously, which by extension means the rest of them are expected to take them seriously too. Including their participation in what is known as the 'lucky lap'.

The voice of Vince, the rink owner, has already come over the speakers announcing tonight’s Derby matchup and calling the teams to arms, reminding the audience that the lucky lap is, as always, Ladies’ Choice.

“C’monnnnnn Tom, it’s tradition.”

He can’t groan in protest, but Thomas rolls his eyes hard enough he hopes Teresa can hear it, as she half-drags, half-helps him out of the booth.

Brenda and Minho have already made it to the rink and are flying past them with a whoop, on a second go-round by the time Teresa has Thomas to the rink entrance, wobbling and clutching and secretly plotting mutiny the entire way.

Three years they’ve been doing this, and you would think she’d have given up on Thomas’ ever mastering roller skating, as there is clearly some sort of lesser known law of physics preventing it as a physical possibility. But after all this time she still seems to find it singularly hilarious, and manages to drag him, laughing all the way, maybe about halfway around the rink before the girls are all ditching their dates. And Teresa is swept off his arm by Brenda to join the rest of the team in a second lap, clapping their hands above their heads to the tune of Wake me Up before you Go-Go to pump up the crowd that is gathering in the snack bar and at the rink walls, before heading to the starting line to get suited up in helmets and knee pads.

Which leaves Thomas jerking and weaving his way drunkenly through a dangerously shifting crowd of hapless males in acid wash jean jackets filtering off the rink floor. The lights, while perfectly flattering for the likes of Sonyarriet, aren’t helping either.

Don’t look down, Thomas reminds himself of Teresa’s repeated weekly advice, as he inwardly curses the disco ball for the vertiginous swoop of the refracted donuts of light that keep swiping past under his feet and drawing his eye in a dangerous, dizzying line from where they should be pointing: in a direct straight line toward the nearest exit from the rink and to safety. And relative sanity.

He’s nearly there when a big dude in a tank top, who appears to consist entirely of biceps, goes zipping past him on the left – and then some butthead little kid who can’t be more than eight and should totally be at home in bed on a school night on the right – and Thomas is going down. He has already given his dignity up for lost, flailing wildly for balance and striking several accidental poses that would probably still look like he was having some kind of medical emergency even if Walk Like an Egyptian had been playing over the sound system, which it isn’t. Thomas shuts his eyes, and prepares for impact.

It doesn’t come.

Instead, his fingers find what feels like pleather. His eyes open on skates, naturally, and are subsequently treated to an excruciatingly extended trip up over ripped jeans, a slim fitting black turtleneck and what appears to be one of those jackets with the zippers all over it from the Beat It video. Which Thomas is clutched shamelessly onto, like a sugar junkie with Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

He is going to have to look his rescuer in the face at some point and – oh. When he does. Things do not get much better.

Thomas mentally un-curses the disco ball, for sending tiny blinding halos darting like pixies all over a longish shock of blond hair, and setting sparks flitting here and there in a pair of dark eyes, like fireflies against the sky at night. His mouth is dry. Which maybe doesn’t matter much when you can’t say anything, even if you want to, but still.

He should let go. He tries, and only ends up sending both legs in separate directions like Bambi learning to walk, and gripping on a whole lot tighter.

His saviour just laughs, and shifts his grip on Thomas’ elbows down to his hands.

They’re moving. Which means Thomas is actually skating. And it means this guy is skating backwards, which Thomas doesn’t want to even think about too hard because it makes him wobble all over again.

Don’t look down, Thomas thinks again. As if he would even consider looking anywhere else but these eyes.

So Thomas doesn’t. Until he notices they have somehow come back to the rink’s exit, having made a full lap of the rink by some species of miracle. And his mysterious rescuer gives a grin and a wink, and with a final tug on his hands for direction, lets him go.

Thomas lets the residual velocity in his wheels carry him drifting toward the exit, hands meeting the blessed safety of the rink wall before he can look around and be sure his new absolute favourite person has actually disappeared from sight, just as suddenly as he appeared.

The girls win their match, although admittedly with Teresa losing a surprisingly substantial hank of the blue streak in her crimped hair to the effort at one point, and Brenda now sporting what is definitely a pretty badly sprained pinky finger despite, or maybe because of, wearing her fingerless lace gloves into battle.

Thomas rolls unsteadily along after the others to the benches to remove and return their rental skates and tries to keep the smile sitting across his face looking engaged instead of sort of stagnant and distant, while he listens to the group’s excited post-match chatter pop and percolate around him.

There are plans being bandied about for celebrations over nachos and Slurpees at the arcade before heading home for the night, but Thomas is really only halfway tuned in. To be fair, it’s been a pretty distracting day.

Coming of Age and philosophical life decisions. It’s a lot to process.

As he gratefully finishes up unlacing the accursed skates, and is wrestling his trusty old high tops out of his bag, something pops out and tumbles to the floor.

His Letter. Still unopened.

Thomas reaches down to tuck it hastily away, but then a new thought starts to bloom in his mind, as he hooks a fingernail in under the corner to lift it up off the perpetually-sticky floor.

He can’t help but think of Sonya and Harriet and their brave and intrepid pact.

He can’t help but remember clinging to the plexi-glass ridge of the rink’s wall attempting to recover his footing as well as his composure, after night sky eyes glinting like dark crystals at him under the disco ball, and the way a set of long legs led up to slender hips, and filled out a pair of distressed jeans. He remembers the thought slowly but firmly sinking in that he had never, ever been more sure than he was in that moment that he doesn’t need some creepy fucking Letter telling him when he has made his life’s worst mistake.

He’s clearly more than capable of finding all the right ones to make on his own.

Thomas can all but hear the cautionary tragedies, repeating themselves in his head in remembrance as he stares down at the still unopened letter in his hand. Alby, Winston, Chuck…

The address printed on the envelope stares right back at him from the top corner, beckoning. And the new thought blooming in Thomas’ head starts to put down roots.

Dr. A. Paige
c/o WCKD Institute
Prophetics Department
Room 7152 - 6483 Haven Boulevard

He doesn’t have much of a plan yet, he can admit. But maybe, it’s a place to start…

Thomas wakes up, as is only good and right and just on a day like the day that today is, to the smell of pancakes.

He is in and out of the shower, teeth brushed and hair – who’s he kidding, he’s not going so far as to bother combing his hair – dressed, with discman securely in place and flannel shirt cinched swiftly around his hips, and clattering his way down the stairs to the kitchen in what might be a new personal best.

He does duck quickly back into his room from the hall, mind you, to slide the last joint he’s been saving specifically for today’s afterschool circle of friendship from its hiding place behind his old poster of Bart Simpson, reminding you he’s an underachiever and proud of it, man.

But. No snooze button roulette today, no calculating exactly how many minutes he will need to make it to the bus stop on time, then taking five more anyway. No side-hopping out the door with his Doc Martens half laced and backpack over one shoulder, skateboard in hand and cold, untoasted Pop-Tart dangling from his teeth.

Not today. Today is the dawn of a new era of freedom, a world of new potential and possibilities shining on the horizon. Today is a day for Comings of Age and freshly squeezed juice and his mother’s famous…

fancy occasional tea set?

Thomas nearly trips over his own aforementioned unlaced boot when he sees it being put to very infrequent use on the table. Where somebody Thomas is sure he has never seen in his life is seated, her immaculately painted lips sipping delicately from the gold rim of her tea cup, over a plate laden with two perfect, fluffy golden pancakes.

Thomas’ perfect fluffy golden pancakes.

“Good morning,” she says cordially, rising suddenly to her feet like she might be greeting the Queen, so that Thomas makes a near miss of thoroughly humiliating himself by turning around to see if somebody of actual importance happens to be entering the kitchen behind him.

If by near miss you mean completely and totally doing it. Twice.

“Thomas!” his mother exclaims, turning from the stove with her spatula still in hand, as if she’s surprised to see him hanging out in his own house. “Happy birthday, sweetie,” she rambles, hurriedly shoveling a few more pancakes onto a plate that’s presumably his, and seeming oddly flustered by the presence of the stranger making herself apparently quite at home in their kitchen. “This is Ms Paige, from the Institute.”

His mother makes her way hurriedly past Ms Paige and to the table, prompting him to have a seat as she does but then standing over him, without putting down the plate of pancakes.

“Hello Thomas,” Ms Paige says. “Today is a big day for a young person. Congratulations.”

“Thanks…” Thomas says, uncertainly. He tries to fill up some of the awkward space hanging in the air of the room by picking up his fork hopefully, but to seemingly no effect. On either count.

“Ms Paige has come to deliver your Letter,” his mother explains.

Thomas is still looking in hope and no small amount of confusion at the plate of pancakes hovering inches from the table, though, so it takes a second or so for her words sink in.

“…Oh.” He wonders if he should put down his fork.

There’s nothing about this entire scene that isn’t weird, but there’s a couple of things that really stand out. First of all, Thomas’ birthday is pretty late in the year. There's currently mistletoe in the front hallway, actually, which Thomas can only imagine must have made for an awkward moment when his mother opened the door to their visitor this morning. But the thing is, most of his friends had gotten their Letters months ago. None of them – in fact nobody he has ever met – had mentioned it being hand delivered.

Not to mention by a tall, blonde obelisk of a woman dressed in fastidious head-to-toe bright white, walking oddly stiffly – yet appearing to be completely at her ease, which is more than he can say for anybody else in the room – right into the middle of their breakfast. Her hair is a glamorous shade of pale, pulled back into a severe looking bun, and her stance in the centre of the room is strong under the pristine lines of her suit, like under all the layers of white she might actually be cast out of iron.

But there’s another thing too.

“Some people actually choose not to op—” Thomas begins. But before he can finish, his mother is clearing her throat in a disapproving sounding tone and setting the plate loudly down on the table in front of him.

Thomas sighs and raises his fork, but before it can land, Ms Paige is leaning across the table with a benign smile on her bright scarlet lips and holding out a letter in front of it.

“That’s why we’ve taken the liberty of visiting you in person, Thomas.” She says, surprisingly warmly. “So as to be sure that we reached you.”

The letter seems to be lacking an envelope, he can’t help but notice. Which means he can’t help but notice something else:

“It’s… blank.”

Well, it isn’t. It’s a whole entire letter. Greetings Citizen, we are pleased to yadda yadda and a couple more yaddas. But in the place where a Match Phrase should be, there is nothing. It’s blank.

“It’s what?” his mother gasps, but Ms Paige continues speaking, unperturbed.

“It is. A little unusual, but not something we would want you to be worried about,” she agrees, the continued warm purr in her voice at odds with the glint of steel in her expression.

“In fact, there’s an opportunity in it for you that is part of why I came to talk to you today. We think the uncommon status of your pronouncement makes you uniquely qualified to work in our Archives at the Institute, Thomas. It could be quite an opportunity for you, if you’re interested.”

“Blank…” his mother is still saying under her breath, as Thomas finally accepts the stiff white sheet of paper still hovering between him and his pancakes and lays it down beside his plate. He’s just starting to think that if he doesn’t get to it soon, this birthday breakfast is going to start wandering back into cold untoasted Pop-Tart country any minute, when Ms Paige decides it has apparently been a good talk but it’s time to wrap up.

“I won’t keep you,” she says, politely, setting down his mother’s pansy-print teacup with considerate grace in front of her untouched plate. “I’m sure you have many special plans to keep, today. But, do feel free to be in touch with us, if you think you might be interested.”

There’s a starkly white business card thrust between his pancakes and his fork again. And then, with Thomas’ mom following her somewhat dazedly down the hall and to the door, Ms Paige cordially shows herself out.

The new year dawns cold and bright and full of promise, and Thomas learns – mostly at his mother’s insistence – that the ‘opportunity’ turns out to mainly consist of working in the copier room, transcribing pronouncements. It’s not clear what not having a Match Phrase has to do with being good at it, but maybe it’s something as simple as not being tempted to waste a lot of time reading each and every slip to see if one seems to make some kind of sense paired up against his own.

Thomas rarely sees hide or hair of Ms Paige again once she sets him to work. But once a day, a fresh batch of Prophecies is brought into the copier room by her assistant, Newt.

Newt is a lanky blond specimen of a boy maybe a couple years older than him who constantly seems to be multitasking and is always, without fail, carrying entirely too much shit. The first day Ava introduces him he looks up from his place seated cross-legged on the floor of her office, surrounded by stacks of old daisy-wheel print-outs taller than he himself is, with a calculator and what looks like a set of tiny brass scales in hand. There is also a fat fluorescent pink highlighter sticking out of his mouth, but the friendly wink he throws Thomas overtop of it seems welcoming enough.

The second day Thomas meets Newt, he is hefting a box marked XXL Voodoo Dolls so big it completely dwarfs his narrow frame, and he has the handle of a bucket full of what has got to be crystal balls clamped unconcernedly in his teeth to boot, like the personification of some long-limbed breed of golden retriever.

On the third day, Thomas is making his way into the building to report for copying duty, when he comes across Newt sitting atop the long, low wall that borders the walk leading to the entrance.

"Hey,” Thomas greets him, strolling up to the wall’s edge and stuffing his hands into his pockets, with only maybe ten percent awkwardness, give or take.

There’s nothing more unusual in Newt’s mouth this time than the cigarette he is trying to light, but it does just as good a job as anything else of keeping his greeting to Thomas wordless. Which this time consists of an acknowledging raise of his eyebrows over a couple more flicks of the lighter, followed by handing Thomas the cigarette as soon as he gets it lit, in a companionable offer of the first drag.

Thomas accepts, and they spend the walk up to the entrance passing it back and forth in amiable silence.

By the fourth day Thomas is starting to feel like too much time has officially passed for him to acceptably ask whether Newt can’t speak, or whether he just doesn’t.

He still really kind of needs to know though. Even his friends are getting sick of hearing about it already.

"Oh right, Mute Newt,” Gally says, taking a swipe at a hovering pink fairy with his sword on their typical Sunday afternoon, from his perch on the edge of Minho's bed.

“Don’t,” Brenda cuts him off, blowing out her lungful of smoke. “You’re supposed to catch it in a bottle,” she instructs, making him hold the controller out in one hand and crane his chin up to keep his eyes on the TV as she leans across him to pass the joint to Minho. Who is stretched out diagonally next to Thomas on the bed so that the tips of his spiky gelled hair tickle the edge of Thomas’ arm now and then but his feet can still rest, probably more distractingly than comfortably, on Gally’s leg while he plays.

“An EMPTY bottle, numbnuts,” Brenda critiques lazily, leaning back into her spot against the wall as Link dumps out his potion uselessly then looks around, befuddled, on the screen.

“Now you’ve walked into it,” she adds, pulling the cuffs of her Hakuna Matata sweatshirt snugly down over her hands. “You’ll have to run back over to the Deku stump then come back and start again.”

“This game is hella lame.”

“You picked it.” She had him there. Then again he hadn’t had much choice. She had already viciously destroyed him at GoldenEye – and everybody, at Mario Kart – repeatedly.

“What’s it doing!?"

"Healing you – wow, what is it about a glittery pink fluffball that says ‘Threat’ to you?” Brenda asks, raising a shrewd eyebrow that makes Thomas snort, and a laugh that is definitely chemically enhanced bubble itself halfway up his throat, as Gally’s sword makes several more uselessly violent strokes. “I already said don’t—oh my god.”

“Okay chill,” Gally says, giving up on the uncooperative fairy and tossing the controller aside to stretch out over Minho and loom down meaningfully until he provides. He looks a little surprised when Minho does so by reaching up to place the joint delicately between his lips instead of handing it to him, but Gally accepts anyway, shifting it to the corner of his mouth and puffing out the side so he bears a disturbing resemblance to Popeye. “I thought you were saying ‘don’t say Newt the M—'”

“Oy gevalt,” Brenda declares, apparently annoyed enough to spontaneously convert to Judaism just in the hope that a new deity might have better luck granting her the strength to deal with him, just as he is interrupted by Minho's foot removing itself from his lap to give his thigh a quelling shove.

“And Jesus, don't do that either,” she goes on, seemingly forgetting her recent religious awakening in favour of returning to the classics, and watching as Gally restores the rotation by passing off to Thomas next. “For all you know, maybe he is.”

“Why don’t you just ask him,” Gally asks, voice a little husky. Possibly from the smoke, but also maybe something to do with the way Minho’s toes, now that his feet have made their point, are burrowing themselves seekingly in underneath his thigh.

“You get that if the answer is yes,” Minho says, exhaling philosophically, “he literally can’t answer him right?”

It’s kind of embarrassingly late in the game for Thomas to be only just realizing that exact same thing.

The miniature epiphany makes him choke on his next inhale. And Thomas reaches down, coughing, to pass back to Minho.

Maybe he should lay off a bit for a while.

It takes him several weeks of classes and a lot of pestering for private tutelage from one unfortunate Ms Mary Cooper, who teaches Sign Language at the local Health and Wellness Centre, to be able to master the very simple phrase, but when Thomas finally sees his opportunity, he’s ready for it.

Nice t-shirt, he manages, in stumbling Sign, one particularly soggy and dripping spring morning when Newt makes his entrance to the copier room sporting a Nirvana tee under his habitual layers of plaid.

Newt stops halfway through setting down the day’s box of Pronouncement Slips to stare at him a minute like he is just noticing Thomas is there. He reaches up in slow surprise to remove the Beginner’s Guide to Divination booklet jutting out from between his teeth.

And for the first time, Thomas is introduced to Newt’s smile.

It is completely worth the price of admission.

At some point in the next few days, a Nirvana CD makes it into the pronouncements box. Thomas already has a copy, but he hangs onto the loan for a couple days before returning it with a payment in kind, in the currency of Pearl Jam. They make their way through the obvious Stone Temple Pilots, Radiohead and Green Day, but then Newt zags with The Beatles and Thomas is forced to dig into his mother’s stash and parry with Simon and Garfunkel.

What follows is some sort of musical shittalking one-upmanship deal that goes some pretty nerdy, alternative and maybe-even-Leonard Cohen places – not to even mention the Disney – that culminates eventually in Newt shaking his head ruefully over Thomas’ assertion of Avril Lavigne and Thomas reaching out to swipe his discman toward him across the table and pop out the Spice Girls with a:

“May I remind you, that you own this!?”

Then Newt’s head falls back, shoulders shaking in silent laughter a good long moment before he recovers enough to respond.

I didn’t actually. I bought it for you.

Thomas gasps dramatically and snatches the disc back from where he has been holding it out in the air, clutching it to his chest to Newt’s apparent vast entertainment, before popping it back into the discman with a definitive snap.

Then I’m keeping it!!

Nobody’s going to tell him Wannabe isn’t a dope track.

It’s nice. They both end up with a couple things they’ve never heard before, and Thomas in particular is introduced to a rendition of Clair de Lune that officially changes his life.

And then, around the time the sunshine is starting to be a sure bet most mornings, Newt shows up to the copier room with a different box from the usual.

Want to see how it works?

Thomas peers inside as Newt lifts out a stack of paper and what looks like a flat, round dish made out of a frosty material, like sea glass. Under that are bottles. Maybe a hundred diminutive glass bottles, with cork stoppers.

Newt isn’t paying them much mind though, he’s settling the broad dish on the table in front of them and filling it with a clear liquid that looks like water from a silver flask. Next he pulls a stiff, stark white piece of paper from off the top of the stack and Thomas realizes what they are. Letters.

But still unwritten.

His realization must show all over him because Newt smiles a little to himself. Then, without further hesitation, he sinks it under his splayed fingertips beneath the surface of the water in the shallow basin.

Thomas feels his hand move, reaching in protective reflex for the thin white sheet that should start to dissolve and come apart in the water, but Newt puts up a hand. And then both of them, making the sign for Wait.

He uncorks one of the little bottles, and upends it over the dish. Thomas can see what looks like a thick, silver liquid something like mercury tilt and slosh forward inside the bottle but what comes out is more like smoke. It pours out, heavy and swirling and indeterminate in its colour; now grey, edged with purple, then shot through with fumes of a deep navy.

The vapour curls and floats above the water’s surface, rising in the formation of letters. Words. Words Thomas barely has time to take in before they are puffing into a pink and lilac cloud of particulate and falling through the air into the dish like a trickling of iridescent hourglass sand.

Newt lifts the letter out, and it’s not only dry, it’s fully filled out.

Thomas is gaping. He can feel the astonished expression completely taking over his face. Newt grins luminously and hands him the next bottle.

They pour prophecy after prophecy into the dish, and Thomas watches in fascination as the words furl themselves up from just above the surface, only to come sprinkling like glittering ash all the way back down.

PICTURESQUE FLIGHT TOO

A CRAZED OCTOPUS

POINTILLIST CRACKER FAN

YOU FOREVER YOU

It’s not long before Newt casts him a sideways glance like Thomas has been a fool if he thinks he’s been getting this calibre of a show for free, and shoves a stack of envelopes into his chest. Thomas takes the hint and gets down to work stuffing.

But as he does, he can watch Newt’s profile as he works; a picture of placid and assured focus painted in the ethereal silvery-blue light show of the pronouncements’ potion. And silent.

And Thomas can’t help but wonder.

It is dark in the Archives after hours. His lantern nearly goes out a whole pile of times, and he keeps starting at the sound of wings now and then in the shadows, but after several hours spent searching the colossal, unwieldy tomes of the Annals, Thomas is pretty sure he has his answer.

He finds himself easily enough, right there in bold, blocky print, or the lack of it. His name and birth details, and then a big ol’ taunting blank where a jumble of cryptic, dooming nonsense should be. But he’s checked the year after his too, and the year after that, and as far as five years back before his, just to be extra thorough.

No Newt. No Newtons – first name or last. There’s three Nortons and some poor soul who is actually called Newby. But no Newts.

Thomas actually kind of can’t conceptualize it. It’s nothing like fair.

It seems like it would get lonely enough, being Newt. Not that he’s ever been much of a whiz with self-expression himself. Even so, he can’t imagine what it must be like not to be able to talk to the vast majority of the human population.

But for that to be a reason to be left out of the plan altogether? Just swept aside by the Universe at large?

And for it to be Newt? Newt is smart and hardworking and if Thomas is honest, completely fascinating. And despite a sort of stiff, steely disposition not so different from their boss’, sort of… soft. Sweet. He’s… just a lovely guy, really.

It’s more than just a sucky deal. It’s quite frankly bullshit.

Thomas heaves a tired sigh, and the flame in the stupid lantern gutters and threatens suicide on him again. But as he takes it gingerly in hand and prepares to make his escape before it can snuff itself completely and leave him down here quite royally fucked, its flickering glow gleams intriguingly off the book cage housing the Rare and Restricted spellbooks section.

It’s a bad idea. A dumb, stupid, really terrible crappy idea full of pitfalls and so, so many ways Thomas could end up in buttloads of trouble. But if there’s guys like him and Newt getting dealt a shoddy hand by the system, there’s got to be more people like them out there.

Whether they were simple errors, or something more nefariously selective was at work, one thing is clear. The system doesn’t work. It’s broken.

It’s a really stupid plan. But it’s the one he’s got…

“I understand, completely,” says Ms Paige, her manicured hands folded calmly in front of her on the jade green blotter in the centre of her desk, and her voice coolly sympathetic. “Prophetic determinations are quite opaque until their moment of revelation, by design. They can feel very challenging to interpret, but I can assure you our Department’s pronouncements have never been incorrect.”

“Yes Ma’am. I mean, no, Ma’am, I’m not— It’s just—”

Thomas clamps down on the urge to contend that Ms Paige may in fact not understand completely, if at all. He’s not here, in the cluttered back office of a frankly somewhat creepy WCKD Institute building that had taken Thomas half the day to find, walking back and forth past the entire towering stone edifice several times despite paying close attention to the numbers on the buildings as if it were somehow evading him on purpose, because his pronouncement is opaque.

He’s not here, staring at the small glass sphere a bit like a snow globe on the end of Ms Paige’s desk, nestled in amongst the various stacks of yellowing, curl-edged notes that look much too old to be her own – all pinned neatly down under burnished brass paperweights, what might be a Rubiks Cube except carved entirely out of something like obsidian and with symbols instead of colours that look vaguely Egyptian or maybe even Sumerian, and more than one fountain pen – and trying what feels inordinately hard not to be distracted by the contents, which appears to be some kind of sunken flower or sea anemone in a rich, deep, purple until it moves; dark petals parting to reveal the tiny arrow-shaped head of a bright, bead-eyed little fish – because it’s challenging.

He didn’t even say it was incorrect. It’s none of those things. He’s here because, as he says, holding out the pronouncement in question “…it’s blank.”

Ms Paige blinks. Thomas thinks it might be the most emotion he’s seen her display yet.

The plaque adorning the base of the fish globe reads Nina.

“I see.” Ms Paige says. Although it’s hard to see how, given that she isn’t even looking at the letter Thomas is handing her. Her pale eyes and white-blonde hair glint softly right at him, backlit by the late afternoon sun filtering in through the arched window on the far wall of the tiny office, despite its ledge being stacked high with unshelved books.

A tiny potted poinsettia placed on top of the pile like the Princess atop her manifold pea-bolstering mattresses suggests they’ve been there a while, and aren’t expected to go anywhere at least until well into the new year.

“Newt,” Ms Paige says, turning to the side and looking for a moment like she is addressing the fish in the bowl, which gives a sudden shake of its inky black tailfins and goes scooting promptly around the circumference of its globe, appearing to grow several times in size and then abruptly giving the impression it may have actually disappeared altogether for a moment, as it zips around the convex walls of the glass. As if offended at being mislabeled as a newt when it is clearly some breed of exotic betta with a lush fan of what, at quick count, Thomas can only estimate to be approximately nine gently billowing tails. Or maybe it’s some sort of fancy squid.

But then, just as it settles itself on its gravelly bed of gleaming quartz, flushing an irritable dark vampiric red, a thatch of sandy-gold hair ducks out from behind the long bookcase behind Ms Paige’s desk.

“Newt, can you show this young man to the Annals please?”

And the Newt she’s addressing steps out from behind the bookcase, revealing that there is in fact an entire tallish, lankily-built boy living under the unruly crown of thatched-gold hair. He looks to be about Thomas’ own age, if not a tad older, and Thomas recognizes his Academy uniform straight off, although he doesn’t think he has ever met him before. It’s a little hard to tell, however, as he is also juggling a stack of books piled so high in his arms that his eyes are just peeking over the top, and Thomas marvels that his slim frame doesn’t topple right over under the weight.

“The Annals hold all original pronouncements, which are transcribed directly to our Matching Letters,” Ms Paige is saying now. “As I said, I can promise you that our system has never been wrong before, but maybe having a look for yourself will put your mind a little more at ease,” she reiterates, in a tone that is obviously aiming at kindly, and doesn’t actually fall too far off the mark, for all the answers that it provides.

“And take these down to Lawrence in the Caretaker’s office, please,” she adds, as Newt passes her desk. “I’ve tried to explain it won’t be of any help for his sinus troubles but he’s been rather insistent.” And she reaches out to place a deck of Tarot cards atop his teetering Jenga tower of texts, so that he has to drop them down to hip level and tuck his chin down over top of them to avoid them sliding off.

“Can I…?” Thomas offers, hastily stuffing his Letter away into his pocket to offer a hand, but Newt’s only answer is to turn from where he has already crossed to the door of the minuscule office, tilting his head as best he can without dislodging his deck of cards, to give an indicating nod at something on the wall.

There is a line of keys on hooks, each bearing labels in tidy block print. “Rare and Restricted,” Thomas reads the first label out loud.

Newt clicks his tongue jovially at him in confirmation, giving Thomas the distinct impression he would have cocked an accompanying finger-gun at him, were his hands not quite so precariously full, and strides off into the hallway.

“Oh and Thomas?” Ms Paige calls dulcetly from her desk, already pulling what appears to be a scroll of parchment toward herself just as Thomas is reaching to remove the key from its hook, and making to hurry after Newt out into the hall. “Happy Birthday.”

“Thanks,” Thomas murmurs back, trailing a little dazedly after Newt and not at all sure when he had ever given her his name. But then, he supposes, he did show her his Letter.

He is several turns down the twisting, labyrinthine hallways and following Newt into an elevator – Newt uses the end of what looks like some sort of large animal bone Thomas hadn’t noticed before, tucked into his arm alongside the stack of teetering volumes, to push the buttons despite Thomas’ repeated offer of help – before he realizes his Letter is simply and anonymously addressed: Greetings, Citizen.

Prophetics Department indeed.

Newt doesn’t seem a very talkative sort, but Thomas figures it’s pretty hard to be when the slightest movement of your jaw could trigger an avalanche of potentially priceless and obviously fragile occult artefacts.

The elevator takes them rattling and juddering down on a long, awkwardly silent ride several more floors than Thomas would have thought the building could logically house, and dings dissonantly. Newt steps out into a dank, stone basement level that Thomas’ brain can only make enough mental space for one description of in his mind – in Minho’s voice no less – and in no other terms but a dead-ass straight up dungeon.

Thomas tags quietly along just the same, feeling his fingers itch with anticipation and nerves and something in the mossy, damp air a little harder to identify, and tries not to follow on Newt’s heels too closely. Or focus too acutely on how the hair at Newt’s nape is just barely long enough to delicately graze the top of his collar, or think about how fortunate Newt is in the way his blazer flatters the lines of his lean frame or how his posture seems oddly particular and, for lack of a better word, perfect – despite currently schlepping enough weighty books to ostensibly crush a small army.

They come to a wrought iron book cage, with a sign above its tall gate that reads Rare and Restricted Spellbooks. Newt swings silently and suavely aside with his burden, and Thomas takes his cue to make with the key, already – the one job Newt seemingly trusted him to handle, and still it would be a lie if Thomas said it didn’t take him several tries.

The Annals, as Ms Paige described them, are not for the faint of heart. They turn out to be several aisles wide, housing tomes thicker than the span of Thomas’ hand and ranging from the century before this one, all the way on into the one that hasn’t begun yet.

Next to him, Newt shifts the weight of the book tower in his arms. This could take a while.

Thomas turns to Newt, whose entire contribution consists of a knowing-looking smirk. His eyes give a certain glint as he cocks an accompanying brow for good measure. Thomas couldn’t agree more.

“I… guess I can just let myself out when I’m done here?” he suggests.

Newt’s unsurprisingly wordless response is to lower his stack of books and lift his chin obligingly so that Thomas can place the book cage key gingerly between it and the top of the infamous deck of cards. And with a cheeky little wink that tells Thomas once again that if Newt hadn’t been too weighed down to perform, he would have been treated to another trip to the finger-gun show, he’s gone.

Leaving Thomas with nothing but a severely daunting row of musty old books heavy-looking enough that his wrists are already aching out of sheer intimidation and Minho’s voice in his head, reminding him that now he’s alone in a full-on legit whole-ass dungeon. Nice going, shuck-face.

It does take him some time to find himself in fact, not least because he learns too late he will have to check under the year of his birth, and not of his Coming of Age. But when he does, it turns out that Ms Paige was wrong about one thing. What he finds under his name does nothing to put his mind at ease at all.

How? Thomas thinks, restlessly. It’s no printing error. It’s not a matter of simple oversight, or as if he was simply forgotten. His name is there, as clear as day. The date and even the time of his birth are printed clearly and, as far as he knows, accurately right underneath. And then, next to that:

Nothing.

Where each and every other entry in the giant, smelly old tome shows a short jumble of cryptic and generally nonsensical Final Words intended to mark your ‘ideal companion for this life and the next’, the space next to Thomas’ name is as blank as the one in the form letter now sitting oddly heavily in his jacket pocket.

Does he not have a Soulmate at all? Or is there some perfect somebody out there that he is destined never to meet? But then, wouldn’t that be the opposite of destiny altogether, and what honestly would be the freakin’ point of that?

Maybe he should feel relieved. He’s always been of the personal opinion that the idea of finding the one person in the Universe supposedly designated as your most perfect company by learning you’d just had your last ever interaction with them seems a bit of a sick joke about as funny as a screen door on a submarine, and approximately just as useful.

He is so taken up with his thoughts as he wends his way out of the Institute – admittedly getting himself lost more than once in the Maze of its halls – that as he comes out into the chill winter air and the darkening late-afternoon light and absently rounds the corner of the building into the parking lot, he nearly walks smack into a motorcycle parked just on the other side.

Thomas takes two quick steps backward, but the pavement is icy and his boots miss their grip, his arms pinwheeling idiotically in an attempt to stay upright.

There’s a man standing astride the bike in front of him, because of course there is, and he flings out a hand to catch Thomas by the elbow before he can completely lose his balance, as well as any and all remaining shred of dignity, and go right down on his ass.

He’s out of his uniform and he has his helmet on over his bright hair already, but apparently Thomas would recognize that posture, even shrugged casually into a heavy leather riding jacket like it is currently, anywhere.

Naturally.

“Graceful,” Thomas critiques his performance in rueful thanks, gripping Newt back by the leather clad elbow for an indulgent moment while he steadies himself. He looks down at the slippery ground as he tries to gain his footing and lo and behold, it appears that Newt has finally dropped a book.

Thomas bends down to retrieve it for him as soon as he’s stable – only fair, as he was probably the one to knock it out of Newt’s hand in the first place – and he recognizes the title, instantly. Huh.

“Steinbeck, right?” he says, handing the novel over.

But Newt isn’t taking it.

Newt is staring. Right at him. Thomas can see his adam’s apple bob as he swallows, hard. The motorcycle engine roars suddenly to life, making both of them jump and looking not a little like Newt’s foot may have slipped on the starter more than it was deliberate.

But then, after a strangely long, ringing moment, Newt blinks himself out of his stare and revs the throttle anyway. The abrupt rise in volume and vibration send Thomas backward another couple of unsteady steps, and then to his continued surprise and confusion, Newt says something Thomas can’t hear over the sound of the motor, and promptly drives off. Leaving Thomas still holding the apparently unwanted novel, and confused as all hell, as he watches Newt’s bike go arrowing out of the parking lot and corner expertly into traffic, its wheels skidding slightly on the cold tarmac just as the snow begins to fall.

Thomas hasn’t been walking long, his pace just as meandering as his thoughts, as he picks his way over the slippery walk through what is quite quickly becoming an all out snowstorm, still hugging the abandoned novel to his chest. A vague plot to come back to this spot around the time Newt gets off again tomorrow so that he can return it to him is just beginning to percolate its way slowly through the fog of what-the-hell-just-happened swirling around his brain, when he is interrupted in his reverie. By sirens.

Thomas’ step falters to an unsteady stop. The snow is falling in thick, silent clumps through the air and the wail of the ambulance flying past sends a hot pang of adrenaline through his guts, as the thought strikes that the ice under his feet isn’t likely to be any less treacherous beneath the treads of his shoes than it would under a set of motorcycle tires.

“I brought you your book back,” Thomas says, just like he rehearsed, when he sees Newt next. The doctor with sly-looking features and a sharp gaze who had showed him to Newt’s room had assured him, in an oddly knowing tone, that Newt could hear it if he talked to him. “Steinbeck. Right?”

Newt breathes, inhaling surprisingly sharply for somebody who is unconscious. His eyes stay shuttered, his lashes marking out dark little crescent moons against the pallor of his cheeks under the harsh hospital lights. He exhales, too.

Given the luck Thomas has had trying to talk to Newt up to now, he supposes this isn’t their worst conversation so far.

“I remember reading this in school…”

The monitor beside Newt’s bed pings metallically, and his eyelids give what Thomas is sure is a flutter. Thomas feels his heart match the miniscule movement in anticipation, with the thought that maybe they are about to blink open. A weak hope gives a little leap in his chest as he thumbs open the paperback cover, and just for the heck of it, reads out Steinbeck’s first few lines.

They don’t.

The last rains come gently to the red and gray country of Oklahoma, and Thomas finds himself wishing idly that he could remember what colour they are.

There’s a chair left waiting next to Newt’s bed when Thomas comes back to read again the next day. And the next after that. He comes back, every day on his way home, to read to Newt and watch for infinitesimal twitches of still, slender fingers, and those eyes stay stubbornly, determinedly closed.

Still Thomas shows up, and he makes small talk to Newt’s profile, so perfectly pale and impassive it is hard not to imagine it carved out of marble – smooth and cold to the touch, if only he were brave enough – and he reads. Until the day, just about when that young snot-nose Connie is walking down the river away from camp, Thomas flips the page and a white leaf of paper Newt must have been using to mark his place flutters free.

Steinbeck’s words blur in front of his eyes in favour of the blocky, institutional print Thomas can’t help but recognize immediately before he can even catch the Letter’s edge between suddenly shaky fingers.

Because in that moment Thomas knows he will never know the colour of Newt’s eyes, not with the final words that Newt would ever hear him speak, no matter what the doctors might tell him, staring up at him from the Matching Letter clutched in his trembling hand.

The Grapes of Wrath slithers from his lap to the floor as he sits and stares, but Thomas spares it hardly any thought. It isn’t the book that he needs.

He knows now what he will need to do. It’s a long shot but maybe he can save Newt. Maybe he can save everyone. From the feeling coursing through his blood and pounding in his temples right now. The sick, useless grief swimming hot and buzzing electric in front of his eyes.

Thomas swallows it down, feels his resolve set itself as his eyes move, achingly slow, from the fateful words up to the address printed in the top left corner of the Letter, where Thomas just happens to know there is a row of keys marked Rare and Restricted Spells.

And a plan starts to take root in his mind…

The buildings rise up tall and imperiously overhead on both sides of the downtown city street.

Thomas keeps his head down, hands pushed deep into his coat pockets against the cutting bite of the wind, and nearly misses Haven Boulevard altogether.

So maybe he’s distracted. Brooding even, just a little. Which is more than fair, considering, Thomas thinks, fingering the letter folded carefully into his pocket. He repeats the address printed on the envelope over again to himself and scans the faces of the buildings for numbers as he walks, not sure which of the looming, indifferent structures he is looking for.

Typical, Thomas sighs inwardly, hearing it in Teresa’s voice, for some reason, inside his head. As per freakin’ usual, Thomas can’t really argue she’d be wrong. He has no plan of attack, no idea what kind of place he’s going to be walking into. He hasn’t even figured out how he’s going to word his question when he does – if he can ever find the damn place.

Thomas stops long enough to check his watch, blowing on his hands to warm them a little before he hurries on. He’ll miss his appointment with Dr Paige at this rate and then it’ll all be moot anyway.

All he does know is, something just doesn’t feel right. Being born this late in the year meant Thomas was one of the last of his group to get his letter. If his friends’ letters were anything to go on, Final Words were meant to be mysterious, a cryptic little puzzle unique enough to announce itself so it wasn’t just some coincidental nothing you would hear all the time, like ‘see you later’ or ‘have fun dude’.

Thomas’ message isn’t quite as bland, sure, but that’s what makes it all the more unsettling. It’s just weird is all, can’t be right. Your Matching letter isn’t supposed to read like a personal message. And if the Prophetics Department had meant this one to be reassuring, well then frankly, it’s having the opposite effect.

Okay so Thomas is brooding, so much so that he completely fails to notice until much too late, that there’s a boy standing on the corner in front of him – a student like him, or a year or two older maybe, struggling to fit several more books than seems possible into the messenger bag slung over his shoulder as he waits for the traffic lights to change. Thomas draws up short before he smacks right into him – boots skidding on the icy sidewalk, arms pinwheeling ridiculously like a poor imitation of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, the whole entire frickin’ bit – and successfully slams right into the guy anyway.

Messenger Bag Guy yelps in surprise and drops a book. His black motorcycle boots scrabble for purchase on the ice under them in turn and both Thomas’ hands land sturdily on his shoulders. And if it’s to hold himself steady as much as it is to stabilize this latest victim of his genetic predisposition for epic face-planting, then hey, two birds, Thomas figures.

His victim’s hair is blond. His features are sharpish and almost a bit… ethereal, if Thomas does say so himself. But he doesn’t. Out loud. Thankfully.

“Graceful,” Thomas critiques his entrance ruefully instead, hoping the wry tone and the way he can feel his nose wrinkling itself up sheepishly conveys some sort of apology. Messenger Dude’s mouth curves up at one side as if he’s still working out whether or not Thomas is worthy of his smile, and he's rubbing his arm like it might be bruised. There’s no way it possibly hurts more than Thomas’ pride.

Thomas lets his shoulders go. He bends down to retrieve the guy’s fallen paperback, and recognizes the title. Huh.

“Steinbeck, right?” he says, handing it over.

The boy’s eyes widen, and rather than taking the book back he takes a few surprised steps backward instead. Right toward traffic.

A strange feeling closes Thomas in, like the air is suddenly made of cotton candy. Cloying and suffocating and packing in closer and tighter around him until his vision almost shimmers in front of his face and his ears feel stuffed with cotton and gauze. And Thomas sees it happening well before the other boy does—who is much too busy staring at Thomas with his mouth open slightly, and forming words Thomas really only half-way hears.

The ice under their feet is in vast black sheets on the ground, covering the walks and the streets, and it is obvious the car speeding toward the intersection is not going to have time to stop. Thomas moves before he is thinking, diving forward with his hands to that set of slight, angular shoulders again, barreling both of them right into the path of the Ford Pinto flying toward them, and right across.

It misses them by inches. Thomas is almost sure he can feel the edge of the bumper graze the back of his trouser leg.

They stand stunned in the centre of the street, chests heaving. Thomas is still clutching the boy’s elbow, staring disbelievingly into the depths of a pair of eyes in a shade so dark, like pools of slate, that they seem almost otherworldly.

They are staring just as intently back.

So neither of them sees the truck careering at them from the opposite direction.

Thomas is the first to wake up.

“Tinnitus,” says Dr Janson. “The ringing in your ears is not a condition in itself, just a symptom of the trauma, I’m afraid. I know it can be a little uncomfortable but unfortunately there’s no treatment except time. It should start to ease up in a couple of days or so.”

“You’ve been very lucky, Thomas,” he reminds him exactly a couple of days or so later, when it doesn’t. And Thomas doesn’t need the pointed glance over at the bed next to his to know that what he is really saying is that he could have it as bad as the blond boy lying in it. That a little ringing in the ears is nothing compared to thirteen fractured bones – even if several of them are ribs – and a medically induced coma, and frankly he’d prefer it if Thomas would hush up complaining.

As if Thomas could forget. As if Thomas hasn’t spent every waking minute – as few of them as he was admittedly managing to muster in a day so far – staring at the unconscious features of the boy next to him.

Newt, the Doctors said he was called. Short for something, maybe.

Newt, with his ivory-pale skin nearly translucent under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, and his golden hair. His long slender fingers laid relaxed and elegant on the coverlet where the nurses placed them carefully after they checked his vitals and changed his IV and drew the blue privacy curtain around his bed to carry out the work of their washcloths and sponges in efficient, awkward silence; wheeling their cart of syringes, tubes and wipes out of the room when they finished, and leaving his hair damp and falling in fresh little clumps down over his forehead.

Newt, this gilt and alabaster mystery who had taken one look at him and walked them both straight into traffic.

They bring Thomas his things, when his blood pressure and organ function and enzyme levels start to even out and they start telling him nonsensical things like ‘you’ll be home before you know it’. The cardboard banker’s box holds his jacket – the rest of his clothes had to be cut off him, and there was too much blood to save them anyway, they say, waving this fact away like if he had wanted to keep his pants he would have thought about that before he jumped in front of a speeding delivery van. It also contains all the contents of his pockets, and Newt’s book. The one Thomas had bent down to rescue from the icy pavement just before they were hit.

Steinbeck. Right. Thomas moves his fingers over the slightly worn cover, the surface of the lettering and the folksy watercolour art roughening and blistered here and there with age and use.

“You know,” Dr Janson says, with a knowing look in those sly, sharp eyes he’s got, as he finishes up scribbling incomprehensible numbers onto the chart at the foot of Thomas’ bed. “He can hear it, if you speak to him.”

They let him have a chair, and get far enough out of bed to sit by Newt’s side, where Thomas is careful not to wrap his fingers around the long, motionless ones lying atop the bleached-bone white sheets; extra sure never to reach up and gently brush the soft-looking, slightly-curled strands of hair out of the way of Newt’s eyes in case each day is the day they choose suddenly to blink open.

At first, it mostly helps to drown out the ringing. But as the clouds give up and the sun flares down on the corn until a line of brown spreads along the edge of each green bayonet, and the Joad family moves off down the Mother Road in their doomed flight from dust and truth and the world at large, Thomas finds himself doing more than reading aloud. He stops to apologize when he stutters over a word or the pages stick together – it’s only polite – he will break in to interrupt his own narration to comment when a line of the prose is just too good to let pass without praise, or something is simply too patently hilarious – did they really need the entire chapter about the land turtle? And soon he is doing more than reading. He’s doing what Dr Janson suggested: talking to Newt.

He tells him what little news there is to be had from the events of their day, what colour the jell-o was at meal times, or the results of his tests. That the doctors say he should be waking up any day now.

And every time they do, Thomas feels the little swallow-tailed flitting of hopefulness swoop through his chest like a swift–winged martin.

He can’t be sure when it is he starts to hear Newt talking back to him inside his head, but every time he does, those imagined replies are unfailingly dry and witty in a way that leave him chuckling fondly to himself in the humming silence of the room like a crazy person.

Then. Just as young snot-nose Connie is walking his way south down the river and away from the camp, Thomas flips the page and a white leaf of paper Newt must have been using to mark his place flutters free. It’s white and stiff and familiar in his fingers as he leans down to pick it up from the disinfectant-scented floor.

Greetings Citizen,
Congratulations on your Coming of Age! We are pleased to provide you with the following notice.

The final words you will hear from your Soulmate are:

GRACEFUL STEINBECK RIGHT

The ring in his ears flares to a blaring pitch and Thomas is surrounded again by that suffocating cotton candy din in the air that seems to come from nowhere, and everywhere, maybe. Definitely some place inside him, and he can see it all over again, the shocked pale features of the blond boy stepping back and away from him. He can see it as vividly as the moment it happened, so much clearer now in the slow motion playback of memory, his mouth opening to form words Thomas still can’t hear, but he can see them this time, in the movement of Newt’s lips, clear now as anything as he steps unsteadily backward over the slick of the ice, leaving the abandoned novel in Thomas’ dumb-stricken hand –

Let me know how it ends, alright?

Thomas does his best. As he knows now he always will for this boy, for Newt, his gilt and alabaster fate. Even as he knows his efforts are as doomed as the Joads as they climb back into the jalopy and take once again to the Mother Road, still he reads.

He reads until the hum that should be receding and not rising in his ears finally takes the notice of the doctors and Thomas ends up spending most of his time in an all-new battery of tests. He reads and he talks about jell-o and he asks sheepishly if he’s shouting, because he’s never sure now, and he hears Newt’s warm responding chuckle in his head.

He reads until the morning when he wakes up to the sound of the ringing finally wiped completely clean away – along with the sounds of everything else.

Thomas has to return to the hospital twice a week after he’s released for his Sign Language classes with Mary, and Newt has to stay long after he wakes up, for his Physio. So it works out in a way. But Thomas leaves him a note none the less, tucked into the book the nurses promise to leave quite prominently on Newt’s ugly hospital nightstand, right at the page where they left off.

It’s hastily written, on the only bit of paper he has available – the one that was in the cardboard banker box, in the pocket of his jacket – but Thomas is sure it explains everything. Why he couldn’t finish Newt’s story for him, where he had to go.

Of course, the most useful explanation is probably the one where Thomas writes his instructions to flip the note over, and read the words printed in blocky, institutional lettering on the other side.

Greetings Citizen,
Congratulations on your Coming of Age! We are pleased to provide you with the following notice.

The final words you will hear from your Soulmate are:

IT ENDS ALRIGHT

His mother cries, and Minho looks curiously at him with that sage, knowing look of understanding that almost always breaks Thomas’ resolve whenever he’s plotting something particularly stupid. Brenda punches his arm and throws herself around his neck and chews him out with a long rant Thomas can only experience as an enduring bout of warm and varied vibrations punctuated with a lot of sniffling into his shoulder – which she makes him go through all over again in its entirety three months later when she has learned the whole thing in Sign. Teresa is much more sensible about the whole thing and writes him an eloquently worded letter supporting him in whatever decision he makes, without explicitly promising that she will necessarily approve. But Thomas still refuses surgery.

They have a chance that few, if any, are ever lucky enough to get. This loophole they’ve slipped through feels like some kind of small, or even sort of large-ish, miracle, and Thomas isn’t about to mess with it.

It probably makes sense that Newt fits seamlessly into his life like hands into a well-worn pair of gloves.

He and Minho turn out to share a love of vintage cartoons, and vintage records, and vintage movies and comics and video games – as well as kicking Thomas’ butt at them – that blossoms into what can clearly be nothing less than a lasting and life-long connection at what has to be some kind of record speed. He bonds with Brenda when she finds out he has a competitive streak maybe as wide as her own is, and it comes to pass that the two of them can make a game – and correspondingly some slightly distressingly wild bets and dares – out of pretty much any activity. He wins Frypan over within seconds by falling in what seems to be actual genuine love with his cooking, most notably his stew, with the mystery ingredient Thomas and Minho have still never succeeded in cajoling, begging, spying or otherwise tricking out of him, and Teresa is absolutely thrilled to finally have a tag team partner for her favoured hobby of dragging Thomas clothes shopping – widely known to all as a thinly veiled excuse for criticizing his fashion sense and vetoing all of his selections.

It’s a pretty good deal, as far as trade-offs go. His wardrobe is improving, his love life is definitely looking up, and interestingly, Thomas is developing a whole new appreciation for the night life.

A night club may be one of the only places where not hearing a thing feels like an advantage.

The music has always been so loud that he could feel it but now the feeling is comfortable, low and rich and pulsing, and Thomas can sink idly back into it to watch his friends carouse and carry on together like he is wrapped up in his own personal feather counterpane. He is even getting to the point he can recognize a few songs by the beat of the pounding bass shivering in his skin.

Watching Newt laugh at Minho, or share glinting, conspiratorial smirks with the girls when he catches one of them turning her nose a little too fondly into the silky dark locks of the head resting in casual end-of-the-night familiarity on her shoulder, is a pleasure Thomas enjoys any time. And he is almost getting good enough now at reading lips to fold himself contentedly into the couch at Frypan’s apartment, or lean back in their booth at their favourite weeknight pub, and take in nearly the entirety of the group’s conversation. But in the club, everybody gets so tired of shouting they end up signing everything to one another anyway, so that Thomas doesn’t even have to try.

And as they inevitably scatter one by one – Brenda to the dancefloor and Frypan after drinks, Minho and Teresa slipping into the crowd like the sleek jungle predators they are only to disappear off to wherever the night’s conquests inevitably take them. Then, sitting at the bar and watching the scene spread out in front of him, takes on a new and special secret joy.

He can read each individual drama and heartbreak in the house - bold propositions and daring risks and rejections, leaned in close to be spoken into a waiting ear. Hopeful questions written out as tentative first kisses. All making up the night’s intricate tapestry. And the vast, spreading panorama of bodies moving in natural, primal synchronicity that is a silent dance floor is one of the most human and beautiful things Thomas thinks he may have ever seen.

Most beautiful after Newt, of course. Standing in front of him now, pint in hand, gleaming under the colour and chaos of the dance floor lights. And that smile.

“Alright, Tommy?”

Newt says it so much Thomas barely needs to lip read anymore. But he has to lean past him to place his drink on the bar so that he can sign: time to head home?

Thomas smiles, warm and happy and glowing with gin and tonic and coloured lights and the thudding of the bass in his blood, and takes advantage of the proximity to get a firm enough grip on Newt’s belt he can yank him close, pivoting on his barstool so that when the surprise and the beer bring him stumbling forward, Newt comes to land slotted safely in between his knees. And when Thomas pushes his forehead in under his chin so Newt can feel him nod his answer against his collar bone, the way the responding laughter in Newt’s throat knocks at the side of his temple makes a pure and uncomplicated heady joy walk its familiar fingers in steps down the notched path of his vertebrae.

Newt leaves Thomas to settle the bill while he goes out to fight the flocks of homeward-fleeing drunks for a cab.

So Thomas is fumbling with his wallet when he spills his change - silver and copper spilling and rolling wild over the length of the bar-top and down onto the floor, as far as several stools over.

"Fuck,” he mutters, what he can only assume is quietly and under his breath, only to turn around and see Minho, watching – and listening – with raised eyebrows.

“Hey,” he sees Minho say, stepping forward to bend down and collect a few of the fallen coins, effectively rescuing him both from the mess and from having to offer an explanation for why Minho is hearing for the first time in years that Thomas’ voice still works as well, as far as he knows anyway, as it ever did. “I get it.”

Minho runs his palm along the bar, sweeping the majority of the change across it toward Thomas for him to take, so his hands are free to sign.

TO WRITE SHANKS

Thomas’ own hands freeze in their scrabbling for lose quarters. He would know the only person capable of that particular final Phrase, even if he didn’t recognize it. From the day a year and a half ago now, when they had watched their friend head for the sign marked Departures. Internship-bound and boarding a flight for Denver, with the final farewell: “Don’t forget to write, shanks.”

Gally, Thomas signs, bringing his hand up in front of his forehead to make a G with his fingers and sign in a swooping, bird’s wing shape in front of his eyebrows.

And he doesn’t need Minho to say ‘I get that you’re scared, every day, of what happens if you talk out loud in front of Newt’, because it’s immediately and abundantly clear, how very much Minho does get it. Minho has understood that particular conundrum for a while, apparently.

Does he know?

Minho looks down at his empty beer bottle, setting the heel of it down on the bar.

I don’t even remember the last thing I said to him, he signs, after a sigh. But we’ve written back and forth a couple times. Neither of us ever mentions meeting up again, or when he might be coming back home. Minho nods. There’s an unusually distant look in his eye.

…I think he does.

It’s a minute before Minho is looking at him again so that Thomas can say it.

I’m sorry.

Minho gives him that look he always does, the one that says ‘don’t do anything stupid’. He puts a hand out for Thomas' shoulder before he pulls it back, ready to speak in Sign again.

You have a chance, Thomas.

Thomas nods.

Make sure you don’t waste it.

Thomas doesn’t fucking plan on it.

They move into a three-story walk-up above a barber shop on the first floor, and a palm reader’s on the second, who reads them their fortunes for free on a stormy night in October when the power goes out, and sends them back upstairs hauling an armload of enough spare candles to light the entire building with a conspiratorial wink for Newt and a motherly pat on the side of Thomas’ cheek.

No matter where they go, Newt always remembers to describe the sounds of birdsong and traffic jams, of wind in the trees and the snow squeaking and crunching under their feet. He is somehow never standing with his back to the sun so Thomas never has to squint at him so as not to miss a sign, and the night he drags him out to the fire escape because some pack of idiots has decided to set off fireworks in the alley, Newt is the one to remember to guide Thomas’ hands to the railing; to settle in warmly behind him and wrap his own palms just as bravely around the freezing wrought iron on either side of Thomas’ own, where they can take in the shake and shimmy of each boom of the roman candle.

And Thomas doesn’t need the movement of Newt’s lips tucked in against the side of his nape as he sings along, or to pick out the beloved faces of his illegal pyrotechnics team below, lit up in flares of flaming cobalt blue, sizzling sparking green and fiery canary yellow, to make out the lyrics or the infamous tune of Happy Birthday to You. But he’ll sure as hell take it, Thomas thinks, as he leans backward into the steady warmth of his Soulmate standing as always at his back, taking in the unfaltering truth in the resolute beating of Newt’s heart, tapping itself out to him like all the secrets of the Universe spelled silently out in Morse code just for him.

Yes, a damn good deal as far as trade-offs go. And if Thomas could do it all over again, he would, and he wouldn’t change a single thing.

So it is that Thomas doesn’t hear the sirens the night Newt swipes up the apartment keys and kisses him a quick goodbye to run out to the shop on the corner for milk and a pack of cigarettes, and he isn’t there this time around, when the slick black ice on the curb proves too much for his bad leg. But the lights that flood the apartment with their flashing notes of dire red and blue are as good a knell as any to bring him clattering down all three flights of stairs to their walk-up and out into the crisply singing winter night air in time to see the paramedics raise the stretcher.

Teresa arrives, right on cue for their Friday night tradition of white wine and judgemental celebrity gossip, just as they are loading Newt up the ramp. Just in time to tut, pale and shell-shocked, at Thomas over his lack of a coat of all things, and to wrap her arms around him and sob wrackingly into his shoulder as he stands statue-still and helpless over the ruin of the smashed milk carton, bleeding white out onto the frozen curb under the coloured Christmas lights flashing determinedly from the balconies and the bare branches of the city trees.

And so it is that this time, Newt is first to Wake up.

He Remembers.

And he watches. He watches as Thomas and Teresa go in together on a big old house on the outskirts of town, that starts to feel too big and too empty for just the two of them before long. And he watches them fill it up fostering not one, not two, but three kids who had been handed a rotten start at life, only to find a much better one awaiting them in Thomas and Teresa’s empty rooms. Starting with curly-headed, cheerful young Chuck. He watches Sonya and Harriet make good on their pact to burn their rejected Letters, laughing and dusting the ash from their nearly-singed fingers into the swirling water churning and eddying around their feet where they stand at the base of a gleaming waterfall on their 10^th Anniversary hike over Machu Pichu, before turning joyfully to each other to join their sooty hands for a solemn renewal of their wedding vows. He watches as Frypan launches a small bakery, and then a food blog, and then a Mexican taqueria, and finally ends by inventing a line of sustainable plant-based yogurts with probiotics that eventually finds its way to into nearly every home refrigerator in the Nation. He watches Minho succeed as smoothly as he ever does at everything he tries, as if almost by mistake; eventually settling into one job as one of the top-paid Scouts in the history of professional sports, even effortlessly negotiating that his contract is to exclude, in no uncertain terms and with no questions asked, any travel whatsoever to Denver or its surrounding area. And he watches Brenda collapse to her knees to dissolve into tears in the centre of the bare hardwood floor, when she and Teresa get into a nonsensical but incendiary fight that starts but doesn’t end with the colour scheme for the bathroom in their new apartment, and Teresa finishes by storming out past the unpacked cardboard boxes, slamming the door on the heels of her final, shouted words: “And those towels are indigo, not cerulean!"

And Newt watches further back still, than his own memory takes him. To the day his overseer stood where Newt stands now, watching the scene unfolding before her, in which a young boy born without a Mark lives, right next door to a boy who does not speak. And instead of drawing the logical conclusion, takes it upon himself, despite the fact that humans haven’t had much success with magic for centuries, to begin tracking down the fragmentation spell far beyond his level of ability or any reasonable expectation of it, that he hopes will shatter the entire system. Not only for himself but for all those around him. Everyone that he loves.

“Interesting,” Ava murmurs under her breath, if breath were even a thing in this place. “Promising.” And she turns to the snow white dove sitting on the windowsill.

“Nina. Send word for Newt, once he’s Awake,” she says, paying it hardly any mind as it flutters promptly off on its way. “I need to speak with him about an idea...”

And Newt Remembers, again, the day that the Letter Trials were born.

Thomas goes to sleep at 8:52pm on a Wednesday night exactly like any other.

He prepares a dinner for himself and Teresa that neither of them really has any heart to eat, and when he clears the plates he pats her hand and kisses her cheek, just to see her wizened but still heartfelt smile. He pauses on the stairs as he does more and more these days, out of sentiment or of need; fingers resting on the frame of the photograph hung on the wall, of Chuck grinning in his gown and mortar board, as the breath returns to his chest.

He washes and undresses, slow and careful, his fingers finding more trouble than they used to with the pyjama buttons. Then he sits himself on the edge of the bed, as is his habit of late, accustomed by now to the way the stammering and stalling beat of his heart needs the time to catch up to itself, and climb its way back into its frail, unsteady rhythm.

If the tremor in his hands is worse than it was a month ago, there are no eyes there to see it as they lift, like they still do every evening, toward the empty side of the bed in the sign for Goodnight. And then with a worn, faraway smile and a last quiet sigh, he lifts the eiderdown and settles himself peacefully between the sheets.

And at long, long last, Thomas Wakes up.

The first, and only, thing Thomas sees when his eyes open, is Newt.

“This doesn’t feel like a dream,” Thomas says, the sounding of his own voice out loud not as surprising as it probably should be.

Newt’s, however, is another thing altogether.

“It doesn’t much, does it,” he agrees, looking over each shoulder at their surroundings, whatever they might be. Newt, as ever, is all his eyes seem to want to take in. “Not yet, anyway.” He takes a few steps closer to the bed.

The sheets don’t feel like the ones Thomas went to sleep in. The white of them is harsh and too much. Everywhere he looks his eyes, if that is what they are, seem to dazzle. But Newt is like the safe spot within it, this chaos of nothingness. His particular shine – golden and day-bright as he has always been for Thomas – is familiar, a perfect fit.

“You’re British.” A new and long forgotten tidbit Thomas can’t help but think he always should have known.

Or maybe he always has. It’s a feeling roughly the same temperature and weight as taking an old coat out of mothballs and finding money left sitting all summer long in the pocket.

“Am I?” Newt cocks an eyebrow at him, and his eyes glint in a manner Thomas definitely remembers from another time, another place than this one. “…Interesting.”

Another Newt, maybe. All of them, suddenly, just out of view but definitely there, as if just on the other side of row on row of windowpanes in his mind. Like he could look through and find him, each one, if Thomas could only get close enough to stand on tiptoe and peek in over the ledges.

There are no windows where they are though. In fact if there were walls at all, there are none now. Maybe it’s just his ears still waking themselves up, but the air here almost tinkles, like it’s full of tiny ice crystals constantly on the move, chiming together. It’s not cold here though, not warm either. Thomas hesitates to say that it’s a particular degree of perfect. Off in the distance he can see what might be the outline of trees.

But right next to him is Newt. Newt, right here with him, and watching him mildly, as if waiting for the question he knows comes next. He makes Thomas ask it anyway, of course.

“Where are we?”

“Safe,” Newt replies, telling him everything he needs to know without answering anything much at all. “At rest.”

He reaches out to lay his hand over top of Thomas’, and all the windows open up for him, clear as the days they happened; Newt’s eyes by the light of the disco ball, that blond head bent gracefully over scintillating, smoky prophecies and the squeal of the truck’s tires. The ache of pushing Steinbeck’s words past the lump in his throat. Each and every one of their trials and missed chances.

Thomas looks down, blinking carefully, sure that he has eyes now because they are swimming with tears. He has hands, too. The way he remembers them once; joints straight and sure in the strength of their movements, the skin on the backs of them smooth and unblemished.

“Finished,” Newt finishes.

And when Thomas looks back up at him, there is definitely a copse of trees to make his background. Newt looks around them, because apparently he can see it too, taking in the grassy meadow that surrounds them, wide and bright and fresh. He smiles approvingly. “Nicely done.”

There is something in Newt’s hand that Thomas can’t be sure was there a moment ago. He accepts it, unfolding the stiff white slip of paper with fingers that no longer tremble, knowing the words he will find even as they unfurl.

GRACEFUL STEINBECK RIGHT

“Our final words…”

“Are they?” Newt reaches out a radiant finger, and taps the fine print just above.

…the first words you will hear from your Soulmate are

“You did it, Tommy.”

The never-heard nickname sounds somehow thousands of years old.

“My spell? It worked? But…"

"Well,” Newt says, “matter of opinion, I suppose,” the words no less cryptic than any of his others so far. “Let’s just say you can be very convincing.”

“I still don’t understand.” He never had. Was this where Matches came from? Who had he convinced? The whole thing has never given him stronger visions of cold, faceless committees of stone, sitting around sterile, white tables, deciding the best rules for a system they would never have to live by.

Was it really changed? For everyone? No more stories that ended in heartbreak and tragedy before they even got a chance to begin? “Why…”

The rest of his question doesn’t seem to have its words in line. Luckily, Newt doesn’t seem to need them.

He gives a sigh like it’s a question he has been waiting for and an answer he still doesn’t quite have, and reaches for Thomas’ hand again. And Thomas lets him turn the still unlettered skin of his inner wrist demonstratively up and into view.

“Because it’s a Soulmark not a lifemark,” says Newt. “It’s not there to tell you what to do with your life…” And his touch is cool where a single fingertip traces a long line up the inside of Thomas’ forearm like he has been waiting for it, longing as keenly as Thomas to know for certain that if this is a dream after all, that it is one that is lasting, and real. “It’s for the soul. To find your companion, or your guide, when the journey’s over and you get to where we’re all going.”

“Here,” Thomas says, and Newt smiles as a family of birds, glittering iridescently as if they were carved out of crystal, goes chittering overhead to roost in the copse of trees behind him. “Minho and Gally here, then?”

The light in Newt’s eyes warms to a height of fondness Thomas hasn’t yet seen there since his arrival here. “Wouldn’t be much of a Paradise if they weren’t, now would it?”

“Together?"

"Like I said,” comes the answer.

Paradise. Where Matches are made. Thomas almost wants to hold in the words that seem to slip past his lips like shadows into the night. “So this is Heaven?"

"…Some call it that.”

A straighter answer than really expected, and Thomas is struck all at once by a memory of another Newt, or maybe they are all this one, standing over him just like this. Backdropped by stars and laughing soundlessly down at him. Thomas makes the sound of Newt’s laugh for him in his head, imagines it bright and chiming like a hundred tiny silvered bells, mixing in with the music of the stars. There is snow in Newt’s hair. Thomas can feel the cold of it biting into him – brittle, crystalline fangs bursting into wet, glacial pinpricks against the warm skin at his wrists and the back of his neck where it is exposed over the top of his mother’s brightly hand-knitted scarf – laid on his back while his limbs move with purpose under the constellations reflected in Newt’s laughing gaze, arms outstretched… fingertips reaching…

Tracing out the shape of wings.

If Thomas has a heart here, it isn’t beating.

“You’re an angel.” It’s as awed it is certain, not at all a question but still courting an answer.

Newt smiles that way he always has, as if at some joke only he understands. His head cants thoughtfully to the side.

“Apprentice,” he allows.

And then, not for the first time, Newt gives the impression he knows exactly what Thomas is thinking, as his head ducks under the pull of the way Thomas’ gaze moves, drawn irresistibly to the almost involuntary shift of Newt’s shoulders, as if there is some phantom weight held there, missing from that always impossibly light and suspiciously perfect bow-string posture.

“No feathers,” Thomas notes with a careful grin. Can you tease an angel?

“…Not currently.” Apparently you can. If he happens to be your Soulmate.

There is a dark note in the rejoinder that dulls the wry spark of it, a downward flick of Newt’s adored, night-sky gaze that needs unpacking, but Thomas is remembering something else now too. Strong, iron angles under the broadly starched shoulder pads and sharp-lined lapels of a crisp white suit.

“Ms Paige…”

Newt shakes his head, half-smirking in fond confirmation. “There’s a reason you were Chosen.”

“Chosen?”

“For the Program.” Newt’s half smirk relaxes itself into both whole halves of a smile, flavoured with what Thomas can’t help but think is a hint of some sort of pride. “You’re an Architect, Tommy. Or will be, if you accept. It’s the reason you were assigned a Guide, and not a mortal Mate.”

Thomas understands about as much of that as he has everything else so far, but Newt is shifting his weight a little, from one leg to the other, as if trying to get comfortable for what promises to be a long explanation. So Thomas shifts himself, making room next to him at the edge of the bed in case Newt might want to sit.

“See,” Newt says, doing so without pause or hesitation, and Thomas tries to get used to the way the shimmering proximity makes a feeling like glowing start to bubble everywhere under his skin. “Everybody’s will has an effect here, it’s what makes up this place. Building off of will, off each Citizen’s hopes and desires, is the only way a Paradise can be what it is. But obviously if every person had absolute power it would be… well, pretty much the opposite.” Newt pauses to make sure his words are sinking in, but Thomas isn’t the best judge of that at the moment. The glowing feeling in his skin has a happy little hum to it that he wonders if angelic ears can pick up. “So each person’s effect is slow, subtle. But some have… potential,” Newt concludes finally. “A will that’s stronger than others.”

“You saying I’m stubborn?”

“Never. But most definitely.” Apparently angels can tease right back. “But it’s more than that. An Architect can create for others, makes harmony… changes things,” Newt says significantly, with a glance down at the slip of paper still sitting in Thomas’ hand – which appears to have folded itself into the planes and angles of a delicate paper crane. Newt accepts it, but not without a raised brow and a look like Thomas is being inordinately cheeky. “It’s important that an Architect has to want to change things, to make them better for others,” he says seriously, “to work for everyone.”

It’s a responsibility. Not a small one. That much at least, Thomas can absorb. He imagines the crane’s tiny wings flapping gamely up and down. They hardly move at all.

“…I have so much to learn.”

“We have all the time in the Universe,” says Newt.

And it may be strange, that the thought is only occurring now, but then everything here is strange.

“Is that even your name? …Newt?” Thomas adds, realizing he is getting so used to Newt responding as smoothly as if he knows what Thomas is thinking before he says it aloud, that he didn’t bother the first time.

Newt looks at him, letting Thomas look searchingly into his eyes – dark, like midnight – for a moment or two, or maybe several years, as if he should be able to find the answer there for himself, before he finally nods.

“It’s all they let you keep,” he says. “Everything else, any memory of who or what you are, is Swiped away. It’s part of the deal of being inserted into the Trials. To keep the experience pure.”

There is still so much Thomas doesn’t understand. But he supposes Newt would say they have all the time in the Universe for all of that too.

Right now though, Newt doesn’t look much like he favours the topic. He is looking somewhat determinedly down at the Matching Letter in his hand, running his finger along the edge of a pointed little wing like a caress. Thomas reaches out a fingertip to stroke a wing too, spoiling their odd little origami pet. The wings manage a weak half-flutter that makes Newt’s smile return and Thomas’ internal, under-skin glow pulse happily.

“But then I still don’t understand,” he says, a little emboldened but still joining Newt in gazing determinedly down at the letter. “I checked for you, in the Annals. You didn’t have an entry.”

“Not at first,” Newt agrees. “The thing about having a Soulmate is, you need a soul.”

So souls – not an angel thing. Thomas feels his eyes widen, as Newt’s smile does the same. He feels like it’s probably okay to ask.

“What happened?”

“In a word? You.” Thomas has lost track of the crane that used to be in Newt’s hand because that hand is now wrapping itself meaningfully around his own. “Like I said, you’re very convincing.” The glow bubbling in Thomas’ skin pulses, and deepens. “I may have been a bit stubborn about it for a couple of lifetimes, but you grew on me. Literally speaking I suppose.”

“So.” The thought pops into his head – like a fist had shoved it in his brain and let go – of Newt, the day he first spoke to him in Sign; awash in watery-pale spring morning light bathing in through the arched windows of the WCKD Institute copier room, and staring at Thomas like he was suddenly seeing him for the first time. “You grew a soul?”

“Well, not from nothing,” Newt says, like it ought to be obvious. “But once one has accepted the seed they’ve been given…” Newt breaks off with a sigh, as if it will be either too difficult or too painful to try to explain, and Thomas can feel himself frown. “You remember the hospital?” he says instead. “After our last words?” Thomas wants to say there is no way, Swipe or none, that he could ever forget that, but Newt is still talking. “It’s a powerful little bit of magic, Tommy. Being willing to give up your life for somebody else’s.”

Newt’s hand is still cool on his, but Thomas feels warmer, somehow. “The kind of act that can splinter, throw off… Sparks.”

His soul had splintered?

Thomas doesn’t feel broken. Just the opposite.

“What did it feel like?” His voice is quiet, almost a breath, and for a moment Thomas almost thinks maybe it would be best if Newt didn’t hear.

“Like falling,” he says.

It’s a second or so before Thomas feels like he can speak again, but Newt is looking gently at him when he does.

“So— Are you the first to— are we the first…”

“Celestial in love with a mortal?” Newt asks, a light glinting from the depths of his dark eyes and making a wild and hope-filled something put up a jumble of commotion in Thomas’ chest right about where a heart should be. “Not by a long way. Time’s oldest story, innit?”

Newt just may be getting more English by the minute and Thomas could almost suspect it might be on purpose. Not that he’s complaining – his voice soothes like honey and twinkles like stars, and Thomas realizes, just as he is thinking that he’s sure he could listen to it quite literally for exactly forever, that that is probably the gist of the plan.

“Honestly Tommy, you’d think you’ve never read a book!”

Thomas’ smile feels a little too shy and sheepish for somebody who has lived as long, and as many times, apparently, as he has.

Newt is smiling too, but there is still something faraway and distant reflected in it.

“If you want the truth I’d say it’s probably most of us, if I had my guess.” Newt is looking down at their hands now. “One needs a reason, after all. For choosing the Fall,” he says, watching the movement of his thumb across the ridges of Thomas’ knuckles. “It’s hard to think of one better.”

It makes Newt’s second time mentioning Falling. His fingers tighten briefly around Thomas’ own, and his expression is illegible, but he shifts in his place on the edge of the bed a little like there are still ways he’s less than completely comfortable, and Thomas can’t help but remember his earlier joke about feathers and the self-conscious way Newt’s shoulders moved like something there was lacking. He remembers the way Newt used to shift himself incrementally about like this on the sofa when they settled down in front of a TV movie or the nightly news. Until Thomas would reach over to nudge and coax and pull until Newt was humouring him enough to let Thomas draw his legs out straight and up onto the cushions to lie comfortably across his lap, where he could settle his hand sympathetically over the right ankle. And he remembers how he never asked, whether or not Newt had the injury that used to worsen gradually, from subtle quirky shuffle to outright excruciating limp, each year around the same time as the weather darkened and chilled, before their accident or not.

He had always just assumed. Now, Thomas can’t help but wonder.

“So what does a soul do?” Was a soul even good for anything?

Maybe it’s the way it’s supposed to be, that Thomas feels like he could never get enough of Newt’s smile.

“Mostly? Getting into trouble and making poor decisions, it feels like,” Newt says, sounding unsurprisingly at this point like he’s answering the unasked question and the spoken one alike. “But also finding."

"Finding?”

“Mmm hmm,” Newt hums affirmatively. “Finding your way,” he adds, looking down at his thumb moving appreciatively over the back of Thomas’ hand again, “to certain things. Wanting. A soul’s main job is to want things, really, provide pull in the right directions."

"Ang— Celestials don’t want things?"

Newt cants his head to the side again, considering. As if they have finally happened on a question he hadn’t already been expecting.

“We observe,” he settles on, finally. “It’s best to… remain objective.”

Thomas doesn’t miss the way Newt’s eyes track up and to the side as if they want to be rolling sardonically, but the baffling and frankly slightly entertaining thought that Thomas might be mated for eternity to an apprenticing angel with a propensity for sass and an angelic boss whose opinions he doesn’t always share is swiftly smothered under something else, bigger and weightier.

“So, they can’t love?” Thomas tries not to make it sound as bereft and sad as the feeling that fills him up suddenly. More than sympathy, more than emotion even. A bigger thing than himself, that he isn’t sure his being here, whatever it consists of, can contain.

An instinct, maybe. And Thomas wonders if this is what it tastes like, that desire Newt was talking about, for action, for betterment. For change.

Newt is watching him intently, and Thomas thinks for a moment he may have actually missed a question, until his brows draw together in a pensive frown so familiar and endearing it makes warmth preen happily in Thomas' chest.

“Most would tell you they do nothing but love,” he says, finally. “Some might even argue it’s what we are made of.” There is a pause that feels weighty but warm, pregnant with meaning, as Newt’s fingers curl tighter in between Thomas’ own. “But I’m in a position to know… it’s nothing like the same thing.”

It all hits him at once. The way the look in Newt’s eyes is the softest it has been yet, and when he looks, Thomas can see everything in them. That Newt’s hands curling into his are the same ones that spoke to him of the sound of birdsong in spring and the rustle of falling leaves in autumn and held his as they watched the nurses wheeling Chuck into the MRI. The way Newt said falling.

"…Was I—”

Words seem to be the doom that will always be Thomas’ downfall. First, Final, and all the ones in between that never really seemed to obey his tongue, not in a single one of his lives, and they still don’t seem to be falling in line.

Thomas pulls his hands gently free of Newt’s hold, to say it their way.

I hope it was worth it.

Then he lets his palm settle softly on Newt’s right leg, wondering if pain is something that still happens here, thinking most surely that if it is it shouldn’t be.

An expression crosses Newt’s luminous features, inscrutable and profound, that Thomas can’t place. But the smile that comes after it is one of his absolute favourites; soft and sweet and molten in its core, glowing with something treasured and fragile that peeps out from someplace deep down – and almost always followed in the fondest of his memories by a kiss.

You’re going to be good at this Architect thing, Newt signs back. Out loud he says: “You were. Every minute.”

Those dark eyes gleam the way a starless night still shines somehow, dark and brilliant both at once and closer than they were a moment ago, and then Thomas knows that he has a heart here because it explodes to violent, fluttering life like a thousand rampaging butterflies as they come together – fitting together in a way that is absolute and encompassing and more than that jigsaw perfection Thomas remembers from all those times and places that are not this one. Completing, like missing shards of a shattered image etched in glass; melding, flowing together like water so the lines between where each of them ends blur and melt off, and if anybody ever happened to ask Thomas what kissing an angel felt like he would have no choice but to answer that it felt like this. Like your lost fledgling heart finally coming home to roost.

Like Newt.

The air is scintillating with crystalline birdsong from the living gemstones flashing here and there through the trees, and they aren’t sitting on a bed anymore. Thomas looks around them, wondering whether he is the responsible party for the milliard tiny blue flowers spreading out in pinpoints of jubilant periwinkle in the wide field of green from the spot where they are curled nestled in around each other in the springing meadow grass, or if it’s Newt. But Newt only seems to have eyes for him.

Thomas can relate.

Newt sighs, and the flowers wink their sudden silver pindrop centres happily. Then he gets to his feet and dusts himself down – although Thomas strongly suspects dust is not an actual thing here – and stands in waiting, hands tucking expectantly into his pockets.

If Newt has pockets, then Newt is wearing clothes. Thomas will have to get better at this Architecting thing.

Newt laughs. Clear and ringing and—

“Wait—” Thomas just has to ask. “Can angels read thoughts?”

“Didn’t need to.” Newt grins, taking his hands out of the offending pockets in order to offer one to help him to his feet. Thomas accepts, and quietly notes that the answer wasn’t exactly a ‘no.’

“So… What do we do now?”

Newt arches a brow.

“What do you want to do?” It is Paradise after all.

The field stretches on out beyond them – sunlit now that Thomas’ eyes and mind have opened, awakened enough to bring him sun and sky – and endless. Yet there, right before the endless distance ends, are the gathering silhouettes of structures that murmur to his mind unmistakably of community, and Newt’s earlier assurance that this place wouldn’t be what it needed to if it wasn’t making itself as much a home to Gally and Minho, all his long missed family and friends, as it promises now to be for him.

Thomas kisses him again. And then, he just smiles.

Thomas hasn’t run like this, or at all, in years. There is a line from a storybook he used to read to Chuck, by the light of his Millennium Falcon night light; ‘if one could run without getting tired, I don’t think one would often want to do anything else.’ And that feels about right.

So many times they had everything swiped away from them, but here, they get to keep it. All of it; his track meets with Minho and the time Frypan tried to make soufflé. The way Newt stood in the kitchen in the mornings while the coffee brewed, grumpy and golden and mussed. Long drives out to the beach in summer and Teresa’s crimped hair. And Chuck.

Thomas can still hear every note of Claire de Lune in his head.

The wind in his hair, if that’s what it is, is delicious, and he still can’t be quite sure he has lungs but the air filling and buoying him and rushing past, is clear and sweet and intoxicating, as the vibrant meadow grass under his feet – he supposes he has feet as long as he wants them – flashes endlessly and effortlessly by.

He runs on, every moment faster, and lighter, and not the least bit tired of it, and feeling almost like he is flying.

But then for all he knows why not, Thomas thinks, over the sound of the light chuckle at his shoulder as Newt catches up with him, hair golden in the sunshine and glowing brighter than anything he has yet to see in all of his lives, and whatever this is that comes after.

Maybe they can.

In fact, it hardly surprises him at all, when he glances back to see Newt’s head thrown back in a peal of silvery, bell-like laughter, as a pair of dazzling white feathered wings burst into being in a great, proud arc out behind him as they race on.

Maybe, they will.

For now, Thomas holds out a hand to let his fingers find his Guide’s and tangle in together, familiar and tight, and together they set their sights on whatever lies ahead. In the distance, Thomas can just make it out, the edges of skyline and bustle, activity and community, where they will find all the time in the Universe for reunions and family, and so, so much to learn.

And whether this is the end or whether it’s the beginning, there is one thing about his story with Newt that Thomas can know now, for absolutely sure.

It ends alright.