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There is a man standing out on the water, and Thomas is not haunted.
He sits on the beach, moonlight so bright it makes the concept of night redundant, and stares at the man. The waves lap at the sand and the stars look down on him. Eventually when the salty air starts to carry hints of dawn, Thomas stands with some difficulty, turning and walking away.
-
“How’s the garden idea going?” Brenda asks later when the hints of dawn had turned into full-blown paradise sun. Thomas takes the shuffling step that he’d figured out enough to be more of a nuisance than an actual impairment, dust puffing up under their boots as they walk down the dirt path.
“Good.” Thomas says, and when he offers nothing else she gives an irritated sigh. Until she’s distracted by a small child passing them in a opposite direction. Brenda’s hand snapping out, one of her fingers hooking into the little boy’s collar and tugging him gently backwards.
“Jesse.”
The boy, roughly eight, has the decency to look bashfully at the ground. “Yeah Brenda?”
“You’re supposed to be down on the beach collecting seaweed right now.”
The little boy shook his head. “Harriet sent me to go find Frypan. That big storm last week loosened up different kinds of seaweed from the deep and she wants to know which ones are better.”
“We both know that Fry is at the kitchens right now, not out by the Med-shack, which is the direction your heading in.”
Jesse toed the dirt with his shoe, blush rising. “I was just going to see if Sonya needed anything.”
Brenda’s mouth quirked upwards. This was apparently allowed. “Alright. Be quick.” And as he scampers off she calls out “Don’t go through the jungle on your way back.”
“W-h-y?” The word drawn out with pouting.
Brenda rolled her eyes. “Because I said.” And Jesse just has to accept this because Brenda’s already walking again, Thomas taking an extra step to catch up.
“Why don’t you want him to use the short cut?” He asks once she’s slowed down and he’s sped up and they pull level with each other.
Brenda looked straight ahead, and maybe it was the heat but her cheeks tinted the tiniest bit pink. “I just...it creeps me out. I don’t like it when the kids go in there.”
Maybe she admits this to Thomas because she knows he wouldn’t laugh or judge her, or think any less of her fearlessness. If anything, it makes her even more fearless in his eyes, the act of admitting. Maybe she tells Thomas this because she knows he would understand.
He does.
If Thomas had any children, he’s fairly sure he would never let them go into the water.
-
Over the years Safe Haven bloomed like one of the heavy red flowers that hung from the bushes framing the dirt roads. The brown paths crisscrossed like veins over the sloping hills and up to the jungle and down to the beach. Certain landmarks taking on the jobs of different organs. The roasting pits and outdoor kitchen to feed them. The circles and clusters of shelters, first shacks and then real log cabins to house them. The town square and its raised platform for announcements and meetings. The beach with its wooden dock for boats and nets floating on top of crystal clear water. The slowly rising fields beyond them, lines of crops growing steadily.
The stone.
-
“I’m really sorry Thomas.” Sonya had said with big brown eyes full of sorrow. (He didn’t like her eyes, but he doesn’t know why and tries not to hold it against her.) “It might be that a muscle’s not healing right or maybe scar tissue or something else entirely but...” she’d trailed off, chewing her lip and fussing with a bandage, folding it and putting it on the shelf with other medical supplies.
“S’okay.” Thomas had said, pulling his shirt back on and letting it fall over the small jagged gunshot scar on his right side. He’d slid carefully off the wood examination table, putting weight on his leg gingerly and feeling the strange sharp tug under his skin that extended from his side and down his hip, ending in a small sizzle of pain half-way to his knee.
-
Thomas almost had himself convinced he isn’t haunted. Not one hundred percent, but a solid eighty-three. He was passing the sanity test with a respectable margin.
And then Chuck had come from Away.
This Chuck is not his Chuck. This Chuck is skinny like a weed in the dirt with massive green eyes that see everything and thick black hair and skin the color of coconuts.
-
This Chuck is not his Chuck, and he came on a boat.
He came on a boat at around the time Thomas had been starting to eye the distant unclaimed field that would one day become his garden. One of Brenda’s W.C.K.D orphans had sprinted up to her, knocking Minho to the side on the path and making him juggle the mangos in his arms to keep them from falling. “I am so damn impressive.” He says to the universe at large with hands full of un-dropped fruit and Gally trying not to laugh beside him.
The young girl ignoring them completely, making a beeline for Brenda and shouting about someone landing on the beach.
They weren’t the first and they weren’t the last but there definitely was a lessening of the stream of people finding their way to Haven. “Where’d they come from?” Thomas asked Brenda that night after the excitement at new arrivals had died down. Raising his voice slightly over the chatter of most of the population piled onto the long bench tables in the massive gazebo next to the roasting pits and newly built clay oven. They really were building something here, he acknowledges absently.
Her mouth was full when he asked and she shot him an exasperated look before chewing determinedly. The little boy next to Brenda answers for her instead. “They came from Away.” He says matter-of-factly. As if that explained everything.
Thomas raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, put that together myself actually. But where did they come from?”
The little boy blinked up at him. “Away.” He says again slowly, face screwed up in confusion.
“No, I know. But where?”
A look was shot at Brenda, clearly questioning his guardian’s choice of company. “...Away.” He says to Thomas again, even more slowly. Taking on the air of someone explaining a simple concept to a toddler.
Brenda looks at him from across the table and they realize at the exact same time that it didn’t matter. It was all just Away now.
-
After they’d waited out the quarantine period the mother and son were given the tour by a more mature and disarmingly genuine Aris, walking them along the packed dirt pathways and the sturdy log cabins. The fire pit and fields of crops. The kitchens. The boar pens that they’d manage to construct and fill.
“Oh!” Aris adds with a smile, slowing on the path and gesturing to Thomas. “This is Thomas, he’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades.”
Thomas wiped his hand on his pants to try and get some of the dirt off before shaking with the young woman who looked roughly his age. Her son tucked behind her and clinging to her side, eyeing him warily.
“Hey there.” He offers as their hands drop and Thomas does his best not to look at Aris. Despite everything being fine there was still just...an edge of something in their interactions.
The silence stretches and Aris shakes himself before grinning a bit sheepishly. “Shoot, sorry. Got lost for a second.” He pats the woman’s shoulder, and because Aris did not know and none of them had told him, says casually, “This is Sarah and her son Chuck.”
It had been a while, a few months at least, since the past had slammed into him so hard his lungs collapsed. His vison whited out for a moment. “Chuck.” Whispered on numb lips.
The woman-Sarah-looked at him, unnerved and defiant and he realized she must have had Chuck right around the same time that Thomas was blinking himself awake with no name. “It was my father’s name.” She snapped defensive, teeth pulling back and becoming feral in a heartbeat. You had to be, Thomas figured, to be able to survive as long as they did before making their way here. To be able to survive out there. Away.
He coughs out a noise that vaguely sounds like a word, but he’s not quite sure which one, and spins around. Walking sharply and resolutely away and completely ignoring Aris’s confused questions. Left, right, straight, left. Past houses and work stations and swaying palm trees. Zig-zagging through paradise as quickly as he could. Not stopping when Minho waves and gestures and calls his name, grief twisting his features and his body, the pain of it visible even from the distance. Next to Minho and slumped in the dirt against his home was Gally, head cradled in his hands. Fry beside him.
But Thomas doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow at all until he’s reached the end of the settlement, and he only lingers for a second along the edges before striding right into the jungle. Thick curling darkness wraps around him and humidity has his clothes sticking to his skin in seconds. Massive leaves and rough bark and hanging vine reach out and grab him with green fingers, but he fights them off, shoving them aside. He doesn’t stop until a tree root-that he swore wasn’t there a second ago-wraps around his ankle, forcing him to shift weight to his bad leg. It gives out instantly in response with a hot splinter of pain up his side and he falls to the damp earth, curling up tight in a ball. Cheek pressed against the ground and breathing deeply, the heavy scent of wet dirt coating his tongue. He takes the blissfully cool metal cylinder from around his neck and presses it against his lips.
The trees drip, condensation sliding down leaves. So much water in the air that the jungle makes its own rainfall under the thick canopy ceiling of green. Almost no sunlight makes it through.
“Stop it.” Thomas says loudly to the ringing silence and the steady soft tapping, mouth brushing against the message-in-a-bottle.
And then, after a heartbeat’s pause-
“I can’t.” Thomas responds. And then blinks. Looking around to see who’s question he was answering. The shadows of the jungle shift, and Thomas tells himself that he is not haunted.
-
There’s a small patch of earth at the very edge of Haven, practically up the side of the mountain, that Thomas had been eyeing with interest. He clears it slowly and pig-headedly, a labor of love or hatred or maybe something in-between. Rolling small boulders out of the way is difficult, but sometimes Brenda gathers the cluster of children and pre-teens that follow her around like ducklings and points them at whatever rock or stump or log is giving Thomas a particular bit of trouble. They swarm over it like ants with a lazy wave of Brenda’s finger and Thomas once again thanks whatever gods there were that Brenda had chosen their side.
-
Minho sits down beside him, the beach washed pale with moonlight, and they stare silently out at the ocean. Identical poses. Leaning forward, legs bent and hands clasped limply together in-between knees.
There is a man standing out on the water.
“Do you think Gally is going to come back?” Minho asks eventually.
Thomas shakes his head.
-
It takes him the better part of a year, spending most of his evenings there, but eventually he has about an acer clear. And then for a week he just sits on a rock and looks at it, wondering why the hell he did it in the first place.
-
It’s a waste of resources, he knows, but Thomas keeps a small candle burning in a lantern next to his bed every night. His house isn’t large and it’s basically a single room, but the shadows that pulse in the corners are black as veins and Thomas refuses to face what’s lurking there.
-
The first crop that he plants is corn. All of it dies.
With a sigh and a stretch and twisting his back to make it click satisfyingly Thomas tells himself that it’ll be good fertilizer for his next attempt. Ignoring the complaint in his bad leg and getting resolutely back to his knees to start digging.
“Lucy had a little boy, healthy and definitely with Jasper’s set of lungs.” Sonya offered while she prodded his thigh in the Med-shack, looking up to check his face and watch what pressures made him wince.
A sharp jab like a needle sinking under his skin has his cheek twitching. Thomas stares resolutely at the cherished glass bottles and coveted medicines, trying to memorize them, to see what was low and what was almost gone. They were running out, slowly. Herbal remedies starting to outnumber the scavenged supplies brought across the ocean. Brought from Away.
“That’s good. I’m glad he’s healthy.” He offers, hands laced together in his lap and counting back from ten.
Sonya frowns at the clicking in his knee. “How old are you, roughly?”
He shrugs. “Twenty-five, I think? Maybe twenty-four? Same as the others.”
“Hmm.” She says, frowning down at his leg.
-
There is a man standing out on the water, and Thomas is not haunted.
When he gets up to walk back to his cabin a small dark shadow darts behind a bush further down the shoreline.
-
“If you’re so afraid of the dark why do you go and sit down there at night?”
Setting down the hammer with a sigh Thomas rubs the stinging sweat out of his eyes and looks at the kid standing in front of him defiantly.
“What?” He asks, and the kid puts his hands on his hips. The wagon that Thomas is trying to fix sags pathetically.
“You’re afraid of the dark. There’s always a light on in your house.” Stated as if it’s obvious. “But you go and sit in the dark down at the beach all the time.”
Thomas blinks down at him, shrugs, and picks up the hammer again. Lining up the nail and sending it home with a resounding twack.
Before he can reach down to get another nail from the small box one’s shoved under his nose. Thomas takes it wordlessly and lines it up parallel to the first.
“Why don’t you like me?” The kid asks as he swings and Thomas’s twitches, bringing the hammer down on his thumb instead.
“You shouldn’t go down to the water alone at night.” Thomas says an hour and a half later, after he had walked out into the jungle and screamed and picked up rocks to slam against tree trunks and ripped up vine roots and then just sat, motionless. Pressing the message-in-a-bottle against his lips and watching his thumbnail slowly go from white to red to purple. At one point his head snaps up, turning left and right wildly. “Stop looking at me.” He says loudly around the metal and into the green shadows. The jungle creeks and whispers in his ear, informing Thomas in no uncertain terms that he was a visitor and his presence being allowed was tenuous at best.
When he’d walked back to finish the cart the kid was still sitting there, finger drawing swirls in the dirt.
“Why shouldn’t I go down to the beach?” He asks, petulant and sharp and pushing wavy dark hair out of shocking green eyes. “You do.”
-
“People are leaving, I think. I think they’re going into the jungle. But only some people. Do you notice that? The jungle, I mean. Some people it just completely creeps out, and then some…” Minho offers to him as they sit on the beach. A strange thick awkwardness hanging between them, and Thomas remembers how it had taken a while, but that independently and simultaneously Minho and him had come to realize that before Haven, they had, at absolute maximum, spent a few weeks in each other’s physical presence. At least for the half of their lives that they could remember
There is a man standing out on the water.
Leaves shake in the tree line behind them. Minho turns sharply, instantly on high alert, but Thomas stares resolutely ahead even as he raises his voice to carry over the waves.
“Go home kid.”
The bushes and trees rustle and the sound of snapping twigs and shoes scuffing the underbrush gradually retreats.
-
His second attempt is sweet potatoes, and it’s markedly more successful. “Look at you go Mr. Green.” Brenda says with a triumphant grin, holding up the bundle of vegetables and wiping the dirt off of them.
On the edge of the field Jorge reclines on a boulder, Thomas’s usual seat happily given up for the steadily greying man to sit and rest and soak the sun up into his bones. It was almost amazing, how much the generation above theirs had aged in just a few short years.
“I think a lot of them feel like their jobs done now. They get to be tired, you know? They get to rest.” Harriet had said with a shrug once. “No one’s gonna argue that they didn’t earn it.”
-
“Why do you go down there?” Thomas asks the kid one day, mostly to get him to stop just staring at him creepily. He heaves another crate of mangos onto the kitchen counter next to the massive chopping block, and the kid hops up to sit as well, knobby knees and skinny legs swinging back and forth.
“Because,” A small hand plucks a mango out of the pile and retrieves a little knife from his pocket, unfolding it and cutting into the skin of the fruit. “You guys don’t have any signals or flags or anything on the beach to let people know you’re here. You can’t really see the dock from more than a mile out. Especially at night. What if people are trying to get here and they can’t find it?”
A pot bubbles over and Fry blinks, shaking himself and taking the industrial sized container off the fire.
“I never really thought about that.” Thomas admits and the kid rolls his eyes.
“Well duh.” Handing a slice of mango to Thomas. “You didn’t need to find here. You were just here.”
-
“It’s weird, isn’t it, having a living shadow?” Brenda offers with a laugh when Thomas almost steps directly on top of the kid for the third time that week. And, honestly, if the kid didn’t stop exclusively existing less than fifteen centimeters away from him, Thomas was pretty sure he was going to stop ignoring the jungle’s murmured invites to come and see what was behind the door-sized leaves and the rising steam.
After Thomas snaps at the kid to leave him alone, again, he watches the small skinny figure plod sulkily away and down the path.
He turns to Brenda incredulously. “It’s not the same as with you and yours. He’s not an orphan. He’s got a mom. I don’t know why he’s doing this.”
-
When they find the first small chips of bleached white standing out stark against the moist dirt, a few people quirk their heads in interest over dinner by the communal roasting pits.
When the bleached white chips turn into something long and smooth and buried in the ground, something that looked to be massive, something the length and width and even the size of a Jeep, it’s all anyone can talk about.
The digging for the proposed field grinds to a halt, and from Thomas’s spot in his garden on the mountain he can just make out Minho and Harriet striding up and down and along the buried thing, thick twine wrapped around sticks to section it off.
“We’re going to dig it up. Just to see.” Harriet had said, hands raised soothingly when a chatter of nervous whispering breaks out at dinner that night. Minho nodding along beside her on the raised platform, arms crossed lax and stance easy. They were, justifiably, a slightly cautious society.
The island had been kind to them over the years so far, but most people there had experienced how quickly your life could be ripped into pieces with one wrong decision. Except for the ones that were lucky enough to be born in the new world.
“What’s the big deal?” The Kid next to him says out of half his mouth, face smashed into his open palm and elbows on the table.
Fry had used some of the mint in the roast tonight. He’d been bugging Thomas to grow it for years. Mint was tricky for some reason in this climate. It’d taken him a while to figure it out. “Sometimes when people have been through a lot, new things make them a bit nervous.” Thomas offers around a bite of sweet potato. He shoves his slice of meat onto the kid’s plate.
The boy let out a huff of a breath and caught his mother’s eye from her seat a table down and seven spots to the left. She shoots him a look and scrawny elbows drop from their resting spot, back going a bit straighter. Not so much lying on the table anymore. “I still don’t see what the big deal is.”
Thomas pushes a carrot around his plate. “Do you want to go see it?”
“Okay.”
After dinner, the kid pushes his way to the front of the crowd with zero hesitation, elbows out and full steam ahead, disappearing out of sight around legs and waists. And then, after a moment, is pushing right back to where Thomas is hanging on the fringes. “Sorry.” The boy says, coming to plant himself beside Thomas. “We can wait until the others leave before we go and look at it. I know you don’t like crowds.”
-
“Happy birthday, I guess.” The Kid offers him randomly from his seat on the boulder next to Thomas’s garden.
Thomas looks up at him. “What?”
“It’s been at least a year and a half since we started talking. So, it has to have been your birthday at some point.”
“Oh. Huh.” He says, burying another seed in the dirt. “Thanks.” He digs the next small hole. The breeze that makes its way up the gently sloping hill is tinted with salt and hibiscus. “Happy Birthday too, I guess.” Thomas adds.
-
There is a man standing out on the water.
As he sits on the beach at night Thomas reaches under his shirt collar, bringing the small cylinder necklace to his mouth. “Happy Birthday.” He whispers, lips brushing metal.
-
“It’s a fossil. It’s a dinosaur. It’s a skull.” Fry says one day in a flat emotionless voice, eyes unfocused at the edge of the dig site. And then he jerks, snapping back into his body and his only-half-a-memory and everyone in the vicinity that had a chip in the back of their neck understood.
-
“You should plant some flowers here too.” Sonya mentions off-handedly with a smile as she picks herbs next to him in his garden.
“I like the rings you and Harriet made.” Thomas says back. She tucks a loose strand of blonde that’d escaped her braid behind her ear, smile getting bigger.
-
There’s a thick fog on the day the skull is fully excavated. Thomas walks and limps (a bit more pronounced today, the weather) his way through the mist and across the field and climbs down the short ladder to the massive hole they’d dug, almost as tall as Thomas himself and with enough room for three people to move around comfortably. Staring in awe at the teeth the size of his hands. Next to him Harriet and Minho sigh as one, Harriet reaching up to rub her neck.
“I dunno why but it just feels…” She says, trailing off.
Minho nods, the two leaders so used to each other by now that they had the whole ‘Finish each other’s thoughts’ thing down pat.
“We shouldn’t move it.” Minho says, looking at the bone and reaching out before thinking better of it, pulling his fingers back at the last second as if the remains were hot to the touch. “We shouldn’t…we should just leave it. I don’t want us to move it.”
“What’d Frypan say it was called?” Says a voice that is not Thomas’s or Harriet’s or Minho’s.
The three of them jump roughly ten fucking feet in the air at the surprise input.
“Kid.” Thomas spits through grit teeth, clutching his heart with fingers digging in his chest and bracing himself against the wall of the excavation site. “Go home.” The Kid sighs and gets up from where he’d sat down at the edge of the hole, disappearing over the lip and moping off into the fog.
Thomas rattles out an exhale, pressing the heels of his palms over his eyes. “What’d Fry say it was called?” He asked the two of them, words soft and tight.
“Um, a T-Rex? Right?” Minho turned to Harriet for confirmation.
“Yeah.” She agrees, voice still faint from the recent heart attack. “Yeah. A ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex.’ He said. ‘T-Rex’ for short.”
“Hey, kid.” Thomas calls out, grinding his hands into his eye-sockets until dots appear behind his closed lids. “It’s called a ‘T-Rex’ apparently.”
And drifting back on the damp fog is a simple, light, “Thanks Thomas.”
-
“I think the big town meeting next week is going to be about building a school. You should come to this one.” Brenda offers from her spot on her newly constructed backyard bench under the shade of a tree.
Thomas turns to her. “Really? A school?”
She nods and yawns. “Mhm. Tons of little rugrats running around now. Dawn of humanity ‘two-point-oh’. Might as well start getting organized.”
Thomas grins. “You gonna hang up the gun holster and pick up the pencil? Become a teacher?”
“Nah.” She waves a hand limply in the afternoon heat, the sun high in the sky and all of ‘humanity-two-point-oh’ retreated to various points of shade throughout the settlement to doze off the hottest part of the day. Brenda stretches “Besides,” She adds “I’ve done my part. Most of my baby chicks have flown the coop. Time to retire. Practically ancient.”
“Don’t make me come out there and show you what ancient really feels like.” Jorge calls softly from inside the house, his bedroom window practically above their heads. Thomas knows that Brenda chose this spot for them to doze so that she’d be within ear shot.
If anything happened.
“You’ve only got three of the W.C.K.D orphans left with you, don’t you?” He asks, but she’s staring off, looking at the space between two palm trees contemplatively.
“Think I could get a hammock in there?” She asks him, not waiting for his answer and turning to call up to the slightly elevated window. “Hey old man! You want a hammock?”
-
Gally, once again, makes Thomas look stupid. This time, it’s by coming back.
He wanders out of the jungle near Thomas while he’s digging around in his garden and for a second all Thomas sees is a tall thin silhouette slipping from between two massive fronds and his heart literally stops.
And then it starts again.
When Minho comes back from his scouting mission to the news he strides directly into the Med-shack where Sonya was muttering angrily about infection and emaciation and pushes her gently out of the way. Taking Gally’s face in his hands and kissing him soundly on the mouth.
“Your breath is terrible.” Minho says shakily, their noses brushing. “Welcome back. Took you long enough.”
Minho doesn’t even notice Frypan and Thomas sitting on stools in the corner. Thomas doesn’t blame him, not one bit.
Thomas, who dodges Fry’s reaching hand, and slips away quietly.
-
He stands at the edge of the settlement and rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet before suddenly walking deep into the jungle without a conscious decision. It murmurs soothingly at him and runs its fingers through his hair and Thomas curls up on the wet ground like how he used too in the glade, knees pulled as close to his chest as he could get them and hands tucked under his chin.
“Stop looking at me.” He says to the silence. And then-
“I don’t know why you gave me it.” And then-
“I tried.” And then-
Thomas doesn’t remember closing his eyes.
When he comes out hours later, gaze dull and bloodshot and a leaf stuck to his cheek The Kid is sitting on his front step, a tin plate of food covered with a cloth next to him.
“You missed dinner. I know you don’t like to eat meat but I brought you some of the bell peppers.” The Kid says, green eyes flashing angrily at the abandonment.
“Sorry.” Thomas rasps. “Who’d you sit with?”
He shrugs. “My mom. It was fine. She bugs me about putting my elbows on the table.”
“That’s what mom’s do, I think. Although what’do I know? I’m not exactly an expert on the subject.” Thomas offers, sitting gingerly and wincing.
The Kid perks his ears up with concern. “Why do you have dirt on your face? Did you fall? Did your leg give out?”
“I fell asleep.”
“In the jungle?”
Thomas blinks down at him, starting to crunch at bell-peppers around a grin. “That a problem with you?”
The Kid’s eyes trace the wall of green in the distance. “Don’t do that again.” He says and Thomas sobers. Those startlingly light eyes were full of genuine fear. “Promise me you won’t do that again.”
Thomas puts the plate down, looking him dead in the eyes and gripping his shoulder. “I won’t. I’m sorry.” He wasn’t sure why it mattered, but if it made the kid upset, it mattered.
A tiny sigh of relief. “Okay.” Swirling patterns in the dirt with a small finger. “I don’t like it out there. It’s not…” He trails off. The sun had darkened his skin over the years like it’d darkened all the rest of them. “Don’t fall asleep in there again.” He stares at Thomas, wavy black hair falling in his eyes. “You get weird when you stay out there for too long.”
-
There is a man standing out on the water. The moon is behind him, casting his front in shadow, and he’s far enough away out there that Thomas can’t identify a single distinguishing feature about him.
Thomas is not sure if he’s haunted.
-
“Kid, who’re you waiting for? All those nights out on the beach?” Thomas asks him as they sit on the docks with fishing poles during a paradise-on-earth-perfect sunset.
“My dad. He gonna meet us here. He has a boat.” He says matter-of-fact and bobbing his hook into the water to make ripples before turning to look at Thomas. “Who’re you waiting for?”
It’s getting harder and harder to stay in his house after dark, even with a candle. Thomas starts to drag a sleeping bag to the edge of his field up the mountain every few nights.
-
“I saw Vince. He’s still out there.” Gally offers unprompted one day as he’s straightening up the lines of soil for new planting.
“How’s he doing?” Thomas asks, leaning against a shovel and using it to take the weight off his bad leg with a quiet sigh of relief.
“Alright, I guess. He’s gone a bit…well. I think it’s the solitude. Being so alone out there. In the jungle. It makes you…a bit. It’s…just…a strange place.” Gally puts his hands on his hips and surveys the plot of land, now full and overflowing with vegetables and fruit and flowers. An absolutely dizzying kaleidoscope of tropical color. “This is bigger. It wasn’t this big when I left.”
Thomas looks around absently before turning back to the chili plant exploding from the ground. “Huh. Yeah. I guess it is.”
“You didn’t realize you were clearing more land?” Gally asks incredulous and maybe a little frustrated because Thomas was being Thomas. This is a bedrock level of irritation for Gally.
The wind blows and Thomas hears the jungle whispering to him on the breeze. “You know,” He licks his lips, staring out of focus at the wall of green in the distance. “I don’t actually remember doing it.”
Gally looks at him silently for a moment before going back to work. He doesn’t come back up the mountain again.
-
One day The Kid’s mom is walking past him on a outskirt-path when she catches his eye, frowns, and strides over. Taking Thomas’s chin in her hand suddenly and turning his head first left and then right. “You need a haircut.” And then she gives him one in her house, closer to the center of Haven than he’d been in a long time.
“Thank god.” The Kid says from his perch on a stool with a smug grin as scissors snip and flash around Thomas’s ears. “You were starting to look a little scary there.”
“Just into town for a day of shopping and pampering eh?” Brenda teases when he runs into her in the main square, her last W.C.K.D orphan a teenager and walking along beside her.
When he’s on his way back out of the much more bustling streets (there were a lot of rug-rats running around) he bumps into Aris. Watching how his eyes widen, just minutely. “Thomas!” He says, surprised and a bit taken aback and maybe pleased. “What’re you doing here?”
Thomas points up to his own head. “Haircut, apparently.” And then for some reason- “How’re you?”
There’s a rattle of a cart and they move to get out of the way and further out of the center of the dirt street. Thomas stumbles on his bad leg and Aris steadies him without conscious thought. “I’m, uh, good.” He smiles playfully. “Shocked, to be honest. You almost never come down off the mountain anymore.”
Thomas is not haunted, he tells himself.
“I go to the beach.” He tells Aris. His mouth is filled with the dust kicked up by the passing cart and it feels like sand on his tongue. “I go to the beach, sometimes.”
-
He starts to bring his sleeping bag to the field more and more nights, tucking himself into a ball under the paradise starry sky and using the plant shoots and stems as his ceiling. The soft earth is a better bed than anything the flickering lights below could offer him.
One day he wakes up to The Kid looking down at him and chewing his lip anxiously. “You promised you wouldn’t sleep in the jungle.” There’s accusation in his tone.
Thomas rubs the crust out of his eyes and reaches for the small metal canteen propped up against a pumpkin, taking a long sip of copper tasting water and clears the sleep out of his throat. “This isn’t the jungle.”
“Don’t go any further.” He says. The lip chewing gets quicker. “You’re getting weird again. Stop being weird.”
-
“You don’t see him at all, do you?” Thomas asks Minho as they sit out on the bright moonlit beach. Open coconuts at their feet, palm trees swaying in the sharp sea breeze, their skin gritty with salt. A Blood Lily drifts by them on the gentle tide, the sweet scent of it trailing along behind. Heaven on earth, by every account.
“You don’t, do you?” Thomas presses.
Minho gets up and walks away.
-
“Think it’s time to have a mid-life crisis yet?” Brenda asks him with a teasing grin as she visits him, rolling a Mulberry between her fingers.
“You’re twenty-eight Bren. I think you can put it off for a few more years.” He nods at the berry in her palm. “Watch out, those things stain your hands purple for days.”
She shrugs, popping it in her mouth and chewing, stretching out in the sun and lying down in-between one of the rows of plants, hands folded behind her head like a pillow. “I think you should come stay with me and Jorge for a bit. Not long or anything, just. Get down off the mountain for a little while.”
Thomas turns back to the soil, feeling invisible hands stretch out and green fingers creeping along the ground. Searching and hunting, brushing inches away from him. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Maybe in a few weeks.”
-
“I’m fine. It’s just bugging me today.” Thomas mutters as The Kid helps him to his feet before slipping himself under Thomas’s shoulder, taking the weight off his bad leg.
-
“You promised that you’d stop.”
The accusatory whine causing Thomas to blink and raise his hand to block out the steadily rising morning sun. “What?” He asks, squinting up at the figure cast in shadow from the glare behind his head. “Kid, look around. I’m not sleeping in the jungle. I’m right here.”
The Kid sits down suddenly, wrapping his thin arms around his skinny knees and Thomas realizes numbly that those scarily green eyes were swimming with tears. “But you’re getting closer to it.” He whispers.
Thomas looks around. He was closer to it. When had that happened? “I won’t go any closer. I promise. Hey.” He reaches out, gripping the kids shoulder once and squeezing. “I promise.”
There’s a sniffle and The Kid rubs the back of his fist against his nose. “No one comes here from Away anymore.”
A bird trills in the distance and Thomas sits up with a groan, clicking his spine back into place. Rolling his shoulders and looking at the tense pile of scrawny limbs next to him. “What was still out there, when you and your mom left to come here?”
A hand smaller than Thomas’s reaches out, tweaking the cherry tomato bush next to him and retying the string that helped support it. “Not much.”
-
Harriet comes up to see him one day. “I went by your house.” She says, sitting next to him on the boulder. “When was the last time you were there?”
Thomas hums, ripping off a chunk of the loaf of bread she’d brought him. “A few days ago?”
She turns to look at him disbelievingly. “I could make a line through the dust with my finger. Try again.” It’s not like he’d lied on purpose. He does his best to think back.
“The last cold night I guess? I think? I know I went to get a sweater and my leg hurt too much to make it up the path again. I waited until morning.”
There’s a long moment of silence that affects Harriet a lot and Thomas not really. He was too busy with this bread. It was good.
“Thomas it’s summer. We haven’t had a cold night for almost two months.” Staring at him searchingly, and then at his field, and then at the jungle in the distance. “You’ve cleared more away, haven’t you? It’s bigger again.” He shrugs and she tilts her head at him and her eyes tell him to be careful. “I don’t know if you should stay up here much longer Thomas.”
Harriet doesn’t come up to see him again. She’d said everything she wanted too, apparently.
-
He starts to wake up in different parts of the field from where he lies down. Every time, he’s closer to the jungle when he gets up than when he'd curled up the previous night, no matter where he starts. No one but the kid and Brenda make the walk up anymore.
“Doesn’t it hurt your leg? The hill? Getting up here?” The kid asks while he’s filling a basket of cucumbers to bring back down to Haven. Thomas doesn’t quite know when he’d started to think of himself as something independent of the place.
“That’s why I don’t go down so much anymore.” Thomas says, leaning back on his boulder and chewing on more bread the kid had shoved in his hands. Even if no one came to see him it was nice to know that Fry still thought about him occasionally.
The Kid’s lips press into a tight line as he hefts the basket up into his arms. “I don’t think that’s true at all.” He mumbles, turning around and slowly disappearing down the curve.
-
“What’re you doing?”
Thomas blinks at the words. World slowly coming back into focus and then he’s barely managing to hold the shriek bubbling in his throat. He’s half an inch from the giant skull, his hand tracing a tooth. He had been asleep, he realizes numbly. He slams back into consciousness, snatching his hand away from the jaw and its teeth and there’s a line of fire drawing across his palm. And then when he stumbles there’s a line of fire up his leg as well, and then he’s sliding down the dirt wall and landing with a thump, cradling his hand and looking down at the seeping red.
“How is it still sharp?” Thomas asks with detached curiosity, looking up from the pit. Adding, directly after, “Why is the fog always here?” as if the young face leaning over the edge of the dugout hole had all the answers.
Watching green eyes grow massive and round with fear. Black wavy hair being pushed out of them fitfully.
-
The next time Thomas wakes up doing something, it’s exactly what he’d thought he’d been doing all along. Clearing away parts of the underbrush for more room to plant things. He frowns down at the spot his sleeping-self had chosen. It was a small patch, rectangular. Away from the rest of the field and, if anything, totally unusable to grow crops, due mostly to the fact that it sat on a hill overlooking the sea. The incline was too steep, wouldn’t be good for the roots, they might get washed away in the rain.
Thomas looks back over his shoulder with muddled confusion. “Why here?” He asks the open air, and he realizes he’s genuinely expecting an answer.
-
He comes down off the mountain to be there for Brenda and only Brenda. Not much else would’ve gotten him too, not anymore. Except to go to the beach (which he hasn’t done in months) or maybe to see The Kid (who comes to see him, anyways).
“Hey.” He says, lingering in the doorway of her house and clearing his throat. Surrounded by all of their old friends and the children that she’d taken in like shiny pebbles on a beach, Brenda raises her head up from where it had been buried in her hands.
Smile as weak and ready to snap as a twig. “Well,” She says, voice rasping and tears rolling fresh out of bright red eyes. “He’dve been happy to know that he was this important, to warrant a visit from the mountain king.”
He stays in his old house for a night and he doesn’t sleep. He sits in the dark with a candle brought by Aris, who had shrugged and said “Your little minion told me to bring you it.” Thomas swallows and almost invites him in, and then he doesn’t.
Instead he slips a small blue vial and a carved figure into his pack to take back with him, and when he goes to say goodbye to Brenda the next morning before heading up the winding path he hugs her tightly. “I have somewhere, maybe.” He offers. “If you think he’d like it.”
On the sloping hill too steep for plants to grow, overlooking the sea, a breeze makes Brenda’s hair dance on the wind and she closes her eyes. Breathing in and out deeply. “He’d like it.” Her hand clasping his and squeezing. “Thank you.”
-
Thomas looks at him one day with narrowed eyes. “How old are you?”
The Kid looks back at him and raises his eyebrow unimpressed. “You don’t know how old I am?”
The bean stalk wound around the pole was beginning to droop at the top. Thomas starts the delicate process of replacing the pole with a taller one. “Why should I know your age off the bat?”
A sharp chin rests on a skinny wrist that’s propped on a bent elbow that’s crooked on knobby knees. The whole scrawny mess perched on a felled palm tree and watching Thomas as he worked.
“Because were best friends. And you don’t even know how old I am. You’re really bad at being a best friend.” He says matter-of-fact while biting at a nail.
The bean stalk is wound as carefully around the newly planted stick as a mother tucking a cherished infant into its crib. “Kid.” Thomas can’t stop the small bitter laugh escaping his mouth. “You sure got that right.”
Two days later when they were three rows over and further down the line of crops The Kid pats the freshly turned dirt into a small mound around a different recently replaced bean pole, and he offers “I’m thirteen, you asshole.”
The scent of earth and life is all around and he watches how The Kid pats the soil down with satisfaction. Thomas counts backwards in his head, and then he starts to laugh again.
Sharp green eyes flash and dark eyebrows pull down. “You’re so weird.” He mumbles, fussing over the dirt.
-
One day the kid falls asleep in the afternoon sun and Thomas stops from wandering around his field for a minute to hang up a sheet to give the him some shade as he naps.
The boy blinks himself awake eventually, looking up at it, and then at Thomas while he carefully pulls away at radishes. “How old were you, when all of it happened, when all of them died?” He asks, green eyes flashing again.
Thomas’s lips were getting cracked from the air. If Sonya ever came back up here he’d ask her for some balm. If any of them ever came up here again. He doesn’t blame them. They had lives to lead. “Sixteen. Maybe seventeen, I think.” Thomas licked the uneven skin of his mouth, knowing that he was only making it worse.
“And now you’re twenty-nine?”
“Look who doesn’t know their best friend’s age now.” Thomas says, smiling playfully. The action makes his lip split and he rubs away the blood with the back of his hand with a shrug. These things happen.
-
A small dented tin is slapped into his palm, and Thomas unscrews it to find the scent of medicated lip balm.
“I asked my mom. I was born when you were in the maze, I think. Maybe a bit after.”
Thomas looks out, squinting and trying to see what was shifting and waiting in the thick green shadows. “What do you think is out there?”
“I dunno.” The boy answers, face filling with slow dread and shockingly large eyes afraid. “I dunno what it wants. Thomas I don’t think you guys picked the right island.”
-
The next time Thomas wakes up he is standing at the edge of the jungle.
-
The time after that he’s woken up by a smaller hand wrapping around his wrist and yanking him backwards just as his boot starts to brush past the thick wall of leaves. He slams down and the wind is knocked out of his lungs and for a moment he gapes like a fish in the dirt.
“Kid, why do you care so much?” Thomas chokes out at him from flat on his back on the ground. Staring up at the gasping boy, sides heaving, the kid clearly having sprinted the entire way up the mountain and across field to get to Thomas in time. “How did you know?” He adds, because how did the kid know?
“I don’t know.” He wheezes, bracing his hands on his skinny pre-teen knees and hanging his head. “I just know I’m supposed too.”
“It just doesn’t seem fair to you, really.” Thomas remarks calmly later, the two of them staring up at the sky.
And then after a long period of silence Thomas adds almost sheepishly “I’m sorry about all this.”
-
“Which one do you like the best?” Thomas says, holding out his hands and offering up the small items.
The Kid looks at him with vivid terror on his face. “Please come down from here.” He whispers.
-
“You’re just…just…nothing like them.” Thomas says disbelievingly one day.
“Which one?” He asks, eyes huge and green and wide with interest.
Thomas’s mouth moves wordlessly.
When the kid waves goodbye and trots off home for dinner Thomas crumbles to the ground and yanks at his hair and yells at the sky and slams his fists into the dirt and takes the small cylinder from his neck and whips it as far away from him as he can.
-
And then he searches, franticly, for the next eight hours in the dark. Hyperventilating through more than half of it and tearing up plants and flowers to run his fingers along the ground of the field, praying for a cool smooth surface. When the light turns pink there’s a glint out of the corner of his eye, and he ignores his screaming leg to scramble over and wrap shaking fingers around the metal tube. The thing just poking out from under a palm leaf at the edge of the jungle. Sagging fully to the ground and almost fainting in relief. Laying with his cheek against dirt and feeling the humidity just beyond in the shadows.
“I’m sorry.” He mumbles, hazy, pressing the message against his lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The palm leaf brushed across his forehead lovingly like fingers, smoothing his hair back. He needed another haircut.
His eyes slip closed.
And then he forces them open, getting up and limping away because he promised. Taking his sleeping bag and curling close to Jorge and cradling the last thing Thomas had of Newt to his chest. Letting himself believe that it will be enough to keep himself from wandering. He places the small carved figure and the blue vial nearby, for added defense.
He sleeps through the whole day and when he wakes up at dusk he’s exactly where he was when he fell asleep, a small tin plate of food with cloth covering it beside him.
-
“Can you see him?” He asks the small figure that throws himself down on the beach next to Thomas one night. (But the kid’s not so small, not anymore, is he? He would be tall one day, judging from his height now.)
“Nope.” A hand picks up sand, letting the grains slip through his fist. “But I don’t think that necessarily means he isn’t there.” Green eyes, so sharp and piercing, scan the horizon. “I always see a boat.”
Thomas swallows and looks at the man standing out on the water. “I don’t know if that makes me feel better or not.”
He may or may not be haunted, and he doesn’t tell the kid that he almost fell asleep in the jungle but he hasn’t been back to his field since. Instead curling up in a ball in his bedroll behind either Brenda’s house or The Kid’s mom’s house. If anyone minds they take pity on him and don’t say anything.
Minho sees him one day while walking down the path and jumps as if he’d been struck by lightning again. “You’re back.”
Thomas puts more balm on his lips instead of licking them. “I think so. For now. I’ll go back up, probably.”
Minho nodded, hands slipping into his pockets. “And then you might come back down again.” He adds with a tilt of his head.
Thomas turns, looking up at the mountain. He could see his field from here, the explosions of color, and he’d never quite realized in all the time he was up there just how big it had gotten. “That’s true.”
-
“Happy Fourteenth Birthday Chuck.” Thomas says the words for the first and only time in his life as they sit on the beach at night waiting for people who would never come from Away.
Maybe names are just names and green eyes are most definitely not blue and there might not be a man standing out on the water.
But Thomas doesn’t think so.
Chuck screws up his face, looking up at him with a scowl and cradling the birthday gift of seeds close to his heart. “That was a weird way to say it. Why’d you say ‘fourteenth’ like that? I know which birthday this is. You’re being weird.” He says, and then his scowl deepens. “Why’d you call me by my name? You never do that.” He pockets the seeds carefully. “Stop being so weird.”
Thomas looks down silently at him and Chuck’s expression shifts into something more fearful. “You’re being weird again.” He searches Thomas’s face. “Have you been sleeping in the jungle?”
-
There is a man standing out on the water, and Thomas is not sure if he’s haunted, but he knows he can’t go to sleep in the jungle no matter how much it wants him too.
He’d made a promise to a friend.
Thomas just couldn’t figure out which one.