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i. you’re going to die in your best friend’s arms.
you don’t know this yet, and you don’t know him, either.
he comes into your life like every other person you’ve ever remembered meeting: from a box in the ground, covered in sweat and puke. you don’t think he’s anything special and at this point you don’t care enough to find out if you’re wrong.
then you shake his hand. meet his eyes.
and, well.
shit.
he asks too many questions.
you laugh to yourself as you see alby cart him around the glade, patience visibly thinning even all the way from your vantage point at the gardens. he is defiant, and pressing, and a little (very) stupid (and reckless, and brash, and impulsive, and maybe insane). you tell yourself that you should keep your distance, because someone like that is someone who has hope and you just got finished picking out the last splinters of optimism that persisted within you, wedged in the spaces between the shattered bits of bone. there are one million edges that will never quite fit together again, that are surely too sharp for anyone—not him, especially not him—to get close to, and—
and, yet.
inside of twelve hours you find yourself gravitating toward him like a magnet to metal; he is the molten core of the earth, churning, and you are caught in the flux of his magnetic fields, exploding like an aurora.
( aurora—you know what this means and what it looks like, even though you’ve never seen one. you no longer ask why, but you know that he would.
you’re one hundred percent certain, you couldn’t explain it if you tried.)
instead you tell him about this horrid life you have all lived, the life that is now his. he takes it not as a death sentence but a challenge, defying every single expectation you prematurely placed upon him.
the day after you lose ben, you stand on the spot he collapsed and feel your own legs urge to give out as you realize, all at once, that you are not done losing.
he stands beside you, fidgeting, constantly shifting, a mass of pure kinetic energy. he is barely contained, nearly vibrating, like he is seconds away from—
oh.
your fingers nearly graze the curve of his shoulderblade, but it is not enough.
(it is never enough. you wish you could be numb, feel like you should be, after everything. it is never enough.)
the girl comes the next day, and you feel your stomach drop when you read the note curled underneath her ghostly pale fingers.
he is blamed, of course. you can see where they’re coming from—she said his name, after all. there’s no way that can be a coincidence. there is a lot at play here, probably more than you’ll ever get to know. still, you trust him.
you make him a runner, and watch minho take him out to the doors just before the break of dawn. it worries you sick, seeing the two of them out there again, running quite literally headfirst into the unknown. but you don’t say anything. you trust minho, and you’re starting to realize that you trust him, too, implicitly and inadvertently—yet completely—despite everything and everyone telling you not to.
you trust him when he comes back and says he’s solved the maze.
you trust him when alby wakes up screaming, saying they’re all doomed.
you trust him when the doors don’t close and the grievers come for you.
(when they come for you: someone who is, if you’re being honest with yourself, still a little too quick to jump at a chance to sacrifice himself when given the slightest opportunity—you don’t think too hard about which direction your machete ends up landing in the thick of it all, after all.
someone like this, who also happens to be one of the few someones they don’t take, for whatever twisted reason wckd deems fit.
someone who certainly doesn’t have any more right to being alive than alby did.
did.)
you trust him.
gally apparently decides that the best course of action following the recent events is to do a fucking mutiny. or maybe anarchy is a better term. you’re not sure how you know the definition to either of them, another bitter reminder of just how incredibly fucked your lives all are—you know, in case you forgot among the spider robots murdering half the people you know.
you kneel in the dirt, heart beating in time with the hurricane of eyelashes attached to the boy in the makeshift jail, box in the ground #2. the surrounding structures are still burning, lowly, neat little plumes of smoke getting blown off into the wind. you wonder if it should feel like losing something, like the vice grip on your heart that seizes you every time someone stops sleeping in the homestead and makes their place in the deadheads. because it doesn’t feel like that—it doesn’t feel like anything. it doesn’t feel like home, and maybe it never did. maybe that’s why you never felt like you could settle, your bones itching and aching for something, anything, that felt different, that felt right, that felt like, oh, yes, this is where i belong.
you tell him to pick his ass up, and finish what he started.
the next thing that gally apparently decides is that he is a coward, though maybe he always was. you remember that you all deal with this life in different ways, and try not to pity him as the rift between factions grows larger and larger.
it’s your first time crossing the threshold of the doors since—you don’t want to say it. you don’t even want to think it. the uneven sound of your steps says enough. since. minho stays at the back of the group with you, silent support all you need to keep from letting your eyes wander up the walls, to the thick vines entangled at the top.
it’s either minutes or hours later when you watch the woman on the screen, and it feels less like a revelation and more like a confirmation. it makes you sick all the same. you look away from the images they play and count the bodies instead, hoping that this is the end of the game they’ve made you play for the past three years.
when the doors of the helicopter close, you add two more to your count.
you watch the confines of your entire life grow smaller and smaller through the grime of the window, and when you can no longer make it out on the horizon, you turn and find his eyes.
following him is the easiest thing you’ve ever done.
ii. you’re going to die in your best friend’s arms.
you’ve seen it happen what seems like more times than you can count.
you’ve always wondered how, despite absolutely everything, it hasn’t yet been you.
this time the walls are a little closer in. this time they’re a little more sterile, almost jarringly so. this time there are people there that want to help you.
this time, you still believe them.
he’s an idiot. you thought that maybe his antics in the glade were just a one-time thing, or the result of stress.
(you wouldn’t blame him. you’ve all done stupid things.
you’ve done stupid things.)
you learn that nothing about him, except maybe the very fact that he exists , is ever going to be a one-time thing.
he is persistently rash, and you can feel your instincts kicking into overdrive as he continually defies the people who saved you. something’s not right, he seems to tell you, with nothing but an uneasy look. you don’t want to believe him. you want to sit down and close your eyes, and eat their food and take their vaccines and believe that wckd and the glade and the maze are far, far away. you want to believe that. you don’t want to believe him.
but, really.
you do.
(this, is no closer to being a one-time thing than any of the rest of it.)
his plan is people, in the mountains (mountain people). it doesn’t take long to realize that you are going to follow him and you think you might hate him, for that—for making you someone who is fine with all of this. not an hour later he grabs you and your life off of a dirty mall floor and you call him tommy, and realize that maybe hate isn’t quite the right word.
(you know what the word is. you’re lying in the dark on a pile of rubble with his back pressed against yours—him just as awake as you, air hanging dead and silent like a blanket over your shivering bodies, either cold or afraid or both—when you resign yourself to the thin press of lips you lie and tell yourself will keep you from saying it each time his eyes pass over yours.)
you can’t remember how many days have passed when the tension between him and teresa finally snaps, thin cord tethering them together swallowed away by the thick heat of the desert, relentless and unforgiving.
you know, then. the second that line is severed, they will not come back to each other.
(the scorch does not forgive, and neither does he.)
you’re in the middle of thinking about what that means for you: the greater, collective You, always the first thought to your mind in varying shades of panic; and the selfish you, swelling out against your concave chest in a sick sense of satisfaction that you wish you didn’t understand. it would be so much easier to ignore, if you didn’t understand.
and while you’re in the middle of understanding and hating there is. someone else that is Understanding and Hating but unlike you, he is Doing. the Doing sounds like a gunshot and it looks like everybody you’ve ever loved it looks like nick and alby and ben and jeff and chuck and maybe even gally, if you’re being honest, and more than anyone and anything else it looks like you.
winston’s hand, the gun, your hand. there is no difference between the three: the same thread of the universe, plucked long ago by the hand of fate and now resonating back and forth like an echo, endless and unkind.
it’s going to be you, and it’s going to be soon.
you are split into two different parts: the part of you that thinks he could save you all, and the part of you that is you. hours after winston, by the fire, you are the part that believes, precisely because he doesn’t.
it doesn’t matter if you believe what you’re saying, it just matters if he does. but maybe you do, too. maybe the you in the reflection of his eyes—glassy, brilliant, captured—is a you that could believe, as long as he’s the one leading the way. that word is settled into the back of your throat once more, igniting with each ember that dances its way over to where the two of you sit, hunched together in the darkness.
you inhale, fanning the flame that runs the short fuse down into your heart. he looks at you, searching, and his eyes burn—is it him, too? or is it just you, making your home in the curve of his irises, right where the edge folds into the pupil, flush like the sickly beat of your heart against the wall of your throat?
home: a dangerous word; definition: something you should know by now not to hope for. here’s some more dangerous words: you can’t give up. i won’t let you.
you hope you can be enough.
next there is hope, which soon flickers out only to come alive once more. then: a building collapses after midnight, and you think that it should have been you. a day later you find him again in crumbling drug den with your lives in the hands of a man you don’t know—a man that is beating your supposed saviour senseless, screaming about arms and mountains and other things with a passion and a desperation you recognize, faintly, from an earlier version of yourself.
(and, from him, but you try not to think about that, not when he’s still in her arms.)
it should have been you, an echo whispers. it is such a familiar sound that you pay it no mind.
yes, i know. it should have been me.
but despite that fact you make it to the people, in the mountains. the mountain people.
the mountain people are scared and hostile, and much too mirror-like for anyone’s comfort. you think that maybe this is it, finally, but then he steps away from your side and into the arms of another woman he knows but doesn’t. this time he’s the source and not the traitor, and your heart wobbles precariously on the edge of a thing you can’t name.
he sheds the role of traitor like an old jacket, only for her to try it on for size. for just one moment, you allow yourself to wonder: was she eyeing him, or just the role he’d been assigned? which would be worse?
you know, which Should be worse. that doesn’t mean it Is what’s worse.
then the moment is over, and the world erupts into flames.
in the ruins of it all: a boy and some rubble, both smoldering. the latter silent and defeated, but the former with a declaration, quiet and firm.
you follow him. you’re pretty sure you’d follow him anywhere.
iii. you’re going to die in your best friend’s arms.
you know that it won’t be long, now.
six months pass, and you wonder why it wasn’t you. six months pass, and you sit half-awake (half-alive, you think) at the table beside him and the growing collection of maps, hours past sundown. you try not to think of nights spent sitting with another boy, at another table, with another set of maps. you know he is thinking about it, has only been thinking of it.
six months pass, and you wonder if he would be thinking of you.
in the end, you don’t even get the right compartment from the train.
you’re not surprised when he tries to leave, and he isn’t surprised when you go with him. you wonder if that’s normal—the split second before he opens his mouth and you know, like you’ve done it all before. like this story’s been written, and you’re just playing the part.
and this isn’t anything you don’t already know—intimately, firsthand, over and over and over again—but the writer is a sick son of a bitch, because things turn bad before you even have a chance to think about hoping for them to be good.
your arm hurts. you wreck the truck and almost get killed by cranks. brenda and jorge save you, again, and your arm hurts, again. gally’s alive, and minho’s fate rests in the hands of a dying man.
(he might not call it dying, but you certainly do.)
your arm hurts. you don’t look at it, because if you do, it’ll have to exist. instead, you make a scene because in this moment you are not in control of the words that come out of your mouth and this is when you know.
you tell him that you’ve always been dying. he tells you that this time is going to be different.
you’re not sure if it’s denial, naivety, or just plain stupidity, but whatever it is it makes you nod your head and follow him, for the rest of your life.
you follow him into the city, to find her—six months later a reflection of him, convinced and unmoving but for all the wrong reasons (that is, depending who you ask). you see now a perfect mirror of all the things he’s done, for a different kind of hope. he speaks to her in inpatient fragments, clipped, and you wonder if either of them will make it to the end of the night and be able to say that any of it was worth it.
you follow him into minho’s arms, half-delirious and probably only upright because of the adrenaline of it all, mixing with whatever else is coursing through your veins, pulsing thick and dark. you can feel him watching you, studying, even in his vaguely drugged haze he is sharper than you remember and you know that he is calculating the minutes you have left.
(it is exactly the number of minutes you need to save him, to bring him back. it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but there is still a dull, muted relief when you realize you won’t have to make him live through seeing you make That choice again, because this time the choice isn’t yours to make.)
you follow him into the end of the world, bullets and hellfire blazing at the edge of your consciousness. you know that it shouldn’t have to compete for attention. you summon what might very well be the last of yourself and watch his hands curl around your necklace. you can’t quite remember why he has to have it, but you know that it can’t die with the rest of you. you trust that he’ll know what to do with it.
you are slumped at the edge of the end of the world, and you know that you are going to die. he knows that you are going to die.
you know that he’ll try, anyway.
you follow him.
the last time it’s an arena, lights blasting on overhead with a mechanical thud, as final a sound as you’ve ever heard. he’s still there, close, but you’re on the ground staring up at the sky. there are no stars, and the smell of burning lingers in the distance.
it reminds you of somewhere else, somewhere familiar. you’re not sure what.
you don’t know when you stand, or how the gun gets into your hand. the scene plays out in tableaus: blink and you lunge at him. blink and he has you in a chokehold. blink and the gun is across the floor. blink and the knife is swinging through the air.
you slip in and out of yourself and you hear him tell you that it’s okay, it’s okay. for a second you think that maybe he means that this is him giving you permission, his face a shattered mosaic of love and fear and every possible thing that lies on the spectrum between. but then you are gone again before you can figure it out (before you can figure him out, something you swiftly realize you will never get to do, not fully) and then your neck twitches and the fight resumes, uncaring.
in the thin, milky haze of your consciousness, you realize you’re not sure if you’re fighting to save your life or end it. have you ever been on one side or the other? or have you always been stumbling along this line, unable to commit? you suppose it’s fitting, every moment of your life (the portion you can remember, at least, even that flickering weakly in what’s left of your mind) has been spent in limbo, maze or scorch or city but always waiting to live or waiting to die but never really doing either.
and when it’s all over, it doesn’t matter whose hand was on the knife, because it was your chest that the blade got stuck in, in the end.
in that last moment, all you have is him and the hope that you have done enough.
you die in your best friend’s arms.
(it’s your big scene. you know your lines. you play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.)