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Thomas doesn’t really think about it.
Love is a weird concept for Thomas, only familiar in the way coffee or snow is - images caught in his brain for context but the personal experience scrubbed from his memory. He knows what love is, even feels variations of it, but he never thinks deeply about his feelings of it.
He knows that love is soft and sweet, yet all consuming and passionate like a raging inferno. Those in love would die for each other, would tear the world apart and leave it asunder for each other. Still, he doesn’t think he knows love.
Thomas finds himself thinking about it when Newt shows him his infected arm.
Newt’s outburst had concerned him - no, to be completely honest it had scared Thomas, because while Newt could get angry the brit had always been controlled with his temper. Even in the glade, Newt had been more cold and quiet when he was angry. The outburst was the exact opposite, the boys’ cool composure lost to this extreme show of emotion outside of his normal attitude. Nevermind the cruel and cutting words used, as if Thomas cared more about Teresa than he did Minho.
Thomas had wanted to find Newt immediately, but Gally made him wait for the other boy to calm down. When he finally found Newt - legs hanging off the edge of the roof, gaze pensive with a tight grip on his left arm - it’d been an hour since the incident. Newt’s shoulders were tense, turned away from the roof exit, but he turns his head when Thomas enters the space and Thomas can see the hallowed out look in the brits' eyes.
Newt still managed to look incandescent in the light of the sinking sun; skin once pale now somewhat tanned from weeks in the scorch, freckles now adorning his cheeks and nose; sandy blonde hair seeming to glow like a halo around the boys’ face.
The gut wrenching clarity that bloomed in Thomas when he saw the creeping black veins of the Flare inching their way up Newt’s arm had nearly bowled him over. As it was, Thomas had to sit down with the revelation - his heart pounding with the realization of Newt’s fate. There was no cure; there was no saving Newt from his eventual end.
It was this confession that brought Thomas towards thoughts of love.
Thomas thinks he loves Minho; doggedly chasing after rumors and whispers of his whereabouts would indicate something similar to it at the least. He knows he loves Teresa, despite the hurt and betrayal that layer over it. He loved Chuck the same, and it was easier to identify with him too - he saw Chuck as a brother, as his little brother. In the end they all hurt the same.
But as Thomas watches Newt deteriorate and worsen, as he sees the discolored veins of the Flare curl up Newt’s jaw, when Newt finally staggers to his feet again like a marionette puppet with strings cut and loose. As Newt pummels and batters in Thomas’s chest, as he chokes Thomas and pleads with him all the same - Thomas knows. Maybe he knew beforehand, but hid the realization from himself for later, or maybe he never would have known until he was faced with a world where Newt wasn't a given.
He loves Newt. Thomas has loved him from the beginning.
(Thomas has loved Newt since he was Stephan and Newt was Sam, when they’d only ever glanced at each other once on a train.)
Thomas despairs at their fate, at their impending destiny. He wants to scream at WICKED or God or whoever will hear him. He loves this boy and he can’t save him. And as Newt lay limp on the concrete, eyes empty of life and spark and a knife stuck out from his chest, Thomas knows that what he feels is love.
Thomas knows he is too late.
Now, he stands idly at a beach. The sand reminds him of Newt’s hair, and the pebbles and rocks scattered around it of Newt’s eyes. Everything seems to remind Thomas of the brit, lying in rubble across the sea - unreachable and dead. He holds Newt’s necklace tight in his hands, feeling the grain of thread against his skin and the weight of the bullet pull on his fingers.
He knows it’s contents; battered pages with gentle words written into the soft pages, the way Newt called him Thomas in his sentences rather than his preferred nickname. It gives Thomas the same emotion that grabs hold of him when he traces the crevices of Newt’s name carved into the memorial rock. It’s the same grief that swallows him when he sees Minho’s haunted gaze, when he sees Aris and Sonya curl into themselves like the world is out to get them.
(Maybe it is. Maybe this is all a cruel joke from the Universe.)
Water slips between his bare feet, cold sea salt making him scrunch his feet into the sand. It licks at the ends of his pants, soaks them with it’s briney liquid. Thomas watches with apathy as the ocean and the sky blur into the same shade of blue. He has no real way of knowing if the direction he stares is where Newt lays, thousands of miles away from Thomas, but something in him tells him that it is.
(If he started swimming, and swam all the way to the otherside, would a cranked out Newt meet him?)
Thomas slides the necklace around his throat, the weight of the bullet against his chest now familiar. He lifts the makeshift locket to his lips, and gives it a gentle kiss before walking away from the sea and the sinking sun on the horizon.
Thomas did love Newt, even so - he’ll never love again.