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i.
He’s nine years old when they first take him to the building with the big white walls. “It’s safe here”, his mother tells him tearfully when she lets go, kisses his forehead and the doctors in the white coats try to lead him in kindly. He never does anything kindly, stoic and quiet but also ready to jump at the chance to protect other kids on the playground, to yell and scream and look big and threatening to scare them away.
Yelling and screaming doesn’t work with the doctors, who grab both of his arms and carry him inside; the last thing he sees is his mother covering her mouth and the red, red sky behind her.
They tell him his name is Albert, and he tells them that’s wrong, but he doesn’t get much of a choice in the matter. “It’s a new name for a new place, isn’t it?” is the game. He doesn’t go quietly, and he sleeps alone in a bed that’s too big for his growth-spurt legs, curled up with a pillow that’s wet with his own tears.
He wakes up the next morning and tries the name on his tongue, again. Whatever else was there before feels fuzzy, but Albert suspects no foul play—he’s too young to think there could have been. Everything is still there; his mom, his dad, the park he used to play at with his dog, the heat from outside, but his name is missing, a question mark in a sea of a lifetime. Albert, he decides, is better than nothing, and Albert spends his entire day doing tests for the doctors, who call themselves WICKED. Tests are stupid, he decides, but they mostly involve him picking colors off a bright screen while something’s connected to his head, or him coloring or writing or speaking, a million different, dumb things that he can do just fine without stuff attached to his head.
That night, Albert goes to move to bed, only to find another kid sitting on the other bed in the room. Maybe he’s a little younger than Albert—he can’t tell—but he looks sad, hugging his knees and crying into them. He has blonde hair and blue eyes and he looks up when Albert walks in the room and then shakes his head, dropping it back down into the space between his knees and sniffling, loudly.
Albert considers ignoring him, but it’s the first person he’s seen who’s his age since he’s arrived, and so he walks over and clambers onto the bed with him, sits beside him. “What’s your name?”
The boy shakes his head again. Albert frowns. “Whatever one they gave ya, then.”
“…Newt.” he says, quietly, his voice trembling with an accent Albert’s never heard before, like something from a movie, “It’s Newt.”
Albert doesn’t smile. It’s not something he does. But, he reaches over and puts his hand on top of Newt’s, giving it an awkward pat, and Newt hiccups and turns into him, suddenly wrapping his arms around Albert’s shoulders and buries his nose in the front of his shirt.
Albert’s small hands come up and he wraps around the boy—Newt, now—with every little bit of strength he has, and he cries too, and makes a promise to try and make both of them stop crying for good.
ii.
At thirteen years old, Albert’s learned to hate this place.
The only interactions they have with the doctors—scientists, maybe—is the occasional word spoken over a loudspeaker, or someone coming to direct them to a test. It’s maddening, because the longer time Albert spends here, in this place with it’s big, cavernous walls and other boys, the more he thinks there’s something bad about it, something he can’t put his fingers on. His shirt says WICKED near the collar and his pants say it on the waistband, too—it’s everywhere—but no one will tell him or any of the others what it stands for, what it means. He feels like he’s lost memories, like he can’t remember his mom’s face, his dad’s smile, but there are no answers to that, either.
Lots of questions and no answers is quickly become Albert’s least favorite thing in the world.
If it wasn’t for the other boys, he might have lost his mind already. There are a total of fifty of them, now, with the same recycled names that WICKED seems to be giving all of them. Minho, Mozart, Sigmund, Winston, Newt. They’re his family, he thinks, the one that replaces the misty image of his mother, crying in front of that red sky, his family that’s irreplaceable and important, even if sometimes they get on his god damned nerves.
When two of the boys start to fight, a fistfight—pounding and screaming and yelling about something stupid, Albert’s sure, no doctor steps up to stop it. No, he can almost feel them watching when he does, when he grabs one boy and Newt grabs the other, pulling them off of each other. Albert barks at them to stop being stupid and learn some sense—he meets eyes with Newt, who’s got the boy—Stephen?—by the underarms, and Newt gives him a look that’s approving, maybe with a hint of a smile to it.
Albert’s heart skips a beat, and he thinks, oh no.
iii.
“Your name’s terrible.” Newt declares this one evening, late after most of the boys had gone to bed. He’d been at this all week„ smiling at the boys and calling them by different names, affectionate and warm and clapping them on the shoulders—only a couple resisted (Minho, because “my name’sawesome, thanks”, Winston because “Winnie” was “a girl’s name” and a few others) but most went right for it, agreeable if not eager to accept it.
Newt commands respect, Albert thinks. Not in a way that Albert himself does, with loud words and a stern face, but with kindness. No one wants to hurt the kid who saves your seat at dinner time.
So, he probably should have seen this coming, and Albert can’t help but feel secretly glad for it—it’s not like he was jealous of the other boys, or anything, because he had no reason to be but it still warms that now familiar place that had made a home in Albert’s chest, small and tucked away somewhere private, a place that belonged to Newt and to the dreamy thoughts he let himself have at night of curling around the boy in the bed across the room instead of sleeping on his back alone in the dark. They’re working together on a test WICKED left for them, at age fifteen and sixteen each, and for all of the fancy testing equipment and cameras, it’s just a jigsaw puzzle.
They’ve always been allowed to chat during their tests, and this is no different. Newt grins at Albert with a little bit of a crooked smile, eyes crinkling up with a mixture of amusement, and maybe fondness if Albert looks hard enough. He covers his internal reaction to it with a frown, and a noncommittal grunt of, “ ‘Ssat right,” and moves another puzzle piece into place, easily.
“Do you feel like an Albert?”
“Do you feel like a Newt?”
Newt laughs, a bright, loud thing and ducks his head with it—the wires connected to his head in his beautiful blonde curls shift with the movement. “No, guess not. ‘s better than Isaac, anyway. Whatever shuck named their kid Newt’s just askin for him to get beat up for the rest of his life.”
Albert rolls his eyes, but his expression’s impossibly fond, and he knows it; Newt reaches fits together another piece of the puzzle, connecting the bottom of the puzzle to the left side, and continues talking. “I was thinkin—Alby.”
Albert pauses, testing the name in his head, rolling it around, “Alby.” He likes how it sounds off of Newt’s accent, better, likes the way Newt smiles at him when he repeats it, and Albert becomes Alby, just like that. He knows why the other boys acquiesce so easily, and thinks maybe he could know it for the rest of his life.
Newt watches him for approval, and lights up when Alby nods his head, laughing, and then turning his smile down at the puzzle pieces; when he reaches over for a new one, he’s just inches from Alby’s face, and they stare at each other for a moment that feels like a lifetime. Newt has an eyelash on his cheek and Alby feels the uncontrollable urge to reach up and brush it away, to cup his cheek in his hand and kiss him—
There’s a loud beep from one of the machines in the room, and they both jump.
Next time, he promises himself, but next time doesn’t come.
iv.
He pulls a blonde boy up from the Box with a surprisingly strong grip. “I’m Newt,” he says, slowly, and Alby wonders why it feels so familiar.
v.
Watching Newt run is going to give Alby a shucking heart attack. It’s not the running that worries him—although it is, a little—but the way Newt looks when it’s over and he comes barreling through the door on Minho’s heels, bent at the waist and looking dead in the eyes. It’s when he doesn’t speak at dinner for three days straight, no matter how much Alby prods at him—and Alby’s not exactly a conversationalist. It’s almost like a facade, and Alby wonders if maybe if it’s just him who catches it, just him who knows Newt the best, who catches the split seconds of silence and the far away look in his eyes before it’s back to scolding one of the gladers or laughing with Minho over something.
Something’s wrong, and he can’t put a finger on what it is, or where it’s come from.
He can take a guess at it, though, and one night after everyone’s tucked in for curfew, Alby shakes Newt awake in the bedroll next to him and leads him out on a walk into the Glade, to the Deadheads. Newt stays quiet the whole time, his blonde hair tousled from a restless sleep, and it’s sort of oddly peaceful, even with the curtain that seems to be hanging over them both. Alby doesn’t think about the sadness, the cracks in the foundation and the water seeping into the house, because he can’t. He’s a leader, here, a second in command, and he has to pretend things are alright for a little while longer, to keep Newt afloat beside him.
They stop at a tree unmarked by a grave and settle beneath it, Newt sitting at first far from Alby but eventually scooching closer. He’s the first to speak, and he does so softly, his voice husky from sleep. “Not much stargazing where there’s no stars.”
Alby huffs a thing you might call a laugh, shakes his head. “Nah. Just a nice night.”
“All of the nights are the same, you know that, yeah?”
He can hear the faint joke to Newt’s tone and Alby feels something release a little in his shoulders. It’s bitter and cold but it’s still a joke, a faint hint of Newt beyond what he puts on for the other Gladers, beyond what he even tries to hide from Alby. It’s the boy who stops fights, who whispers silly jokes to Alby in the dead of night from their bedrolls pressed too close together. It’s Alby’s best friend, he thinks, with a surge of warmth and affection that starts in his chest and seems to drip downward, the one person he couldn’t live in this world without. For as shucked up as the Glade is, sometimes he wonders what his life would have been like without it—if he’d have ever known Newt, who’s shifted to rest his head on Alby’s shoulder.
He thinks, idly, of what would happen if he kissed him.
Alby shifts his arm up, around Newt’s shoulders, and Newt slouches down and melts into his side, turning in to rest his cheek on his chest. The silence is companionable, perfect, just them and the souls of the boys who’d not survived, not like them.
Next time, he thinks, looking down at Newt’s sleeping face an hour later. Next time.
+1.
Alby makes do on that promise when his world almost ends with the person that’s lying in a bed at the Homestead, chest rising slow and steady, face so bruised he looks like a raccoon. In the end, Alby hadbeen right. Something was wrong, something was so broken he feared it could never be fixed again. Alby could look a hundred Grievers dead in the eye—nothing could be scarier than the sight of Newt in a pool of blood on the maze floor, nothing could be worse than the sound of his scream of pain echoing through the Glade, amplified by the open doors. Nothing could be worse than Alby holding him in his arms, looking so tiny and so, so fragile, gritting his teeth and sprinting through the maze, thinking, if he dies here, we’re going to do it together.
He had made it through the Doors just in time.
Newt thought the contrary.
Alby slept by his bed for two days, and today, the third, they get into an argument. Newt’s eyes look dead, hollow—he looks like he’s drowning in the blankets on the bed as he bites out, “I wish you’d left me there.”
It shocks Alby to the core. It makes him mad—furious, even, a part of him boiling up with rage, but it’s not that. It’s heartbreak. He’s never been good at dealing with his emotions and Alby knows it, and that’s what makes him stand up, the chair he was sitting in making a vicious scraping noise on the floor. “Yeah? Well, too bad—I didn’t, I ain’t ever gonna leave you like that, what kind of shucked up, stupid, slintheaded decision was that, huh? Did you even think—did you even know how bad it would’ve—how I would’ve—”
Newt stays silent and Alby forces himself to keep going, a little longer, his hands curling and uncurling into fists. “You could’ve come to me, you know? I just….” He has to stop, inhale—every breath feels heavy and sticky, like there’s a weight on his chest, and Alby runs a hand over the bristle of his hair in hopes of grounding himself. There are tears in his throat, hot and wet and he has to swallow them back, but he can’t, and he knows how pathetic he sounds when his voice cracks, when he drops back down into the chair with a soft thump. “Newt, I can’t—Can’t. I thought I lost you for good.”
The silence in the room is painful, heavier than anything; Alby feels the tears leak down his cheeks and sniffles, wiping his eyes furiously with the sleeve of his shirt. It’s then and only then that Newt speaks up again, and his voice sounds like he hasn’t used it in years. “I’m sorry,” he says, and Alby doesn’t know if he’s sorry that he did it, or that he’s sorry that he failed. He doesn’t care to find out.
Instead, he sits on the edge of his chair and leans over the bed, pressing his lips to Newt’s gently. Neither of them move until the blonde hiccups and he reaches up with those small, calloused hands and curls them into the front of Alby’s shirt like it’s a god damned lifeline. Alby’s shoulders slump and he lifts a hand to card into Newt’s blonde curls, to hold him as close as he can and kiss every sad word off his lips, because he’s officially out of “next times”, and Alby’ll never take those for granted again.
(Later, when Newt’s arranged himself on his side so that Alby can curl around him, his arm around his waist, half asleep, Alby murmurs into his hair that he loves him. Newt kisses his knuckles where he’s holding their hands, and he has to strain to hear him say i love you too.)