Work Text:
On the third day of the third month in Paradise, Thomas found strawberries.
Lovely little things – clean white blossoms and fresh scarlet bulbs in bunches thick like grapes, growing among thick leaves on tangles of runners all over the ground. They were greeted with much enthusiasm and feasted on almost reverently. People's lips were stained red for days. Thomas was hailed as a hero.
But when Thomas reentered their cabin with basketfuls of strawberries and asked, grinning, if Minho would like a taste, and Minho saw the red liquid and smelled their sweet tang in the woodsy indoor air, his hands turned cold and his head started to pound.
Strawberries, like on that final night with Newt.
Strawberries, red and sweet like Newt's lips from a time long gone and never to return.
Strawberries.
He declined.
-
He declined, but when night fell and the Immunes turned in for the night, he snuck out and went down to the ravine in which Thomas said the strawberries grew. The moon was full and bright, and Minho bore its melancholy on his back until the trail turned down into the ravine and its light slid behind the dewed, pebbled slopes.
He sat with his feet in the water and strawberries by his sides. The darkness and the silence were a blank page, and his memory was writing. The things that he would never have were taking shape around him, in flashes of smiling teeth and the glint of moonlight on blond hair.
His whole body ached with the strength of his longing.
-
“What the hell are these?”
“Strawberries. Swiped from the dinner table especially for you.”
Minho picked one up and glared at it. “It's weird.”
A glint of eyes, a flash of teeth. A smile in the dark. “It hasn't got anything to do with Frypan's mush. No worries.”
And Minho ate it, leaves and all; he cringed. “It's weird,” he repeated, and watched as Newt devoured a second strawberry in as many seconds. “Hell, are you trying to poison me?”
There was no answer but for a soft, lingering kiss, and then there was nothing but love and heat and the sweetness of the strawberries on lip and skin and breath.
It was the last night before circumstances came and threw them into the battlefield again. It was the calm before the storm; a storm that Newt would not survive, a storm that Minho would never recover from.
It was the last time he would ever feel truly happy.