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Minho had taught himself not to scream. The Safe Haven didn’t have proper buildings yet. They all shared a few large, covered platforms with hammocks and cots, and a few proper beds and bunks.
Most kids stuck with those they knew. Clusters of the different Mazes slept close to each other along with the adults assigned to watch over them. It was no different for their group. Gally’s cot stood half under Frypan’s hammock, and Minho’s hammock hung right beside that. Brenda slept on Frypan’s other side, with Jorge beside her. Thomas had his own on Minho’s other side. The last hammock before Vince’s closed their group, forming the blurred border between groups A and B. Thomas didn’t use his hammock much, though. So much so that the stray dog they picked up in the harbor—Bark, they called him—had claimed it. Instead, Thomas had his arms wrapped around Minho’s chest.
Aside from his friends, scattered around them, lay the reasons Minho promised himself that no matter the horrors in his dreams, he wouldn’t scream. The kids that didn’t have their groups. The ones WCKD stole and kidnapped along the way. They were younger than most. WCKD already had or killed everyone older.
They had their own nightmares, too. Most of them had been stolen from their homes either directly by WCKD or people longing to make a profit. They’d been locked up and shipped away to labs. Parents or caretakers taken care of. For the greater good, WCKD would have told them. Others lost their homes before that. Cranks or thieves took it away. Some would have died alone, without WCKD’s intervention, but the complexity of that knowledge was far too much for kids that young to handle.
When they dreamt, they couldn’t understand. Those were their fears. WCKD didn’t have big goals, and a moral excuse. They were simply monsters, and all anyone had to do to soothe their cries was hold them tightly, and tell them, look, look at the stars. Thomas was great at it. Frypan too. They’d taken some of those kids under their wing.
It amazed Minho how Thomas could sit by their side and distract them from their fears with something as simple as the night sky, the glimmer of the moonlight on the waves, or the soft sounds of nighttime wildlife. It didn’t fix them, of course, but he and Frypan both excelled at a gentleness Minho couldn’t grasp.
Those same kids were scared of him. Not because of anything he did, specifically, but because his nightmares couldn’t be soothed. His body wouldn’t let them be soothed. He couldn’t be held, pressed to a chest and rocked side to side with the promise that he’d feel better in the morning.
He trashed and fought. He mistook the people who’d risked their lives for half a year to save him for Grievers, doctors, guards, and Cranks. The soft beach sand under his feet, after he’d crashed out of his bunk in a panic, would turn coarse, dead, hot as on the Scorch. The ocean reminded him of the height they jumped down from. They’d survived without a scratch, but he couldn’t bear to stand on the cliffs.
When the little ones woke up in terror, their sounds were high-pitched, loud, but in the end, weak. Vulnerable.
Minho’s screams came from his gut, cracked in his throat, and came roaring past his lips.
Some of those kids, the ones that played only in the playground far from the shoreline (Gally had built it some time ago. Minho had helped him dug the canal and pool that allowed the kids to play in the water without the threat of the tides), with someone watching them because they were too young to understand that they could get lost in the forest, or drown in the ocean if they weren’t careful, couldn’t understand either that what Minho became in the night wasn’t who he was during the day.
They avoided him, hid behind Thomas’s back when Minho came to bring the lunch he’d forgotten.
So Minho learned to keep himself from making a sound.
If Thomas held him, he sunk into the embrace. If he faced Thomas, he would bury his head in his chest. If he didn’t, he’d hold on to his hands instead of turning around, because Thomas had been a light sleeper lately.
If he held Thomas, he would hold him tighter. He would keep him close, feel stronger, safer with the knowledge that he wasn’t alone.
Ever since he started that, the rest of their area slept more soundly, which meant Thomas, Frypan, Jorge and Vince too, could sleep through the night. Minho’s nightmares, however, bloomed in the quiet.
It was the same this night, only as Minho tried to slow his breathing, listening to Thomas’s as a guide, the hands he held onto squeezed back. Thomas’s own dreams had calmed some time ago, but Minho’s never seemed to want to.
“Are you awake?” Thomas whispered, soft in his ear.
Minho shrugged. The night had a way of taking his words from him lately.
“All right.” Thomas sat up and kissed Minho’s forehead from behind. His fingers tapped his shoulders and his collarbones in a gentle, familiar rhythm. The touches were the same whenever Thomas melted him with them, yet Minho could never think enough to map them.
All he could think about were Thomas’s soft finger tips caressing places that had once been battered and bruised from being held down and tossed around like an object.
Those touches reminded him of the sensation he had in the moments after he woke up in the Box, but in a good way. The melody in Thomas’s touches drowned out the memory of any less-trusted touches in the same place.
“You don’t have to hide it,” Thomas murmured as he dried a tear from Minho’s cheek. “It’s only been a few months. We all know whatever they did—tested on you was… different.”
Minho hadn’t told them. He didn’t know how to explain. Not even to the people that had come to join them a few weeks ago, whose sole purpose seemed to be to be spoken to. Thomas saw one of them every day for a week or two, then every few days, now, once a week. Minho had tried it, once, but he couldn’t transform his memories into words, and that seemed to be the point.
They told him it was okay, that he didn’t have to talk about it if he wasn’t ready, but that wasn’t the problem. He wanted to talk about it. To be rid of it. To replace whatever distorted and nightmare-tainted memory he held of that last experiment with some soothing, spoken comfort he could repeat to himself. He was ready. He was just not capable.
He’d gotten so frustrated he ran out, and faced the waves even though they were several feet high and ice-cold with the upcoming winter, to shock the rage out of his system.
That always helped at WCKD.
He’d caught a cold, then a flu, and he’d been hammock-ridden for days.
“If it’s about waking us up, I’m pretty sure it’s better for everyone in the long run if you just… let it out.”
Not for everyone.
Minho glanced at one of the smaller hammocks by the edge of the platform. In it lay the youngest resident of the Glade, a boy, of, they guessed, about three years old. He hadn’t been at WCKD, unlike most others. Not many people had survived the fall of the Last City. This little boy’s group had, and fled to a place not far from the shipyard. Unfortunately, they’d brought the Flare with them.
Jorge found the boy, injured but otherwise healthy, wandering around alone the day they were supposed to leave. He’d been glued to Jorge’s hip ever since, but too scared to do much else than that. Hadn’t even opened up about his name. He stayed away from Minho as a rule. Ran, even, once. Minho figured his screams were too familiar.
Thomas followed his gaze and grabbed their sweaters from a chair beside their hammock. “Let’s take a walk.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
Thomas’s fingers completed their song on his chest. “I’ve been told it’s nicer at night.”
Minho wasn’t as relentlessly curious as Thomas could be, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have buttons that could be pushed. He let Thomas pull the sweater over his head, still half under the blankets because this far from the Scorch, temperatures lowered toward winter.
They slipped out of the hammock, hands glued to one another, and slipped on their shoes. Thomas grabbed a flashlight from the cabinet their group, plus nearby kids shared. They had a board there with wooden cards of their names, split into three columns. Home, bay, and forest. Thomas moved their names to forest, and scribbled a note of where exactly they planned to go, so people would be able to find them if they were needed.
A simple system for each that let them keep track over almost two hundred kids without problems.
Minho tried to peek at the note, but Thomas chuckled and folded it, then stuck it under the card with his name.
Minho’s chest felt lighter than before.
“You do realize I’m also the one drawing the maps of this place?” he whispered.
“Our maps cover the East. We’re going West. It’s only ten minutes away.” Thomas squeezed Minho’s hand, grabbed two large towels, and quietly led him down the platform toward the tree line.
On their way, however, Minho’s pulse quickened. The shadows followed them. The woods made sounds different from those at night, and some of the trees bore the same vines as in the Maze. They glimmered the same way in the moonlight.
Footsteps cracked twigs and crunched leaves. Not unlike the sounds of a massive creature on concrete, inching closer to catch its prey.
“Thomas, I can’t.” Minho sucked in air and pulled Thomas’s wrist to halt his steps. “Not at night. I can’t.”
He’d had a healthy fear of the Maze, always, but even in the Glade, that turned to terror after the sun set. What if the doors didn’t close? It was a fear everyone had at some point. One night they did, and he was on the wrong side. Another they didn’t, and the side they stood on didn’t matter.
Thomas turned around. “It’s a large clearing near— it’s upstream that river that mounds by the cliffs. We’ll only be in the forest for a few minutes. It’s not that thick this way. But we can go sit by the sea if you feel safer there. I don’t want to scare you.”
Minho swallowed. He wasn’t like how he used to be. He couldn’t soak up his feelings and make them disappear anymore. Especially not near Thomas. He lured hem out of him. Vince once said that was a good thing, but it didn’t always feel like that.
But he trusted Thomas, with his life, and in the end, they were only memories.
“We’ll take the forest.”
“Are you sure?”
Thomas was right there.
“I’m a Runner. I can handle it.”
Thomas’s steps guided them across a young trail, but it was easier said than done. Grass tickled Minho’s ankles. A twig caused him to jump, and the sudden flight of a bird made him trip. Each time he told Thomas it was fine, but his dreams still lay fresh in his mind, and the shadows pulled them into the present.
He spotted the end of their path, but it didn’t help.
He couldn’t breathe. There was something behind them. He shot around, tried to find it, but he couldn’t see it. It had hidden itself.
“Shit, Min, are you okay?”
“I can’t— it—”
“I’m sorry. It’s okay. Come on, let’s get out of here. We’re almost there.”
Thomas’s hands brought him out the dark, back into the moonlight, in, indeed, a large clearing. As soon as they stepped out of the shadows’ reach, Minho gasped for air.
Thomas caught him against his chest and guided him down into the grass. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”
Minho slumped against Thomas’s chest and bit back the sounds of old fears. Thomas’s fingers replayed their song, and Minho locked the anticipated heaved breaths away. “I know. Is it far?”
“Right there. No more trees, I promise. But you can close your eyes if that helps.”
“No, it’s the sounds. More the sounds than the trees.” He never told Thomas that for him, tree shadows transformed into different things in the dark. He’d told Frypan, once, so maybe Thomas knew. It had been easier to come Frypan. Not because of anything about Thomas other than the fact that as much as Minho loved him, he didn’t know the Glade the same way Frypan did.
Weak on his feet, probably a little pale, Minho followed Thomas to a set of rocks, down a hill, near the river. Thin steam rose up from a group of springs.
The stars twinkled in the water, jumped on gentle ripples. Where one spring met the other, water trickled down softly. Bubbles rose the surface because of the heat, meeting the air with soft pops.
“Brenda comes here when her leg hurts,” Thomas said. “The water’s clean, warm.” His hands cupped Minho’s shoulders, then slid over to let Thomas lean over his back. “Come sit.”
“In the water?”
Thomas held up the towels he brought. “Or on the side. Whatever you want. No one’s gonna come bother us for a while.”
Minho kicked of his shoes and pried off his socks as Thomas did the same. It wasn’t exactly warm, hence the sweaters and large towels, but the water grasped his toes with its comfortable heat. It lured him in.
He undressed, blushing slightly as Thomas did the same. Thomas had this unique talent where he could make him do that with as much as a blink or a smile.
The spring wasn’t all that deep, so they leaned back slightly to stay in the water. Thomas lay back entirely, and took Minho toward his chest. Minho aided him in his goal and swam closer, rested his head on Thomas’s shoulder and stared up at the sky.
“We don’t have to talk,” Thomas said. “You just get so tense at night.”
“They get scared.”
“I know. That’s why we’re here.”
Minho always got a little jealous of how quickly Thomas had adjusted, even through his grief, to their new life. Of course, Thomas had been with the Right Arm and their members (anyone from soldiers to doctors, teachers, shrinks) for months, safe, while Minho was stuck in WCKD’s clutches, and it wouldn’t be fair to think Thomas had it easier. He simply had had more time, but Minho wished he’d come that far already too.
Minho turned around to hang onto Thomas, noses touching, a light kiss between them. He wasn’t sure what to say.
Thomas made that all right as his hands moved up and down Minho’s bare back, expertly managing not to trigger the ticklish area at Minho’s waist, spreading serenity with only his touches.
Thomas’s energy rose with the sun. His calm with the moon.
Both felt like a blessing, each at home in their moment of appearance.
They sat in silence, bodies brushed against each other, floating in the heat of the spring. Thomas hummed. He’d started to that a few weeks ago, when the memories the Grievers brought back to him finally settled from frantic blurs into sensory experiences Thomas could bring back. He’d told Minho about this. He didn’t remember what his house looked like, but he remembered the smell of his kitchen and the feeling of the sheets of his childhood bed.
He didn’t know what his father sounded like, but he remembered his touch, ever so slightly.
He never spoke of any concrete events, though. But he remembered songs. Children’s songs, wordless, sometimes made audible through his hums, and other times played on Minho’s skin by tracing and tapping his fingers into patterns and melodies.
Laying by his side as he did that softened Minho’s muscles, and caused barriers in his mind to dissipate. To melt, like the wall that had kept him from weeping like a child, curling up as if that would protect him, all night.
He sniffed, quietly, against Thomas’s chest. His cries stayed silent, though not on purpose. They didn’t have to be heard, now. His mind didn’t have to make him scream in order to reach comfort: Thomas was right there, playing silent songs on Minho’s back with one hand, and on his thigh with the other.
He didn’t ask questions other than if he was okay, and held him until dawn’s light met his face first, then Minho’s.
The sun met her equal in Thomas’s loving expression, as the moon left its bright mirror behind.
“I don’t think I want to talk about it yet,” Minho quietly admitted, knowing the effort it would cost Thomas to keep the well-meant question off his lips.
“That’s okay.” They moved, slightly, to bask in the morning sun, though Minho longed for slumber against Thomas’s chest. His body had never felt this quiet and calm before.
“I wrote Vince we’d take the day off. Stay here ‘till we don’t want to anymore.”
Minho hummed and met Thomas’s eyes, glowing bronze, almost golden in the sun. “I’d like that.” He rose, pressed into the cold of the morning so he could lean over Thomas and return his favor on his lips, then took him in his arms in return, and they lay tangled insofar a passerby wouldn’t be able to tell who held who.
“You’re even prettier at dawn,” Thomas whispered.
“Hm.” Minho chuckled and ran his fingers over Thomas’s hands, a melody of his own, though he was still learning it. “I guess we’re alike, then. I’m sorry I woke you.”
“I’ll always be awake for you.” Thomas continued to play his song as birds woke woke with the sunlight. “ We’ll camp out by fields for a few nights. By the fireflies. We’ll make a tent or shack. And… maybe you can try the doctors again. Just… a few times, not that much. You can just talk about something else, even. It’ll help.”
The shrinks, not the medics.
Minho knew it would help. He’d tried to rush it last time. Wanted to fix himself before even knowing what made the broken parts of him tick.
“Once a week,” he decided. “At first. I don’t— I don’t want to do it all at once.”
“Okay.” Thomas’s eyes fluttered with a certain drowsiness as well as they floated together. You won’t feel like that forever, you know? It just takes time.”
Minho took a breath of the morning air, pushed his cheek against Thomas’s, and closed his eyes to listen to the water, to the birds, the rustling of the grasses and the flowers, and to Thomas’s heartbeat. “I know.”