Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Life in the Safe Haven was slow. Thomas didn’t think he’d ever moved slowly before.

He helped Newt get situated in his hut before realizing there wasn’t really room to build a second bed–not that he’d used his own bed while Newt was out. He’d slept in the med hut, first out of necessity to watch his wounds, then out of fear that if he left, Newt would take a turn for the worse.

He didn’t bring the one-bed situation up to the Builders.

His bed was big enough for both him and Newt to fit in comfortably, and a little uncomfortably if they wanted to avoid touching. (Thomas tried to keep some respectful distance that first night, but Newt just sighed in annoyance and yanked him towards the center of the mattress, so their arms overlapped and their knees pressed together.)

Thomas woke up every morning and ate breakfast without the threat of a time crunch looming over him. (He woke up every morning with Newt in his bed. That was strange. And strangely normal.)

Thomas found work to be done among the Builders, once being away from Newt for more than ten minutes stopped sending him into the depths of his own head. (And that was definitely weird. Codependence was a word he thought of a couple times, but it didn’t quite fit.) There were huts to be constructed, logs to be sawed, boulders to be moved, stumps to be dug up.

Thomas found a sleep schedule, a job, an enjoyment for walking the sand after dinner. Yet he was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for the sound of Bergs to cut through the laughter-filled air, waiting for Newt’s cough and temper to return, waiting for the scream of a Griever in the night, waiting for an errant signal to crackle through Vince’s precautionary radios.

The other shoe never dropped. Shit like Brenda having a couple seizures (and scaring the hell out of Thomas, who was unlucky enough to be by her side for one of them), Harriet holding a knife to his throat out of reflex when he’d walked in too quietly (which they’d both apologized for), and some of the younger kids getting themselves hurt had happened, but that was the extent of any real danger Thomas faced.

The tides rose and fell. The moon waxed and waned. Nightmares came and went. Huts went up, Fry’s cooking skills improved, and the Safe Haven started to feel…safe.

Thomas didn’t know what to do about that.

Life in the Safe Haven was slow, and Thomas was slow to catch up.

But then, so was Newt.

Thomas watched as he pried himself from sleep every morning, looking confused, like he was never quite sure he wasn’t dreaming. (Thomas watched him avoid sleep to avoid the nightmares. They both did, some nights.)

Thomas watched as Newt’s muscles slowly got used to being worked again, as his stomach got used to full meals, as his bones became less prominent and his skin gained a little more color. (And that would’ve been great, if he didn’t have an uncontrollable habit of flashing back to black bile and throwing up at least once every three days with Thomas’ hand on his back.)

Thomas watched as he chose a job with Sonya in what could only be described as the “homemaking department”. With a few older WCKD escapees, they fixed huts and hammocks, ran supplies and food to job sites, helped Fry with food prep, trained the younger Immunes to sew their own clothes, to bandage their wounds. Mending and cooking hadn’t been where Thomas had seen Newt ending up (he hadn’t really seen either of them ending up anywhere), but it seemed to be good for him. It gave him opportunities to sit when his leg was bothering him, gave him something to do with his hands when they came too close to shaking. (Thomas watched him teach the Immunes the way of the world, and pretended his stomach didn’t twist into a knot when it made him think of Chuck.)

Thomas watched as Newt took a page out of his book and pretended everything was fine.

That’d come crashing down on them both, soon enough. But they were in the Safe Haven. “Soon” was just a measure of time there, not a threat of what was to come.

~

Unsettled was a good word to use when describing the churning sensation in Thomas’ gut whenever he woke unable to remember his dreams.

His dreams were never good. They weren’t always nightmares, but they were never good, and most mornings he woke with churning in his gut and cotton in his head.

That was usually solved by looking up–because he always ended up with his head below Newt’s chin, resting on his shoulder, his chest, the mattress, in the crook of his arm–and watching Newt stir. And maybe he should’ve spent some time dissecting that, but, hey, they were in the Safe Haven. He had all the time in the world to revel in the comfort he got to leech from Newt’s peaceful, sleeping face before he decided to dissect the way Newt’s smile made his insides light up.

This morning, Newt really did look peaceful, for once. He wasn’t frowning in his sleep. He’d thrown off his side of the blanket at some point in the night, and it was curled over one of his legs and Thomas’ body. Thomas echoed his slow, even breaths, watching the way the sunlight filtering in through the gaps in their stick walls left dancing lights on his face. There was a little shadow in the hollow of the scar next to his nose.

It had been a week since Newt had been permanently released from the clutches of the med-jacks. Day eight, now. He’d accepted the job with Sonya on day three, stubbornly limped around all of day four until Minho ordered him to slim it and sit down, shuckface, or I’ll have Brenda tie you to a chair, and finally snapped and given Thomas the list of all his remaining ailments on day five.

This list included, but was not limited to:

- Feeling fine, you arse, until I can’t keep a bloody thing down because there’s still slime in my throat, Tommy, it’s still fuckin’ there–
- His bad leg being worse than usual, to the point where even sitting feels like there’s rusty nails in my bones, fuck, don’t touch me
- His hands never losing that little tremor he’d developed when the Flare first started spreading (which, upon its mention, scared Thomas probably just as much as it did Newt)
- His muscles being so tight that I can’t even sit the hell down without everything in my body screaming, God, is this what Brenda feels like after every time? Why am I still so keyed up? It was two weeks ago

Thomas had his own list of ailments, but he had a silent agreement with Gally, Brenda, Minho, and even Jorge that Newt’s had to come first for a while. (This agreement had been formed the first time Newt spat his lunch back up, while Thomas rubbed his back at the edge of the cafeteria and made worried eye contact with his aforementioned friends.) Like it or not, Newt was in a pretty sorry state, and Thomas could run on fumes for a little while longer while Newt got his feet under him. After all, he’d managed to do it for those six months they’d searched for Minho.

Newt stirred. Thomas blinked out of his half-dream, pulling himself back from priorities and injuries and necessary evils.

His head was on Newt’s chest this morning, he realized belatedly, sleepily. That chest was still bony, but at least the breath rolling through it didn’t rattle. At least its heartbeat was consistent.

Newt blinked a few times, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Thomas watched him pause, orient himself, before he looked down–bemused, but not surprised–at where Thomas had ended up over the course of the night.

“Morning,” Newt said, and Thomas was struck with an urge to bottle the sound of his voice, low and rough and warm, accent thick and enunciation slow from what seemed like a dreamless night.

“Morning,” Thomas murmured. A little smile tugged at his lips. He didn’t really try to hide those little smiles anymore, the ones just for Newt. At least, not when they were alone. He wasn’t really sure when that had started happening.

“Time’s it?”

“Mmm…” Thomas decided it wasn’t worth the effort to sit up and find his watch. “No idea.”

“Helpful, Tommy.”

“That’s me.”

Newt’s eyes closed again. Thomas wouldn’t have minded getting another hour of sleep, himself, but just as he settled down again, Newt grunted.

“What?”

“Hungry,” Newt huffed.

Thomas chuckled, but his heart did a little jump for joy and a click of its heels. Appearances made by Newt’s stomach, and not just his obligation to his stomach, were few and far between. He made a silent prayer that Newt would be able to keep his food down before stretching a little and heaving himself upwards.

Life in the Safe Haven was slow. This meant that there was no set time for anything, including meals, but Fry was up early.

“Hey, boys,” he said as Newt and Thomas (slowly, with some limping on Newt’s part) filed into the kitchen. “Nice shirt, Newt.”

They looked down simultaneously, and Thomas’ face heated as he realized Newt was in one of his shirts, probably grabbed off the floor of the hut. It was far too big on him. Newt’s ears went red, but he managed to look up at Fry with a straight face when he said, “Thanks, mate.”

“Looks comfortable.”

Thomas couldn’t help but hide behind one of his hands in a halfhearted pass at rubbing his eyes.

“Alright, alright,” Fry laughed. “Y’all want some food?”

“Please,” Thomas said, a little too fast. Newt didn’t look at him as they sat down at the little kitchen table. (He was glad for that; he would have started banging his head into the tabletop. They had to acknowledge what all of their friends–and it really was all of their friends–were thinking sooner or later, but breakfast before half the Haven was even awake was not the time.)

“What’s the stomach thinkin’ today?” Fry asked. Thomas didn’t miss the casualty of his tone. “I got fresh fruit from Sonya’s minions–don’t worry, it’s whole–and I got some leftover cornbread from last night.”

Newt sighed, scrubbed a hand through his hair. It needed a wash. Everything needed a wash, in Newt’s case, but he couldn’t stand in the bathing falls long enough–the walk there was iffy in and of itself–to get properly clean, and Thomas wasn’t about to cross that line and hold him up in the water. (Not without express permission, and implied permission for…a few other things.) Ben and Harriet were working on showers. He’d get a proper wash soon enough. Thomas would gladly put up with a little grease until then, when Newt could have a shower stool and bear the water for more than three minutes.

“I dunno, Fry,” Newt said, sounding defeated. “Put somethin’ in front of me and we’ll see if I hold it down.”

Fry chuckled. “Fair enough.”

When he turned away, Newt glared up through his lashes at Thomas. “Stop starin’, Tommy.”

Thomas hadn’t even realized he was still watching Newt’s movements. He blinked. “Sorry.”

Breakfast was cornbread and mangoes. They were red. Mutated humans, mutated fruit, Thomas supposed. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Newt thanked Fry for his plate, then proceeded to stare it down for almost a full minute before popping a piece of cornbread into his mouth.

Thomas could count on both hands the number of meals Newt had been able to completely keep down since he’d started eating again. He’d have a good day, then he’d have a nightmare or swallow wrong and the streak would be lost.

He realized he’d officially reached a record of meals tolerated in a row when Newt stood, plate cleared, and washed his dishes without so much as a grimace. Five meals. No stumbling away from the table with a hand over his mouth.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Thomas wandered off to the bathing falls when Newt clapped Fry on the shoulder and went to find a different shirt that he could actually work in. Thomas always felt like the second he looked away, Newt’s leg would give out under him and he’d go tumbling to the ground with no one there to catch him. So far, it hadn’t happened, but Thomas still had to count to five when he watched Newt’s back retreating. And wasn’t that quite the thing? They could split up now. The buddy system, which had become second nature in the Scorch, didn’t apply to the Safe Haven.

What did apply was trying not to think of all the worst-case scenarios when Thomas let Newt out of his sight. It probably shouldn’t apply. That probably wasn’t a great sign.

Life in the Safe Haven was slow. Thomas was slow to adjust.

~

On day ten, Thomas’ bite was declared healed enough to have his bandages removed.

The bite was big, but not so big that it was the first thing someone would notice when they looked at Thomas. It was scabbed and scarring over and generally looked disgusting.

Thomas had to clench his jaw and his fists when his mind brought him back to how he got it.

Erin, one of their appointed med-jacks (and the only Immune Thomas had ever met with actual medical training) patched him up a bit with antiseptic and salve that smelled like shit and gave him a set of lighter bandages for sleeping, so he didn’t tear his new skin while rolling over.

“Do not pick at it,” Erin snapped when Thomas ran his fingers over the gnarled, fragile skin. He had seen Erin relocate joints without so much as a grimace, so he decided to obey.

When Thomas emerged from the med hut, fighting impulses to keep poking at the bite, he almost ran into Newt.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

Newt made a face. “Safe Haven, Tommy. None of us have to be at our jobs all day, every day.”

He sort of…trailed off towards the end of his sentence. Thomas followed his eyes down to his own recently exposed wound.

There was a look on Newt’s face that Thomas couldn’t read. It was somewhere between self-loathing and desperation. Something sticky and guilty climbed into Thomas' throat.

“Healing pretty good,” Thomas said, quietly. Testing the waters.

Newt was silent.

“Shouldn’t scar too bad if I don’t pick it.”

“It’s big,” Newt said after a moment.

Thomas reached out, then thought better of it. “It’s not your fault.”

“I still did it, Tommy. Those are still my teeth.”

Thomas glanced down. Newt’s hands were shaking. Thomas could see what was running through his mind: black bile, the taste of blood, the feeling of hitting concrete over and over.

“Do you want me to cover it back up?”

Newt swallowed. A moment passed, and something steely crossed his face, too quickly for Thomas to do anything about it.

“No.”

Thomas could feel Newt’s eyes on the bite right up until they crawled into bed.

When he thought Thomas was asleep, Newt reached out in the darkness and traced the outline of his teeth in Thomas’ flesh.

His touch was ghostly. Thomas fought an urge to shiver.

On day eleven, Newt stopped staring.

Life in the Safe Haven was slow. Newt was faster at accepting that than Thomas.

~

On day fifteen, talk of some kind of celebration started circulating.

“I haven’t had a real bonfire night in almost a year,” Gally grouched as he and Thomas stripped bark from a log. It was the calmest activity Thomas had been involved in since joining Gally’s unofficial Builders. Thomas had one eye on his hands and their splinters, and one eye on Newt and Lorraine—one of the rescued Immunes from the train, that he’d taken a shine to—as they unloaded foraged food into crates not too far away.

“Maybe we should fix that,” said Ben, who had wandered over to steal one of Gally’s whittling knives for a sign in progress.

Thomas was struck by an image of himself, choking on Gally’s moonshine on his first night in the Glade. He smiled, a little ruefully, and stripped away a piece of bark in one long movement.

“I think we can make that happen. But I’m not having any of your special recipe this time.”

Gally chuckled. “Okay, Greenie.”

Thomas glared at the log and ripped another strip of bark. Newt barked orders from his place by the crates, and Thomas looked up to watch.

He’d been doing better lately, Newt. His leg wasn’t as bad, his muscles had loosened up, and his aversion to food had started being limited to breakfasts. The past couple days, he’d been more difficult to drag out of bed. Thomas didn’t know whether that was a good thing, but his sleep had been more solid overall. He had decided to take the win and not do anything about their interlinked sleep schedule unless it started to become something where they were missing breakfasts.

They didn’t talk about a celebration any more that day, but as Thomas helped Gally tie bark and lift logs–he was pretty sure they were putting together a longer house for the youngest kids to bunk together, but he hadn’t really been listening to that conversation when it had happened–he felt himself starting to…droop, for lack of better phrasing.

Which was really, really weird, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

Since arriving in the Safe Haven, Thomas had been running on leftover adrenaline, which kept him up and moving as long as he fed himself every now and again. He’d been so pumped up on the stuff that he didn’t realize he needed sleep or rest until his head hit the pillow every night. But now, he was slotting a log into place and his muscles were screaming.

It all hit him at once, and he stumbled dumbly to the side as soon as the weight was off his shoulder.

“Hey, hey! Whoa!” Gally yelped, watching Thomas trip over his own feet. He was at his side in an instant and hauling him upright. It was a strange sensation, to be thrown around like a rag doll. Thomas wondered briefly if that was what Newt felt like when Thomas moved him of his own accord. “What’s going on, man? You freakin’ out on me?”

Thomas swallowed, shook his head. He felt a bit like passing out. Which definitely wasn’t supposed to be happening.

“When was the last time you had any water, huh?” When Thomas shook his head again, blinked hard, Gally gripped his arms. “Talk to me, man, what’s going on?”

“I don’t, uh…” Thomas frowned. Wow. His eyelids were trying to close of their own accord. Was this what hitting a wall felt like? “When Sonya brought by the pitcher last, I guess.”

Gally scowled. Oh boy. “That was two hours ago, Greenie.”

“I swear to God, Gally, stop calling me–”

“As long as you’re being stupid, I get to call you Greenie. Jesus. No wonder Newt never lets you go unsupervised.”

Thomas wanted to say something about that, but then he was being sat on an available log and handed someone’s water pouch.

He got through the rest of the day after that mandated break, but it was a close thing. Yawns kept splitting his head open, and his coordination was off. Something was seriously wrong with him. He was pretty sure it was called extreme fatigue.

He was practically asleep at dinner. Minho kept poking fun at him, but Newt eyed him worriedly from his right.

“I’m fine,” Thomas murmured after the third once-over. “I’m just tired.”

Newt made a face, but went back to his meal. Thomas should have seen it coming when Newt stuck to his side like glue through the nighttime rounds and ushered him into bed far earlier than usual.

“No wonder you ended up in the homemaking department,” Thomas mumbled into his pillow upon collapse. “You act like a mom.”

Newt smacked him upside the head, but gave in when Thomas tugged him a little closer on the mattress.

When he woke, they’d missed breakfast, and Newt was already awake.

And looking at Thomas.

Thomas rolled to face him.

“You look better,” Newt remarked, quietly.

“So do you.”

Something quiet and tender softened the creases around Newt’s eyes, and Thomas’ big stupid heart caught in his big stupid chest.

Careful, he wanted to say.

He settled for feeling his stomach flip when Newt held eye contact—and wow, he hadn’t had a moment to revel in all the huge and terrifying things Newt made him feel since…maybe ever.

Chattering of Immunes and the day’s work was slightly muffled outside. The tarp ceiling cast uneven shadows on Newt and Thomas’ faces.

Thomas let himself just…breathe.

He felt like he was taking everything in for the first time. The way Newt’s eyes looked in the patchy sunlight; the sound of the waves, not too far off. The feeling of actual safety. That one was new. It was nice. Thomas didn’t quite believe it yet.

The feeling of whatever this was, between him and Newt—that one wasn’t new.

But it also wasn’t urgent.

Thomas was content to continue to let it stew for a while longer, even if it made it a little hard to breathe. (Especially then.)

Newt’s fingers brushed Thomas’ hair back from his forehead, and the motion left a trail of electricity in its wake.

Chapter Text

Thomas had taken to counting the days.

Newt learned this for the first time on day fifteen, when Minho was teasing Thomas from across the table for finally running out of steam. Newt had wanted to glare the I-told-you-so smile off his face, but that wouldn’t have been very good for his reputation, now would it?

“Fifteen days,” Minho had said around a mouthful of stew, “And it’s only now that you actually decide to listen to your body.”

Newt had turned to him with a frown and a halfway-snappy retort, but confusion took over. “Fifteen days?”

“Yeah, since you…” Minho glanced at Thomas. He was staring at his bowl, eyes glazed over, clearly not listening. “Since you woke up. He’s been counting. Didn’t you know?”

Newt shook his head slowly. Something about that unsettled him. He wasn’t sure why. But he watched Thomas finish his bowl that night and didn’t leave his side till the following day.

Day sixteen. Newt probably would have been happier to not know that it had been less than a month since his most recent (and most gut-wrenching, horrible, awful, no-thank-you) brush with death.

Day sixteen was long and difficult.

Newt woke up early–and watched Thomas sleeping, sue him–and felt a little bit of worry grow in his chest when he heard people massing for breakfast. Thomas wasn’t one to sleep in. But he didn’t have that little twist to his brows that he got when he was dreaming, and his breathing was slow and even, so Newt didn’t wake him.

When they did get up and get moving, Thomas’ heart was (painfully obviously) not in anything he did, and Newt kept catching him stealing looks at him from the site of the almost-finished longhouse. Whatever that meant.

At dinner, Thomas ate even less than Newt and ended up with his eyes closed and his forehead resting on Newt’s shoulder.

(Which, Christ. Could he have been any more obvious? Could he not have just said he was turning in early and spare Newt the public suffering of his face flushing and his body language doing God knows what while Thomas had a nice little restful moment on his shoulder? Sharing a bed was bad enough, for crying out loud–but Newt didn’t do anything about it. Shoving him off would have been worse. Telling him quietly to go to bed, you look dead on your feet, Tommy would have been so much worse. Their friends were sharing self-satisfied smirks as it was.)

On day seventeen, they missed breakfast again. Newt was torn between being worried and being relieved that the streak of sleep was holding.

The sleepy little smile Thomas sent his way upon waking, blinking dreamily up from the crook of his elbow, was enough to send Newt leaning towards the latter.

When Newt wandered in to find Sonya after delivering Thomas to an incredulous Gally, she just shook her head at him and laughed. He gave her a look–what, do you know something I don’t?–and went to help Jorge with boat blueprints. They were going to need those, soon, and Newt was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t notice Sonya watching him until she pulled him aside.

“Can I help you?”

“Why are you at work?” Sonya asked, like Newt was walking around on a bad leg again.

Newt frowned at her. “What’re you talkin’ about?”

“Oh my God.” Sonya actually pinched the bridge of her nose. Newt had a strange feeling he’d seen her do it before. “Thomas is finally letting himself relax, and you’re here, with me, and Jorge, for some reason, instead of taking advantage of that?”

“Wh–” Newt could feel his ears getting red. Good lord, she knows how to throw a punch. “I like Jorge.”

“Not like you like Thomas,” Sonya said, point-blank, and Newt froze like a deer in bloody headlights.

Sonya had the gall to laugh. “Go on. Get out of here. I’ll take care of your stuff.”

Newt went.

By day eighteen, Newt stopped trying to adhere to any kind of “normal people who didn’t witness the last human city falling” schedule or routine. When he did, Thomas seemed happy to match his speed. (And wasn’t that something?)

Newt felt a bit like a buoy lost at sea. Untethered. But not in a bad way. He had sunshine, he had food, he had Thomas. Thomas, who stuck to Newt like a burr, body curved and relaxed like waving grass, and seemed to be in a half-dream half the time.

His eyes would glaze over, in those dreamlike moments, and Newt didn’t know, couldn’t figure out what was going on in his head.

“Tommy,” he’d say, when it had been long enough to be concerning. “You with me?”

He would always be right up in Thomas’ space when that happened, and the relief he felt when Thomas came back down to Earth was rolled over into something else when he looked at Newt like he was something precious.

By day twenty-one, Newt felt a little like he was losing his mind.

There was talk of a bonfire night starting to properly circulate. There was a little plateau about a fifteen minute hike away that Gally said they could get a real fire going on, not just one of the little ones they had in the evenings on the beach. Yeah, great, fine. Newt was more preoccupied with the fact that he felt like he was going to explode whenever he was within three feet of Thomas.

Which was ninety percent of the time, these days. Newt was close to throwing something. Or slapping someone. Preferably Thomas.

There was this thing that happened whenever they talked or touched or…did anything, really, and it was driving Newt mad. It was like a static shock, only worse because it lasted and then it did funny things to Newt’s insides.

He felt like a child, a primary schooler with a crush. And Thomas wasn’t doing anything about it.

That was the worst part.

Because Newt could see this thing sparkling in his eyes, controlling his body language like a puppet having been given the prompt “careful”. He could see the same feelings ricocheting around in Thomas’ bones. And Thomas seemed happy to just let it sit.

Newt was definitely losing his mind.

He was happy to blame it on Thomas. Because Thomas was being a stupid, stuck-up, half-witted schoolboy playing at a man who knew what he was doing. And it was even worse that Newt couldn’t bring himself to blame him.

Newt knew what it was like to have a good thing, and to want it to stick around for as long as possible without damaging it.

But he was also, as previously mentioned, losing it.

On day twenty-five, Newt wandered out of the hut–at an even later time than what had become normal–and found Thomas, sitting with a length of rope in his hands, staring out at the water. Newt toed off his shoes and crossed the divide between grass and sand to sit with him.

For all their inability to talk to each other, Newt still didn’t like being away from Thomas. Call him codependent, call him traumatized, whatever you like. That was the truth of it.

Thomas looked up as Newt sat down, then went back to staring at the water. Newt perched himself on the edge of the field of crackling electricity that emerged wherever Thomas stood still, and wrapped his arms around his knees. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t need to.

The water was beautiful. Newt thought that every time he saw it, but it was true. When they’d been preparing to leave the mainland, Vince’s little found seaport had been a mess of metal and dirty beaches. The stuff of real life. This beach, now, was even and picturesque and inviting.

It occurred to Newt that he hadn’t taken advantage of that yet.

“Have you swum yet?” He asked, abruptly.

Thomas paused where he was untying a knot. He shook his head, looked sideways at Newt. “Do you want to?”

Newt grinned. “Yeah.”

A slow smile crept across Thomas’ face. “Okay.”

Hiding behind one of the scruffy bushes at the edge of the beach, they stripped off shirts and socks (and if Newt found it a little hard to tear his eyes from Thomas’ skin, well, that was between him and his conscience). Their clothes were left in hurried stacks and then Thomas was chasing Newt into the waves.

The tide was high, the water was freezing, and Newt laughed in outrage when Thomas sent water spraying in his direction. Then Thomas’ smile dropped when Newt pushed his now-soaked hair off his forehead, into some posh slick-back, and came after Thomas with his fingers outstretched for his middle.

Up to their waists and running–hilariously slowly, due to the waves rocking them back and forth–they eventually forgot that there were people on land that could watch them. They wrestled and shoved and dove, and Newt felt, for the first time since Thomas had accidentally fucked up his leg again, like he wasn’t an invalid. He was just as fast as Thomas in the water. It was a bit like training for Running again. Just without the life-threatening circumstances.

While Thomas wasn’t looking, getting his hair wet again so he could push it out of his eyes, Newt swam up quietly behind him.

He stood and buried one foot in the sand as an anchor, reached out, and yanked Thomas’ shoulders down, kicking the backs of his knees. Thomas shrieked, and his head went under.

When he came back up, he was scowling and spluttering and looking so stupid that Newt just had to laugh. He laughed and he laughed until Thomas was smiling and putting him in a halfhearted headlock.

Once upon a time, Newt would have thrown him off and ruined the moment.

Now, he only dejectedly wriggled out of the headlock enough for it to end with Thomas’ arm around his shoulders, and the sides of their hips pressed together under the water.

“Am I interrupting something?”

Newt and Thomas both craned their necks to find Brenda standing on the beach, hands on her hips, a smug smile on her face.

“Care to join us?” Newt called, because he could.

Brenda laughed. “No. Jorge needs Newt for a minute.”

Newt and Thomas shared a look. Subtly, Thomas tilted his head toward Brenda, and Newt nodded. Somehow, he managed to keep his features schooled as they left the water.

Brenda’s guard was down when they grabbed her.

Look, Newt wasn’t a complete monster. He wouldn’t have agreed to this course of action if Brenda hadn’t already been barefoot and tank topped. As it was, she shrieked, but could not wriggle away as he and Thomas picked her up—most of the weight went to Thomas, but Newt cackled like anything and helped keep her steady—and tossed Brenda in the water like a rag doll.

When she came up, both Newt and Thomas burst out laughing again—because Christ, she looked so angry, and somehow also completely harmless. (Newt knew this was false, and she could have taken off his head, but with her hair plastered in her eyes and her shirt askew and her arms akimbo, she looked like a wet cat.)

“You assholes,” Brenda managed between coughs. Newt could barely breathe.

“Ay!” Came a voice from the sand. Newt turned, wiping his eyes, to find Jorge in the same hands-on-hips pose Brenda had chosen. A few kids were standing around mid-errand, watching the unfolding scene. “That’s my assistant you just soaked, I needed her.”

Thomas just raised his hands in an oversize shrug like, whoops. Newt had to let out a long, almost-pained noise to get himself to stop laughing. Jorge smiled.

“Don’t let her out of your sight,” he ordered gravely. Then he turned and headed back for the village.

“Wh–Jorge!” Brenda shrieked. When Newt turned to look at her, she’d managed to get her hair off her face, which was a storm. She glared at Newt for a moment, then apparently decided he wasn’t worth her time and turned her gaze on Thomas.

Thomas was big and strong, but Brenda was skinny and fast and apparently a very good swimmer. He didn’t stand a chance.

He went down with a look of surprise, and Newt was laughing again. His sides were starting to ache. The kids distracted by Jorge had given up on their tasks and were chanting fight, fight, fight.

Thomas didn’t put up much of a fight, just tried to get Brenda in the eyes with a splash when he came up for air. That didn’t deter her. She used his size against him and then his head was going under again. When he came up the second time, his hands were in the air in surrender.

“Okay, shit, you win!” He spluttered, laughing.

Brenda crossed her arms in cranky triumph. Then she looked past Thomas’ shoulder at the small crowd of kids that had gathered on the beach to watch.

“Are you guys gonna stand there, or are you gonna join?”

Newt hadn’t planned for his morning swim to turn into a group activity–at least, not with more people than himself and Thomas–but the more, the merrier, he supposed. He stepped closer to Thomas as people yanked off socks and shoes and came tumbling into the water.

Thomas' skin was cool and slick when it brushed against Newt's. He took a step away before he did something stupid.

It was just younger kids, at first, but then core Gladers and Right Arm members were joining in too. After some coaxing, Aris picked his way into the water. Harriet managed to drag Sonya in behind him. When the shrieks and splashes were loud enough to be heard even in the farthest reaches of the village, Ben came dragging Gally down the sand. Gally’s eyebrows made a valiant attempt to fly clean off his forehead when he felt how cold the water was.

They played chicken and had breath-holding contests and races between people acting as goalposts. For a few hours, Newt managed to let go of all the shit weighing him down. He could see Thomas doing the same. Newt had to stop and watch when a huge laugh—at Aris, falling off Minho’s shoulders—completely overtook Thomas' body.

That was a beautiful sight. Newt wondered if he’d ever seen it before.

Eventually, Jorge and a few recruits that hadn’t gotten in the water came down to the beach with towels and orders for everyone to start getting out and rehydrating.

This was followed by groans of disappointment, but Jorge raised his hands in surrender. “Don’t come crying to me when you’re all sunburnt and dried-out tomorrow.”

Sonya was the first to give in. Harriet, and then the others, followed.

“Where did you learn to swim?” Newt asked later, sitting around the evening fire instead of at the cafeteria tables with Brenda, Harriet, Sonya, Thomas, and Aris. Newt’s hair had dried stiff from the salt water, and Thomas’ was sticking up in strange places. They were some of the only ones who hadn’t gone to the bathing falls.

“Jorge made me learn while Vince was fixing up the boat,” Brenda said, stabbing a potato chunk with her fork. “And I am holding that against you, by the way. The throwing me in? I will be exacting revenge.”

Thomas chuckled, and Newt could hear the sheepish look on his face without even looking.

Newt chewed thoughtfully, frowning at the fire. “We should all learn to properly swim,” he said after a moment. “And not just flounder around. Safety thing.”

“Probably,” Aris sighed.

“Don’t feel bad,” Harriet said to him, and bumped his shoulder. “You looked cute, floundering around.”

Aris’ face flushed bright red. “Exactly.”

Harriet and Sonya laughed at him. Newt didn’t bother to hold back a smile.

Learning to swim. Dinners around a fire. Proper beds, clean socks every morning, a bonfire night in the works.

Yeah. Day twenty-five had been good.

It got a little better when Thomas pressed his left knee into Newt’s right when Harriet cracked a joke.

Chapter Text

Thomas had a recurring dream.

He was sitting before the evening fire, surrounded by friends and Immunes. There was a letter clutched in his hands, crumpled and tear-stained, and the small capsule it had come from was pressed between his knuckles.

The letter was from Newt.

And Newt wasn’t among his friends.

In the way that you do in dreams, Thomas knew Newt was dead. He never made it out of the City.

Thomas wanted to scream, to run, to break open his own chest and tear out his heart where it was somehow still pumping blood through his body.

He didn’t.

He sat before the fire, tears falling from his eyes and ruining the letter. None of his friends noticed.

Thomas always woke when the paper tore, fibers wet and words muddied.

On day twenty-seven, he woke to an empty bed.

There was sunlight streaming through a gap in the east wall, and Thomas blinked hard for a few moments, wondering why Newt’s shoulder wasn’t blocking it. He patted blindly at the sheets.

Newt wasn’t there.

Thomas’ heart skipped a beat.

He sat straight up, tried to keep himself calm–the bed was empty, but the blankets had been carefully placed aside where Newt had lain. That didn’t mean anything, he could be anywhere. He could be anywhere, hiding black veins on his arm again or–

Thomas’ brain kicked into overdrive. He practically fell off the bed. Ice was pounding through his veins, his hands were suddenly clammy. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, it had been too hot the night before. He didn’t have time to grab one off the floor, fuck, fuck, where was Newt?

Thomas lurched for the doorway, knocked the curtain aside. His heart was pounding in his ears. He stumbled out onto the path, scouring everything in sight for Newt. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t fucking there. Thomas’ breath caught in his throat. His nightmares were coming true.

“Hey. Green Bean.”

Thomas’ head snapped around as Gally’s fingers closed around his arm. He was wrenching it away before he could blink.

“Get the hell off me–where is he?” Thomas sounded strangled. He didn’t care.

Something flashed in Gally’s eyes, and he glanced up toward the hills, and Thomas was turning to run that direction, but then both his wrists were caught in Gally’s goddamn iron grip.

Gally’s eyes were like stone when he said, “Thomas. Stop it.”

Thomas stopped. Mostly out of surprise.

“Do you even know where you are right now?” Gally asked, and Thomas, absurdly, distantly, felt himself coming to grips with reality.

He blinked a few times. Air left his chest like a flat tire, but anxiety was still soaking his insides like poison.

He swallowed.

Sounds. Sights. Wind and salt. Safe Haven.

People were pretending not to stare at him.

“Where’s Newt?” Thomas asked, as calmly as he could, and his voice was raw.

Gally loosened his grip. His eyebrows went from full panic placement to worried mother hen placement. If he hadn’t been on the receiving end, Thomas would have laughed.

“He’s at the bathing falls,” Gally started, but gripped Thomas’ wrists again when he tried to turn and run there, right on instinct. “Put a shirt on.”

Thomas stepped back. Gally let him go.

Something ugly crawled into his throat when he picked up a clean shirt, and it made his hands shake as he pulled on his boots. The grass and sand and sky were a blur of things he still didn’t quite believe were real until he was cresting the hill and turning left to clamber down the rocks to the pools.

Newt was standing with his back to Thomas at the edge of the water, wearing a pair of cargo pants Thomas hadn’t seen before, bare footed with no shirt, rubbing his hair dry with a towel.

Sometimes, drinking in the sight of him was enough. Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes Thomas had to bridge the distance and reach out like a lost dog.

Newt turned at the sound of Thomas’ footsteps. His face fell, but he was there, and real, and he hadn’t disappeared.

Thomas somehow managed not to cry when Newt let him paw at his hand until their fingers were locked together.

“I was hopin’ you’d be asleep longer,” Newt said, and of course he had. And of course the sound of his voice made the knot in Thomas’ chest loosen just that much.

Thomas looked down at Newt’s arm. He angled their hands until he could see the smooth, unmarked skin on the inside of Newt’s forearm.

“You scared me,” Thomas said.

“Yeah.”

Newt’s gaze was burning hot, and when Thomas glanced up to meet his eyes, he realized this was the first time they’d been really alone since…ever, maybe. That was a strange realization to have, when he was coming down off a panic attack. That’s what it had been, hadn’t it?

“Sorry,” Newt whispered, and Thomas nodded and took his hand back before he could ruin whatever this was even more than it already had been.

Newt frowned at the sudden loss of contact, and then Thomas was being yanked into a hug.

Which, shit, he hadn’t expected. And that was uncharacteristic for Newt. But all the fight and fear started leaving his body as his own arms started winding themselves around Newt’s waist.

“‘S alright, Tommy,” Newt said quietly. Most of Thomas believed him.

Newt held on for a few moments longer, while Thomas’ world righted itself and his breathing returned to something normal. Then he slowly let Thomas go, and exhaustion started seeping into Thomas’ body as he watched Newt step back to his spot and pull on a shirt and his shoes.

He felt a bit like falling over and throwing up by the time Newt’s bag was over his shoulder, he’d bundled up his clothes, and was standing at Thomas’ side again.

“Need a shower while we’re here?” Newt asked.

Thomas smiled thinly. “No.”

“Want some food?” A half-smile tugged at Newt’s mouth. He knew what the answer was going to be.

“No,” Thomas said, and damn it, Newt was making him feel better. Thomas grabbed the bundle of Newt’s clothes from his hand and led the way up the rocks. If he was still shaky, and hated turning his back on Newt for even a moment, he didn’t show it.

When they were over the rocks and headed back toward the village, Newt laced his fingers through Thomas’ again. The motion was a half-conscious muscle memory, and reciprocated immediately. It made Thomas feel like he had been given a sedative and a shot of adrenaline at the same time.

Another thing to pick apart later.

Later, later, later. He was putting a lot of things with Newt off for later, lately. The excuse of having all the time in the world was wearing thin.

Apparently, Newt had been up much earlier than their usual. Breakfast was only halfway through when Thomas mustered the courage to follow Newt to the cafeteria after stopping by the hut.

Gally and Ben were arguing over cornbread at one of the tables nearest the kitchen. Newt and Thomas collected plates of their own and slid onto the bench across from them.

“It’s my half, you’ve had enough,” Ben said decisively, and slapped Gally’s hands away. Gally scowled at his food and stabbed a piece of fruit with his fork.

“Looks like you’ve been having fun,” Newt said.

“You too,” said Ben, raising an eyebrow at Newt’s nervous body language and Thomas’ obvious exhaustion.

“It’s been a long morning.”

“It’s barely eight thirty.”

Thomas squeezed his face. He did not want to be awake. Or part of this conversation. But he was also about to raise hell upon separation from Newt, so there was no way he was going back to the hut.

When he emerged from behind his hands, Newt and Ben had moved on to another topic Thomas couldn’t follow, and Gally was watching him.

“What?” Thomas asked, somewhat grumpily.

Gally narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to figure Thomas out. Then he reached out and pushed Thomas’ plate closer to him.

“Eat.”

Thomas huffed, but picked up his fork.

He was painfully aware of Gally still watching when Newt pressed his leg into Thomas’ as he chewed. His food tasted like ash, but the contact calmed the cloud of hellish energy buzzing in his stomach, and he chewed and swallowed. He was also painfully aware that Gally saw him physically relax against his will upon the contact.

When Gally continued to watch, Thomas set down his fork and sent him a look. What?

Gally raised his eyebrows, shrugged. Nothing. He went back to his food, and to eyeing Ben’s cornbread. He and Newt lapsed into silence, and Gally seized the opportunity to open his mouth.

“Rainy season’s gonna be here soon,” Gally said around a mouthful. “We’ve got the longhouse done, but we’ve gotta set up some real housing that water won’t get through for everyone over the age of thirteen.”

“Always on business, Gally,” said Ben.

Gally glared at him. “I like my job.”

“I know you do, babe.”

“So, what, are you trying to recruit me back?” Thomas asked. Newt snorted beside him. “What?”

“You really want to try getting up at Gally’s time every bloody morning?”

“Did it today.”

“You didn’t seem very happy about it,” Gally put in.

“Extenuating circumstances,” Thomas said. He was getting a headache.

“Oh, my God. Stop it.” Ben broke his cornbread in half and gave some to Gally, who was immediately distracted. “Thomas, he’d be glad to have you back. He’s been complaining to no damn end with me. But there’s no pressure.”

“Yeah, okay.” Thomas rubbed his eyes.

Newt huffed, and Thomas looked out from behind his fingers to find him shoveling the rest of his food into his mouth. He glanced at Ben, who shrugged.

“I’m taking him back to the hut,” Newt announced when he’d cleared his plate.

“Wh–”

“You’re sleep deprived and edgy and you’re gonna make both our days bloody awful.” Newt got to his feet.

“You’re not sleep deprived?”

Newt stuck out his hand. “Get up, Tommy.” The long-suffering exhale in his words made Thomas feel like a toddler. He deliberately avoided eye contact with Ben and Gally as he took Newt’s hand, and deliberately didn’t put any of his weight on Newt as he got to his feet.

The hut was a mess. Thomas couldn’t remember if he’d wrecked it in his rush to get to the bathing falls, or if they’d both just let it get cluttered over the course of the last few days. Either way, he didn’t have the energy to deal with it. He toed off his boots and sat, hard, at the foot of the bed as Newt pulled the curtain doorway closed.

Newt watched him for a moment. One of those inscrutable looks was tugging at his brow. Thomas always wondered what was going on in his head when he made that face.

It was the only expression he’d never been able to read on Newt. He’d worn it in the Glade, when Alby and Minho had been gone too long. He’d worn it when they reunited with Gally outside the City. He’d worn it when he showed Thomas his arm.

Newt was gathering the last few items off the floor when Thomas came back to the present. He straightened, winced a little, came to sit beside Thomas.

“With me?” Newt asked, tapping Thomas’ arm.

“Yeah. Sorry.” Thomas took a breath. The clouds in his head had moved in when they’d come back from the bathing falls, and hadn’t moved out. “I didn’t want you to clean up the whole thing.”

“I don’t mind.”

Newt paused, and Thomas wanted to lean over and rest his head in the crook of his neck. But something about that was far too intimate in private, when it was still light outside.

“I won’t mind either, if you want to go back to work, Tommy,” Newt said quietly.

Thomas looked down at him. His eyes were hidden behind the pale line of his hair, which needed a trim.

“Is that what you’ve been thinking about?”

Newt pushed his hair back. His eyes were almost amber in the light filtering through the canvas ceiling. “You’ve been seemin’ restless. I’ve been wondering.”

Thomas’ breath caught at the prove-me-wrong casualty to Newt’s tone. He almost reached out, almost took his hand. Almost.

“Newt.” He blinked at Thomas, hopeful and guarded. Shit. “I don’t want to go back unless you do.”

“I don’t,” Newt practically whispered, and everything they weren’t saying was laid out in the space between them.

A pair of unmistakably younger voices ran past the hut, laughing and shouting, and the moment broke. Thomas watched as Newt pulled himself back inside his walls, as the openness in his eyes closed itself off. Something twisted in pain in his chest as it happened.

“C’mon then,” Newt said, getting back on his feet.

Thomas watched as he fixed the blanket. Then he put his own walls back up.

Later, later, later.

He didn’t think he’d sleep, not after whatever the hell just happened at the end of the bed, but the firm line of Newt’s body next to his was warm and comforting, and the rise and fall of Newt’s chest was slow and even.

~

Thomas was starting to realize he couldn’t put off this thing with Newt much longer. The reality of it slapped him in the face and made him go bright red when Harriet asked him why he hadn’t jumped at the opportunity to have more privacy.

Thomas frowned at her. They were sitting side by side in one of the workspaces, helping Sonya with making and dyeing linens. Day twenty-nine. Newt was spinning thread with her not too far away. She’d recruited as many people as she could for this particular activity. Thomas could see why. Clothes and blankets were going to have to be made from linens. Things people needed. But now he was stuck on Harriet’s question.

“What are you talking about?”

“Gally’s starting to plan real houses for people instead of huts, since it’s gonna get cold and wet soon. Didn’t you know?”

“Well, yeah,” Thomas faltered. “But why would we need more privacy? Shouldn’t the first houses go to people who want them more?”

Harriet fixed him with a look. “Trouble in paradise?”

“What?”

Thomas watched in real time as Harriet’s face morphed from confused to shocked to barely concealed mirth. She covered her mouth, wiped her face clean, went back to scutching.

“Sorry. I must’ve read the signs wrong.”

“What are you talking about?”

Harriet shrugged. “Sonya and I are on Gally’s list. We want a sturdy house. With actual walls, and an actual ceiling. I thought you and Newt would want to be on the list too, y’know, since you live together.”

Thomas felt incredibly stupid when he realized what Harriet had been talking about, and he was pretty sure the way his face went red could be seen all the way down on the beach.

When Sonya called it quits a few hours later, stomachs were growling, Fry had made sandwiches with the younger kids, and the homemaking department’s linen quota was much closer to being met than it had been at the start of the day. Thomas deliberately didn’t get as close to Newt as he usually did when they lined up for dinner. Newt shot him a look, but didn’t say anything.

The cafeteria was completely overtaken with vats of dye and drying thread and lengths of fabric, so everyone ate around the fire. Thomas ended up sandwiched between Brenda and Newt. Gally, Ben, Sonya, and Harriet were in the row in front of them, and had turned to eat on crossed legs, facing Thomas’ row. Their other friends were on the opposite side of the fire, where Minho was telling an extremely animated story, and Aris looked mildly nauseous.

“So,” Gally said, leaning in, and Thomas jumped a little. “Vince is gonna be mapping the other end of the island two days from now. Supposedly, it’s gonna take him all day to get around that end in the motorboat, so he’ll be gone for twenty-four hours at least.”

“You sound like a teenager planning a house party while dad’s not home,” Brenda said.

“That’s cause he is,” Newt said drily. Thomas snorted. Gally scowled.

“If you shanks wanna sit out, that’s fine by me.”

“No, no, go on,” Harriet urged. Beside her, Sonya was hiding a smile behind a hand holding her sandwich.

Gally made a face, but continued. “The younger kids are usually in bed by eleven. If we can get the memo out to the rest of us to meet at the clearing past the bathing falls around twelve—and get past Jorge on the way there—we’re golden. Got pretty much everything ready to go.”

“Jorge knows,” Brenda said, matter-of-fact. “He ran a colony for twelve years. Nothing gets past him.”

“Except WCKD, apparently,” Thomas said into his sandwich.

“They were pretty quickly flattened, remember?”

“Alright, alright,” Thomas said, backing off.

“Is that gonna be a problem?” Newt asked. “That he knows?”

“Nah, he’d have ratted us out by now,” Brenda said. “He’s probably secretly encouraging it.”

Thomas glanced over to where Jorge was sitting among the youngest rescues, who were all in raptures at whatever he was telling them about. Yeah. Jorge was a sucker for kids. And it was weird to acknowledge, but they were all still kids in the end. Jorge wouldn’t bother to stop them. He’d laugh, when they were all sleep deprived and hung over.

Thomas frowned. “When you said ready to go, were you implying you’ve been brewing your trade secret recipe somewhere behind our backs?”

Gally laughed. “What, like you wanted any?”

Newt snorted, choked on his food. Thomas shook his head and patted Newt’s back till he got ahold of himself.

“I didn’t, but I’d like to know if I’ll be the only sober one there.”

“Still no hair on that chest,” Newt muttered, and Thomas slapped his back just a little harder than necessary.

“I won’t be having any,” Brenda said. “Makes me seize.”

“Oh, good, you can both babysit,” Sonya said, grinning.

“Joy.” Brenda finished off her sandwich.

Newt chuckled, and it reverberated through Thomas’ side. He frantically tamped down the things that woke up in his chest. And his stomach. And everywhere else.

Jesus. Get a grip. You’re at dinner. You were fine two seconds ago.

Thomas shoved the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and ignored the sidelong looks he got from the girls.

Chapter Text

When Thomas snuck out of the hut with Newt on his heels, the one-month anniversary of both of them alive and present in the Safe Haven, on their way to Gally’s bonfire night, he wasn’t expecting to crash right into someone else.

They squeaked, and Thomas jumped as their bodies collided, grabbing the stranger’s arms firmly to keep them from toppling over.

“Sorry,” they whispered after a moment of adrenaline-spiked silence.

“It’s fine,” Thomas whispered back, heartbeat slowing from its startled pace. He couldn’t make out the stranger’s face in the dark, but he thought he recognized their braided hair and height as one of the Group C kids.

“Alright?” Newt asked over Thomas’ shoulder, voice low.

“Fine.”

“Wanna let ‘em go, Tommy?”

Thomas blinked. He was still gripping the stranger’s arms. He released them. “Sorry.”

“You’re good,” the stranger said, then giggled a little. “Jeez. That was scary. You came out of nowhere.”

“You okay?” Another voice carried through the dark, and Thomas watched another figure approach the gathering. “Oh, hi, Newt.”

“Hey, Lo.” Thomas blinked in the darkness, remembering Lorraine, who he guessed was cool with being called Lo.

“Why are we standing around?”

Thomas saw Newt shake his head. “Can we go, Tommy?”

“Yeah. Uh, lead the way,” he gestured toward the stranger, and they grabbed Lorraine by the sleeve. Thomas made sure Newt was next to him, then followed the pair up the path toward the bathing falls. There was a little orange glow over the tops of the trees. Gally already had the bonfire going.

A grunt from somewhere on Thomas’ left was followed by the scuffing of a shoe through dirt, and then a sudden hand on Thomas’ arm. “Root,” Newt announced. “Watch out for roots.”

Thomas laughed, trying to keep his voice low. “Want me to carry you?”

“Tommy, if you walk into Gally’s party carrying me, I will never forgive you, and Brenda will never let either of us live it down. You know this, somewhere deep down.”

Thomas heard a snort come from the pair ahead of them, and failed to conceal an amused smile of his own. No one could see it, anyway. He slowed down regardless as Newt let go of his arm. Thomas could hear the uneven tick of Newt’s walking and knew the trip had jostled his leg.

He tried to ignore the little twang of guilt that twisted through his sternum. He’d been forgiven for throwing Newt around in the City. That didn’t mean it wasn’t his fault that the damn leg acted up so much now.

The twang lessened up some when Newt’s hand returned to Thomas’ arm, cool and slight and probably there just for balance but Thomas didn’t really care, especially when it slid down his wrist to wrap around his palm.

The party was in full swing when Newt and Thomas broke through the bushes.

Nearly everyone from every Maze trial was there, talking and laughing and passing around jars of Gally’s drink to cough over. Thomas noted a few younger kids, too, but if anyone cared that they’d snuck in, they apparently hadn’t said so. Someone with a pair of hand drums had paired up with a guitarist off to one side. (Where the guitar had come from, Thomas had no idea.) The fire was blazing, at least six feet around, Gally had put together a sparring ring, and Thomas had a moment of the strongest deja vu he’d felt since coming up in the Box.

“Just like old times,” Newt said.

“Yeah,” Thomas said, stupidly, unable to think of anything else.

He glanced at Newt, who was surveying the scene like a battlefield.

“Let’s get a drink.”

“I’m not having any.”

“I know. I’m having some, and you can come with me.”

Thomas chuckled. “Okay.”

Newt found Minho like a magnet, who was standing at a table with Fry, a jar of alcohol in one hand and a skewer of meat in the other. Fry beamed upon Newt and Thomas’ approach, and Minho’s eyes crinkled in that way that meant he was secretly happy.

“Hey, fellas!” Fry laughed. “Welcome to the party.”

“Thanks, mate,” Newt said, and Thomas could hear the smile in his voice. He would have seen it, as well, but he was locked in a smile/glare contest with Minho, who was apparently very happy about the fact that Newt hadn’t let go of Thomas’ hand. “Got anything for us?”

“Meat for both,” Fry said, handing skewers to Newt and then Thomas, “And Gally special for Newt.”

Newt let go of Thomas’ hand to accept the jar he was given, and if Thomas felt a little bereft, well, that was between him and Minho’s prying eyes. And Fry’s knowing grin.

Newt said his thanks, and when Minho turned down coming to sit with them, led the way towards where some logs had been set up as benches. Despite his initial reaction to the atmosphere of the whole thing, Thomas found himself relaxing into the party as he people-watched, laughing outright a few times at newbies in the sparring ring and saying hello to people as they passed by.

He kept an eye on Newt, too, who was stomaching the meat and alcohol with a mild smile. He looked content, for once. That was nice. Thomas felt like he only ever saw Newt these days with one of three expressions—impassive, frustrated, or with a rare, genuine smile unexpectedly splitting open his face, which always made Thomas’ heart do double-step.

Thomas looked away before he was caught staring.

“Hey! Green Bean!”

Thomas looked up to find Gally staring at him expectantly from the sparring ring. “Oh, no,” he muttered.

“C’mon, shank, for tradition’s sake,” Gally called.

“It’s not tradition if it only happened once,” Thomas called back, but he was already sticking his cleaned skewer in the ground and getting to his feet.

“Just can’t resist, can you?” Newt asked, with a shit-eating grin. Thomas shook his head with what he hoped was exasperation and held out his hand. Newt took it and pulled himself to his feet, leaving behind his own half-finished skewer and jar.

As Thomas approached the ring, he felt extremely put upon. People were chanting. Thomas, Thomas, Thomas was mixed in with quieter Greenie, Greenie, Greenie. Thomas had to double-check that the Glade walls were absent as he pulled off his boots and socks.

“Okay, alright,” Gally said, unable to contain his excitement as he shook out his limbs. Thomas rolled up his sleeves. “Remember the rules?”

“You try to push me out of the circle, I try and last more than five seconds?” Thomas deadpanned, leaving Newt’s side to step into the circle of sandy dirt that had been cleared. The group of people–which was rapidly growing–around the circle laughed.

Gally grinned. “Exactly.”

“Okay.” Thomas raised his hands, tried to remember how to hold his body. “Bring it.”

Gally wasted no time, and Thomas was getting thrown to his back before he could process what was happening.

He hit the ground hard, right next to Newt’s feet, who was smiling down at him. “Alright?”

“Shut up,” Thomas managed, before he was getting pulled upright again.

“Round two?” Gally asked, gripping Thomas’ forearms to keep him in place.

“You barely even gave me round one,” Thomas complained (good-naturedly), but Gally just laughed and backed up to his edge of the circle.

“C’mon, Thomas, kick his ass,” Aris called from somewhere in the crowd. Thomas just shook his head. I’m doing my damn best.

Gally rushed him again, but Thomas dodged. Not by much. Gally got a fistful of his shirt and yanked him back around, causing Thomas’ head to snap back and a little burst of pain to rocket through his neck. Thomas grabbed Gally’s wrists, but trying to force him backwards with sheer will was never going to be enough. Somehow, Gally packed the strength of a goddamn tank into his six-foot-something frame, and Thomas was being thrown to the side, barely managing to catch himself before he flew out of the circle into an innocent bystander–who happened to be Brenda.

“What are you playin’ around for, dumbass?” She cackled.

Thomas didn’t have a chance to say anything. Gally’s arms grabbed at his ribs and he was being yanked backwards.

Okay, fine. Strategy over strength. Thomas yelled with the effort of it, but he got under Gally’s arm and twisted his body so that Gally was tripping over his own feet. The crowd cheered as Gally stumbled, then cheered louder when he managed to push off the ground with one hand and get back into position.

When they rushed each other this time, Gally opted to simply grab Thomas and force him to the ground.

The dirt under his back felt a lot like concrete.

The smoke from the bonfire smelled a lot like burning buildings.

Thomas might have yelled, he wasn’t sure. Pain and adrenaline flooded his senses as Gally held him down. Self-preservation kicked in, and he flung Gally off of him.

He hit the ground with a thud, and fuck, fuck, fuck, was this really happening? Had Thomas ever left the square in the City? Gally was rolling over, laughing. He was going to start punching, soon, he was going to pull a knife out of his belt, it was going to happen, Thomas could see it.

Thomas pulled back and hit him.

Gally’s head snapped back, and he instantly recoiled. Thomas couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. His head was spinning. Fuck. Fuck. Where was Newt?

“Tommy!”

There was a pair of gray cargo pants and a tan shirt overtaking his vision as someone dropped to their knees in front of Thomas.

“Tommy. Tommy. Look at me.”

Thomas’ breath was coming in shallow whispers. He couldn’t move.

Gentle hands cupped his face. He found his strength and writhed away–and in doing so, forced Newt’s face into vision.

Newt’s face. Which was not blackened. Not bloody. Just full of fear.

Reality wove itself back into Thomas’ senses, and his stupid eyes filled with stupid tears.

Fuck. Everyone was looking at him. He just punched Gally. Fuck.

Newt pulled–cradled–Thomas’ head to his chest before the tears could fall. “Back off,” he barked, and Thomas felt the words reverberating.

There was some shuffling, some murmuring, and Thomas burned with shame. Newt just held him, like he hadn’t hit anyone, like he wasn’t the most messed-up person alive.

Thomas hid.

What else could he do?

He hid and tried to remember how to breathe.

Newt’s heartbeat was steady, if a little fast. The expanse of his chest was firm and warm and real. Thomas tried to convince himself of it. Tried to convince himself that his body wasn’t shaking and his head wasn’t spinning and he wasn’t in the past.

“Wanna move him?” Someone asked. Thomas distantly recognized the voice as Minho’s. A little bit of relief trickled through his muscles.

“Yeah. It’s gonna have to be you, though,” Newt said softly, and, okay. Thomas may have been a mess, but he wasn’t going to put his burden on his friends. He turned his face out from Newt’s chest, just the littlest bit.

“I can move myself.”

Thomas could practically feel Newt and Minho sharing a look.

“Alright, Tommy,” Newt murmured. “Wipe your face, not everyone’s cleared out.”

Thomas did as told, unrolling one of his sweaty sleeves to do it. He hadn’t noticed it, but he had been crying into Newt’s shirt. Jesus. That was a whole new level of helpless.

Newt and Minho got him to his feet. Thomas tried not to look at anything or anyone. Newt wrapped his fingers around Thomas’ wrist, and Minho walked behind them, carrying Thomas’ boots.

The walk back to the hut was agony and embarrassment and a hard-set jaw. Somehow, no one tripped over anything in the dark. Thomas didn’t react when pebbles pierced his skin.

He ducked through the curtain the moment they got back, leaving Newt and Minho outside, and buried his face in his dirty, sweaty hands. He pressed the palms of his heels into his eyes, trying not to listen to the murmurings of Newt and Minho outside.

Inhale. Exhale. Shake out the limbs. Don’t cry.

Not again.

When Newt entered the hut, Thomas had already changed into something clean that he could sleep in and wasn’t covered in sweat, dirt, or tears. A rare commodity. He’d taken advantage of it; if he had to stay in that shirt, he’d have clawed off his own skin—and he still might.

Newt didn’t say anything; he just tucked Thomas’ boots into their spot by the doorway. Thomas could feel Newt watching him, even from where he sat on the bed, head down, Chuck’s whittled man in his fingers.

He got the little totem out sometimes, when it got bad.

Newt stood still for a moment, then started to change into some clean clothes of his own. When he was finished, he gathered the clothes on the floor into a neat pile and lit a mosquito candle. It cast dancing shadows across the room, gave both of them a bit more sight. Thomas kept his head down, eyes on the floor.

Unfortunately, this created the perfect opening for Newt to kneel and be right in his eyeline.

“Tommy,” he said, slowly, gently, and the well of darkness in Thomas’ chest wanted to split right open.

He swallowed it down.

“Did I hurt anybody?” He asked. His throat ached.

Newt’s brown eyes were full of hurt. The pink line of his mouth thinned. He shook his head. “Clocked Gally pretty good, but he’ll be fine.”

When Thomas didn’t say anything, Newt sighed, reached out and stopped Thomas’ fingers from turning Chuck’s totem over and over. He hadn’t even registered that he’d been doing that.

“You know it’s alright, yeah? Nobody’s gonna hold that against you,” Newt said. “We’re all getting better. But it’s not gonna happen fast.”

Oh, but Thomas would hold it against himself. He shook his head. Swallowed hard.

“I’m not getting better, Newt,” Thomas said. His voice was raw. His hands were shaking. He felt so young, so wildly unprepared for dealing with being alive.

He knew he didn’t look young. God, he looked so old, and so did Newt, especially in the dark. Neither of them looked like teenagers anymore. Maybe they hadn’t since leaving the Maze.

“You are,” Newt said, and hell, he sounded desperate.

Thomas dragged his eyes back up to meet Newt’s. They were wide and worried. He still hadn’t let go of Thomas’ hands.

“Look, I’m…” Newt shook his head. “I’m not the best with words, here. But, Tommy, please believe me, okay? We’re all getting better. We all wake up with nightmares. Half of us don’t sleep at all. You think you’re the only one having panic attacks? I don’t think I’ve gone a single day without staving one off. Minho practically lives in flashbacks. Wonder why Fry’s always in the kitchen? Wonder why Sonya hasn’t missed a day, why Brenda never lets that bitchy exterior go?”

Thomas waited. Newt shifted closer.

“Because they’re scared. We’re all scared to our bloody limits.” Newt paused. Swallowed. Thomas watched. “I don’t know if we’re all getting better. I can’t say that for sure. But I know that we can. And we will.”

A moment passed. Despite himself, Thomas found a little smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Newt was so damn earnest.

“Not good with words, my ass.”

Newt chuckled, albeit ruefully. He let go of Thomas’ hands. The loss was hellish.

“Wanna get some sleep, Tommy?”

The answer was no. Thomas knew what he’d see the moment he closed his eyes. But Newt was looking up at him with that crease between his eyebrows, and exhaustion was seeping into his bones from the fight and the crying and…everything else.

Thomas nodded.

~

Newt didn’t sleep.

Thomas did, to his immense relief. But once the breathing on the other side of the bed evened out, Newt found himself staring at the hollows of Thomas’ face, holding back from reaching out and touching the outline of his own teeth in Thomas’ skin.

I’m not getting better, Newt.

That declaration had been terrifying. It was still scaring him, lying in the dark, listening to the sputtering of their single candle.

If Thomas was right, and he wasn’t getting better, then Newt wasn’t getting better, either.

He had to be. They both had to be. Newt wouldn’t go another round of vomiting and not sleeping and absolute hell if he didn’t have to.

With shaking fingers, Newt brushed some of the curly, sweat-matted hair from Thomas’ forehead.

“Come on, Tommy,” he whispered. Thomas couldn’t hear him. He didn’t care. “Don’t give up on me now, you bloody selfless idiot.”

Thomas didn’t say anything. Newt refrained from cradling his face in his hands.

Newt managed to doze, once his chest stopped feeling like a quagmire of acid. Every time he jerked awake, Thomas was still in the same position, unmoving. Newt reached out and put two fingers under Thomas’ nose a couple times, until he could feel even, warm exhales. Just to make sure.

He was awake when Thomas’ brow furrowed. When he started to curl in on himself. When his fingers tightened around Chuck’s totem, that he’d fallen asleep with.

Newt’s heart squeezed. He grabbed Thomas’ wrist.

“Tommy.”

Thomas mumbled something incoherent. Newt knew he wasn’t responding to him. He was lost in whatever hellscape his mind decided to show him.

“Tommy. Wake up.” Newt squeezed his wrist. Thomas didn’t wake.

Newt turned to ice as Thomas curled further in on himself, as he mumbled things into the sheets. He should have been used to the nightmares by now. He wasn’t.

Newt sat up and took Thomas’ hands in his own, totem and all, pressed into the mattress with the fearful strength of someone who had lived through too many things. He tucked his legs under him, sat far enough back from Thomas’ head that they wouldn’t collide if he screamed himself upright.

Newt didn’t have to wait long.

Thomas shouted, scrambled into a sitting position, and Newt did his best not to flinch. He kept a firm grasp on Thomas’ hands as he gasped and panted. He waited for Thomas to come back to the present.

Slowly, Thomas’ brown eyes–doe eyes, Newt thought disconnectedly–drifted over to Newt’s and focused on his face. The frightened, animalistic look that always followed his nightmares slowly faded.

“With me, Tommy?”

Slowly, Thomas nodded.

“Yeah,” he rasped, and Newt took a breath for what felt like the first time in hours. Thomas’s breath was slowing, and Newt still had a hold on his hands, and they were so close together yet so damn far apart.

A moment passed, and Newt decided, fuck it. He released Thomas’ hands and pulled him into a tight embrace instead.

The way Thomas immediately exhaled and relaxed into his shoulder told Newt he had made the right decision.

“You’re scarin’ the shit out of me, Tommy,” Newt said. His voice was shaking.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said immediately, and bloody hell, he sounded so wrecked. Newt’s own throat constricted with banned tears.

“It’s alright,” Newt managed. “Don’t be sorry. Got nothin’ to be sorry for.”

If Newt wasn’t so close, if Thomas’ mouth wasn’t pressed into the bony line of his shoulder, he wouldn’t have been able to hear:

“But I scared you,” whispered into the air like a child’s protest against unfairness.

Newt just held him closer. Thomas’ hands were trembling where they came to rest at the base of Newt’s spine.

“You just gotta talk to me,” Newt said, with as much command as he could scrape together—which wasn’t much. “Talk to me, yeah? It’ll scare me less.”

Thomas exhaled, searing hot, against Newt’s collarbone, and his head spun.

“I’ll try.”

Something unlocked itself and let go of a huge weight in Newt’s bones. It seemed too much, the amount of relief two little words sent coursing through his body. Newt took it anyway, and his next breath was a little lighter.

When Thomas was a little less skittish—and Newt a little less clingy—Newt rearranged the bed where it had been mussed and coaxed Thomas into laying down, at least, if not sleeping.

Newt didn’t sleep, of course. He hadn’t kidded himself that he would, especially not with Thomas half-layered over him in exhaustion, having given up on pretending he wouldn’t end up there over the course of the night anyway. But that meant that Newt was awake while Thomas drifted off again. It meant he was awake when Thomas sighed, right into Newt’s ribs, and murmured something he knew Thomas wouldn’t remember in the morning.

“Too good f’me.”

Newt resisted the urge to cry. Resisted the urge to shake Thomas by the shoulders and ask if he was insane.

A little ball of something—desperation, care, fear, he didn’t know—settled in Newt’s sternum.

He wound his fingers through Thomas’ hair and waited for sunrise.

Chapter Text

Thomas was starting to wonder what was considered normal.

He was starting to wonder if there was such a thing as normal.

On the one hand, there were people like Sonya, Gally, Frypan. They never seemed to stop moving, as if having a task at all times would keep the past at bay. On the other hand, there were people like Aris, Ben, and a lot of the older Maze trial kids. They had never even tried to pretend to be okay, and whether they showed face outside their huts and hammocks on any given day was a toss-up.

Then, there were people like Newt. Like Thomas. They functioned for a while—on stress, on exhilaration, who knew—and then crashed hard.

Some of those people, like Lorraine and her friend (neither of which Thomas had spoken to since running into them before the bonfire), managed to pick themselves up a little after their crash. Thomas was finding that they were the least narcotic, the most adaptable. Thomas was finding that he did not fit in their category. He had crashed, first from exhaustion, then from what was probably trauma catching up to him, and he hadn’t managed to get back up.

Neither had Newt. Thomas wasn’t sure if it was twisted of him to be torn between relief upon not being alone in that way, and sheer fear for the state of Newt’s mind under the weight of it all.

Thomas found that what served him best was trying not to think very hard about the things that were haunting him.

He knew he couldn’t do that forever. But when he wasn’t actively reeling from a nightmare, or watching Newt eat from the corner of his eye, or feeling his body still as he tried not to fall into flashbacks, it was a damn good way to pretend he was feeling normal.

Which led him back to the question of whether anyone in the Safe Haven was experiencing any kind of normalcy.

On day thirty-six, Thomas dragged himself out of bed, pretended not to feel Newt’s eyes on his back as he found a shirt, and ducked out of the hut. The sky was gray, and the breeze was chillier than it had been since arriving at the Haven.

Thomas watched the people milling around structures, at job sites, and was reminded of watching the Maze. People going about their tasks in the Glade, all day, every day.

He pulled back from the fragmented memory—blue, blurry, filled with monitors and Teresa’s face and white lab coats—and headed for the showers. They had been finished on day thirty-three, and were stocked with homemade soap from Sonya’s minions. Newt’s hair was in its right state, fluffy and curling every which way, for the first time since before the trials thanks to that. Thomas was filled with an urge to turn back to the hut, to race back to Newt for a moment, just to see that.

His mind wandered under the water, as it was wont to do.

Things hadn’t been…great, lately. Not since the bonfire. Another thing Thomas was trying not to think about. Gally had forgiven him pretty easily for the hit. That didn’t mean he had forgiven himself.

Sleep had been worse, for both Thomas and Newt. Thomas was so exhausted from the effort of trying to maintain a somewhat normal exterior every day that he knocked out the moment his head hit his pillow. But he woke at least twice every night, dragging himself out of dreams, and usually found Newt awake.

Par for the course when they weren’t in danger; Thomas could sleep anywhere, just not consistently. Newt couldn’t sleep anywhere. Consistently.

The dreams (nightmares) weren’t the worst part of the night. The worst part of the night was when Thomas had to pull himself to consciousness only to find Newt in the worst state of insomnia he’d ever seen, eyes glazed over, hand limply holding Thomas’ as the cogs spun uselessly in his mind.

“Newt?”

Sometimes, Newt didn’t respond until the second or third try.

He’d blink a few times, his eyes would refocus, and he’d meet Thomas’ gaze.

“You alright, Tommy?”

A stupid question, which Thomas always stupidly answered with yes.

Eating had been worse, too. Newt’s streak of holding food down—a week and a half streak, the ending of which Thomas’ chest hurt over—had been harshly broken the morning after the bonfire.

Thomas, shamed and exhausted, had diligently eaten as much as he could with Fry and Minho staring him down from the edge of the kitchen. When he decided to say fuck it to the rest of his serving, he sat back to find Newt’s jaw clenched and his fork digging into the table.

When he reached out to touch him, to check in, Newt recoiled from the motion. Then he gagged. Thomas’ stomach dropped as Newt jerked up off the bench and ran for the trash can by the kitchen.

As Newt stood over the can, heaving and shuddering, Thomas rubbed between his shoulder blades and tried not to let the bubble of emotion get past his own throat.

When he was done, Newt wiped his mouth, shook just a little harder for a moment, and pushed away from the can. He limped two paces past Thomas before taking a wrong step and buckling.

Thomas’ heart broke. It just broke.

He was there faster than he remembered moving, shielding Newt’s face from the occupants of the cafeteria and holding him up with an arm around his ribs. Newt was still for a moment. Thomas stilled with him. He breathed. Then they moved.

They went back to the hut. Minho came by with a bucket of warm water from the kitchen so Newt could clean up in private. They ended up talking, reminiscing, as insane as it was, for most of the day—once Newt had a mint leaf in his gums and was folded in on himself against the pillows. Thomas sat by his feet. Minho sat on the floor. Just the three of them in a messy hut in messy lives.

The day wasn’t a total loss. But Newt’s good streak with food was broken, and wouldn’t repair itself for a while.

Thomas jolted back to the present—day thirty-six, he reminded himself, day thirty-six—when a comb clattered to the floor of another stall. A string of creative curses followed as Thomas tried to get his heartbeat back to a reasonable speed.

“You okay?” Came another voice. Thomas knew that voice from somewhere.

“Yeah, fuckin’, dropped my shit, I’m fine.” Thomas heard the comb scrape against the slab floor as it was picked up.

“Okay,” they laughed.

Day thirty-six. Thomas turned off the water in his stall, rubbed his hair dry, and wrapped his towel around his waist before shoving his curtain aside. There was a little separate area—temporary, like most of the village, still—curtained off for changing. Thomas grabbed his clothes and found a corner.

When he emerged, damp and cold but clean, at least, he almost ran into someone.

It was the same someone he had almost run into on the night of the bonfire, and she jumped about a foot in the air, braided hair whipping around, as he stumbled backwards.

“Jesus!” She yelped. That was twice now that Thomas’ heart rate had skyrocketed.

“We should stop meeting like this,” he said, trying to regain composure. She cracked a smile.

“Hey.” Thomas and the someone, who he was deciding to call Braids, both turned to find Lorraine approaching with a set of towels. “There’s two open ones at the end.”

“Is that for me?” Braids asked.

Lorraine held out a towel in exasperation. “Unfortunately.”

“You love me, really.”

“I’d love you more if you didn’t keep forgetting your towel.”

“Thank you,” Braids singsonged. “Delilah dropped her comb while you were gone, pretty sure she woke up the whole Haven.”

“With the comb or the cursing?”

“Maybe both.”

Thomas watched the exchange with a little bit of hurt in his chest.

Lorraine noticed him still standing there. She looked him over, then patted Braids’ shoulder and headed for the showers. Braids turned back to Thomas.

“I’m Elle, by the way,” she said, sticking out her hand. Thomas shook. He noticed that she was covered in freckles.

“Thomas.”

“Yeah, I know.” Elle looked at him with something between praise and clinical examination in her eyes. “How’ve you been holding up?”

“Uh…” Thomas chuckled, rubbed at his neck. Stopped when he felt the sensitive skin of the bite under his fingers.

“That bad, huh?”

From the deadpan in her voice, Thomas couldn’t tell if Elle was being serious. He blinked. She stared expectantly at him.

“I, uh…” Thomas floundered. How did you say how are you so well-adjusted without actually saying it?

“We’re all a little worried,” Elle said after a moment. Her voice was gentler. “Y’know. We see you and Newt–and the whole rest of your Glade, really–kinda struggling. Not to say you have to talk about it. But a lot of us want to be here for each other, which includes all of you.”

Thomas faltered. “Who’s ‘we?’”

“Me, Lorraine, a lot of us.” Elle studied him. “You don’t have to deal with all of this all by yourself.”

“Haven’t you been?”

Elle laughed. It caught Thomas off guard.

“By myself? Christ, no. I’d be having a panic attack every five minutes. I’ve got Lo, I’ve got Delilah. I’ve got the rest of my Glade. Erin’s good for a chat, too, if you can catch her in a good mood.” Elle paused. “The point is, you can’t expect yourself to function on a bad sleep schedule and bottled-up trauma.”

“Trauma,” Thomas murmured. He had that in goddamn spades, that much was for sure.

“Yeah, trauma. T-R-A-U-M-A.” Elle squinted. “Did I spell that right?”

Thomas chuckled, even though he was reeling just a bit. “I think so.”

Elle hesitated, for just long enough that Thomas wondered if the conversation was over. Then:

“It’s just about taking advantage of the present,” Elle said, almost like she was sharing a secret. “That’s how I’ve been doing it. The past happened. But it’s over. And if I don’t take advantage of the present, pay attention to the moment, then I start to think the past is still around. And it starts taking over my image of the future.”

That…made sense.

Thomas stared at Elle. Elle looked back at him. Something settled, firm and sure, over the constant rattling uncertainty in his sternum. It wasn’t much. It was just the result of thoughtful words.

It was a start.

Thomas realized he was still staring.

“Thanks,” he managed. Elle smiled, reached out and patted his arm.

“No problem.”

“Elle!”

Thomas and Elle looked toward the showers to find Lorraine standing by one of the stalls.

“What?” Thomas cringed at the way Elle’s voice rang his ears.

“I need your comb!”

“Oh, for the love of–I’ll talk to you later, Thomas.” Elle flashed him a grin and darted away, dual braids swinging behind her shoulders. Thomas was briefly reminded of a children’s book he must have read—Pippi Longstocking?

Newt was still in bed when Thomas got back to the hut, arms crossed behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. He looked down when Thomas came in.

“Thinking?” Thomas asked, instead of asking why haven’t you gotten up, what’s wrong, what is it?

“Yeah,” Newt said, and his voice was casual, and Thomas relaxed a bit. “We should get on Gally’s list for a real cabin.”

Thomas nodded, eyes drifting over to the gaps in the stick walls. “Yeah, probably.” Thomas thought that was a future issue. Then he thought back to Elle, and her insistency on living in the present. “I got a, uh…got a philosophy talk at the showers.”

“Philosophy talk?” Newt half-laughed, sitting up and making room for Thomas at the end of the bed. Thomas sat.

“You know Elle?”

“Lorraine’s friend.”

“Yeah, that one. She cornered me at the changing stalls.”

Newt bared a crooked smile. Thomas’ chest warmed. “Seems like something she’d do. What did she say?”

“She said…” Thomas frowned at the sheets. “Well, apparently, our Glade is the worst at adapting. People are worried about us. Apparently.”

Newt hummed. He didn’t sound surprised.

“And she forced advice onto me.”

“Good advice?”

“I…I think so.”

“Go on, then.”

Thomas tried to remember what Elle had said. “She said that the secret is living in the present. Or something like that. Y’know? You can’t go back to the past if you stay in the present. And then the past won’t interfere with your future.”

Newt was silent. Thomas watched as he turned the words over.

“I think it probably made more sense comin’ from her, Tommy.”

Thomas laughed, halfway hollow. “Probably. But I think it’s pretty smart.”

“Live in the present and don’t think about the past? Pushin’ it down hasn’t worked for anybody so far.”

“She didn’t say not to think about the past. It was more of a letting the past go thing. Like, if you keep living like you’re still in the Scorch, you’ll never leave the Scorch in your head.” Thomas felt incredibly stupid. He picked at his thumbnail.

Newt nodded slowly, though, eyes staring into the middle distance.

Then he came back, and asked Thomas to get off the blanket so he could get up.

~

Living in the present was nigh impossible with insensitive, traumatized twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids around who couldn’t keep their mouths shut in public spaces.

When someone said something stupid, did something rude, made a passing comment that made someone else curl in on themself, Thomas tried to let it go. He really did. He tried to breathe it out and let Vince or someone else—like Brenda, who enjoyed enforcing emotional sensitivity—deal with the problem.

It was just a little harder to do that when there were three of them talking about the fall of the City one table away from him and Newt.

“What happened to that girl?” One of them asked, and Thomas felt something sickly crawl down his spine.

“The doctor?”

“She wasn’t a doctor. She was one of us.”

“Sure.” A snort. “She burned with the rest of the City, I hope. Deserved it after what she did to us.”

Thomas’ eyes were boring into the table, but he was seeing Teresa, all long hair and crying, begging eyes, all anger and hope after slamming the fire door.

There was a lump in his throat. His mouth filled with iron. His eyes were stinging. Something animal in him wanted to scream.

Thomas got up and left the cafeteria, leaving Newt and their dinner in his wake. Or so he thought, until Newt batted the curtain aside when he followed Thomas into the hut.

They stood opposite each other for a few loaded breaths. Thomas’ fists were clenching and unclenching at his sides.

“We need a real door,” Thomas said, voice hoarse. Just not a fire door. Something I can open.

“We need a lot of things,” said Newt.

Thomas’ face contorted as his eyes welled up and the forsaken dam in his chest cavity broke wide open.

He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes as the tears spilled over. Fucking kids. Fucking WCKD.

Then there were gentle hands on his arm and the back of his neck, pulling him into an embrace. Newt’s hands. They were sure and warm and Newt’s breath on Thomas’ hair, familiar and tired, made Thomas give in. A sob crawled from his throat. Then another punched its way through his chest.

Thomas hadn’t cried—properly cried—in a long time. He had forgotten that once the tears started, they were nigh impossible to stop. He had forgotten the way his airways closed up, the way he had to fight for an inward breath just to cry it back out. He remembered those things now. Those were old; inescapable.

Newt holding him, rubbing a thumb at the base of his hairline, keeping him firmly tucked away from the world—that was new.

Thomas cried himself out. The well the tears had risen from was deep and seemed to be filled a little further every time he thought about Teresa, or Chuck, or anyone else they lost.

When the tears stopped, his face was swollen, the room was tilting, and Thomas was just about ready to pass out. At some point, Newt had moved them to sit on the floor, but his body, warm and soft and damn near tranquilizing, was still wrapped around Thomas’.

Thomas took a long, difficult breath.

“Better?” Newt murmured.

Thomas swallowed. The crying had been awful. He felt like he’d been wrung out like a washcloth. But things felt…lighter, now. Less world-ending.

“Yeah,” he croaked.

Newt chuckled. “Want some water, Tommy?”

“Yeah.”

When Newt extricated himself to reach the jug in the corner, Thomas realized he’d tacked a Tommy onto the end of his sentence—seemingly just so he could say it. Thomas didn’t say anything about that. He just accepted the cup he was handed, and subsequently drained it.

~

Newt walked Thomas up to the showers, unable to keep a hand off his arm. He was feeling protective, sue him—and if he saw those kids from the cafeteria, he wasn’t sure he could be trusted not to lose his cool.

So, a hand on Thomas’ sleeve. It was grounding. No one had to know but him.

It was also helping him balance, because while he’d been sitting on the dirt floor, holding Thomas and chewing on memories of the City, aches had set into his leg. And they hadn’t gone away.

He wasn’t sure if they were phantoms, caused by the memories, or if the unforgiving earth had actually messed something up. Newt found himself not caring very much. It was just pain. He’d dealt with it before; he’d deal with it again.

Newt got Thomas cleaned up while he sank into complete detachment. Newt didn’t blame him, just swiped a cold cloth over his face and wiped the sweat from his hands and neck. Breakdowns were a bitch. Newt tried to have as few as possible.

Thomas was asleep the second his head hit his pillow. Newt watched him for a while, and woke with Thomas’ forehead in the crook of his neck and shoulder.

Vince took full attendance at breakfast that day as an opportunity to hold a speech. Newt watched with aching bones and a knee pressed into Thomas’ thigh—just to make sure he stayed there.

“Okay, attention, please,” Vince called, getting up on a chair so everyone could see him. He looked exhausted. A glance across the table at Minho confirmed that Newt wasn’t the only one thinking it.

“Some of you—about half of you, actually—didn’t go through what we went through in the Scorch, and what your older counterparts went through in the Mazes.” Vince paused, rubbed at his forehead. Newt’s breakfast was even less appetizing than it had been moments before. “So, it makes sense that you don’t know what’s okay, and what’s not okay, to talk about in public settings. And if the older ones of y’all don’t want to be around for this, I won’t judge.”

Some of the rescues shifted uncomfortably and more than one Glader grit their teeth, but no one got up. Newt saw Minho grip his fork a little tighter.

“Alright. First of all, the reason I’m talking about this is that we’ve had a few incidents caused by…well, blabbermouthing, for lack of better phrasing. And I’m sure most of you have been around for those incidents.”

Newt prayed no one was looking at his table as his own gaze drifted downwards. Thomas pressed his leg more firmly against Newt’s.

“So, I’m gonna lay out a couple ground rules for discussion in main spaces. One, try and use discretion, okay? You’re all old enough to understand that there are topics that are gonna set some people off. Among your friends, those topics are probably gonna be pretty obvious. Big ones are talking about deaths of people you did or didn’t like, and things you saw in your pasts.” Vince ticked them off on his fingers as Newt’s stomach twisted uncomfortably. “Ground rule number two: try to be sensitive. Try to own up to your mistakes when you make ‘em, cause we’re all gonna make ‘em.

“It’s not all about being the toughest or the least affected. Hell, I’m affected, and I never had to go through half of what most of you did. If we want this place to work, as a Haven, and a functioning society, more or less, we need to have communication. None of this works unless we have trust, and trust dies off when people don’t hold themselves accountable for their mistakes.”

Something sickly and sad was bubbling under Newt’s skin. He had never been talked to by an adult–even indirectly–about rules in a way that let him keep his personhood. His dignity.

“And three,” Vince was saying. Newt blinked a few times. “Try to keep yourselves clean, okay?”

A startled laugh came from somewhere in the cafeteria, and a few nervous chuckles followed. Vince was pretty good at public speaking, as it turned out. Newt’s leg was aching again. He wondered if WCKD had briefed any of their test subjects before they were put into the Mazes, or if they had just shoved them into an operating room and then into the Boxes. Had they received ground rules? Had they known what was expected of them?

“I mean it,” Vince said. “Very few of you are done growing. That means you’re not done stinking up the place. Use the showers! They’re free!”

When Vince got down off his chair, Newt found his hands shaking.

He got up off the table bench, carefully deposited his plate in the kitchen bins, and limped out of the cafeteria.

Halfway to the hut, he heard Thomas’ footsteps behind him. And much like Thomas had, not too long ago, Newt broke the moment they were both inside.

His leg was fucked. He dropped down at the edge of the bed, buried his eyes in his hand, and let the wave of ruin wash up from his chest and out through his mouth in a wrecked, pitiful noise.

Thomas’ hand found his back and began to rub circles into the bones there. Newt’s chest rattled, and the tears came.

At some point, Thomas’ other arm came around Newt’s ribcage to hold him. Newt leaned into it. He was tired. He couldn’t have stopped the flood if he tried.

“What was it?” Thomas asked eventually. His voice was strained, rumbling against Newt’s head, and he swallowed hard before continuing, like he was trying to choke down medicine. “The Scorch? The deaths?”

Newt exhaled. His heart felt leadened. “Just Vince.”

“Just Vince?” Thomas asked, and Newt could hear his confused smile.

“He just…talked about it. The past. Like it’s normal to talk about that shit.” Newt swallowed, swiped at his face. Thomas let him go when he sat up. “Is it that hard to talk to kids? Fuck, Tommy, we were kids. And WCKD weren’t honest with us, never. Lies and games and bullshit, it’s all bullshit, bloody hell, none of it was worth it. Vince stands up there and talks at them. WCKD couldn’t even manage that.”

Newt knew his gesturing looked insane and he sounded half-hysterical, but Thomas’ eyes on him were sad and understanding and so damn soft Newt just about wanted to kiss him.

He didn’t. He turned toward the opposite wall and didn’t hold in the tears when they came back around.

~

That was the second time Thomas had seen Newt cry in earnest. It didn’t feel right to witness, but he supposed they were even now.

In lieu of knowing what to do for Newt, Thomas did what he did best: caretaking. Newt was in pain—both emotionally and physically, with the way he was leaning off his hip and pressing his toes into the dirt. So Thomas kept rubbing circles into his back and waited for the long exhale that meant he was more settled.

“Better?” Thomas asked. Newt huffed a laugh, sniffed, ran a hand over his face.

“Yeah,” he said, but Thomas could hear the lingering anger and emotion in his voice. “Yeah.”

Thomas was tempted to pull Newt close and just hold him. Shield him for a while.

Instead, he crossed the room to Newt’s crate of clothes and pulled out a fresh set.

Newt laughed again, derisively, but not towards Thomas. Thomas held out the clothes where he knelt by the crate, a silent question, and Newt nodded.

Thomas turned the clean shirt right side out while Newt stripped out of his sweaty, rumpled one, and held it open for Newt to slip into so he wouldn’t have to get off the bed. All the while, Thomas’ heart was sitting in his stomach like a fallen lead balloon. He just hoped the silent care would be enough for Newt, since he had no idea what he was supposed to say or do otherwise.

Freshly dressed and slightly less splotchy, Newt let Thomas act as a crutch up to the showers. Newt’s limp, heavier than he’d ever seen it, made Thomas’ hands go clammy. Newt didn’t betray much pain on his face. Thomas didn’t ask whether that was because he was hiding pain or if it was because he was exaggerating the limp for ease of movement. He wanted to ask, but he didn’t.

Most of the shower stalls were empty at that time of day. Thomas located one with a stool and sat Newt down, standing at his side in front of the curtain with a wet cloth and hopefully steady hands.

It was funny, how often they mirrored each other. Newt had cleaned Thomas up not too long before while Thomas let himself be washed and wiped, too defeated to do much else. Now Thomas was doing the same for Newt.

Thomas didn’t mean for his train of thought to find its way out of his mouth, but while he was wiping the back of Newt’s neck, it just sort of happened.

“I think that was sort of the point,” he murmured.

Newt didn’t look up, just shifted his weight. “What was?”

“That…WCKD didn’t talk to us. You know, that was part of their campaign. If there was distrust between any of us, it caused more stress, which made more serum.”

“So?”

“So–” Thomas struggled with the words for a moment. “They didn’t teach us how to communicate. If we didn’t communicate in the trials, we created distrust. So we need to be the ones to talk to each other now. We need each other.”

Newt was very, very still, and Thomas’ heart jumped over itself as he wondered if he’d said something wrong.

A moment passed.

Then two.

“I need you, you know, Tommy,” Newt finally whispered.

Thomas swallowed as his heart leapt into his throat.

His hand fell from Newt’s shoulder, ghosting over Newt’s fingers where they dug into the fabric of his shirt. Newt took his hand. Thomas felt like he might sink down into the molten core of the earth.

“Yeah.” Thomas managed. Their fingers tightened around the expanse of each other’s palms, over the cracked, tired ridges of their knuckles. I need you too went unsaid, because it was obvious. It was so damn obvious.

Slowly, Newt leaned his shoulder into Thomas’ stomach. Thomas dropped the washcloth and wrapped his arm around Newt.

It wasn’t quite a confession. It wasn’t quite anything. But it was there. And it stayed there long after they left the showers to try to re-integrate into the Haven.

It was like a switch was flipped.

Newt and Thomas started hanging onto each other like they’d been glued together. They hadn’t done that in a few weeks, and Thomas was astounded at how much he’d missed it, now that it was back. Newt pressed into Thomas’ side when they stood together, wrapped his pinky finger around Thomas’ under the table or the blanket, and Thomas felt his heartbeat slow.

Jesus. He was a goner.

Sometimes Thomas thought about how quickly he and Newt had come to know every in and out of each other—how they acted under stress, what their first instincts were, when one of them should take the lead rather than the other. When Thomas had snuck out to chase down Minho, Newt had been right there, knowing every move Thomas was going to make before he made it.

When Newt sat in the passenger seat, so to speak, all Thomas had to do when he was feeling unsure was look to the right. They didn’t have to talk; didn’t have to confirm with each other what the plan was going to be, who was in charge, who was unsure. It always passed between them in looks, in subtle nods.

Sometimes, Thomas thought about that, and how much reaching that point of understanding felt like slotting something back into place, when it first happened–whenever it happened. Like they’d always been able to do that, they’d just been out of practice.

He wondered whether, if he let it happen, this thing with Newt would feel that way too. If the electric shocks he got from every touch would ease into a current. If the deer-in-headlights freeze he pretended not to fight upon lingering looks would morph into easy analysis.

He hoped so.

Chapter Text

They didn’t sleep normally. They didn’t eat normally. They didn’t live normally.

Then again, no one did.

For a few weeks, despite the insomnia, falling through dreams, and sporadic pains and nausea, Newt and Thomas started to even out. Newt and Thomas started to smile.

Newt started to crack old jokes with Minho, to do his and Thomas’ laundry, even when he wasn’t finishing his meals, even when he was massaging the meat of his leg. Thomas started to get up on time, to show up at build sites, even when the bags under his eyes were the color of blueberries, even when he was so lost in thought he had to be elbowed to answer a question.

They hung onto each other like lifelines, like rescue floats, and all the while, Thomas heard the echo of what had gotten him through—and then out of—the City, in the back of his mind:

I cannot lose Newt.

I cannot lose Newt.

I cannot lose Newt.

It had been like a bullhorn, a battle cry, keeping his blood pumping and his eyes on the light at the end of the hellish tunnel. From the moment Thomas first saw Newt’s arm till the moment he woke up in the Haven.

Now, it was a murmur; remains of a life now past.

It stuck around, though, and kept Thomas’ compass pointing in Newt’s direction. Which was why he had been getting so little sleep the past few nights.

Day fifty. Thomas didn’t think he’d been so sleep deprived since the Scorch.

Newt’s insomnia had been better, for a few nights. The switch finally flipped around day forty, and for almost a whole week, it seemed like he’d done nothing but sleep. He hit his pillow early and woke late. At lunch, he’d fallen asleep on his own hand or Thomas’ shoulder a few times. (Thomas had been fairly sure he would burst into flame.)

Then, the streak had broken again. It seemed as soon as they fixed one issue, a new one cropped up. Newt had stopped throwing up, but that had been replaced by eyes wide as owls’ and deep as black holes that Thomas startled awake to in the wee hours of the mornings.

It was a different kind of deepness—a different kind of darkness—than had been in Newt’s eyes in the City. But Thomas’ heart still shriveled a little when he had to wait for Newt to come back around to the present tense, instead of wherever he was in the depths of his own head when he wasn’t sleeping.

When Thomas managed to drag Newt into mental existence, he was too afraid to let himself fall back to sleep–hence, the deprivation.

They would lie awake for hours, until the sun came up, staring into the middle space between their bodies. Thomas made sure Newt didn’t drift too far into his head. Newt kept his fingers over Thomas’ pulse point, between the jutting ridges of his wrist bones. They hadn’t kept such a close eye on each other since the Scorch and the City, and while Thomas didn’t feel as strung out and terrified as he had then, he was still exhausted and more than a little jumpy.

Which was why he nearly clocked Newt’s skull with his own after a dream on night fifty.

It was the standard falling sensation. That kind of dream seemed to be a nightly occurrence with the shitty sleep he was getting, but he couldn’t seem to get used to it, and he always jumped and flailed when he woke. (This time, he’d been tripping over his own feet and falling into the pond in the Glade, but he’d rather not revisit that—not when the memory of the foliage and the air and the fear opened a vent of freezing air in his chest.)

Thomas woke with a start and a strangled yell.

His heart was pounding in his chest, his head and the room seemed to be spinning in opposite directions, and it took a second before he came around to realize that Newt had recoiled from him at some point, brown eyes wide in shock.

“Shit—sorry, did I—” Thomas’ throat wasn't working right. He swallowed, about to try again, but his eyes darted downwards and the words died in his mouth.

Newt was gripping Thomas’ hands like he was afraid he’d disappear.

Thomas looked back up at Newt, sudden worry burning through him. “What is it?”

“You…” Newt cleared his throat. Was that fear or sadness in his eyes? “You were askin’ for me. In your sleep.”

Thomas blinked.

“I…what?”

“I’ve never heard you sleep-talk before.” One of Newt’s hands unwrapped, and came up to smooth Thomas’ hair away from his forehead. His fingers shook. “You didn’t wake up ‘till you woke yourself up.”

Thomas frowned. “What was I saying?”

“You were…” Newt swallowed. His hand dropped back to the mattress. When he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. “Said you couldn’t lose me.”

A lump formed in Thomas’ throat. Shit. Newt was terrified.

And Thomas had no idea what to do about it.

So, naturally (and maybe just to quell the shaking beat of his own heart), Thomas snaked an arm under Newt’s shoulder, gently turned him to face the opposite wall, and pulled him in close.

Newt’s back, burning hot, pressed to Thomas’ freezing chest. Newt’s hands found Thomas’ again, against his own chest, and gripped them fiercely.

With Newt close and caged in, Thomas’ own fear started to give way to the pull of sleep. God, he was exhausted. But Newt was still shaking—just slightly.

Thomas gave in and pressed his face into Newt’s curls, nose resting against the nape of his neck.

When he exhaled, so did Newt.

“Sorry I scared you,” Thomas whispered.

“S’alright,” Newt murmured. He was silent for a moment, and Thomas wondered, murkily, whether he was really forgiven.

Then Newt’s body relaxed against his own, and he let out a long breath that sounded like it had been trapped between his ribs for weeks.

Curled into one comma, Newt and Thomas slept through the rest of the night for the first time in days.

Outside, clouds swirled in the darkness, and pressure thickened the air in warning of an incoming storm.

~

Newt unclenched his jaw and pried his fingers from the meat of his leg, until the skin under his nails faded from pressure-white to pink.

Sweat had stuck tiny fibers of the material of his pants to his fingertips. He tried to focus on that, rather than the rain lashing the tarp ceiling, rather than the water seeping in through and under the walls, rather than the way his entire body jerked involuntarily at the next flash-bang of lightning. He focused on linen instead of the echoes of bombs and crumbling buildings rattling through his bones with every roll of thunder.

(Linen and rain. Like those were normal things to focus on—normal things that he had never really seen before in his life. Things that only existed in the Haven. Things that had been simulated in the Glade.)

Newt had to breathe manually, pushing air in and out through his nose in motions that the med-jacks would call far too forceful. The usual signals for unconscious oxygen intake were getting lost in the flood of deep-seated pain clawing its way up from his bad hip. His bad hip, which had him stuck on his and Tommy’s too-thin mattress, fingers digging into the raw wood of the bedframe, sweat and muggy air soaking his shirt.

Another bolt of lightning lit up the hut, and another crack of thunder made Newt’s spine stiffen and his leg clench and his nails cut into the wood.

When he got his body to loosen, the edge of the bedframe dug into his femur through his meager excuse for leg muscles. “Fuck,” he hissed as his leg spasmed.

It was too late to be dealing with this shit, and he’d been dealing with it for far too long now. Newt wasn’t even sure what day it was on Thomas’ counter. All he’d known was pain—first mild, manageable, then uncontrollable and bad bad bad—since the storm set in. And that was…how long ago now? A day? He couldn’t tell where the sun was, with the black clouds in the sky blocking any possible rays of light that might have touched the leaking ceiling of the hut.

At first, when the barometric pressure had gotten to be too much, Thomas had dragged Newt to see Erin. She’d become the unofficial med-jack overlord, since she was the only one with official training from WCKD days. And overlord was a good term for her; she was maybe the most intimidating person in the Haven.

“Nothing to be done,” she’d announced, over Thomas’ wringing hands and Newt’s grinding molars. “If you’re in this bad of pain during a storm, you need strengthening, but that can’t happen until the pain gets better.”

“So, what, he just has to wait?” Thomas asked. Newt already knew the answer, and both wanted to shut Thomas up via force and have him hold Newt until the pressure of his arms overrode the pain in his leg.

“He just has to wait.” Erin placed a hand on Newt’s shoulder and gripped harder than necessary. Newt was grateful for it; the mild pain from her fingertips distracted from the aching in his leg.

So, Newt was waiting. He was waiting through damp he couldn’t escape, flashbacks he couldn’t control, and pain creeping through his body like poison.

Thomas had left the hut almost eight hours ago. Newt wanted to find and strangle him for being gone this long—but then, he couldn’t really do that. He’d been the one to insist that Thomas go in the first place, after Gally had come running, looking for any and all volunteers to batten down the hatches of leaking buildings and tarps threatening to blow away in the wind, and something else about flooding. Newt hadn’t really been paying attention at the time.

“Go, Tommy, it’s fine,” he’d said. Thomas had gotten that look, like he wanted to say something but couldn’t formulate it.

“You’re in pain,” Thomas said, quietly, and Newt would have melted if he wasn’t starting to sweat from the discomfort.

“And there’s nothin’ you can do about it,” Newt replied. A stupid thing to say, when he wanted Thomas to stay, but it was true, and they both knew it. “You can be useful. I can keep my arse parked and not get Minho up in my face for following you around.”

When Gally shifted anxiously in the doorway, Thomas relented.

“I’ll be back, okay? Stay put.”

“Kay.”

Stupid.

Eight hours later, and Newt wanted to start bashing his head into the wall. (That would probably hurt the wall more than him, if the amount of water in the hut and smell of wet wood were anything to go by.)

Another crack of thunder rocked his world, and this one was so close that it seemed to rumble through the earth as well as his bones. His stomach rolled. He swallowed hard, nails digging into his flesh to create a sharp pain to focus on. He would not be sick again.

When the nausea died down, Newt was able to form a clear thought for the first time in…several lightning strikes gone.

Painkillers.

An absurd laugh overtook him as soon as the word passed.

“So, he has to wait, and you’re not even gonna give him painkillers or anything?” Thomas had asked Erin, incredulous, as Newt was gathering his strength to stand and go back to the hut.

“Tommy,” Newt muttered, but Erin spoke over him.

“We’ve decided to save what painkillers we have for emergencies and operations.” Factual, punctual, as always. “If the pain gets substantially worse, you can come back for him and plead his case. In the meantime, try pressure, heating, anything that usually makes it a little better.”

Newt wanted to say that nothing usually made it better, because it felt like his bones were slowly splitting down their middles, but the sentence would have taken too much exertion. He had gotten up, grabbed Thomas’ arm, and forcibly walked them both out into the (at the time) gentle rain.

Now, Newt was betting he could strongly word Erin into giving him some of the good stuff. (He sincerely hoped the Haven’s medical supplies included something more than the little red pills Jorge kept around for Brenda after seizures. Those things were good for headaches and not much else.)

With a pitiful amount of effort, and trying not to flinch at the next flash of lightning through the walls, Newt levered off the mattress and steadied himself on the crate acting as a bedside table. (Not because the world seemed to be tilting beneath him. That would just be goddamn embarrassing.)

He made it a respectable distance past the hut before collapsing, and his fall was melodramatic enough to rival Thomas’ after he’d stuck himself with Griever juice.

When the world stopped looking like a screen glitch, Newt blinked rain out of his eyes to find himself on the ground like a paint splatter.

He’d managed to fall on his good side, thankfully, but that didn’t make it any easier to pry himself from the muddy patch ten feet from the hut. There was silt in his mouth and his hair. He spat, tried to reorient, then hissed and jerked involuntarily when his entire leg seemed to light on fire.

“Fuck,” he barked, once his muscles stopped spasming, since that seemed the only appropriate thing to do. Then he fisted a hand in his (soaked, muddy) linen pants again to ride another wave of pain.

Once it passed, Newt did the mental math. It was about a four minute walk from his and Thomas’ hut to the newly erected medical building. In his state, that would be about a ten minute hobble.

Yet again, he wished he hadn’t let Thomas leave with Gally. If he were here, he’d just carry Newt straight back to Erin without thinking twice.

Before the thought could make its way from his spinning head down to his leg and it could spasm again, Newt bit down hard on his tongue and pushed off from the ground.

There was no one around to witness his fall, nor his miniature pity party. Everyone was either locked firmly in their mostly-waterproofed lodgings or off with the Builders, battening down hatches and dumping out overflowing drip pails.

Newt made it another ten feet before the shouting reached his ears.

“Hey!”

Minho, barefoot, soaked and dripping from head to toe, was running toward Newt at full speed. When he staggered to a stop, he caught Newt’s arm, and Newt nearly collapsed against him out of sheer relief. Minho held him up, subtly checking him over for injuries.

“Jesus, man, did Thomas run off on you? What are you doin’ out here?”

“What does it look like?” Newt snapped, in too much pain to be anything but angry.

“What—” Minho paused, and Newt could see the pieces come together in his mind. “Shit. Okay. Come on, I got you.”

Newt could have cried.

For the second time since either could remember, Minho split Newt’s weight and half-carried him to safety.

Erin’s mouth was a thin line when she sat Newt down on a bed. Newt grinned at her, all teeth and no eyes, exhausted, shivering.

“Take off your clothes,” Erin ordered. Minho looked like he wanted to say something, but then Erin tossed a gown at Newt from a stack by her desk and ducked through a curtained doorway to a second room.

Newt got his shirt off alright enough, but a slight shift in his posture set off a wave of pain and a clench in his muscles like an ice pick. He hissed through his teeth.

Minho was grimacing when Newt glanced over at him.

“Can I help? At all?”

Newt bit his cheek before speaking to try and steady his voice. It didn’t work all too well.

“Go back to work, Min.”

“Uh huh.” Minho crossed his arms and widened his stance, like he was in a Council Hall meeting. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Are you decent?” Erin called from behind the curtain.

“He hasn’t even gotten out of the damn pants yet,” Minho replied. Newt huffed. He sent another glare towards Minho and tried not to jump when his muscles twinged again.

“Just help me out here, mate,” Newt muttered eventually.

Minho carefully—and with surprising grace—levered Newt from the bed, provided an arm for him to hold steady, and pulled Newt’s soggy linen pants away from his feet so he wouldn’t trip when they landed on the floor. Newt held his arms up, and Minho dropped the gown over his head to settle in its intended potato sack form.

Newt didn’t like the feeling of the gown at all. It probably had to do with WCKD. He was grateful for the dry garment anyway, and for Minho’s hand as he sat down again.

“Decent,” Minho announced. Erin returned from the back room with two bottles of pills and a syringe.

The sky cracked open, illuminating the room in another flash-bang of lightning. Minho tensed, Erin’s jaw clenched, and Newt jumped. The room tilted a bit, barbed wire cut through his flesh, and he would have landed happily on the mattress if it weren’t for the fact that he would probably dislocate his hip altogether—and that there were painkillers so close within his reach.

Newt gripped the bedframe, letting the bending of his fingernails distract him like it had in his and Thomas’ hut.

Tommy, Newt thought blearily as Erin uncapped the syringe. His eyes stung. He wanted Thomas with him. He wanted there to never have been a goddamn storm in the first place.

“Whoa.”

Newt blinked. Minho was gripping his arm. He’d been listing to the side.

He looked up at Minho in bleary surprise, but didn’t have a chance to say anything before Erin approached with a sour-smelling cotton pad.

“Hold him up,” she instructed Minho. Then she glared at Newt. “Hold still.”

Erin pushed the bottom of Newt’s gown up to the edge of his boxers at the outside of his leg, wiped his skin with the pad, and promptly provided him with a sharp jab. Thankfully, she avoided the epicenter of fiery pain, but the room still tilted and the light blazed white. Newt tried not to react. He was pretty sure his eyes watered anyway.

When the needle was removed, Newt exhaled. “What was that, then?” He asked, strained over the rain.

“Local anesthetic. Trigger point injection.” Erin tossed the needle into a bucket under her desk.

“How’d you know which leg?”

“Your boyfriend didn’t stop staring at it earlier.”

“He’s—” Newt drew a sharp breath. The pain was easier, but still present, even as his skin was going numb. The topic of Thomas wasn’t helping at all. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

Erin stared at him.

“You, go get his friend,” Erin said, turning to Minho.

“My name’s Minho.”

“Minho, go get his friend.”

Newt let his head drop against the wall as Minho turned on his heel. Everyone was impossible. Everyone was impossible and even anesthetic didn’t kill the pain.

At least Thomas was coming.

And the pain was dying down, actually.

Newt was exhausted.

“Lie down,” Erin said, rather gentler than she tended to. Newt hadn’t even realized she’d turned her attention back to him.

With one of Erin’s hands on Newt’s shoulder and the other helping his legs onto the bed, the two of them managed to get him in a horizontal position. Erin put a pillow between his knees and two more beneath his head. The room was still tilting, but…nicely. Sleepily.

It wasn’t thundering anymore. Newt was only aching. Aching, and drooping. Whatever Erin jabbed him with was potent. And working.

“Nice mattress you’ve got ‘ere,” he mumbled, watching Erin sift through a basket against the far wall.

“Yeah, I had Sonya stuff it extra thick.” Erin sounded conversational for once, rather than militant. Newt wondered if it was because he needed to be babied.

Erin pulled a gray blanket from the basket, unfurled it, and gently spread it over Newt’s lower half. If his eyelids were heavy before the blanket, they redoubled in weight after it. Thomas, though. Thomas was coming. Newt wanted to be awake for that.

He wasn’t sure if he said it out loud, or if Erin was just a mind-reader, but she answered his thoughts.

“It’s okay to sleep,” she said. Newt dragged his gaze over to her desk chair, where she’d ended up at some point, scribbling in a notepad. “They’ll be on their way back by now. He’ll be here when you wake up.”

Newt tried to stay awake. He really did.

But the rain was drumming patterns on the ceiling, and the lightning flashes seemed to have passed. His leg was slowly loosening up, and he simply did not have it in him to keep his eyes open.

~

Newt woke to two low voices—and a hand running through his hair.

“Make sure that one gets taken as soon as he starts acting funny.”

“That’s the pre-emptive one?”

Tommy.

Newt felt drugged. He probably was drugged. He still recognized Thomas’ voice, at the same time he realized whose fingers were combing over his head.

He blinked heavily, trying to bring the room into focus and failing somewhat. It was darker than it had been when he had fallen asleep, and the flickering light of an oil lamp was casting dancing shadows across the space. Newt couldn’t really keep his eyes open. He was sleepy, warm, and somehow pain-free. He felt lighter than he knew was possible.

“That’s the pre-emptive one.” Erin, agreeing. “Extended release. Should help him deal with a flare-up. These are the drowsy ones. If he can’t sleep—”

“Give him one to start, two at most,” Thomas finished for her, almost absent-mindedly. His thumb scratched over Newt’s forehead, and Newt couldn’t stop a contented breath from escaping his chest.

Thomas’ hand froze.

Bugger.

Newt forced his eyes open, frowning and squinting. At some point while he was out, his body had been rearranged so that he lay supine, one pillow propped under his bad knee and a few others keeping him supported at various angles.

The ceiling eventually came into focus. With Herculean effort, Newt turned to find Thomas at his right, half-layered over his sickbed, one hand in his hair and the most worried face Newt had seen on him since the City.

“Alright?” Newt asked, unable to keep a smile off his face. It was so good to see him.

“You asshole,” Thomas laughed. He was crying.

Little reassurances, close quarters—in ways that couldn’t be passed off as leftover fears for the other’s life—had been relegated to the privacy of Newt and Thomas’ hut, for the time they’d been in the Haven. Newt almost never reached for Thomas in public, despite how much he wanted to.

And he wanted.

A little high on endorphins and painkillers, Newt wanted even more.

But he couldn’t take this anywhere—not in medical. Not with a muddied head.

Somewhere in the background, Erin quietly rose from her desk chair and slipped into the other room.

Newt reached out and put one hand against Thomas’ cheek, curling over his jawbone, exploring the expanse of rocky skin and day-old stubble.

Thomas’ tears landed on Newt’s fingertips. Newt brushed them away, and Thomas exhaled, a frightened, wobbly thing. Something in Newt wanted to back away, out of habit. But Thomas was scared, and Newt didn’t hurt, for once.

“It’s okay, Tommy,” Newt whispered.

Thomas drew a breath, broken and slow.

“Don’t scare me like that anymore.”

“Hey, you left me all on my lonesome,” Newt said, knowingly sounding like the biggest ass in the Haven.

“I won’t again.” Thomas shook his head vehemently, hand moving from Newt’s hair to cradle his head.

Newt’s chest constricted. He moved his hand from Thomas’ face to hold his wrist where it rested at the edge of the mattress.

“What’s the diagnosis?”

Thomas swallowed. His eyes darted to Newt’s hip. “Pretty bad muscle issues from, uh, sustained trauma. Erin said you’re tighter than a tree trunk knot.”

Newt snorted.

“Two kinds of meds from her, while you work on figuring out how to improve the tension and strengthen up.” Thomas sniffed, continuing, nodding at the desk, where two bottles of pills stood next to each other. “One for the day, one for the night.”

“Better painkillers than Jorge’s?”

“Way better.” Something like a smile ghosted across Thomas’ face.

Newt looked at Thomas’ shirt collar rather than his eyes. He was a muddy mess from the chin down, as if Erin had given him a washcloth only for his face and hands.

“Don’t have to sleep here tonight, do I?”

“Uh,” Thomas hesitated. Sniffed. “Not if you can stand and walk.”

“That Erin’s decision, or yours?”

“Erin’s.” Meaning, Newt knew, that if he couldn’t stand and walk, Thomas would carry him anyway. Because he was Thomas.

Newt blinked. “What time is it?”

Thomas frowned, twisted around to scan the surface of Erin’s desk. He must have found a clock Newt couldn’t see, because when he turned back to Newt, he delivered the news of it being a little past midnight.

Newt pretended like he hadn’t been watching Thomas’ body show obvious signs of stress and exhaustion as he sat up and slouched back down. Pretended he hadn’t wanted to cup his hand around the back of Thomas’ neck and pull him close.

“Past our bedtime,” he said, instead of confessing anything.

“Yeah,” Thomas chuckled.

Newt was tempted not to move. He was well supported, painless for once. However, he also didn’t want to sleep in a med hut ever again. He grit his teeth.

“Help me up?”

Thomas was the picture of caution, and read Newt’s body language before he himself could interpret it, as pillows were removed and legs were carefully swung over the edge of the bed. The room swayed, once, as Newt’s head equalized with its position atop his shoulders. Thomas held him steady.

As it turned out, Newt could stand, but not quite walk. Painkillers made the stiffness in his legs and torso glaringly obvious. Grudgingly, Erin let him go regardless. Thomas slipped the pills into his pocket with one hand and held Newt’s waist with the other.

Outside, the storm was no more.

Newt took a breath of cold, wet air. The island smelled clean. The Haven was the quietest it’d ever been.

“Sure you don’t need me to carry you?” Thomas asked gently, when Newt continued to linger outside the door. God. Newt was proper whipped.

“Just help me out a bit,” Newt murmured. Thomas nodded and tightened his hand around Newt’s side. Newt pretended it didn’t send lightning through his body, frying the butterflies in his stomach.

Get a damn grip.

Slowly, the pair of them hobbled back to their hut. Occasional soft breezes ruffled the air. Newt was shoeless and hospital gowned. Thomas was caked in mud. Newt couldn’t find it in himself to care, not even as he shuffled through puddles.

The door curtain had been replaced.

Both Newt and Thomas stood before it, just staring, for a good few seconds.

“Did you do that?” Newt asked.

“No, I’ve…I was with you.”

Thomas maneuvered them through the doorway. Newt had to freeze and blink at the sight that greeted them.

The bed was made. His and Thomas’ clothes—clean ones, anyway—were neatly folded in their crate. There was a tarp spread on the floor, protecting their feet from the muddy state of the raw earth. The ceiling had been firmly reattached to its anchors in the walls and exterior ground, and no longer fluttered in the breeze or looked like it was about to start leaking. Two mosquito candles were flickering on the crate nightstand.

“Who…?”

“Sonya,” Newt said. He didn’t know how, but he knew. He knew from the candles dripping carefully onto a plate rather than the wood of the crate. He knew from the way the pillows were tossed haphazardly atop the blanket, rather than arranged or stacked.

He knew from the cup of water full of mint sprigs beside the candles.

“Huh,” Thomas murmured.

They were both disgusting, but that was a problem for later. Right then, they changed into fresh clothes and shook what detritus they could from their hair. Thomas pulled back the blanket and helped Newt onto the mattress—and if Newt’s heart did a little jump when Thomas’ hands tightened around him to move into a more comfortable position, well, no one had to know.

Newt wasn’t sure when he drifted off, but it happened while watching candlelight shadows dance across the ceiling, his hand wrapped around one of Thomas’.

~

Brenda was smiling up at Thomas, hands stained with dirt and a small trowel tucked into her belt. She had an armful of corn, and was insisting quite happily that it was Thomas’ turn for shucking.

Chuck, sitting at the edge of the cornfield with his whittling project and leaning against the wall of the Glade, laughed at her choice of words.

“Very mature, Chuckie,” Teresa scolded, but she was smiling too.

It really wasn’t Thomas’ turn. He turned back to Brenda to tell her so.

Her eyes were rolled back in her head, and despite being standing, she was seizing. Her whole body shook. Her hands were covered in blood, not dirt, and in her clenched hands was a syringe of serum.

Thomas gasped, though no sound came out, and stumbled backwards. He tripped over his own feet and landed facing Chuck–only it wasn’t Chuck. He looked the same, but now his shirt was bloodstained and he was staring at Thomas with pure hatred in his eyes and not a sliver of recognition. Teresa was looking at him blankly, deathly pale in the sudden moonlight. Hadn’t it been day just a moment ago?

A Griever’s scream broke through the air. Thomas couldn’t move. Teresa and Chuck were standing, moving towards him.

He opened his mouth to scream, and only air came out.

“Tommy!”

Thomas sat bolt upright, arms flying up to protect his face. Something felt wrong with his throat—that was the least of his worries, he had to get away—

“Thomas.”

Newt’s voice was firm, commanding. It seemed weirdly quiet, like something else was drowning it out. There was a weight on Thomas’ legs, and his hands were being pulled away from his head—shit, shit, exposure—and there was a slim, cool hand over his mouth. His mouth, which was open for some reason, and betraying the lump of terror in his throat.

“Tommy. Tommy.”

Newt’s voice was louder now. Thomas’ throat constricted as he tried to draw a breath, and he realized, stupidly, that he had been screaming. Newt’s hand was covering his mouth and putting a stop to the sound.

As his heartbeat—which he hadn’t even realized had been racing—slowed to something normal, Newt’s face, creased in worry, came into focus. One hand was pressing Thomas’ wrists to his chest. The other was over Thomas’ mouth. Thomas realized belatedly that Newt was in his lap. And oh boy, wouldn’t that have been a kicker if his brain was in gear.

Newt pulled his hand back from Thomas’ mouth, and he took a shuddering breath. He was panting, really. That was embarrassing. But pure relief at being pulled from his nightmare (which hadn’t even been that bad, by his and Newt’s standards) overruled the part of him that wanted to shrink away.

He let his head drop to Newt’s shoulder, let his arms wrap around Newt’s solid, warm torso like he was a tether, like the presence of his body would help Thomas scrape together the dregs of reality.

Newt accommodated, wrapped one arm over Thomas’ and used his other hand to cradle the nape of Thomas’ neck.

“With me, Tommy?” Newt asked, as if this was a normal, everyday position to end up in.

Thomas felt like the world was spinning around him, and Brenda, Chuck, and Teresa’s faces were still flashing behind his eyelids, but he managed to nod.

“Sorry,” he said into Newt’s shirt. His voice was raw. It had been a while since he’d last woken up screaming.

“It’s alright. No one came running.” Newt’s fingers started playing with the hair at the base of Thomas’ skull, and if he wasn’t so full of adrenaline and so damn disoriented, he was pretty sure that would be sending electricity straight down his spine.

Thomas registered, belatedly, that Newt had climbed on top of him just now when he’d been in unimaginable amounts of pain only hours ago. That sent a jolt of worry through his insides, and he sat up, pulling away to look Newt up and down.

“Are you—”

“I’m fine. I was stretching it out.”

“You were awake?”

“Woke up an hour ago. Couldn’t go back to sleep,” Newt answered. He paused. “You look like you’re gonna be sick.”

“M’fine,” Thomas tried, but Newt pulled him back in until his cheek rested against Newt’s collarbone.

God, he loved when Newt did that.

For a few moments, Thomas listened to Newt’s heartbeat and tried to calm his own. Newt’s fingers found their way to Thomas’ hair again, stroking a rhythm in time with his breathing.

“Give me the bullet points,” Newt murmured.

They’d been doing this lately. When one of them got stuck in a flashback or a nightmare or something else that comes from a life of torture and terror, the other had them break it down into digestible chunks. The idea was to distract the brain and body from reliving whatever it was reliving. It worked, most of the time.

Thomas sighed, but turned his head so he wouldn’t be talking into Newt’s shoulder. He didn’t pull away, though; he was still trembling like a Greenie.

“It was in the Glade,” Thomas said. His heart was crawling into his throat as he remembered how horrifyingly normal being back in the Glade had felt. Newt’s fingers stilled in his hair for a moment, but resumed their ministrations quickly enough. “Started out, uh, fine. Gardening. With Bren, and Chuck, and…Teresa.”

Sore fucking subject, Thomas thought, but Newt didn’t betray any signs of being upset by Teresa’s mention.

“Then Brenda was having a seizure, and there was a Griever somewhere. Too close.” Thomas had to stop and take a breath. He was properly shaking now, as the adrenaline wore off. “Chuck and Teresa were going to kill me. I tripped over myself as they were coming at me.”

Newt hummed. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Shitty dreams you’ve got there, mate.”

“Yeah,” Thomas chuckled. “I know.”

“Doesn’t even follow a timeline.”

“She was seizing standing up, too.”

“Inaccurate,” Newt said, like it was a scandal. Thomas smiled into his neck. (He wanted to feel weird about the position they were still in, but it was far too comforting, and he was far too fragile. How stupid it was, to feel fragile. He was so stupidly strong he could pick Newt up with barely any effort when his leg didn’t want to cooperate. Thomas. Big old leader, unbreakable, and he might fall apart if you tap him the wrong way.)

Thomas let out a shuddering breath into Newt’s shoulder. He was tired of being the leader.

Apparently, he said so out loud. Newt’s breath came a little sharper for a moment, and his fingers tightened their grip in Thomas’ hair.

“You’re not,” he said quietly. “Not here.”

Thomas turned further into the material of Newt’s shirt, hiding away. He didn’t know how not to be the leader. He didn’t say as much to Newt.

Eventually, when he was feeling a little more fortified, Thomas took a breath and pulled away from Newt. In the moonlight seeping through the hut, he could just make out the expression on Newt’s face.

“How are you doing?” He asked, curling one hand around Newt’s arm, and pretending it didn’t feel like gripping a lifeline. “How’s your leg?”

“It’s fine. Told you.”

“Yeah, y’know, sometimes I find it hard to believe you.”

Thomas meant it to be funny, to get Newt to open up a little, but Newt just frowned and looked down at Thomas’ stomach.

“Hey, what—” Thomas ducked his head, trying to get Newt to look at him. What did I do? “What’s the matter?”

Newt hesitated, but spoke, slowly. “Getting better is…hard.” He huffed, smiling. “You’d know better than most.”

Thomas’ heart twisted. “Yeah.” He rubbed Newt’s arm with his thumb. “Guess I would.”

“Hard to move, to answer your question,” Newt said, somewhat defeatedly. “But not too bad.”

“Guess I’ll be your crutch again, huh?” Thomas tried. Yet again, the sentence didn’t land.

“I don’t want to stay in bed,” Newt confessed. Thomas nodded, his movements jerky.

“I don’t either.” The makeover by Sonya was lovely, but Thomas knew neither him nor Newt would get any more sleep that night. A freshly made blanket didn’t atone for the thin mattress, or the memories of sleepless nights.

Newt sighed.

“Take me down to the beach, Tommy.”

~

“That one looks like Chuck’s totem.”

Thomas craned his neck, trying to follow Newt’s line of sight. “Where?”

“There, next to the Dipper. See?” Newt angled his arm so Thomas could follow the point of his finger.

Free from light pollution, the Haven beach at night was the best place to stargaze—at least, that Thomas had ever found.

He and Newt were leaning against the slight drop-off in the divide between grass and sand, listening to the waves and naming new constellations. Their shoulders and knees were pressed against one another. The contact kept distracting Thomas from what he was supposed to be looking at.

“Yeah,” Thomas murmured, following the pattern Newt traced in the sky. “Yeah, I see it.”

It was a cylinder with two extra stars for eyes, really, but it was the thought of Chuck that counted.

“He’d think we’re pretty stupid,” Thomas realized.

“Why?” Newt asked.

“Stargazing,” Thomas said, like that explained it all. Because it did.

“Guy probably would’a gagged.”

“Get a room,” Thomas whisper-yelled, doing his best impression of a scowling, prepubescent twelve year old.

Newt’s face crinkled into a slow, genuine smile. He was all teeth and twinkling eyes. A little laugh escaped his chest.

Thomas was struck with an urge to kiss him.

It hit him like a lightning bolt, a bucket of ice water to the face. That hadn’t happened before.

Six months of chasing Minho, being attached at the hip, which turned into two months in the Safe Haven. Lingering looks, electric fingertips. Thomas felt like an idiot. Of course he wanted to kiss him. Why hadn’t he before?

“You’re starin’, Tommy,” Newt said quietly, without even turning his head.

Thomas flushed, and was suddenly grateful for the low starlight. “Sorry.”

Newt was quiet for a moment. Thomas grappled with his sudden lightheadedness.

“I think about him just as much as you, y’know,” Newt said.

That sobered Thomas up. He felt a little heavier, and looked back up at the totem constellation.

“You don’t talk about him.” Not a judgement—an observation.

Newt exhaled. “It makes me…makes me livid. Thinkin’ about what happened to him.”

It just made Thomas feel numb, these days. Still, he shifted a bit to press his shoulder more firmly against Newt’s.

“Wasted potential, Tommy, that’s what it is.”

“That’s what makes you crazy?”

“It doesn’t make you crazy?”

“Thing that makes me crazy the most these days is when Fry’s helpers undercook breakfast,” Thomas grumbled. (It wasn’t absolutely true. The things that really set him off were seeing Newt stumble, or gag, or force a smile.)

Newt laughed, caught off guard, and Thomas smiled.

The moment was still heavy, though, and images of people who should have lived came to Thomas as he looked back up into the sky.

“Wasted potential,” Thomas murmured. “Yeah. It makes me crazy too.”

Newt shifted a little. Thomas briefly worried that his hip was bothering him, but then he saw Newt’s fingers wringing, and knew something else was going on in his head.

“What kind of potential?” Newt asked.

Thomas exhaled, shook his head. “I don’t know. Everything. I guess. Some of the Gladers were our age.”

“Yeah,” Newt said, barely above a whisper. “Suppose they didn’t get to do a lot of the stuff we take for granted.”

“Like what?”

“Make friends,” Newt said. “Take chances.”

Thomas’ breath caught. Then his stomach did a little backflip as Newt’s fingers brushed against his own.

“What kind of chances?” He managed. His throat felt oddly tight.

“Stupid things, Tommy.” Newt turned his head to look at Thomas. “Teenage things.”

Thomas had to break himself out of the spell Newt’s eyes were casting on him.

“Teenage things,” he repeated. “Uh-oh. Like what?”

“Fuckin’ around and findin’ out.”

Thomas laughed, softly, nervously.

“Got a question for you, Tommy.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you want to find out?”

Thomas swallowed.

Yes. God, yes, please.

“Yeah.”

Newt’s lips against his own were soft, and hesitant, and Thomas swore he died and came back to life in the few moments between breaths that they were connected.

Newt pulled back, like he was afraid.

Thomas wrapped a hand around the nape of Newt’s neck and pulled him back in.

Nothing he’d ever imagined in the dark, in the shower, at the dinner table compared to the real thing, and Thomas didn’t ever want to come up for air. Every synapse was firing. He felt like his skin was radiating electricity.

Newt got a little braver, a little hungrier, and Thomas grinned. He would happily be putty in Newt’s hands for the rest of his life.

Rest of his life.

“Hold on,” Thomas said, breaking away. He almost lost his train of thought–Newt looked as euphoric as he felt, pupils blown, hair mussed, cheeks flushed. Thomas’ heart squeezed. “Can we keep doing this? Like–properly?”

Newt laughed, and Thomas felt like he was floating.

“Yes, Tommy,” he said, grinning. “Properly.”

Thomas didn’t think he’d smiled so wide in years, and he decided he’d happily never breathe again when Newt took his face in his hands to crash back together.