“ ALL OF THEM. ”

“have you ever thought about it,” he murmurs one evening, the flames dying both in his eyes and in real life, too. thomas shivers in the onset of cold and looks up, watches newt, his impossibly bright hair, his miraculous hands, the way his fingers would fold green stems over and over until thomas is sure the end product will be anything but the wreaths and rings and pieces of art that they are.

“thought about what?”

he thinks about what they’re surrounded by: walls, the certainty of clockwork. torch flames beaming into the night. the summer-evening hum of the glade, the purring of crickets, the soft beds of grass. “i dunno,” he says after a moment. newt laughs, and it’s a kind laugh because everything about newt (even the bitterness around the edges, or the darker rings in his eyes, or the dry quality of his accent) is kind. he’s like snowfall, thomas thinks, and then doesn’t know what to think about the fact that he misses snow or even knows what it is. if newt knows what snow is. there’s another bubbling silence between them. he looks at newt, braiding something together, a prize coming into formation in his fingers. “winning?” he tries.

newt’s mouth moves along a silent rhythm as he braids, in a poem or a prayer he doesn’t let thomas hear. he fixes the ends together. “winning what?” he asks, looking up, and it’s by the absolute last dredges of light in the glade that thomas sees absolute emptiness in his eyes, like caves or portals, or a sharp structure on the precipice of collapse. he sucks in a breath. oh, newt. oh, jeez.

“everything,” thomas replies. the world raw, the entire shuck world, still less than you deserve. instead he says “everything i can give you, all the good stuff.”

“you think you can win all of that?” newt keeps questioning. something’s come loose in him now, rattled down out of his eyes and into the pit of his stomach. thomas can feel it, pillowed underneath his head, through newt’s clothes, his skin. after a moment newt drops the thing in his hands onto thomas’s face. it’s a flower crown without any flowers. thomas (sputters a little indignantly) takes it, carefully so as to not pull on anything he shouldn’t touch.

“what’s this?”

“consider it your scoreboard,” newt says. oh, newt. hope claws itself sharp into thomas’s belly, roars into his veins. “for every victory, i’ll add a flower.”