#itsthemaze

“Just turn it off, Fry.” Gally sighs, slamming the dough onto the counter with more force than he needs to. “I don't know why you're so insistent that we should talk.”

“Because we should.” Thomas’s voice gets him to look up. “You're looking well, Gally.”

Thomas… Thomas is a little taller, maybe. His hair is still brown–he'd never been one for funky colors–but it's styled now, in a way Thomas had never bothered with in high school.

“So are you.” 

Gally’s thought about seeing him again. Of course he has. But in those daydreams, he'd been the one going after Thomas, chasing him. 

He would find him in his dorm, or after class, and say that it had all been a mistake, beg for Thomas to take him back. Kiss him in the middle of the hallway, on the sidewalk, in the pouring rain. Whatever it took.

He’s lost his chance. 

“I was hoping you'd call, that first Christmas.” Thomas tells him, not moving any closer. “I called you, and you didn't pick up–I hoped you would answer when you woke up.”

And he never had. He'd texted instead, invited Thomas to call him again, but it hadn't happened.

“I didn’t know how to celebrate Christmas without you. I have gifts for you that I never sent. I hoped that maybe, when the semester ended, you'd tell me that you would meet me halfway and we could do a summer roadtrip like we always talked about. When I texted you about it, you blew me off.”

Gally remembers that, too.

“I made friends and wanted to tell them all about you, but I wasn't sure if I could do that anymore. And when they got it out of me, they dragged me around town for a new haircut, some new clothes. Said I wasn't going to forget about you if I kept wearing your t-shirts to bed. I didn't want to forget about you, not then. Even though it had been over a year. Since we still had the string, I thought we would be okay.”

Gally can't make himself say anything. Thomas has the talking handled, anyway. Does he know that Gally could listen to him talk forever and never get tired of his voice?

“I don't know what you feel, or why you really broke up with me, but I know the string's been fading. I can barely see it, some days. It’s… not why I came back. You know, if you had asked me stay, begged me to come back, I would have. We're tied together, we were so in love in high school that we made our friends sick.”

When Gally glances behind him, Frypan’s not there anymore to help him figure out what to say.

“Thomas, I'm sorry. I–”

“Please, Gally, not now.” Thomas finally comes closer, putting the bag he's carrying on the counter between them. “Everything in here is yours, my friends told me I should burn it but I didn't want to get rid of anything that you'd touched. There are gifts for you, too, and for your parents and grandma. I never figured out how to knit the way she does, but I hope she'll like it anyway.

“You've probably figured this out by now, but I've met someone. Someone… who runs in with me when I need to figure something out. It took me a long time to realize that you weren't going to come and find me, that you didn't want to go back to the way things were. That's okay, Gally, but we both need to stop clinging to our red string of fate.”

“You came here to ask me to get it cut.”

“Yes.”

Gally wants to say no, he really does.

He just doesn't think he has the right, or the nerve, to ask that of Thomas.

“You could have cut it at school. You don't need me there.”

“Gally, you were a big part of my life for a long time, even before we could see our strings. You taught me that all holidays, big or small, were supposed to be fun. When I met my grandma and celebrated Chanukah for the first time, you were right by my side. You researched with me, visited three synagogues with me so I could learn as much as possible without leaving the state. You arranged your family's holiday plans the next year so we could celebrate both.

You were the most important person in my world. If you don't want to cut it, I won't. We can let it fade.”

“No, I'll go with you.” And break his own heart in the process, but he can see that Thomas means it. There's nothing left for them, not where Thomas is concerned. He's patched up whatever holes Gally had left in him and he's ready to move on.

“Thank you.” Thomas sighs, shoulders dropping–there was a time when Gally would have noticed how tense he was immediately. “Do you want to make an appointment, or should we try a walk-in place?”

He's surprised he's being given the option. He hasn’t been particularly nice to Thomas when they’d broken up. 

“How long are you here for?”

“You’re not changing my mind, Gally.”

“I wasn’t going to try.” He knows better than that; the Thomas he remembers rarely backed down. “I–When works for you?”

“We could go right now. If Fry’s around, you could bring him.” Cutting red strings of fate can be painful, but Gally doesn’t think that theirs will hurt Thomas one bit.

“Do you have anyone to come with you?”

“He’s outside. I wanted to do this by myself.”

Gally wants to throw up. He wants to tell Thomas no, he can’t cut their string, he can’t go and be with someone else.

He’s the one who let him go, so he doesn’t get to set the terms.

“I’m available now.” Frypan steps out of the depths of the kitchen. “Sorry, I didn’t hear all of it.”

“That’s fine. I’m sure we’ve got plenty of people wondering what’s going on, anyway.” Thomas seems so calm about all of this.

Gally wonders how long he’s known that he was going to come back and ask about cutting their string.

“There’s a reputable string-shearer a few blocks away.”

“You did your research.”

“I wanted to be prepared if you said yes. They take walk-ins.”

“What’s the address?” Frypan writes it down. “Thanks, Thomas. It’s good to see you again.”

“You, too. I’ve missed everyone here.” 

Then why haven’t you come back? Gally wants to scream. Why not come visit if you missed us so much.

But he knows why. And he can’t blame him. He probably would have cut the string already.

“Maybe we can have everyone get together one evening, while you’re here.” Frypan suggests. “Are you going somewhere else over break?”

“No, we’re staying with Newt. His little sister goes to our school.”

“Must feel like a small world over there.”

“It does, sometimes. Took a while for that to happen. I felt like I was drowning at first.” It’s not pointed, but it still cuts Gally into pieces.

“We’ll meet you over there in half an hour.” Frypan promises.

“I’ll get started on the paperwork, then.”

The automatic door can only shut quietly, but it’s the loudest thing Gally’s ever heard.

“How long has it been fading?”

“Since the start of summer. That’s when I first let myself notice it.” Gally admits. “I didn’t want to… I didn’t want to say anything was wrong. I didn’t want anything to be wrong.”

“Did you really ignore his calls on Christmas?”

“Well, there’s a time difference–”

“It’s a few hours, not a whole day, Gally. Get your stuff together, I’ll clear up in here. I get the feeling we’re not coming back after this.”

“It’s rare that I have both people here at once.” Mary raises her brow at Gally and he wants to melt. She won’t tell anyone about this–she wouldn’t have business if she did–but she used to babysit him when he was a kid and he doesn’t want to do this with her.

But he knows she’s good, and she’ll be fair.

“We’ve been fading for a while.” Thomas tells her. “But I didn’t want to get our string cut without talking to him.” The string hasn’t gotten any brighter; if anything, it’s gotten dimmer.

“I need to hear your reasons for cutting the string. Technically, only one of you has to speak.”

“I can go.” Gally whispers. He doesn’t really know what he’s going to say until he says it. “Thomas, even before we really knew what the strings meant, I was watching you. You refused to stop asking questions and wouldn’t play like the rest of us on the playground and it drove me mad. I loved you when we started dating, and I love you now, despite the distance between us. Distance I created. I wasn’t going to let you ruin your chances at a full ride scholarship for me, but I didn’t want to tell you that. I was scared that seeing what else was out there would make you resent me for tying you down, holding you back, so I didn’t even try. I broke up with you and said it was because I didn’t think we could handle long-distance, when I know we would have made it work. We could have marked dates on our shared calendar and video-called each other to eat dinner together. I thought about you every day, but I was too proud to ask you to come back, or to ask to come to you. I thought you’d be home for the holidays, and we could talk. But you didn’t come back that year, or the next. And then our string started fading and I realized that I was never getting you back.”

It’s the most he’s said to Thomas in years. It’s not an apology. It’s not what he deserves.

“You were all I had.” Thomas answers. “You were all I had here, for the longest time. One of the only people who would listen to me. And then, as soon as I was going somewhere else, you gave up on us. Instead of trying something hard. Before, if I ran when something got to be too much, you’d be waiting on the other side, and we’d figure it out. Then I had to learn how it felt to run from you. And I wanted to die.

“You were all I had, and you made it sound so easy, so logical, when you broke up with me. I remember thinking ‘this is all wrong, I’m supposed to be the logical one’, before telling myself that I was not going to cry over this around you. You would have comforted me, and I would have hit you for it. It took so long for my friends to convince me that I didn’t need to run back to you when I had someone who was matching my stride. That’s why I want our strings cut. I could wait for them to fade, but for me this is just one more reminder of the boy who diced his eggs before they even made it into the basket.”

“I think I’ve heard enough. Are you ready?” They both nod, and Mary reaches for their string. It’s loose around Gally’s wrist, now. A few more days and it would fade away or fall off on its own.

When the whole string is visible, he can see all of the knots tied in it. All of the times they could have worked things out, but didn’t. He also sees it on Thomas for the first time in years. His isn’t loose. It’s wrapped around his arm and pulled taut, the knots pressing into his skin. 

They’re not able to cut off circulation. If it were a real string, Thomas would only have half of his bicep left.

This is what Gally’s been doing to him.

That realization makes him go numb.

Mary cuts the string and unravels it from their bodies.

“You’re all done here.” She says to him, or maybe Frypan, quietly. “A warm bath and some warm drinks would be good. He might feel a chill for a while.” 

Thomas looks completely unaffected. Gally doesn’t recognize the guy he’s with–that’s probably for the best. He looks settled in his arms.

Mary probably doesn’t realize that the door isn’t completely shut when she says “And you already had string forming, even when you were still tied to someone else. That’s a good indication of a strong bond.”