#thomas imagines

Oddly enough, Chuck seems a little subdued the night before the next Greenie’s arrival. Minho, unused to going so long in peace and quiet, realizes that the younger kid has trailed off from the main group, and is sitting at the base of a tree near the sleeping hammocks, picking at his fingers as he stares at the Walls with timid eyes.

He looks worried, so Minho says a mental goodbye to the last of his peace of mind and goes over to see what’s wrong with the kid. Chuck barely even looks up when Minho takes a seat next to him, although he squirms a little when Minho ruffles the top of his curly head.

“What’s up with you?” Minho asks. “Celebrating the last moments you’ll have as a Greenbean?”

Chuck shudders. “Can’t wait for you to never call me that again, thank you very much. Besides, I don’t even feel like it fits me anymore. I know an awful lot about this place. I’m no Greenie.”

He says it so matter-of-factly that Minho has to bite his tongue to stop himself from bursting into laughter. “Of course not, Chuck. To me, you’re the most seasoned Glader here. A true expert.”

“Yeah,” Chuck says, grinning a little in spite of himself. “The expert on how to piss Gally off the most, more like it. But yeah, it’ll be good to be able to pick on someone else instead.”

Minho gives him a sidelong look. “So, if you’re not out here thinking about the Box coming up, what’s got your shorts twisted?”

Chuck shoves him halfheartedly. “Nothing. Can’t I sit if I want to?”

Minho arches a brow, and after a few moments of silence, Chuck caves. Poor boy. He couldn’t keep quiet for long if he tried, not when he had an audience. “Nothing, honest, it’s just– do you think we’re gonna be stuck here forever?”

Minho breathes out slowly. “No, Chuck, I don’t. You know me and the other Runners are working as hard as we can on finding a way out, and–”

He’s told this bit of klunk to many people many times before, including Chuck, and it must be getting old, because Chuck shakes his head and interrupts him before Minho has to go on too long. “No, no. I know you guys are working on the exit. I’m just thinking about, well– if we get out soon, we’d probably still all have time to find our soulmates, right?”

This really does put Minho at a loss for words. It’s not like he hasn’t thought about his soulmate before, every guy here has, it’s just that everyone else had also wondered if there was anyone out there in the world left to be their matching pair. The concept of soulmates had existed in everyone’s mind when they came up in the Box, same as the idea of summer sun hot on their skin or the refreshing crunch of biting into an apple. It was just another recollection, bleached to remove all details until only the bare bones remained.

Maybe they didn’t remember any specific soulmate pairs that they had met, because no faces or names existed in any of their shuck memories anymore, but that didn’t mean anyone had forgotten the basics of the whole soulmate business. It was just another fact of life, that everyone had someone out there meant just for them, that you had no idea who your soulmate was until you came in contact with them for the first time. Some people spent their whole lives without ever once meeting their soulmate. If you were lucky, of course, you’d know that special someone when you touched them for the first time, because every single brush of your skin against theirs would leave a mark that would fade some minutes after you pulled your hand away. 

If Minho really focuses, images flash into his mind, pictures that may or may not come from his own memory, of two hands reaching out for a shake, and the lasting imprint of the other person’s fingers lingering on each hand like a burn. He sees the print of a kiss on a cheek, etched in discolored skin, and handprints all over backs and arms and legs that disappear as someone walks down the street. Minho knows all of this, but he has never seen it, because he has only ever been here, with the other boys in the Glade. There aren’t any girls here, so none of them have a soulmate. Guess they’ll never know what that’s like unless they get out.

Minho knows this, but Chuck’s still looking at him with those big, sorrowful kid’s eyes, so he rearranges his face into what he hopes is an encouraging smile. “Of course we’ll all get soulmates, Chuck. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re all waiting for us right after we get past the Maze. Our own welcome party. Maybe they’ll have balloons.”

Chuck snorts, but he looks more cheered up. “I wouldn’t need the balloons if I had my soulmate. She’d be everything, right? The total package. What d’you think they’re like, really?”

Minho arches a brow. “Women, or soulmates?”

Chuck rolls his eyes. “Our soulmates, duh. Maybe yours is, like, some super-athlete or something. You can go on runs all the time.”

Minho grins. “Oh, yeah. Maybe we’d even get matching running shoes. Whatever it is,” he says, stretching a little and putting his hands behind his head so he can stare up at the night sky, “I’m sure they’re great. That’s the point, isn’t it? Some big force out there, bigger than WICKED, found us the perfect person. Whoever your soulmate is, I bet they’re going to think your stupid jokes are the funniest thing they’ve ever heard, and they’ll follow you around like a lost puppy the way you do to the rest of us.”

“Oh, she’d have to find me funny,” Chuck insists. “That’s the point. My soulmate’s going to be super hot, too, you’ll see. Like, a supermodel.”

“A supermodel?” Minho asks, turning to Chuck with an exaggerated expression of surprise. “I think I’ll be getting the supermodels, thank you very much.”

“No way,” the younger boy insists, folding his arms across his chest. “I bet my soulmate’s going to blow yours out of the water.”

Minho just laughs, gesturing for Chuck to leave him alone. “Go to bed, you shank. Go dream some happy dreams of pretty girls.”

Chuck looks like he wants to argue, but he can’t silence a loud yawn, so he shuffles off to his own hammock with only a few choice words about the kinds of dreams Minho should expect to have. Minho should probably go to bed, too, Runners get up too early for him not to catch up on sleep when he can, but he lies awake in his hammock anyway, brain still caught on the conversation with Chuck. 

What would it be like to have a soulmate, anyway? Chuck’s vision of his perfect match may be limited to physical appearance only, but in truth, Minho’s even worse off. He has no idea what he would want his soulmate to be like. Every time he tries to picture a face, he draws a blank. Truth is, the idea just feels so unnatural here. How could Minho have a soulmate after being in a place like this? How could anyone understand what it had been like to survive in the Glade for so many months? He tries to imagine himself a beautiful girl who could make him smile or listen to him, but all the pretty figments of his imagination seem off-limits somehow, not quite right in some sense that Minho can’t name. If he has a soulmate, Minho decides at last, they’d have to be almost exactly like him, and that would probably make for a pretty crazy girl, anyway. Maybe it’s for the best that they’ll never get out of here. The disappointment of meeting a soulmate who couldn’t appeal to him seems worse than never meeting her at all.

Morning light comes far too early, and soon enough Minho is stumbling off into the Maze with Ben, all thoughts of soulmates left behind to dissipate from his hammock with his leftover body heat. It’s a long day, a hot one, and, frustratingly enough, they’re no closer to finding a way out than they ever have been. It had been easier to build momentum for the daily runs when the Maze was still a big mystery, when everyone was certain there would just be a door or something waiting for them down the right corridor, but as they cover more and more of the pathways without a single exit sign, Minho’s hatred for the place only grows.

He couldn’t be happier to leave the ivy-shrouded walls behind when it’s finally time for their shift to be over. Even after all this time running the Maze, a weight still lifts from Minho’s shoulders as he passes through the Doors again, back into the light of the Glade and safety. Oddly enough, their home base seems a bit more on edge than usual, and as Minho jogs closer, he notices two figures standing near the opening of the Walls, looking inside with obvious curiosity.

One of them he recognizes as Chuck, but the other is an unfamiliar face. A second later, the pieces click into place. The Box came up today, this must be the new Greenie. He’s older than Chuck, which is probably good, and looks the same age as Minho or Newt. He’s got dark hair, which creeps into his eyes as he stares wildly from the looming Walls to the gaping maw of the Doors before gawking openly at Minho. 

Clearly, the new kid hasn’t been told about Runners yet, because Minho can make out a jealous look in his eyes as he glances between the Maze and the emerging pair of boys. For someone who’s staring so intently at Minho, it hasn’t occurred to the Greenie to get out of his direct path. He’s standing right in the opening of the Doors, and Minho extends a hand to push him to the side and out of the way as he jogs on by. Ben cackles, shouts something to Chuck about policing his Greenie a little better (“Minho’s extra punchy today!”) before the two of them run past, off to the Map Room to report on the nothing that they’d found and plan for the nothing they’ll discover tomorrow.

It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t. It’s one idiot shuckface Greenie. They’ve had dozens before. But as Minho runs on, his attention catches on his hand, the one he’d used to shove the Greenie aside. For some reason, and it must just be the uneven light filtering through the trees up above, it looks like Minho’s skin has become mottled, the tips of his fingers burned slightly red against the tanned skin. It reminds him of something, but he forgets the word for a moment. It reminds him of–

Minho sucks in a breath and whips his head around, staring at the Greenie over his shoulder. The new boy has gone back to bothering Chuck, or probably the inverse, judging by the incessant circling of the younger kid around the older one. It doesn’t seem like he’s been affected by anything. It doesn’t look like he’s noticed anything might be wrong.

By his shoulder, Ben chuckles, having also turned around to jog backwards. “Looks like Chuck’s got a new victim. How long before Greenbean’s ears start bleeding from all the questions?”

Minho can’t answer at first, still staring at the discolored skin on his fingers. He swears he can still feel the Greenie’s shoulder against his hand, hot on his flesh like a burn. “Yeah. Probably won’t last too long.”

Ben shoots Minho an odd look. “I don’t know, man. I feel like that one’s different.”

Yeah, Minho thinks with a sudden, awful certainty. That’s the worst part.

The day carries on into night. The redness fades from Minho’s hands after a few more minutes, although he’s panicked and fidgety the whole time, certain someone’s going to notice and figure it out. Even after the markings vanish, he keeps feverishly rubbing his fingers together to erase any last trace of them, which probably just makes it worse. He’s grateful for the cover of sunset, when no one can see his face as clearly, when he can use the excuse of Bonfire Night and Gally’s brew to cover up for why he can’t quite look anyone in the eye.

Minho usually gets right up in the center of everything, but tonight, he opts to stay on the outside of the pack, circling in moody silence while one by one boys go up against each other in the ring, or hang together, pushing and shoving each other delightedly, their blood hot from whatever fermented poison is in their cups. The new Greenie, nameless still, has been spending most of the night talking with Newt, sitting against a fallen log with their backs to the assembled party. Minho watches them coldly, alternating drinks with obvious stares. See, Newt’s normal. Newt can put his hand on the guy’s shoulder without making an issue for himself. When their knees knock from laughing into each other, they don’t betray themselves with a change of the skin. Minho can’t figure out what the fuck his problem is, but clearly no one else has it.

Shaking his head, Minho heads over to the fight ring again, laughing with the rest when another kid gets knocked out of the circle. Gally’s the undisputed king of the ring. Maybe another night, Minho would go toe to toe with him, knock that ugly smirk off his face, but tonight he just stays quiet and tries to keep his blood from boiling. Another boy enters the ring, gets his shit rocked, leaves. There’s a shifty bruise forming on his elbow where he’d skinned it, shoved by Gally. Everyone sees it, nobody cares. There’s nothing wrong with that, just good harmless fun, something that isn’t corrupted by whatever the hell Minho did to their Greenie.

Speaking of which, the Greenie has opted to stand up and take a lap, interrupting by clumsy accident the latest fight. Gally, true to nature, tries to instigate something, and it works, because this Greenbean is somehow even more quick to the punch than the Keeper of the Builders. The newbie loses, obviously, but it isn’t a terrible fight, and when he falls, he comes back up shouting a name. Thomas. It strikes a chord somewhere in him, and it takes Minho a beat to start clapping and cheering with the rest of the Gladers. So the boy has a name. A name, and a face, and the ability to mess up Minho’s life forever. Who the hell let Greenies get away with so much?

Minho turns away from the proceedings, for some reason oddly irritated to see everyone clapping Thomas on the back and shouting his name as if they hadn’t been laughing their asses off when he went face-first in the sand mere moments ago. They all have the privilege of having nothing wrong with them, of being able to slap Thomas’ shoulders and ruffle his hair and other boyish things with no consequences, and they won’t even use it properly. Minho would. Minho would– 

A face rushes up out of nowhere, illuminated by the soaring flames of the Bonfire. Thomas. Minho flinches back in a moment to avoid the Greenie’s drunken lean forward. He hopes it’s not too obvious that he’s keeping himself just outside the reach of loosely gesturing fingertips.

“Looks like someone’s tried Gally’s brew,” Minho says to cover himself.

Thomas snorts, laughing. “Tried it, nearly threw up, tried some more. I remembered my name,” he says abruptly, eyes wide and expectant in the dark. “It’s Thomas. I’m Thomas.”

He pronounces this loudly, clearly, as if it wouldn’t have been impossible to miss that fact with all the shouting and general ruckus that had taken over the Bonfire Night party just a few minutes ago.

“I heard,” Minho says with a dubiously raised eyebrow.

Thomas nods stoically. “Yeah, yeah. How long did’t take you to remember your name? This long, or–”

Minho shrugs a little too quickly, eyes flashing out to Thomas’ hands, which have started to move around more as he talks, coming closer to Minho’s exposed forearms than he would like. “Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t take long.”

For some reason, Thomas almost looks disappointed. “Yeah, I guess everyone’s pretty good at this stuff. You probably remembered it in the Box coming up or something. Fast at everything. ‘S that why they made you a Runner?”

Minho actually laughs at that, a quick, sharp bite, but it’s fond and he manages to choke it out before Thomas can marshal his face enough to look offended. “No, they didn’t make me a Runner because I remembered my name on time. And for the record, it’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure I remembered it at my Bonfire Night too. If not after.”

The obvious relief crossing Thomas’ face is sort of adorable. “Oh. Oh, good. I’m not, uh, behind, then.”

Minho shakes his head. “No, you’re not.”

They go silent, and Minho is about to take this as his excuse to slip out and surreptitiously stare at his suspicious skin again, because Thomas really had almost tripped into him and the last thing Minho needs is to be walking around with something showing, when Thomas blurts out at last, “If it’s not my memory, then why don’t you like me?”

Minho freezes. “What?” The words come out funny, like he has to force them out.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Thomas says, rambling in the way only true believers of Gally’s brew do, “Ev’ryone else has something to say about me tripping when I got out of the Box, or asking too much, but you won’t go near me. And don’t say it’s, like, running keeping you busy, because even Ben came over to say hi. You couldn’t care less what I do, but I haven’t done anything to you.” 

And before Minho can stop it, one of Thomas’ errant hands flies on and shoves Minho clean on the shoulder. He stumbles a little bit, not from the force, but just from the surprise of it. Thomas touched him. He’d actually touched him. Minho had been hoping this whole time that he was wrong, that his mind had played tricks on him earlier that day, but here, yes, even here, in front of everybody, Minho can see a slow flame of color blossom over Thomas’ palm in the imprint of Minho’s shoulder. Irrefutable proof.

Immediately, Minho takes a quick, desperate scan around him, but miracle of miracles, no one is looking their way. It’s dark, too, and Minho can only notice the discoloration on Thomas’ skin because he knows to look for it. If anyone else brushed by on their way to either fight Gally or help themselves to more of his product, they’d probably just think Thomas got some ash on his palm. It just seems like a smear, really. You’d get your hands dirtier in a minute as a Track-hoe.

Against all odds, Thomas doesn’t seem to have noticed either. He’s still looking at Minho with disbelief and hurt, but his hands are down at his sides, and thanks to Gally, his critical thinking isn’t firing on all cylinders, either. That’s fine, then. It means Minho only has to buy time until the marks fade and Thomas’ skin goes back to normal, until no one can tell that they’d touched at all.

So, to save his ass, and to stop Thomas from looking at him like a kicked puppy, Minho talks. “I don’t hate you, Thomas. I have nothing against you.”

Thomas doesn’t seem convinced. “You’ve been avoiding me. I saw you when you came in, you know. You were heading right for Newt, then you saw me next to him and went the other way.”

This is not wrong. Minho might be able to rely on Thomas being too freaked out by everything around him to notice that he’s got another big problem, but Newt would spot it in a heartbeat. It’s not that Minho doesn’t trust Newt, he does, he would put his life in Newt’s hands any day, but this– it’s different, that’s all. This isn’t a matter of getting someone to lead him out of the Maze if he was hurt or making the tough calls to get the Glade through bad times. It’s–

Thomas is still staring at him, waiting for an answer. Minho can see his hands twitching slightly at his sides, and if he walks away now, he’ll know like Minho knows, and then it’ll all be over.

“That was stupid of me,” Minho blurts out. “I thought you were having a better time talking to Newt, that’s all. He’s more patient than I am. I would have pissed you off so badly you would have run straight into the Maze the next morning to get away from me.”

It’s a fair concern. He just doesn’t feel like wasting time on Greenies and their boundless optimism. No one gets out, not now, not ever, and he’s heard the same round of questions and suggestions a hundred times. Either the new kids get burned out and stop asking or they die. Either way, it’s not worth the effort he puts in to coddle them. The only exception is Chuck, but he’s just a kid. Everyone takes it easy on Chuck, even Gally, although shuck knows he complains about it.

Thomas doesn’t know this, and he doesn’t seem to believe it, either. “I already wanted to go in the Maze. You could have told me about it.”

Minho shakes his head definitively. “No, Greenie, you don’t. All you get in the Maze is hopeless. Stay out here and get a decent job. No one gets to be a Runner anymore. We’re fine with what we’ve got.”

“Why do you get to decide that?” Thomas asks, irritation rising. “You wanted to be a Runner and you are. Why don’t I get to do that, too? It’s not my fault I came late to the party. Maybe I’ll be good at it. Maybe you’ll need me.”

Thomas’ temper builds with every sentence, to the point where people around them are starting to shoot odd glances at them. Minho makes a point of nodding at a few Gladers, so they start to back off, but this isn’t helped by Thomas punctuating his last few sentences by pointing an accusatory finger at Minho. 

Minho usually would argue right back, but the heat is stolen out of his chest because all he can see when he looks at that coiled hand is the pattern of off-colored skin spiraling out from under the clenched fingers. He did that. So easily, too. Wasn’t even on purpose, and it’s still here. It’s starting to fade, Minho thinks, but not enough, not fast enough. Raised from the shadows of Thomas’ side, it looks like a burn, as if Thomas had thrust his hand into the roaring bonfire behind them to get the strength to yell at him. Minho wants to touch the skin again, watch it turn, see if it’s hot to the touch or just body-warm like the rest of him. 

The curl of skin taunts Minho, arresting his gaze, stopping him from looking away. There it is, proof. Irrefutable proof that Minho corrupted this whole damn thing. No one had soulmates before Thomas got here, and Minho had to be the one to sully him. Thank everything holy Alby said no more Runners, thank heaven and hell everyone’s been giving up on getting out. Thomas looks at Minho like there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to get out there in the Maze, where Minho is. At least this way he’ll be stuck in the Glade, away from where Minho can do any more damage. Minho can’t keep hiding forever, but shuck, he can try.

“It’s not up to you,” Minho says loudly. “That’s the way the Glade works. You don’t have to think it’s fair, you just have to follow the rules.”

Thomas scoffs. “Yeah, and if you were in my shoes, you would hate that just as much as I do.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not, then,” Minho says calmly. “Enjoy the rest of your Bonfire Night, Thomas. Your life starts in the morning.”

A final glance at Thomas’ hands; they’ve dropped to his sides again, and the stain is less noticeable. If anyone looks now, they’ll just think it’s the flush of having too much to drink, or the irritation of a fight with the Keeper of the Runners. Minho spins off and disappears into the crowd before he can do something else stupid, like touch Thomas again to keep the mark from erasing completely. He goes to bed early under the excuse of needing to sleep off his drinking for a dawn run tomorrow, and dreams of scars that curl from one body to another, sewing two boys together and cutting them apart at the same time.

The next few days are something out of a hallucination. Minho does his Running business and tries to pretend that they definitely haven’t run out of spaces to map, that they’re ever going to find a way out of this place. They stick the Greenie in different jobs one after another, like usual, but word on the street is that no matter where he is, Thomas only half-does everything, too busy staring listlessly out at the Maze to get his work done. Minho hears all this with a sick twist in his stomach. No one’s going out to the Maze now, and anyway, what would they find?

Besides, Thomas is causing enough problems when he’s stuck in the Glade alone. Minho has been avoiding him as best he can without drawing suspicion, which is getting harder and harder given that Newt seems to be oddly soft on the guy. Minho has been informed that Thomas actually isn’t that bad if he got to know him, but Minho has no desire to do that. If he spends time with Thomas, the truth will come out. Minho has worked hard to be who he is, the Keeper of the Runners. He looks after his guys, he looks after everybody. He can’t let them down.

Still, Thomas lingers at the edges of Minho’s visions whenever he’s back in the Maze. At one point, they’d brushed past each other when Minho was trying to make it to Frypan’s dinner table at the end of a long day. All the Gladers were swarming; they still had new supplies from the Box, and Fry was trying out a new dish. In the chaos, Thomas had gotten pushed near Minho. He’d pulled down his sleeves as fast as he could, but shuck, you can’t be doing that to a guy with no warning, you know. The heat on his skin had mocked him the whole dinner, long after the marks had gone away.

It’s not as if there hadn’t been plenty to do to keep his mind off things. First, a girl comes up, shouting about Thomas of all things. Minho’s furious when he hears about it upon his return from the Maze, though he can’t say why. The only claim he’s got is a subcutaneous curse he’s trying his utmost to ignore. Still, he thinks with some satisfaction, Teresa’s skin isn’t the one blooming whenever Thomas touches it.

There are bigger things, too. They find a dead Griever in the Maze, which in Minho’s eyes has to be the beginning of something terrible. Alby agrees too, which is why he decides to go into the Maze with Alby to look for it. They find the corpse, alright, except what was supposed to be a dead mess of blubber and spikes comes to life suddenly, Stinging their first-in-command before escaping into the confines of the Maze.

Just like that, Minho knows he’s fucked. It’s already late into the day, and now he’s dragging Alby’s useless body to the Doors, hoping against hope he can get the boy to safety before they’re both sealed inside. Minho can see the progression of the sun through the sky, though. His mind knows what his body refuses to believe, but he can’t let Alby go. Not Alby, who’s been here for all of them no matter what the Glade threw at them. Minho has to save him. He has to save somebody, because the Maze has no damn exits and he can’t save the rest.

He almost thinks he can do it when he rounds a corner and sees the green shock of the Glade at the far end of a corridor. There is the opening of the doors, through which Minho can just make out a burgeoning crowd of Gladers, who all start shouting at Minho to hurry up the second they see him. Chuck’s the one who starts off the screams, Minho thinks. Damn Chuck. Poor kid, now he’ll have one more scratched out name to linger over when he dares get that close to the Walls. Felt like just the other day they were sitting around talking about soulmates, and now Chuck’s going to watch him die. Minho’s trying, he really is, but he’s been on his feet a while and Alby’s dead weight is no joke. They’re yelling at him to leave Alby behind and just run, but he can’t– and then the Doors start to close–

He’s still dragging Alby as the gap shrinks smaller, smaller. It’s funny, despite all evidence to the contrary, the shrieking of the stone grinding shut, the desperate cries of his friends, the sunlight disappearing from his world, Minho still can’t comprehend the fact that he might be trapped in the Maze until the Doors slam shut at last, sealing his fate for good. It takes Minho a moment to realize that the shouts of the Gladers had crescendoed at the last moment, that there had been a flurry of movement, and, most importantly, that Minho is no longer alone in his grave. Someone is here. Someone pushed through the Doors to stick themselves in the Maze, too, and that person is Thomas.

For a moment, they just stare at each other, exhausted and stunned and utterly at a loss for themselves. At last, Minho manages to choke something out through gasps of breath. “Good job,” he says, “You just killed yourself.”

This, if nothing else, shocks Thomas out of his system, activating that hair-trigger irritation that seems to lurk under Thomas’ skin like– well, like Minho does. Minho collapses on the ground next to Alby’s body at the same time that Thomas jerks himself up to his feet.

Thomas holds out a hand to help him up; it’s slightly trembling, Minho wonders if Thomas is aware of it. Minho just stares at it, and Thomas scoffs incredulously. “What, we’re about to die, and you still can’t bring yourself to touch me? No one’s watching anymore, Minho. It doesn’t matter.”

Minho’s head snaps up. “What?”

Thomas shakes his head, almost disgusted, mostly tired. “Yeah, I know. Wasn’t that hard to piece together. I wasn’t blind at the Bonfire Night, you know.”

All this time, then. Minho had thought he was hiding it so well and Thomas had known the whole time. “You never said anything.”

“Neither did you,” Thomas retorts, and thrusts his hand forward again. 

Minho ignores it and gets up on his own. It hurts. “We’re dead. We’re shucking dead. Why the hell did you do that? Don’t tell me you had some fantasy about saving your soulmate. Thought you’d save us and we’d both live happily ever after?”

It’s the first time he’s said the word aloud. He’s hardly even admitted it to himself. To his credit, Thomas hardly reacts to this at all. “I didn’t think.”

“Yeah,” Minho groans, wiping dirt and sweat off his face, “I can tell.”

Thomas loses the fight to avoid rolling his eyes and turns to Alby instead. “What happened to him?”

“Stung,” Minho bites out. He can’t look at Alby’s body without guilt threatening to destroy him, so he doesn’t. “Turns out the dead Griever wasn’t dead. The Sting will take him soon enough.”

Thomas crouches over the body, and Minho realizes belatedly that he’s trying to pick it up. “Help me. We can hide him in the ivy, maybe drag him up somewhere the Grievers won’t find him.”

The mention of the Grievers makes Minho flinch. “It doesn’t shucking matter, Thomas. You get that, right? We’re dead. No one survives a night in the Maze.”

“So you’re giving up already?” Thomas bites back. “I thought you were better than that. Keeper of the Runners and it’s all over because you had one bad thing happen to you. Come on, we can get him up if we both try.”

Minho stares at him uncomprehendingly, then shakes his head unthinkingly and bends to help. They manage to drag Alby’s unconscious form to the wall, where Thomas matter-of-factly starts tearing off pieces of ivy and knotting others around Alby’s arms and legs, as if this were a thing he did all the time. There are small crescents and dots on each other’s hands where their knuckles have brushed getting Alby to the wall, and Minho finds it hard to look away. They’re both hauling Alby up through the ivy, but the lights are getting dimmer and Minho is starting to hear things, crashing sounds, and the snap of metal on metal.

“Come on, Minho, just a little longer,” Thomas says through gritted teeth.

Minho tries to focus but he can hear it again, that sound, that awful sound, death getting closer. He can hear something in the back of his mind too, Ben yelling his lungs out after he’d been Stung, after Minho had forced him into the Maze. He’d begged for his life, begged and pleaded for anything but to be left in the Maze where Minho is now. Minho remembers finding the torn and bloodied piece of Ben’s shirt. Ben was fast, too, and strong. Getting Stung had made him wild, and even then, Ben hadn’t stood a chance. What is Minho going to do?

Thomas is saying something about how they’re almost there, just wait, but the metal sound jars through his mind, louder this time, and closer, and Minho can’t anymore, he just can’t. He mutters an apology and sprints away, the echo of Thomas’ surprised grunt as the weight of Alby’s body suspended by the ivy falls on his arms alone echoing through the stone corridors as Minho tears away. He knows these hallways like the back of his hand from all the times he’d run them, but it’s different now, the light is wrong, and Minho can’t stop the fear from coursing through him like bad blood. Plus, he’s alone now, too, and Runners always go in pairs. He’d had a partner. He’d left him behind. That’s twice now. Minho had left Ben right here by these same doors where he just abandoned Thomas, and you know what they say about Gladers who break the rules. Sure to die.

It’s dark and the wind that whips through the Maze as the stone walls shift cuts into Minho like a knife. Still, he isn’t quite cold, the force of pushing himself to run keeps him hot. That and the shame of leaving Thomas behind. He’s the Keeper of the Runners, yet a Greenie showed more guts than him back there. He knows automatically that he’s going to have to go back, but fights the urge until he can’t anymore.

It’s easier to run when he’s going back to Thomas, for some reason, like a rubber band has snapped in his chest and yanked him the way he’d come. Now that he’s no longer fighting a mental tether, Minho runs faster than he swears he ever has before. The Grievers are out by now, he can hear them snapping overhead, can see the shadows of their nauseating pincers reaching towards him from above, but he just keeps going, pushing himself farther and faster, turning corners and doubling back to shake the awful monsters from his tail.

The Maze is big, though, sprawling and vast, and Minho wonders how the hell he’s supposed to find Thomas in all this. The best he can do is strain his ears for the sound of angry Grievers (or victorious ones, too, but he doesn’t want to think about that) and hope that Thomas is the cause of it. Eventually, he hears a terrible shrieking from the walls overhead and knows he’s gotten close. By chance, Minho looks up, and he sees a shape arcing through the sky. It’s a body, Thomas’ body. He’s thrown himself from the top of a wall. 

For an awful moment, Minho has the memory of finding Newt at the base of a similar wall, but Thomas has what Newt did not, a purpose, and he reaches out to grab the ivy of an opposite wall and Minho realizes at last that he’s not falling but jumping to safety. Thomas catches himself and the Griever leaps after him, but its foul body isn’t as graceful as Thomas’, and it knots itself in the ivy, squealing and scraping those horrific metal appendages against the walls and floor as it attempts to free itself. Thomas stands stock-still, watching in unadulterated terror at the freakish spasms of the caught Griever. Minho shouts at him to run, but Thomas doesn’t respond. 

It doesn’t take much for Minho to sprint up to him, shake him by the shoulders. Only then does Thomas startle, finally realize that he isn’t alone. “Minho,” Thomas says in a daze. One of Minho’s hands slips up to the side of his face, and even in the half moonlight, Minho can see the ghost of his handprint start to blossom over Thomas’ cheekbone. “You came back.”

“Yeah,” Minho sighs, “I did. I’m sorry. Shuck, I’m sorry. Shouldn’t have left.”

“It’s fine,” Thomas begins, but out of the corner of his eye Minho can see the Griever starting to shake loose the ivy so he claps Thomas on the shoulder and starts to drag him away. “Later. Right now, we run.”

And run they do, sprinting in tandem down the ivy-coated walls. Even as they run for their lives, a strange exhilaration builds in Minho’s chest. It's been a while since he had a running partner who could keep up as well as Thomas does now. Then again, Minho thinks as he shoots a quick glance at Thomas, he supposes Thomas was quite literally meant for this. Meant for him.

Shuck, a soulmate. And they’ll both get to die together, too, in the place Minho has spent his life exploring, the place Thomas gave up his life to reach. It would almost be poetic if it wasn’t so damn depressing.

They reach a split in the road, and Minho realizes instinctively that he knows where they are. This is the entrance to Section 7. The walls are juddering and moving around them; they were deeper in the Maze than Minho had assumed, and it occurs to him with sickening dread that they have a limited amount of time to get out of this section before the walls change and seal them in with the Grievers forever. He shouts this over to Thomas, who nods in understanding immediately and falls in behind Minho. They’re almost out of Section 7, there’s just one more long door that’s quickly closing. Minho sprints through it, then slows to a stop to catch his breath. He has a theory about whether or not the Grivers can come through it, one that’ll be proved with their survival or quickly hastening deaths.

When Minho turns around, though, he realizes that he’s alone. For some reason, Thomas is hesitating on the other side of the closing door, the Griever bearing down behind him. An awful horror catches in Minho’s throat, and he shouts desperately for Thomas to come on, to run. Thomas pauses a moment longer, looking behind him again as if he were waiting for the Griever, then hurls himself down the corridor towards the door. The gap slides shut with every moment, and all Minho can do is watch. With a sickening lurch, he wonders if this is how the Gladers had felt watching him get locked in the Maze with Alby, if the same sense of powerlessness that threatens to take him over now had choked them out just the same.

Unlike Minho at the start of this awful night, though, Thomas makes it through. The door to Section 7 spits him out just in time, and he stumbles into Minho, who catches him before he can hit the ground. They both turn in unison to watch the Griever, who cannot repeat Thomas’ success and is crushed between the door and the wall. The air reverberates with the sound of impact of stone on stone, and a slow, tentative quiet starts to fall on the Maze.

Minho stares at the sight uncomprehendingly. The crushed Griever twitches once, a final death throe, then goes motionless. Unlike the one that had tricked Alby earlier today, though, this one is really dead. “You killed a Griever,” Minho says blankly. “You actually killed it.”

“The walls killed it,” Thomas replies, although he’s staring just the same as Minho. “I just helped it along.”

Thomas is still in Minho’s arms, he realizes. He should probably step away. He doesn’t. Instead, they stand together, heart to heart, and watch the corpse of the thing that had come so close to killing them, until the gore stops dripping, until the dust of the moving walls settles on the claws, until they are sure once and for all that it cannot hurt them anymore.

There’s a bit of time in the early hours of the morning before the Doors open when the Maze has evidently settled down to sleep and leaves the two Gladers alone. Minho and Thomas climb up to the top of one of the Maze sections so they can have a vantage point to see if anything is trying to kill them again, then promptly collapse on the narrow stone walkway.

“Shuck,” Minho groans, dragging a hand over his bleary eyes. “When we get out of here, I’m going to sleep for a week.”

Thomas chuckles, the sound bleeding into a yawn. “Don’t worry about that, I’m sure Gally will wake you before long. Can’t have any slackers in his Glade.”

Minho snorts. “He’s not so bad when you get to know him.”

Thomas gives him such a dubious look that Minho breaks out laughing. “You can’t be serious. The guy hates me.”

“He hates all Greenies,” Minho says fondly. “You just happen to be the newest one.”

Thomas is sitting sprawled a bit away; too far away, Minho decides, and reaches out a tired arm to drag him closer by the leg. There’s a tear in Thomas’ trousers over the knee where he’d skinned it jumping from the Grievers, and it bleeds over afresh with the ghost of Minho’s touch. Fascinated, he lays a finger on it again, again, to watch the skin flower and fade every time he lets go.

When Minho finally looks up, he realizes Thomas is staring at him. “So you’re not pretending it doesn't exist anymore?” Thomas asks pointedly.

Minho’s jaw tightens but he doesn’t look away. “No one else here had a soulmate. What was I supposed to do?”

“You could have talked to me about it,” Thomas says.

“Every time I got near you, you started talking about the Maze,” Minho counters. “Wasn’t really room in that conversation to bring up the fact that we might be cosmically bound.”

Thomas shrugs. “Well, now we’re both in the Maze and we’re both talking. I guess I do get everything I want.”

Minho pokes him in the chest. “See, this sort of attitude is why Gally hates your guts.”

Thomas cracks a grin. “I’m hurt.”

“I bet,” Minho says, and reaches forward to poke him again. Thomas counters by shoving him back, and then they’re laughing, trying to knock each other even while sitting down, anything to watch the consequences of one touch on a bit of exposed skin. They’re horrible, really. Even though he’d nearly died several times this night, Minho doesn’t think he’s laughed this hard in his life. His ribs hurt from slamming into the ground and the grin splitting his face ear to ear. The sun rises, and shuck help him, he’s happy.

The Gladers are happy, too, when the Doors open at the start of the day and Minho and Thomas are there to greet them. They were careful to stop touching a bit before they made their way over to the Doors, just in case, which was the safe thing to do, but now Minho can’t stop staring at the back of Thomas’ neck, the places where his rolled-up shirtsleeves dig into the crook of his elbow. Getting what he wanted has only made Minho greedy, but from the way Thomas keeps glancing back at him, Minho doesn’t think he’s the only one.

Minho is glad to see his friends and all, but once the constant adrenaline starts to wear away, the exhaustion of the last 24 hours hits him in full force and Minho feels ready to pass out. It’s all he can do to smile tiredly when the Gladers come to greet him, then drag his cinder-block feet to his hammock. He’s hardly climbed inside before his eyes shut and he’s out cold. The sleep that follows is deep and dreamless, untroubled in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time.

He wakes up an indescribable amount of time later. Stumbling around, wiping the sleep from his eyes, it feels like he’s been out for centuries, but judging by the place of the sun in the sky, it’s probably only been a few hours. Distantly, Minho remembers Newt saying something about everyone wanting to have a Gathering of all the Keepers to discuss what had happened in the Maze overnight and settle on a fate for Thomas, who had broken the rules to go into the Maze even though he’d saved Minho’s life.

A Gathering has to be the last thing Minho wants to do right now, but he dutifully shakes himself awake. A sound of soft snoring comes from somewhere close by, and Minho peers through the rows of empty hammocks until he finds one that’s full. He smiles at what he sees:  Thomas, just as deeply asleep as Minho had been only a few moments ago. His eyelashes flutter slightly as he dreams, mouth drifting open to let out the occasional snore.

Minho grins and gently shakes the other boy awake. Thomas rouses slowly, fighting off the embrace of unconsciousness, and blinks up at Minho in confusion.

“What– whadd’you want?” Thomas asks through a yawn.

Minho chuckles. “Get yourself up, shank. We’ve got a Gathering to attend.”

Thomas groans and tries to close his eyes again, but Minho won’t let him. “Up and at ‘em. They’ll be even less inclined to hear you out if you’re late.”

Minho is trying to return to the self he knows how to be, the brusque Runner who doesn’t put up with anything that isn’t deserved, but all this is thrown off immediately when Thomas reaches up quietly to take his hand. Arcs of sunfire skin appear wherever Thomas moves his thumb against Minho’s knuckles.

“Are you inclined to hear me out?” Thomas asks quietly.

Minho nods. “I’ll do everything I can to convince them you were only there because you knew you could help. It’s the truth, anyway. You don’t deserve to be punished for this.”

Staring at Thomas’ hand in his, Minho can’t quite decide if he’s referring to their time in the Maze or what they are now, here. Soulmates. He doesn’t intend to tell the Gathering about that, but maybe a time will come when he will.

Thomas nods slowly. Minho stretches out his other hand to gently brush against a patch of broken skin on Thomas’ upper cheekbone, contributing to the streak of red. He can’t remember when that injury set in, maybe when they were running from the Grievers, or climbing the ivy. “It’ll be fine,” Minho insists. “They might be loud, but they’re good guys. No worse than you or me.”

Thomas accepts this, standing up at last with another yawn. “Let’s get it over with, then.”

“That’s the spirit,” Minho grins, dodging a pretend swing from Thomas at his words.

“That attitude better disappear when it’s time to defend me to the Keepers,” Thomas warns.

Minho rolls his eyes fondly. “Oh, trust me. I’ll be nothing but sincere.”

The sun sinks into the afternoon while Thomas makes some disbelieving comments about this. Minho isn’t entirely listening. Instead, he’s taking in the even sounds of Thomas’ voice, slightly louder when he gets annoyed, and watching a few birds wheel in the sky overhead. Last night, he thought he would be dead, and now he’s walking in the sunlight with his soulmate next to him. Minho doesn’t know how to describe this, but it feels something like payback. He’s fought hard to get to this point, and finally, finally, he gets something good, even if it’s just for right now. 

He knows what he wants to say in the Gathering, how he wants Thomas to join him as a Runner. Then they’ll be together, running side by side every day, except for their off days when they can just lie around and waste time. Minho can’t explain why, but he’s starting to regain his hope that something might change around here. Maybe it’s because they just killed a Griever, or survived a night in the Maze, which no one was supposed to do, or the girl who came up with her mysterious note. Regardless, it’s been a long time since he felt like the tides might be shifting.

That night, when Minho lays himself down to sleep, he dreams of his soulmate again. This time, though, the guy’s got a face, and a pair of bright, focused brown eyes, and he’s running with Minho as far as they’ll go. Unlike all the other nights, Minho doesn’t have to wonder. Unlike all the other nights, Minho can wake up and find Thomas, and the idea of knowing his soulmate doesn’t have to end with the dream. It all starts now.

tmr tag list: @blondsauduun, @ellobruv, @retvenkos, @neewtmas, @mayfieldss, @jvst4ever, @gods-fools-heroes, @pjxcksonswrd, @23victoria, @w1shes43, @imwaysthelastchoice, @fadedver, @il0vebeingdelulu

Your father has borne this burden for years, never backing down no matter how great or small the woes brought before him. As his daughter, you’ll inherit the title of chief some day, hopefully far into the future, so your father has taken to roping you into his chiefly duties as a sort of training process. You shadow him in meetings, you listen to the complaints of the townspeople, and recently he’s even allowed you to make decisions on public matters, albeit only the small ones.

You’re glad to be able to help your village, even in the small, carefully limited way permitted by your father, but you’d be lying if you said it was all smiles and well wishes. It feels like there’s always someone left jilted and sour-faced by one of your decisions, even when you’ve spent far too much time deliberating. Everything has a trade-off, every good choice has unintended consequences. You know that’s the lesson your father hoped you’d understand, but it’s so hard to accept. You hate letting people down, so you can’t help but overthink everything, trying to find the impossible decision that lets you make everyone happy. Very rarely does that ever play out in your favor, but you still hold out hope.

Hope, however, is a fleeting thing, and certainly not something that can survive long in a Viking village. If it weren’t enough to have burly, disagreeable warriors all trapped together on an inhospitable rock, constantly in danger of running out of resources or getting on each other’s nerves, you have to face one big problem that blows everything out of proportion. Life wasn’t difficult as is, so your ancestors had to move to an island home threatened by dragons.

Dragons. Behemoths of scale and talons scorching your homes and carrying off your livestock. Your father is obsessed with them, of finding some way to their labyrinthine nest and slaughtering the lot of them. He dreams of the day when he can eradicate the disease of dragons and protect everyone for good. It seems an impossible task– how could anyone fight against something like that– but if anyone were to do it, Chief Janson seems the best suited for it. He’s fiendishly clever and brutal with his methods. There is no bridge he wouldn’t burn to end the dragon threat, once and for all.

For years, you’ve watched the warriors of the village setting out to slay the dragons that plagued your home, mostly to mixed results. A successful raid will be rewarded by a vicious slaughter one week later, or they’ll manage to keep their homes from burning down one night only to lose an entire street a few days afterwards. It’s a constant battle, ever changing, ever dangerous. You’ve begged your father to let you join the warriors, but he’s never let you, not until you were old enough.

Secretly, awfully, you think Chief Janson doesn’t keep you from the dragons because he’s worried you’ll get hurt, but because he thinks you’re too young to handle yourself. If you went out in a blaze of glory, cementing the legacy of your people, stopping the tide of dragons, your father would be delighted. If you embarrassed him by putting on a poor performance in front of his people, Janson would wish you had just died instead. He’s more of a schemer than he ever has been a father, and even if he says he loves you, he loves his vengeance more. To disappoint him would be deadly. It is a fate you cannot allow.

So, when your father finally announced that this was the year you’d be allowed to take part in dragon training, you knew that this opportunity wasn’t just a privilege but an expectation. A winner is announced among the students every year, and if it isn’t you, if you cannot prove yourself as worthy of your father’s legacy, he might honestly just offer you as bait to the dragons then and there. At least then you would be of use to him.

In order to win the coveted title of best among the dragon trainers, you’ll have to beat out the other students. The competition is mixed this year– a few top contenders, like always, and those on the outskirts. There’s Gally, the stonemason’s son. You think he could out-wrestle a dragon even without training. Minho is lithe and fast, and still quite strong even if not quite at Gally’s level. Newt, a farmer’s boy, doesn’t even need to be here, everyone knows he’ll be a future advisor to your council one of these days. In fact, you’re fairly sure he’s more trusted to solve conflicts than you, and you’ve got the direct tie to the chief. You’d be jealous of his clear favor were it not for the fact that he’s a genuinely nice guy, someone you consider a friend.

They’ll be your toughest competitors, strength and speed and skill. There are a few other sons and daughters, no one really worth considering, and then there’s– well, there’s Thomas, but that’s an entirely different conversation altogether. Thomas– he tries, you think, he really does, but Thomas is better known for his mishaps than his successes. He’s attempted many different professions, but after nearly breaking Gally’s foot by dropping a heavy stone a hair’s breadth from the older boy’s boot, then outright refusing to join the butchers, then dozing off at a council of the elders, he’s shown less promise than most. Right now, they’ve stuck him in the smithy, somewhere he’s not completely terrible, for his strength to improve while he keeps out of trouble.

Thomas is somewhat of a nuisance to most of the village. He’s best at appearing when you least want him, always snooping around like he’s suspicious of the very walls that surround you. If he’s looking for a way out, though, he’ll be hard-pressed to find it. Your village is tucked into rocky precipices that plunge to the ocean below. It’s this life or no other, something even the always-questioning Thomas has to accept.

Your father seems to have written Thomas off completely. There was hope for him at some point– his mother was a prominent council member, and he was effortlessly brave growing up, always running ahead of the pack, but then he kept running and refused to settle down. He’s too flighty, so claims your father, too wild. He’ll never fit in.

You, on the other hand, have a less critical view of the boy. Thomas was always kind to you growing up, even if your father stopped allowing you to be near him once it became clear that your playmate might convince you to run from your problems instead of facing them head on and screaming a war cry like any proper Viking. What you remember was a nice boy, if quiet at times, who looked at the world like a puzzle to be solved. He fascinated you, the way his curiosity never failed him. You’d love to read his mind someday, to find out all the things he’s learned that you could only imagine.

To you, Thomas is a bated breath, a pull of air trapped in the lungs, stuck until ribs crack and bend and break. He will spend his whole life waiting for the one thing he’s meant to do, and when that day comes, he’s going to blow all of you away. You know it like muscle memory. His entire being, body and blood and mind, seems tense and ready for something that has never happened to him. There’s a sharpness in his eyes, a fuse in his mind ready to light. You can only wonder if he’ll ever stumble across his purpose, or if that bright fire in him will crumble to ash without even so much as a spark before it goes.

You watch him during dragon training when he isn’t looking. For someone everyone considers a fool, too busy running to stand and fight like a proper Viking, Thomas doesn’t seem particularly afraid of the fire-breathing monsters thrust before him. He takes proper care, of course, always keeping himself well out of reach of claws or fangs, but he isn’t running with fright or hiding behind wooden structures like some of the other would-be students. Instead, you swear Thomas is watching them, as if he knows some secret of theirs that you could only guess.

It confuses you. What has Thomas figured out? He manages to emerge from every dragon training session completely unscathed, even after that one Razorwhip that left everyone’s armor in tatters, even yours. Yet when the rest of you were trying to get ash off of your skin and mourning the deep scores in your shields, Thomas was totally fine. He griped with everyone else about how difficult the dragon had been, but not so much as a hair was out of place. Somehow, he’d figured out how to navigate the beast’s attacks, but he never bothered attacking, just kept himself safe. You’re fairly sure your father would consider that a coward’s plan, but you think there’s more to it. Thomas seems to understand the language of dragons, you just can’t fathom where he could have learned it.

Maybe you’re too focused on Thomas instead of actually fighting the beasts you were sent here to slay. Maybe that’s why Gally ends up getting the decisive blow on a Windstriker during one of the later lessons instead of you. Normally, it would have been no matter at all, you’d get the upper hand on a later day and show Gally up like usual, but your father had happened to be in attendance that afternoon. He was expecting a great show of your prowess, but instead he saw Gally win the accolades that day.

You dread returning home after the lesson, dragging your feet as if to fight off whatever’s waiting for you behind your front door. However, you can’t delay forever, and you know your father well enough to tell that any more dilly-dallying will only get you in more trouble than you are already, so you gather your spirits and head inside at last.

The chief is waiting for you by the great hearth, arms folded across his chest. He doesn’t bother with greetings, but since when has Janson let etiquette get in the way of what he wants?

“Is this how you spend every lesson?” Your father asks coldly. “You chase the dragon’s tail while someone else goes after the head? I was under the impression that I was raising a warrior, but I saw none out there in the arena today.”

You fight to keep your chin up, already wanting to shrink under the weight of his disapproval. “I let myself get distracted, it was my mistake. Clint had tripped and fallen, I was trying to pull him out of the way when Gally charged.”

Your father arches a brow. “That’s your excuse? One healer’s boy?”

“I was trying to prioritize the strength of the village,” you plead. “Isn’t that important for a chief?”

“What’s important is slaying a dragon when you see it,” your father says icily. “One dragon can slaughter a thousand healers. If this had been a real attack, you would have saved that boy only to see that Windstriker destroy half the village. You cannot let your emotions get in the way of your true purpose.”

You nod, but you still feel upset. “So, next time I should ignore a friend in need? How could I expect them to trust me? What if I needed help and they left me to die because I did the same to them?”

Your father scoffs. “No chief would need help. If you were ever in a situation in which you had to rely on one boy to save you, I would rather–”

Stupidly, you interrupt, fury radiating through you. “You’d rather I died, right? Better a dead warrior than a living embarrassment.”

Your father refuses to rise to the bait. “You seem to know my position perfectly. Why should I bother to agree with it?”

You shake your head disgustedly. “Maybe I wanted you to contradict me for once. Maybe I wanted to believe that, as my father, you cared about my life in any way.”

“No Viking needs petty condolences,” your father sneers. “I don’t recall raising you to rely on pretty lies. The truth should be sufficient, and if it doesn’t make you feel better, maybe you should try improving yourself. I’ll never lie to you, Y/N. I’ll never tell you I need you if I don’t.”

The words cut to the quick. He’s hinted at this before, but he’s never said it, not outright. Your throat burns, and before you can say something to land yourself even further in your father’s disregard, you turn and head for the door. You’re sure he’ll hate you even more for it, for running instead of facing what bothers you, but you’ve had enough fighting for the day. Just once, you want to be enough for somebody. Just once, you want to matter.

You’re through the village and into the surrounding forest in the blink of an eye. You’re not sure where you’re going, only that it cannot be here. You vaguely remember seeing Thomas walking down into these parts of the woods a few times, and the thought fills you with an odd sense of relief. Thomas has figured out how to survive despite the ire of the villagers. The comments and mutterings about his isolation and unusual behavior seem to wash off of him. You could learn a thing or two from him, or at least you could commiserate.

Your eyes prick as you remember the harsh words from your father. He’s been in a worse mood than usual, ever since the dragon raid a week or two ago. There had been a clear spell of attacks for a bit, and your father’s confidence had grown, assuming it had been his direction in leading raids and fighting off the beasts that had finally scared them off. No sooner had he said that, though, than your village had suffered one of the worst raids in a while. There were even rumors of a Night Fury sighting, although no one had been able to land so much as a scratch on the thing, and those that did catch a glimpse ended up with the healers, badly burned and talking gibberish.

Your progress through the forest is harsher than usual, twigs snapping under your feet as you irritably swat low-hanging branches away from your face. It feels as if no one wants you to succeed, no one cares about you, it’s just as your father said–

The brush clears away, and you find yourself in a clearing surrounded on all sides by swooping faces of pale rock. You’re not alone, either, Thomas is sitting on a smooth shore by a small lake and writing something in that journal he always carries around. He’s clearly lost in thought, and only looks up when you’re quite nearby to him. Since you’re not the closest of friends, you weren’t expecting an enthusiastic greeting, but you certainly didn’t think he would jump up immediately, eyes full of panic, and start trying to force you back the way you’d come.

“What are you doing?” You ask, confused.

Thomas shakes his head frantically. “Nothing. Nothing! Just, uh, writing. Super boring. Say, I think some of the healers wanted to see you about something? Something important, for sure. You’d better leave as fast as you can and–”

You shake your arm free. “Why are you acting so weirdly? Are you hiding something?”

“No, not at all,” Thomas says suspiciously, “I hate hiding. I’ve never hid. You should definitely go, though.”

The sound of movement echoes across the clearing, and Thomas steps forward to try and block your view of whatever is happening behind him. It’s too late, though, you’ve already ducked around him and seen– and seen–

Thomas isn’t just hiding a stray cat or unusual collection of runes. No, his secret is dangerous and terrible, so completely unexpected that all thoughts of the argument you’d had with your father are erased from your head in the blink of an eye. Climbing down from one of the far rock walls is a dragon, and not just any dragon, either. You’ve heard whispers of those ink-jet scales, the wings that could cover an entire house, the brilliant green eyes that stare straight to your soul.

“That’s a Night Fury!” You hiss, eyes wide.

Thomas winces. “Would you believe me if I said it wasn’t?”

You’re unable to tear your eyes from the dragon. “Why aren’t you running? We should be running.”

Thomas shakes his head. “No, don’t run! Please. I can explain.”

You shoot him a suspicious look. “You were certainly in a hurry to get me out of here earlier, but now you want me to stay? You had better explain yourself.”

“I will,” Thomas pleads, “I just need you to trust me, alright? I was hoping to get you out of here so you wouldn’t see him, but it’s too late for that, obviously, so I’m going for a different approach. I think you two can be friends.”

“Friends,” you repeat dubiously. “You want me to be friends with a Night Fury?”

“I’m friends with a Night Fury,” Thomas says pleasantly. “He’s actually pretty great, disregarding the obvious attitude issues. Serious entitlement, I’m telling you.”

“Obviously,” you repeat faintly.

Thomas makes a face. “Let me start from the beginning. I found Toothless after that bad raid a few weeks back. He didn’t like me at first, but we’ve gotten to trust each other. Look, I can prove it. I’ll introduce you.”

“That’s alright,” you say hastily. “I think I can go without introductions. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can just leave right now, and it won’t be an issue at all.”

“I think it’s a little late for that,” Thomas says, forcing calm into his words. “Toothless wants to meet you.”

You start to ask him what he means, and then you happen to glance over your shoulder and you realize that the Night Fury has crept up on you while you were talking. It’s impossible that a creature that large could move without making a sound, but now it’s regarding you from just a few steps away. You’re certain it could lunge and tear out your throat in the blink of an eye, or bite your head off, or incinerate you with that infamous fire–

“Stay calm,” Thomas tells you firmly. “I won’t let anything happen to you, I swear it. Toothless, this is Y/N. She’s a friend of mine, alright? That means she’s a friend of yours, too.”

It is absolutely ridiculous, but you swear the dragon cocks its head as if it’s listening to Thomas. You’re still not sure why you both aren’t dead yet, but the dragon looks back to you expectantly, and you feel the odd urge to say something. “Hi, Toothless. It’s, uh, nice to meet you.”

Thomas nods. “That was great. Here, give him this.”

You risk a glance away from the Night Fury to realize that Thomas is handing you a large fish. You take hold of the slippery thing and hesitantly toss it to the dragon, who swallows it up in one gulp. The Night Fury tilts its head to the side, and if you weren’t absolutely crazy you’d honestly believe it smiles at you, leathery skin pulling a little away from its mouth. You smile back, and Toothless makes a sort of keening noise.

“Perfect,” Thomas says. “You can touch him, if you want.”

“I can?” You ask.

“Sure,” Thomas answered. “He’s spoiled, anyway. Might as well make it worse.”

He goes first, approaching the dragon and rubbing small circles into the scales above its nose. He nods at you to follow and you do, albeit much more slowly. Your breath catches when you place your hand on the black scales, certain your luck will run out and Toothless will bite you in half, but instead the dragon just sighs and leans into your touch.

You let out a surprised laugh. “This is crazy. You’re friends with a Night Fury.”

“You are too, now,” Thomas says. “If you bring him more fish, he’ll probably like you more than me.”

You shake your head, dumbstruck. “You amaze me, Thomas. I knew you had some sort of secret, but I never imagined this.”

Thomas looks over at you. “You thought I had a secret?”

“Not something as big as this,” you murmur, embarrassed, “It’s just– you’re good at dragon training, that’s all. Better than the rest of us. I just thought you studied a lot or something.”

Thomas snorts. “I’m awful at dragon training. I have yet to strike a single one of them, even the weak ones.”

“That’s on purpose, isn’t it?” You ask, realization dawning upon you. “You know how to live with the dragons because of Toothless, but you don’t want to hurt them, either.”

Thomas shakes his head, looking oddly guilty. “How could I? I mean, what if every dragon is just like Toothless? Dangerous, sure but so are humans. We just keep attacking each other for no reason, but if a human and a Night Fury can get along, I figure the same is true for everything else. My friendship with Toothless feels more real than any fake battle in dragon training. This can’t be wrong. I know that somehow, I don’t know why. I can’t help but believe that we aren’t supposed to fight them, even if that’s why we were put on this island in the first place.”

He looks suddenly abashed. “You probably don’t want to hear that, though. Chief’s daughter and all. I don’t mean to insult your father or his way of ruling, it’s just–”

“No, you should,” you interrupt. “He’s wrong. Wrong about a lot. He doesn’t care about the village, just slaughtering dragons. Growing up, I thought a chief was supposed to protect his people, but my father’s only obsession is killing. That’s no way to lead your people. He’ll get all of us killed in the name of salvation.”

Thomas stares at you, respect blossoming in his eyes. “I never thought I’d hear you say that.”

You let out a quiet half-laugh. “I’m the one who knows it the best. I see him all the time. He– he’s worse than you could ever imagine.”

Thomas reaches out, gently laying a hand on your shoulder. “Hey, if you ever need an escape, you’ve always got us. You know, all the best friends are dragons or loner misfits.”

“I don’t think you’re a misfit,” you say. “Never have. I think you’re smarter than the rest of us. Smart enough to figure out that we’ve trapped ourselves in a war we’re not supposed to fight.”

Thomas smiles. “If anyone had to find out about Toothless, I’m glad it was you.”

You frown. “Why? Because I can protect him from my father?”

“No,” Thomas says, shaking his head, “Because I trust you. Always have. Your father has years of experience, and the council is fine, but whenever someone had to weigh in on a tough decision, you always gave the best advice. Even when no one could agree on anything.”

The words mean more to you than you could have expected. They’re enough to convince you to stick around a little longer than you planned, to talk idly with Thomas until the sun starts to dip over the horizon and you realize you’ve spent hours here instead of minutes. Thomas doesn’t seem to mind, in fact he appears glad for the company, for your company. You had always assumed he was perfectly fine on his own, but he opens up to you as if he had been waiting his whole life for you to get to know him.

Maybe that’s why you come back the next day, and the next. Thomas takes you up into the sky with Toothless, soaring until the whole world seems just a hazy smear of green and blue below you. Every ride is perfect, enough to steal the breath from your lungs with a rush of adrenaline, but it ends, it always ends. No matter how crisp the air, how far you soar, you always have to come back. You wish you could stay up there in the clouds forever, answering to no one, but there always comes the point when your feet touch back down, when you begin the slow trek back to your house, where the weight of your father’s disapproval threatens to pull you under.

You live for those stolen hours with Thomas. In just a matter of weeks, he seems to understand you better than any of your friends, even your father. It’s a welcome relief, especially since the time you spend in the company of Thomas’ Night Fury only serves to pull you down his path and all of a sudden you don’t want to slay any dragons, either. This only serves to make your father even more furious with you, so you sneak out to visit Thomas more often, and the cycle intensifies.

As the days tick down to the final day of dragon training, where one of you will have to actually slay a dragon, you get more nervous. You’re still in the lead, even despite your refusal to actually harm any of the dragons. That only means that you’ll be the one to do the bloody deed.

Thomas tries to help talk you through it, but neither of you can find a way out. “Just refuse,” Thomas urges. “They can’t make you kill it, right? If you found some way to rise above, maybe argue for working with them instead of against, if you had enough reason, maybe–”

“That would never work,” you laugh bitterly. “You don’t know my father, Thomas. You haven’t lived with him as I have. Every moment in his presence is a test. Every conversation is a demand to prove my worth. I hover on the knife’s edge of his approval, and if I ever fall, he’d have my head in a moment. I cannot disappoint him, Thomas, not like this. He would feed me to the dragons himself if I let him down in front of the whole village.”

Thomas sees the true fear written plainly on your face and reaches over to take your hand, squeezing it comfortingly. “Hey, don’t worry. We’ll find a way out, I swear it. Maybe I’ll crash your ceremony and stop the whole thing. They’ll think I’m just jealous, but I could get you out and they’d only blame me.”

You shake your head fervently. “Then they’d make me go after you. I’ll never betray you, Thomas, I swear it.”

“Then you have to know I’m not letting you do this alone, either,” Thomas says. “We’ll find a way.”

In the end, you leave the clearing together, no closer to a way out than you ever had been before. Running seems the only option, but you have no idea where you’d go. The only way out, it seems, is through.

When you get back to the village center, though, thoughts of dragon training are quickly swept from your mind. Everyone seems on high alert, rushing to the smithy to get more weapons and hurrying with shields and spears down to warboats waiting below.

You catch the arm of one of your father’s councilmen as he passes. “What happened?”

The councilman shakes his head darkly. “Some of our warriors went out for a raid on a nearby island. It should have been an easy task, but they were caught unawares by a nest of Grievers. We set off to save them, but we fear it’s too late.” He fixes you with a wary look, then continues. “Your father was among the first party.”

You draw in a sharp gasp, and the man leaves, pulled back into the throngs of rushing Vikings. You may not always get along with your father, but even he doesn’t deserve this fate. Grievers are monsters worse than dragons, worse than anything. Some say they clawed their way up from the very reaches of the land of the dead. They’re massive, sharp things that have killed dozens if not hundreds of warriors from your island home over the years. Dragons are smart, they could be trusted, as you’ve learned. Grievers are another story. There is no befriending a Griever. To see one is to accept your own death, and your father has been set upon by a nest of them.

As the village center quickly empties of people, you turn to Thomas. “We have to save them. We have to do something.”

Your voice catches on the word, and Thomas’s face twists to see you in pain. “We will, I swear.” A look of dawning realization crosses his countenance. “Actually, I think I have an idea. Gather your friends, tell them to meet me in the dragon training arena as fast as you can.”

You look at him questioningly, but Thomas doesn’t elaborate. There’s no time to ask, with every passing moment more of your people put themselves at risk, so you start to run. Thomas knows what he’s doing, you’re sure of it.

Soon enough, you’re in the arena. You managed to track down Gally, Newt, Minho, Winston, and a few others. When Thomas tells you all that he intends to rescue your father and his warriors by using dragons to fight the Grievers, no one believes him at first. It’s only when Thomas calls his Night Fury down from the skies that people start listening.

It takes less time than expected to coax the dragons out of their cages from training, to convince them to trust you, but then you’re up in the air, clutching at crevices in blue-green scales as you soar through the skies. Minho shoots through the air, racing Newt, who laughs delightedly as the wind pulls at his hair.

The laughter dies at once when you come upon the scene of the fight. Already, you see bodies crumpled on the ground, but you feel shamefully relieved to see your father isn’t among them. Thomas leads the charge down, and the terror on your villager’s faces when they see the dragons quickly melts into confusion when they realize you’re riding them.

The Grievers are deadly, awful things. You’ve never seen them face-to-face, only heard awful stories from people missing legs or eyes or lives. Even on dragonback, they pose a substantial threat, but slowly, tenuously, they succumb to the burns and slashes of your dragons. Once you’re sure the danger is past, you land your dragon and climb to the ground, searching the gathering crowds for your father.

He finds you soon enough. Your father stalks through the throngs of Vikings, eyes cold. “What is the meaning of this?”

You straighten up, forcing yourself to seem confident even if you don’t entirely feel it anymore. “We had to save you from the Grievers. This seemed the best way.”

“Dragons,” your father spits out. “You trusted dragons over your own people. You should have been down here fighting with the rest of us, but you turned to the beasts.”

“We saved your life,” you retort. “We were wrong about the dragons. They saved all of us today from the Grievers. Doesn’t that warrant a second chance?”

Your father scoffs. “No Viking would ally itself with a monster. You’ve disappointed me, Y/N, for the last time.”

Your eyes widen, but all of a sudden Thomas is emerging from the crowd and putting himself between you and your father. “You’re wrong, Janson. Y/N is more a Viking than you ever could be.”

The crowd behind you dissolves in shocked gasps. You try to tell Thomas to stand down, but he shakes his head, as obstinate as ever. “Y/N would have given her life to save you, to save this whole village. She trusted the dragons because she would do anything to protect her people. If you think that’s a failure, then you have no idea what I think of you.”

Your father’s eyes flash, and he opens his mouth to argue, but he’s interrupted by a voice from the crowd. “He’s right,” a woman says. You recognize her at once– Ava Paige, one of the village’s finest warriors. She’s covered in long scars from a Griever attack, making her one of only a small handful that had survived such a deadly assault. “I see nothing wrong with their plan. Better than they acted quickly to ally themselves with the dragons then watch all of us die throwing ourselves at the Grievers.”

You smile thankfully at her. Your father turns to Ava, then takes in the approving looks being exchanged by the rest of the village and realizes at last that he alone has a problem with your plan. He forces a thin smile. “Fine,” he says briskly. “All glory be yours for this battle. I only hope that your dependence on the dragons does not prove dangerous in the end.”

“It won’t,” you vow. Your father seems to disagree with this, but he heads back into the crowds to the boats, leaving you with Thomas.

“Thank you,” you whisper to him.

“It’s nothing,” he says. “I’ve been wanting to fight with him for a while, anyway. No one should make you feel so badly about yourself. There isn’t a single thing about you that could ever disappoint me, and I’ll tell that to the whole village if I have to.”

As it turns out, he doesn’t need to tell the whole village anything. He says enough when he kisses you, right there on the bloodsoaked beach, under the light of the afternoon sun. If this is victory, you want all of it. The only glory you would ever want is here, with him, knowing at last that you’ve proved yourself. It’s better than you could have ever imagined.

requested by @pjxcksonswrd, i hope you enjoy!

tmr tag list:

tmr tag list: @blondsauduun, @ellobruv, @retvenkos, @neewtmas, @mayfieldss, @jvst4ever, @gods-fools-heroes, @pjxcksonswrd, @23victoria, @w1shes43, @imwaysthelastchoice, @fadedver, @il0vebeingdelulu

When you finally made it to the Safe Haven, you had assumed that you would finally be alright. You weren’t in danger anymore. You and your friends were safe. WCKD couldn’t find you if it tried, and the Cranks were an ocean away. It was truly a paradise. It should have been enough for you.

It wasn’t.

How could it possibly be enough? Whenever you looked around, you saw the signs of society starting to rebuild itself. Some of your fellow Gladers were taking charge, having already been used to what it took to organize everyone after the Maze trials, and others opted for simple jobs, deciding that their days of responsibility were over. Your friends are doing better, for the most part, but you feel the opposite way.

No, you feel terrible. It’s like having this break from running around day and night has only given you the time to realize how much you’ve lost. When you watch Minho and Thomas joking with each other, you don’t appreciate their friendship, you think about how strange it is that Newt isn’t there with them, or Alby, or Chuck. When one of the younger kids falls and skins their knee, your first response isn’t to brush off this small injury but to wonder if they could have survived out in the Scorch with an open wound. It would get infected easily, you know. Anything could happen.

This is supposed to be the part where you relax and give up your paranoia, but you just can’t manage it. Even weeks after the last time you came in contact with WCKD or the Cranks, you still jump whenever you hear a loud noise when you’re not expecting it. You still get nightmares about running through the Scorch with a pack of infected behind you. You still carry your weapons around, even though there’s nothing to fight. Even Gally has given up on tucking knives into his belt loops, even Minho knows there’s nothing to run from. Everyone is aware of this but you.

You’re not sure why you’re taking it so much harder than the rest. All of your friends are dealing with all of the torment of the Maze and the Scorch, obviously. The first few days after you arrived at the Safe Haven, everyone’s eyes had bags under them from lost sleep, and no one could hold a conversation without speaking quietly in case a Crank heard them or jumping when they saw someone moving in the distance.

Over time, though, they were all able to move on. You’re coming up on a month after your arrival in the Safe Haven, yet you’re no closer to healing than you were at the start. You’re not sure what it takes for you to be better, but at this point, you’re willing to wager anything. You spend time with your friends, but you can’t stop yourself from being quiet and withdrawn. You force yourself to put in extra hours at your job in the hopes that the tedium of a chore will take your mind off of things, but you still get nightmares when you go to bed, no matter how exhausted you feel.

It’s enough to make anyone feel hopeless. You’re sure your friends are aware of it, but there’s nothing they can do. Everyone’s dealing with this, everyone’s trying to figure out how they are when they’re not fearing for their lives. There’s simply no good way to move on after the apocalypse.

Thomas, however, seems to be the most attuned to your shift in mood. He asks how you are every morning, and doesn’t seem content until you honestly answer him. He’ll listen to you ramble on about the unsettled feeling in your blood when you don’t have to be on the run anymore, and he constantly reassures you that you’re all going to be alright.

Truthfully, you don’t know what you’d do without him. Thomas is one of the best parts of your life, if not the very best entirely. You have no idea how he’s still going after losing so many friends right before his eyes, but he somehow manages to not only keep himself alive but you, too. He’s all you need. Him, and the splendid truth of the Safe Haven, the knowledge that for once in your life, you are not going to die. Not of something violent, at least. That’s worth more than you could have ever imagined.

You wonder what you must have been like in a former life, before WCKD stole your memories or even stole you away from your home. Before the disease of the Cranks. Before the solar flares. When everything was simple and you didn’t feel like you do right now– haunted, terrified, and uncertain of who you’re supposed to be when the world isn’t ending. Maybe you would have been close with Thomas anyway. Maybe you never would have known him at all.

If there is one good thing to come out of this chaos, you have to admit it would be him. Thomas is a bright spark. He stood out in the darkest nights of the Maze, the worst horrors of the Scorch. If there’s one reason you’re still alive, it’s him.

And, if there’s one reason you’re going to become your old self again, or at least grow as close as you can, it’ll be because of Thomas, too. That night, Thomas gathers your old friends from the Glade and announces that they’ll be bringing back a good tradition from your old days before you broke out of the Maze:  bonfire night.

Instantly, your spirits soar. Much like every other Glader, past and present, bonfire nights were the best times you had. Gally manages to cook up a batch of his special brew in record time, Frypan’s already hard at work producing some delicious foods, and crews of people are bringing back piles of wood for your fire.

When the sun sets, the bonfire is lit. You watch as the flames climb up to the sky. Around you, the survivors of the Flare laugh and shout and dance, talking to each other and having fun. You can feel the heat of the fire on your cheeks even despite the cool night, and for what feels like the first time in a very long time indeed, you smile.

Thomas pushes through the crowd to come to a stop by your side. “I haven’t seen that in a while,” he says.

You chuckle quietly. “I haven’t had a whole lot of reasons to smile. Thanks for proving otherwise.”

“Anytime,” Thomas promises. “We made it out, Y/N. We’re alive. We might as well celebrate, right?”

“I know, I just feel bad for celebrating when we’ve lost so many people,” you admit. “It doesn’t feel right that we’re all out here having a good time when we left so many of our friends behind.”

Thomas blows out a low breath through his teeth. “I know how you feel. Shuck, I feel it every day. I don’t think our friends would want us to be moping around all the time, though.”

“Really?” You ask doubtfully.

“Really,” he repeats. “Come on, you know Alby is watching us somewhere, shaking his head with annoyance that he went to the trouble of saving us just so we can waste the chance he gave us. Same with Newt, and Teresa, and the rest. They’d want us to be happy. They wanted that when they were alive, too.”

Your heart twists painfully at the mentions of the friends you’ve lost. “I think so, too. And I’m trying, it’s just hard sometimes.”

“I know,” Thomas tells you. “You’re trying, though. So am I. That’s the important part.”

You look back towards the bonfire. You can see some of the Gladers clustered together. Minho’s telling a dramatic story about something he’d discovered that day; he spreads his arms wide to demonstrate something and they all break out into laughter, even Gally. Maybe Thomas is right. Maybe there’s something here worth smiling about after all.

“Let’s have fun tonight,” you decide.

Thomas puts his arm around your waist, starting to lead you back towards the bonfire, back towards your friends, back towards the life you’d like to keep on living. “Let’s.”

It’ll take a while for the nightmares to stop, for you to avoid flinching whenever someone mentions something that reminds you of the Glade. You’ll never be exactly who you were before you woke up in the Box, but maybe that’s alright. You have a life you never thought you’d have, and best of all, you have a happy ending. You have Thomas. You’re going to be alright.

requested by @hope92100, i hope you enjoy!

tmr tag list: @blondsauduun, @ellobruv, @retvenkos, @neewtmas, @mayfieldss, @hiya-itsamber, @gods-fools-heroes, @23victoria, @w1shes43, @imwaysthelastchoice, @fadedver, @il0vebeingdelulu

Thankfully, you have at least a couple of days to feel better before you really have to be productive. You started feeling poorly on a Friday, barely managing to stumble through class before heading home as quickly as you could. Not wanting to complain and spoil the good mood of everyone excited about their weekend plans, you had tried to tell as few people as possible. Specifically, you hadn’t told your boyfriend, Thomas, but now you’re missing him more than ever.

It’s not like you’re intentionally trying to keep things from him, you just don’t want him giving up whatever fun things he was supposed to do this weekend so he could hover over you. You love your boyfriend more than anything, honestly, but when it took you so long to admit your feelings for him because you were certain he would never like you back, small things like this make it even easier to talk yourself out of thinking he’ll want to know about it. Thomas is the varsity cross country athlete, the popular one. He loves you, and he’ll tell you that as many times as it takes so you believe it, but some part of you will always wonder why.

That’s why you haven’t told him, not yet, although you have a feeling that he’ll find out sooner or later. Your adoptive sister, Brenda, is best friends with Thomas’ twin, Teresa, and they trade gossip like no one you’ve ever seen before. Both of them have repeatedly assured you that Thomas is head over heels for you, but what if he’s not quite infatuated enough to want to drop his weekend plans to take care of an invalid?

As the cold progresses, though, you start to wish that you had bothered him anyway. You’ve shut yourself up in your bedroom with all the lights off, just lying there and reminiscing about the golden days when your nose had worked as it was supposed to. You had taken so much for granted, and now you’re afflicted with a truly terrible fate indeed.

You’re miserable even on a Saturday, which is how you know things have truly taken a turn for the worst. Not even the weekend, the blessed release from work, can lift your spirits. Your best friend Newt was the only one who knew that you were going through it, and he’d made you promise to call him the second you started feeling better so he could plan a friend group movie night or something. Newt’s always the one on top of stuff like that. You doubt any of you could accomplish anything without his work behind the scenes to keep you all organized. He holds all of you together and keeps anyone from straying too far.

You had hoped that Newt would forget that you were feeling down, but it’s half past noon when your phone buzzes with an incoming call from the blond boy. You briefly consider just letting it go to voicemail, but that would alarm him even more than if you admitted that you still aren’t feeling your best.

You end up giving yourself a second or two to put on your best fake smile before answering the call. Thankfully, Newt had elected to go for just a talk over the phone instead of FaceTime, so you only have to disguise your voice and not your expression, too.

Newt’s voice rings over your phone. “What’s up, Y/N? How’re you doing today?”

You’ve never planned on a career as an actress, but when you answer Newt as happily as you can, you start to consider it. You sound chipper and excited, surprising even yourself. “Doing fine, Newt. How about yourself?”

Maybe this is actually doable. Maybe you might be able to convince your friend that you’re fine so he doesn’t do something terrible like try to get involved. Right now, you just want to be left alone to wallow in your dark room until you’re physically forced out of it.

Newt clicks his tongue in disapproval, sending a rush of static crackling over the phone. “Y/N, are you being honest with me?”

You start to sputter in surprise. Hadn’t your ruse been perfect? “What? Of course I am!”

Newt lets out a sarcastic laugh. “Sure thing. We’ve been friends for years, I know when you’re lying. You want to let me know how you’re really feeling?”

“Really, I’m great,” you eke out. “You’re being paranoid, Newt.”

“Am I?” He asks.

“No,” you admit. “I’m still miserable. My head is killing me, and I haven’t left my bed for more than a couple of minutes all day.”

Newt sighs. “That’s what I was worried about. Is there anything I can do? Maybe rally the group to swing by your house to cheer you up?”

“No, honestly. I don’t want to do anything. Hopefully I’ll get better soon, but until then, I don’t want any crowds around.” You tell him.

Newt pauses for a moment, thinking, then asks, “What about just one person?”

You frown. “Are you offering? I thought you were busy all day.”

“I am,” Newt clarifies, “But Thomas isn’t.”

You go silent. Newt, always the perceptive one, sighs again. “You haven’t told him that you’ve been feeling under the weather, have you?”

“No,” you admit, “but I didn’t want to bother him, that’s all. There’s nothing Thomas can do about this. I don’t want him to worry about something out of his control. He’s already got enough on his plate already, you know that as well as I do.”

Although this conversation is happening over the phone, you can picture Newt’s look of disappointed consternation anyway. “No, he would be furious with me if you were sick and I didn’t tell him. I’m letting him know immediately.”

“Newt, don’t you dare,” you admonish.

He just chuckles. “Too late. Texting him now. With any luck he’ll be over within the hour.”

“You’ve betrayed my trust. You’re a terrible friend,” you admonish him, but only half heartedly.

Newt laughs openly. “No, I’m a fantastic friend and you know it. Did I not use everything in me to get the two of you together?”

You giggle in spite of yourself. “You did indeed. I remember you bringing that up many times.”

“As I deserve,” Newt grumbles. “The two of you fought me all the way despite supposedly wanting this. He had better make you happy now, I’m not ruining all of my hard work for a bad cold.”

You smile. “Thanks, Newt. I’m very glad that you suffered so much for us.”

“You had better be,” he says, but he’s laughing when he hangs up.

Seconds later, you get a text from Thomas: On my way ASAP. Might be breaking the speed limit.

You grin and text him back. Don’t get pulled over.

Never, he answers, and he’s true to his word, a knock sounding on your front door about five minutes later. The rest of your family is out of the house, so you have no problems creeping down the hall to unlock the door and let him in.

Thomas swoops in immediately, pressing a kiss to the top of your head before pulling away so he can get a good look at you. “How are you feeling, Y/N? Dizzy? Feverish? You look alright, if a little tired, but let’s get you back in bed at once.”

You laugh. “I’m not dying of the plague, Thomas. I’ll survive standing up for a few more seconds.”

“Yeah, but you shouldn’t have to,” he says. Pausing briefly to leave his shoes at the door, Thomas proves his point by picking you up in bridal style and carrying you back to your room despite your protests, which are admittedly pretty halfhearted.

Once Thomas has gotten you back in bed again, found a glass somewhere to bring you water, insisted on watching you drink all of it, run back downstairs so he could fill it again, and returned, he perches on the side of your bed, gently squeezing your hand.

“Well, Doctor Thomas?” You ask teasingly. “What’s your diagnosis?”

He grins and plays along. “Not terrible. I recommend bed rest, and maybe also letting your boyfriend know when he needs to take care of you.”

This last bit is delivered with increasing passion, and you’re left sheepishly smiling at him. “Alright, maybe I should have told you in the first place, but I just didn’t want you to worry.”

“Worrying is my job,” Thomas says, “I am excellent at it. Also, if I think you’re not telling me when you need extra love, I’ll worry even more than usual. The only way to keep me from worrying is to let me know when you’re sick or hurt. Deal?”

“Deal,” you agree, and smile when he kisses your cheek.

“You should get some rest,” Thomas urges you. “Here, I’ll close the door so the noise from downstairs doesn’t bother you.”

He moves to stand, but you reach for his hand and he freezes at once. “Stay with me?” You ask hopefully.

“Of course,” he smiles, and, careful not to disturb you, climbs into bed next to you, lying down on top of your blankets to keep his street clothes off of the mattress. You curl into him, letting your eyes shut as the steady beat of his heart lulls you to sleep. Once you wake up, you’ll feel better, and be more open to conversation, but for now, both of you are quite content with the silence. Peace is good for both of you.

requested by @hope92100, i hope you enjoy!

maze runner tag list: @rogueanschel, @ellobruv, @retvenkos, @neewtmas, @mayfieldss, @hiya-itsamber, @gods-fools-heroes, @23victoria, @w1shes43, @imwaysthelastchoice, @fadedver

This is not what you need, not right now. As if it is not taking everything in you to survive the Scorch. Your waking hours are nightmarish enough without being reminded of every friend you’ve lost and every monster you’ve faced whenever you close your eyes. The only constants in your life are the family you’ve made along the way, the good memories cemented in the past, and now Thomas is threatening to send all of that into upheaval.

It makes you think. Who exactly is the Thomas that you know? There is the confused boy who woke up in the Box for the first time only a matter of weeks ago, the hero who saved Minho and Alby from a night in the Maze, and the enemy Gally kept trying to make him out to be. There’s the brave Runner with that uncanny sense of direction that brought all of you out of the Maze, and there’s the friend who won you over within hours of first meeting just because of his smile.

All of them are Thomas to you, and all of them are good. However, none of these remembered versions of your best friend include the shifty figure hovering at the sides of your consciousness right now, the one who jumps whenever someone speaks to him and second guesses every word he says lest he say too much. 

Thomas is still confident in his ability to guide your group out of harm’s way, but he seems far less confident in himself. You’ve seen him waking up abruptly from tumultuous nightmares, or getting lost in a haze of thoughts he won’t share with any of you no matter how many times you ask. 

When he cares to let out any detail to you, Thomas says that he’s starting to remember things from his life before WICKED, the lingering aftereffects of the time that he’d stabbed himself with the stinger of a Griever back in the Maze. This could be true, but they must be some hellish memories indeed, and the fact that none of the rest of you have had the slightest luck in unlocking any memories before your forced amnesia seems rather suspicious.

It feels pointless to question him in this way. Thomas is Thomas, at the end of the day, still your friend, still one of you. If he’s remembering anything, there has to be a reason outside of his control. Thomas is no different than any of you.

On second thought, is he? Before Thomas came to the Glade, you used to be good friends with Gally, a relationship that only ended once Gally started losing it close to the end of everything. You can remember countless fiery monologues Gally had delivered to you, all warning you to stay from Thomas. Gally had tossed hundreds of accusations at the unsuspecting Greenie, all going back to the fact that there was something wrong with Thomas that he wouldn’t tell any of you.

Those hateful claims had only doubled in volume once Teresa showed up and Thomas spent a night in the Maze without dying. You were there firsthand to watch how Gally’s wrath consumed him, up until the very moment when he killed Chuck and died on the floor of the crumbling WICKED base just outside of the Maze. You had never put any merit into anything Gally told you about Thomas, brushing it off as jealousy or, later, madness, but–

What if he was right? The thought brings you nothing but shame at first. Who are you to question such a good friend of yours, someone who has risked his life over and over again to protect all of the Gladers, yourself included? Thomas brought you out of the Maze, and delivered you from WICKED headquarters. He’s keeping you alive in the Scorch right now. All of this, and you thank him by doubting his every move.

The questions start to bubble up again, though, multiplying by the hour. You start noticing things about Thomas that you don’t think you should. Whenever he wanders the Scorch, he has this strange sort of purpose in his step, as if he can smell a path to salvation on the faint breeze. You ask Minho about it later and he says Thomas was the same way in the Maze, like even though he’d never been there before, he knew exactly where to go. It’s not enough for either of you to distrust him, but it’s still a fact that you wish you didn’t know.

You start watching Thomas closer than before. It’s like he has a sixth sense for figuring out when Cranks are around, either in the shambling shadows of a wrecked building or even when one of the Gladers was bit and hasn’t told any of you yet. It’s a frustrating feeling burning beneath his skin, and he boils with the uncomfortable knowledge that something is wrong until he finds out the source and can relax at last.

And then– that one night– Your group was wandering near a crop of destroyed skyscrapers near dusk, looking for a place to rest when it got too dark to see. The skyline was mostly rubble at that point, but Thomas said that there weren’t any Cranks there, so it would be safe enough. No one asked how he knew. No one wanted to figure out that grim sense of determination behind his eyes.

Everything had been fine, and no attacks occurred that night, as promised, but there was this one moment when everyone was settling down to sleep that won’t leave your head. You had been on watch first, and were startled by a shuffling sound in one of the nearby rooms long after everyone else was unconscious.

You had grabbed one of the precious flashlights Newt had found in a nearby building and poked your head cautiously around the corner to see what was the matter. It ended up being nothing at all, and the beam of your light caught only Thomas, but instead of feeling your nerves abate when you spotted your friend, your heart instead leapt up into your chest.

For a moment there, when Thomas had jerked his head up at the sudden light with this almost animalistic speed, the beam of the flashlight had caught his face dead on and his eyes– they were glowing, almost, kind of like that of a deer or fox. Twin silver disks staring right back at you, utterly devoid of any expression or humanity. They blinked back at you for just a moment, and then Thomas shifted slightly in the light and his normal eyes were back again.

The whole thing lasted for perhaps a second, nothing more. Just short enough that you could have imagined the whole thing. Just long enough that you can’t possibly put it out of your head. 

Thomas had mumbled apologies and excuses about being unable to sleep, but even after he followed you back to the rows of sleeping Gladers to join their numbers, you couldn’t shake the feeling like cold rain slipping down your back. Perhaps it was the memory of those ghastly silver-white eyes blinking at you in the light. Or perhaps it was the fact that you watched his shoulders for the telltale rise and fall of breath, and he was motionless for one hour until the movement came at last, forced and uncanny.

You might have to amend your quick dismissal of Gally’s theories. There might indeed be something wrong with Thomas. Perhaps he isn’t as similar to the rest of you as you’d originally thought. Perhaps– perhaps he isn’t even human.

This is not a good thought to have. It plagues you all night, making you toss and turn even after your watch ends and it’s time to sleep. It’s as if now that you know it, Thomas does too, and the weight of too much of his awareness could be quite a difficult thing to stomach indeed.

You do your best to put it from your mind. Out here in the Scorch, there are a thousand things more pressing than the impossibility of your best friend being anything but human. WICKED’s still out there, after all, and more than that, there are Cranks everywhere in the desert, just waiting for you and your friend to spring a nest of them.

Right now, the threat of Cranks is more prevalent than ever. In order to reach the mountains where the Right Arm may or may not be waiting to help you, the Gladers have to cut through part of a solar flare-ravaged city. The wind whistles through the debris as you walk, and you swear you’ve been hearing the echoes of distant footsteps for miles now.

The Cranks wait until your small group has been walking through their city for two days before they strike. One moment, the streets are clear, and then they’re descending on you like a cloud of flies, rushing towards you out of nowhere. Thomas sees them first and shouts for all of you to run further into town. You’ll be able to lose them in the twisting mess of buildings, if you don’t lose yourselves first.

The Cranks lunge out of you out of every alley. You take a quick turn to dodge one of the infected, which takes you onto a street parallel to the one on which the rest of your friends are sprinting down. Thomas notices your detour and chases after you, tossing you a piece of shrapnel as you run so you can have some sort of weapon.

The mass of Cranks splits, half following you and Thomas and the other half following the rest of the Gladers. Thomas shouts for you to keep moving, and you have no problem obeying. You don’t like the idea of what would happen to you should the teeming horde of Cranks catch up to you. Would the madness set in fast enough to soften the agony of being torn to pieces?

Thomas risks a glance over his shoulder and swears. “There’s too many of them.”

You point at the entry of a building not far ahead. It’s got a functional door, at least, which should hold long enough for the two of you to catch your breath. “There!”

You throw yourself into the shelter. Thomas is right behind you, slamming the door behind him and quickly barring it with whatever junk he finds nearby. Loud thuds echo from the door as the Cranks hurl themselves into it, causing dust to rain down from the ceiling onto you.

“It’s holding,” Thomas says, gasping for air.

“Not for long,” you grimace.

Cracks are starting to appear in the wooden paneling of the door, and the rusty hinges scream from the strain. Thomas lets out a low breath, then gestures for you to move further into the building. “Get back.”

You do as told, but hesitate at the far end of the room when he doesn’t follow suit. “Aren’t you coming too?”

Thomas sets his jaw, turning his determined gaze towards the door, which caves more by the second. “I need you to trust me.”

You nod once, even though he can’t see it, and watch as the Cranks beat down the thin door standing between themselves and your best friend. You scream his name as they start to lunge towards him, but they’ve hardly cleared the threshold when something strange happens.

In the days to follow, you’ll go over this memory again and again in your head, trying to piece together how it happened. Surely there’s some reason other than the obvious. There must be a way that it made sense without the explanation he gave you. There must be some way that Thomas is still human, even as he extends his palm at the mass of Cranks and the shards of the door below them erupt into flames.

It’s like no fire you’ve ever seen before. The tendrils of flame grow to the ceiling in seconds, incinerating the Cranks as if they were so much kindling. You can feel the immediate wave of heat, and shrink away, already feeling sweat break out onto your forehead. By contrast, Thomas does not seem fazed at all. He just curls his fingers, watching the rest of the Cranks burn away to ash.

Once the last of the infected are gone, Thomas lowers his hand and the fire dies down in moments, leaving only the lingering smell of ash and smoke as testament to what had just happened. He turns back to you, and you stare at him with undisguised horror. Worst of all, he’s almost smiling, proud of himself for saving your lives, yes, but also massacring things that had once been human.

You can’t take the sight of it, the last proof that the Thomas you thought you knew is not remotely close to the Thomas in this room with you, and you turn frantically to the room behind you, searching for some sign of escape.

Thomas calls after you. “Y/N, you can’t leave.”

You almost double over with fear. It doesn’t sound like him, whatever has become of your friend. A cold certainty has tinged his syllables, making them darker than human. “No. I don’t know what you are, I don’t want this anymore.”

A scuffling of footsteps. He’s following you, or would, were you able to move at all. "No, wait– Y/N, look at me. Look at me. It's still me. Thomas. Still Thomas."

And when you do as told, you realize he’s right. This is still Thomas, but a different sort of Thomas. Thomas, glowing not because of the setting sun, but because of the lingering coils of flames still dancing around his palms and his face. Thomas, eyes wide, knowing things that you could never even dream of.

“How long have you had this?”

Thomas shrugs helplessly. “As long as I can remember. That isn’t that long, but–”

You cut him off, mind already whirring to make sense of this nonsense. “That’s how you got out of the Maze so quickly, isn’t it? Those– abilities?”

Thomas nods. “I could feel the way out. It would have driven me crazy if I didn’t go.”

You let out a shaky half-laugh. “Gally always did say there was something off about you.”

Thomas’ expression darkens almost immediately. “So he was right to fear me, then? To try to kill me?”

You consider this, then shake your head at last. “No. But he was right to worry.”

Thomas’ expression lightens microscopically. “And you? Are you worried now?”

You tilt your head to the side, considering this. “I’m worried about the Cranks. I’m worried that our friends might not have made it out alive. You, though? If you wanted us dead, you could have done it a long time ago. You’re my friend. Always have been.”

Human or not, Thomas still has the same tells as ever. You watch his shoulders drop, his brow clear. “I don’t want you dead. By the way.”

“I know,” you tell him, “You need me alive way too much for that.”

Thomas snorts. “That’s bold of you.”

“Is it?” You ask. 

Thomas takes your hand when you offer it to him, and he leads you out of the abandoned building, back into the streets of the city. Your friends are waiting for you. Less than a day’s worth of travel is between you and the Right Arm. For once, everything might be going according to plan. And, if it didn’t, it’s nice to know that you have someone more than capable of evening the scales on your side.

requested by @hope92100, i hope you enjoy!

The nothingness makes it easier to remember the lessons. He has so few concrete memories in his head that the day-to-day events stand out in bright highlighter neon. Thomas can remember the sensation of a pen but never what brand he liked best nor what he might have written with it. Thomas does not know if he has ever worked in a garden growing up, but he knows what seeds can become and that he hates being a Track-Hoe, so he focuses on the last bit instead.

It makes him lie awake at night, spending hours staring up at a sky utterly foreign to him in the hopes of remembering any more of it. The constellation over his nose could have been his favorite, once upon a time, it could have been taught to him by a mother or father, but now it is just a broad handful of stars somewhere beyond his reach.

With so little to fill his head except fear and paranoia of the day before, Thomas is forced to conjure up something better worth his imagination, and more often than not, that happy thing becomes Y/N. Y/N is probably what Thomas will become sooner or later, once the initial rush of finding himself in the Glade wears off and he just grows sick of everything in sight.

Y/N has been here longer than most everyone here. The only rivals she has in terms of tenure would be Alby or the dead boys lying in a grave somewhere in the Deadheads. All that time stuck in these stone walls, and it taught her the importance of never getting your hopes up. Thomas met her the first time and thought that he might make it his goal to get her to smile.

He reached that after a few days, but that didn’t stop him from trying again and again. So what if Y/N is a realist who’s given up on dreaming of a way to get out of here, Thomas has enough heart for both of them and he’ll wield it just the same. Thomas sidles up to her at meals and tells terrible jokes until she has to sip at her water to hide a smile. He listens to her talk about everything that goes wrong in the Glade and intersperses recollections of what went well that day as well.

Slowly, surely, Thomas swears that she’s coming over to his side. He can win her friendship like a battle, a round of cards, anything he can make his own with enough dumb luck and a good few twists of fate. He’s come closer than anyone else, so that surely should count for something, right?

Thomas knows he’s getting there when the other kids start intervening. Minho takes it upon himself to tell Thomas that this whole thing is a lost cause. Been there, done that, Minho says one day while they’re out mapping a sector of the Glade, you’re going to have to give up eventually, and you know that. Y/N doesn’t want to suddenly become an optimist. It’s not going to happen.

I don’t want her to suddenly become an optimist, Thomas argues back, I just want her to like being around me even if I’m one.

Later that day, while they were taking one of their few much-needed breaks, Thomas had dared to ask Minho more in between desperate sips of water.

You knew her at the start, didn’t you? What was she like? He’d prompted.

Minho had sighed, stared at the water in his hands. She was like you. I never thought she’d give up on the hope that we’d get of here, and then she did.

Thomas had pushed for more details on just what had happened to change Y/N’s mind, but he hadn’t been able to get any additional facts out of Minho other than a recollection of several Gladers lost without any monumental change in their slow slog towards getting answers out of the Maze.

Mainly, though, what had done Y/N in was time. She’s spent three years here now, three years without any sign that they’ll ever leave. Fine, then, Thomas decides. If Y/N can’t see a world in which they ever get out of here, he’ll forge a new one just to make her eyes light up again.

He’s good on his word, too. When Thomas finds the way out, when their entire way of life goes awry and Gally tries to exert his control over the Glade, Thomas fights his way out with his friends. He shows Y/N the door out of the Maze, and he takes her through it.

Thomas doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to forget the look on her face when they step out into the sunlight for the first time. The sun was still there in the Glade, obviously, but it isn’t the same when you can feel the shadows of the Maze walls on your back with every other breath. Out there in the real world, though, that was something else altogether.

It was good, even when they were fighting for their lives in the Scorch. They spent their days terrified of Crank activity, but when the sun sank beneath the horizon and they were finally able to rest in whatever meager shelter that crossed their path, Thomas looked at Y/N and he knew that her hope was back. It was enough to make him keep fighting for a better life. It was enough to make him feel infallible.

And they did it, didn’t they? They found their way out. Thomas is reminiscing about old, worse times from his hut in the Safe Haven, far away from harm. Cranks cannot reach them here, nor WICKED, nor anyone else. He is here with his friends and Y/N, and he could not want for anyone else.

The final fights were the worst of Thomas’ life. He lost allies, but he saved some, too. Thomas doesn’t know that he’ll ever experience a fear quite like the one ricocheting through his chest when Newt was bitten. For a few horrific minutes there, Thomas had thought that he might lose him, the one friend he’d had from the very start. 

Minho had made it back in time with the cure, though, and then Newt was blinking up at him with shocked eyes and asking what had happened. Thomas hadn’t been able to answer him, not for a while. He remembers standing there, clutching Y/N for support, knowing that without her there he might have collapsed to the ground by Newt’s side.

That was Y/N for him, Thomas supposes. Whenever he was low, she was high. They complemented each other perfectly. He held out hope when she couldn’t, and when he was in danger of losing himself, Y/N pulled him back from the brink. Survival does horrible things to us all, but sometimes it gives you salvation in the form of people. Y/N is his people. Y/N is all he has ever needed.

Y/N was the one Thomas was thinking about when he was fleeing Janson through a burning city. Y/N was the name on his mind when Thomas caught Teresa just before the roof caved in. When the explosion hit him too hard and Thomas passed out on the Berg carrying them away, her face was the last one that flashed through his head.

It is all okay, though. They have lived through the horrors, the desolation, the grief. All that is left for them now is a quiet sort of ending, an epilogue in which the heroes win and the villains are forgotten. Thomas rises with the sun and goes to bed with the moon, and slowly, carefully, he heals.

They do that together, too. Thomas hands over leadership duties of the new settlement to the others; he wants no part of that now, no forced maturity of any kind, and he runs away to the one person who will always want him now. It’s funny, looking back on the Glade, how Thomas had always operated with this slight fear that Y/N was just humoring him because they were both stuck in the same place. He knows now for a fact that was never the case.

She’s told him as much, both directly and through the little things. He picks a wildflower out of surprise that such a colorful thing could idly grow on the side of the road and she tucks it behind her ear for the rest of the day. He wakes with nightmares and she holds him until the dreams become just that, just dreams, just memories which can no longer touch him.

Thomas thinks for the first time that growing old sounds like something that he can finally ignore. In the Glade and Scorch, the thought of making it to infirmity was something of a dream, an impossibility he would never reach. Right now, though, Thomas wants all the time he can get his hands on. He’s desperate for it, greedy and drunk on every moment. He loves the little things. He is enchanted by the big events. All of it is his, and all of it is beautiful.

He finds Y/N in the mornings, the evenings, the afternoons. They walk until their feet ache and sleep until the sun has climbed far too high in the sky, laugh and cry and live. It is nothing like what he thought growing up would be like, but then again, he never thought he’d make it far enough to judge. Right now, he is happy.

Very happy. He turns to Y/N as they’re sitting by the edge of the water and tells some sort of stupid joke. He’s been prone to them recently, like some inner comedian has suddenly remembered it exists and dusted itself off for its fair share in his personality. Maybe the Thomas before the Maze liked being funny. He’s never had enough time to figure out who that was at all.

Thomas waits for Y/N to say what she usually says in response to his attempts at being funny:  laugh along, maybe, or swat him on the shoulder, or come up with an even better joke just to make fun of him.

Instead, she rolls her eyes fondly. “That was awful.”

“Great,” Thomas corrects, “I think you mean it was great.”

“I certainly do not,” she says, smiling, “Remind me again why I love you?”

It’s late in the evening, maybe she’s tired, maybe that’s why she slips up and says something like that. Neither of them have been willing in any way to put a name on what they have or what they feel, but it occurs to Thomas that he wants that label more than anything he’s ever wanted before.

Y/N’s face looks tight, as if the skin has been yanked up on her bones to expose the skeleton beneath. She starts talking about something else quickly, the words tumbling out in an attempt to hide what had been said before. It doesn’t matter, though, Thomas knows what he heard and he adores it.

“I love you too,” he says. He feels like shouting it.

Y/N stares at him. “What?”

“I love you,” he answers her. “I love you. And you totally knew that, by the way. You’ve known that all along, so you do not get to just pretend like that didn’t happen. I know what you said. Also, I want it remembered from here on out that you said ‘I love you first.’”

Y/N gives him a look, but she can’t stop her lips from twisting up into a grin, so even her fiercest glares can’t weather him in the slightest. “Why does the order of who said what first even matter?”

“Who knows?” Thomas says, shrugging as casually as he can, “Probably that you’re just, you know, obsessed with me or something. I wouldn’t blame you.”

This time Y/N does swat him, but she kisses him too, so Thomas supposes she could be forgiven. He already has. He’d do it in a heartbeat, even if she was stabbing him through the chest instead of toying with him. He loves her. He loves her, and he won’t do anything else but that.

requested by @hope92100, i hope you enjoy!

Thomas has always liked questions. The other Gladers could tell him that much, what from the way he used to never stop asking about the most benign details of the Maze. Thomas has never had much to hold against the truth:  as long as curiosity is his best friend, he doesn’t get stuck in that ugly, familiar pattern of giving up before answers are found.

Right now, though, Thomas thinks that he would prefer to shut his eyes again. If he blocks out the world, if he pretends that everything is fine and nothing has changed at all, maybe everything will go back to normal. Maybe he’ll wake up and Y/N will be just the same as ever.

The change happened slowly, piece by piece and fracture by fracture. The Scorch ruined them all, that much is clear, but it did something worse to Y/N. She stalks through the desert like a predator waiting to hunt, and when they face something or someone they have to fight, she becomes a person Thomas has never seen before. She loses some part of herself with every bit of danger that crosses her path. At some point, there will be nothing left, and that is what scares Thomas the most.

She wasn’t always like this. Thomas only had a brief period in the Glade before things turned sour, or at least more sour than life trapped within the stone walls of the Maze with no memories save his own name. In that short time, though, Thomas met Y/N, and he liked what he saw enough to fall in love.

It was easy, falling. Easier than breathing. Easier than dying. She laughed, and the world laughed with her. Thomas watched as Runners dragged themselves out of the Maze, burned out on what their meager lives had to offer, but one conversation with Y/N had them smiling like nothing was the matter. She was the only one who could talk Gally out of a foul temper every time he wanted to start a fight. Well, every time but one, down in the depths of the ruined W.I.C.K.E.D. structure, but no one likes to think about that.

Even Thomas, terrified out of his mind that nothing made sense when he was certain that it should, wasn’t immune to Y/N’s optimism. He remembers sitting with her out on the grass, watching the sun set. There were moments on Bonfire Night when he knew he would give her the world, and early mornings just before he set out for the Maze in which one look her way gave Thomas the courage of thousands of men.

It was good back then, and Thomas wishes he had the hindsight to appreciate that before they escaped. Something happened in between their journey out of the Maze and the present day, something to turn Y/N’s ever-present grin into a deadly glare. She doesn’t smile like she used to, she doesn’t smile at all. It’s rare that she’ll speak more than a few words at a time, and those are always tinged with a foreign cruelty.

Thomas has racked his brain about a thousand times, searching for clues he never picked up to explain the change in Y/N’s behavior. Every time, though, he comes up short. If Grievers and memory loss couldn’t shake her, why this? What do the shifting sands of the Scorch hold to torment her so?

He still holds out hope that maybe they’ll make it to a safe place and Y/N’s fierce temper will leave her. One day far in the future, Thomas could wake up to her laughing just like before. It could be alright. The others have given up on that, but Thomas holds on.

Then again, the others don’t share in the love that Thomas feels for Y/N, so maybe that explains it. He’s heard the Gladers murmuring when Y/N isn’t around, shunning her cold eyes and curled fists. Thomas wants to defend her, but he gets the feeling that she almost enjoys her new reputation, using it as a shield to block out the rest of the world. If her friends can’t stand her, then surely her enemies will all but run the other way.

They need to count on her loyalty, though, and given all the changes to Y/N’s character, Thomas knows the others doubt even that. There is no time for second guessing friends turned into foes, there are already far more villains than anyone could ever need.

The small, struggling group of Gladers has to pass through a section of a Flare-ravaged city. Skyscrapers that must have been impressive once upon a time are broken and bloodied by rust now, bits and pieces disappearing by the day. The metal has lost its shine, the glass stripped of all but its ability to cut through flesh like butter. Everywhere Thomas looks, he sees places where maniacs could hide, or sharp chunks of debris that could be used as weapons. 

It’s not on his bucket list of dream destinations, to say the least, but they have no other choice. Circumnavigating this broken metropolis would take them days they don’t have. If they don’t reach the hideout of the Right Arm in time, they’ll all die in this godforsaken desert. The Gladers can risk a few Crank attacks if it means making it to a source of potential allies.

That’s what they tell themselves, at least. Still, Thomas doesn’t miss the way the group draws into itself, shoulders brushing against shoulders as they pretend they’re not half so scared as they actually are. Every time the wind whips around a desiccating office building, sending rivets and bolts scurrying down the road, everyone jumps about a foot.

One uneasy night and day later, they’re almost out. Thomas has just started to formulate the trembling hope that they might be able to pass through without incident when he starts seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. Shadowy creatures jump back into obscurity whenever he cranes his head for a better look, but the second Thomas redirects his gaze towards the road ahead, they creep back out again.

The others see it too, Thomas can tell. They all shift closer and closer together until they’re practically walking into each other with every step. Still, it’s better than the alternative. Somehow, he gets the feeling that naming those silhouettes aloud would finally allow them to charge.

Even with the maintained silence, the figures in the shadows don’t care much for inactivity. The bounds of the city are just in sight when the shapes start making noise. The streets echo with it, a cacophony of clicks and jeers, howls and coughs. The unearthly symphony makes Thomas shudder, cold slicking over his spine like fingers made of ice.

Thomas just has enough time to think that it sounds like a war cry when the silhouettes give up their lurking and pounce. Cranks appear out of nowhere, sprinting towards the Gladers with all the speed that complete and utter insanity gives you. Thomas sees some figures so damaged by time and the elements that bones poke out of their legs, but they still run like they’re competing for a national title.

Minho shouts for everyone to go, go, but it’s not like anyone wants to stick around. The Gladers hurl themselves towards the city limits; most Cranks are territorial, they give up the chase once prey heads further into the desert. That’ll be their only hope. Thomas picks up the rear, dragging friends forward when they stumble and praying that they all make it.

This side of the city is surrounded by a low wall, most likely to keep Cranks out. Now it just serves to keep sane humans in. Minho turns towards a section that’s started to crumble and jumps up with ease, perching on top to start hauling people over. It’s slow going, though, and the Cranks aren’t giving up their chase.

Thomas picks up a fallen piece of metal scaffolding by his side, swinging it experimentally like a baseball bat before turning to face the oncoming mass of Cranks. The first few go down easily, but the numbers aren’t in his favor. Someone joins the fight on his side, thankfully, and Thomas dodges a blow before turning to see who’s sticking their neck out to keep the creatures at bay.

To his surprise, it’s Y/N. She faces down the Cranks, expression grim but determined. She also wields a chunk of debris, and Thomas watches as she impales a nearby Crank before finding another victim. Thomas has a vague, fleeting memory of Winston joking about how Y/N always got totally grossed out by the amount of blood the Slicers had to deal with. Now, she’s chopping through Cranks like they were those same farm animals doomed to the blade.

Minho shouts to the two of them, and they abandon the fight to scale the wall as well. Once in the desert, the Gladers continue running, but they slow down once it’s clear that the Cranks won’t be following. Hands on his knees, Thomas catches his breath. He looks over at Y/N, searching her face for some sign of kindness. After all, she just risked herself to protect him against those Cranks.

All he sees, though, is that same blank pessimism that’s come to haunt him. Y/N catches him looking and eyes him coolly for a moment before deciding that even the endless sands hold better entertainment and turning away. Thomas is left to wonder why she would care enough to save his life but not enough to reward him with a smile.

Dusk rushes upon the land, making further travel impossible. The city had been in their way, and now they’ll need the light of morning to illuminate where they should travel next. There are a few buildings past the wall, twisting remnants of the city. Thomas recommends that they stay the night in that shelter, as it’s the best they’ll get for a while. Even after he closes his eyes, Thomas swears he can still feel the shadow of the infected city looming over him, practically breathing down his back.

It makes sleep impossible, to say the least. Eventually, Thomas gives up on fidgeting from side to side in the hopes of unconsciousness and quietly gets up, retreating to another hall in their temporary hideout to refrain from waking the others. His pulse skyrockets when he hears a noise, but he’s able to settle once it grows obvious that the source is not a Crank but another Glader. Clearly, he wasn’t the only one unable to fall asleep.

Thomas draws closer to the source of the sound. He heads into a nearby room and spots a silhouette crouching in the corner. A broken out window lets moonlight race through the cracks and towards the other occupant. Thomas blinks, and he realizes it’s Y/N. Y/N is not doing well, though. Something is wrong. The tones of her skin are different, darker in places than expected.

It’s hard to see, what with the shadows still pressing ominously around everything, but Thomas thinks– yes, it is, that’s blood covering almost half of her body. The scarlet stuff is practically painted on her, palms up to the elbows, dotting her face like gruesome freckles. He realizes that she must have gone back to the city and rid it of its mad occupants once and for all.

Y/N is staring back at him now, daring him to say something. Thomas swallows hard and tries not to sound too horrified. It’s not an easy task.

“I’m not sure it’s the best thing to be so covered in Crank blood,” he manages to choke out at last.

Y/N just laughs. It’s a bitter, harsh sound, and it reminds him a little too much of the shrieks and giggles of the infected. “I’m immune, Thomas, it doesn’t matter. They can’t do anything to me but die.”

“Still,” Thomas begins, but his courage fractures. Still, she shouldn’t tempt fate by being so careless around potential pathogens. Still, she shouldn’t be this far removed from someone Thomas knew without even falling victim to the Flare.

Y/N stands slowly, and it takes everything in him for Thomas to not flinch. “Go ahead, judge me. Say what you want. I know you and the rest have been too afraid to mention it to my face, but you can’t keep it back forever. You hate me. You’re scared of me. Just say it.”

Thomas shakes his head. “I’m not scared of you. I just miss you.”

Y/N spreads her arms. The gesture is meant to be welcoming, but Thomas can’t stop staring at the blood dried across her skin. “I’m right here, Thomas. I haven’t gone anywhere.”

“You have,” he whispers back, “the girl I met back in the Glade, she’s gone. I think you left her there. I don’t know who you are anymore, but she’s not my friend.”

Y/N draws back as if slapped. “I’m still me. You might not like it, but I’m me. I changed to survive. We all did. It’s not my fault if you want to keep clinging to an illusion. This is who I have to be if I want to live.”

“And what about the inhabitants of that city?” Thomas asks pointedly, “Didn’t they want to live?”

Y/N gives him a cross look. “They wanted to live before they became Cranks. I’m making sure people who come after us will find a safe place to hide from everyone else. You can go on believing in fairytales, but at least one of us had to grow up. Maybe it had to be me.”

Thomas sighs, the ghost of the sound circling the two of them on disappointed, broken wings. “I don’t want to believe in fairytales, Y/N. I just want to believe in you.”

“Then do it,” she says softly.

“I wish I could,” Thomas replies.

It’s quiet for a minute. Thomas thinks she might hate him. Then, her voice comes again, barely discernible in the darkened room.

“Did you love me?” A pause. “Back in the Glade. Did you love me then?”

Thomas’ throat feels tight. “I loved you then, and I love you now. I just need to know that you’re not going to leave.”

“Not more than I have, you mean,” Y/N corrects.

“Yes.” Thomas puts it plainly.

They both know what it means, how far Y/N has gone from the girl he once knew. For once, though, Thomas thinks that he might have made some headway in correcting her course.

Y/N stares at her hands, starting to rub them together as if trying to wash the red from her skin. “I can’t get it out. The blood.”

“I’ll help you clean it,” Thomas answers her unspoken plea, “I’ll help you today, and every other day after that. You just have to let me do it.”

Y/N looks up at him now, and seems to question something before nodding at last. “I will.”

It’s as close as she’ll get to an apology for now. Maybe later, once the dangers settle, they’ll have a better ending. Thomas is happy with this, though. In a world such as theirs, it’s all they can ask for. They can try again.

requested by @hope92100, i hope you enjoy!