First Maze Runner fic, very very new to this fandom, but this idea struck me and I ended up working on it for nanowrimo. It's big, it's probably going to be about 80k words big. It's a slow burn. It's angsty. I'm so excited to share it with you.
December
00000
It's easy to think of the tumor as a monster. As some foreign, awful thing eating away at Newt's life, at everything that he is. But really? It's a timer. It's a horrible clock that puts pressure on decisions no one is ready for.
The monster was probably already there when Thomas met Newt, sitting like a killer in wait, lounging around just behind the blonde boy's frontal lobe and biding its time until it was strong enough to make a difference. There was never Newt without the monster, not to Thomas. And maybe that's part of it, maybe that's part of this pounding in his chest, this sickly churning in his stomach, confusion and urgency and doubt mixed together in a toxic cocktail.
But he doesn't think so.
Yes, the monster is eating away at Newt. But it's like peeling an orange, revealing something fragile and important. Something to be savored.
And maybe there isn't a word for this, maybe it's something new and ambiguous as it feels. But there's not time to care about titles anymore, not with the monster tapping at its watch and counting down until…Until. There's no point in fretting, nothing but minutes and hours and months lost to confusion and denial and pointless, mind-numbing circles paced around Thomas's bedroom, thinking of the boy down the hall.
There's no point now in anything but action. The only thing to do is to seize the time Newt has—they have—left and spend it doing something other than pacing. Thomas rehearses something like a speech as he walks purposefully to his bedroom door, yanks it open and trots down the hallway, slowing by the stairs in hopes that the other boy's won't hear him over the sound of their movie. He knocks on Newt's door once. Twice. Trying not to think about the last time he was inside, kissing the other boy for all of the wrong reasons, blind to the right ones as he is now, but more determined to think instead of do.
Newt opens the door, blank faced, those steel vaults solid and impenetrable behind his eyes.
"Can I come in?"
"Why?"
"Because we don't have time to do this stupid shuck dance," it's the last thing Thomas expects to fall out of his mouth, given that his head is full of nothing but professions about the impermanence of life and how he has weird thoughts when Newt smiles.
"You're finally catching on, Tommy."
Thomas leans in and kisses him, and it's stupid and electric and a really shucking bad idea. But it's the only idea, the only way that anything can move forward and the only thing worth moving forward. His hand finds the back of Newt's neck and holds him close as Thomas steps into Newt's room, shutting the door behind them.
Newt pulls back, his breath shockingly cool against Thomas's cheek, "Why?"
"Because I would hate it if anyone else called me Tommy," he starts in a shaky voice, planting his lips against Newt's cheek. It's cheesy and stupid, and he feels like an idiot but it's worth it when Newt sighs, relaxing slightly, his forehead resting against Thomas's. Another kiss on the cheek, "because I can't make myself give a shuck about anything other than what's happening to you." Thomas's hand moves down to Newt's back, squarely between his too evident shoulder blades, pulling him into a hug so tight it would be painful if it weren't so unbelievably necessary, "because I can't think of any reason why not and you don't have time for me to waste coming up with one." Thomas tucks his face into the side of Newt's neck, because somehow this is too private, and it feels like such a good place to hide. A secure corner out in the open, a space where he won't be judged, where he doesn't have to be anyone better or smarter or braver than the mythical Tommy that only Newt seems to see. "Because it feels right even when nothing else does. Because I don't think I've ever loved anyone but Chuck, but I can't come up with another word for this."
"Tom—"
"And you know what else?" Thomas lets go all at once, instantly cold and idiotic as he paces the room just like he thought he didn't have time for. "I have all these stupid instincts. Whenever something happens, you're the first person I want to tell. When you're cold, I want to warm you up. I want to get you away from everything that's hurting you, and most of the time it's yourself!"
"I can't help this thing in my head!" It's too loud, Newt's eyes too wild, nearly glowing with their sudden burst of fury.
"But you don't think about anything else!" Thomas flops on the foot of Newt's bed, cradling his head in his hands. The bed is unmade, there's a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, a half-eaten bagel on the night stand. "I want to give you something else to think about."
Thomas looks up and swallows hard, "and I have no shucking idea why, but I want the something else to be me."
00000
September
00000
Thomas never really thought about joining a fraternity until he read his scholarship in whole. It would cover the dorms but not a meal plan, or a lump sum. And the Gamma Lambda Delta fraternity offers a joining discount to athletes and another joining discount to students with a GPA above a certain level and—and well after triple checking his math, he should be able to live in the house in a single room where his little brother Chuck can sleep over sometimes and if he lives on ramen and frozen waffles, the savings from his summer job should be enough.
He runs through the math again in his head, irrationally nervous when a pair of hands he doesn't recognize tie a blindfold behind his head with disconcerting efficiency. He knows hazing is a thing that only really happens in those awful lifetime movies his foster mom would watch on full volume at two in the morning, and he knows this is probably something stupid, but fight or flight thrums in his brain and erases everything else. He should run. He should rip this fabric off of his head and just fucking run. He knows in this terrifying moment that running is what he's good at and what he should be doing.
The smell of the room hits him all at once, cleaning solvent and something dusty, and the fact that he doesn't know any of these people hits him solidly in the chest. He could be entering into some violent secret society. He doesn't know anything but the rent is cheap and the two guys he talked to didn't kill him in the spot.
The crowd is laughing behind him, pauses punctuated with fluttering, anxious breaths of the new recruits. Thomas can feel his chest trembling and he barely resists the urge to rip off the blindfold.
"Calm the shuck down, Greenie," hands on his shoulders are surprisingly gentle, the disjointedly British voice in his ears low enough that the boys around him won't hear it. "We're taking you to the bloody basement, stop acting like you're about to beat every shank in the room and run for it."
"Do I have to be blindfolded—"
"Shhh," the voice is a whisper across his ear, and he shivers, a combination of dissipating fear and over concentrated adrenaline.
They march down to the basement, an intermingling of sure footed current fraternity members and stumbling pledges. The footsteps immediately behind Thomas are slightly uneven, a clomp-thump, clomp-thump, that somehow makes more sense of the size of the stairs than the even trudging in front of him. His mysterious guide pressing on his shoulders after he takes exactly three steps from the base of the stairs, signaling for him to stop.
"Alby's going to talk for a moment," the hands leave his shoulders, "then you can run away all you like."
"Pledges," a deep voice booms from the corner, electronically magnified and drawing stifled snickers from the crowd gathered behind the line of boys to either side of Thomas. "Welcome to the Glade. From this moment on, we will be your family. You will follow our rules and we will embrace you. And with this!"
Thomas is doused with freezing water that sucks the air out of his lungs. A boy down the row yelps, another swears. The water drips through Thomas's clothes, past his belt, tracing frigid lines down his legs and soaking his shoes. That's going to be fun to run in tomorrow.
Behind him, the crowd breaks into laughter and happy hoots. Thomas is clapped on the back by what feels like dozens of hands.
"You are baptized into the Glade!" The booming voice cuts out with a whistle of static and Thomas yanks instantly at the blindfold across his face, dropping the scrap of fabric to the ground and wiping still freezing water away from his forehead.
"Sorry about kidnapping you," a hand appears in front of him. A hand attached to a tall, lanky blonde boy who honestly looks some kind of apologetic beneath his grin. "I'm Newt."
"N-nice to m-meet you."
"The freezing water is bloody awful, isn't it?" He laughs, shaking Thomas's hand and wiping the residual clamminess on his jeans. "I don't know why Alby shucking insists on this klunk. Some shank back in his day made him to do it and he holds a buggin' grudge."
"What?"
"Sorry," Newt—and what kind of a name is that, in the first place?—shakes his head and grins, and it's the only thing that's really seemed friendly since Thomas left Chuck at his foster house with a long, reassuring hug. "The accent can't help make sense of all the Glader slang at once, can it? I was bloody confused myself, getting a bucket of water over my head with a bunch of prats calling me a shank."
Thomas's mouth flaps wordlessly for a second before he shakes his head, more ice cold water dribbling from his hair just when he thought he managed to warm it all to a tolerable temperature, "I'm Thomas."
"What was that? Tommy?" Newt leans in, hand to his ear, "couldn't hear you over all of the bloody shivering." He turns and calls over his shoulder, "hypothermia doesn't breed shucking brotherhood, Alby you shank."
"Uh, Thomas. Actually."
He leads Thomas towards the base of the stairs with a beckoning hand, and Thomas can't help but notice a slight asymmetry to his gait. The uneven steps on the stairs, "I'll show you to your room, Tommy, I'm assuming you want to change. Now you see why we told you shanks to leave your stuff outside, I guarantee there's one bloody greenie in there whose cell phone got soaked." Newt turns to him at the top of the stairs, "it's not you is it?"
"No," Thomas looks around the house, somehow stunned by it, stunned that he's living here, after ten years in foster homes and a month in the school's worst dorm, where mold crept down the wall of his filthy triple room.
It's painfully upper-middle class. High ceilings, a fifty inch TV in the living room across from a comfortable looking couch. Three or four well-loved game consoles he drooled over as a child are on the stand beneath it and the kitchen to his left shows clear signs of being cooked in. Two or three dirty plates in the sink, a pot drying on the rack.
"It's ok," Newt claps him on the back, "I was a bit gobsmacked myself when everyone wasn't doing a constant kegstand and drinking out of shucking red plastic cups."
"Sorry, I'm just—"
"S'alright," Newt leads to the front door, "I could tell you were a bit shell shocked down there, some people don't take too well to the whole, blindfolded to the basement douse with shucking freezing water. Some shanks think it's funny, but I think the whole…charade is a bit past bloody unnecessary. Where's your stuff?"
Thomas rifles through the stacks of suitcases and plastic bins on the lawn, yanking his duffel bag over his shoulder and shrugging, "this is it."
"Light packer," Newt holds his hand out for the bag and Thomas shakes his head. He wants to say that he's usually more talkative than this. He doesn't know why he's filled with the urge to assure Newt that he's not wasting his friendliness on a crazy mute.
"What's with all the slang?" Thomas blurts, his mind suddenly filling with questions as a few more boys leave through the front doors, most of them dry and grinning, a few more soaked and seemingly shocked that their ordeal is over.
"Glader thing," Newt starts leading the way back towards the house again, "no idea when it started, but we all pick it up after a few months, pretty shucking reliably. Makes swearing in front of the general public a good bit easier though." He grins over his shoulder as he starts to climb the stairs, his limp once again pronounced.
Thomas wants to ask him about it, but that's a question he's smart enough to swallow, "How long have you been here?"
"Two years," Newt shrugs, "I was a greenie my first year too. It's better than the dorms, definitely. My room is right down there, the loo straight across from the stairs, and you're down at the other end. A bit of a small room, but next year you can take over someone else's."
For someone who's never had their own room before, any sort of personal space sounds blissful and Thomas steps into the space behind Newt. There's a twin bedframe with a bare mattress pressed into the corner and Thomas sets his bag down on it.
"It's great."
"I take it you want to get changed," Newt flicks the light on, "but then you should come downstairs, there's a bit of a party starting."
"Yeah," Thomas nods, more questions blurring together under the fading veneer of general shock. "I'll be down in a few."
"See you then, Tommy." Newt claps him on the shoulder and Thomas can't quite bring himself to correct him.
Thomas hangs his clothes to dry over his bedframe and rifles for his suitcase for dry ones, dropping his stack of well-used sheets on the bed and yanking out a pair of jeans. Music starts up downstairs and voices fill the hallway, new boys moving into their rooms. The house is too big to be residential, obviously built by the school for exactly this purpose. There must be a dozen small bedrooms along the hallway and the basement looked similar, from what Thomas saw.
He takes a minute to change and dry his hair, standing by the doorway and taking in the peace of the tiny room. His room. The music downstairs sounds less foreboding all of a sudden, less intimidating, more like it's for him instead of against him.
He tugs on a clean tee shirt and closes the door behind him on the way downstairs. The room is still relatively empty, his new housemates relaxed and milling around two or three wet heads recognizable and nervous among the older, comfortable mass. Thomas walks downstairs, searching for a familiar face and seeing Newt in the corner talking to the tall black boy he met at recruitment. Newt smiles and waves him over, slinging an easy arm over his shoulders.
"Greenie, this is Alby, you have him to thank for the ice bath."
"When tradition falls apart, all of this klunk falls apart," Alby claps Thomas on the shoulder. "What's your name again, Greenie? I've got to get you on the chore schedule—"
"It's a party, Alby," Newt rolls his eyes, "can't it wait?" Newt leans in to talk closer to Thomas as someone turns the music up, "Alby just got elected president last week, keeps talking about shucking changes, I think it's all gone to his head." He raises his voice, talking to Alby too, "I'll introduce him around, get another greenie to start vacuuming."
Newt leads him around the party, introducing him to a blur of faces and names. Everyone has their jobs, their cliques, their majors. There's a cluster of architecture majors in the basement who apparently don't get along too well with the wannabe veterinarians they share space with. A sophomore named Gally stands out, only because he tells Thomas "to stay off of his turf", and so does Minho, a guy that Thomas knows of from cross country practice. They're talking about an upcoming race, Thomas getting more than a little lost in the 'Glader slang', when the door opens and a small group of girls walks in.
"Know any of them?" Minho asks with a knowing smile, looking over his shoulder at the group. Thomas frowns at the girl in the front, something about her hair ringing a bell, the contrast of it with the pale skin of her shoulders.
"I think I might."
The girl looks his way and cocks her head slightly, blue eyes squinting, confused, before springing open. She says something to her friends and slips through the crowd towards them, catching Thomas in an unexpected side hug.
"Thomas!" She yells over the music, smiling a particularly blinding smile and keeping her hand on his arm. "I had no idea you went to school here, why haven't I seen you around?"
"Right," Thomas nods, because he definitely does know her, and she obviously knows him. Newt pats his back and disappears into the thickening crowd with Minho.
"You don't remember me?" She smacks his arm, "third period English? Last year?"
"Right! Teresa, right?"
"Yes!" She laughs, "I'm glad to know I wasn't that invisible."
"Not invisible at all," Thomas laughs, because he wants her to stick around. "I was just always busy—"
"Yeah, yeah, busy being the best at everything," she moves closer to him so that he can hear her, "so you're a Glader now? I never would have picked you for the fraternity type."
"I didn't realize you were picking me for anything."
Her smile feels like home, like high school hallways that seem so welcome now that college is so big and daunting. His throat is dry looking at her and he swallows.
"Do you want to go get a drink?" She reads his mind, gesturing towards the kitchen and he shrugs and nods at the same time, an awkward word of jiggling that makes her laugh. She has a nice laugh, a familiar laugh, and he follows her.
00000
Thomas is late to chemistry lecture, slipping in through a side door and carefully easing the door closed behind him and sitting in the nearest seat. He pulls out his notebook and flips to the page for the last class. The girl beside him pushes her hood back, her feet kicked easily up on the chair in front of her as she grins at him.
"You haven't missed anything."
"Thanks."
She holds out her hand, "Brenda, by the way."
"Thomas," he shakes it, easing slightly into his seat. Brenda's backpack is zipped at her feet and she's watching the professor with half of her attention, nibbling on her fingernails and glancing sideways at Thomas.
"You're on the cross country team, right? I think I recognize you from one of those pictures of you winning." She doesn't say it like a compliment, and Thomas looks at her carefully, curiously. "I got the right guy?"
"Yeah, I'm on the cross country team, but I didn't realize the world was so inundated with pictures of me winning things."
"And somehow, your head remains normal sized," she grins, the expression mischievous on her face. With her short, messy hair and wide brown eyes, she looks like she hasn't realized she's grown up yet. "What's your major?"
"Pre-med," Thomas nods slowly, hating the sound of it the more times he says it. It's like someone else's idea of success, someone else's plan for him. Brenda nods slowly, tapping her heel against the back of the seat in front of her. Someone down the row glares and Thomas shrinks slightly in his seat.
"What? Shy even after posing for all those pictures?" She nudges him with her elbow, too friendly, everything about her tone teasing and familiar.
"I didn't pose."
"And you're photogenic too?" She shakes her head, "some people just have all the luck."
00000
Minho approaches Thomas outside of the locker room after practice, adjusting his bag on his shoulder, "Hey Greenie."
"Do you really have to call me that?"
"Seeing that you're a greenie," Minho falls into step beside him, and it's a different sort of comfortable than when they ran together earlier, more companionable when they can talk without wheezing. "I do. Newt and I were planning on hanging out, and he wanted to ask you this morning, apparently, but missed you, so I have to do his shucking dirty work." It's not real irritation in Minho's voice, but something hinting at a larger, more familiar relationship with the friendly blond.
"What are you guys doing?"
"Probably playing video games. Just unwinding from the week," he shrugs, "Newt thinks you're pissed at him or some klunk, for the whole ice bucket thing. At least you didn't have your shucking phone in your pocket."
"I'm not, I just don't know him—"
"You don't know anybody," Minho cuts him off. He has a way of saying things, kind and cruel all at once, and Thomas thinks he understands what tough love is supposed to be for the first time. "And Newt is literally the nicest shank on the planet. We've been friends since high school, I don't know if I would have gotten into the glade if it weren't for Newt. Shuck, I only joined the track team because he told me I should."
"You sound like you're selling him."
"I promised I'd get you to come," he knocks his elbow against Thomas's, "I could start selling myself but that might make things awkward when you couldn't resist and…well, you know how it goes."
"I don't know how it goes," Thomas shakes his head, "are you offering to show me?"
Minho punches his shoulder and he feigns kneeing the other boy in the stomach, and they walk back to the house together, a little more comfortable.
Newt is kicked back on the couch, the Nintendo 64 stretched under the coffee table so that its wired controllers reach the couch. He grins when he sees Thomas, scooting to make room for the two of them.
"I was inspired," he tells Minho, handing him one of the ancient, well-loved controllers. "I think I figured out how to beat this bloody thing."
"And what's the brilliant plan?" Minho flops down in the middle of the couch, his expression suddenly the steely mask Thomas recognizes from the starting line of their first big race.
"We haven't shucking played in a month, we need to keep trying."
"I wasn't expecting anything brilliant anyway," Minho rolls his eyes at Newt, looking up at Thomas. "We've been trying to beat the original Mario Party with the computers on difficult for two years. One of them always beats one of us."
"How many times have you two done this?" Thomas sits down on the open end of the couch beside Minho, laughing to himself at the abysmal graphics.
"Not enough," Minho watches the bright and peppy loading screen with an expression of such intense focus that Thomas half expects lasers to blast out of his eyes and blow the TV apart. "We obviously haven't cracked it yet."
"We've tried everything," Newt counts on his fingers, leaning back against the couch cushion and shifting back and forth, like a runner warming up for a race. "We've worked up to it, starting with the computer on easy, then medium, then difficult. We've played as every possible assortment of these shanks. We've tried every map. Twice."
"What about the computers—"
"Tried it, Tommy. We have the best luck against Mario and Luigi, but not by much."
"And I play like shuck without Wario," Minho glares at Thomas when he laughs. "Two years. We've been working on this for two years. We started it our first week on a whim but then some shank doesn't—"
"There's got to be a solution." Newt picks up the controller in front of him, thumbs stretched comfortably across the plastic. "It wouldn't be an option if there weren't a solution."
"Plus, we're still beating records." Minho shrugs, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
"Sign me up," Thomas reaches for a spare controller on the floor but Newt stops him with a stern hand on his arm.
"Have you ever played Mario Party, Tommy?" The blonde quirks his eyebrow, and Thomas feels like a kid trying to drive without a license. He swallows against a blush that appears for absolutely no reason. Minho snorts at him.
"I've played Mario Kart, with my brother. I've won on rainbow road."
"On wii?" Newt asks, all knowing, his head cocked slightly. Thomas shrugs.
"We'll practice later," Minho tosses Thomas a can of soda. "But right now, just try and learn something."
"You do take this seriously. I thought Alby was kidding." The president had cautioned the whole crop of greenies about the oldest console on their tour of the glade the morning after the party.
"Alby doesn't kid," Newt nudges his shoulder against Thomas's. "Hand me my drink, would you?"
Minho selects Wario, his face back to that mask of intense concentration as he looks towards Newt, who chooses Yoshi with a definitive twitch of his thumb.
"We've found we're better if we just play our favorites," he explains, Yoshi doing a little turn as Newt toggles the controller.
"And Newt is Yoshi, because they're both adorable little lizards." Minho pinches Newt's cheek. Newt shoves him off, fighting off a grin.
"Stop bloody showing off," Newt turns towards the TV, selecting Mario and Luigi as the computer's characters, difficult as the level.
"If we're not showing off, why did you invite an audience?" Minho grins at Thomas, elbowing Newt in the side and flicking through the first few maps. "Which map are we playing?"
"I don't give a shuck," Newt runs his hand over his face. "Let's just do this."
As ridiculous as this all is, Thomas can't help but admire his determination.
So. There will be a few pairings floating around for the first part of it...but I hope it's pretty clear where this is going...
