As Alby likes to tell greenies, There are only three rules in the Glade.
Don't go in the Maze; do your share; don't hurt the other Gladers. Newt's heard him give the speech a thousand times, don't go in the Maze, do your share, don't hurt another Glader.
Victor, a builder, came out of the box with an accent and with a couple words that nobody knew, words he didn't even know why he knew. Linguistic separation seemed kind of pointless, all things considered, so eventually the words got subsumed into the language of the Gladers. Not long after Victor first showed up, before his language because everyone's, he was talking with Alby and the others, Newt sitting on Alby's right-hand side like he always did, and Victor started to laugh.
"I just-" he broke off, breathless in his mirth. "I just realized this, is funny, Alby, I just realized." Exchanging a glance with Newt, Alby raised an eyebrow, and then Victor explained, "In my language, I don't know what to call it, but in my language –alba," he said, grinning. "Alba, like Alby." Alby narrowed his eyes at him and Victor lost his breath, wheezing in laughter, and said, "Alba means white."
They laughed at that, the rest of the Gladers around them. At first Alby, ever the stoic leader, only eyed Victor suspiciously, but then beside him Newt began to chuckle, and Alby glanced over at him. Newt elbowed him in the ribs. "Come on," he said lowly, "it's funny."
Alby didn't laugh until Newt was no longer looking at him.
The only halfway decent thing about the Maze walls is that, at night, at least, they're safe. No need to keep watch when a Griever can't get through giant stone-concrete eight feet strong. In the dead of night, the Glade lit up only by the light of the moon, the stars thrown haphazardly across the inky dark sky, no one is awake.
By the Deadheads, in the trees, two boys stay very quiet. Whether out of respect for the dead, fear of being found, or otherwise just because Alby never did like to talk too much, neither of them could very well say – if you asked, they would probably both claim different reasons. In the big picture, Newt supposed it didn't really matter, he would scream to alert all the Gladers or stay as silent as a rock, whatever it took to keep Alby with him, just for a few more minutes, just for the night.
As Alby's lips trailed down Newt's neck, catching his breath in his throat, Newt managed to murmur, "Admit it, Al, you thought it was funny."
This stopped the other boy in his tracks; even in the darkness, Newt could see Alby's judgmental gaze. "You mean Victor?"
"Yeah." Newt grinned at him, interlocking his fingers with Alby's, holding his hands tightly. "D'you think they knew what they were doing when they named you?"
Newt had expected Alby to reply with something stony and move on, but he didn't. For a moment, he didn't say anything at all, and then he leaned down and lowered his face to Newt's neck again, touching their skin together, both warm and flushed in the heat of the moment. He turned his head so that his lips whispered against Newt's pale skin, and Alby muttered, "You really think they named us, Newt?"
Somewhere within the walls of the Maze, a griever let out one of their piercing, moaning howls. It might have woken one of the other boys back at the Homestead, and any other night Alby might have been the one to go around, gently resting a hand on their shoulders, a comforting presence in the darkness. Tonight, Newt thought, still holding tightly onto the other boy's hands, tonight, someone else can do your job.
It was a rare moment of vulnerability, and Newt didn't know what to do, but he also knew that Alby had given him so much and cared for him too deeply for Newt to leave him without an answer. Letting go of one of Alby's hands, Newt gently placed his fingers on the other boy's face, lifted his chin up so that their eyes met, the whites of their eyes lit up by the silvery light of the moon. "Well," he answered, his gaze flickering down to Alby's dark lips. "I certainly hope they did, whoever they are. Otherwise I have to live with the idea of parents idiotic enough to settle their child with the misfortune of being called Newt." Grinning at Alby, he met the other boy's gaze, always heavy, always sagging under the weight of responsibility and the omnipresent fear. Gently, Newt leaned forward, pressed his lips against Alby's. For a moment, Alby stood there, stock-still against his touch. Then he softened, wrapping his arms around Newt's smaller body, drinking in Newt's warmth and breath like a dying man.
Like a dying man, like a fall which was meant to break more than Newt's leg and Alby's heart. Slowly, Alby's impenetrable veneer began to chip away, and he sunk deeper and deeper into Newt's touch. He shifted slightly, holding onto Newt's body, and Newt responded wordlessly, allowing the other boy's touch, his roaming hands, his warm fingertips even in the cool night-
And then, with a harsh gasp of breath, Newt's knee buckled; Alby only just managed to keep him upright, the hazy look in his eyes immediately evaporating. "Are you OK?" asked Alby, holding only Newt's arms now, keeping him on his feet.
"Shuck," hissed Newt, the pain in his leg spiking up his body, as if cutting right up his spine. "I'm all right," he said. "It hurts when I stand on it wrong, sometimes. That's all."
Newt refused to say any more, and Alby stood there for a moment, peering into the other boy's eyes. It had been some time since Newt retired as a runner, and since then he had been like a greenie again, bouncing between jobs, from Keeper to Keeper, doing what he could while nursing an injury which, and they all said this, all the Gladers, which he was lucky didn't put him out for good. Lucky, Newt thought, bitterly.
There are three rules in the Glades. Number one: don't go in the Maze. Unless you're a runner, Newt supposes, and Newt used to be a runner, but he'd ended up abusing that privilege. He wished he had never been a runner at all. There is nothing as endlessly hopeless and soul-draining as being a runner, as darting down dark passageways again and again, always the same in function but never in form. Every day, every day it changed, and it is only after weeks and months of nothing but horror and confusion and panting and soreness in your legs that you come to the real, full understanding of where you are. They are trapped, and there is no way out. Well. Newt thought he'd rather cleverly found an alternate route out, but that had failed him in the end, too.
The second rule: do your share. With a leg that didn't work and a pain he hadn't yet learned to ignore, Newt was practically useless, and yet they kept him up and they kept him busy, giving him tasks that nobody needed to do, just to keep him there with them. Newt wondered how much of that was the Gladers, collectively, and how much was Alby and Minho throwing their weight around at Gatherings, Gatherings which had been held without Newt, back when he stayed inside, healing his body and his head.
The third, and most important rule, the only thing that kept them alive, the only rule which managed to preserve order in such a wild place: do not hurt a fellow Glader.
Alby and Newt stood there in the nighttime, beside the place where they buried the friends whose bodies hadn't been claimed by the Grievers, and they said nothing. Newt's leg throbbed in pain, but Alby was too proud and too injured to kiss him better.
It was hard, leading so many kids, turning them into something productive, something strong, something that would survive. The harder thing, as Alby had learned, was spending so much effort, spending so much time and sweat and spilling blood over the cause – only to have Newt, who had come up out of the box shaking so hard that Alby had to hold him down to get him to stay still – Newt, who ran harder than all the other runners, who came back and fell to his knees, retching, as the Maze closed its massive doors behind him – Newt, who never lasted very long after he came back with the other runners, who had to go outside and sit in the fading light as they all did their work inside, because he could no longer stand the idea for searching for an exit when, shuck it, didn't they get it? – there was no way out…
The hardest thing about devising a system to keep these boys alive, Alby had found, was when one of them simply said, I don't want to anymore.
Newt had only seen Alby cry once, and that was when they were tending to Newt's injury in the Homestead, med-jacks attending to his awful, crushed leg. Newt was hardly conscious when Alby kissed him, but he was awake enough to know nothere, Alby, not with the others, what if they see…
Do not hurt a fellow Glader. If Alby had any sense, he would have put Newt in the ground long ago, buried him among the Deadheads, forced him into the Maze before dusk. It was only what Newt deserved, for breaking all three of the Glade's rules.
Much later, after the Flare took root in Newt's mind, a boy shot a gun, and the pain lasted only a moment, and then Newt was happy, because wasn't this exactly what he had wanted all along?
In the darkness, bathed in moonlight like that night beside the Deadheads, Alby was waiting for him.