The room is smoky, the fire alarm dangling from the ceiling by a green and yellow wire, batteries slid out of place and glinting in the light from Newt's laptop on the desk. Thomas's phone buzzes, an alarm in Morse code, to remind him he has things he's supposed to deal with. The idea of responsibility is oddly hilarious at the moment and he snickers, sliding the phone away, snorting when it thunks into the wall.
Newt rolls over onto his stomach, propping himself on his elbows and looking down at Thomas. Looming.
"Who is it this time? Teresa or Brenda?"
"I honestly don't give a shuck," Thomas shakes his head, reaching up to rub Newt's fuzzy head, barely plushy after the shaving incident a few weeks before.
"That's not a bloody good sign, is it?" Newt rolls the end of his joint between two fingers, touching it to the tip of Thomas's nose. "I had ten quid on you finally deciding by tomorrow. If you miss that deadline, buggin' Minho wins and I don't want to deal with his gloating. Do you?"
"You have a pool going?"
"It's boring without my own sex life to worry about."
"Minho is right, you know," Thomas plucks the joint from his friend's hand, fumbling with his lighter for a hilarious moment before striking the end of the paper and taking a deep breath. "You could get mad lucky with the whole cancer angle."
"Oh yes, everyone's favorite. The old 'I'm dying, fuck me before it's too late'." Newt shakes his head, "I'm not in the business of collecting pity shags."
"Too bad," Thomas holds the joint up to Newt's lips and he inhales, holding the smoke for a second before exhaling it through his nose. It stings Thomas's eyes and he laughs. "Are you hungry yet? Isn't this supposed to make you hungry?"
"I'm not ready to face the kitchen just yet," Newt rests his chin on Thomas's forehead for a second before sighing, biting his lip and blinking too slowly. "Frypan keeps trying to feed me. It freaks me out. I don't buggin' like it."
"He keeps trying to give me things to bring to you."
"Good that," Newt frowns, his head sagging, his forehead pressing against Thomas's. "Can we…change the subject? If I recall, this was originally me teasing you about your confusing taste in women."
"It's not confusing." Thomas closes his eyes, chewing on the inside of his cheek, like the pain will make it easier to think. Somehow it's so hard. It's probably the smoke, just the haze in his mind taking over. It has nothing to do with Newt. That's insane. "You're just jealous."
"That's funny, Tommy," Newt brushes his hair way from his forehead and the room feels warmer than it already did. Sweltering. Burning, like he's leaning over a fire. "And actually, I'm not jealous of your issues with women. I'm betting on them."
Thomas stares at his friend for a moment, and maybe it's the haze. Maybe it's the smoke, but he continues anyway, "what's the bet against me?"
"What does that bloody nonsense mean?"
"It means—what if I choose neither? How much money do you get then?"
"If you choose neither, I don't give a damn," Newt stamps out the joint on the ashtray, inhaling the smoky air and closing his eyes. "Why would I?"
"Money."
"I've never given a klunk about money, you know that," Newt leans down, too suddenly, too close, and presses his lips against Thomas's.
It's too warm. Too close. Thomas feels like he's going to explode at Newt's touch, the glancing contact of Newt's skin against his. This isn't what kissing feels like. This isn't mechanical and predictable and believable. This isn't the next step of something that was always, obviously moving forward. This is lightning. Lightning and fire and ice. This is impossible. Thomas kisses back with everything he understands, his hand dragging across Newt's fuzzy scalp, his fingers against the nape of Newt's neck.
"Shuck, I'm…I'm acting like a shucking crank," Newt pulls away, his accent thicker, like he's dragging all of the vowels through the moment's unusually heavy air.
Thomas wants to say no. Suddenly, powerfully. He wants to rebel, to tell Newt that he wanted it. He wanted every second of it. He wants more of it, in fact. He wants all the kisses he can worm his way into.
He can't say any of those things. For a million, complicated reasons, he's trapped, his mouth flapping uselessly. His heart pounding painfully against his chest.
"Shuck," he whispers, locked in by Newt's upside down, wide, chocolate eyes.
"Yeah," Newt sits up, his head blurring from view like a speeding racecar. It's funny, for some reason, and Thomas laughs, rolling to his front and sitting, leaning on his hand hard enough that it felt weak. Out of practice. "That about sums it up."
Thomas looks at his friend, tries to ignore the still tingling heat in his cheeks. Newt's expression is ambiguous, all sorts of fear and anger flitting across it in waves. Thomas looks for regret, a strange bubble of warmth swelling in his chest when he doesn't find it.
"I'm starving." He takes a deep breath of the smoky air. "And if you don't come down to eat with me, I'm pretty sure Frypan is going to force feed me twice as much so I come up here and feed you like a mother bird, so you should probably come with me."
"What? Next are you going to make me eat my shucking vegetables?" He sounds like Chuck and the imitation game has gone full circle.
"I just said I didn't want to be your mother bird. Let's go." Thomas stands up, offering his hand to his friend and ignoring the jolt when Newt takes it. He probably shouldn't smoke anymore. It makes everything feel funny and too intense. That kiss was…that kiss was probably what DARE warned him about. Don't do drugs or you'll make out with one of your best friends and like it.
And wouldn't that be unfortunate?
Thomas helps Newt to his feet, clapping him on the shoulder and dropping his hand. He doesn't feel lighter, but that's not saying much, given the starting point. Thomas misses just worrying about school and unbeatable video games and his brother sleeping over every other night. Worrying about Newt is worse than all of that. It's heavy, dragging across his every thought like molasses, polluting everything with a strange, foggy listlessness. If he thinks too hard about the monster in his best friend's brain, his whole life starts to look like this room. Foggy, paranoid, filled with feelings it shouldn't be.
Newt bends over suddenly, and Thomas jolts forward, one hand on his friend's stomach as he tries to pull him up straight. Newt shoves him off with a hand on his chest, brushing Thomas's touch off of his shirt and handing him his phone, which he'd completely forgotten about, unread texts and all.
"I wasn't keeling over," Newt frowns, a frown full of heat and anger that can't seem to push past the surface. "You should probably check that. Whoever it is texted again."
"Right," Thomas says slowly.
Newt runs a hand across his own fuzzy head, like he's trying to arrange hair that isn't there anymore, and his shoulders slump slightly. He glances at Thomas, cheeks flushed, radiating embarrassment like an aura.
"I wouldn't tell anyone—"
"You telling someone that we kissed is literally my smallest shucking problem. Let's go get something to eat." Newt laughs, a cartoonish guffaw that sounds entirely wrong, slamming the window open with entirely too much force. The smoke streams out as the cool night air flushes over them and Thomas blinks against it, his head clearing slightly.
He looks at his phone, it's a text from Brenda.
'SOS. Cops investigating break in.'
Thomas's heart drops to his stomach, to his knees, straight out of his feet and into the floor where it's frantic pounding shakes Thomas's whole frame, like an isolated earth quake. He looks up at Newt's back, disappearing down the hallway and around the corner. The loneliness is like a vice, pressing in on his temples, the problem he can't wrap his head around boxing him into a tiny little corner.
What he wouldn't give for it to be five minutes ago. Joking around about bets in a world where most things still seemed to make sense.
00000
"We'll just play it cool," Brenda's shrug is animated, like she's trying to show a satellite how completely, fanatically easy going she is. "They don't know it was us."
Thomas reads the e-mail from the school for what feels like the millionth time.
Dear Students,
Three weeks ago, two perpetrators who we now believe to be students broke into the Life Science's building and vandalized the fire escape. If you have any information on this crime, please report it to Detective Janson at campus police, and reward for the information will be discussed. This is a stain on our students' excellent reputation and needs to be addressed promptly.
Dean Paige
The words stab like individual threats into Thomas's chest. He's never even gotten a detention before, and now they're calling it vandalism.
"…Thomas," Brenda waves her hand in front of his face, "don't zone out on me, alright? It's going to be fine. There's nothing they can do. They wouldn't have sent this out if they had any idea it was us."
"Maybe we should just tell them," Thomas frowns, wondering if it's a test. If they know who did it, if the reward is some sort of reduced sentence for the crime.
His foster mother, one he had a few back, used to pull that trick all of the time. She'd line up all the kids she had at the time and try to get them to rat each other out. Whoever didn't talk would be punished, it didn't matter who did it. Chuck wouldn't ever talk, and when Thomas talked for him, she'd punish him anyway. Thomas took blame for a lot of things in those two years and it got them kicked out eventually when it involved a broken punch bowl that had belonged to the wretched woman's grandmother.
That foster parent was one of Thomas's least favorite, and one of the few he remembers so clearly he still gets angry when imagining their face. She fancied herself an economist, made the kids work in the context of supply and demand. The more they asked for something the less of it there was.
"Hey," Brenda says too sharply for her calm exterior, and Thomas feels closer to her than ever, looking at his own nerves reflected on her face. It's different than Teresa, Teresa would tell him what to do, Teresa would make this all seem obvious, but there's something about the confusion, the alarm in Brenda's face that makes him feel guilty for comparing the two. "They don't know. They can't."
"But what if they do?"
"If they do, it's all inevitable," she smirks, "so we might as well enjoy the time we have."
She has a way of making everything sound pressing, certain. Like she'll give him the answer. He accepts it for the moment, using it to smother the defiant nerves in his gut. She has to be right. They don't know. They couldn't. She loops her arm through his and steers them, "come on. I'm starving. Let's go get something to eat."
00000
Thomas knocks on Newt's door, chewing on the inside of his cheek and trying not to imagine the older boy being disappointed with him. Trying not to imagine his friend turning him in. That's all he can think about, Newt's lips curled with unfamiliar malice as he tells someone that Thomas wasn't home that night, that Newt covered for him. That he regrets it.
But not telling anyone is driving insane. His mind would win every single turning molehills into mountains competition that could ever be staged. He spent an hour before falling asleep last night just…staring at the e-mail, the promise of the reward, listening to Chuck's breathing and trying not to focus on the fact that he threw all of this away.
Newt opens the door, his face falling slightly when he sees Thomas. Great, exactly the reaction he was looking for.
"Yeah?" Newt leans on the doorframe, hand still locked on the edge of his door.
"I…I need advice on something," Thomas swallows, "and I need to tell you something. And can I come in?"
"Sure," Newt drags out the word slightly, staring at Thomas with that peculiar half frown and stepping back slowly from the doorframe. He cocks his head when Thomas steps inside, shutting the door behind him.
"Can I sit down?"
Newt gestures to his desk chair, sitting himself in the middle of his bed, cross-legged. The room is vaguely smoky and cold due to the open window. Half of a joint sits unfinished in the ashtray, a half eaten sandwich on a plate next to it. The whole room is vaguely in disarray, shoes on the floor, a pile of dirty clothes near the foot of the bed, like someone unceremoniously kicked them off.
"This is all very cryptic," Newt rubs his temple, the motion stiff and mechanical, like he does it very often and his heart isn't in it at all.
"Yeah," Thomas runs his hand through his hair, "it's…shuck."
"That's optimistic," Newt frowns at his lap. His hair is growing back with a vengeance, like it was personally offended by being cut so short, the ends that were so bristled two weeks ago now curling every which way.
Thomas fiddles with his phone, exhaling pointedly and clearing his throat, "did you get the email? About the vandalism."
"No," Newt is taken aback, blinking twice and shaking his head, "must have gotten lost somewhere in the bloody stack this morning—"
"They're talking about Brenda and my…date." Thomas blurts, the relief like a sucker punch to the gut, "She has a key to the building and I failed that quiz and she wanted me to go in and change it, but I didn't change it, and we had to bail out of the window because the cops showed up and I guess the fire escape got damaged and now they're looking for us and you covered for me before, but I don't see how it'll hold and—and I have no idea what to do."
Newt blinks, "good that."
"What?"
"That…right." Newt rubs his hands together, "wow." He grins, "Your cat burglar skills are klunk. That's why you study so shucking much, isn't it? You realized you'd have no chance making it as a bloody art thief."
"I'm not laughing," Thomas feels utterly defeated. It can only be a matter of time before someone puts together that he was there and then what?
"Tommy, we can figure this out."
The 'we' is reassuring, almost as reassuring as Newt's nickname for him. He still has at least one friend who will stand by him, one person who knows the truth but isn't staring at him like he's someone different now.
"They wouldn't have sent that e-mail if they had any idea who it was," Newt starts, numbering on his finger, "so they obviously have no idea you were involved. Do you know the exact damage caused to the building?"
"No, I didn't even know it was shucking broken. I bet it was that shank cop, making sure he had reason to catch us."
"So you didn't change your test and you have no buggin' idea what damage was done?"
"Yeah," Thomas's ears feel hot. The ball of snarled tension in his gut is unwinding slowly, his head suddenly aching from holding it so tightly together for so long. "But what if they figure it out?"
"Have you told anyone?" Newt shakes his head, "of course you haven't. You've been sneaking around for a bloody week looking like you were going to hit something. It's all a big shuck secret, isn't it?"
Thomas doesn't think to point out that now Newt knows. Of course Newt wouldn't tell. The idea of Newt going behind his back is so preposterous he can barely imagine it.
"And for the record, Tommy, it's vandalism, you didn't kill some shank in cold blood." He shakes his head and Thomas can't help but notice that Newt looks as bizarrely relieved as he feels. "If they can even tie you to it, which would be buggin' hard, given what they know. Brenda, sure, she has a key, but still, that makes the whole bloody idea of breaking and entering debatable."
"I'll lose my scholarship if they catch me."
Newt thinks on that for a second, chin in his hand, staring at the floor a foot in front of Thomas's shoes. He's putting the weight back on, that instant five pound loss that happened in the wake of his first treatment melting away, the sharp angles of his shoulders softening slightly. He looks back up at Thomas's face, narrowing his eyes slightly and smiling a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes.
"You know, with you stomping around in a shucking huff all week avoiding me, I thought you were carrying on about—" He seems to rethink it for a moment, holding his next word carefully, "about that kiss."
"Kiss?" Thomas barks a laugh, "no, not at all. That was just…a situation, and I got the text from Brenda about them filing a police report on the building and I guess I just…forgot."
"I bloody envy that about you, you know?" Newt picks up his joint and examines it like it's going to speak up and give him some answer. "You never sit around worrying about some shucking kiss when you've got more important klunk going on."
"There wasn't anything to worry about." Thomas remembers the kiss, now, in all of its strangeness. The hazy room, the gauzy feeling of his own limbs, the detachment from everything and everyone besides the boy across from him. It's like someone else's memory, honestly, a patchwork quilt of impossible passed down from someone else and reimagined crudely in his own brain.
"Good that," Newt lights his joint, taking a deep breath and releasing some of the smoke through his nostrils. "I thought I was going to have to kill you for turning me down."
"If they catch me, I might have to take you up on that," Thomas laughs, standing and crossing the room to sit next to Newt on his bed. He holds his hand out for the joint, because a week's worth of twisted, awful stress doesn't dissolve on its own.
"Tommy, if you want me to kill you, you're going to have to do a whole lot more than bloody kiss me."
00000
"What's wrong?" Teresa leans in close, textbooks forgotten, her hand on his knee. Her fingers are too warm, making him dizzy in the best way possible. He feels in that moment that he'd tell her anything and that her reaction couldn't be anything but the truth.
"Nothing," He shrugs, "I'm just tired."
"Have you been staying up with Newt?" She squeezes his knee.
"He doesn't sleep so well," Thomas shrugs, like it's not a big deal, but in the moment he's proud of something that only felt natural the night before. "I don't mind keeping him company."
"You're a good friend," she leans back down over her book, and he follows the sweeping line of her shoulders, her upper back. She tucks her hair behind her ear and smiles at him, "What?"
"Nothing," he leans forward and starts reading again.
He wants to tell her that she's pretty, but she already knows that, and there's a sort of beauty in the silence.
They read a few more minutes in silence, her fingers drumming out a slow beat on his knee, when the doubts start creeping back in. The chief of campus police came to the house last night to talk about the charges and it reeked of them getting closer. He can't get over the penetrating way Janson looked at him, like he could see right through the barricade of half-truths surrounding his alibi.
"What's up, Tom?" Teresa asks again, jostling her shoulder against his, "I always know when something is wrong, you can't hide it. Intuition," she presses her finger to his temple and it makes him smile.
"Eh," he grabs her hand just to hold it, his fingers curled around her palm. "I don't want to bother you with it."
"It's not bothering me, stupid," she kisses his cheek. "You can tell me anything."
He almost asks her then, what they are. He wants so badly to call her his girlfriend, and that's what he thinks she acts like, but he sees her too sporadically, is greeted too differently each time to be sure. He wonders what would happen if he kissed her.
"You know….you know that whole breaking and entering thing the school is investigating?" It's easier to tell her than it was to tell Newt because some part of him is sure she already knows. How could she not with the way she reads his mind?
"I hope they catch whoever did it," she glowers at the table.
"I mean, hardly anything got broken—"
"That doesn't matter. They broke in, they deserve to be punished, like anyone breaking the rules."
"What if I said it was me?" He winces as the words come out, wishing he'd held them back but knowing all the same it would have been futile. He needs to hear her judgement, to hear what he should believe. He needs the guidance. Not like Newt's 'lead a horse to water' technique, he wants someone to drown him in understanding, to make the last of his anxious worries go away.
"Hypothetically, I hope," she laughs, raising an eyebrow.
He launches into the whole story unthinking, telling her twice that he didn't change his test, that they didn't change anything in the office, that the jumped in and out in a moment and that was it. She stares at him disbelieving. Disappointed.
"Brenda used her key to open the building and help you cheat?"
"But we didn't change the tests," he reiterates. That part feels important to him, or maybe it's the only part still clinging to morality.
"It's hard to draw a line in the right place sometimes," she thinks so hard about it that it trips Thomas up, and he finds himself wondering what she means.
Does she mean she could have drawn a better line? Probably. And she probably could have. She's the one person that makes him feel so small, like he can't comprehend what he can't comprehend.
"It's not a line so much as a…maze," he laughs but instantly wishes he hadn't when she stares at him, through him, like he's disappearing in front of her.
"There's always a line somewhere."
He looks at his hands, feeling guilty for the first time since his and Brenda's mad sprint. Since then he's been angry and scared and anxious, but he hasn't been guilty. He hasn't felt that the eventual punishment fits the crime until now.
"How can you be so sure about things?"
"Someone has to be," she whispers before leaning in and kissing him, hand in his hair, tilting his head towards her. And it silences the questioning voice at the back of his head, the worry about telling her. She fills his senses with something better, restorative, filling in all of the cracks. A full patch job for body and mind.
00000
"Shuck," Thomas swears under his breath when Peach lands on a minigame spot with a delighted little twirl. He hates the minigames, he's awful at them, and they're close this time, in first, second and third in the last five turns.
"You've got it, Tommy," Newt sets down his controller, his hands landing bracingly on Thomas's shoulders. "It's just limbo. You can do this, just find your rhythm."
Thomas presses start and Newt drums a fingertip against his shoulder, trying to help.
"Come on, Greenie. We don't have all day," Minho is too focused, hunched forward, his elbows on his knees. It's just past midnight and the day hits Thomas all at once, the game in front of him suddenly impossible.
"Don't listen to him," Newt shakes Thomas's shoulders, "you can do it." He works his thumbs into the stress tight muscle behind Thomas's neck and his thumb stutters on the button. Princess Peach wails and almost falls. "Focus, Tommy, focus."
"Are we playing or not?"
Thomas redoubles his focus, hopping a bit unevenly forward. The music speeds up and so does Newt's finger, a metronome on his shoulder. He jostles the last limbo pole but scrapes through, hopping through the finish. Peach hoots, spinning in a circle.
"Nice," Newt drums his fist against Thomas's shoulders one last time before picking his controller back up and taking his turn. Minho gives Thomas a high five, his expression absent and focused all at once.
It's a two player game, Newt paired with the computer, and Minho taps his hand on the arm of the couch for a moment, "yo, Thomas, we have to win this."
"Go for it," Newt sets his controller down again, "I won't help." The two boys fist bump and Thomas shakes his head, trying to focus on the screen. "Let Minho steer," Newt cautions again, his hands back on Thomas's shoulders. "You have better luck if one person steers and the other focuses on speed."
"You never coach me like that," Minho smirks knowingly at the two of them, "ready, Greenie?"
"That's still not motivating," Thomas reaches around Newt to punch Minho in the ribs.
"Fine Princess," Minho shakes his head, "is that better?"
"Your Majesty works too," Thomas leans forward slightly, trying to focus on the TV in front of them. Newt's knuckles dig into a tight spot in his mid-back and he groans, leaning back into the touch in spite of himself.
Minho presses start and they're off sledding, racing around the competitor driven only by the computer. Luigi loses by a landslide, Yoshi steering him off of the path entirely around one of the sharper corners. Newt takes his hands away from Thomas's back, picking his controller up again and leaning forward, their sides pressed together more tightly than before. Thomas doesn't know why he's so aware of it, probably their elbows bumping together as they play, and he scoots slightly towards the arm of the couch, trying to make room.
Newt tucks one leg underneath his seat, his knee halfway on Thomas's lap.
The next few turns are relatively uneventful until Luigi lands on a minigame spot. Minho groans, "the computer is great at this one, shuck."
Luigi wins thirty coins, steals a star, and shoves Princess Peach off of the podium. Newt groans, Minho throws his controller across the room, pressing his hands to his eyes and swearing under his breath.
"We'll get you next time, Tommy," Newt shakes his head, grabbing Thomas's shoulders and shaking him slightly. His hands squeeze slightly once, twice, and Thomas stretches into it in spite of himself.
"We aren't playing with that slinthead Luigi anymore," Minho rubs his eyes one last time, "Lucky shank."
"We were close that time though," Thomas nods.
"Yeah, we've been close a million shucking times."
"That was good though, for your first real game," Newt's hands drag down a few inches, pressing into another sore muscle from that weekend's race.
"Peach suits you," Minho laughs, his eyes darting between whatever Newt's hands are doing and Thomas's face, his smile drooping slightly. "Come on, dude, we should get to bed. Morning practice tomorrow."
"I'm trying to give Chuck a few more solid hours," Thomas shrugs. Newt keeps rubbing and rubbing and Thomas's head lolls forward, chin against his chest.
"But he lost," Minho laughs a little too loudly at his own bad joke, standing and stretching with a wide yawn. "Why does he get the back rub? Why do you have to tease me like this, Newt?"
"He's the one that needs cheering up."
"I'll see you shanks in the morning," Minho says a little too slowly, a little too purposefully, pulling his phone out of his pocket on the way out of the room.
"Night, dear," Newt teases. Thomas's phone buzzes in his pocket and he shifts, setting his controller down. Newt finds a particularly tense part, rubbing in a small circle, and Thomas shivers.
"You really don't have to do that."
"Eh," Newt turns slightly, getting a better angle, "you said you were giving Chuck more sleep? That can't be fun, sharing a bed with your thirteen-year-old brother."
"We've had worse," Thomas shrugs, "there was a foster home a few years ago where one of the beds that was supposed to be ours actually belonged to the family's massive, evil dog. That thing would growl every time one of us rolled over. Chuck slept in a ball on the pillow for six months."
"I'm sorry, Tommy." He's quiet for a moment, his hands slowing down, the pressure easing. A strange sort of embarrassed heat blooms in Thomas's stomach and he shifts slightly in his seat, wondering why he let Newt do that, why it's conflicting. Why he's nervous about what Minho texted him. "You know, I'm not sleeping so well, new medication makes it feel like I'm covered in shucking ants if I sit still for a bleeding second, but if you wanted, you could sleep in my bed."
The offer exacerbates the strangeness and Thomas stiffens slightly, scratching the top of his head.
"Nah, you need your rest."
"I'm literally going to go upstairs and read in my bloody desk chair."
Thomas thinks about it for a second, earnestly, imagines what color Newt's sheets are, whether they're soft or pressed and crisp. He thinks about it a bit too hard, scooting away from Newt's touch and turning to face him with half of a shrug.
"Chuck would worry."
"Right, Chuck."
"Yeah, Chuck," Thomas feels a bit shaky as he stands, and he wipes mysteriously sweaty palms on his jeans as he takes a step towards the doorway. "I'll—I'll talk to you tomorrow, alright? At least try and get some sleep."
"You're cute when you're worried," Newt smiles a conflicted smile, like he can't quite figure something out. "G'night, Tommy."
"Yeah. Goodnight." Thomas pulls his phone out of his pocket on the way towards the stairs, a single text from Minho visible: Careful.
00000