Thomas jumps at Newt's voice cutting through the steamy bathroom, "hey Tommy, I mind if I come in for a second?"

"Uhh, sure?" Thomas adjusts the shower curtain, feeling suddenly, strangely self-conscious. He's an athlete, he's showered in public showers more times than private, probably, at least over the last four years, but the back of his neck prickles when Newt shuts the door behind him.

"Sorry, just need the sink for a moment." Newt brushes his teeth like he's taking something out on the toothbrush, spitting the toothpaste into the sink and washing it down. The shower temperature dips for a moment and Thomas crosses his arms, moving more fully under the stream. "I knocked, you know," he laughs, the sound high pitched and off kilter, "you just didn't answer."

"Yeah, I was washing my hair."

"Fuck," he mutters, "I forgot about my hair."

"What's wrong with your hair?" Thomas peeks out around the curtain in spite of himself, and Newt is bent forward over the counter, staring intently at his expression. He spots Thomas in the mirror and his lips twitch into a weak imitation of a smile.

"Skyping my parents in fifteen shucking minutes," he explains with a shrug, "bloody forgot about it until my warning alarm went off."

"Oh," Thomas wipes a dribble of water from his forehead, holding the curtain a little closer to his chest, leaning against the wall. "Why is skyping your parents such a big deal?"

"They haven't seen me since…" he glances at the toilet, "since I restarted chemo."

"Ah," Thomas shifts, his foot squeaking against the wet floor, reminding him all at once that he's in the shower, that this should be a strange conversation. "You're looking better, though."

"They don't know I shaved my buggin' head," Newt scratches the top of his head, too roughly, like he can grow his hair back all at once.

"Why would they care?"

His face darkens and he stares at the mirror again, like he's looking at a ghost. "Sort of rash, innit? Not my sanest thought, it didn't take me forty-eight bloody hours before I was pissed drunk and shaving my head."

"Technically, I shaved your head. Blame me."

Newt smiles at that, "thanks, Tommy."

"I don't see why they'd care though, really. It looks fine." It feels strange saying it, looking at Newt's appearance as a holistic sort of thing, like it matters, like it's something Thomas thinks about. The strangest part is that it isn't that strange, that he knows Newt looks better than he did a week ago, that his color is better, his cheeks less hollow. Thomas repositions the shower curtain across his chest, pinning it to the wall with his hip.

"You wouldn't call me…impulsive, would you?"

He thinks of the Newt he met when he first moved in, the Newt that warned him, the Newt that told him what was what. He thinks of Newt slamming around the kitchen because he smelled smoke that wasn't there, of Newt drunk and open and raw. He wonders which is real, how he could possibly draw a line between them. If there is a line it's blurry, zigging and zagging based on the day or the meds or something Thomas hasn't caught onto yet.

"Right," Newt sighs.

"No, you just—it's just when you get worked up about being sick, you get—"

"Cranky," he fills in, shifting between his feet. He looks down at his bad ankle and Thomas almost asks about it. "Yeah, bloody figures."

"You aren't—"

"Coming in here while you're in the buggin' shower, what the hell was I thinking," he pushes away from the counter, his limp worse than normal as he steps towards the door. For a mad moment, Thomas thinks about stopping him, about stepping out of the tub and grabbing his arm. He doesn't know what he'd say, but he wants to say something, wants to fix this problem.

Newt slams the door on his way out and Thomas stays in the shower a few minutes longer than he normally would. The water starts to go cold, the steam dripping down the mirror in hectic little rivulets as he finally turns the shower off and steps out to dry off. He wonders if it's the tumor, that makes Newt act strangely, or if it's just the looming threat of it. The clouds drifting over the mountains making him yearn for one last day in the sun.

He thinks about the way Newt says crank, about the venom behind it. He thinks about commercials for Make a Wish, cameras zooming in on sick kids at NFL games, the way they're always so wide eyed and hopeful. Maybe crank is something that comes after that, around that. When hoping gets to be too hard, when tomorrow is too uncertain and now seems like a way more boundless place.

And when it comes to Newt, Newt who thrives in the bounds of order, Newt who seems to like rules and the regimented problems that occur within them, that must be awful. Newt, who wanted to climb the ladder, to go step by step, suddenly realizing he won't have time that he'll have to stray from the road.

Thomas gets dressed feeling somber, strange, like he wants to finish their conversation but isn't really sure what they were talking about. He tosses his towel into his room before walking down the hall towards Newt's, pausing outside the open door when he hears voices.

"And you're taking all your meds? You're remembering every day?"

"Yes Mum," Newt sighs indulgently, and it occurs to Thomas that he isn't any better at taking orders than the rest of them. It makes Thomas smile and he creeps forward, leaning around the doorway. Newt is sitting at his desk, cradling his head in his hand, facing a computer screen with two people who look very much like him on it. His mother is worried, brow furrowed in a way Thomas has seen a million times on Newt's own face and his father is brushing crumbs out of a blonde moustache, the exact, particular color of Newt's own hair.

"And you're sleeping? And you're going to classes too, dear? You don't have to, you know, I'm sure your professors will understand, they wouldn't want you overtaxing yourself either. You don't need the stress—"

"It's handled, Mum."

"Don't be short with your mother, Isaac," his father chides affectionately, and Thomas can see it all in his mind's eye, Newt's parents sending him for a time out when he did something wrong, talking it through with him. Conflicting jealousy and admiration whirl all at once in Thomas's chest and he feels guilty for eaves-dropping. "It's all I can do to keep her from getting on a plane tomorrow."

"There's nothing you could do, anyway."

"The medication will work," there's an edge to his mother's voice. "What is it this time? Zoloft again? That made you awfully peaky last time, you need to keep your strength up—"

"Look at me," Newt holds his arms out from his sides, "I'm obviously keeping my bloody strength up."

"He gets this from you, dear," his mother shakes her head, a weak, sort of watery smile on her face.

"He's taking care of himself."

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here," Newt laughs but there's an edge to it, that familiar edge that always seems to accompany people discussing his head or his treatment or anything he doesn't want to talk about. "Minho is helping too, he's keeping an eye on me, Mum. And—and well, I've got people. I'm taking my meds. You should be worried about Gran anyway."

"I'm worried about both of you equally," she pronounces and Thomas can hear Newt's breathing in the silence that stretches.

"We really must be going," Newt's dad wraps his arm over his mom's shoulders in a bracing hug and Newt's back stiffens noticeably, his shirt stretched briefly across the breadth of his shoulders. "Told the home we'd be there in an hour."

"Say hi to Gran for me," Newt's finger hovers over his track pad while his parents say goodbye and he hangs up with a last 'I love you too' and a sigh. "How much did you hear?" He spins around and looks at Thomas, arms crossed.

"Not much."

"Dad thought the haircut was practical," Newt shakes his head, "sorry about that earlier, by the way, I just...I always build it up in my head to be buggin' worse than it ever shucking is."

Thomas lingers at the door for another second before stepping inside and sitting on the foot of Newt's bed. "They love you, I saw that much."

Newt looks at him, a lingering, steady sort of look, before moving to sit next to him, their knees barely touching. He stares at his hands, wringing them together on his lap, "I didn't handle this klunk very well before. The meds…it's like I'm not really myself. Sometimes. I know I'm being cranky, but I can't fix it. It's like I'm shucking yelling in a room full of people, but no one…they notice, but no one cares."

Thomas thinks of how scared he is with this investigation sniffing around his feet. He thinks about Brenda's laugh, Teresa's disappointment, the fact that neither of them took a moment to wonder if he was ok. Not the situation, just…Thomas, as a person. Whether he was crumbling.

"I care," he bumps Newt's shoulder with his. And all at once, it's too close, and Thomas takes half a step back, "Isaac huh? I guess I should have known your parents didn't name you Newt, but…you don't look like an Isaac."

"Newt, like Isaac Newton," he mutters under his breath, "I was a smart kid, apparently, Isaac only ever came out when I was in trouble."

"I thought you said it went well."

"My parents haven't called me Newt in years," he stares at his feet and he looks like he's on the cusp of admitting something. Thomas opens his mouth to ask what it is and Newt looks at him, usually open eyes locked off like steel vaults.

"I like Newt."

They stare at each other again, and it feels like something, it feels fraught and strange and Thomas can't put his finger on why. He wants to leave. He wants to stay. He wants to shut an imaginary door between them and the rest of the world.

"Well," Newt sits up straight, rubs his hands together like he's dusting something off of them, "at least I've got that going for me. I'm going to have a smoke, feeling a bit off, in or out?"

Thomas thinks of the stack of homework he doesn't want to do and shrugs, "I'll hang out."

00000

Thomas can't believe what he's seeing. He didn't know what to think when the cop came to his classroom, he didn't know what they'd found. Sure, he's been nervous, he's been waiting for this particular hammer to fall, but he didn't expect it to happen in his 10 am English class. The cop leads him down the hallway, watching him with a wary eye, to the office he really doesn't want to think about, the office he's avoided like the plague since that stupid night.

Inside he sees Brenda, instantly recognizable by her small stature and defiant posture, sitting across from the chief of campus police, Officer Janson, the same rat faced cad that tried to punish Chuck for existing.

"Shuck," he mutters under his breath, his legs suddenly feeling like lead as he stumbles through the door.

Teresa is standing in the corner, looking sheepish but determined, her blue eyes locked immediately and unapologetically on his.

She couldn't have. How could she?

When he'd told her about it felt like stretching a bridge between them, enforcing the strange sense of home he felt when he first saw her. He thinks of his home, the home Chuck isn't ever at, and wonders for a second if home is even an idea he understands.

"Miss Agnes has informed me that you two were behind the break in and subsequent fire escape vandalism outside of this window," Janson looks like every victorious cop Thomas has ever seen, like he just brought down an international drug ring rather than caught a couple of kids who broke a ladder.

"How would she know anything?" Brenda snaps, her face red and splotchy, her eyes wide. She's scared and that makes Thomas more nervous than anything else.

Teresa glances at Thomas and crosses her arms.

"You have a key to this building, don't you?" The cop points at Brenda, who crosses her arms and shakes her head.

"What does that have to do with anything? Plenty of people have keys to the building—"

"And none of them were seen hurtling off of the fire escape. That was you."

There's a moment then, a scalding, terrifying moment where Brenda looks at Thomas, expecting him to have some solution that he doesn't, that he can't. And for the first time, this isn't some crazy plan he got roped into, this is something he participated in. This is a problem he encountered he didn't bother thinking of a solution for and now Brenda wants that from him.

She looks at him like she wants a savior, not a sidekick, and Thomas doesn't really remember signing up to be either.

"Tell them exactly what you saw, Miss Agnes," the cop points at Teresa in the corner and she clears her throat, looking bigger than normal, almost looming as she exhales in a measured, prepared way.

"I was walking back to my dorm from the computer lab." Lie Number 1. "When I heard yelling and saw Thomas running across the parking lot. We're friends," she says it like it's so easy, like if she says it enough it'll make it true, "so I went over to the fence to see why he was running and I saw Brenda. And then the cop was running after them, and the ladder was breaking—"

"You couldn't have seen the ladder break from the other side of the fence," Brenda turns to Teresa and spits, breathing too hard, unfamiliar with a problem she can't dodge her way out of.

"That's a student restricted parking lot, how do you know what it looks like, young lady?" Janson narrows his eyes at Brenda before glancing at Thomas.

Brenda reaches over and grabs Thomas's hand, squeezing hard enough that it hurts, and Janson's eyes light up like he put the puzzle together. Thomas looks at Brenda out of the corner of his eye, her terrified expression, the way she keeps looking at him for help.

He can help her.

He can dig her out of this hole, his quiz grade is enough, they'll believe he wanted to break in.

"It was my idea," he blurts. "You can look at my grade in this class, on that day, I failed a quiz. I thought I could break in and fix it and leave without anyone knowing the wiser. I asked for her key but she wouldn't give it to me. She came with me instead."

"No, that's not what—" Teresa starts, cutting off abruptly. Probably when she realizes she has no way to back up her story, no way to look sparkling clean if she tries to steer this meeting anymore.

"Is that what happened?" The officer asks Brenda, and she looks at Thomas for a second before nodding slowly.

"That's about it."

A wave of ice crashes through Thomas's veins and he exhales sharply, yanking his hand away from Brenda's. He's an idiot, he knew it was stupid when he said it, knew what he was signing himself up for, but until this second, he trusted Brenda. He saved her record when he said what he said, and he doesn't regret that, fundamentally, but he didn't realize that if she went along with it, it would shatter the embryonic trust that they had.

Brenda is the kind of person who will drag him into a dangerous situation then look to him to drag her out, and he suddenly sees it so clearly it hurts.

"I didn't change my test though. We got caught first. So it's not against Academic Honor Code," Thomas sounds stupid saying it, fighting for something so small in the face of something so shucking stupid. "It's just the vandalism."

Somehow, his relationship with his grades feels like the only one in the room worth saving and he presses forward, feeling silly but determined. "I'll pay it back. I'll get the money somehow and—"

"You'll have a hearing at the city hall next week," the officer cuts him off, scrawling on the carbon copy ticket paper in front of him. "The court date is twenty fifth, at nine o'clock. You'll get your sentence there."

"Fine," Thomas takes his copy of the ticket and stuffs it into his pocket. "Can I go now?"

He doesn't wait for an answer, springing to his feet and stalking out of the room before Teresa can look at him, before Brenda can reach for his hand again. He wants his living room. He wants his friends. He wants someone to tell him that this isn't the end of his college career, that somehow, it's not all going to be taken away for a stupid vandalism charge.

Brenda catches up to him right down the hall, the congratulatory, supportive sounds of Janson telling Teresa that she did the right thing echoing in the background. Brenda tries to loop her arm through Thomas's and he steps away, running his hand along the back of his neck to avoid the touch.

"Thanks for that back there, that was a close one."

"It was a little more than a close one, thanks," he pats the ticket in his pocket, stalking down the hallway and hoping she won't follow.

"You really helped me out back there, let me say thank you—"

"Maybe I'll let you make it up to me if I don't lose my scholarship," he snaps. "We shouldn't talk about this here. Or ever."

It's mean enough that she lets him leave, mean enough that she doesn't follow as he takes the stairs two at a time, bursting outside. The world is cold, calm, so real that Thomas can't pretend that didn't just happen, that a decade carefully pacing the straight and narrow no matter how hard it got could end in a stupid vandalism charge for something he didn't even break.

"Tom wait," it's Teresa and he walks away as fast as he can, sighing when her footfalls speed up and she catches him with a hand on his upper arm. "Thomas—"

"What was that all about?"

"They were going to take it out of the research budget," her fingers curl in his jacket and drag him to a stop. He whirls to face her.

"You threw us under the bus for a research budget?"

"No, Tom, you threw yourself under the bus when you lied about what happened."

"I wouldn't have had to lie about it if you didn't turn us in—"

"I don't like when you do stupid, dangerous things," she grabs both of his arms at once, running her hands up and down them. "It's because I care about you. I told you to trust me, if you'd just stayed quiet they would have figured it out, she had the key—"

"I trusted you." He looks over her shoulder and sees Brenda, pale and slack-jawed, like there's something to be upset about here besides the slip of paper in his pocket. "I trusted both of you."

"Tom," Teresa whispers one more time, her fingers hooked in the sleeves of his jacket, and he can't bring himself to feel bad about it when he shakes her off and stalks towards home.

0000

"Those complete slintheads," Minho paces, and while Thomas hasn't heard that particular piece of Glader slang before, the force behind it resonates.

Newt is holding the summons, his knuckles white, his face pinched. He sets it down on the kitchen counter and pops a pill from the bottle constantly in his pocket.

"Just letting you take all of the blame—"

"We get it, Minho," even Newt's quietest voice is effective now and Minho goes quiet, pacing the room with his hands behind his back. "It's still a hearing, Tommy, you still have a chance to make your case."

"What? Are you going to tell me this isn't the end of the world?"

"That is a bit overdramatic," Newt tries to smile, but it never reaches his eyes. Thomas wonders if he's still being weird about their kiss. Thomas nearly forgot about it as soon as he heard they were investigating the vandalism charge that has now been so gracefully draped over his shoulders, but he remembers it all now, looking at Newt's carefully measured expression.

"These things happen to me."

Newt smiles at that, a real smile, "I know a little bit about klunk luck, Tommy." He shakes his head, scratching the back of his neck, "I'll give you a ride, yeah? It can't be that awful, it's just a shuck vandalism charge—"

"What did the greenie do now?" Gally is leaning in the doorway, apparently eavesdropping. "Greenie is in actual trouble?" He walks in and picks up the ticket, scanning it with a far too gleeful look in his eyes. "He's out. He has to be out."

"What?"

"It's one of the glade rules. Clean criminal records, it's one of the very basic—"

"This ticket is a piece of klunk," Minho steps in, taking the ticket away and handing it to Thomas. "It shouldn't count—"

"Newt! He broke the rules, the first most important rule of the Glade, he has to be kicked out, he can't just get the shuck away with this—"

"You don't know what you're talking about," Minho nearly growls, and for the first time since Newt's diagnosis, he feels like he's on his teammates good side. "It was—"

"Don't tell me it was that girl," Gally flexes, "I swear—"

"Just because you can't get a date—" Minho steps forward, fists clenched.

"Slim it. Everyone." Newt shakes his head, and Thomas wonders for a second if he acts so feeble because he sees it brings them together. Gally deflates immediately, shrinking down like an apologetic dog and offering a hand to Newt, like he needs to be held up. Minho steps back, like all that karate is finally paying off towards his impulse control. Thomas feels like absolute klunk, bringing his problems back to Newt. "I'll talk to Alby. I'll take him to his hearing, and we'll decide there. Until then, an extra night of dishes duty, alright Tommy?"

"This is bullshit," Gally grumbles, storming out of the room.

Newt perks up immediately, leaning back against the counter with his usual lazy grace. "We'll get it figured out. We aren't going to leave you to bloody rot."

"Thanks, guys."

"No problem," Minho pats Thomas on the back, "I've always wanted an excuse to punch that guy."

"Haven't we all," Newt stands and stuffs his hands in his pockets, "everyone is leaving for thanksgiving soon anyway, it should be relatively quiet until the trial." He elbows Thomas, "we'll get it figured out."

Minho looks between them, shaking his head with apparent astonishment and checking his pocket for his phone, "I have to go to karate. I'll see you shanks later."

"Don't start any fights you can't win," Thomas calls after him, gratified at his responding snort.

"Not possible, Greenie."

The door shuts behind him and it's too quiet in the kitchen. Thomas thinks about the kiss and he flinches for a moment. He thinks about how Teresa always seemed to read his mind and glances at Newt, at his easy posture. He's looking better, after his last treatment. Like he's gained the weight he lost, his color back to normal.

"You act sick when Gally is around, don't you?"

"Always with the questions, Tommy," but Newt's smile is answer enough. "I don't have Alby's raw dominance, and he's so busy this whole place would have gone to klunk if someone hadn't stepped in."

"How are you actually feeling?"

"That's your question?" His expression warms as he scratches the top of his head. Thomas shrugs and Newt matches the motion. "Like there's some great, bloody hammer over my head waiting to decide my whole shuck future. Not that you would know anything about that."