A/N: While I love Thomas and Teresa, they do not exactly come out of this fic smelling like roses. This fic deals with emotional infidelity. Furthermore, it also has discussions of a teenage suicide attempt. If you have issues with these things, this fic is not the one for you, and I'd recommend reading something else.

If you do decide to read - hope you enjoy!

Stranger Than Your Sympathy

chapter one: uproot

Newt stares at the door.

It's unfamiliar, but he's trying to convince himself it isn't. That he's been here more times than he can count. That he's the one who helped move the couch to its spot and has a particular seat he likes. That he's sat at the dining table many times, playing games and drinking with friends, knows the grain of the wood under his hands. Of course he'd be able to tell anyone who asked with absolute confidence that the appliances are silver or black or white.

If Newt can't make the inside of the house familiar, he'll have to admit that the man behind the door may now be as unknown to him as the contents of the house. If that happens, Newt will break. Or at least, he'll have to submit to the miserable option of having driven twenty hours only to end up sleeping in his car all the same.

He doesn't have anywhere else to go. He doesn't want to be alone, and the last hotel he checked had no vacancies. This has to work.

He knocks.

There is movement inside immediately. The sound of music clicking off, the sound of furniture shuffling. Newt breathes a sigh of relief — the instant reaction is at least unchanged from what Newt remembers.

The door opens.

"Newt?"

Gally's surprised to see him. How could he not be? They haven't lain eyes on each other since college which was — fuck was it really? — four years ago. Haven't done much more than exchange emails and have drunken group calls with him because Gally hasn't used any of the social media accounts that Newt made him when they were sixteen since he wassixteen, and because Newt was never very good at texting friends who he didn't see on a regular basis.

That and it's eleven o'clock. Admittedly, Newt was surprised to see light from inside the house.

"Hey Gally." Newt curls his fingers into the fraying hems of his pockets. "Been a long time."

Newt doesn't tell Gally that he looks exactly how Newt had remembered him. People don't like that, being told after all of their maturation and whatever hellish life experiences have doled onto them that they look the same boyish self they were in college. Not that Gally could ever be described as boyish.

No, Gally is built like the Coliseum and is just as imposing. His hair still cropped short, too practical for anything that'd require four tubes of hair gel in a month. Newt may not have had the exact pattern of his freckles right, but they still dot Gally's cheeks, the only signpost that Gally is more innocent than he's ever come off. Or at least he was.

Gally lets Newt inside.

"What brings you here?" Gally asks, and Newt notes that he is better at keeping casual than he used to be. At pretending this is small talk and Newt hasn't come in the night with tears crusted all over his face. In college, Newt would have already been four questions into an exchange that mimicked an interrogation more than a conversation.

Newt gets to the point swiftly. He doesn't want to waste anymore of his life on dead ends.

Thomas and him broke up after seven years. Newt does not tell Gally why and Gally doesn't ask. Tells Gally that he just got into his car and drove, found himself back in Denver of all bloody places. And that he needs a place to stay.

"Doesn't have to be here," Newt adds, sheepish, his voice hoarse from hours of not speaking at all in the car, the radio shut off, glaring at the road as if challenging it to sweep him up and swallow him. "The last hotel had no room, but I just figured I'd see —"

But Gally's already heading outside the house, glossing his fingers against Newt's car — it's the same one he had in college, the old beater, Gally knows it well — and finding his way to the backseat.

"You can stay here," he says, pulling Newt's suitcase out from the back of the car.

"You sure? Really, Gally, you don't have to."

Gally drops the suitcase inside the house with a thud. "We've done it before. Think we can handle it again."

Gally and Newt have known each other since grade school. They'd been good friends. There isn't a point in their "friendship chronology" that Newt believes either of them would call the other their best friend, but there's an intimacy that comes just with putting in time.

When they found out they were both going to UC-Denver, they decided to room their first year together. It made things easier — Gally had anger problems, always did, and familiarity abated them; Newt had been painfully shy and after his time at their boarding school had been a shitshow he wanted to have a better start — and it'd been a fine arrangement. Gally had been a stellar roommate.

Newt wished he could say the same. The truth was he wasn't. He got swept up in a relationship a month into first semester with Tommy — Thomas. Thomas. He was a lovesick moron in retrospect, too excited about his first real romance, he did all the cliche things: phone calls late into the night, sneaking around — unconvincingly — to hide Thomas in the dorms after curfew, and overall didn't shut up about him if given any opportunity to bring Thomas up at all.

Dating Thomas had been the start of an adventure and he'd known it, could feel something big and great and exciting in his bones. Newt would have followed him anywhere. Had followed him anywhere.

Not anymore.

It was, in hindsight, probably egregiously inconsiderate and extremely embarrassing. To Gally's credit, he never complained. Only noted, once, that Thomas didn't seem to like him much.

It'd been true, but Newt tried to deny it.

"Fine by me," he'd said."I don't like him either."

And Newt didn't think of it then, but now he knows that's when the lines were being drawn. Gally probably knew Newt's decision before he did, before Newt even realized that there was a decision to be made. And Gally made his.

Then their lives began to diverge, just like that.

Gally's table is made of pine. Newt would bet money he made it himself — Gally has always been good at things like that.

He gestures for Newt to sit.

"Have you eaten?" Gally asks.

"I'm not hungry."

"Have you eaten?"

"No."

Gally couldn't cook for shit for as long as Newt had known him. Burned damn near everything and ate it like a garbage disposal; Newt's pretty sure Gally gave himself food poisoning once because he wasn't willing to waste something he'd bought that'd gone bad. The smell of blackened ramen still burns in Newt's nose sometimes.

Remembering that makes Newt's stomach turn, but he keeps quiet. If Gally's going to insist on hospitalities, then Newt will bloody take them. Least he can do to try to make this normal.

While Gally messes around in the kitchen, Newt closes his eyes and listens. He wants to hear the sound of clattering dishes as Thomas tries to pull a plate out of their cupboard without removing the tower of bowls before the stack of plates. Their dishes' lives were always hanging in the balance due to Thomas's lack of patience. Made Newt laugh every time.

But Gally isn't like that. There's no cacophony of rattled glasses coupled with grunts of exertion in trying to keep the cups at bay. There is only careful shifting, the wrapping and unwrapping of cling film, the tear of a paper towel over whatever dish Gally's reheating.

The food Gally places in front of Newt surprises him. It's a simple dish, spaghetti and meatballs, but it actually looks edible. Even smells good, like the sauce is homemade and there are spices in it.

"You can cook, now," Newt blurts, aware that his tone is probably bloody rude, but it's too late and too early and he doesn't have a filter anymore.

"Since college?" Gally snorts. "Yeah, I've picked up a few things."

Turns out, Newt is hungry. Grief has hollowed him out and made him ravenous. He devours it like he hasn't seen food for days.

Once he's done Gally takes the plate away, washes it and puts it in the dishwasher. Thomas would have left it in the sink until it overflowed and if Newt hadn't gotten to it before Thomas's stress wound him up tight, they'd all get cleaned in one of Thomas's major cleaning-procrastination sprees.

Then Gally sits down in front of him. Crosses his arms and raises one of those angular eyebrows. Used to be bloody intimidating — Gally'd had those same accusatory eyebrows when he was a foot shorter and they were sitting at sticky metal cafeteria tables, and the expression on Gally's face had Newt unsure of whether he should tell him his life story or never talk again — but now Newt's hardly fazed. Intense as his face may be, it is the face of a friend.

"So." His voice, though clipped, is quiet. Almost soft. "You want to tell me what happened?"

Newt saw this coming. Was hoping he'd feel more like a movie star for this question. That he'd be able to give the camera a bitter glance and shake his head and say "It's in the past, now," and make sudden but appreciated strides towards moving on that would lead to the montage about life getting better, then worse, then better again. Maybe Newt would've even cracked a bitter but hilarious joke. Newt had always been good at those.

"You look so nice and polite, but you have one of the blackest senses of humor I've ever heard," Thomas had said about him once. It came paired with, "I love that about you, you know."

The memory does not help. Fueled by spaghetti, lack of sleep, and anguish, Newt starts crying all over again.

Newt and Thomas had dated for seven years. Going on eight. Going on life, they used to say.

Fuck, he always knew that line was cheesy, but thinking on it now makes Newt sound like a total wanker.

They dated all throughout college. Lived together after that first year. Before long he and Thomas were one entity. Thomas and Newt, Newt and Thomas, you couldn't say one name without the other.

Senior year they began looking for jobs that were close to each other, unwilling to do long distance. Turned out, Minho was looking to get out of Colorado too, interested in Seattle particularly. So, Thomas thought it'd be fun to go along with him. He even managed to convince all their group to come with: Harriet and Brenda and Aris and Winston and Fry.

Well, almost all their group. Gally was never going to go to Seattle. He'd already gotten a job at a prestigious architecture firm lined up by his junior year because he had one hell of a work ethic. They were never going to convince him to go, not that Thomas truly tried. His effort was a courtesy born of Newt elbowing him in the ribs every time he brought it up and forgot to include Gally.

They moved to Seattle and it was great. Their friends hung out together all the time, had "their spots" around the city with the gang, and he and Thomas had "their spots" that were just the two of them. There was a sushi place that was down by the Sound, or this running trail that made its way to a beautiful pier where they could watch the boats —

Their life settled into place.

But there'd been this girl. Teresa. Thomas had known her for forever. Longer than Newt and Gally had known each other. It was like the two had slept in the same bassinet. Ate off the same spoon throughout kindergarten, when one of them skinned their knee on the asphalt the other would yell ouch. They were two plants growing out of the same graft.

That was the kind of statement that made Thomas crinkle up his nose. Accuse Newt, probably correctly, that he was being jealous.

Newt worked hard to be better about that. Managed to box up that nasty, ugly feeling, not just to make Thomas feel better, but because it spawned so many other issues. Drove Newt to a dark place, where he was still fifteen and horrifically lonely and climbing over the railing of his and Gally's boarding school and about to turn a bad idea into a moment he'd carry with him forever.

And maybe Thomas had been correct, Newt was being jealous, but this felt different from the other times. No, Thomas was never going to entertain the love of a stranger over the love of his closest friend, but how about his first love? This girl who he'd known forever?

Newt didn't want to cause a rift between Thomas and a dear friend of his. So he learned to let it go. In the end, Thomas loved him — it seemed so clearly true that Newt never questioned it — and Thomas would acknowledge his concerns and Newt would apologize for his jealousy and they'd keep moving.

But you can love two. Or at least, Thomas could love two.

Laid before Newt the night before last was nine years of communication, nine years of love letters and text messages and voicemails, an emotional betrayal so deep and entangled in Thomas's every move that the physical betrayal hardly mattered in the end.

The knife twisted when he learned Teresa had known about Newt. The whole time. All those years, on the opposite side of the ocean or wherever her extravagant travels took her, she'd known that Newt was in Thomas's life.

That night she took it upon herself to show Newt that damnable little box filled with their secrets that Thomas had stowed away in their own home.

Its contents had Newt undone.

"He loves you, though. He does. He talks about you all the time, there isn't anything he does that isn't with you in mind. He never meant to hurt you, so please don't hurt Tom this way. It'll destroy him if you leave."

Tom. Newt had nearly strangled her.

"Well thank bloody fuck that he's got you to cushion the blow then, yeah?"

Clever bitch didn't have much to say to that.

Gally doesn't say he's sorry. Doesn't say it'll get better. Doesn't say that he always knew this would happen, either. He has a look on his face that Newt doesn't recognize. Heartsick and sympathetic. An expression you can't have as a kid, it's too weary and selfless.

"I'll go make up the guest bedroom."

Gally gets up, goes to his closet doors and starts tugging out blankets.

He doesn't comment on Newt's story at all. It makes Newt feel better than any stupid platitude that Minho tried to tell him over the phone while also trying to coax him to turn the car around. There are no words for this. Maybe Gally knows that.

Either that or Gally is just being Gally. Even so, Newt appreciates it.

There's a million polite things Newt should be doing. Insisting on the couch, offering to help, apologizing for putting Gally out and thanking him profusely for letting Newt stay.

Instead he just stares.

Gally comes back with a deep green towel, big and fluffy. Last towel he saw Gally have was some ragged thing that was tearing apart in strips as he washed up in the locker room after rugby. This is a guest towel, because Gally's an adult now, and he has special designated towels like this.

"You can shower. Um, it's pretty simple to operate but sometimes the hot water sticks. If that happens, just let me know, I can fix it."

Newt's never seen something Gally couldn't fix. He once corrected a plumber who came into their dormitory who was trying to fix a pipe burst in their grungy, mold-covered bathroom. When the guy fucked it up worse, Gally fixed it himself with the man's tools, then left an invoice at the Resident Life office. The sheer nerve of him, Gally got his money, too. Not much, Newt remembered, but he'd treated all their friends to dinner on it. Thomas too, even though Thomas didn't like him.

"Just let me know if you need anything."

Newt can't stand up. If he does, he'll collapse, and he's not like Gally's tables and chairs — his legs can't be screwed back in and tightened at the bolts to keep him upright. He'll just fall again.

Gally seems to know. Simply drapes the towel over the chair he once occupied and turns to walk back down the hall, hands in his pockets.

"Gally?"

Gally stops.

"Thank you."

Gally nods. "Try to get some sleep."

The lights are still on in the dining room, and if Newt had the capacity to, he'd laugh. Gally's trusting him to turn off the lights, like they're in college all over again, when Newt always came into the dorm room late.

Newt gets up. Looks at the house. It's a nice house. Quaint, but cozy. Not far off from how Newt always suspected Gally would decorate his home.

The appliances are black, Newt can admit now that he hadn't known that without suffering a complete breakdown. There's a rust-colored couch in the center covered in quilted blankets. There's industrial looking shelves that Gally also probably made himself. One's filled with knick knacks and carvings and models of houses, a couple of picture frames — though most of the pictures have been blocked by blueprints that Gally probably will come back to later. Another bookshelf is filled with architecture textbooks with little sci-fi novels and classics like Huckleberry Finn and Of Mice and Men tucked in between the gaps. There's a TV and a radio, the radio looking more used than the television. Gally never was one to sit still and watch a program, however he always seemed to be able to follow along with whatever Newt was watching even if he was sawing off planks and never turned his eyes toward the screen once. "Eyes on the back of your head," Newt would claim.

It's strange to see the past and present blending together like this. A lump forms in Newt's throat.

He shuts the lights off. Grabs the green towel and heads toward the bathroom.

The hot water doesn't stick.

A/N: The author's notes should stop after this one. This fic was first posted on ao3, which is why I'm dumping all five chapters I have at once. However, this fic will update on Fridays from hereon out. Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoy, and any feedback is welcome! 3