When Eleanor woke up the next morning, Minho was long gone.
She could barely recall him laying her down on her sleeping bag in the middle of the night. She must've not been completely concious, so she couldn't be sure if it had actually happened. But it must have, because she woke up to the warmth of her sleeping bag around her body.
She groggily smiled. Sometimes it was hard to see it but Minho actually had a heart, and she knew it.
She groaned as she turned, trying to get away from the faint sunlight. It didn't really work. She knew she had to get up but she didn't want to leave the warmth of her covers. She felt the fabric of her jeans pressing into her hipbone and she immediately regretted falling asleep without changing her attire.
She extended her arm out of the bag, the cold hitting her skin like tiny needles, and quickly retrived some spare clothes from the small backpack she kept next to her sleeping place.
She proceeded to change her clothing inside of the sleeping bag, something she had become surprisingly good at. When one lives in a secluded place with forty boys, one has to learn those things.
When she arrived at the kitchens she was bummed to find that Minho had already left for his runner obligations. She must've slept in more than usual.
She sat down in one of the few empty tables once she had grabbed a plate of food.
Still feeling sleepy, she waited no time to start eating. She was so hungry she felt like her own stomach was devouring itself from the lack of food.
After everything that had happened the previous night, she had fallen asleep without eating anything at all.
When she was almost finished, she started to feel a bit better.
A noise in front of her made her snap her gaze from her food to the person standing in front of her. She was surprised to see that one of the builders was taking a seat across the table from her. But, looking around, she found the rest of the tables were mostly full by then so it wasn't really that odd.
"Hey, Eleanor." He said shyly.
She looked at him surprised that he was actually talking to her.
"Hey, Joe." She replied, her tone unsure.
He was a young boy, around fourteen. He had a round face full of freckles and he tended to have a scared look on him. He looked like the child he was. His complexion, however, didn't match it. He was tall, and his shoulders were decently wide, he looked quite strong. Probably the reason why he was a builder.
She knew him. He was Gally's friend, or at least he used to be, before the accident. She had hung around him and his friends a few times, but he had never spoken to her, not directly. She felt clueless as to why he was doing so that morning.
"How are you?" It felt as he was scared to talk to her. He was just a shy kid.
"I'm... good." She replied, kind of awkwardly. "How are you?"
"Good." He replied, nodding his head slightly.
Eleanor guessed he wanted to say something. He kept pushing the food around his place with his fork, and that was weird in itself because those boys devoured any food as if it were their last day on earth. But she had also caught him opening and closing his mouth a few times, like he wanted to say something but stopped himself.
She decided not to pressure him. If he wanted to say something, he would.
So she kept eating her breakfast, even though his nervousness was making her anxious.
What didn't go unoticed was when he stole a glance across the room at the builders table. She didn't follow his gaze. She knew he was looking that way but she didn't dare to look, afraid to exchange glances with someone in praticular. So, she waited until his gaze returned to her.
She shot him a questioning look, when he did. He finally spoke.
"We miss having you around." He said, and immediately looked down like he was ashamed of what he had just said.
Eleanor was more than surprised. She hadn't been expecting that.
The builders missed her? That was odd.
She had been sure they only liked her because Gally did. And Gally had become this new version of himself. She didn't fit there anymore.
She opened her mouth to say something but the words didn't come out. She didn't even know what to say to that.
The thing was, she had liked the builders. Some of them were actually quite nice, but she wasn't sure she missed them. She couldn't separate them from Gally in her mind. To her, her friendship with the builders was something that came along with being friends with Gally.
But, she wasn't friends with him anymore.
She sure as hell missed Gally, but not this Gally.
Could she even be friends with them without dealing with him? It didn't seem like a probable outcome.
She settled for smiling at him, letting him know she appreciated. And she did.
She thought she should say something to him, because this encounter already felt too awkward for her morning self. But, before she got a chance to, someone cleared their throat behind her.
"You have work to do, shuck-face."
She had started to tuen to see who it was, but she froze, recognizing his voice.
She could've recognized that voice anywhere.
She felt her blood freeze inside her veins and an actual cold started hovering over her.
She knew she was being ridiculous but it was like she had no control over her own body. She felt frozen in place. She couldn't move and she wasn't sure she wanted to.
She had been avoiding him like the plague, and there he was, just a few inches from her.
The hair in the back of her neck stood up, alert.
"But I haven't eaten yet." Protested the younger boy across the table.
She could tell Gally scared him.
"I don't care." The coldness in his voice didn't surprise her one bit, but it made her heart sink in her chest.
She couldn't get used to hearing his voice sound so... mean.
How could someone change so much overnight? This kid used to be his friend and now he was bullying him down like he owned him.
Whoever this new Gally was, he was an asshole.
She tried to ignore her sadness so she focused on the other strong emotion she felt, anger.
She turned around to glare at him but he didn't even spare her a single glance.
"But..." Joe tried to protest but Gally's expresion didn't change, like he had a scowl constantly engraved on his face.
"Now." He said.
He hadn't raised his tone but his voice sounded incredibly menacing. Like he was threatening him.
How dare he treat people like that? Eleanor thought.
"You know what, Gally?" She spoke to him for the first time in what felt like years.
And just as she had started she had immediately regretted every word she was saying. But she knew she had to defend Joe. She couldn't let Gally walk around thinking it was okay to treat people like that.
"Why don't you leave him alone?" She tried sounding calm and collected, and reasonable.
She tried acting the way Newt would. Because Newt might've been a Slint-head but there was no denying he was a good ruler.
Gally's eyes snapped to hers. She felt incredibly exposed, his stare boring into her.
But she didn't look away. She tried to keep her expresion neutral, but she wasn't sure she was doing a very good job of it.
Gally didn't speak right away.
For a moment, she could've sworn she saw some kind of emotion flash behind his icy blue eyes, sadness maybe. But it was gone before she could be sure.
She knew she couldn't trust her own eyes. Gally was not that boy anymore, why was that so hard for her to grasp? He was just a shell of the boy he used to be. A shell filled with anger and hatred.
He opened his mouth to retort and she braced herself for what was coming.
"Okay, okay."
It wasn't Gally's voice. It was Joe's. It sounded urgent.
Soon, he was infront of her, blocking her view of Gally.
"I'm going." He said.
Gally nodded but still managed to glare at him. He wasted no time on turning on his heel and walking away, not before throwing her one last hateful glare.
She felt her insides twist.
"Bye, Eleanor." Joe said quietly, as if he was afraid Gally would yell at him if he heard.
"Bye, Joe." Her voice sounded pained even to her own ears.
She immediately closed her mouth and tried to swallow the bump in her throat as she watched them leave.
That day she kept stealing glances at the builders across the glade as she worked.
The wheat had fully grown by then, ready for them to harvest it.
Zart had given her an easy job, which she would've normally been slightly insulted by, but that day she was grateful for it.
She simply had to cut the usable part of the plants. Although he had been wary about giving her the knife, she could tell he was begininning to trust her more and more.
Well, she had been in the glade for almost a month so she figured it was about time.
Her duties that day were slightly more entretaining than they usually were, setting aside the scratches it was leaving on her hand. But she wasn't really focused on her work.
She kept stealing glances at Gally, which translated to a few deep cuts on her skin when she got distracted by something he did.
She hadn't realized before how much of a dictator he had become. She thought 'dictator' was a word as good as any to describe his brand new personality.
He was constantly barking orders around and insulting the boys who didn't do things the way he wanted them to. None of the boys seemed too happy, but they didn't question him. She didn't blame them. He was their keeper. There wasn't much they could do.
At that moment, Eleanor felt really glad she was a Track-hoe.
Zart might've been a pain in the ass, but he was definetly a better keeper than Gally.
Speak of the devil, she thought, as said glader blocked her view of Gally. She hadn't realised she had stopped working so she quickly set back to it.
"Are you alright there, Greenie?"
She sighed, that word again.
Just a few more days, she thought.
She kept cutting, hoping Zart wouldn't see the cuts in her hands. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she couldn't even handle the simplest task.
"Yeah." She answered non-chalantly.
"I meant-" He said. When he paused she looked up at him only to find him looking away from her. "I meant with what happened this morning."
His voice was filled with such awkwardness that Eleanor felt herself growing nervous. She was sure she was blushing.
Of course everyone had seen what had happened at breakfast. They had nothing better to do than gossip around. She swore sometimes they were nothing more than a bunch of old ladies.
"I'm fine." She didn't lie. Well, not completely.
The air around them turned tense. They could both tell the other was not comfortable.
"Why are you even asking me that, Zart?" She questioned.
She knew there must've been a reason behind it, because they weren't friends, and they both knew it.
Then, something weird happened. He didn't just look uncomfortable. He looked nervous, and Zart never loked nervous, at least not around her.
She raised her eyebrows at him, forgetting all about her work for a moment.
"Somebody put you up to this." She said. It wasn't a question.
He glanced around, a small look of alarm crossing his face.
That was enough answer for her. She curiously looked around trying to figure out who would do such thing. Gally crossed her mind, but she immediately rejected that idea. She couldn't let herself tap into the false hope that he still cared, because he didn't.
However, when she spotted a pair of golden brown eyes looking at her from across the field patch, she had her answer.
He quickly tore his gaze away from hers but it was too late. She had caught him staring.
"Newt?" She questioned, surprised.
Zart released a big sigh, slumping his shoulders.
Eleanor felt slightly annoyed. Why would Newt want to check on her?
The answer would have been fairly simple had it been regarding any other glader. Newt was a nice guy, and he worried about the well-being of everyone in the glade. But, when it came to her, it always felt like there was something she was missing. She couldn't even bring her mind around why he would worry about her after the scene she put on the previous night.
He always confused her and she didn't know what to think of their awkward encounters. There were moments when she felt she could trust him. It felt like he cared and that maybe they could even become friends. But then he'd usually leave her without warning, and he'd just ignore her for days. And quite frankly, she was getting really tired of it all.
"Well, you can tell Newt that I'm fine. That I can take care of myself." She said, "And if he wants to check up on me, he can do it himself."
With that, she began cutting again.
After a few seconds, Zart left.
It was common knowledge that exercise was good for your health, but Eleanor wondered if it was all one big lie that people were led to believe. Because she didn't feel good. She felt awful. Her muscles ached like she never knew they could as she made her way through the glade. Sure, she had been sore from planting and harvesting, but this was in a whole other level.
Her mind had started to come up with hundreds of excuses for her to turn around, go back to where she came from and forget about the whole thing. But she had set her mind to commiting to her daily runs. She had to prove herself she could actually do something right for once.
So, despite her screaming limbs, she made her way to the woods.
The light was going down and the air around her was turning colder which she was more than thankful for. She had sweat enough as she worked in the fields. She didn't really need to collapse while running because of the temperature.
Her second run was even worse than her first, but she still managed to run for a decent amount of time before she felt like she no longer could stand. So she alowed herself to feel a little bit proud of herself.
Maybe she would never be as fast as Minho or she wouldn't last as long as any of the runners, but she was proving herself that she could do it. That was good enough for her. She knew it was going to take some time but she promised herself she would do her best every day until she no longer felt as useless at everything as she did.
This was something that was hers, and only hers. She wasn't about to give that up.
As she collected herself from the ground, some movement up ahead caught her eye. She thought she saw something through the trees, but she couldn't be sure. Also, she felt too tired to even care.
So she went back out the forest. The flash of something golden she thought she had seen burried in the back of her mind.