Newt was half afraid that Ada would refuse to have anything to do with the rest of the Gladers after the dramatics of the previous day which would have made his life particularly difficult given that he very much did have to be around them.
He had briefly entertained a vision of himself scooping her up and depositing her in the track-hoes' wheelbarrow and pushing her sound to the various places he needed to go day to day against her will. She was definitely small enough to fit. Knowing Ada though, she would have figured out the exact scientific equation of weight distribution, wind resistance and wheel rotation speed to know which way to lean to keep them from being able to move an inch.
Luckily it hadn't come to that.
Unlike their usual routine of the last few days, Newt found that Ada was already awake when he sat up from his mattress, her feet already dangling from her hammock as she pushed herself gently back and forth.
It was possible she hadn't slept at all but he was pretty sure she wouldn't want him to ask.
So instead they had both just prepared for the day in what he hoped she also saw as a relatively companionable silence, each very pointedly not watching each other get dressed. Newt had produced a couple of packaged energy bars for them to eat for breakfast, guessing that whether she said it or not Ada might not be ready to be in the Mess Hall with the entire population of the Glade at once just yet. The bars came up routinely in the box, enclosed in blank gray wrappers that did little to identify what they actually contained. They had figured out pretty quickly that whatever they were made a good meal substitute and generally came with a decently sizable energy boost so they were handed over to the runners to take with them into the maze. Newt often kept a few on hand though, for those days when he was too busy to make it to the Mess Hall.
Ada had eyed the bar suspiciously but after seeing him dig into his she had followed suit.
It didn't have much of a taste to it but it served its purpose.
After they finished eating they slipped out of their room and through the mostly empty sleeping area and out into the Glade.
"So," Ada started, eying him cautiously from under a lock of wavy blonde hair that had already escaped from her daily attempts to brush it back and out of her face. "What's on the agenda for today?"
Newt resisted the urge to reach out and tuck the hair behind her ear.
That would be weird.
Not that he wanted to do it for a weird reason…he just didn't see how she could see with it flopping over her face like that.
Nothing more to it.
Definitely not.
Still.
Some of the boys had slightly longer hair despite Clint and Jeff offering rudimentary haircuts between tending to injuries and he couldn't say he had ever had the urge to fix Wilson's hair for him.
Newt cleared his throat and directed his gaze away from the girl beside him and out to the Glade where boys were starting to emerge from the Mess Hall, trudging towards their various work sites.
"Do you remember what I told you my job is?" He asked.
"Sometimes gardening, sometimes other stuff," She quoted in a terrible approximation of his accent.
He rolled his eyes and decided not to dignify that attempt at an impression with a response.
"Well, today is the other stuff," He told her. "Come on."
He started across the Glade in the direction of the showers where Gally and the other builders were just getting picking up their tools.
"But what does that mean?" Ada's exasperated voice rose up from behind him and Newt allowed himself a small smile he knew she wouldn't see.
Messing with greenies was one of the only consistent pleasures in their life in the Glade and he wasn't entirely above it.
Especially not when it was this particular greenie.
"How's it looking, Gally?" Newt called out when they reached the showers.
Gally looked up from the wooden plank he had been in the process of measuring. He glanced between Newt and Ada and for a brief moment Newt was afraid he was going to say something completely unrelated to his question. Luckily he only shrugged and brushed his hands on his pants before answering.
"Good enough," He said, gesturing behind him. "We should be able to add another stall without too much trouble. We think we've got it worked out how to redirect the water too."
"Good that," Newt nodded. "The line for a rinse off has gotten out of hand."
"You can say that again," Ada muttered.
Newt knew that the showers weren't exactly her favorite part of the Glade. It wasn't like anything too awkward had happened with the other boys since Newt by design of their situation had to wait right outside the door of whichever stall she ended up in which put a damper on any misguided Glader who thought they could hang around to catch a glimpse of…well, anything.
But even without those extra layers the showers took some getting used to for all of the newbies.
The creators had set the Glade up with running water, probably realizing that without it they would have lost all their prisoners to disease even if there was a small creek running through the woods. There was a pump over by the kitchen that they could use for drinking and cooking and pipes that filled a large tank next to the current site of their showers. The tank stayed full which was a relief when there were 50 or so boys who needed to wash daily (ok…so maybe they didn't all manage every day but close). On the less great side the creators hadn't provided any way to heat it and they hadn't found a solution for that other than try to time their showers when possible to allow the sun to warm it for a few hours first. So the builders built the shower stalls and connected them to the tank and it worked damn well for something constructed by a bunch of random teenagers with rudimentary tools.
It was bugging cold though.
"What can I do?" Newt asked Gally, before correcting himself. "What can we do?"
"Help Dan map it out," Gally jerked his head over his shoulder, already focused on his own task again.
So Newt and Ada joined Dan, a slight kid of about 14 who was in the process of pounding stakes into the ground to mark out the edges of the space for the new stall. Then they helped him unwind string and wrap it around the stakes until the site was marked by a white square that stood out starkly against the green grass. They followed that up by marking out the location of the pipes and where a whole would need to be dug to reach them.
Newt didn't miss the way Ada stared down proudly at her handiwork, admiring the crisscrossing string she had just tied off.
"Good that," Newt offered, slapping Dan's back affably before gesturing for Ada to follow him. "Let's go."
Ada frowned.
"I thought we were builders today," She pointed out.
Newt shook his head with a knowing grin.
"Come on Greenie," He told her. "We're just getting started."
By the time Ada dropped down onto a bench in the Mess Hall for dinner she was almost too exhausted to remember why she had been dreading being there in the first place.
They had spent the entire day bouncing from one work site to another, first the builders, than the the slicers, track-hoes, med-jacks and even ending up in the kitchen with Frypan and his crew chopping vegetables for a stew she could only imagine she'd be eating soon.
Pounding stakes into the ground, feeding goats, pulling weeds, rolling bandages…her head was spinning from the wide array of seemingly random tasks she had undertaken in the previous hours, all while keeping within an arm's length of Newt for obvious reasons.
His only response to her repeated questions about why exactly they were spending their day doing just about every job that existed in the Glade was that part of being one of the leaders was keeping up with what everyone else was doing and offering help when he could. There was a certain logic to that and Ada was sure that this hadn't been the first day Newt spent in that fashion. She could see how much everybody in the glade loved Newt, how naturally they expressed their loyalty to him, how quick they were to respond to his orders most of the time. It made sense that he earned that allegiance partly by being someone who cared about everyone, who wasn't above helping with anything.
But as she watched him settle onto the bench opposite her, two bowls of stew in his hand that someone had just handed off to him, she couldn't help but think there was another reason they had spent the day running all over the Glade.
"You did it for me, right?" She asked, leaning forward and narrowing her eyes slightly as she examined his face for confirmation of her theory.
"Don't know what you're talking about, Greenie," Newt insisted, pushing one of the bowls towards her. "Eat up."
"You did," Ada said decisively, sitting back and folding her arms. "You knew I was nervous to be around the others because of yesterday so you gave me a reason to be around everyone but not all at once. You kept me busy and made me face my fears."
"Did I?" Newt responded noncommittally, shoveling a spoonful of stew into his mouth and nodding for her to do the same.
Ada sighed and took her own bite, knowing better by now than to expect Newt to continue a conversation at meal times if he didn't see her actively eating.
"It's a hypothesis," She admitted, a slight but grateful smile making its way onto her face. "But it's an informed hypothesis."
"Oh yeah?" Newt chuckled, still more focused on his meal than her. "Based on what?"
"You," She answered more quickly than she had meant to, the answer coming naturally in that moment. "You're a good person, Newt."
She wasn't sure if it was because of what she said or because her voice had dropped to a softer tone but that got his attention, his eyes snapping up to meet hers, his spoon forgotten halfway to his mouth. Neither of them said anything for a long moment, the noise of the Mess Hall fading out a bit for Ada as she waited to hear his response.
In the end she wouldn't get one.
At least not then.
Another Glader she thought might be named Carl chose that moment to drop onto the other end of their table, his heavy sitting style enough to gently shake the bench Newt sat on despite the boy choosing to leave a healthy amount of space between them. Newt startled slightly and coughed, glancing over his shoulder as though searching for something.
She wasn't sure what he had been looking for originally but within a second he spotted someone and was calling them over.
"Alby! Over here!"
Newt stuck his hand up to beckon over his friend who had just claimed his bowl of stew from Frypan.
Alby definitely saw them, his eyes landed on Newt then swept over to her before studiously sliding away from them both. The leader pretended not to have heard the other boy and instead dropped into the open seat at the table furthest from them.
Newt frowned and sighed, leaving a rush of guilt to rush through Ada.
It wasn't like any of this was her fault.
She didn't ask to be stuck here anymore than the rest of them.
She didn't ask to be a girl or to receive a mysterious note or to be broken in the way that required her to stay close to Newt.
But if she didn't deserve to be ostracized for things out of her control, Newt really didn't deserve the same just for his proximity to her.
Proximity he didn't even have a choice in.
Proximity he had spent the day making the most of to try to calm her fears.
Before she could muster up the courage to say anything about Alby's slight, Gally appeared, collapsing with force onto the bench beside Newt, digging into his stew almost before he had finished moving.
"Damn it, Gally!" Newt protested, reaching out to save his bowl which was wobbling from the reverberations. "Watch what your shucking doing!"
"What I'm doing is eating," Gally pointed at Newt with his spoon. "Same as you."
"Yeah, yeah," Newt grumbled but Ada was just glad the awkward moment with Alby had been dissipated by Gally's appearance. "Well, who told you to do it next to us?"
Ada knew that Newt was mostly joking.
He got along alright with Gally most of the time and though Gally didn't normally sit with them…
Gally didn't normally sit with them.
"You did it for me, huh?" Ada asked the builder a sense of pleasant deja vu washing over her.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Gally answered with a shrug before digging back into his food.
For his part Newt was frowning.
Again.
"Didn't we just have this conversation?"
"I'm talking about Gally this time," Ada pointed out. "He's sitting with us to show everybody else it's ok."
"Says who?" Gally responded without looking up from his stew.
"Me," Ada said, a satisfying warmth lodging itself in her chest.
"Has anyone ever told you that you're not the center of the universe, Greenie?" Gally countered with a scoff.
"I have to say this is bordering on narcissistic at this point, Greenie," Newt agreed, his affectionate tone downplaying any implied insult in his words.
"That's another hypothesis," Ada acknowledged with a knowing smile, finally digging into her own food properly.
In the end their table ended up full.
Dan from the builders who they helped map out the new shower stall, and Winston who she had helped feed the goats, and Clint who had shown her how to roll the bandages just tight enough…
Newt's plan had worked.
Gally's too.
If her hypothesis was correct.
Either way.
She spent the rest of the meal smiling and laughing at the boys antics a feeling of comfort and safety settling deep in her chest that she never could have imagined just the day before.
She still needed to convince Alby and some of the other Gladers that she wasn't a threat. It would take more than one work day or meal to achieve that.
She still needed answers about her affliction, and the maze and the Creators and…everything really.
But for the first time since she had been dragged from that box she felt like she could understand a bit how the boys managed to keep getting up every single day and trying.
Ada's eyes caught Newt's again in the middle of a rowdy conversation between their tablemates, and she watched the corner of his mouth quirk up in a smile just for her.
Something she couldn't pinpoint told her that some parts of life in the Glade were better than whatever one she had lived before.
It seemed improbable.
A hypothesis so outlandish it barely warranted testing.
But as she returned the smile to the boy across the table, his eyes flashing with the promise of better days ahead, she thought that maybe, just maybe improbable wasn't the same thing as impossible.