Ada crept down the eerily bright hallway, her heart pounding in her chest.
She felt way too exposed, the hint of her own shadow on the bright white floor enough to have her jumping nearly out of her skin.
She was pretty sure it wasn't her first time sneaking into this part of the facility but she was also pretty sure that she had never actually been able to do more once she got there than peer through the windows in locked doors.
Opening the doors would require the little rectangular piece of plastic she could practically feel burning a hole through her pocket.
Something told her she wasn't supposed to have it.
But she did.
She also had a cupcake of all things clutched in her right hand, swirling pink icing and all, that somehow felt more precious than it had any right to.
Time suddenly skipped forward, her surroundings flickering in an entirely disorienting way.
Ada was outside a locked door, hesitating as she stared into the darkness on the other side of the small glass window on its surface.
Her mind was too fuzzy to fully grasp what her plan had been but clearly it hadn't fully accounted for the fact that arriving in the middle of the night didn't just lessen the chance she would be caught.
It also meant that whoever she was looking for was going to be asleep.
Inconvenient.
Not that she was sure she was looking for anyone in particular.
More like a group of people.
Or a singular person but not a specific one.
Whichever of that group she happened to find?
She crept forward, brought her head up to the glass of the window like that extra inch was going to somehow make the darkness inside less hard to see through.
A face suddenly appeared on the other side of the glass and Ada jumped back barely managing to keep from dropping the cupcake that had started all of this.
It was a boy.
Her age or close enough.
Even in the low light on his side she could make out blonde fluffy hair, large brown eyes, and a frown so deep it seemed plausible that it was permanent.
His mouth moved but no sound made it's way to her.
The door was soundproof. Somehow.
Time skipped forward again.
They were sitting in the hallway.
"Let me get this straight…you stole an ID card, snuck over here and broke me out after curfew so we could eat that together?"
He nodded at the cupcake that was now sitting on the floor between them.
Had that been her plan? When he put it like that it did sound increasingly ridiculous.
But she didn't think it had been about the cupcake, not really.
It was finally giving herself permission to go looking for the only thing she had ever wanted.
A friend.
"Not you specifically," She corrected with a shrug. "Just…one of you."
He frowned.
Again.
"You don't remember me?"
And now that he said it she did. Sort of.
His face looked so familiar, that hair and those eyes and that frown…
Was he someone from her past?
Her future?
"My name's Newt."
"I'm…"
"Ada!"
She startled awake, sitting up so fast she very nearly knocked Newt off his feet in the process.
She instinctively reached out and gripped his shoulders, whether her goal was to steady him or to ground herself in the waking world was a toss up. She sucked in a slightly shaky breath and allowed her vision to clear.
"Hey, you alright?"
One of Newt's hands had come up to rest on top of one of hers, his fingers curling there so naturally that neither of them noticed for a long moment.
"I had a weird dream," Ada explained, trying to grasp the details even as they quickly fled her mind. "You were there and I um…I think I broke you out of prison to give you a cupcake."
Newt's signature frown deepened for a second before her words fully sunk in and his expression shifted to one of amusement.
"Well, thanks for that, Greenie," He said with sarcastic gratitude. "Good to know you've got my back."
"What are friends for?" Ada joked, sliding fully out of her hammock until her feet hit the floor, her hands dropping from Newt's shoulders in the process.
He released her hand at the same time, the slight blush in his cheeks the only evidence it had happened at all. Not that she really understood why he was blushing. They had held hands for a lot longer the night before. It didn't mean anything. Well, it meant something but it didn't have to mean…that. It couldn't mean that, no matter how much a traitorous part of her brain wanted it to.
Not when she had so much to figure out.
"Oh, we're friends are we?" Newt said quickly presumably to cover up any potential awkwardness.
Ada sighed.
"Fine, thanks for waking me up totally business like roommate person."
One of Newt's eyebrows shot up comically at that.
"That's the best you could come up with?"
"I woke up literally five seconds ago," Ada grumbled, pushing past Newt and planning to head towards her pack where her clothes were stored only he caught her wrist before she could get that far.
She turned back to face him and if it was her turn to blush now she very purposefully ignored it.
"Here," He pressed something into her hand before releasing it and taking a step back, reaching up to play with the hair at the nape of his neck.
Ada looked down to discover that she was now holding a small notebook and her eyes immediately shot back up to meet his.
"This is…a runner's notebook," She observed slowly, her forehead furrowing as she considered what that meant.
"Right," Newt nodded. "You can use it to you know, write down your requests. For the box."
"But I thought there was only one notebook per runner," Ada pointed out. "When I needed paper before they couldn't spare any."
Newt didn't say anything but he didn't need to.
The answer was suddenly obvious.
"You were a runner," She said, the truth of the statement sinking in as she spoke. "This is yours."
He nodded again, avoiding her eyes.
"Yeah, well," He shrugged, his tone carefully casual. "I'm not anymore so. You can have it."
He had been a runner.
He had been in the maze.
He might have some real answers.
How could that not have come up before now?
"Newt," She started, searching his face for clues. "You didn't tell me you were a runner."
"Not much to tell," He insisted, his tone still light as he stepped around her and backed towards the door. "Was useless enough to fall off when we were building the watchtower and ended up with this."
He made a fist and knocked on the side of his leg.
"So now I stick to the Glade and make sure greenies like you don't get themselves into trouble."
Ada frowned, her conflicting instincts ordering her to question him further, offer him comfort and let him walk away from the conversation like he clearly wanted to all at once.
Too bad for him he couldn't physically walk away more than a step or two more unless he wanted to torture her.
Still.
She didn't think it was right to take advantage of the fact that he couldn't give himself space when he wanted it, especially not when his restraint was for her benefit.
So she just nodded.
Newt looked grateful at her uncharacteristic lack of questions.
"Good that," He jerked his head behind him towards the door. "Come on, Greenie, you can fill out your requests at breakfast. The box should be coming up in a couple of hours."
Those hours passed way faster than they had any right to, Ada finding herself standing near the box what felt like mere minutes later.
She wasn't alone of course, the entire Glade had turned out for the arrival of the new greenie and she couldn't say she really blamed them. From what she could tell after her first month there didn't seem to be many excuses good enough to warrant an extended break during the work day. The arrival of the box and the supplies and new person that came with it was one of those so it made sense that everyone would gather up to witness it. She wasn't exactly immune to that excitement either, especially since she knew Newt would be dropping her page of requests into the box at some point which promised to improve her life in the Glade even if only half of them ended up being fulfilled by the Creators.
She couldn't shake the nerves though either.
From what everyone told her the Glade ran on routine and she had been a big, giant break in that routine.
What if her arrival was just the start?
What if something different came up again?
What if it was something worse?
Her mind raced with the possibilities, a box full of poisonous gas that released when opened or an actual spy, someone even worse than what some of them imagined her to be, someone trained to kill them in their sleep or…
Ada reached over and pinched her own arm in another only semi-successful bid to interrupt her spiraling thoughts.
Too many possibilities, too many variables.
It wasn't doing her any good to consider them.
She just had to hope whatever…whoever…came up in that box it wasn't something that would throw greater suspicion in her direction from the few holdouts who refused to believe she was just as clueless as all of them.
Ada shifted her weight between her feet and sighed, leaning over to whisper to Newt.
"What's taking so long?"
"Be patient, Greenie," Newt ordered, his eyes still on the box and clearly half his attention at best focused on her. "It'll be here."
Ada sighed again.
"Think it will be another girl?" A voice somewhere behind her and to her left asked just loud enough for her to pick up.
"Maybe they'll all be girls from now on," Another voice replied. "And we'll all be stuck with one like Newt is."
"I'd run into the maze and get it over with if that was me," The first one replied.
Ada refused to let herself react or turn around. It wouldn't help. Anyway, she was pretty sure she heard the murmuring of other boys telling those two to slim it so it wasn't like that perspective was necessarily wide spread.
Still.
She suddenly wished she could be standing at the back of the crowd or at least blending into the middle of it but unfortunately that wasn't an option.
Alby and Newt were stationed at the front and so Ada was stationed at the front too. The perfect position to feel like absolutely everyone was staring at the back of her head even if she knew that logically that probably wasn't true.
A sudden noise of metal grinding and gears turning startled Ada enough to leave her jumping and stumbling slightly to the left directly into Newt. He steadied her with a hand at the small of her back while the intense noise continued, too loud at this distance for her to be heard if she had thanked him. Their eyes did catch for a moment though and she offered up a slight smile she hoped would get the message across. He nodded, bringing his hand up to squeeze her arm gently before stepping back slightly to separate them.
Ada wished irrationally that he had stayed where he was, maintained some form of contact between them until she knew whether or not the box was bringing up further disaster for her.
In the end her fears were more or less unfounded.
The box finally ground to a halt and Alby and Newt stepped forward to lift the metal and reveal the boy inside.
It was a boy which was the first thing that had Ada breathing a sigh of relief.
It wasn't like she wanted to be the only girl in the Glade and under different circumstances she could imagine that this development would have been intensely disappointing to her. With everything that had happened though, another girl would have signified more change for the boys around her and she could only assume that would have further stirred up those who didn't trust her.
She needed more answers about herself and her situation before she could face the risk of further complications.
So the fact that a rather nondescript boy (pale skin, red hair, 15 or 16) was in the box, not screaming his head off in mysterious pain, just blinking up at them in understandable confusion…it was a huge relief.
Alby and Gally helped haul him out of the box while Newt dropped in to check over the supplies and deposit the requests for next month.
Ada waited as close as she dared to the edge of the box for several long minutes, the battle between her anxiety when looking down into the box and the painful buzzing that made itself known if she stood too far away raging silently in her head.
"So, how's it feel to not be the greenie anymore, Greenie?"
Ada turned to find Gally next to her, his arms folded and his eyes fixed not on her but on the new guy who was being led away by Alby. He was doing that Gally thing where he pretended he was above talking to her while doing exactly that. She didn't miss the way the corner of his mouth jerked up in a subtle sign of amusement though.
"You realize you just contradicted yourself, right?" Ada pointed out dryly, edging half a step closer to the edge of the box and feeling an immediate easing of the ache in her head.
She hadn't thought she was being obvious but Gally frowned and stepped up to the edge of the box to shout down to Newt.
"Hey Newt, you planning to take all day?"
Newt's head snapped up from his task, his expression primed for annoyance until his eyes landed on her and she watched him realize why Gally was bothering him in the first place.
"I'm done," He said, already moving to grab Gally's outstretched hand and haul himself out of the box.
He was in front of Ada in less than a second, bending to examine her face with a look of concern.
"Sorry, I wasn't thinking," He said. "You alright?"
"I'm fine," Ada assured him, gratefully watching Gally move away to start removing the supplies.
She wasn't sure why she felt she needed that illusion of privacy but as she dared to glance up and meet Newt's eyes she appreciated it all the same.
He was frowning, because of course he was, but something unnamed fluttered in her chest to see his full attention focused on her from such a close distance. His eyes darted over her face as though he expected to find some physical evidence of what ailed her. His hand came up to rest on her elbow and she wondered if he was purposefully increasing contact to help her recover more quickly or if he just touched her without thinking at this point.
All she knew was she couldn't stop thinking about it, the outsized sensation of his fingers just barely grazing her skin making no logical sense to her but being welcome nonetheless as she stared back into his eyes.
Of course, all too soon he was straightening up and stepping back half a step and whatever warm yet nervous feeling she had been allowing herself to indulge in reigned itself in.
"Right, well bad news is we still have a few more hours of work to get to," Newt said.
"Does that mean there's good news coming or…" Ada trailed off hopefully.
Newt grinned and slapped a decidedly friendly and somehow less feeling inducing hand onto her shoulder.
"Good news is that tonight is a celebration to welcome the new greenie," He offered.
Her facial expression must have given away that she hadn't exactly been counting the days to the next party because Newt gave her shoulder a squeeze and continued.
"Which starting today officially isn't you."
Ada allowed herself a smile at that.
He was right that probably did qualify as good news all things considered.
She didn't want to be trapped there without any answers of course, and in some ways reaching the milestone of a month could be seen as a grim one. The truth was though she liked being with the boys, the ones who didn't hate her guts anyway. She liked laughing with them during meals, and working by their side during the day and she especially liked talking with Newt in the cocoon of darkness that was just theirs at night. If she had to be here…if they had to be here…she wanted to be part of it.
All of it.
So moving on from greenie status was something to celebrate as much as anything could be at the moment.
Besides the party would be a great opportunity to check off some of the last few gladers she needed to touch to complete her experiment to confirm Newt's proximity was the only one that eased her painful symptoms.
"How many hours of work do we have left before the party exactly?" She asked.
Newt rolled his eyes but his expression looked too pleased at her sudden reversal to give the gesture any bite.
"Come on, let's go, slacker."
The party was not exactly going the way Newt had imagined it.
The greenie…well, Ada…hadn't even seemed that excited about the party when he first brought it up.
Not that he could blame her.
The last one, the one to supposedly welcome her, hadn't offered much but the opportunity to be tossed around by Gally. True, that was her own bugging idiotic idea but that didn't stop him from feeling bad about it.
He had started the day determined to get her to enjoy herself, even just a bit.
He just hadn't thought it would be quite as easy as it had turned out to be.
When they had arrived she had insisted he introduce her to a few of the Gladers she hadn't managed to actually speak to yet and if he found her insistence on stepping slightly away from him and shaking their hands suspicious he had chosen not to say anything. Then she had dragged him over to watch Gally challenge the new greenie to a shoving match which she seemed to enjoy a little too much though she did shout for Gally to go easy on him which strangely enough the builder had seemed to listen to. After that they ended up talking with some of their usual meal companions near the fire, Ada laughing more than Newt ever remembered her doing.
Eventually though it was just the two of them and a little bit too steady of a supply of Gally's brew.
"You sure you want another one of those?" He asked skeptically, watching as Ada reached for her second jar.
"I'm sure," She insisted, taking a big gulp of the mysterious liquid before Newt had a chance to urge her to reconsider.
Newt winced, remembering all too well the way the alcohol had burned his throat the first night he tried it.
"Doesn't it hurt?" He asked incredulously, frankly baffled by how easily she was consuming the beverage that greenies usually described as somewhere between an acquired taste and jet fuel.
Ada shrugged.
"I've hurt way worse most days since I've been here."
She said it with no malice or judgment, just a statement of fact in that objective way she so often made observations about things. It was still enough to hit Newt like a slap to the face.
Of course she wasn't phased by Gally's attempts at moonshine.
She was enduring practical torture everytime he had to take a shower, or sort things in the box, or go to a gathering.
Every time his forgetfulness or pure necessity required him to take a few too many steps away from her she suffered for it.
"Hey!"
Newt froze as soft fingers took hold of his chin and guided his head to the side until his attention and his gaze were both thoroughly focused on her.
"Come back," She demanded, her words slurring slightly but her eyes as focused as ever.
He still remembered trying to catalog her appearance that first day she appeared in the Glade, the way he had been totally unequipped for the task of describing a girl. The way he had wondered about her eye color while waiting for her to wake up.
He knew now they were blue of course.
So blue he sometimes had a hard time not just losing time staring into them.
This was really not the time for that though.
Not that there was actually any time a shank like him should be doing that but still.
"I didn't go anywhere," He said, very aware that she was still touching his face.
"You did," She argued, her hand finally dropping back to her side. "You went into that Newty head of yours and started feeling bad about some shuck thing that probably wasn't even your fault to begin with."
Newt blinked at the girl before him with a mixture of wonder and disbelief as she took another swig of her drink.
How the bloody hell did she read him that well after a month? While well on her way to being drunk at that?
And why did it make him feel equally warm and anxious?
He cleared his throat and forced himself to take a sip of his own drink before answering.
"Whatever you say, Greenie," He finally said, proud that his tone was far lighter than his racing thoughts would suggest.
Ada sighed and leaned back more fully against the log they were resting in front of close enough to feel the warmth of the fire but still slightly on the outskirts of the party.
"Why do people still keep calling me that?" She whined, earning her a chuckle from him. "He's the greenie now!"
She waved her hand in the general direction of the new boy and Newt glanced over in time to see the poor kid choking on his drink.
She had a point.
He usually made a pretty conscious switch from greenie to newbie or the person's name at this point.
He had a lot of practice.
Unfortunately.
But with her…his brain was resisting.
He watched as she reached up to push that same lock of blonde hair that was constantly giving her trouble out of her face and found himself smiling unconsciously.
"Don't know, you must just really look like Greenie suits you," He teased.
She sat up suddenly and he jumped then tried to hide it as best he could.
Which he had to admit wasn't very well.
Way to hold it together, Newt.
"I like it when you do that," She announced, leaning forward and swaying slightly in the process prompting one of his hands to shoot out on instinct and steady her.
"You like when I do what?" He asked, chiding himself mentally for encouraging her nonsensical conversation.
Ada didn't answer at first, just swayed even closer to him before reaching up to rest one finger just at the corner of his mouth.
Newt sucked in a surprised breath, freezing under her touch for the second time in less than an hour.
She carefully moved her finger up and over dragging the corner of his mouth slightly with it.
"Smile," She finally explained, matching the word with one of her own. "You hardly ever do it but you should. You would be so much more fun if you did."
Her finger dropped and the loss of contact was enough to jump start Newt's brain.
"Obviously I smile and…wait, I'm fun," He insisted, offense clear in his tone. "I'm very fun."
She had the audacity to giggle in response before arranging her face in an exaggerated frown.
"I'm Newt and I wear a machete on my back and my job is sometimes gardening and sometimes other stuff and my face looks like this!"
She somehow managed to frown even deeper.
"Oh, ok, that, that is not my face," He protested.
"It is, it really is your face," She laughed, having no choice but to abandon her annoyingly endearing impression of him in the process. "But do you want to know a secret?"
Her voice dropped down to what probably would have qualified as a whisper if she hadn't had just enough to drink to make true whispering impossible.
Newt rolled his eyes and chuckled.
"Sure, Greenie, tell me your…"
The words died in his throat as Ada leaned in to speak directly into his ear.
"I like it when you frown too," She murmured, the small puff of her breath sending a shiver down his spine. "I just like you I guess."
She pulled back just enough to drop her head to his shoulder and Newt's heart squeezed painfully in his chest.
It was a lot.
The weight of her against his side, the soft press of her cheek on his arm, the quiet mutterings he couldn't quite make out other than one completely ridiculous sentence.
"I'd let you have all my cupcakes."
Newt couldn't stop a burst of laughter from escaping at that, his head tilting to rest on top of hers for a moment without his permission.
He couldn't say how long he would have allowed himself to linger in that stolen moment if they had been left to their own devices but almost immediately he felt eyes on them and glanced up to lock eyes with Alby from across the fire.
His friend didn't say anything, not that he needed to.
Newt knew Alby well enough after all these years to know exactly what he was thinking.
Not a good idea.
Not the time.
Not the place.
Not the right person to open himself up to when they had no idea what he might be letting in.
And it wasn't like Newt thought his friend was totally wrong.
He just thought it was a little pointless to think about now.
She was already in whether he wanted her to be there or not, making herself at home in that painful spot in his chest, the one that filled him with equal parts joy and dread.
"Come on, Greenie," He said softly, easing her head off of his shoulder and leaning her more firmly against the log so he could pull himself to his feet, stiff leg and all.
"Not tired," She argued as he grabbed her hands and tugged her unsteadily to her feet.
"I know, Greenie," He agreed, looping one of her arms over his shoulder so he could support most of her weight. "I know."
"Not the greenie anymore either," She pouted.
Newt shook his head with a rueful smile as he led her slowly across the Glade in the direction of the Homestead.
"Now who's frowning, huh?"
That earned him another giggle.
Ada kept up a steady dialogue that he only half paid attention to as they went. Between his stiff leg and her less than stellar balance it took most of his concentration just to keep them standing and making progress towards their destination. Eventually they did make it though, easing through first the door to the main sleeping area and then through the door that led to their room.
And when exactly had he truly started thinking of it like that?
As theirs.
"Here you go, careful, careful," Newt cringed as he directed her towards her hammock, the girl in front of him managing to trip on obstacles he didn't even see before her weight finally dropped onto her sleeping place.
She left her feet dangling over the edge and Newt knelt without thinking to pull off her shoes, focused only on getting her fully in her hammock and on her way to sleep as quickly as possible before she managed to hurt herself somehow. Once the shoes were off and tossed aside he rose back to a standing position only to find Ada reaching for his hands.
"Newt?"
Her voice was still unsteady but any trace of drunken mirth had disappeared.
"Hmm?" He hummed, trying very hard not to pay attention to the way she had interlaced their fingers.
"I know what my next experiment is going to be," She said.
"Yeah?" He asked.
He couldn't see much in the darkness of the room but his other senses had kicked into overdrive.
He was suddenly aware of every little sound, the creaking of the hammock, the distant echoes of the continuing party, the bleating of the sheep in the pen over behind the slicer building.
He could almost convince himself he could hear his own heartbeat too.
"We need to figure out exactly how far away I can be from you before it hurts too much and how long before it gets that bad too. I already think over the last month the distance I can take has improved slightly. Maybe with practice it can increase more and…"
"What? Why? Bloody hell, Ada, absolutely bugging not."
His hand clenched anxiously around hers.
Why was she so intent on making things even harder for herself? Why was she so bloody curious at her own expense?
"It's not realistic to think I can stay a few feet away from you for the rest of our lives," She pointed out far too logically for someone who had consumed more than one jar of Gally's brew. "What if we're needed in different places? What if we get out of here someday? What if one of us dies?"
Newt was already shaking his head in denial before she had even finished speaking.
"That won't happen. I won't let it. And the rest…we can make it work. Maybe something else will come out of the box that helps or…just…be patient, ok?"
"But it's not fair," She said, the distinct sound of held back tears in her voice.
"I know," Newt agreed, that painful clenching in his chest making a repeat appearance. "You got a bad deal, Greenie and I'm sorry about that but…"
"No," She interrupted. "You don't get it. It's not fair to you, Newt. You didn't ask to be stuck with me and I have to at least try to get your life back for you."
Well that idiotically touching statement stole the air from his lungs.
Newt closed his eyes for a moment despite the fact that he was already surrounded by darkness, needing the respite from his surroundings nonetheless.
This girl was the smartest dumb shank he'd ever met.
He opened his eyes.
"Ada, I know you're completely sloshed at the moment but I need you to hear me ok?"
He swallowed hard, forcing all the conviction he could muster into his words.
"Being stuck with you is the best thing I can remember happening to me."
"But…" She started only for him to cut her off immediately.
"Slim it," He said firmly. "I'll do what I can to help you figure this mess out because I don't want you to hurt anymore but if you think for one second I want you out of my life then you're not as smart as I thought."
Ada seemed like she wanted to continue arguing but in the end the exhaustion won and she simply leaned forward until her head rested against him.
Newt sighed.
In the morning he would have to try salvage what was left of his self restraint to get them back to some kind of equilibrium that didn't make him panic at the thought of it but in the moment he didn't feel like denying himself.
He leaned down and pressed a kiss onto the crown of her head, allowed her to rest against him for a few seconds longer, then pushed her gently back. He disentangled their hands before pulling up her palm and placing a barely there kiss as well.
Then he helped her pull her legs up into the hammock, brushed that troublesome lock of hair off of her face, and watched her almost instantly drift off to sleep knowing it would be a lot longer coming for him.
Shuck.
He was really, really in trouble.