Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You know, staring at me isn’t gonna fix anything,” Newt grumbles.

He’s in bed, back propped up against the headboard, face pale and shiny with sweat. The veins have started to creep up from under his collar, now: dark spiderweb tendrils licking up the base of his throat, like the disease is curling its rotten fingers around his neck, the final push upwards before it’s got him in a chokehold, and Newt will be—

Thomas doesn’t finish that thought.

“I know,” he says. His voice comes out brittle, just like he feels—as if any wrong move could make him crumble into pieces, scatter him all over the floor, broken and useless.

And so he stays still, pulls and pushes himself together, and watches Newt. It’s the only thing he can do now, it seems. Watch.

Newt raises an eyebrow at him. “Do you? ‘Cause with the way you’re gawkin’ at me, I’d suspect otherwise.”

There’s a teasing lilt to his words, and normally Thomas would match his energy and joke along. He’d love nothing more than to just share a laugh with Newt right now—feel some of the tension drain from his body, see Newt’s eyes crinkle, get some colour back on his cheeks. But he finds he doesn’t even have it in him to crack a smile.

Instead, he just sits and blinks at Newt, takes in the pallor of his face, the uneven rise and fall of his chest, the dark circles ringing his eyes, the tangled web of black veins at his throat, slowly creeping upwards—and all he feels is fear.

“It’s getting worse,” he says.

It’s the wrong thing to point out, apparently, because Newt sighs sharply, and presses his head back against the headboard.

Something shifts in his face—hardens, tightens, like a mask slipping into place—and the whole atmosphere of the room seems to shift alongside it.

Thomas feels his chest tighten. He has a feeling he knows where this is going—although he hopes he’s wrong.

Several tense seconds tick by, and then Newt finally replies, a clipped edge to his voice.

“Yeah, alright. Thanks for deciding that on my behalf, Tommy. Listen—I’m the one with the virus here, alright? I’ll tell you when it gets worse, but until then, just... lay off, will you?”

Thomas swallows. A few weeks ago—no, even a few days ago, he would’ve felt unsettled if he’d heard Newt suddenly speak to him so harshly, spit out his name so coldly, as if he’s nothing more than a nuisance.

And, sure, it still stings—but now, he’s just tired. He knows what this is: Newt’s trying to get a rise out of him. Or, rather—the virus is.

It likes to play games like that: always push back, always deflect, always be stubborn and cross. And Thomas knows—he shouldn’t rise to the bait. He should know better. It’s the virus, after all. No use getting into an argument when the Cure is the only thing that’ll fix this.

But it’s late, and he’s tired, and he can’t quite untangle the threads of worry and fear and anger in his chest, and the more he pulls at them, the tighter they twist and tangle together into a painful knot. He’s tired of this game—of being let in, and then shut out again. And he knows Newt’s not himself, like this, and he knows he shouldn’t argue with him—he knows it won’t help. But Thomas is only human, too.

And so he rises to the bait.

“Oh, come on,” he huffs. “Don’t be like that.”

Newt’s mouth twitches into something halfway between a smirk and a frown. It doesn’t suit him, Thomas thinks—it pulls at his face in all the wrong places, makes him look so sharp, so angry, so hollowed out inside.

And abruptly, the flicker of irritation inside him is snuffed out, and a thick wave of worry pushes to the front, heavy and pleading—because how horrible must this all be for Newt? The sensation of his body moving without his permission, of hearing himself say things he doesn’t agree with, of being puppeteered around by the Flare, one blackened vein at a time, and knowing there’s nothing he can do to stop it?

Thomas takes a breath, feels his lungs squeeze and knead at the air, and tries to keep his voice calm.

“I notice, you know,” he says softly. “And I wish you’d let me do something to help, anything—‘cause your symptoms are getting worse, fast. That’s not me speaking for you, that’s me saying what I can see. And—it scares me, Newt, that it’s so… present now, the Flare.”

But his efforts at placating Newt—no, the Flare—are wasted, it seems, because that last sentence pushes a button. Newt twitches, frowns, and his eyes darken under his brows.

“Oh, so you’re scared of me now?” he sneers.

“No, Newt,” Thomas tries, “That wasn’t what I—”

But Newt doesn’t listen—and that’s so unlike him, as well. Newt always listens, always lets people finish their thoughts before weighing in with his own. But the Flare doesn’t care about that—it just barges on, fires off neurotransmittors and synapses at random, creating as much chaos, as much friction as possible, because it thrives on that.

“Well, maybe you should be,” Newt spits. “Just let me rot here, then, and you can run off with Teresa, how ‘bout that? You know, I wonder, sometimes—do you even want to rescue Minho, or is this all just about her as well?”

It’s a harsh response—no longer cold and sharp, but fanning out abruptly with fiery anger. The Flare’s good at that, it seems—twisting Newt’s even, smooth temper into unpredictable, jagged shapes, sharp-toothed and sharp-tongued and with an infallible instinct to push where it hurts.

And it hurts, to hear Newt speak to him like this—it does, even if Thomas knows it’s not Newt, not really.

And, horribly, it scares him, too. Not because he’s scared of Newt, but because he’s scared for him. Because this isn’t just a little discussion anymore. It feels like something bigger—like when they were talking about rescuing Minho, and then suddenly, Newt was at his throat, eyes wild and hollow and burning with anger. And he hadn’t been scared of Newt, either, back then, but for him—terrified, because he didn’t recognise him.

The Newt staring back at him now looks eerily similar to the one in that moment: heaving chest, pale face, empty eyes.

Unrecognisable.

The realisation settles heavily on his shoulders, and Thomas knows this can't go any further. He needs to de-escalate. Now.

“Don’t say that,” he murmurs. “Please, Newt. You know you don’t mean any of this. I know you don’t mean any of this. Let’s not argue now, alright? It’s late, we’re both tired—I don’t want to fight with you. And I think—no, I know you don’t want to, either.”

Newt listens to him carefully as he speaks, dark eyes fixed on Thomas’s face. He wonders if Newt can hear him properly, like this, or if the Flare’s twisting his words, too—feeding Newt some warped, distorted version of reality where everyone’s mean and angry and the Flare is the only voice of reason. He prays that’s not the case, because he needs Newt back here, with him, now.

When he finally falls silent, a shiver racks through Newt's body. His shoulders hitch up, his jaw clenches, he squeezes his eyes shut, and his whole body seems to go taut against the headboard.

Thomas braces himself. If Newt gets mad now, really mad, there’s no telling what he’ll do. The virus has spread so far now, and it’s made Newt so volatile and unpredictable that Thomas is scared something will happen, one of these days—that the virus won’t be satisfied with just hurling insults and grabbing at collars anymore, but that it’ll get an appetite for real violence, instead. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when—if that happens. Even just thinking about fending off Newt makes him feel sick, let alone hurting him.

And then—Newt goes still on the bed.

His head dips forward, and he opens his eyes again, blinks down at his legs. Thomas’s heart jumps to his throat. He leans forward in his chair, and tries to get a look at Newt’s face.

In his head, he can see it already: Newt’s eyes, clouded over, dark, and completely empty—as if there’s no life in them anymore, just a hollow abyss, carved out by the virus and echoing with a neverending hunger for pain, violence, flesh.

But when his eyes meet Newt’s, there’s no dark haze staring back at him—just the familiar deep brown of Newt’s eyes, tired, confused, frightened, but clear.

Thomas feels his shoulders drop. He takes a deep breath—but it catches and stumbles on the emotions still lodged in his throat.

“There you are,” he breathes.

Newt blinks at him. He drags a shaky hand through his hair, bites at his lip, and then sits up a little straighter, twisting to face Thomas. His hands lie limply in his lap.

“Tommy,” he says, voice halting. “I’m sorry. I—that wasn’t—”

He takes a shaky breath, and his brows knit together again—but this time, not in the sharp, angry arch the Flare twists them into. They’re softer, somehow. More sad, more real. It hurts just as badly to see, though, because Thomas knows Newt doesn’t mean for any of this to happen. He knows.

“It’s alright,” he says. “You can’t help it. It’s okay.”

Newt shakes his head. “It’s not. I’m—I’m mean, Tommy. And I don’t want to be.” There’s a shrill, panicked edge to his voice, and it feels like he’s not just trying to convince Thomas, but himself, too.

“And I know you understand, or—or, you try to,” Newt continues, “but that doesn’t make it any less horrible—the things I say, and do. It’s like I just get trapped in my body sometimes, and that—virus takes over. I hate it.”

“You always come back, though,” Thomas murmurs. “You fight it. I know it’s not you, and I know you’re in there, trying to get back out.”

Newt looks down into his lap. He tugs at the ends of his sleeves, trying to pull them down over the black veins circling his wrists.

It doesn’t work. They’ve climbed too far, already.

He opens his mouth, hesitates, and then speaks, voice a whisper, eyes wide and glassy.

“But what if I can’t, next time? What if next time—I’m just gone?”

“You won’t be,” Thomas says. He doesn’t know if he believes it himself—but he has to. Newt has to. “We can still fix this, remember?”

He searches Newt’s face, tries to hold his eyes, but Newt still looks uneasy, and scared—and Thomas can’t stand seeing that look on his face, so he adds on: “I promise, Newt. I won’t let you go.”

Newt gives him a shaky nod.

“It’s getting hard, though. For you,” he says. “And—I don’t want to hurt you, Tommy, so you have to promise me that you’ll keep yourself safe, okay?”

His eyes bore into Thomas’s. “From me, I mean. If I get too… dangerous, if the Flare becomes too strong—you have to let go, okay?”

Something twists in Thomas’s chest. He wonders if this is it—the moment he snaps, shatters, drops to the floor in a million misshapen shards.

“Please don’t make me promise that, Newt,” he says quietly. It sounds like a plea—feels like a plea, so it might as well be one. “You know I can’t.”

Newt sighs. His left hand absently drifts up to rub at his throat, and Thomas watches for a moment as his fingers trace the veins.

He wonders if it hurts. It probably does, if the way he had to drag Newt up the stairs just a moment ago is any indication. If Thomas had to guess, he’d say the virus was aggravating the scar tissue in Newt’s bad leg. It’s just a guess, though, because Newt won’t tell him, won’t let him help. He supposes that’s one thing the virus hasn’t touched yet: Newt’s selflessness.

After all, that’s how they’d ended up here as well—with Newt propped up in bed, and Thomas hovering in a chair next to him. His heart still thumps heavily in his chest when he thinks back to the sequence of events from the night—the blood draining from Newt’s face all of a sudden, the unsteady shuffle of his steps as he’d rushed out of their meeting with Lawrence and Gally, the shivering of his spine under Thomas’s hand after he’d bent over the toilet, coughing and wheezing and bringing up nothing but bile.

If Newt had looked tired then, he looks exhausted now. His fingers have drifted up to his face, rubbing at the dark circles lining his eyes. He blinks up at the ceiling a few times, then looks back at Thomas, eyes flickering with emotion, warmth, life—Newt—and nothing, nothing like the empty darkened holes they’d been before.

“Alright,” Newt concedes after a moment. He drops his hand to his lap, and it twitches, curls around his lower right arm protectively. Thomas tries not to think of the wound under his sleeve, there—the knotted mess of black veins, aching and pulling and biting at his skin.

He forces himself to focus on what he can see, instead: the slight frown still visible between Newt’s eyebrows, the tremor in his fingers, the shivers that seem to crawl up his spine every now and then.

“How do you feel?” he asks quietly.

Newt shrugs. “Dunno. Weird. Like I just woke up from a nightmare—except I didn’t, ‘cause the nightmare’s still there, just less… visible, I guess.”

Thomas hums, and Newt’s eyes snap up to him. “God, this is all so—” he huffs a bitter laugh. “I don’t know what to do about any of this. Feel like I’m going fuckin’ crazy.”

“You’re not.” The words tumble out of Thomas's mouth before he even realises it—but it's true. Newt isn't going crazy. He's not. Crazy means—damaged. Scarred. Irreversible. And that's not what this is. That can't be what this is—because the Flare has to be curable. It has to be.

“I am, though,” Newt presses, eyes big and insistent. “Isn’t that what this is? I’m a liability. This isn’t gonna work—for Minho—”

“Do you want to join us, still?” Thomas cuts in. “When we go and—get Minho back? You feel up to it?”

Newt hesistates for a moment, and then nods. “Well—yeah, I think so. But, Tommy—”

“Then come.”

Newt frowns at him, opens his mouth, but Thomas refuses to let him argue. “You’re not a liability. Not to me, not now, and you won’t be then.”

A flurry of emotions flashes across Newt’s face, at that—uncertainty, frustration, sadness, and something that looks a little bit like fondness, almost, but it’s gone before Thomas can blink.

“But—how can you be so certain of that?” Newt says. His voice sounds small, all of a sudden.

“‘Cause I know you,” Thomas says. “You care about Minho more than anyone else. You want to help him, don’t you? The Flare can’t twist that against you. It can’t. You’ll be fine.”

Newt frowns. “That’s not true,” he murmurs. “I care about you, too, Tommy. Just as much. It’s just—I miss him, so much, and… I couldn’t live with myself if I somehow messed up our plan. I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

Thomas shifts in his seat, huddles a little closer to the bed, hoping, somehow, that the proximity will make it easier to get his words across to Newt.

“You won’t mess it up. It’s a simple plan—we’ll be in and out.” He looks down at his lap, fiddles with his hands. His heart feels heavy in chest, all of a sudden, big and raw, pushing into his lungs and throat, but he blurts out the rest of his thoughts, anyway. “And—I need you there, Newt. I couldn’t do it without you.”

Newt takes in an unsteady breath. “I feel like we’re walking in circles here. You can’t—rely on me, Tommy. That’s the whole issue. And if you do choose to, then I need to know that you’ll walk away if you have to. Save yourself and Minho. Leave me, God—kill me, if you have to—”

Thomas can’t bear this.

“Stop,” he cuts in harshly. “Stop. Don’t—” His heart twitches, pumps erratically, cuts off his words. His eyes sting. “Don’t say that.”

Newt sighs. He pauses for a moment, gathers himself, and then says, softly: “I’m just trying to be realistic here, Tommy.”

And that makes Thomas even more upset, because he knows that softness is something Newt’s doing just for him—just to make it easier for him to accept the defeatism that Newt has already settled into. It makes him feel sick, to realise that Newt really, truly believes this—that it’s over for him, and the Flare has won. He won’t accept it.

“No you’re not.” He looks up, meets Newt’s eyes. They’re soft and tired—resigned, he thinks—and it hurts. “You’re—you’re talking about this as if it’s reality, already. As if we can’t fight it, fix it anymore. Don’t do that, Newt.” He’s pleading now, he knows. But he doesn’t care anymore.

Newt listens quietly, and then, before Thomas even realises what’s happening, he’s smiling at him—a brittle twitch of his lips. “You haven’t changed a lick since I first met you, you know,” he says. “Still a stubborn Greenie.”

And it's strange, but it comes easily this time—through the stinging of tears in his eyes, through his heaving chest, through his racing heart. Through it all—Thomas feels his own lips turn up into a smile, too.

“Of course I haven’t." His voice feels wet and shaky, but he smiles, and Newt's there, smiling back. “I’ve still got so much to be stubborn about. I’m not planning on stopping now.”

Newt huffs a laugh. It feels like Fry's warm stew at the end of a hard day's work, like the first drop of water after they'd survived the ruthless heat of the Scorch, like a glimmer of sunshine, breaking through the clouds at last. “You’re an incorrigible shank, you know that?”

"Yeah," Thomas whispers. He can't stop staring at Newt, drinking it in—the curve of his lips, the softness of his eyes, the apples of his cheeks, slowly returning back to their normal shade.

And then, just as quickly, Newt sobers up. He turns to Thomas, eyes big and serious.

“Let’s do it this way, then,” he says. His hands twitch in his lap, and then dart out to grasp at Thomas’s, fingers cold against his skin. “You don’t give up, and I won’t either. For Minho. We got a deal?”

Thomas swallows. For Minho, he thinks, yes, for Minho—but for you, too.

He curls his fingers a little more tightly around Newt’s, feeling the warmth from his hands spread and gradually melt the bone-deep chill that seems to have settled in Newt, these days. Deep down, he wishes it were this simple—all of it. That he could stave off the virus this easily, just by holding on, being there, keeping Newt close through all of this.

He knows it’s not that simple, though. They both do.

But Newt’s fingers twitch and tighten around his anyway—and maybe, Thomas thinks, this is just what they both need right now. To pretend, just for a moment. To allow themselves to believe that this—this naive mutual promise that doesn’t stand a chance against the Flare or WCKD—will help them pull through this, somehow.

And so Thomas holds on tight, and meets Newt’s eyes—warm, brown, alive—and he knows: he’ll fight tooth and nail to keep doing this, again and again. To keep Newt here with him, close, for as long as he’ll stay.

He can’t let go. He won’t let go.

The world is no bigger than this room, for a moment. This is all that matters, all that’s ever mattered—the two of them, here, huddled close, alive, in spite of a whole universe of odds stacked against them.

And like this, he finally feels like he can do it. He lets himself believe—truly, fully—that there is a chance. That they’ll make it. Together.

He draws a deep breath, and for the first time in weeks, the air flows smoothly into his lungs. And when he speaks, his heart's no longer blocking his throat—it's settled now. Just for a moment.

“Deal.”