Chapter Text
Newt gasped, eyes flying open. His lungs ached as air filled them, like he’d held his breath for too long. He tried to remember what had happened, why he was lying on the hard pavement of a dirty road, but the memories that flooded back made no sense. He remembered tackling Thomas to the ground, forcing Thomas to hold a gun to his head, yelling horrible things that he didn’t mean, and asking – no, begging – his best friend to kill him. And he had. Thomas had pulled the trigger and the deafening crack of the shot just barely registered in his ears before everything went black.
He felt as though someone had reached into his chest and ripped out his heart with one hand and constricted his breathing with the other. Tommy had actually done it, he’d actually killed him. Except that he hadn’t, obviously. Newt reached up to inspect his forehead for any sign of damage; he felt nothing but something thick and sticky covering smooth skin and hard bone. When he looked at his hand, he discovered that the substance was congealing blood. He frantically ran his fingers over his face and through his hair, searching desperately for the source of the drying blood, but only found more of it.
Newt felt something tugging at this shoe. He sat up and found one of the Cranks from the group that he’d been with – a gangly man with only one eye and more than a few teeth missing – gnawing on his shoe. Blood oozed from the corners of the man’s mouth and Newt thought that he heard a tooth break as the man repositioned the sole of Newt’s shoe to the side of his mouth and chomped down. Newt kicked the Crank in the mouth and scrambled backwards.
The Crank clasped his mangled hands over his injured mouth, blood oozing out between his fingers, and began whining like a dog that had been kicked by its master. Once Newt had put a good eight feet or so of distance between them, he stopped, feeling oddly bad about hurting the man. In an instant, the look in the man’s eyes switched from hurt to rage.
Newt tensed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, knowing that it wouldn’t help anything, but feeling the need to apologize anyways.
The Crank dropped his hands from his mouth to the pavement and slowly began to crawl towards Newt, blood dripping unhindered from his chin and eyes flashing dangerously, madly. He grinned, showing off his broken and jagged teeth before licking his lips as though he were looking at a large freshly cooked steak instead of a living, breathing person.
Newt glanced from the crank advancing on him to the group still digging through the trash pile; luckily none of the group seemed to notice that anything had changed, that he had changed. At least he had one thing going for him. Newt looked back to the mangled Crank; the man had stopped and was crouching, muscles twitching, ready to attack at any moment. Newt began running in the opposite direction, not waiting for the Crank to decide to attack. He could hear growling and heavy breathing from somewhere behind him, but dared not spend the time or effort to look back.
When his legs couldn’t take much more, Newt slowed until he finally came to a stop, doubling over and bracing his hands on his knees for the support he definitely needed. He looked back the way he’d come, searching for any sign of the Crank he’d been running from or any others that might be lurking in the vicinity. He saw none. His deep, almost desperate breaths echoed off the buildings and sounded much louder to his own ears than he hoped it really was. He tried to slow his breathing, but his body had other ideas. The ache he’d felt in his lungs when he’d awoken was worse than ever. He had no idea of how far he’d run, but he’d never felt so tired and winded than he did at that moment and his bad leg was hurting something awful. He wouldn’t be able to go much further without a decent amount of rest first.
After several minutes, his breathing finally slowed and he stood up straight. He caught sight of his reflection in a window that had been painted over black from the inside and almost didn’t recognize himself. Blood had run down his forehead, on each side of his nose, past his jaw and down his neck, disappearing to the back. His clothes were filthy and ripped, caked with small amounts of blood – that he suspected was not his own – in a few places. His skin was covered in a thin layer of dirt and there were some more pronounced smudges on his neck, right cheek and arms. Large patches of his hair were missing; he could vaguely remember them being pulled out, but his scalp looked normal, uninjured. Newt raised his hand to one of spots devoid of hair and gingerly touched it, expecting it to be tender, but it wasn’t. He looked an absolute mess and so he looked away, ashamed of what he had become.
He wanted to cry, thinking that this was how Thomas had last seen him… that if he never saw Thomas again, this was the way his friend – the boy he loved – would remember him. Newt had never been a vain person, but this was not the way he wanted anyone to remember him. If he had to be remembered, he wanted to be remembered as the boy before the Flare, the one that could be depended on, who stayed strong even when all he and everyone else wanted to do was break, the boy with the smile that Minho once claimed could fix anything.
Newt took another look at his surroundings. He needed to find somewhere reasonably safe to stay for the night. The sun was going down fast and he reckoned that the streets were no place be once night fell. Newt crossed the street and began testing the doors of the buildings; most seemed to be locked, which didn’t surprise him much. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the knowledge that only a few days ago this had been a bustling city rattled around, but he couldn’t remember how he knew that. Every memory he’d had before going to the Crank Palace seemed so far away and foggy, like it’d happened a lifetime ago instead of mere days. He supposed that was probably due to the Flare eating away at his brain, but now everything was clear again… clearer than it had been since they’d been since they'd escaped the Maze.
After trying two streets worth of buildings and not finding a single unlocked door on any of the shops, with the evening growing ever darker, Newt finally decided that he was going to have to take matters into his own hands and make a safe place. Deciding on a space with boarded-up windows, Newt picked up a nearby metal trashcan and threw it at the door to break the glass, then kicked the board still covering the door loose. He carefully peeked inside, looking for any signs of life; finding none, he stepped through the door, picked the board up and leaned it back against the door as best he could, hoping that anyone roaming the streets that night wouldn’t notice the difference.
The place looked like it had been some sort of café or restaurant once upon a time, but it didn’t look like anyone had eaten there for a while. A layer of dust covered everything and rats scurried across the floor in a panic and back into holes, away from the intruder. It definitely wasn’t ideal, but hopefully it would do for a night or two… at least until he could figure out what to do next. Quietly as he could, Newt turned tables on their sides with their legs against the back wall to form a barrier that he could sleep behind and placed the chairs around the room in a maze pattern of sorts that would hopefully trip any intruders up or at least give him a bit of warning as to their presence. Newt surveyed his work before nodding to himself in approval and crawling over behind the tables to lay down.
Sleep didn’t come easy. His mind was reeling with a hundred different questions about what had happened to him, gears turning trying to come up with a decent plan of what to do next and where to go. The rats didn’t help. After what felt like a couple hours they turned brazen and came out of the woodwork to investigate him. Newt tried to shoo them away but they wouldn’t be so easily detoured. Finally he got up and repositioned his tables so that they couldn’t get into his barricade. As he lay back down, he tried to remember a night worse than this, but nothing that had happened in the Maze or even the Scorch seemed quite as bad as that particular moment in time… maybe it was because he’d always had Minho and Tommy with him before. There was safety in numbers and reassurance in knowing that people that you trusted and loved had your back, and right now Newt had neither of those things.