Chapter Text
Newt did not know whether he could swim.
With the pond in the Glade too shallow ever to demand an answer, too modest a body of water to reveal whether some forgotten instinct would remember what his mind did not—whether it would bear him safely back to the surface or surrender him to the silence beneath—the question had simply never arisen.
Yet the open sea had always held a peculiar claim upon his quiet reveries. Strange, he thought, as the notion stole upon him now, that he had never once imagined himself entering it.
Always he had remained upon the shore, content to watch the patient breathing of the tide beneath an unbounded sky, where blue yielded to blue until even the eye abandoned its pursuit; and therein lay its true enchantment. It was a horizon that acknowledged no walls, a world whose immensity defied every measure he knew, whose only frontier lay beyond the reach of his imagining.
His thoughts returned to it now without invitation. Perhaps because this room bore the peculiar cruelty of deep water. Perhaps because there was no horizon here, no promise that the world continued beyond what the eye could bear—only bodies and shadows and sound advancing from every direction until they seemed to close above him, smothering him beneath their weight, leaving him aching for the impossible simplicity of air, for the mercy of a surface he might break through, for a single breath that belonged wholly to himself.
He was not drowning.
Yet it bloody well felt as though he were.
His eyes, his ears—every one of his senses conspired against him, and the place revealed itself only in reluctant fragments: a vaulted cellar unfolding into a warren of interlocking chambers, narrow alcoves, and blind corners where darkness pooled. There was little light, and Newt could not tell whence it came. It drifted through the smoke, wan and spectral, while the music did not merely echo against the stone but insinuated itself into it, pressing through the walls, seeping from the ceiling, rising beneath his ribs until each breath drew it deeper into him, as though the air itself had been displaced.
Light dissolved into movement; movement into shadow; shadow into human forms that dissolved again before his gaze could lay hold of them.
To Newt, they were people no longer. They had become a single restless creature wrought from innumerable bodies, forever surging, folding, and remaking itself beneath the bruised glow. He found himself at its mercy. Whether he wished to move no longer mattered. The current had claimed him. It carried him without effort, surrendering him to its unseen will, drawing him ever deeper towards the centre of the room, towards the Cyclops' eye—or whatever lay waiting in its place.
The space obeyed the impossible logic of a nightmare, stirring the same nameless disquiet that had so often haunted him upon waking in the Glade: the wordless conviction that something essential had been taken before his eyes had even opened. Morning after morning, he had searched for it without ever knowing what it was, reaching, always reaching, left with nothing but the hollow ache of an absence too vast to name.
Now he knew.
And somehow that knowledge proved crueller still.
To know what he sought—or rather, whom. To know that Thomas was here, somewhere within this breathing multitude, concealed behind faces that refused to resolve into his.
The smell was the worst of it.
Spirits saturated the air until they seemed almost corporeal, interwoven with sweat, sour breath, stale smoke, and the bitter tang of vomit; Newt felt sullied merely by drawing breath.
He wanted to leave at once.
No—
Newt closed his eyes, and, in that fleeting darkness, sought to gather himself. It was not the night beyond those walls he yearned for, nor the cold absolution of untouched air filling his lungs.
It was Thomas.
A longing so profound that the very act of breathing had become indistinguishable from the ache of it; his absence a suffocation all its own.
"Stay close," Jorge muttered, though he had to raise his voice above the music. "You leave my sight, you're on your own. Don't start conversations, don't answer questions. The fewer people who notice you, the better."
Newt nodded before remembering the gesture was wasted. Jorge could never have seen it.
The man was already carving a path through the throng.
Every few paces he caught hold of a shoulder—a figure with cropped dark hair, another slight enough to be Brenda from behind—and turned them round, searching one face after another before dismissing them and pressing on to the next.
They were young, Newt realised. Younger than they were, many of them. Children, almost. He looked away before his mind could begin to imagine who they had been—or who they might never become.
A boy surfaced from the press, blond hair catching the light as he slipped between the bodies. Not Thomas. A faded blue shirt, the turn of a shoulder so painfully familiar that Newt was already pushing towards it before the stranger glanced aside. Not Thomas. The crowd gave him another face, then another. Not Thomas. Not Thomas. Not Thomas. Not—
Someone collided with him shoulder-first, the force of the impact sending him stumbling a pace sideways.
"Watch it," Newt snapped.
The stranger neither apologised nor so much as turned their head, but drifted onwards with the vacant, dreamlike gait of one moving through a world only half perceived, and before the last of Newt's words had left his mouth they had already been swallowed by the crowd.
"Slinthead!" Minho shouted, already surging after them.
Newt caught him by the elbow before he had gone more than a single step. After everything that had happened that day, the last thing they needed was another senseless confrontation, another moment's delay.
"Leave it."
For an instant Minho resisted, every sinew held taut beneath Newt's grasp as his gaze lingered upon the place where the stranger had disappeared; then, with visible reluctance, the tension ebbed from him, and he allowed himself to be guided after Jorge.
Sullenly, they continued through the cellar and into another chamber, larger even than the last, where the revelry had swollen into something approaching frenzy. Nothing within the narrow compass of Newt's memory resembled this place, though its purpose required little interpretation. Pleasure had ceased to be a luxury here. It had become an anaesthetic, another means by which people blunted the jagged edges of a world that offered precious little worth feeling.
Not that he imagined himself entitled to condemn them.
Judgement required the certainty of some better existence against which another might be measured, and he possessed little enough evidence that such a life had ever belonged to him.
Greenie Day came closest, perhaps—not to this kind of excess, never to this—but to the same desperate instinct. A bonfire standing stubbornly against the encroaching dark; laughter made sacred by its rarity; a handful of stolen hours during which frightened boys might persuade themselves they were merely that: boys, rather than prisoners; souls still permitted to imagine a future instead of nameless remnants severed from a forgotten yesterday.
Even celebration in the Glade had carried the weight of labour. It belonged to evenings earned by blistered hands and aching backs, and vanished again before dawn returned to collect its due.
Here, no such permission seemed necessary.
Perhaps that was the difference.
To endure a world intent upon consuming itself demanded, from time to time, an act of magnificent self-deception. Better, perhaps, to surrender oneself to music and liquor than to lie awake another night listening to civilisation perish by imperceptible degrees, another fragment yielding to darkness with every passing hour, until memory itself began to doubt that any brighter world had ever existed.
There had been nights in the Glade when Gally's brew passed from hand to hand like an infection; nights when laughter curdled into argument, argument into violence, and familiar paths seemed briefly to forget themselves beneath uncertain feet.
Yet even those nights possessed an innocence this place had long since forfeited. Here, excess, it seemed, was no longer an indulgence. It had become a creed.
Newt hated this place and everything it represented.
He hated the heat that clung to his skin like an unwelcome hand; hated the ceaseless press of strangers that admitted neither distance nor breath; hated the unrelenting clamour of voices and music beneath which every thought seemed doomed to perish before it had fully formed.
Most of all, he hated that Thomas could be anywhere.
Or nowhere.
Could intoxication linger in the air like smoke? Could it settle upon clothing, hair, skin—could it seep into the lungs until the body breathed it as naturally as oxygen? Had he drawn enough of it into himself that his thoughts no longer belonged entirely to him?
His mind, as ever, pursued the thought into darker regions. For if madness wished to pass unseen from one body to the next, what richer harvest could it hope to find than a room such as this?
Jorge had insisted the virus was not airborne, and he threaded his way through the crowd with remarkably little caution for a man who lacked immunity. Perhaps he believed it. Newt could do little but trust that he was right.
Even so, his hand rose of its own accord, drawing the faded red scarf higher across his mouth and nose, as though so pitiful a barrier might yet bargain with whatever unseen presence drifted amongst them.
All around him, figures dissolved into shadow and flesh until Newt could no longer tell whether he was witnessing an embrace or a feast. Every appetite that ought to have remained restrained had instead been invited to rule without consequence, surrendering itself to the darkness of the room and the anonymity it provided. He saw more acts of intimacy than he cared to, though he could not rid himself of the suspicion that not every surrender of the body had been a willing one; that some had simply been carried away by the fever of the room rather than consciously chosen it.
He had only just turned his gaze away from another such scene when Jorge came to so abrupt a halt that Newt nearly walked into him.
He followed Jorge's gaze and, at long last, found a face he recognised.
Brenda.
She swayed with the music, her eyes closed, yet there was something disquieting in the way she moved. Her body obeyed the rhythm, but not quite; as though another cadence had reached her, one that belonged neither to the music nor to the room, audible only to herself. She occupied the same space as everyone else and yet appeared curiously absent from it.
"Brenda!" Jorge shouted.
She did not acknowledge him, nor anything else around her, her thoughts seemingly adrift somewhere far beyond the reach of the room.
"Brenda!"
Jorge thrust his way towards her, parting the crowd with little regard for those in his path until at last he stood before her. His hands found her shoulders, turning her towards him.
Her eyes opened only slowly, looking upon him with the mild, untroubled courtesy one might extend to a stranger, tracing the contours of his face without ever quite finding him.
"Brenda!"
She blinked once. Then again. Something shifted behind her eyes—a flicker of wonder, quiet and almost childlike.
"Jorge...?" she murmured, the name sounding less like recognition than a question addressed to herself. "What...?"
A smile came to her lips with such effortless warmth that, had Newt not witnessed the terrible vacancy from which it had blossomed only a heartbeat before, he might have mistaken it for happiness.
"Oh... there you are," she slurred, the words touched by the faintest trace of amusement, as though this were any ordinary reunion rather than a rescue. "Took you long enough."
"What's wrong with her?" Frypan shouted.
"Drugs," Jorge growled, never once looking away from her. "Must be whatever Marcus has his people handing out at the entrance. Everyone in this hellhole's high."
His hands slipped from her shoulders, rising to cradle her face, his thumbs brushing lightly across her cheeks as though searching beneath skin and bone for the woman he knew, trying to summon her back through touch alone.
"Ay, Brenda... mija... ¿qué has hecho?"
“Where’s Thomas?” Minho’s voice intruded upon the exchange, rising above Jorge’s words.
Brenda continued to smile absently at Jorge, giving no sign that Minho's voice had reached her at all.
"THOMAS!" Minho bellowed. "WHERE IS HE?"
This time something stirred. Her gaze drifted beyond Jorge's shoulder, travelling slowly across the restless multitude as though she expected Thomas to emerge from its shifting body at any moment.
"He was..."
The words withered where they were born. A faint crease gathered between her brows as she lingered upon the unfinished thought.
"He's..."
Newt watched an invisible struggle pass across her face. It was not the bewilderment of a forgotten name nor the ordinary frustration of memory refusing to yield; it seemed instead as though her thoughts had wandered into some place from which they could no longer find an unbroken path back to speech.
At last, almost wonderingly, she whispered,
"...here."
"What do you mean, 'here'?" Newt demanded, frustration and impatience laying claim to his voice, wrenching the words from him before compassion could stay his tongue, until each one struck like an accusation. Brenda recoiled, almost imperceptibly.
He didn't feel sorry for her, not in the way he knew he ought to have. Remorse belonged to quieter moments, and there was nothing quiet left within him.
Thomas had been with her.
Thomas was here.
Somewhere.
Newt turned slowly where he stood; the room flowed around him without beginning or end, swallowing each half-glimpsed face before recognition could gather, denying him the one countenance for which his soul searched.
If only someone would turn on the bloody lights. Let every shadow retreat. Tear this monstrous body apart until it remembered it had once been made of individuals. Silence the music. Strip away the smoke. Force every hidden corner to surrender its secrets until nowhere remained for a single man to vanish.
"How could you possibly lose Thomas?" Minho huffed. "Shank's got all the subtlety of a brick through a window."
He had already abandoned the questioning, pushing back the way they had come, slipping between the bodies; then returned only moments later.
His eyes found Newt's.
Then, almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.
"Hey, where did Teresa—"
"Help!"
Both boys turned at the cry, moving as one, forcing their way through the thicket of strangers. Yet to Newt it seemed as though the room itself had risen against him, conspiring to root him in place with every footfall. Bodies became branches thrown across his path; reaching arms became tendrils winding around him, until the crowd transformed into a wilderness of limbs and shoulders and grasping hands through which he was forced to carve his passage.
He did not heed them. Did not care whose hands he shoved aside or whose protests followed in his wake. The music receded. The voices dissolved. All that remained was the hiss of static filling the hollow behind his ears, stretching even the frantic rhythm of his breathing into something distant and unreal. There was only that small clearing beyond the dancers, appearing and vanishing with every turn of the crowd.
He kept his eyes fixed upon it.
Teresa. On her knees. And the motionless figure before her.
Thomas.
Face-down upon the ground, his arms folded above his head as though some final instinct—one that had survived even unconsciousness—had commanded him to make himself small beneath whatever force had brought him down.
"Tommy!"
Newt dropped beside him. His palms met the floor, slick and tacky with spilt liquor—he refused to consider what else. Neither did he care. He could have knelt in blood and never noticed.
Around them, no one stopped. Shoes passed within inches of his fingers; heels struck the ground beside Thomas' legs; bodies brushed against Newt's back and carried on with the same careless gaiety as before.
“Tommy?”
“Is he—” Minho began.
“I already found him like this!” Teresa said, her voice breaking as she leaned over him. Her scarf had slipped away, her dark hair hanging loose about her face.
“Tommy,” Newt reached for him. “Can you hear me?”
“We need to turn him over!”
“Help!”
Frypan arrived almost the same instant as Minho and Newt had, which only registered with Newt peripherally. Aris was there too. Their voices rose on every side of him, swallowing one another until words forfeited all meaning. What reached Newt was no longer language, but its shattered remnants, swallowed in turn by the immense solitude of his own terror.
He heard none of it.
There was Thomas.
And there was everything else.
Together with Teresa, they rolled him carefully onto his side, and Newt caught the weight of him as he turned, one hand finding his shoulder, the other bracing him.
Fragments of old lessons surfaced, knowledge preserved from another life: Jeff’s voice, calm and patient; Clint correcting the angle of his hands; the stern repetition of instructions until they had been worn into something almost instinctive. There was comfort, perhaps, in the sequence. Something merciful in the knowledge that the body could be reduced to necessities, that terror might be held at bay by the simple procession of one task after another.
Stay in the moment.
Do not think beyond it.
Keep the mind within the narrow confines of what must be done.
But his thoughts had never been particularly obedient things.
They would not remain here.
They drew him backwards, away from the filthy floor and drunken music, back towards the Homestead. Back towards another version of Thomas lying unconscious upon a bed, pale and unmoving, lost somewhere inside the Changing whilst Newt had stood beside him.
He remembered that helplessness with an ache that had somehow survived every intervening memory, preserved beneath the anger and laughter and noise, merely dormant, waiting for grief to summon it back into the light. He felt it rising through him now, filling the hollow beneath his ribs until yesterday’s anguish wore the face of today’s fear.
He had known what to do then. He knew what to do now. Yet knowledge had never been the same thing as mastery.
There were moments when a person might possess every answer in the world and yet stand utterly powerless before another's suffering.
You stupid, bloody shank, he cursed himself. Slim yerself.
His fingertips found Thomas’ cheek almost without thought, brushing the warmth—or what remained of it—from his skin before tracing the familiar line of his jaw. The gesture was instinctive. His hand moved lower, following the line of bone beneath the skin until his fingers reached his throat, seeking the larynx by touch before settling into the hollow beside it. He pressed two fingers there and waited.
His own heartbeat thundered beneath his skin with such violence that, for one bewildering moment, it was the only rhythm his fingertips could perceive. Then, beneath the furious insistence of his own pulse, another answered—small, faltering, slow and unsteady beneath his touch, yet undeniably there. Still there. Still alive.
Thank Shuck.
A breath escaped him at last, drawn not from the present but from the terrible interval between losing Thomas and finding him again, as though his lungs had refused to surrender it until Thomas had been returned to him.
“What’ve you gone and done now, Tommy, huh?”
His fingers remained at Thomas’ throat. He could not make himself move them. Could not quite trust the pulse to continue if he did.
“We can’t stay here.”
Minho was right.
Newt reluctantly raised his gaze away from Thomas' face. The room remained obstinately inscrutable. A labyrinth; not of walls, but of bodies and smoke and failing light, an architecture forever altering its shape before his eyes. He could no longer have said from which direction they had come, nor where the nearest exit might lie hidden. Every passage opened only to disappear again; every glimpse of the room beyond was swallowed by another turning body, another surge of movement, until even the walls seemed to have withdrawn into the darkness and every direction had become alike.
A poor Runner he had always been. Not the running itself—that had never troubled him. Once, before he had crippled himself, he had been faster than most, and speed had always seemed the simpler part of the bargain. No, it was the world that confounded him: its crooked paths and shifting landmarks, its infuriating habit of concealing the way home precisely when one most needed to find it.
He had always known to trust Minho with that.
So he did now.
“We need to get out of here!” Minho’s voice tore through the din again, louder this time, stripped of all but urgency. He was already on his feet, survival instinct taking command like an old companion answering a familiar summons, his gaze sweeping the room in search of a way through.
“Upstairs.”
Newt had been so consumed by Thomas that he had not noticed Jorge approach. He stood over them with Brenda gathered against him, one arm secured around her waist, keeping her close whenever the haze of drink threatened to lead her astray, his free hand raised towards the ceiling.
“Apartment,” Newt thought he heard him say. “We can use it.”
Newt neither questioned the suggestion nor spared a moment to weigh it. This was no time for deliberation. Before thought had gathered into anything resembling reason, instinct had already seized the reins and borne him onwards.
He relinquished Thomas’ pulse at last, though only that he might gather him instead. One arm slid beneath his shoulders, the other beneath his knees, and as Newt straightened with him cradled against his chest, his own body exacted its price. A slow protest awakened along his spine, his muscles drawing taut beneath the strain, each fibre stretched like rope bearing a weight beyond its strength. His shoulders burned beneath the burden; so did his leg, deep within the joint, where bone remembered the violence it had once endured. Anguish stirred there and began its ascent.
His jaw locked against it. For one brief instant, his body seemed to become nothing but a catalogue of its own injuries, each one rising to remind him that nothing once broken ever returned untouched.
He denied them all.
What claim had pain upon him now?
Thomas was in his arms.
"Newt—"
Frypan reached for him. His hand faltered as his eyes dropped to Newt's leg.
"Let me take him."
"I've got him."
"Your leg—"
"I've got him."
The words left him with a force that bordered upon anger, and even as they settled between them, Newt knew he would not have recalled them. Something within him had already crossed beyond persuasion, into that strange country where reason no longer held dominion, and the body obeyed only the heart.
Thomas rested against him with the helpless abandon of the unconscious, every ounce of his weight entrusted without knowing it. His head had fallen into the hollow between Newt's shoulder and neck, and there, against his skin, lingered the faintest warmth of breath.
Alive.
The word seemed to find an answering chamber within him—Alive, Alive, Alive—and his own heart struck so fiercely against his ribs that it bordered upon pain; relief and suffering winding themselves so tightly together that they became inseparable, two strands of the same cord pulled taut within his chest.
Frypan looked to Minho.
The objection was already gathering behind Minho's eyes before it could reach his mouth. For a heartbeat, it seemed he might give it voice.
Then he met Newt's gaze. And whatever he found there stilled him.
With nothing more than a weary sigh, he turned to follow Jorge's lead. Frypan hesitated only a moment before falling into step. Newt followed with Thomas in his arms, Teresa close behind.
Gratitude had never come easily to Newt.
Not because he felt too little of it, but because he had always been far more comfortable with carrying things than confessing them. Affection could conceal itself behind mockery. Loyalty could pass unnoticed beneath the easy rituals of habit. Concern might borrow the voice of irritation and escape exposure altogether.
Gratitude permitted no such disguises.
It demanded a kind of honesty Newt had never found easy—the willingness to place some unguarded part of himself into another’s keeping.
He could not remember whether he had ever truly thanked Minho.
Not for carrying him back to the Glade that morning, when the world had been swimming in and out of darkness, and every step Minho took had been another borrowed heartbeat keeping him tethered to life.
How readily a man entrusted tomorrow with all he lacked the courage to speak today. Tomorrow. That quiet inheritance, forever waiting beyond the reach of evening, where every debt of the heart was quietly consigned to some imagined confession, safely laid aside until courage found it—or tomorrow failed to arrive.
Newt had stood before that abyss before. More than once he had believed the last tomorrow had already been spent, only to wake beneath another dawn and find that fate, for reasons beyond understanding, had granted one day more. One more sunrise for Thomas. One more for Minho.
Not for Alby.
Nor Winston.
Nor Chuck.
No.
They reached the body's outermost reaches, and Jorge swept aside another of the heavy curtains, revealing a narrow doorway hidden within its folds.
Beyond lay what might once have been called a yard, though the name seemed too generous for so confined a place. The surrounding walls rose so high, and drew so oppressively close, that they admitted only a narrow wound of sky between their summits. The air lay motionless there, stale with long confinement, as though no honest wind had found its way into that forgotten enclosure in years.
Stepping across the threshold felt less like emerging into the open than passing deeper into the city's entrails. Stone enclosed them on every side, worn into a narrow throat through which light descended only with reluctance, while every sound lingered with a strange persistence, as though the walls refused to relinquish even the smallest echo.
Jorge crossed the little court without breaking stride and made for the spiral staircase bolted to the adjoining wall.
Newt followed; Thomas' breath warm against the hollow of his neck, its rhythm steady, though too slight to silence the dread forever listening for its absence. Before long—and without any conscious assent of his own—Newt found he had surrendered his own breathing to it. He drew each breath only after Thomas had drawn his, matched every exhalation to the quiet rise and fall against his shoulder, until Thomas' breathing became the only rhythm he kept.
It was easier that way.
Easier than listening to the slow revolt of his own body—especially his leg.
Beneath the added burden of Thomas' unconscious weight, the intricate deceptions by which the brace had sustained him began, one by one, to fail; and just as he began to doubt whether he possessed the strength to climb another step, a hand came to rest, firm and unassuming, against the centre of his back.
Newt did not look around.
He knew it was Frypan.
Under any other circumstance, he would have shrugged him off. The instinct remained, and he despised it. Despised himself. Despised the old wound that had made its dwelling in his bones, the slow, inexorable treachery of his own body. The silent indignity of borrowing another's strength to accomplish what had once required no thought at all.
Yet Thomas remained in his arms.
Beside that single, immeasurable truth, pride became too small a thing to matter.
So, for now, as the staircase surrendered them to the open gallery that stretched the length of the upper storey, he suffered the touch without protest.
A waist-high balustrade of age-darkened stone traced its outer edge, overlooking the narrow court below, while the opposite wall was broken only by a succession of weathered wooden doors, each indistinguishable from the next beneath the weary glow of iron lamps whose feeble light seemed scarcely equal to the task of contending with the long shadows gathering beneath the eaves.
Jorge crossed the gallery without once glancing towards the other doors and stopped before the second on the right.
Releasing Brenda only long enough to free one hand, he closed his fingers around the handle and pressed it down.
Nothing.
"So what now?" Minho asked. "Kick it in?"
Jorge clicked his tongue, as though the suggestion itself deserved a reprimand.
"No need, hermano," he said, and his hand disappeared into the breast pocket of his waistcoat, the same pocket where Newt had noticed him keeping his watch.
When it emerged again, it carried no watch.
Instead, a small ring of keys rested in his palm, their worn teeth catching the lamplight as they chimed softly against one another.
“You've got to be shucking kidding me,” Minho muttered. “A key? What kind of place is this?”
Jorge regarded him sidelong, the keys revolving lazily between his fingers with the unconscious precision of long habit. At length he selected a single key, raised it to the lock, and only then permitted himself the faintest suggestion of a smile.
"Do you always make a habit of sticking your nose where it doesn't belong, hermano?"
There was remarkably little malice in the question.
Before Minho could answer, Jorge's attention had already drifted back to Brenda.
She had sunk against the wall beside the door, one shoulder resting heavily against the stone, as though it alone prevented her from slipping any further. Whatever colour the revelry below had lent her face had long since drained away, leaving her pale beneath the wavering glow of the lamps. Her eyes remained open, though they wandered with the distant concentration of someone listening from a place very far away.
Something altered in Jorge's expression as he looked at her. The severity remained, yet concern found its way through it—not enough to erase the hardness carved into his features, but enough to remind Newt that it had never been the whole of him.
Minho noticed.
His gaze wandered from Brenda to Jorge, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
“You say that like it's a flaw. Personally, I think it's one of my better qualities.” He folded his arms with exaggerated innocence. “Hermano.”
Brenda giggled.
Newt did not miss the faint upward tug at the corner of Jorge's mouth before it was gone again.
"Don't push it."
The key turned, and the lock surrendered with a heavy, reluctant click. Jorge pressed the door open.
One by one, they crossed the threshold.
Minho lingered behind to hold the door while Newt followed, Thomas still gathered securely against his chest.
As Newt drew level with him, Minho leaned in.
“Shank's lucky Thomas is out of it,” he muttered. “If Jorge thinks I'm nosy, he'd never survive Mr Investigation.”
Newt tried to laugh.
What escaped him was little more than a tired breath, lost almost at once beneath the strain of carrying the boy in question.
Behind the door lay a loft-like apartment whose melancholy grandeur spoke of a life outlasting its appointed season.
The ceiling rose into a forest of blackened rafters, their upper reaches vanishing into shadow until the darkness above acquired the solemn permanence of a vaulted night. Tall arched windows occupied the far wall, hidden behind curtains so burdened by dust and the slow tyranny of countless summers that whatever colours had once inhabited them had faded into anonymity.
Beyond the glass, evening lingered upon its final breath.
What little of it filtered through those weary folds drifted across the scarred floorboards, settled upon the worn furniture, and gathered in the hollows left by years of quiet occupation, staining each mark, each softened edge, each forgotten corner with dusk.
Old sofas and armchairs stood in solemn congress about a cold fireplace. Dust lay undisturbed upon the faded upholstery, whilst cobwebs hung between the carved legs of forgotten tables with the delicate intricacy of abandoned lace.
Beneath the floorboards, the music lingered as little more than a muffled vibration, rising through timber and plaster, slow and ponderous, as the distant beating of some heart interred beneath the foundations of the house.
Newt limped heavily across the room, his leg having exhausted even its capacity for protest, and made for the nearest sofa, though reaching it and lowering Thomas into it proved rather less graceful than he had intended.
"Sorry, Tommy," he murmured immediately, bending over him to ease him into a more comfortable position. "Could've been a bit more gentle, I'spect."
The apology received no response.
Only the quiet assurance of Thomas' breathing.
Newt remained where he was, his hand resting upon Thomas' chest as though removing it would be an act of surrender. Feeling his breath had not been enough. Watching the rise and fall of Thomas' chest was not enough. He needed the anchor of contact, the undeniable testimony of flesh and warmth, lest the world once again prove itself capable of taking him away.
Only then did he slip the backpack from his shoulders.
It fell to the floor with a dull, unremarkable sound, yet the absence of its weight brought him no relief. On the contrary, it left behind a curious hollowness, as though all the strength that had borne him thus far had belonged less to himself than to the burden he had refused to surrender, and now that Thomas no longer rested in his arms there remained only exhaustion, stripped at last of every reason to conceal itself.
His knees yielded without warning, and he sank slowly to the floor, neither resisting nor entirely aware that he had begun to fall, until the side of his head came gently to rest against the worn arm of the sofa with all the quiet inevitability of something long expected.
The coarse fabric pressed softly against his temple.
His eyes closed.
Only for the space of a single heartbeat.
Thomas’ heartbeat.
Beneath his palm.
Only—
Darkness rose, gentle as the turning of a tide. Not sleep. Something older than sleep. Some ancient and merciful surrender woven into the flesh itself, waiting patiently for the moment when endurance had given away its final measure. It gathered him without violence, loosening first his thoughts, then the burden of his limbs, until the world itself seemed to drift farther and farther from him, receding like a distant shore beneath an evening mist.
The voices dissolved.
The room withdrew.
And Newt, still close enough to feel the faint warmth of Thomas’ presence beside him, let himself be carried into the darkness at last.