#tmr harriet | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mazegays · 2 months

Text

could've followed my fears all the way down

sorry about this one in advance, yall. don't yell at me too much. or do, maybe it'll be cathartic

Chapter 20

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21

Sonya and Anya don't catch up to them until the fifth day after their split.

They haven't seen Thomas either. Minho doesn’t want to give up; he feels like every time he peers around a tree, he could find Thomas.

Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t. Harriet just gives him a dry look when he says anything like that out loud, and if it were anyone else, he would be doing the same. Minho’s usually much better at remembering the stakes and realities of a situation. Thomas, though still cynical at times, is the one who always believed in a way out.

But if Minho treats this like the Maze, like the Scorch, like Denver, then Harriet might end up having to haul his ass out of the woods. So he’s trying to be hopeful.

The storm has abated by now, finally, and it's made it a little easier. The wind is back down to a gentle breeze.

But it’s like Thomas was never here. The rain and mud washed away his tracks, and now they’re not going to get him back. The markers they’ve been seeing every day are enough to keep them on the path, but it’s futile.

"We don't have enough food for much longer," Harriet tells him, as though he doesn’t know that. "We can't stay out here."

"Thomas probably took a slightly different path and is already back. He's smart." Sonya says, but she doesn't look like she believes it.

Why would she?

Minho wants to insist they stay, or continue on by himself, but that’s how they lost Thomas.

He can’t do that.

He can’t make them lose someone else that way.

His anger and worry at Thomas, for Thomas, have given way to numbness.

Even the dread that nearly trapped him in place those first few days is gone, blanketed by absolute nothingness.

They're not going to find him.

Thomas is…

Thomas is gone, and they probably won't even find his body.

He's going to have to tell Gally.

Minho knows, over the next few days, that they will make it back.

"He's gone, isn't he?" Frypan will ask. Or maybe someone else. Maybe it’s Gally, maybe he gets himself out of the cabin for this.

Of course, everyone else is waiting, too. They’ll want to hear what happened.

Minho can't force himself to say it. Not even in his imagination.

Thomas is gone.

He’s not coming back.

Minho failed him.

finish on ao3 or under the cut

Thomas is dead. Gally knew— he'd known it was a possibility, but he hadn't thought it would be real. Thomas is—Thomas was too smart for that. Too determined, stubborn, to die like that. Out in the forest, alone.

Had he been scared? In pain?

Had he died thinking that no one was coming for him?

Gally wishes he had been there.

He wishes Thomas had never gone in the first place.

"He's someone else we'll never get to bury." Sonya told him that Minho has been completely silent since they turned back. Gally hadn’t expected to be the first to hear him speak. "We have too many of those, Gally. It was never supposed to be Thomas."

No. It wasn’t.

Because Thomas should have known better.

Because Thomas is the one who got them out of that fucking Maze in the first place.

It was never supposed to be Thomas.

Did Thomas even know they loved him?

Gally thinks he'll spend the rest of his life wondering that.

"Boys," Everyone is talking so very gently around them right now, like they're going to break.

He hates it, but it’s also not far from the truth.

"Would you like to plan a… a service, or anything? Say a few words?"

"No amount of words could describe what Thomas was for us, Anya." Minho’s voice is rough, angry. Worse than it was before.

"Not now, Anya, please." He finds himself whispering.

A service, memorial, anything, it will make it all too real.

This can't be real. Not yet.

Because if it's not real, then Thomas could come walking out of the forest anytime now, maybe a little hungry and beat up but otherwise okay.

He doesn’t want to admit it.

He knows he doesn't have a choice.

Sonya doesn’t know what she’s doing.

She hardly goes to the greenhouse anymore, even though she's technically in charge of it.

It's just not the same, knowing Thomas is never going to join her for dirt wars ever again, that he’s not even going to see the trees he planned grow.

Gally and Minho hadn't planned a service— Minho’s still hardly speaking, and Gally seems angry at everything— so she, Harriet, and Frypan had figured something out.

It felt wrong, to just… say that he was gone and not do something.

Even in the Glen, they’d buried their dead, when they had bodies. They’ve been lucky enough to avoid anyone dying here, even though everyone knows someone who died on the way here. Even the little kids.

In the end, they'd done a big service— Minho and Gally didn’t come to that one— where almost everyone had something to say.

Most of them had hardly known Thomas. They’d known, or known of, the boy who was supposed to be WCKD’s cure. They understood that he was one of their leaders, but they didn’t know Thomas.

It pisses her off. None of them cared until he died. Thomas wasn’t theirs to mourn, wasn’t theirs to talk about like they’d known him since he was a little boy.

There’s probably not a person alive, and they’re certainly not here if there is, who would have known Thomas when he was a kid. Who would remember knowing him as a kid.

The smaller service— Frypan, Harriet, Minho, Gally, Brenda, Rosa, Frankie, Aris, what’s left of the Gladers and herself— is still more painful.

At the one with just them, they plant a tree a few feet back from Thomas’s favorite spot at the firepit.

It’s out of place, and looks weird, and Thomas would hate it if he could see it.

He’d complain about them messing up his layout, and he’d be right. He’d tell them that it’s a fire hazard.

But he’s not here, so it doesn't matter what he thinks.

Sonya didn't think she'd miss him this much.

Yeah, they’re friends. Outside of Harriet and their remaining Glen girls, she might even say that Thomas is her closest friend. Somehow, she didn’t think it would hurt like this. Every time they’d lost someone in the Glen, in the Scorch, during that final escape, girls she’d spent months and years with, that hurt was expected.

Fresh grief is a bigger wound than she remembered.

Sonya doesn’t even have the peace of knowing how he died. None of them have the closure of burying his body.

Sonya misses him five, six, seven times a day. She’d expected to grieve, she’d known it would be hard.

She didn’t think that she’d be finding his ghost everywhere she turns.

Minho almost doesn't go to the tree planting.

He doesn’t go to the bigger service they have, a memorial, he hears someone call it. It would be too much to hear everyone talk about him.

At least when they plant the tree, everyone there, everyone in their group, gets it. They’ve all buried friends far too young.

They don’t say a lot.

Minho’s let the anger and sadness build up, and it feels like they’re choking him when he tries to speak.

Thomas convinces him to go, in the end. He remembers how when they started planting the saplings everywhere, Thomas could ramble about every one.

He'd had fun, organizing them and telling anyone who would listen facts about the trees. Minho doesn’t even know where he learned all of those facts, or if they were just there, in his head. He can’t ask now.

He wants to ask. He has so many things he wants to ask.

So many things he wants to say.

But all he can do is think about Thomas and his stupid trees. The stupid trees that meant he’d been at least a little happy, again. He’d found something he liked.

He’d been smiling, and honestly it had been the most Minho had ever seen him smile, when he was talking about those trees. Thomas was always so serious, so focused, so ready to throw himself into everything.

Minho won’t see that again. He won’t hear Thomas talk about trees again.

The tree they planted is the wrong type of tree for this area, but it’s also Thomas’s favorite: Spruce. It's a beautiful sapling, a little bigger than the other ones they planted earlier.

They got as close as they safely could to the firepit, and Minho wants to hate the tree.

It's a tree. It's done nothing to him, but he wants to hate it anyway.

Instead, he sits under it and thinks about all the things Thomas used to tell him about spruces.

He should have paid more attention, because he doesn’t remember most of it.

If he did, he thinks he'd feel a little better.

He’d certainly feel a lot less like he’s going to forget Thomas as easily as he forgot his words, already lost forever.

Since he's been okayed to do a little work as long as he takes it easy, Gally finds himself taking Thomas’s place in the kitchen.

He was hardly in here when Thomas was, but something about the organization of the area he works in screams 'Thomas'.

Frypan is endlessly patient with him, even though Gally knows he’s grieving too. It can't be easy, because he’s back to being angry at the world in a way he hasn't been since Thomas came up in the Box.

He has to stop thinking about Thomas.

Jamie, Anya, Jorge, even Brenda— everyone keeps telling him grief takes time. It's not going to be easy, and he’s going to feel more than one thing.

He knows. He’s lost people before. He’s lost too many people. He doesn’t know if he’s buried more friends than they have, but he’s done this time and time again. Too many of them never got a burial. Some of them he still doesn’t know about.

They think that he doesn’t know loss, but Gally can’t bring himself to tell them that he’s lost people before.

People he loved, even. Maybe not in the same way he found himself loving Thomas, but loved all the same.

He's done more than his share of grieving.

Gally knows he shouldn’t think it, but he does: What if Thomas did this on purpose? Had things gotten worse? Was that why he'd been pushing them away again?

The worst days are the days he finds himself thinking like that.

He wants a reason. He wants to know why, and how, and he wants to be mad at Thomas but mostly he just wants him back.

He wants to tell him properly that he loves him.

He wants to have a chance to figure out the three of them, together. Before Thomas, Gally would have never considered being serious with Minho— they had a fling in the Glade, but who hadn't?

Well, Newt and Alby, maybe. They’d been pretty serious. Tried to keep it quiet, so that it didn’t seem like favoritism or whatever when Newt took on being Alby’s second, but none of them would have thought it for a second even if Newt hadn’t tried to throw himself off of a wall. Newt could be a right shank, at times, but he was good at managing the Glade.

Chuck would have been too young, they would have had to have been there for a few more years before he’d had a fling.

Thomas, who just wasn't there long enough.

Thomas should have gotten that chance. Gally thinks that if things had been different, if Thomas had been sent up earlier, they could have been something. They would have worked together so well if they hadn’t started out the way they did. If Gally hadn’t gotten himself Stung and Changed, or if he’d ignored the flashbacks. Why would he think that the Creators would show them anything good, anyway?

He just really wants to know why, and he’s going to be asking himself for as long as he’s going to be wondering if Thomas really knew what Gally had meant when he’d said ‘I love you.’

Because at his core, Gally can’t help but feel this is his fault somehow.

Harriet’s not sure how she should grieve.

She wasn't as close to Thomas as Sonya was, but she liked him. He made Sonya smile, and got along with the girls. He was smart, and when he was in the right mood, quite funny.

She’d thought that they would find him in the woods. He knows how to follow a path, even if Sonya and Aris hadn’t marked it. Surely he can’t have gone so far that he couldn’t find his way back at all.

Harriet doesn’t want to think about what the storm might have done to him. She hopes he wasn’t unlucky enough to get struck by lightning.

They’d been friends, even if they weren't close in the way he and Sonya were. She wants to help Sonya, but she doesn’t know how, not when she can’t figure out how to help herself.

Mostly, she can't explain why she's taken to running in the forest. Minho doesn’t anymore; when he doesn’t have a task to do, he sits under Thomas’s tree, like it can give him answers.

Both Minho and Gally have gone near silent, doing their respective tasks and moving on. Before this, Harriet wouldn’t have thought of them as being so similar.

From some of the Gladers’ stories, though, their anger can look the same, so why not their grief as well?

She focuses her mind back on the path when she steps on a rock. It bites deeper into her foot than usual. She’s going to need a new pair of shoes soon if she keeps this up. She’s been alternating routes, and if she were asked if she were looking for clues, she’d deny it.

She’s not going to find him. Harriet knows that. If Thomas were anywhere close, they would have found him sooner. They would have gotten to him by now.

Maybe he’d still be alive, then.

It’s been too long now.

She doesn’t go far in— no one does. They don’t want a repeat of what happened to Thomas.

Not usually, at least.

But today, it’s like she’s being pulled farther in.

She’s not far from where Minho and Thomas used to run every day. She can’t bring herself to follow that exact path.

In fact, she thinks that’s the ditch Thomas almost fell into.

Today, she detours down it, thinking that maybe it will help ease the grief that sits in the back of her mind. She knows she’s not going to find anything, not Thomas, not a body, probably not even a dead animal, but maybe just following her instincts will be enough to quiet them down.

Hopefully for good.

Frypan was hoping for a normal day— as normal as they get around here with no one knowing how to cope with Thomas being gone.

No one’s said it out loud yet, but Thomas is the first person they’ve lost here. This is supposed to be a safe place, and it has been. Sure, Thomas was being an idiot, charging headfirst into everything, but Frypan knows how Vince is.

People talk when you’re serving them food. He’s got all of the best gossip here, and some of the things he’s heard just have him convinced that some of Vince’s reasons for sending Thomas in particular on this mission are less than ideal.

Frypan just wants one normal day.

Or as normal as they get with all of the adults not knowing what to do with them. They’re all too old to be treated like kids, yet they’re too young to be taken seriously.

Gally’s working with him again, but he’s always angry.

He’s not sure who Gally is more angry with: Thomas, for being a shucking dumbass, Minho, for not finding him, or himself, for being mad at them.

Maybe it varies. Maybe Gally’s anger shifts with each forceful chop of his knife.

Frypan thinks he sees Harriet out of the corner of his eye, running awkwardly, but it’s about that time of day.

Harriet runs. Minho sits under the tree. Sonya’s in the greenhouse. Gally’s always angry. Frypan cooks.

It’s not too far off from how things ran in the Glade, actually. Just… different people, this time. More to be angry at, more grief, knowledge of the world beyond their safe haven.

When they’d been told they were coming to Paradise, Frypan had expected a lot more than this.

Some days, it feels more like this is just another trial, another form of the Maze, but one they don’t know they have to solve.

Those are the days when he tries something new, or shows someone else something new. It’s the only way to make himself feel better about it. Even if this is another test, he can manage that much.

“Hey, Gally, have I ever shown you how to make strawberry applesauce?”

Apples are out of season, so he shouldn’t be using the ones he does have in the cellar, but fuck it.

He needs something to focus on, and so does Gally, something that's not just stabbing a knife into food over and over again.

“No, why?”

“Let me teach you.” Gally’s picked up on a lot; Frypan lets him do most of the work while he just guides.

It’s not the same as making strawberry jam with Thomas, but it feels a lot like it.

“Do you think he knew?” Gally asks, adding more chopped apples to the pot. “That we loved him? I think about it a lot. What if he didn’t know? Really, actually didn’t know?”

“He knew. He might not have known how to handle it, with what happened right after, but he knew.”

Frypan hopes he’s right. For Gally’s sake, and for Thomas’s.

“I think Thomas would have liked this.”

“Me too.” That’s why he had him start making it.

“Why’d you put me at his workstation?”

“Because you needed something to remind you that he’d been here that wasn’t painful.” He says truthfully.

And so he hadn’t felt like a ghost was following him around the kitchen, quietly learning everything and enjoying himself.

Thomas’s lack of questions in the kitchen is still something he wonders at.

“Thank you, Fry.” They only talk when Frypan is giving Gally directions after that.

Gally’s too solid to be a ghost, but now Frypan’s afraid he might have just replaced one type of ghost with another, and the new one is much worse than the first.

<;- 19 21 ->

3 notes · View notes