Newt Imagines (The Maze Runner)

Trouble and Consequence

The sun has barely been up for half an hour, and already, you're itching to cause problems. What the Glade needs more than anything is a good bit of fun, and you have already pledged yourself to the lifelong goal of providing it. Today is going to be good, no matter how many rules you have to break to get there. Alby can never sentence you to a night in the Slammer if he can't form the words through bouts of laughter, right?

So you'd like to pretend, at any rate. Regardless, after serious and careful deliberation, you decide that the target of your playful malice can only be your best friend, the one boy here who you like the most and thus must face the majority of your boredom fueled antics: Newt.

If you're in the mood for being honest, you might be able to admit that it's been a long time since you truly believed Newt to be only a friend. He's been lingering on the edges of your vision for a while now, dancing in and out of your consciousness. No matter how hard you try to pin him down into the concrete squares of what is a friend and what isn't someone you can love, he always manages to escape.

It's not helpful, this crush. It's not going to get anywhere. Newt is the most self sacrificing boy you've ever met, always passing up an opportunity for his personal amusement of comfort for those of others. Without Newt, you think the entire Glade would fall to pieces in a matter of hours.

It's a good thing, then, that you won't ever have to think about losing him. No, the only danger comes with him growing sick of you. None of you are ever leaving this damned square of green fields, none of you will ever make it past the walls of the Maze, so you might as well stop casting far-fetched dreams to the winds and focus on what's right here, right now.

That is the Glade, and that is all you need. All you'll ever need is right here within four walls, and if on occasion you want to taunt yourself with the hallucination that one day Newt might wake up and realize that he's worthy of not only loving someone but being loved back, that's something no one needs to bring up. Least of all you.

To push away the thoughts, you throw yourself into the trouble of causing trouble. All of you have to pick your poison in some way to make it through the endless cycle of days that all begin and end the same. Gally has his temper, Minho his jokes, Newt his kindness, and you your mischief. At least it lets you do something other than give up.

You can already feel yourself starting to spiral, so you force yourself to start moving forward. You and Newt are both Track-Hoes, and thus you know exactly where the blond boy will be going to start his day. The sun is rising overhead; you've never been able to sleep here, not well. Something keeps you from ever being able to truly rest.

All Track-Hoes are kept by a strict schedule. There are no exact work hours, only the knowledge that the longer you put off the day's work, the closer you veer towards spending extensive periods of time in the blazing sun. It's like the lot of you are vampires, how careful you are to stay in the meager shade provided by the fence posts of the garden enclosure, how you'd rather work early in the morning or late in the evening rather than face the noonday brightness.

It's grueling work, so it makes sense that you would all come up with ways to avoid the worst of the heat and light. It also makes sense that Newt should be coming along soon to start off his morning, which is why you only have a limited window to cause your problems before it's too late.

The tools of your trade are all kept in a rusting garden shed not ten paces from the rows of plants and crops carefully tended by you and your friends. It is here that you stop with a delighted smile, here that you slip inside past the groaning metal hinges of the door to stand in the center of the narrow enclosure.

The shed itself was constructed by the Builders a while back, and it's a minor miracle that the thing even stands up in the first place. It might have been one of their very first projects, which would at least explain the uneven floorboards, the dramatic slant of what should have been a straight roof, the dingy lightbulb in the corner kept lit only by an excess of electrical tape.