All That We Are | NEWT (tst)

Four | A SHRED OF QUIET

Night One

"Ooh, I got top bunk!"

"Ha! Too slow."

Newt could hear shuffling behind him, then the sound of someone being hit followed by a cry of outrage, but he didn't turn away from the door, watching through the window until the last flash of copper had vanished from sight and he could no longer see Ada.

Everything about the situation felt wrong, and he hated it.

"Ohhh, I could get used to this," Winston said, and when Newt turned around it was to see him lying in a starfish position on the lower bunk of one of the many bunk beds, gangly limbs hanging off the end.

Of all the prisons he had been in, he supposed, this one was the nicest.

The rows of plush beds, complete with pillows and actual duvets, were a far cry from the glade's hammocks or the rough floor of the slammers that he had spent only one night in way back in the day, but both of those places had the one thing this didn't.

"She'll be okay," Minho said, his voice coming from somewhere above him, and Newt looked up to see him hanging upside down off the top bunk like a bat. "She's a strong girl. She'll be fine, I'm sure."

Newt would have been more inclined to believe him if his eyes weren't full of worry and his hands weren't fidgeting anxiously at his sides.

"Hey Newt," Frypan called, "come check this place out. Actual beds." He fell face first onto the lower bunk, face smushed into a pillow. "So soft."

"Yeah," Newt nodded, trying to push away the anxiety clinging to him like a shadow. "Yeah, it's not bad."

"Hey, what do you think those guys want with Teresa?" Thomas asked suddenly, voice low so that only Newt could hear.

He hesitated, not quite sure how to offer comfort on a situation so similar to the one that had him stressed out of his mind. He barely knew Teresa, could count his interactions with her on one hand, but it was clear that Thomas cared about her a great deal.

If she meant that much to Thomas, then he supposed he could at least try to be supportive of it.

"Now if there's one thing I know about that girl, it's that she can take care of herself." He offered Thomas a small smile, hoping it didn't come across as strained as it felt.

"Yeah," Thomas nodded, looking down at the floor for a moment.

It was hard, in these quiet seconds between the chaos, to reconcile the boy in front of him with the one that had come up in the box, shaking and terrified. That had been barely a week ago, when he and Ada were trading drinks and whispering around campfires, making bets and toeing the line between friends and something more, even though it felt as if a lifetime had passed.

The thought of her had his stomach twisting violently.

His unease must have shown on his face, because Thomas reached out and squeezed his shoulder. "The same goes for Ada, you know. I wouldn't have suggested she go with him if I didn't think she could handle trouble."

"It's not that," Newt shook his head.

He took a step backwards, lowering himself down onto the lower bunk behind him, sinking into the soft cushions.

"I know she can take care of herself, I'm not an idiot. And she's free to make her own choices, obviously, it's just that..." He ran a hand through his hair, not used to how soft it now was. "I don't like not knowing where she is, if she's okay. It seems that every time she's out of my sight recently she's getting hurt, or worse. It's the same feeling I used to get when she'd go into the maze every morning and I didn't know if she was going to make it back out again."