Maze Runner One-Shots

He Looked At Me, and I Looked At Him

I blacked out after they pulled me away from Chuck. All I saw was him, his small, lifeless body lying there as the rest of us escaped. I was dragged across a huge sandy area, the sediment blowing everywhere as a loud whirring hummed behind me.

There were gunshots around us. I couldn't place the other sounds over the ringing in my ears. Everything was blurry, I couldn't hone in on anything. All the faces and voices and shapes around us fused together dizzyingly.

I was thrown into something I later realized was a helicopter. Everyone was screaming or crying or shooting. I didn't process any of it. I heard some disembodied voice say something like "Relax. Everything's gonna change."

No shucking shit everything's gonna change is what I wanted to say, but my lungs didn't work. They were still heaving, and I was still screaming, even though my voice had stopped working a while ago.

I stared out the window as the helicopter took off, rising above the ground, leaving Gally and Chuck behind.

Gally.

Alby.

Chuck.

The whole Glade.

All gone. Forever.

It seemed impossible. It didn't feel real. We were out. We'd actually gotten out. But at what cost? As the helicopter's blades swirled, a horrible, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach almost made me hurl as a dark questioned crossed my mind.

Was it even worth it?

Then we saw it. The Maze.

It was huge. And as we went higher, it just kept getting bigger.

Everyone stared at it in shock. All sounds of breathing stopped as we watched it grow and grow until we saw the full magnitude of the shucking place. Sure it had felt big when we were running it, the corridors and walls seemed endless. But this was...This was beyond. This was something we never would have gotten out of had we not tried. Had we not done everything we did.

Something in my mind told me to look at Teresa. She and I were connected in all of this, for better or for worse. Right now, it really seemed like the 'for worse' part of that statement...But still, something told me to talk to her.

But when I moved my head, it wasn't in the direction Teresa was sitting in. I turned the complete opposite direction.

I turned towards Newt.

He was sobbing, and I felt my own raging emotions grasp me tighter. Minho, who was also crying, had his hand on Newt's shoulder. Newt had his hands in his hair as he choked, and I was worried he'd throw up from being so worked up. Then, he moved. He tore his hands from his hair and pulled them down, one hand grasping the other in a futile attempt to get them to stop shaking so shucking hard. He clenched them into fists so tight his knuckles turned white. He brute forced a deep breath, and the another.

Then he looked at me. Our eyes met, and I saw something shift in his. It was the same shift I felt in my own eyes. Through our seemingly never ending tears, our debilitating torrents of emotions-fear, anger, grief, guilt, panic, confusion, and just about everything else you could think of-we both inhaled ever so slightly slower. In all the noise and chaos of the world around us, he looked at me, and I looked at him.

And I knew that somehow we would make it out of this. Newt held his gaze with me, and he nodded once. It was a short, small movement, barely visible with the helicopter's jerky flying and Newt's jagged, broken sobs, as well as my own. But I saw it, it was there.

Newt was there. And I was there too.

I nodded once back, letting him know that I was with him. Newt nodded again, and something else shifted in his eyes. It was fleeting, barely visible through the pain and grief and confusion, but just like the small nod, it was there. And I felt it. Looking at Newt, I felt it.

The knowledge that somehow, some way, someday, we were going to be okay.

I started to breathe easier. And then, Newt did too.