The Maze Runner - One Shots / AU

Christmas time - Newtmas

It still hurt Thomas to think about it. To remember all of it.

Especially around this time, with all the lights and music, happy couples walking around hand in hand, sitting down close to each other to stay warm while drinking hot chocolate.
Christmas time.

He sat down on a bench, looking at nothing or no one in particular, just staring at some point in the distance.

This was the second year to experience this – this weird, empty feeling. This feeling of being alone, while everyone seemed to be happy, together with someone.

If only he had someone to walk here with; looking at the beautiful lights in the streets, smiling, holding hands, feeling warm even though it's almost freezing.
Someone to sit down with to drink hot chocolate, laughing at each other for having choco mustaches. To listen to the Christmas songs together while sitting close to each other.

And as he thought of all these things, he imagined himself walking there. Sitting there. And he automatically thought of a person.
Newt - a nice, British boy with blond hair, and a friendly face. He'd been one of Thomas' first friends in his new neighbourhood when he moved there a little over two months ago.

He shook his head.
No, Thomas, he thought. You cannot fall in love with Newt. Or anybody. Not after what happened.

As a child, Thomas always felt left out. He wanted to join the others, but they shut him out. He never knew why. He just wasn't cool enough.
Even as a young teenager, people his age would tell him that he couldn't sit with them during lunch breaks. People laughed at him when he walked away. He still didn't know why.

This all made Thomas shy and insecure. It made him think that no one liked him. That no one could ever love him – that no one could ever fall in love with him.

But two years ago, things changed.
Someone stood up for Thomas. A boy, around his age, maybe a little older. The two of them became best friends.
Thomas had never had a best friend.

After a while of being good, close friends, Thomas started to feel different about the boy - and he realised he was falling in love with him.

Thomas, being shy and insecure, didn't know what to do, to say or how to act around his friend, who eventually found out as he noticed the changes in Thomas' behaviour.
To Thomas' surprise, boy wasn't shocked when Thomas finally opened up to him – in fact, he'd told him he'd been having the same feelings for Thomas for weeks.

The two of them got into a relationship, but agreed on not telling others for a while. Thomas had never been so happy.

Until one day, when he'd just put his books in his locker and walked away, he saw his boyfriend kissing someone else – a girl. Right in front of him. Obviously on purpose.

Thomas immediately froze, staring at the scene in front of him. When they stopped kissing, the boy looked over to Thomas.
"What's wrong, Thomas?"

"I- I thought..."

The boy chuckled, "Aww, Tommy. You didn't really think I was like you, did you?" He laughed, and kept on talking about how stupid Thomas was for thinking the boy really was in love with him.
Thomas ran away, crying.

Thomas had spent the last two years at that school like he always had – alone, with no friends, always sitting alone in class and during lunch breaks.
When there were group projects, no one wanted to work with him. People laughed at him, talked behind his back, even more than before the incident with his 'boyfriend'.
The guy had humiliated him, and Thomas had lost the ability to trust anyone.