The Best of Us - After the Death Cure

Chapter Ten

Thomas

He left Sonya's cabin and started walking. He didn't know where he was going, and frankly, he didn't care. He just needed to get away.

As his feet moved beneath him, his mind kept drifting back to the alley scene. He wanted to forget, but the image of his friend's bloody face was permanently scarred in his brain.

"Kill me or I'll kill you. Kill me!"

He couldn't kill his best friend. He wouldn't.

"Do it before I become one of them"

He could protect him, like he said. He could keep Newt safe. He didn't have to die.

"Please, Tommy. Please"

He couldn't fight it anymore; his heart hurt watching his friend suffering. He needed to free Newt, from all of the suffering he had endured. It was only right. He needed to let him go.

So he pulled the trigger. He shot his best friend in the head, and then he ran away.

He would regret that moment for the rest of his life.

He pulled the trigger. He did that . And he felt Newt's body fall off of his own, onto the road beneath them. He heard that. And as he ran away, tears pooling in his eyes and staining his cheeks, he knew that he hadn't missed. That bullet went right through Newt's brain.

There was no surviving that.

But his conversation with Sonya was confusing things for him. She told him that she had seen Newt lying there, breathing. She said that he was alive.

Could he be? Could Newt's brain somehow survived the bullet?

His feet hurried beneath him, walking, almost as if they knew where they wanted to go. Meanwhile, his mind sat, oblivious to anything besides his best friend.

He felt the cool wind fly by beside him, stinging at the unformed tears in his eyes. It took everything that he had to blink them back, not allowing himself to break apart again.

Thomas.

A voice called out to him in the dark of the forest. He was surrounded by trees, by silence, yet the sound of his name was enough to stop his heart.

There was something so eerily familiar about the voice that he had heard, calling out to him, as if it were miles away. Something that caused the air out of his lungs.

He wanted to move his legs, to force his body to run away from the echoing voice, but every one of his muscles were frozen with fear.

"Thomas?"

Another voice called his name, much closer to him than the original. He felt breath snap back to him like a slap across the face. His whole body stung with unease.

He turned around to see a girl standing before him, her arms clasped around her body in an attempt to keep herself warm. He studied her face, one that he couldn't remember ever seeing before. She was younger than him, fifteen maybe, although the crease in her forehead made her look older and more mature. Her eyes were as blue as the sky, gleaming behind the faintest trail of tears. Her skin was soft and pale, tainted with small white scars. He couldn't help but wonder what had happened to the girl, what pain she had been through.

"You probably don't remember my name" she spoke again. Her voice was soft and pure sounding, yet it was one of the strongest sounds he had heard in a long time.

"No I'm sorry" he shook his head, forcing himself to speak to her. "I've been a little preoccupied recently."

"It's okay" she said, a small smile curved onto her lips. He could tell that she did that for him, a way to comfort him. "I'm Blair"

He ran the name over in his head, one that he was sure he had heard, even if it was only once. But he had heard her name somewhere.

"I was in the maze with Harriet and Sonya." she said, pulling a piece of her light hair behind her ear.

He nodded, a way to tell her that he understood her connection to his friends, who had obviously been her friends before he had even known them.

"I saw you come out of Sonya's cabin, and I followed you out here. You looked hurt, I wanted to make sure that you were okay."

His heart tightened in his chest as he remembered Sonya. The tear stains on her cheeks, and the red puffiness to her eyes as he had left her by the window of her cabin, to mourn the brother she had never gotten to know.

"I don't really know if I will ever be okay again." he said to her, the pain in his voice obviously apparent.

He watched as her eyes darkened. The blue of her eyes seemed to dim a little as she looked up at him. He couldn't help but feel a connection to her, like he had known her for most of his life. There was just something about her that was so familiar, so normal.

He looked down at her small face, her eyes wide with compassion. Never in his life had he been so comfortable talking to a person he had just met.

"You don't really have anyone to talk to, do you?" she asked. He thought of Minho, of Brenda, and even Gally. The only people he truly had left. But he hadn't been able to tell any of them about Newt, or how lost he had felt trying to feel happy.

"No" he whispered, his heart breaking all over again.

He felt a warm surge travel through his hand, and was shocked to see Blair's own hand there. It was the first sense of calm he had felt all day.

He moved his eyes back to focus on hers, but found that she was no longer looking at him. Instead she was focused on the ground, her blonde hair pooling around her face.

"Are you okay?" he asked her, quickly wanting to be the one comforting her, instead of the other way around.

"I don't really know either" she said, turning away from him to lean against a tree. It was then that he noticed just how small she really was. She seemed so delicate, like at any moment she would break down and be lost to the wind. He wanted desperately to reach out and hold onto her hand again.

"When we first got here, I was lost. I hadn't made friends so easily in my maze, and the one person that I really truly loved was killed in our escape. I was heartbroken, and truthfully, I still haven't gotten over her death. And then we were brought here, told to make new friends and start all over. But I didn't want to start over if my best friend wasn't here with me, you know?"

Thomas sighed, because he did know. He knew exactly what it was that Blair was feeling, because he was suffering through the exact same thing.

"And I've wondered for so long who I was before the maze, what kind of a life I had lived."

Thomas watched as her face hardened with grief, her eyes still glimmering against the brightness of the sun.

"But now I know. I know who I was, and I'm not proud of her."

Blair looked up towards the opening in the trees, bringing her hand to her face, clearly to wipe away the newly formed tears from her eyes.

He stood and watched her, unsure if he should offer his shoulder for her to cry on, or if he should leave her to be alone. Neither option seemed very appealing to him, so instead he watched.

After a long, peaceful moment of silence, Blair brought her eyes back to his.

"Ben" she breathed. A single word, a name. One that Thomas hadn't heard in a long, long time.

"What?" he asked her, his heart pounding in his chest.

"Ben" she said again, "Does that name sound familiar to you?"

He nodded his head, his mind racing with memories of the blonde boy who had attacked him, so angry, so desperate for vengeance. He remembered the boy's blue eyes staring into his own. Those same eyes haunted his dreams every night, a faint reminder that Ben had died because of Thomas.

All too quickly he realized why Blair had seemed to familiar to him. Her blonde hair, her blue eyes, her calming presence. All traits he had seen before, in someone who he only knew for the better of a day.

"Ben" Blair said again, looking out at the rows of trees around them. "He was my brother."