Hope for Us (NEWT) [COMPLETED]

Ch 28 - My Tough Girl

~Sara~

"Sara, what's wrong?" Minho asked as Newt took a seat next to her on her bed, placing his hand on her knee.

She couldn't stop crying. The sobs continued shaking her entire frame, and the tears kept falling onto her hands; seeping in between her fingers.

Newt didn't know what else to do, and Sara just shook her head at each question he asked. Everyone stood there helplessly as Sara let her built-up frustration consume her.

Sara wasn't good at hiding everything she felt, but she still hated letting everyone into her problems or anything that bothered her. Not even those who were closest to her.

She'd been told that bottling up one's emotions was catastrophic, because once it reached a limit and went overboard, there was nothing one could do to stop it. And it came crashing down on her like a flood of apocalyptic scale.

All of the events, trauma, experiences, hardships—everything rushed back to her memory like a train, and she couldn't stop it from affecting her mental and emotional state no matter how hard she tried.

For the first time in her life, she thought of her memories as a curse, an opinion none of the Gladers could share with her at the moment.

As she kept her eyes shut, she could feel Newt's arms wrap around her. He placed her head on his chest, and he held her silently.

It came to a point where Minho and the Med-jacks were awkwardly standing there in the room.

"We'll leave you two alone," she heard Clint say, and then she heard the shuffling of a few pairs of footsteps that grew quieter once everyone left.

In the silence that followed, not even Newt's embrace, nor his soothing words produced an effect on Sara. It was as though she couldn't feel his touch, even though she was literally pressed up against him. He seemed far out of her reach, and she couldn't hear his words over the screams of despair coming from her thoughts. She could only concentrate on the physical pain that ached through her entire body, and the psychological pain that followed her all the way to this point.

Sure, she cried because Chris and Edward scared her literally half to death. And those threats they threw at her. She couldn't stand to watch her loved ones getting hurt for something that concerned only her. Sara didn't care much about herself.

And then those two boys were sent to their deaths because of her. Their crime against her was almost justified. It was true; Sara was hiding things. They were just two poor boys, scared out of their wits, and looking for someone to blame for everything.

Inadvertently, images of her father flashed before her—the brutal way in which he was murdered. The desperate look on her mother's face before leaving half of her family to go look for the other half. That was the last time she saw her. Sara didn't even know if she was still alive. She didn't know what happened to her aunt and cousin either.

She missed her family, her hometown—everything was ripped away from her too soon, and so cruelly. Her thoughts continued to search for more pain to recall.

Rebecca popped into her head. She'd been a motherly figure for Sara all those years she'd been stuck in HQ, and even now... she was sure Rebecca was still watching over her. She worked for WICKED—the people Sara despised, regardless of her uncle's attempt to convince her otherwise—but it wasn't Rebecca's fault. She was just another victim of Janson's deeds.

Sara cried because she couldn't do anything to help Rebecca. Was she even doing alright? Janson always did whatever he wanted with her.

Sara cried because the person she'd grown to love had suffered so much—much more than she had—and he didn't even know it. He suffered even without remembering the whole story. And she was angry because none of her friends, and not even those Gladers who hated her, deserved to be put into those stupid trials. And she couldn't mention a single thing about it to them yet.