could've followed my fears all the way down
please do enjoy this sunday offering of angst : ). i've played with this one a bit since i originally wrote it and personally i think it has a lot of great lines. let me know what you think!
Chapter 21
Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22
Harriet falls to her knees at the edge of the ditch, the shock of the impact zinging through her body and pulling something in her lungs taut. She has to force herself to close her eyes so that she can take a breath.
He’s on his side, wood tied to his chest.
He’s even still got his bag; if she didn’t know what she was looking for, she wouldn’t have been able to find it.
He—the body—he’s covered in mud, and dirt, and she can’t tell what’s wrong with him. She needs to get someone, needs to move, but she can’t make herself stand up,
One of his arms—oh, that looks bad. His legs look okay, just positioned oddly. He doesn’t have shoes on. How could he have lost them? What happened? Did they wear out that quickly? His feet will be a mess of cuts, for sure. And if they’re infected… what if they have to remove them? Maybe Gally will be able to build him something…
Harriet shakes herself. She can’t afford to get distracted now. She doesn’t even know… she can’t tell, not while she’s still so far away.
She can’t tell if he’s alive, or if she’s just found his body.
How long has he been here? How close were they to finding him?
If they’d spent just one more day looking, would have they found him in time?
His eyes are open, just halfway, and Harriet unfreezes. She moves as quickly as she can down the side of the ditch without tripping herself, and taps his face lightly.
It’s red, swollen; his lips are dry and cracking.
She doesn’t know what that means. Dehydration, but that’s a given. She’d be more surprised if he wasn’t dehydrated. She has to find a way to get her fingers under the wood on his chest to get to his neck.
She can’t tell if he’s dead or not. Her heart is racing in her ears, all the way down to her fingertips; she can’t get a pulse.
“Thomas, can you look at me? Can you hear me? Thomas, it’s okay, you’re going to be okay. I promise. I’ll get you back.”
Harriet’s strong, but she doesn’t think she should be able to carry Thomas.
He’s lost weight, again, that much is obvious—he’s been out here for a while without food. She doesn’t let herself think about how long it’s been. Too long, probably.
And he was right here… he was so close.
His arm is definitely broken. There’s not a lot she can do out here, but she makes a sling out of her shirt to keep it from getting worse while she carries him.
She’s not sure it even matters, but it makes her feel better, at least. If he is still alive, somehow, she’s helped. She’s helping.
So she keeps talking to him, narrating what she’s doing like it matters. Like he can hear her.
“Thomas, I’m going to carry you, okay? We’re not far, you almost made it by yourself.” It’s easier if she pretends he can. Anya can tell her later, but for now, she’s pretending. Pretending that it’s possible for him to be alive, and here, and that she’s just saved him.
“We’ll take care of it, Thomas, I promise. It won’t hurt like this for much longer.” Carrying him is awkward, but she manages to keep his broken arm against his chest.
He’s just too tall for her to be able to support his head at this angle, but she can’t worry about that too much right now.
Anya will know what to do.
She has to know what to do.
They can’t lose Thomas twice.
They can’t.
And if Anya tells her that she’s just found his body, at least she’s brought him back.
They won’t have to leave another friend unburied, with no idea where the body ended up. He won’t be eaten and picked apart by scavengers until only his bones are left.
Harriet can’t do much else now, not if he’s really gone, but she can run, and she can hope.
It’s that hope, faint as it is, that keeps her legs from giving out under her as she tears back out of the woods, directly to the medical cabin.
finish on ao3 or continue reading
Sonya knows something’s up when Harriet doesn’t visit the greenhouse after her morning run. It’s become part of their routine. Harriet runs in the woods, and Sonya pretends she’s working instead of just wishing that she could have another dirt fight with Thomas or something similarly unproductive.
Maybe Harriet tripped on a root or something, and had to go wrap her ankle. Or she could have decided to go on a longer run today. The change in routine itches at her a little; not as much as it would have back in the Glen, she’s more used to changes happening day-to-day now, but it still doesn’t feel right.
Sonya makes herself wait a while before she goes down to the medical cabin, to make sure that Harriet’s really not coming.
Then she can’t get into the medical cabin, and she knows something is really wrong. Had Harriet broken a bone? Someone should have come to get her. Unless there was no one to come and get her.
She’d be allowed in, though. She would be allowed in if it was just a broken bone, as long as it wasn’t, like, poking through the skin.
Why else would Harriet and Anya be locked in the medical cabin for? The kitchens and the greenhouse are the most injury-prone spots, and she already knows that no one in the greenhouse got hurt.
Had Harriet found—
No. She couldn’t have. There’s no way.
Sonya doesn’t let herself think about it. It’s not possible.
Minho’s by Thomas’s tree. Gally’s in the kitchen with Frypan, and Aris, Rosa, and Frankie are working somewhere. Even Jorge is out working this morning.
From what she can see, everyone is where they’re supposed to be. She can’t see everything, not as easily as she could have in the Glen, but she can see enough.
Everyone is working—or playing, in the case of some of the kids—and no one is hurt. They’re all where they’re supposed to be.
Everyone but Harriet and Anya. Well, and herself, since she’s not in the greenhouse.
Harriet might have gotten hurt, or found an injured animal. She didn’t find— she couldn’t have found him.
Thomas can’t have been that close all this time.
His body can’t have been that close the entire time.
Because that means they almost found him. It means that if they had just looked a little harder, they would have been able to save him.
Feeling lost, she sinks down next to Minho and lets him tell her facts about spruce trees.
She’s heard them all from Thomas before, but she thinks she could stand to hear them a few more times.
Minho doesn’t watch as Harriet carries Thomas’s a body into the medical cabin. He can’t.
Gally doesn’t know yet. He’d be rushing over here if he did. Shuck, not even Minho knows yet, not really. He just knows that Harriet was carrying something and rushing. It doesn’t mean she’s found a body. It could be an injured animal.
It’s probably an injured animal.
If it’s Thomas, then Minho’s not going to be the one to tell Gally. Minho hadn’t even been able to tell him the first time around, that they hadn’t found him.
When Sonya sits next to him, he tells her the facts he can remember, the ones he’s been repeating to himself for days like they’ll bring Thomas back.
Nothing will bring Thomas back, not even his body.
Maybe they’ll bury him under this tree, and then Minho can recite Thomas’s spruce facts back to him, over and over again until the roots and trunk have grown their way around him.
Sonya listens, but she’s watching the door.
“Harriet’s okay.” He tells her, realizing she didn’t see what Harriet had been carrying. “She found Thomas’s body.” He hadn’t meant to say that. He doesn’t know that Harriet found Thomas’s body. She found something, but that doesn’t mean it’s Thomas.
“No, she couldn’t have— she doesn’t go that far, he can’t have been that close for all this time. Why didn’t we find him?”
“I don’t know.” If he were less numb, Minho knows he’d be freaking out the way she is.
But he hasn’t felt much of anything since he realized they were never going to find Thomas alive.
“I just want him back.” He whispers, interrupting her. “The tree facts, they’re all from Thomas, and I don’t even remember most of them. I just— I want him back. I want him to tell us this is a stupid place for a tree, especially one that will get as big as a spruce. I want to watch his face when he’s thinking and try to figure it out. I want him to know how much I love him. He didn’t know, Sonya. I never got that chance.”
“Minho, I don’t think he’s dead.” Sonya’s still watching the door. “I don’t think she found a body.”
“What else could she have found, Sonya? He’s dead. It’s…” There are countless reasons.
It’s been too long. He would have run out of food days ago. Probably before they even started looking for him, from what Sonya and Aris have said about how much food he had. The wind storm could have caused him any number of injuries, he might have been crushed by a tree and actually died under it, because Minho wasn’t fast enough to save him.
He wasn’t fast enough to find him in time. He should have gone ahead sooner, and maybe then he would have found Thomas before the worst could happen. If they ever find him now, it will only be his body.
Minho doesn’t know if he’d rather never see Thomas’s face ever again, or be able to bury him properly.
“I think she found Thomas.” Sonya’s still insisting, but Minho can’t let himself believe it. He can’t think he has Thomas back again, only to find out he’s wrong.
He’s the one who wasn’t there in time. Thomas had always been there to save him, to make sure he was safe.
But Minho hadn’t been… he just…
He wasn’t good enough. Not this time. Not when it mattered.
Is this how Thomas felt all the time? That he wasn’t enough?
Minho should have told him earlier.
Should have said something one of those nights where they curled into each other to chase away nightmares, told him ‘I love you.’ and asked if he could kiss him.
He’ll never know what that’s like, now.
He and Gally have moved in together, but it’s not the same. They don’t love each other the way they love Thomas, not yet. They’ve been too distant for that.
He wants to.
He wants to have them both, but Thomas is dead, and now he won’t have either of them.
“No, Minho, why would they still be in there if Thomas is dead?” Sonya insists. He tunes her out.
Thomas is dead. He’s accepted that.
(He hasn’t.)
So why is he hoping for more now?
Making this applesauce, something Thomas would have loved— once he’d made the strawberry jam, it’d been his favorite food to eat. He hadn’t shut up about it.
So why now? Why would Frypan have him make this now?
He can barely see Thomas’s tree from this angle; he knows Minho’s sitting under it.
He hardly goes anywhere else these days.
Sometimes, Gally wants to join him.
Usually, he’s too afraid he’ll say or do something he’ll regret. Things have been weird between them.
Worse than before, even though he moved into Minho’s cabin because it’s closer and easier to manage with his leg.
They don’t have Thomas tying them together now, not in the same way he was before. Gally’s not quite sure what to do with that.
So he draws on his anger the way he always used to in the Glade, because it’s easier than having to deal with the sadness and the worry and the numbness that threatens to creep in and weave ivy walls over his heart and mind.
“Fry, what are we going to do with this? How long will it keep for?” Smashing the strawberries up has been vaguely therapeutic, and as much as he hates the thought of making something Thomas would love that he can’t eat, it’s still been… kind of fun.
“Well, it’s only one batch, so it should go pretty quickly.” Frypan seems tense. Like something’s wrong.
Gally can’t see anything wrong, but he knows Thomas was put at this station because it’s pretty hard to see everything.
What does Frypan know?
Why is he not saying anything about it?
Or maybe it’s just that he’s remembering Thomas, too. Whenever they lost someone, Frypan would do this. He’d be tense for a few days, throw himself into cooking and baking almost aggressively, and it’s nothing new.
But Gally desperately wants for there to be another reason for Fry to be tense.
“What’s going on, Fry?” He can’t leave the applesauce, it’ll burn, but he wants to know.
“I don’t know, Gally. I just saw Harriet running back, is all. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Running back…
Running back from the woods.
Fuck.
She’s found Thomas’s body.
“I want to see him.” He says, moving faster than he thought he could.
“Gally, don’t— ” Frypan takes his spoon and tosses it to one of the other cooks. “If you’re going, you can’t go alone. Your leg is still bad.”
“Mina, you’re in charge. Please make sure nothing burns.”
“Got it, boss.” Frypan takes one of Gally’s arms around his shoulders— it’s faster than the crutches he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of yet.
He can use them fine in the cabin, but he still has a difficult time on the grass.
They go to Thomas’s tree. Sonya, who usually avoids it, is sitting pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with Minho.
Gally sits on Minho’s other side, but not quite as close.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Frypan asks. “I saw Harriet run by, but I wasn’t sure.”
“That’s why you wanted me to make strawberry applesauce. You thought— ” Gally cuts himself off.
Does Frypan think Thomas is alive?
“Would they have been in there this long if he wasn’t?” Sonya counters, softly. She sounds tired. Like they’ve been doing this over and over.
They probably have.
“He’s dead, Sonya. It’s been too long.” Minho sounds tired, like he doesn’t want to hold onto any hope that Thomas is alive, that Harriet found him after all this time.
It’s only been a week and a half since they planted the tree, but it feels like a lot longer.
Most things feel like that. Gally feels like it’s been ten years and also no time at all since they escaped the Glade, since he joined the Right Arm, since they got here.
“She wouldn’t have been running like that if he were dead.” Frypan says. “She was moving pretty quickly. Why would she do that if there was no hope?”
“To keep us from seeing? Because it wasn’t him?”
“No one else has gone missing.”
“Could be an animal.” Gally hears himself say.
He wants to believe it’s Thomas, but— he can’t. He can’t do that to himself. Because if he believes it’s Thomas, lets himself have that, and then it’s not Thomas, it will shatter him.
Minho’s doing the same thing, he realizes.
To protect himself.
Sonya and Frypan were his close friends, but they didn’t know Thomas the way Gally and Minho did.
They weren’t in love with him.
If it is Thomas, Gally’s never letting him go anywhere alone again.
Not in the near future, anyway. And by near future, he means in the next ten years.
(He’s still clinging to the faintest thread of hope that it is Thomas, that he’s alive, that he’s safe.
That he’s here.
Somehow.
He knows the truth is probably that Harriet was moving quickly to conceal the body from them, at least until she and Anya could clean it up a little, but Gally can’t force himself to squash that little bit of hope.
It’s going to be what destroys him, in the end.)
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