Chapter Text
The bonfire burned bright. Thomas thought that maybe everything in his heart burned brighter.
Anger. Love. Despair. Hope. Memory.
But did you see the flares in the sky?
Maybe the sparks were the brightest, shooting into the sky like a cruel, ironic memory.
Were you blinded by the lights?
The flares exploded in the stars. Not a call for help, but a declaration.
“There is life here. There is joy, and love, and memory so pulsingly bright you can almost taste it.”
Did you feel the smoke in your eyes?
Did you? Did you?
The world had tried to kill Thomas. Tried to kill all of them, to break them down, beat them into the ground until there was nothing left. Maybe it’d even succeeded.
Alby was gone. So was Chuck. Jack. Winston.
Newt.
Did you see the sparks, filled with hope?
So many names. Too many graves. They’d all died fighting something that was so much bigger than themselves, but dammit if they hadn’t lived first.
You are not alone
And they lived on even now, in the smallest of places. Newt lived on, in the name carved into a rock and the words scratched into an old journal, in the lights exploding in the sky. He lived in the knowing glances shared between eyes haunted by memories, some of them ugly, some beautiful.
Newt lived on smiles that would never really be the same, but that would still appear nonetheless, because it’s what he would’ve wanted. Because the memories were still beautiful, life was still beautiful, even if it really, really hurt.
‘Cause someone’s out there, sending out flares
Newt would never truly be gone.