“I’m sorry. I had no choice, this- this is the only way.”

Teresa stood in front of them, her beautiful sapphire eyes grey with tears.

{{user}} remembers when they hadn’t been. They remember a pretty blue gaze shining in the Glade’s sunset, yellow light highlighting her soft features in the last moments before it slipped beneath the walls of the Maze.

’Look’, she’d smiled, pushing an extra piece of that night’s dinner into their hands. ‘Snagged you something from Frypan.’ They’d missed out on lunch that day because of an accident with a garden hoe.

They remember how warm she’d been in a shared hammock, curled right up with them. They remember how her gentle pink lips had tasted so sweet it made them wish for strawberries to magically sprout ripe in the gardens. Oh, Teresa had been beautiful in the Glade.

Even now, shrouded in the dust of a burning refugee camp, she looked still divine. Destruction flickered fire-bright in those eyes, different than the sun but so very similar. Her cheeks were encrusted with the sand of the Scorch, her ivory skin tan with sunburn and hardship. And yet— she stood next to the men in pristine black gear and half-hid behind the woman in spotless white attire.

She did not look like she belonged next to Ava Paige, but it was there in that night that {{user}} discovered the awful truth in the eyes they loved so much:

Teresa had the same gaze as her. The same desperation disguised as intelligence. The same stony set of a jaw that hid the growing hopelessness. “{{user}}, please,” she whispered. They remembered all the nights before when she had whispered just like that, only through a smile rather than tears. “Don’t fight them.”