Chapter Text
They tell him his name isn’t Thomas, but something Stilinski. They tell him he’s from California and he has a father that’s been looking for him and a home to return to. All he can focus on is how cold the metal table is against his skin and where are the others? He asks, repeatedly, but none of the doctors seem inclined to give him an answer.
They check his blood pressure, temperature, breathing, and a dozen other things he doesn’t understand. Then they decide to bring out the needles and he goes postal.
Three overturned tables and lots of damaged expensive equipment later and they’ve strapped him into the chair.
Bastards.
He tugs at the restraints, frantic, because they won’t answer him and where are the others and Chuck is dead and why won’t anyone just tell him what the hell is going on?
He’s pretty sure he screams an approximation of this at the doctors; they respond by jabbing a needle in his neck.
Fucking bastards.
He gasps as he feels the sedative hit him like a freight train and before he can curse them to hell and back like he wants, everything goes black.
_ _
He wakes up strapped to a bed so thoroughly that all he can move is his head. Which feels like someone took a hammer to it and then packed it full of fuzz. Marvellous.
He tells himself to calm the hell down and after a few deep, shaking breaths he twists to take in his surroundings.
White room, white walls, lots of beeping machines … hospital? Is that right?
There’s still no sign of the others and he tries not to panic over that. Last he remembers, they were still alive—being dragged away by the soldiers while he cried over Chuck’s body. But who’s taken them now? Are they still with WCKD? Or some new enemy?
Well, one way to find out.
He licks his lips—ready to start yelling again—but the door clicks open before he can get any words out. A woman enters, dressed in a doctor’s lab coat with glasses perched on her nose and her dark hair piled on her head.
She smiles at him. He distrusts her immediately.
“Good to see you’re awake,” she says and her voice sounds like Newt’s—the same crisp accent.
“Because you knocked me out,” he feels the need to point out. He’s not going to fall for her pleasant act. Nope.
“Yes, we are sorry about that.” She remains nonplussed as she sinks gracefully into the chair by his bed, perching a clipboard on her knee. “But it was an unfortunate necessity. Now that you seem to have calmed down a bit we can talk, Stiles.”
What?
“What the hell is a Stiles?”
She quirks a smile at him and finally decides to grace him with an answer. “Your name. Well, in a way. Your last time is Stilinski and I’m afraid we had no idea how to pronounce your first name but your father mentioned that you used to call yourself Stiles.”
What?
He blinks, struggling to process all of that because, “My name is Thomas.”
The doctor shakes her head. “No, I’m afraid not. You’re Stiles Stilinski, born 8th of April 1998 in Beacon Hills, California. Mother deceased; father, John Stilinski. Abducted at age eleven and…”
“Stop,” he snaps, head spinning.
The doctor at least looks contrite but he tunes out her stammered apology as he tries to sort out all the information she just hurled at him. He vaguely remembers the other doctors saying something Stilinski and family and California but he wasn’t exactly paying attention because they were poking him with needles.
“Where are the others?” He asks, deciding he can’t deal with being Stiles Stilinski from Beacon Hills until he knows everyone is safe.
“They’re fine,” the doctor assures him. He never got a name, so for now he’s dubbing her Glasses. “Some minor wounds and malnutrition but we’ll get all of you healthy again.”
“I want to see them.”
He already knows what the answer is going be before she shakes her head. “That isn’t possible at the moment, I’m afraid. We need to debrief all of your separately and finish our initial medical evaluations.”
A quick glance around the room reveals nothing he can use as a weapon. Fine. He can be patient. And he still has an ace up his sleeve he seriously doubts they know about.
Glasses keeps talking. “So if you’re willing to cooperate now, Stiles, I can have the nurse remove the restraints and we can talk. Then I’ll see about you visiting the others.”
Getting untied is definitely a step in the right direction so he nods. Glasses presses a button on her belt and a few seconds later the nurse enters to deftly undo all of the various straps holding him down. She’s also not carrying anything useful. Damn.
“I’m sure you have plenty of questions,” Glasses continues as he sits up, rubbing his wrists. His arms are dotted with bandages, he realises, and a touch to his ribs reveals more wrapped around his torso.
“A few,” he says with as much biting sarcasm as he can muster—which is, sadly, not much. It’s too hard to focus.
Still, he’s not going to let her feed him information in a nice little prepared package, so, “Where are we?”
“Northfield Medical Centre in Arizona. We evacuated you here from the desert facility.”
And right, he distantly remembers a helicopter now and soldiers guiding him out into blinding sunlight.
“Desert facility? You mean the maze?”
Glasses frowns and scratches something on her clipboard. He makes a mental note to get a hold of it as soon as possible. “Yes. The facility where you and the others were being held hostage.”
He has other questions, thousands of them—like who decided to put them in the maze and why and what’s going to happen to him now—but they all jumble up in his throat. He wipes a shaking hand across his face, determined not to cry in front of a stranger.
He’s not that weak.
And they already pulled him screaming from Chuck’s body, which is more than enough emotional vulnerability.
“And who the hell are you guys?” He asks when his voice is strong enough not to crack.
Glasses looks flustered. “God, I’m sorry. I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Doctor Elizabeth Bennet.”
She pauses, as if waiting for a reaction, he blinks at her and the silence stretches awkwardly until she coughs and gestures around her. “Anyway, like I said, you were evacuated here after the National Guard raided the, um, maze. I am part of a team of doctors assigned to evaluate you and get you patched up before you’re returned to your families.”
Jesus. National Guard? His head feels ready to split open.
Dr Bennet seems to sense how freaking overwhelmed he is and fiddles with her clipboard, giving him a few precious moments to compose himself again. “I am sorry. I know this is a lot to take in.”
Yeah. Understatement of the century right there.
He barks out a sick-sounding laugh and grips the edges of the hospital bed until the bones in his hands start to ache. Dr Bennet adjusts her glasses and keeps talking, God. “You were experimented on, though we don’t know the extent of it yet. It appears that a neurotoxin was used to destroy your memories and—“
“Will I get them back?”
She fiddles with her clipboard again; so … no. “We’re not sure yet. I’m sorry.”
Definitely no. He swallows around the sinking feeling weighing down his stomach like a ball of lead; the bed creaks beneath his fingers. Nothing to do but press on, though—that hasn’t changed. “Why did they do this to us? Who did this to us?”
“It was an organisation led by Dr Ava Paige, a renowned geneticist. But for what purpose … we have yet to determine that, nor, like I said, do we know the extent of the damage that was done. But we hope that with further tests we’ll have some clearer answers as to what any lasting effects might be.”
Well that’s fucking fantastic. He can feel himself starting to shake and quickly folds his hands into his lap so the stupid tremors don’t rattle the bed. The stranger doesn’t need to see how unhinged he is—that he can feel his already fragile world unravelling and the air is freezing up in his lungs and soon he won’t be able to breathe—
“Tommy,” a familiar voice whispers. He squeezes his eyes shut and latches on. “Calm down.”
Newt. Thank God.
“Where are you?”
Hospital room, he thinks back, still off-balance. You? The others? Are you okay?
“Easy.” Newt sounds okay—or at least, his mental voice does, but that might not mean anything—Newt is a fucking master at hiding his emotions/pain/worry/discomfort, even mentally, even from those that know him inside and out. “The others are fine, last I checked. Freaked out and disoriented, but fine. Have you gotten a bloody spiel yet about being abducted and experimented on?”
His mouth quirks into a smile in spite of his lingering distress because Newt manages to sound sarcastic even over a mental link. Yeah, just getting it now. Apparently I’m a Stiles Stilinski from California and I have a dad. You?
There’s a pause and Thomas aches for him, for all of them—he’s supposed to protect them but he can’t fix this, can’t give them back the lives and memories that were stolen or even assure them it will be okay because, God, he doesn’t know and it’s been so long and he can’t fake it anymore.
“Stiles Stilinski? That’s a mouthful, Tommy.” Newt’s voice cracks on his name and the ache sharpens.
Fuck, he hates this.
“Apparently I’m Samuel Wilcox from London, England.” Another heavy pause and then, with Newt’s usual measured calm, “And I’m an orphan.”
Shit, Newt…
“It’s fine, Tommy. Better this way, I suppose – no parents I’ve forgotten and—“
“Stiles?”
His eyes fly open and the connection breaks—Newt’s voice cutting off mid-sentence. Dr Bennet is looking at him, eyes big and worried behind her glasses.
“Sorry,” he says and doesn’t ask that she stop calling him Stiles. “I must’ve zoned out.”
Thankfully she accepts this and starts to prattle on about further tests and rehabilitation and more, probably, but he barely listens—too focused on steadying his hands and keeping air cycling through his lungs.
In and out, in and out, in and out, in and…
_ _
More tests, more needles, more lab coats, more fucking questions and he’s ready to go crazy again. The still haven’t let him see any of the others and he’s starting to worry they’re not going to—just silently ship them all off to their families without letting them say goodbye to each other.
At least Newt’s around to keep him updated. Everyone seems to be holding together, from what Newt can tell, and he takes a small measure of comfort in that. He taught them how to keep from breaking and maybe that means they’re going to be okay out there in the great big, half-forgotten world.
His hands keep shaking and he has to remind himself to breathe. He lies awake at night in his too-cold room and runs his fingers over Chuck’s wooden carving, wondering if somewhere in the hospital his parents are mourning their lost son. He wants to apologise to them, for failing Chuck, for letting him die, but he doesn’t think he has the strength.
The fucking doctors probably wouldn’t let him, anyway.
So he keeps the carving close and cries when the lights are out and no one can see. Newt whispers in the back of his mind, “It’ll be okay, Tommy,” and he tries to believe because it’s clear that Newt doesn’t.
_ _
They ask him what he can remember (nothing); they ask him what he knows about the people who built the maze (nothing); they ask him what happened to the boys that weren’t rescued (dead); they ask him about what it was like in the maze (hell).
They don’t ask how the others died and he’s grateful for that. He can keep the blood on his hands hidden a little longer.
He wonders when he became such a fucking coward. They don’t ask him that, either—probably because they’re too busy praising him for surviving to ask about the cost.
_ _
So something’s been altered in his DNA, apparently. At least, that’s the conclusion the doctors have reached after three weeks of “extensive tests.” AKA poking him with needles and taking way more of his blood and tissue than they needed to.
He has no idea what that means, but it’s probably an explanation for all of the shit he can do that he has yet to mention to the Lab Coat Brigade (LCB for short, which got Newt to laugh; score). From the lack of freaking out (and Newt’s nightly reports), none of the others have mentioned it, either.
He’s not about to trust these people and he’s pretty sure that if he suddenly starts levitating objects in the room and blasting people with energy condensed from the air around him, they’d lock him up and make him a lab rat for the rest of his life. Which, no. Five years is way more than enough.
So he keeps his mouth shut and lets the LCB puzzle over the test results and the fact that nothing seems to be wrong with any of them even when shit obviously is. But Ava Paige rather inconveniently blew her own head off (good riddance) so they’re just going to have to muddle along without any real answers.
Pity.
_ _
Physical tests suck. If he has to run on a treadmill one more time he’s going to kill something—violently and messily.
Probably the mousy LCB member who keeps adjusting the speed and incline higher.
Dick.
Are they making you run?
Newt doesn’t answer for a few minutes and giant dick pushes the speed up to eight. He’s sprinting now and honestly, fuck this. It’s been almost a month and he’s sick of it. All of it.
He also misses the others like hell.
“Yes. But not too much. I played the sympathy card with my leg and haven’t been near a treadmill since. Minho hasn’t been so lucky, though.”
Newt sounds tired, drained, and yeah, he’s done. He pulls the wires off his chest and slides off the treadmill. Giant Dick looks nervous, good, and he makes sure to loom to his full height—a nice three inches on the pathetic doctor.
“I want to see Newt.” He figures he might as well start small and work up to “everyone” from there.
Giant Dick shakes his head. Fine. He has a great answer for that and it’s slamming GD into the wall with a nice, choking grip on the front of his stupid coat.
“I want to see Newt. Now.” He glances around—no weapons, shit. Plan B, then: put arm across GD’s throat with enough pressure to cut off his air and watch him turn a nice shade of red. “Or I’ll choke you to death right here.”
GD wheezes and for a moment it looks like he might try to hold out, but then he nods in defeat.
“Tommy?” And now Newt sounds close to alarm. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”
Negotiating.
“Tommy, don’t. They have cameras; you’ll never make it…”
He’s about to tell Newt to shut up when an alarm starts blaring. Shit. GD is looking as smug as possible with limited air and he knocks the idiot unconscious just out of spite. He could make a run for it, but he’s not about to leave the others behind so there’s really nothing left to do but put his hands on his head and let the LCB response team jab him with a sedative.
Blackness rushes in.
_ _
“Tommy, wake up.” It takes him far too long to realise Newt’s voice is coming from above him, rather than inside his head.
He blinks his eyes open, trying to clear the cobwebs left by the drugs, and finds a very worried Newt frowning down at him. Really, no one frowns better than Newt – his eyebrows go all intense and he just looks scary as hell. It’s probably why he ended up in charge so often.
Thomas is too glad to see him to be scared, though, and as soon as Newt finishing unbuckling the last strap, he sits up and pulls Newt into a tight hug. Newt grunts, but then he’s hugging back just as hard and for the first time in weeks Thomas feels like he can breathe properly.
When they finally part, Newt perches on the end of his bed. He’s dressed in the same loose hospital clothes and they practically drown him. There’s a cut on his face that hasn’t healed yet and a few bandages visible around his shoulder but his eyes are as sharp as ever and his usual poise is visible in the set of his shoulders.
Fuck, it’s good to see him.
“You have to stop pulling stupid stunts, Tommy,” he says, still frowning.
Thomas shrugs, because he feels like he’s going crazy and okay, yes, assaulting the medical staff wasn’t his most thought-out plan, but he’s going crazy. Newt knows all of that already, though, so there’s point in spelling it out.
“How did you get in here?” He asks instead and watches Newt let the matter go with a faint sigh of frustration.
“I have my own tricks.”
And shit, he didn’t. “Newt…”
Newt coughs and waves his hand. “It’s fine.”
Of course he did, the idiot. “No it isn’t. You’re not supposed to try that anymore, remember? We’ve had this talk. I know we have. More than once.”
“Then stop making me worry,” Newt snaps and in the dim light, Thomas can see flecks of blood on the back of his hand after he wipes his mouth. “And it wasn’t bad. Just a little nosebleed and some coughing—nothing I can’t handle.”
We’ve had worse, trails in the wake of his words and yeah, they have. Way, way worse. It’s too easy to remember the blood pouring from Newt’s nose as he struggled to hold the feral new arrival in place with just his mind so Chuck could get away.
He coughed for days after that and Thomas pretended he didn’t see the blood that stained his fingers.
“Don’t try it again,” he insists because he can’t lose any more of them. He can’t.
Newt frowns at him again, but doesn’t protest. “I don’t think they’re trying to hurt us, Tommy. You shouldn’t attack them.”
Right, this again. Great.
“How do you know that? They could be WCKD? What if this is just another one of their games?”
Because he can’t stop wondering – it sits in the back of his mind, this little voice that constantly whispers don’t trust anyone you’re trapped don’t trust them what if they’re lying don’t trust them…
Newt shrugs. “I don’t sense any deceit from them. They don’t know how to handle us, but who would? We’re a bunch of traumatised, amnesiac teenagers with messed up genes and brains–I doubt there’s a manual for that.”
“Yeah, no shit.” He picks at a loose thread on his pants. His hands still tremble.
“I think they want to help us, though.” Newt rests his chin on his knee and there are dark circles under his eyes.
“Are the others okay?”
“I would tell you if they weren’t.”
Yeah, he would.
“They’re not gonna let us see each other again, are they?”
“I don’t know.” But there’s a no in his voice and Thomas curls his fingers into a fist against his leg. He wants to run. Being cooped up here sucks—like they’re still stuck in a cage waiting for a higher power to decide their fate.
“You don’t look like a Samuel,” he declares for lack of anything better to say.
Newt cracks a small smile at him. “Well you don’t look like a Stiles.”
“I know. What the hell kind of name is that? Apparently it isn’t even my real one. They couldn’t pronounce my real one. What kind of parent does that to their kid?”
Newt’s voice is dry, “I wouldn’t know.”
Thomas aches for him again. “I wouldn’t, either.” But if the LCB is really telling the truth… “Do you think I actually have a dad waiting out there?”
Newt’s eyes go soft. “Yes. You and most of the others.”
The thought of it makes him panic—stirs up too many emotions to even begin to pick them apart. “But I don’t remember him.”
“Not yet.”
“What if I never remember him?”
Newt reaches out and squeezes his leg. “He’ll still be your dad, Tommy.”
Maybe, but he can’t talk about this anymore. It’s getting hard to breathe again, shit. He hates this. How come he could keep it together so well in the maze when all hell was breaking loose on a fucking daily basis but as soon as they’re out, he turns into a pathetic coward?
Seriously, what’s up with that?
“I think it’s normal,” Newt murmurs and Thomas glares at him, even though Newt can’t actually read minds—emotions, yes, thoughts, no. But he still picks up enough to be fucking annoying about it.
Newt holds up a hand. It’s shaking. “See?” And his voice cracks again. “Normal.”
“I can’t fucking stop,” Thomas confesses, because it’s easier to admit it to someone who already knows.
Newt curls his trembling hand into a fist. “Neither can I. I think it’s called PTSD. We all probably have it.”
Yeah, he’s heard the LCB throwing around that term like it’s going out of style, but it doesn’t seem like enough to sum up the enormity of the terror blooming in his chest or the hurricane of emotions lashing against his ribs or the way his mind seems seconds away from falling to pieces every fucking minute.
“What do you think’s gonna happen to us?”
Getting out of the maze was supposed to be giving them control over their own fate, but it’s clear that was fucking naïve. He really should have known that it’s never that simple.
Newt looks as lost as he does. “I don’t know. I guess … we’ll go back to where we came from.”
Back to parents none of them can remember, back to different countries, back to orphanages.
Fuck.
He wipes a hand across his face and looks away.
“You still got them out, Tommy,” Newt says with another squeeze to his leg.
“We got them out. And not all of them.”
“Then we live for the ones we failed.”
It’s something they decided a long time ago—after the first coat of blood on their hands. It’s a small, pathetic undertaking in the face of something as all-consuming as death – two broken boys promising to live for the ones they killed–but it was all they had to give.
It’s all they have left.
“Yeah,” he agrees and tries to smile. It probably comes out looking fucking horrific, but Newt is kind enough not to comment.
“I should get going,” he says, unfolding himself. “They’re going to notice I’m gone soon.”
Thomas wants to beg him to stay but he’s not that pathetic.
At least, not yet.
_ _
Chuck’s carving is a stone in his pocket and the blood is thick on his hands. At night, he can hear it dripping onto the floor.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
_ _
The LCB talks about long-term effects of the experimentation, about keeping them all under observation for the next couple years, but, most importantly, about letting them leave.
He doesn’t know if that thrills or terrifies him.
_ _
They still don’t have any answers about why Ava Paige decided to kidnap a bunch of kids, perform horrific experiments on them, and then lock them up in a giant-ass maze in the middle of the desert for years on end.
He’s starting to think that they’re aren’t any answers for that kind of crazy and it’s horrible, realising that all those boys—Alby, Chuck, Gally—died for nothing—that all of it, all that hell, wasn’t for some great cause, just the whims of a madwoman.
He maybe breaks a few things when they tell him that no one’s even going to stand trial because they all committed suicide.
Newt sneaks into his room again that night and they sit on the floor in the dark, breathing.
In and out in and out in and out in and…
_ _
He really wishes they would stop calling him Stiles.
_ _
One month and eight days after being rescued from the maze, the LBC tell him that he’s going to be released into his father’s care.
He spends the next hour pacing circles in his room, plotting. Because Theresa has a mother on the East Coast, Minho is going to back his family in New Zealand (a whole fucking world away, apparently), Winston has an aunt and uncle waiting for him in India, and Frypan going to live with his mother and father in Colorado (wherever the fuck that is), but Newt…
There is no way in hell he’s going to let Newt go back to England by himself to be handed over to some orphanage until he turns eighteen.
Fuck no.
He empathically explains this to the LCB, using every reason he can think of, no matter how flimsy—it’s better for them to have someone familiar; it would be easier to observe them if they’re in the same place; this would be easier than getting some foreign orphanage to agree to look after a sixteen-year-old with PTSD, right?
They finally agree to talk to his mysterious father and leave him to basically climb the walls in anxious worry.
But he’s determined—this fight is one he’s going to win.