IT STARTED WITH A MAZE - Newt x Reader (F)

- MEMORIES OF BEFORE -

The world around me fractures into sterile white light, blinding and cold. I'm no longer in the burning Glade but somewhere else - somewhere clinical, sharp, and unforgiving. The walls are smooth, unyielding. The hum of machines pulses like a heartbeat, steady and relentless.

I see data charts scrolling endlessly, columns of numbers and graphs flashing before my eyes. Rows upon rows of complex calculations, lines that spike and dip like the ebb and flow of something alive - breathing, reacting, observing. It's dizzying and overwhelming. I try to make sense of the numbers, but they blur into meaningless symbols.

Doctors move around me - figures in white coats, faces obscured by masks, their voices distant murmurs. They talk in clinical tones, detached and precise, discussing things I barely understand but feel deep in my bones. Something about experiments, tests, subjects.

Then, out of the crowd, a man steps forward. There's a softness in his eyes, a kindness that cuts through the sterile cold. His gaze meets mine, and suddenly the world tilts again.

He knows my name.

Not just a patient number or an experiment code.

He says my name - quietly, as if reminding me I'm still human.

Behind him, a large board hangs on the wall, cluttered with photographs and notes. Faces stare back at me - faces I recognize, etched with exhaustion and fear. Newt's sharp eyes, Minho's determined jaw, Alby's haunted stare. Each one marked with data, stats, charts tied to their lives.

A pulse of pain flares in my head as the image shifts. There, in front of me, is a brain - complex, glowing with eerie light, neural pathways weaving and intertwining like a vast labyrinth. It's mine, I think, or maybe theirs. I don't know anymore.

Thomas sits across a pristine white table in a silent room, his familiar face calm but tense. His eyes bore into mine, searching for something deeper.

"WICKED isn't good," he says quietly, almost a confession.

The name hits me - WICKED.

W.C.K.D

They're the organisation, the puppeteers of this nightmare.

I want to believe him. I want to hold onto that truth.

But then, another voice cuts through the haze - soft, calm, but laced with an unshakable certainty. An older woman steps forward, her lab coat pristine, pressed, the collar framing a face marked by years of quiet authority. Her eyes, sharp and unwavering, lock onto mine with an intensity that sends a cold shiver straight through me. There's no warmth in them, only conviction, like iron forged in fire.

"WICKED is good," she says, each word deliberate, heavy with meaning. "Everything we do is for a purpose. Every sacrifice, every experiment - it's all to save the world outside these walls."

Her voice is smooth, almost hypnotic, but it doesn't comfort me. Instead, it twists inside my chest, a cruel, tangled knot of confusion and fear. Her certainty clashes violently with the echoes of Thomas's words in my mind- "WICKED isn't good" -and I'm torn between two impossible truths, like a battle raging deep inside my soul. The silence that follows is deafening, filled with the weight of what I want to believe and what I fear might be true.

Images flicker once more before my eyes like old film reels - faces of boys I know too well, their expressions raw and desperate. Each is etched with the same fear I feel clawing inside me, faces that have endured too much and still hold on to fragile hope.

The scene shifts again, colder now, darker.

I'm in a vast, shadowed chamber lined with rows of tall glass tanks - silent witnesses to suffering. The sterile, clinical scent of antiseptic lingers in the air. Inside each tank, a boy floats suspended in a thick, viscous liquid that dulls their movements. Their limbs twitch slowly, restrained by the weight of the fluid, their breaths trapped in bubbles that struggle but never break the surface.