Disclaimer:

I do not own The Maze Runner, but if I did, no one would have died and the Gladers would all just be one big, happy family.

-✼-

I decided I hated the colors in the building. They sent a false sense of cheerfulness that wasn't there. They gave personality to a place that was dead. I loathed the bright, lemon-yellow shade of the walls, the green curtains, and every other speck of color that was lively. As crazy as it was, I missed the dull colors of the Glade. At least they matched our moods.

The bright hues contradicted everything we felt inside. Hollow eyes glanced around every corner in fear that something would jump out. Throughout the course of the day, people got weaker. Their shoulders drooped the tiniest of bits. Slivers of hope disappeared from their eyes. Fear was a constant emotion- fear for tomorrow, fear that we'd never escape, fear that our next move would cause everything to crash down upon us. Everyone trod lightly.

In all honesty, I'd rather stay in the Glade for the rest of my life than spend it trapped in that building. Take out the unquenchable thirst for knowledge, the Grievers, and throw in a few more girls, and we could have made a nice little community. At least we'd had resources. We'd smiled at each other and laughed.

That night, before we went to sleep, everyone took turns taking showers. We all had a maximum of five minutes per person. Since Aris had already taken one the night before, he was out of the question. Hot water was scarce and everyone wanted to rinse themselves off.

Each time a Glader finished, he ran out exclaiming how there was a mirror inside the bathroom. It didn't really strike me as odd until I realized that I had never seen myself before. Newt, Minho, and the others who had come up first hadn't seen themselves in years.

I anxiously waited, sighing at the lines in front of both bathroom doors. Thomas and I had offered to be the last ones to shower, but that idea was slowly beginning to prove itself stupid rather than kind. The anticipation to see myself was chewing up my insides.

The time finally came. The last boy came out wearing fresh pajamas and towel-drying his wet hair. I nearly pushed him aside and ran into the bathroom, almost slipping on the wet tile. The room was humid from the steam of the shower, causing the mirror to be fogged up so thickly I couldn't see a thing behind it. There was a single towel on the counter left for me. I picked it up and slowly wiped away the fog until a clear patch revealed my face.

I was surprised. Chuck's initial description of me had been extremely vague, and had painted a false image of myself in my mind. I imagined plain brown hair with muddy eyes, or Thomas with longer hair. That wasn't right at all. My hair was dark, the same shade as my brother's, and ended just at my chest. My eyes were wide and curious like how I remembered my mother's to be in my memories. My nose curved upward like a slope. I noticed everything at once, like the clear expression of shock on my face that made my mouth drop slightly.

Then I started to see the darker details. I had a dried cut just to the left of my eye, one on my jaw, and another across my cheek. My eyes held a strange emotion that I couldn't depict. My hair was wild and unbrushed from the battle with the Grievers. Patches of dirt were stained on my cheeks and nose, which made my skin appear darker. I looked like I had come out of a war.

Sighing, I turned on the water and took my shower. The water was getting cold from all the people that had used it, but I didn't mind. The soap and hair products smelled like absolutely nothing. It was probably the best shower I remembered having, considering the ones at the Glade sucked. The water pressure was much better and the shower head didn't leak. I felt much safer knowing that the curtain had no chance of falling on me.

After I finished, I dried myself off and changed into a black t-shirt and flannel pants with red plaid on them. I managed my hair as best as I could with a comb and eventually emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam.

Thomas was waiting outside, along with Newt and Minho. The three of them were sitting on one of the beds that had been placed in a circle from our Gathering. Each of them had damp hair and unusually clean faces, free from oil and dirt. They all stood up in sync like they were waiting for me.

My eyes squinted in suspicion. "What?"

Thomas sighed and gestured to the other two boys. "They want us to stand in the mirror and look at ourselves side-by-side. See how much we look alike."

I found it a little random, but it wouldn't do any harm. I complied and soon faced the foggy mirror with him at my side. Newt and Minho held hand towels and eagerly began the countdown. "Three, two, one!" As quickly as they could, they hurriedly wiped away the clouds on the glass until a decent-sized blob was cleared of just Thomas and I.

It was clear we were twins, and I wondered how no one had made that connection in the Glade. Our eyes were the same as well as the shade of our hair. The structures of our faces were similar, though my cheekbones were higher and our smiles were different- mine was wider than his. Our eyebrows were even close to identical.

Newt and Minho cleared spots for themselves. After examining his face as well, Newt nudged me with his elbow. There was a teasing smirk on his face. "We make one attractive couple."

It was fairly true. I always knew I only came up to his chest, but seeing it from another point of view was a whole different story. There were the three boys, and then me. I seemed minuscule compared to them.

"Thomas, don't listen to him," Minho scoffed as he rolled his eyes at Newt. "We are the hottest couple around."

Thomas turned on his heel and walked out. "This is where I draw the line."

Minho's expression was full of complete outrage as he stared at Thomas' retreating figure in astonishment. "Thomas, I thought what we had was special!"

"We had nothing!" Thomas shouted in reply. It sounded like he was already in the hallway judging by the echo to his voice. Newt rose his eyebrows in amusement and sent a sideways glance at Minho to see his reaction.

The Keeper of the Runners stormed out, muttering beneath his breath, "He is unbelievable."

The rest of the night was, in one word, strange. Strange because we were dressed in comfortable pajamas and had warm blankets to sleep in. We drew pictures in the fogged mirrors with our fingers. Newt told ghost stories in the pitch black of night, and the only source of light was a small flashlight we had found in the back of one of the drawers. We talked and laughed, and generally forgot about our problems for a while as we sat in a circle with pillows hugged to our chests and cozy blankets as well. It almost felt like we were normal teenagers at a sleepover. Almost.

The only thing that kept me from fully living in that fake, peaceful dream was the hunger. It was slowly but surely settling into our stomachs and building up as more time passed. It was making animals out of us, destroying our humanity and making us desperate. Soon jokes such as, "I'm so hungry I could eat a whole cow," became true.

All the while, I wondered if W.I.C.K.E.D's next move was to keep us there and see who went insane first.

-/-

It had been three days. Three full days without any trace of food, and nothing was getting better. Smiles diminished until no one was smiling at all, and there were only discouraged frowns on every face. If I thought the second night was bad, those next days were worse. The starving animals inside of us were restless and gnawing at our stomachs until they were too small to even growl.

I mostly kept to myself, resting on my bed and not moving much except to stretch or go to the bathroom and freshen up. Every step felt like an anchor was chained to my ankle. I constantly grabbed my stomach, trying to calm the beast inside. No words were spoken. There was nothing to do except sleep, and so I did.

I caught bits and pieces of memories. They stuck into my brain like a giant puzzle struggling to complete itself, and every snippet of something added onto it. I remembered my mom baking chocolate chip cookies for Thomas and I when we would get home from school. I remembered when we couldn't go to school anymore. I remembered when our mother stopped baking chocolate chip cookies. I remembered the Flare getting so bad that we were isolated in our own home, except for occasional trips to the grocery store.

It was getting easier and easier to remember things. Tiny holes would open up in my brain, and if I really concentrated, I could connect points that could extract a memory. They often gave me horrible headaches that lasted for hours, but I felt it was worth it.

Sometimes I would come across a memory that W.I.C.K.E.D didn't want me to see. I'd be performing my usual routine, but then ten seconds later I'd completely forget what I had been doing and why. I figured it out soon enough - it wasn't that hard to pinpoint the ways of the dreaded organization - and decided to only focus on personal memories from my childhood. Those were the ones that came easiest.

One day, Theo came running into my room, shouting about how "las manzanas have arrived." I had no idea what that meant and decided to ignore it. However, I soon regretted that decision when I realized that Gladers were walking around and eating apples.

Minho immediately went to go wake Thomas up, because apparently he had fallen asleep again. Rumor had it that he barely did anything else. Then again, there wasn't much else to do and I couldn't exactly blame him.

Theo threw an apple at my face. I just barely managed to catch it before it zoomed off into the wall behind me. It rested in my hand, shiny and delicious-looking, and making the beast in my stomach awaken at the sight of food. I bit into it. The thing was slightly sour and the inside was a bit green, but I wasn't about to complain. Trickles of energy started to run in my veins for the first time in days. It took all of my willpower not to devour the entire fruit as quickly as my stomach wanted me to.

Theo sat beside me as we finished off our snacks in silence. Then, as if he suddenly had a spark of remembrance, he jumped up and grabbed my arm with a wildly excited look in his eyes. "I nearly forgot to tell you! We found something else besides apples."

My stomach growled again at his words. "Why are we still standing here, then?"

Theo lead me out the door and down the hallway to the common room. It was the big, open space where clothes and personal items had been distributed to us when we first arrived. But instead of it being sparse like how it had been for the last three days, it was now packed with Gladers. They swarmed around a pile of food that had seemingly been dumped there without any real thought. The scene made me think of a bunch of animals attacking their prey. Was this really what W.I.C.K.E.D thought of us?

But then my eyes took in the rest of the common area, and my heart almost stopped. A man was sitting at a desk in the corner, glancing up behind wire-rimmed glasses as he read a book that was in his lap. He was thin, with a face like that of a rat's and a sickly thin body. The man's hair was growing grey around a large bald spot that covered most of his head. But what scared me the most wasn't the fact that he was there, it was his white lab coat, and the acronym W.I.C.K.E.D embroidered on the breast pocket.

I stared at him for a good, long moment, registering that he was here with us and couldn't care less that we had been starving for the past three days. He had dumped a pile of food at us like the Farmers would slop mush to the pigs back at the Glade. There was no trace of sympathy on his face for what he'd done, what he was going to do, nor did he seem to care about anything that had already occurred.

It was for those reasons that I began to see red. Steam built in my ears and I felt my fists clench at my sides. My head filled with pressure that I thought would make it explode, and I stomped toward him with my eyes narrowed into slits that could cut steel.

"Dylan, what are you doing?" Theo questioned, attempting to reach out and grab me. His fingers brushed my arm; I shook him off, continuing to storm toward the W.I.C.K.E.D robot of a man who sat at the stupid desk.

"What the hell is your problem?" I spat as I stopped as close to the desk as I dared. There was only a foot between me and the only piece of furniture that separated us. I felt my nails digging into my palms because I was so livid, and it didn't seem like he cared about that, either.

The man didn't even look up from his book. He merely waved a bony hand at me and said, "If you leave me alone, I'll tell you when everyone's ready."

My eyebrows shot up my forehead. My fists were shaking at my sides. Rage was building up inside of me, increasing the pressure in my head until I heard ringing in my ears. "Leave you alone? Leave you alone? You show up here after three days of us not eating anything, after how you've treated us as if we were lab rats instead of human beings, and you expect us to sit back and listen to you like we're back in school?" I shook my head. "No. No, I won't have it. I want answers, and I'm getting them right now."

The man simply took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his long nose as if I was an annoying five-year-old begging to play with a microscope. A heavy sigh fell from his lungs as he set his spectacles on the desk beside his feet. He finally looked up at me.

"Unfortunately, you don't call the shots around here. I do. I'm in charge, not you, not that brunet over there, nor that blond. Me. I'm the one with the information, and I choose when to give it to you." He paused, holding my gaze steadily with his dull, grey eyes. "Now, sit back and wait until everyone is settled, and then I will begin."

I glared at him long and hard to make sure he got the message that I did not like him, then spun on my heel and joined Theo against the wall. He had a horrified look on his face.

Slowly, he turned to look at me. Theo finally closed his mouth - which had previously been hanging open in a gape - and swallowed nervously. "What did he say?"

I rolled my eyes. "Nothing of importance. He sucks."

"I agree."

My head turned to face him as well, and a wry smile quirked up my lip. "Don't worry- W.I.C.K.E.D can't beat us. I'll make sure they won't."

gif is dylan glaring at rat man

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I LOVE DYLAN'S SASS LIKE YES SLAY JANSON WE ALL HATE HIM

i really like this chapter!!! i'm really proud considering exams have been eating me up. can it be christmas break already?

questions:

-how much do you hate rat man?

-are you excited for the scorch or dreading it?

-if you had to choose, would you pick ava paige or janson?

-WHERE IS NEWT IN THAT SECOND HALF LIKE DUDE THROW AN APPLE AT YOUR GIRLFRIEND DONT MAKE THEO DO IT

these questions just keep getting worse and worse with every chapter

+dedication: mukeshowell aka laura because she sends so much love on almost all of my stories

-kristyn