Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He wakes up with a strangled scream trapped in his throat. He can’t breathe around it so he twists into the pillow he has clenched in shaking fists, buries his face into it and lets it all out. It takes a little while for him to calm down enough to turn his face away and gasp for air. His throat feels raw around the shouts he must’ve been letting out in his sleep, his heart thrums quick and unsteady in his ears, and he guesses from the dampness of his pillow that he’s been sobbing for some time now.

While he waits for his breathing to return to normal, he drags himself up to sit so that his back rests against the wall, tucking his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them.

He needs to get to the paper in order to calm himself down all the way, but the paper is in the drawer of his bedside table, and he would need to unwrap himself to reach for it and he would need to get some light to be able to read it and right now he can’t bear to do either.

“My name is Stiles,” he whispers. He’s almost memorized the paper, been studying it and every change to it for weeks so that he doesn’t get caught off guard when he needs it. Like now. “My name is Stiles Stilinski. I am nineteen years old. I will be twenty years old in—” he cuts himself off to figure out the date, do the math. He doesn’t know the date. He doesn’t remember the date on the paper, either. Shit. “I will be twenty years old soon. My name is Stiles, and I will be twenty soon.”

The trembling of his hands is slowing but it hasn’t stopped yet, and he knows—he knows—tears are still spilling from his eyes. It’s not working. He doesn’t know the date.

“My name is Mieczysław Stilinski. I’m in my bed, in the room I grew up in. I spent sixteen years living in this room.” His mouth trips over the syllables of his name but the weight of it on his tongue finally allows him to begin to relax. He’d had so much trouble reading it off the page in the beginning but the Sheriff—his dad—had guided him through it with more patience than he expected. The last few years of his life, there hadn’t been a lot of patience in the people around him.

“My name is Mieczysław, and people—most people call me Stiles. Some people call me Thomas.” He licks his lips, finds them dry and cracked. He should start bringing a glass of water to bed in case of nights like these. If he woke from one of his dreams to find his throat and mouth too shredded from screams to allow him to recite what he knows from the paper, he doesn’t know what he would do.

(once, he’d become lost and terrified and alone in a room he didn’t recognize, unable to call for help, unable to call for anything, and he’d snagged a shirt from the floor and wrapped his fists in it and shattered the window next to the bed. It had been nearly a twenty foot drop from the window to the ground but there was a tree close enough to the window for him to launch himself at it and shimmy down its branches to get down. He’d been overwhelmed by everything—all of it somewhat familiar in two twisting ways but not quite right, not at all—and he’d ran, ran, ran because that felt right. He spent the rest of the night wandering the streets in search of the people who made him feel safe, until the Sheriff had found him with the help of a man who wasn’t human. the sheriff had had the paper in his hands and read from it with a strong, pained voice until he’d calmed down enough to be walked back to the house. The man had said nothing.)

“My best friend is Scott McCall. I’ve known him since we were—”how old? He doesn’t remember. He needs the paper. “—very little. I live in a town named Beacon Hills. It’s in a state named California, which is in the country of—America.” He unlocks his arms from around his knees and tangles his fingers together. If it weren’t dark right now, he’d move to the window and take in the world. “There is no Scorch. The world is not burned. The Flare virus isn’t real.”

Those three lines had been penciled onto the paper by an unfamiliar hand. After two months back in California, he’d relearned the Sheriff’s thick, blocky writing, and rediscovered his own messy scrawl. The paper was a jumble of text, typed mostly until someone came up with something else he needed to know. Remember. Whatever. He doesn’t know which of his friends wrote the three lines but they’re as comforting to him as the stuff about his own life, and he’s grateful that somebody recognized how much he’d need to hear them.

“What we thought was the Flare virus was actually a kind of rabies that was injected into teenagers in an experiment. To try and find a cure for it.” There’s a scar on one of his hands, a silvery half circle over the tender flesh between thumb and forefinger, from when one of the infected people from the experiment had come at him and he’d been resorted to shoving it—her—away for lack of a weapon, or risk letting her bite him and infect him. The girl had caught him in her teeth anyway and held fast, until someone had come up behind her and bashed her head in, freeing him. They’d watched him for days, waiting for the disease to ravage his mind, waiting to put him down before he could pass him on. Nothing had happened. “I was kidnapped to be part of the experiment. They destroyed all of our memories and had me for over two years, before I—escaped, with a few of the others. Most did not survive.” He remembers that. doesn’t need a paper full of mismatched text to remind him of the horrors of his second life. His brain would need to be fried again before he ever forgets the look on Chuck’s face as he’d died, bloody and in pain in his arms.

(he’d suggested it only one time, around a month after the rescue. When his dad the Sheriff, and his supposed best friend Scott had nervously asked how he was feeling. How he was adjusting. “If all else fails they can just wipe my memories again,” he’d said with a shrug. He hadn’t been serious, not really—had to hold onto Chuck as the punishment he deserved, couldn’t bear to lose the other friends he’d made too—but the looks on their faces was an unspoken order not to ever, ever, say something along the lines of that again.)

“We were rescued after two weeks living in a deserted area. The survivors were identified and returned to their families. Some didn’t have families. Minho was taken to the other side of the country. Newt came home with me.”

That part isn’t on the paper, but he says it anyway because he needs to. The paper reminds him of the life he’d had before he was stolen and it works as a comfort to hear details about it but sometimes he just needs something that he already knows. He needs a familiar detail. Newt is familiar. Newt is in the room across from his, the one that used to be a guest room. He, too, has a paper about his life before the experiment, but he isn’t dependent on it like Mieczysław/Stiles/Thomas is.

(“What do I need a bloody piece of paper for when I’ve got Minho and you?” Newt had told him when he’d asked. “Anything I need to know, anything I need to remember, I can ask you. And the other way around.”)

His hands have stopped shaking. He unlinks his fingers and drums them on the bedspread for a few minutes. His name is Mieczysław, he’s nineteen, he has three best friends(but doesn’t remember one), a father(but doesn’t remember him), a whole mess of scars criss-crossing his body(doesn’t remember any of them but three; one where he’d been ripped up by a Griever in the maze; a starburst on his shoulder where he’d been shot out on the Scorch; a half circle of teeth imprinted on his hand so that he can never forget that there were human beings out there who’d seen him as nothing more than a meal), and fucking amnesia.

He can’t recall anything else on the paper so he starts repeating the things he does know. His name, his age, familiar and solid details. He runs a thumb over the scar on his hand from the teeth and then over the one on his shoulder from the gun. He takes a deep breath.

“My name is Mieczysław…”

Chapter Text

Newt is in the room with him the next time he wakes up.

“Morning, Tommy,” is all he says. He’s sitting at the desk in the corner of the room, a frown on his face and a paper in his hand. It’s all in typed print, no bits or pieces or notes scrawled down on either side from a sudden surge of memory, which means it’s Newt’s.

(when he’d first suggested that they make lists of the details of their former lives to help them come back to themselves, Newt had agreed wholeheartedly. But he’d refused to put his real name down on his page, refused to be called anything other than Newt.

“I may want to know who I used to be, how I used to act,” he’d said, “but I’m not that person anymore. I’m Newt. That’s my name. The other boy is gone.”

They’d never brought it up again, but sometimes Thomas wonders if it doesn’t anger Newt that the first thing on his paper is his true name. if he doesn’t feel betrayed for how tightly Thomas clings to Stiles Stilinski and hopes that one day he might feel like that guy again.)

“Good morning, Newt. What time is it?” from his position against the wall, he can’t see the face of the digital clock against the bedside table. There’s some sunlight coming through the window(newly replaced after he’d broken it in his panic) but not much, and the sky still seems rather gray from how much he can see. He’s used to waking up early to go run in the Maze, but it feels different here, where dawn equals time for breakfast at the family table rather than time to go for another futile sprint in a giant death trap that he’d helped design.

Newt is looking at him instead of the clock so Thomas unfolds himself and starts to stretch, shake off the last clutches of his nighttime terror. He’d fallen asleep clenching his hands together again, so his fingers are stiff; he spends a few seconds wiggling the feeling back into them. His toes feel thick and lifeless and he spares a moment to whisper thanks in his mind that he isn’t still in the Glade or the Scorch, where heavy feet meant death not only for himself but for the people around him, the people he cared about.

“You have a visitor,” Newt says flatly, which doesn’t tell him the time but does explain the scowl. Although it’s reasonable to assume that it can’t be too early if somebody’s already here to see him, because now that he’s sleeping in a real bed again and not the sad little cots back in the Maze he can’t imagine why anybody within their right mind would want to leave theirs at the crack of dawn. “It’s the girl, again. The one with the red hair.” He shifts his gaze down to his paper as if it has the answer for what girls want with Thomas at all, which, Thomas can’t even fault him for because they’d trusted Teresa because of him and she’d betrayed them all, and then they’d warily trusted Brenda because of him and she turned out to be a liar too.

Thomas wonders if the women in Stiles’ life had also frequently stabbed him in the back. Maybe it’s his face. Maybe he has a face thing, and the people he meets just instinctively want to hurt him. It had happened with Gally, certainly—and he totally feels weird for feeling fond of the hostile memories with Gally, but that’s only because things had been so much easier back then, so he shouldn’t—and it had happened a few times since he’d returned to Beacon Hills to stand in the too big shoes of a one Stiles Stilinski, mostly with strangers and not as frequently as he might've feared, because the guy who he used to be apparently knew everybody in town, had a whole smorgasbord of people who seemed to follow him everywhere like he needed their constant presence or he'd disappear again. Like the scruffy man who’d helped the Sheriff find Thomas the night he’d accidentally ran away—

(they had met for the first time when he’d come through the bedroom window—thewindow!—one night a few days after he and Newt had been delivered to the Stilinski household, and his response to seeing Thomas in the bed where he thought he belonged was to actually growl. The dude had managed to take two steps forward, looking like he was ready to make very violent actions toward Thomas, before Newt had come crashing through the door. Then he growled again, threw himself out the window, and Thomas didn’t see him again with the exception of his accidental departure during the night)

—Scott who'd been the first to visit him and had come with a girl on his arm, a trio of dangerous looking teens who kept shifting like they wanted to touch him, a girl who had leaned in to sniff him before being intercepted by Newt, and a pair of girls who appeared to be sweet but then again, so had Teresa. So had Brenda. The one with the red hair—Lydia—had actually slapped him in the face the first time he saw her and then burst into tears, which shocked Newt enough that he didn’t have the time to retaliate before she was setting her shoulders back and apologizing to Thomas.

(“I’m a little insulted that you, of all people, would forget me, Stiles,” she’d said. “Nobody forgets Lydia Martin. But I’m going to excuse you just this once because I know you didn’t do it on purpose.” She’d turned up her nose like the doctors of W.I.C.K.E.D. were the ones right in front of her to face her anger. “You don’t need to worry, though. We’ll figure out how to get your memories back in no time.” The other girl, the one with the strong jaw and the hair that was dark and wavy like Teresa’s, she’d caught her friend by the hand and given him a watery smile and a nod, but didn’t have anything to say other than, “It’s good to have you back, Stiles. We really missed you.)

(the Sheriff, who welcomed him and Newt with misty eyes and open arms, missed him; Scott, who had started crying the first time he saw Thomas, missed him; Kira, who had pressed candles into his hands and told him that meditation would help to open his mind, missed him; Lydia, who was outraged to be forgotten and sworn to recover his mind for him, missed him; Allison, who told him they hadn’t been very close before and understood the distance he needed to readjust, missed him; Isaac and Erica and Boyd, who crowded him into a tearful group hug despite Newt’s warning growl and then laughed at him like that was some kind of joke, missed him; and so did Malia, who had told him that even if he smelled different and couldn't remember her, he was still her favorite person. And there were others, too; people who hadn’t come to the front door of the Stilinski house themselves but instead sent their best wishes and their delight at him being home safe in cards or in messages from other people. A lot of people missed him.

Who missed Newt?)

Newt seems to be lost in thought staring at his page, which is a good thing in that it means he probably hasn’t noticed that Thomas too has drifted away. Or that he’s returned. Thomas checks his feet again to make sure he can feel all his toes before sliding out of bed and to his closet. A quick glance at the clock that his friend has still not checked for him reveals that it’s nearly seven, which isn’t too early for him to answer the door in his sleeping clothes, but they probably reek of sweat and fear from the night before, and there’s no way Lydia will be ok with smelling that. he doesn’t know why, but he wants to please her. It’s almost like the desire he’d had to keep Teresa safe and happy in the Glade, but that had soured pretty quickly in the Scorch and what this is, with Lydia, feels better somehow. More pure.

The closet is full of bright shirts, stamped and decorated with pictures and logos and slogans left and right. It had been an absolute shock going from the drab, colourless wardrobe of life in the Maze to the absolute rainbow of clothes Stiles wore, and Thomas finds himself weirdly grateful for that. it, if nothing else did, helped to remind him that things were different. Thomas-in-the-Maze might’ve been fine with wearing tattered shirts that were the colour of sand and about as comfortable as it too; Thomas-in-Beacon-Hills-waiting-to-remember-how-to-be-Stiles had options. options that included a soft, worn looking shirt that had a small graphic of a muffin with stud printed above.

He pulls it out of a tangle of other clothes, contemplates searching for a pair of pants other than the loose sweats he’s rocking, then decides the smell coming from the closeted clothes is worse than the one on the pants and that just changing his shirt oughtta be enough. Stud muffin. He thinks Lydia will probably understand what that means.

“Do you know what this means?” he strips out of the long-sleeved sleeping shirt and pulls on the muffin one, then turns to show the front of it to Newt, whose eyes drop to Thomas’ chest and linger there for a while.

“You’re no stud,” Newt says after a bit. His lips quirk up on one side, like he’s thinking of something funny, which means he understands the joke and has decided not to be forthcoming with an explanation, much like he’d been with the time.

Thomas contemplates crossing the room to elbow him but decides not to, on account of a) the friendly atmosphere that is especially soothing after the night he’d had, and b) the fact that he needs to get downstairs to talk to Lydia who’s promised that each of her visits will include a new lead for how to solve his memory problem.

He hesitates for a moment and then moves to the bedside table. Newt watches him retrieve the paper, fold it and pocket it without saying a word but the amused twist to his mouth falls flat, which Thomas finds a little unfair seeing as Newt is the one who’d been studying his paper earlier, but whatever.

“This probably won’t take long,” he says as he backs away to the door. “You can stay if you want. I don’t think she’ll have anything solid yet. It hasn't been that long.”

Newt taps his fingers on the desk wordlessly and casts his eyes around the room, catching on a poster or other random paper here and there but avoiding Thomas entirely, which is as good a response as if it had been verbal. Thomas figures that he's probably going to remain sullen and moody until he goes through what Lydia came to try out and gets rid of her, so he doesn't linger at the door any longer.

The Sheriff is in the kitchen when he gets downstairs, bumbling about at the counter and humming some tune to himself that has him smiling. He has a paper bag between his hands and when he looks up and sees Thomas heading for the front door, he freezes and makes an aborted motion to cover it up. Thomas nods at him without a word and keeps going, and he's in the process of pulling open the front door to greet Lydia when he wonders what he did to make the Sheriff go from pleasant to stricken in the blink of an eye.

Lydia's got a thick, dusty book in one hand, one large enough to be an effective weapon should she want it to be one, and a spiral notebook in the other. Thomas takes note of the colourful paper tabs peeking out randomly from the pages that look out of place on such an old thing, and decides anyone who uses such bright colours cannot possibly be out to hurt him. On purpose, at least. Whatever's in a book that ancient can't be entirely friendly.

"I hope your schedule's clear, Stiles," she says after she notices she has his attention. "And if it isn't, make it. I have something I'd like to try."

"Actually," Thomas says, and then stops at the expectant look on her face. Here she is, to help him--though a bit rudely, if you ask him, which no one does now that Minho's far away and Chuck's dead--and all he can think of is I'm not Stiles. Don't call me Stiles. It's never a good idea to contradict the people who are on your side, especially when they're few and far between and you're still not sure who to trust. If Lydia wants to call him Stiles, then he should probably let her, at least until she recognizes that he's not. Or, that's what he thinks he's going to do. Because all it takes is a perfectly arched brow from Lydia and he's shrugging and saying, "actually, I'd prefer it if you didn't call me that." The other brow rises too, and he continues, "Stiles is the guy you used to know. I'm not him. I'm Thomas, the one W.I.C.K.E.D. used, the one who survived the Maze and the Scorch. So..." he trails off, but Thomas knows Lydia understands when she simply nods at him. The little smirk she's been sporting since he opened the door is gone gone gone, but still. She understands.

"Are you going to invite me in, Thomas?" He pretends that the shake of her voice on his name is due to her sudden shivering. "It's cold out here; the wind's ruining my hair." she holds the big book close to her chest, then tucks the notebook into the crook of her arm and uses the newly freed hand to bounce her glorious hair. "And, you know, I'd like you to get your head fixed as soon as possible."

Not your memories back, or his memories back. Which he can't help but to notice and be curious over, and wonder if perhaps he had let her call him by the ghost's name, would she have said something else?

Either way, or whatever way, Thomas steps to the side and lets her in.

"Your room?" Lydia asks once they're both in the hallway. There's no sound coming from the kitchen and Thomas does not wonder if that's because the Sheriff has left the room or if he's still stunned silent from Thomas' non-reaction. Except he kind of maybe does, and that's why it takes him a few seconds to see that Lydia's taken his lack of answer for agreement and begun moving toward the stairs.

"No," he says, reaching out. His hand falters a few inches from her shoulder, bared without thought for the weather, and he withdraws it quickly before she can turn and see. "Newt's upstairs. This will happen down here."

"Newt," Lydia repeats. She glances up the stairs at his room and purses her lips. "The boy who was rescued with you? He's in your room?"

One of the boys who was rescued, Thomas thinks, and then he remembers Chuck's soft face and pleading eyes, wanting to know when he'd get home, when he'd return to his family, when he'd be safe, and stops thinking about that. He nods. "Either in my room or his room but yeah. He's upstairs."

"Perhaps you should fetch him, then, if he experienced the same things you did," Lydia tells him. She moves away from the stairs though and into the living room, where she settles daintily onto one of the couches and begins thumbing through the tabs in her book. He follows her, feeling unsettled by the familiar ease with which she navigates his home, as if she were the host and he were the guest. He doesn't sit down like she does, instead choosing to lean against the side of the other couch so that he's facing her and still has a clear view of the stairs. An eye on every potential threat, and every possible escape route. Lydia doesn't seem to notice that, though. Her eyes are still roving over her book. "The recovery process should be the same for both of you. It'd be smart to have him join us."

He thinks of Newt, upstairs and alone without anyone from his past life around to tell him how much he was missed or declare that they'd found a cure for his broken head, and then of the likelihood that one teenage girl who he doesn't truly know has somehow found a way to reverse several years of W.I.C.K.E.D.S.'s brainwashing. "I think you're underestimating the extent of what we experienced. Both of us have been held for years. We've been wiped of nearly everything. All of us have. W.I.C.K.E.D. may not be the super powerful whatever that they said they were, and they might not run the world, like they said they did, but." Thomas stares down at his scarred hand. Remembers the shock-pain of it, the sudden fear of what would happen to him. What he'd become. What he might do. All because some science-y assholes had thought shoving a bunch of kids in a place full of disease was an A+ plan. "They definitely knew what they were doing with our heads, if nothing else. So. Until you're absolutely sure you have a cure for us, something that'll really work--" he remembers that half-aware daze after the Griever's sting, when he'd been in what seemed like endless agony, either from the venom or memories or both, "--then I don't think he needs to be here. No need to get his hopes up too."

He's thumbing at the scar when he looks up to see Lydia staring at him with nothing hiding the horror and sorrow on her face, until she notices his gaze on her. Her eyes are dipping from his face to his hand, like the scar on it means something to her, which. It might, for all he knows. Maybe her supposed cure only works on those pure of skin, unblemished, unbroken. Thomas almost chuckles. Then he thinks of Newt's brutal limp, which he's still refused to explain to Thomas, and sobers.

"Anyway, yeah. No Newt. Not yet. Not until we're certain. Okay?"

"Okay.' Lydia agrees. "In that case, I should start explaining this ritual. Sooner I've got you convinced, sooner you and your plus one can be helped." She displays the book, finally open to what she'd been looking for. Thomas leans forward from his perch beside the couch to get a better glimpse of the drawing covering one of the pages. It's rather simple to look at, no elaborate sketching or anything, but he can't figure out what a diagram of a human head with stars for eyes and a line of crescents and half circles above it could possibly mean. The ritual itself must be the writing on the other page, but the language looks warped and twisted, nothing he's seen before. He has no idea what it says. He doesn't understand any of it. Luckily, Lydia seems to realize this, or she'd anticipated Thomas' confusion beforehand, because she tosses the notebook--already opened to a specific page, huh, how had he not noticed her flipping through that--toward him, which is filled with neat, semi-familiar lines of text that he guesses is the translation of the ritual.

To open the mind, reads the first line, and heal what has been broken, one must first recognize what has been lost.

"The first part's easy," Lydia tells him. She's studying her nails when he glances back at her. "It basically means you have to acknowledge that you're missing over half your life. Which you've already done simply by agreeing to work to find a cure."

"And then?" Thomas prompts. He doesn't want to read the whole thing. He'd rather get back upstairs, where Newt and his sole familiarity await.

"Something important to you--well, to Stiles, I guess, would be burned. Something that matters, something that makes him who he is. The ash of that object is then drawn into sigils on a few meaningful places on your body while I read the chant that gives the sigils power. All of that, when combined with the magical influence of the full moon, will be enough to break through any barrier that may've been put in your head. You'll get back the memories of the burned object, first, and then with the floodgates open--" Lydia claps her hands together, looking pleased. "Your mind restores itself. What do you think?"

Thomas considers it. Then he moves across the room to the large window, easily finding the thin slice of moon still high in the early morning sky. It's absolutely not full. Not by a long shot.

Lydia joins him at the window a few seconds after he's made the observation. She doesn't look pleased anymore.

"The moon's off," she says, so quietly Thomas assumes it's either just to herself or a thought she'd forgotten to keep in her head. "It won't work. Not for a few weeks at least."

"Good thing we didn't get Newt's hopes up then," Thomas says with only a small bit of disappointment, but he's not really surprised there's a fluke. Maybe there's some part of him that, despite the desire to be the guy all these people crave, despite the list he had made to help him with that, doesn't want his memories back. That doesn't want to be Stiles at all, ever again.

(sort of like how Newt doesn't want to be whoever he was. but different, in that Thomas has people who are trying to figure this out for him)

"I'm sorry." Lydia drums her fingers against the windowsill. Her nails make a click click click sound as they tap on the smooth painted wood. The contrast of red on white catches Thomas' attention before he registers her words and looks up to her eyes, which are steadily fixed on the sliver of moon. He makes a questioning noise, and Lydia sighs. "I got too excited and didn't check the moon cycle, which is incredibly stupid, especially for me. Anyway, now that this plan's through..." she whirls back to the couch, then presses the book and notebook into Thomas' hands. "Keep these safe for two weeks," she tells him. "I'll have another idea before then, of course, but this one is still a possibility, just for the future now."

Then she nods, to herself or Thomas he isn't sure, and lets herself out of the house. He is still standing by the window, books in hand, when she slips into a little car and disappears down the street.

A few moments pass by before he can hear Newt calling for him from upstairs. Thomas lets out a breath he wasn't aware he was holding and starts shuffling back to his room. Apparently discovering a potential solution and then having it ripped away is quite draining. He collapses on his bed as soon as he can, waving off the concerned-sounding noise Newt makes at his entry.

"Like I said," Thomas mumbles, then repeats it louder when it's muffled by the pillow beneath his face, "didn't take long. She didn't have anything."

"Alright," Newt says, just quiet enough for Thomas to hear, but not loud enough for him to be certain whether or not he heard relief in the other boy's voice.

"Alright."