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Thomas is in an elevator, and he's on a mission he can't fail.
Soon. It will be over soon. This time we’ll get him out, Thomas thinks, his veins ablaze with adrenaline. The plan they have isn't the best, it's true, but it has to work. Teresa is tense in front of him, obviously wary. Whether her wariness is due to the massive snowman with a red-and-green scarf wound around his neck standing by her shoulder or something else entirely is anybody's guess. She watches the digital numbers rise as the elevator moves them ever higher, anxiously awaiting their stop.
Newt sways next to him, then rights himself as if nothing is wrong — just another security personnel letting his guard down, inadvertently showing his exhaustion from patrolling the expanse of the building's endless corridors. Thomas notices, even though he catches this slip out of the corner of his eye through the mess of information displayed on his helmet’s visor.
Thomas notices, because he knows better. You can save him, Tom, Teresa had told him, her desperately hopeful voice bouncing off the walls of his skull. A ploy to get him back on WCKD’s futile mission to find the cure, nothing more.
Thomas grips his rifle tighter. He's not sure whether he's angrier about the fact that she knows exactly how to bait him, or that he almost believed her.
Newt is going to be okay. He has to be.
The doors ping open.
Thomas is in the middle of a hallway, and Ava Paige is in front of him. He feels like he's missed a step, but can't quite pinpoint the reason behind it. A commotion — gunshots, yelling — ricochets through the adjoining hallways towards him and Newt, getting ever closer. Other than her usual lab coat, Ava is wearing a white moustache with a red circle over the nose, her lips barely visible underneath the mask. A red Santa hat sits over her elegant, yet practical hairstyle.
Thomas hesitates only a fraction of a second before he lifts a gun to her face. They have to get to Minho, that's the only thing that matters. He’ll deal with the rest later.
She tells him something, but her words fall on deaf ears. The hallway behind her explodes with motion and she vanishes as Newt shoves Thomas out of the line of gunfire, into the branching hallway. There's shouting, explosions, the shattering of glass. Thomas shoots the green-faced elves — or are they goblins? — and doesn't discriminate, and neither does Newt. The faces of their enemies are cartoonish, two-dimensional, flipping on the vertical axis when they look to the side. They are wearing hats too, though theirs are striped in red and green, matching with the snowman's scarf. As a new wave of them fills the other end of the hallway, Newt sinks to his knees and rips a small Christmas tree out of a fallen guard’s pocket, observing it purposefully. Seemingly satisfied, he pulls on the topmost star and throws it away behind them, with as much force as he can manage. The tree slides over to the incoming enemies and blows up, setting them on fire. Thomas watches Newt, sweaty and grinning, and holds back on the urge to press the back of his hand to Newt's forehead.
It's nothing. Newt is going to be okay. He has to be.
Following the hallway in front of them, away from the fire, Thomas hears yelling and curses, the voice startlingly familiar. He looks at Newt at the same time as Newt looks at him, recognition and understanding lighting up the spark of hope in his eyes. As one, they rush to get their friend.
When they skid to a stop in front of a lab, the glass walling it in lies shattered to bits over the floor, littered with unconscious guards. Among them stands Minho, breathing heavily, his arms pent up with rage and a readiness to fight his way out or die trying. Upon seeing them, Minho tenses and takes a step back, disbelieving.
“Newt? Thomas?”
They rush forward to Minho, crashing into each other's arms with palpable relief.
Thomas is standing on Minho’s side, but doesn't remember stepping back. It doesn't matter — there's a crazy snowman and his army of evil elves shooting at them with candy canes they have to get away from.
Thomas runs, Newt and Minho hot on his heels. He dives through the first door he sees that isn't surrounded by glass and locks it immediately after Newt and Minho fall in after him.
There's a tiny problem, though. It's a dead end.
Thomas toes the edge of the office, looking out of the floor to ceiling windows down to the pool, it's-better-if-he-doesn't-know-how-many floors up, and doesn't remember how he got there. He couldn't have teleported, that's impossible even for WCKD. Besides, all of this feels super weird, like he's lived through it before, but it doesn't feel like a memory either. More like a memory that's been turned askew. Something is different, it's just at the tip of his mind, if only—
The door bursts open, spewing the snowman and his green-faced lackeys in. Shit, we're fucked, Thomas thinks desperately. He looks at Newt, his mouth falling open to say God knows what—
And then it clicks.
When Thomas turns back to the windows, the glass is already shattered. Newt nods to him grimly and Minho huffs, resigned, and together they run, gaining what little momentum they can, and jump off.
Thomas is in the pool with Newt and Minho, staring up at the smashed-in window they've just flung themselves out of and survived, and he knows that he's dreaming, but there's just one more thing he wants to do before he wakes up.
He raises his middle finger to the crazy snowman and shouts, “FUCK YOU!”
The snowman trembles with rage, and due to the heat of such an emotion, he disintegrates.
When Thomas blinks his eyes open, he closes them right away with a groan. He feels the weight of Newt before he hears him as he rolls all the way over Thomas and rises on his forearms, bracketing Thomas's head. He's let his hair grow out in the last couple of years so that it falls past his ears and brushes the top of his shoulders, Thomas remembers when soft ringlets tickle his cheek.
Years. It's been years.
He groggily moves his arm up and out of the blanket, placing his hand over Newt's just as Newt cups his cheek.
“Tommy, wake up.”
“‘M okay,” Thomas says. Blinks his eyes open again, leaning into Newt's touch. “Promise.”
Newt sighs heavily, his eyes fluttering shut in minute relief, then settles back down beside him. Thomas rolls over and buries his nose into Newt's neck and hair, smelling the new soaps Sonya has been making on his skin. On instinct, or out of habit, he grabs the edge of their blanket and pulls it over Newt's shoulder. Then his hand slides down Newt's chest to cover the scar over his heart. Newt wraps his arms around Thomas and covers his back, then slides a hand over Thomas's spine until it reaches the nape of his neck.
The dream — he can't even call it a nightmare — persists in the forefront of his mind. Thomas scrunches his nose. “I think I just had the weirdest dream in the history of dreams. Ever.”
“Yeah?” Newt prompts, starting to idly play with Thomas's hair. “You remember it?”
Thomas hums. “A memory. Not from Before. When we found Minho.” When you almost died, he doesn't say. It isn't what the dream was about, not really, and even if it was, he still wouldn't be able to say it out loud. He doesn't think he ever will. “But it wasn't really a memory. More like… Modified?”
Newt tenses.
“It's not as serious as it sounds, I swear,” Thomas hurries to reassure him. “It's— I think it's actually a mix of a real memory and something from Before? Fuck, that sounds even worse.”
Newt laughs — a single expulsion of breath, jostling Thomas as it leaves him. Then he moves his thumb over the thin skin behind Thomas's ear, down to the edge of his jaw. “Don't rush it, Tommy.”
Thomas tries. The dream is starting to fade, sanding its details, but he still remembers the oddest parts. “Do you remember watching cartoons? Or… Santa?”
“Santa?” Newt repeats. “Isn't that the thing about gift giving? Vince suggested—”
Thomas remembers with a start. He opens his eyes, rising up so that he's partly leaning on the pillow and partly on Newt. The hand he cupped Newt's heart with stays where it was. Newt's arms fall down to his waist along with the blanket, loosely circling him in.
“Yes!” Thomas exclaims. “Last night. Must've ticked off something in my brain.” He frowns, searching for words to explain what the hell that something was. Newt watches him intently.
Thomas gets an idea. Newt's eyebrows shoot up.
“Mind if I borrow your sketchbook for a moment?”
“Suit yourself.”
Thomas stretches over Newt to his bedside, grabbing the notebook off of the little desk he uses for his nightstand — a piece of the twin complet, one for Newt and one for Thomas, which Gally had given them as his homecoming gift when they moved into the cottage. The pencil almost rolls down to the floor, but Thomas tilts the notebook the other way and it flops onto the blanket, getting cushioned between its folds. Newt fishes it out for him and hands it over, his eyes alight with intrigue. When Thomas sits up, Newt sits up too, pulling Thomas in between his legs and flush against his chest. Thomas leans back in and hikes the blanket up to his chest; Newt secures it with his arms. When he finds a blank page, Thomas rests the notebook on his knees and starts to draw.
He doesn't mind Newt watching, his chin hooked over Thomas's shoulder and his curls pressed between their cheeks. It feels silly and childish, outlining the strange creatures from his dream, but as he does so, something settles within him. The snowman looks more like a caricature of the one from his dream, but the details are escaping him as to what exactly about his rendition is wrong.
Then Newt gasps. “Cartoons. Moving pictures. Like videos, but hand-drawn.”
“Yes! That's it!”
“We watched them on TV. I think this is from one of them.”
“And I think you're right,” Thomas says, his mouth slowing down as his brain picks up pace. Most of what he remembers from Before is from his time as a WCKD scientist, pieces of knowledge he doesn't remember learning, but lately he's been remembering more: a room, a sense of sneaking out, a classroom of sorts — but nothing concrete. Nothing like this. “I think that… this might be the first thing I've remembered from before WCKD.”
Newt hugs him closer. Thomas looks back down on his sketches — the evil elves, the snowman, the tree… What was it called? It started with K, Thomas thinks.
“Ava Paige had a voluminous white moustache. It curled upwards. And a round red nose. And this was Rat Man.” Thomas taps the drawing of the snowman with the back of his pencil. “He exploded when I told him to fuck himself.”
Newt is silent for a moment, stiff with surprise, then bursts out laughing, turning his head away from Thomas to spare his eardrums. Thomas laughs along, unable to help himself. It really is downright ridiculous, isn't it?
“I'm sorry,” Newt wheezes.
Thomas waves him off, falling back into his arms. “Nah. It was fucking weird, I told you! And I figured out that I was dreaming while I was dreaming.” Recognition sparks in his mind. “Lucid dreaming.”
“What?”
“When you're aware that you're in a dream. You can change things at will, control how the dream plays out in a way. I did it in this one. You're also supposed to wake up pretty soon after you become lucid, but I'm not sure how soon. Like, what time frame we're talking about, because in dreams we perceive time differently.” Thomas blinks rapidly and gapes, stunned with himself. “I don't know where that came from.”
Newt only taps Thomas's temple twice with a slender finger.
“Yes, but why would I need to know that? What did I use it for?”
“Why would you have to use it?”
He doesn't know. He doesn't remember. It could have been anything — another trial maybe, where they put them in comas or something. Or perhaps they'd try to induce this lucid dreaming, do experiments in their prisoners’ own heads. Simulations. Isn't that what they were doing to Minho?
“Tommy!”
Thomas gasps, realizing that he's crying. Newt has his face in his hands, following the lines of his cheekbones with his thumbs. Drying his tears as they fall. The steadiness in his hazel eyes dampens the erratic rhythm of Thomas's heartbeat like a balm. He lifts his shaking hands and grips Newt's like a lifeline.
Newt nods. “You got lost in your head. You weren't hearing me. Walk your way back, and walk me through it.”
Ever since they started getting more of their memories back, they had to come up with ways to make sense of them. Once a neural pathway has been paved, it only gets easier to walk it again, so the more memories they regain, the sooner they'll regain another. A part of Thomas wishes he never remembered a single thing from Before. Another, more persistent part of him wishes — no, needs — to remember it all, no matter how awful and damning.
Everyone has their own way of dealing with this challenge. None of them deal with it alone.
“Simulations,” Thomas says. “WCKD found a way to induce lucid dreaming through… I don't know, but they used it for simulations, another stage of the trials. And they did that to— to Minho. I know it. I must have— I must have been trained—”
“Step back,” Newt encourages gently.
Thomas exhales tearfully. “I know it.”
“Define ‘it’.”
“WCKD made their simulations based on lucid dreaming for the next stage of their trials.”
“Do you know it, as in: you remember it, or have you just figured it out?”
“I…” That's a good question. “I'm not sure.”
“What are you sure you remember?”
“Lucid dreaming. What it is. But— But why would I know that? WCKD must have taught me that for a reason.”
“Speculation,” Newt reminds him. “Is everything you remember from Before related to the trials?”
“I… Why would they teach me something that's not useful to them?”
“Fair question. However, are you sure you remember only the things they taught you? Could you have learned them some other way?”
No, Thomas wants to say. It makes sense. Who else would be teaching him? How would he have learned that which wasn't in their curriculum? He was constantly under their supervision, he remembers that much.
Still, he had managed to sneak out. Still, he had gotten under their radar skillfully enough to be the Right Arm’s informant. He knows this, even if he doesn't remember how he'd done it.
“Talk to me, Tommy.”
“Yeah,” Thomas says. He's stopped shaking. Now, he only feels colossally tired. “It's possible.” And then he smiles. “Those evil elves and the snowman don't seem like their kind of entertainment.”
“No, definitely not,” Newt laughs lightly. “Can't say it's not an apt comparison, though.”
Thomas shrugs, squeezing Newt's hands. “My brain has a funny sense of humor.”
A corner of Newt's mouth hikes up as love fills his eyes to the brim. It is early morning; the Sun rises over their window sill, a crescent Moon is on the rise on Newt's lips, and deep in Thomas's heart, a certainty arises: he’ll be okay one day. Both he and Newt.
When Newt asks him, “Where are you now?”
Thomas tells him, “Here.”