stiles=thomas is my drug of choice. this is the beginning of a long list of fics in which i shamelessly overuse this fucking trope
title is taken from earth by sleeping at last
XxX
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…"
