#badboygally

Don’t worry, Teresa. We won’t hurt you or your friends any more than we already have.

Don’t worry.

We won’t hurt you.

Oh, what a load of shit that was.

The return to WICKED was quicker than Teresa expected. She was thankful for that, every second spent in the Berg staring at a paralyzed - but still incredibly pissed off, impressive given his inability to move - Minho, held up by a beefy guard under each arm. Then there was Sonya, and Aris, the two of them almost looking more betrayed than Minho. Teresa’s back nearly blistered under their stares. And then of course there was Ava Paige, a soft hand on Teresa’s shoulder. Her words echoed in Teresa’s head.

Don’t worry, Teresa. We won’t hurt you.

And god, how she hoped that was true.

How she hoped she hadn’t made an unfathomably colossal mistake.

How she hoped she was right about WICKED, and the cure.

How she hoped that hope was enough.

(It wasn’t.)

She was quite literally thrown - okay, maybe shoved - into a room much like the one she’d stayed in before the maze, before Thomas had changed everything. Ruined everything, even. It was a nice room, just like she’d remembered.

Remembered - that was a strange word. Teresa was still trying to connect herself to the self she remembered. There was this divide between the herself of before the maze and the one after. She could see the good in what she thought was right. She believed in it, she really did. But it all felt a little too impersonal, like she was watching someone else’s life instead of remembering her own.

But it was saving the world and it was right then so it was right now.

Right?

Right?

It was close to five in the morning by the time she fell asleep. She dreamed.

She looks absolutely beautiful, for one thing. Hair cascading in soft waves, skin like porcelain. Eyes wide and bright with no indication of the chances of humanity’s survival weighing down on her shoulders. Her lips-

You get the idea. She’s beautiful, she’s gorgeous, she’s everything she’s ever wanted to be.

She’s a princess.

That’s not just a comparison, though. She’s actually a princess, tiara and everything. Big poofy dress, baby blue. She’s the princess of WICKED, golden girl of the science world. Saving the planet one cure at a time. She’s royalty, she’s a-list, she’s more important than you can even dream of being.

She’s a princess, and she’s the one.

She’s the one, that’s what they tell her the next morning. They say that she’s the final candidate, the one they need to complete the cure. Ava goes on about saving the human race, fixing what we have done (she actually says we, looking at Teresa as if they did this together, which according to Teresa’s albeit still hazy memories, isn’t the truth, because she could never do something like that, right?). She continues with something about the means to an end - Teresa can’t be sure because she can’t focus enough to listen properly. She knows what this means.

Promises mean nothing in WICKED’s kingdom.

Teresa agrees to Ava’s plan because she knows she doesn’t have a choice, anyway. She’s told they need to do additional tests in order to finish the blueprint, to map her brain. It’s kind of like another trial, just one more challenge before she’s free.

Free.

That’s one word that never means what it’s supposed to.

It starts out simple enough. Some wires hooked up to her forehead, and a nap.

She dreams.

Her dress is pink and the halls are white and empty, except for Tom. He stands at the very end of the hall, completely still. He’s royalty, too. They walk toward each other and meet in the middle. They dance. They dance and the peasants applaud until their hands are bloodied.

She sees no one. Not Minho, not Sonya, not Aris. She doesn’t know if they’re alive still, but she hopes they are. She doesn’t see Ava. She sees white walls and hazard suits. She sees mint green wielding shiny silver and she sees bright red that eventually fades to a dull purple. She sees patchy scars and patches together that Ava more likely than not imagined free in a much different way than Teresa did.

After the eighth day she sleeps and wakes up with patchy hair and a patchy memory.

It’s the same dress, she thinks. It’s yellow. Tom is there, and they’re being watched - no, admired - by the peasants again. They examine the pair, big bug eyes studying their elegance. They look into their big pretty brains and see if they can find the cure for their misfortune.

They have no such luck, of course, and they beg for more time. Teresa frowns a bit (but not too much, because god, frown lines, and she’s only sixteen, she can’t be having frown lines at sixteen, especially not when she’s a princess) and thinks of how annoying the peasants (scientists, she calls them. She doesn’t know what it means, but it sounds right) are. Don’t they know she has other things she could be doing? Don’t they know that she and Tom work very hard to maintain the kingdom already? Don’t they know?

She thinks a lot.

She thinks about her mother, and her eyes. She thinks about how maybe if she’d been born earlier, she could have figured out a cure before her mother needed one.

She thinks about Ava, and about WICKED, and if she made the right choice. Because it’s all for the cure, right? It’s all for the greater good? All her suffering, all her work, it would pay off, right? Her own suffering would end that of millions, right?

Right?

Of course, though, she wouldn’t need to be doing the third trial if it weren’t for Tom. She comes to that conclusion on the seventeenth night, and she knows she’s right. They were so close to finding a cure, but then he ruined everything. He sabotaged the mission. Destroyed it. Drenched it in gasoline and lit a pack of matches, laughing as it burned.

And for what?

To escape the only safe place they’d ever known? To feel independent? To act on an impulse so petty and selfish, to be responsible for the death of millions?

Teresa’s pretty sure she hates him.

His face goes through her mind each and every day as she sits in her white room, his dopey ‘I can fix this with my unwavering tendency to not think before I act, ever’ face burned into her mind. His disgust at Teresa’s own actions, the ones that could very well have been the key to saving the human race. Disgust. As if she’d betrayed him by wanting to do the right thing.

Teresa’s certain she hates him.

The tests, they get worse. By the twenty-third day she has no hair left, just dark brown fuzz and bumpy lines. It’s a mess of scars and stitches, her brain poked and prodded and ripped apart.

She doesn’t think much anymore (but when she does it’s of Thomas, always Thomas). Mostly she just sits and waits for the next surgery, the next test.

When she’s not waiting, she dreams.

This time, her dress is pink. Her dress is pink and all the halls are white, and there’s a boy. He’s tall, but not too much taller than Teresa herself. He stands restlessly, like he’s waiting for an explosion to jump in front of. His fingers never stop moving. His hair is dark, just like Teresa’s, and he has moles - or freckles, Teresa’s not really sure which - all over him.

She calls him Tom.

It suits him and Teresa feels proud. She approaches him and he takes her hand. He asks her to dance and she giggles to herself. They do dance, eventually, and there are people with eyes like bugs smiling at them. Teresa knows she’s important from the way the bug-people look at her. They study her. They write things on their clipboards. That means she’s important, right?

Right?

It’s either twelve or seventeen days later that Teresa hears the green bug-men talking to each other as they’re taking her to another test. They’re close to a cure. They’ve made significant progress in the other subjects, including the newly captured ones (Captured - they use that exact word and it rings loud in Teresa’s mind for hours afterwards). They might not even have to harvest every subject, just the final candidate. The data they’ve collected is almost enough. One of them says something about it being a shame, how A1 was always his favourite, since she was brought in by the chancellor herself.

Teresa starts to feel sleepy and as her consciousness drifts, she wonders why A1 seems so familiar.

Weeks pass without another test. Teresa waits.

She’s not stupid. She knows she’s the final candidate. God, she basically royalty. Part of her knew it from the start. She was the one. How couldn’t she be? The harvest - that’s what they’d called it - couldn’t be much further. There’s not really much Teresa can do to stop it, stuck in the only room she’s known for what seems like years. So she waits.

She tries to figure out how long it’s been - since the last test, since the last time she’s seen another person, since anything. Since she’d been taken away by the woman with the hair like straw. Because she was taken, of that Teresa was sure. They’d taken her away from her kingdom, her home, and they’d treated her like a peasant. Cutting her up into little pieces, chopping up her brain and throwing away the chunks after they were done with them. They were inhumane and inhuman.

They were flies swarming the vile residue of the girl she’d once been.

And they were going to pay.

It happens first in another dream, and then again when she wakes.

Her dress is white and the halls are red.

Limp bodies litter the floor, mint green stained brown with blood. Teresa breathes heavily, tiara just barely askew on her head. She raises her hands to adjust the delicate silver and a thin stream of bright red trickles down the small blade gripped in her fingers, toward her elbow. It’s silent save for a quiet electrical hum and the ragged breaths Teresa heaves from deep in her chest. Her breathing returns to a normal pace (a perfect princess pace, steady and calm and unafraid) and there’s footsteps, and Teresa knows exactly who it is.

First friend, last victim.

It’s fitting, really. Teresa recalls an old saying and smiles to herself as she grips the scalpel tighter.

Killing Tom really would be the best.

He steps into the hall slowly, hands held in front of him, like somehow they’d be enough to stop Teresa.