Marooned | Maze Runner | Minho

18. 𝒫𝑒𝓇𝓂𝑒𝒶𝓃𝓉 𝒮𝒸𝒶𝓇𝓈

Happy was one thing Viya was not.

How could anyone be happy in her shoes?

She was alive, yes. But at times it didn't really feel worth it.

The maze was still the same, it always is. Even if the hallways changed, they all still looked the same.

Viya had her hair up in a tight ponytail. She had used some fabric as a makeshift hair tie, it wasn't the best, but it still worked.

"One wall, two wall, three wall, four! How many walls till I find the door!" Viya chanted quietly as she ran.

One thing Viya had noticed throughout her time in the maze was how the vines didn't seem to grow past a certain length. The ones she had cut down had grown back, but they stopped at the same point all the others did. Maybe it was a biological thing, but nothing about the maze ever felt natural. It was something she could never quite explain, it was like her gut was telling her something. That the maze was all fake. She knew it had to have been constructed somehow, but she still felt as if everything had been tampered with, even the trees and fish that swam in the river.

She was probably just crazy.

Viya zoned out as she ran, not paying much attention to her surroundings. She was still memorizing the pathways, but she wasn't as alert as she usually was.

Then she saw him.

Viya came to a sudden stop, she blinked briefly but then he was gone.

Jax had been standing right there. Alive.

Viya fell out of her trance and she rushed forwards to try and see where the boy had gone. She was met with a fork in the path and without thinking she turned left.

She ran through the stony path, but she made it to a dead end without seeing any signs of the boy.

Viya retraced her steps back to the other path, this time she turned right.

Yet this path also led straight to a dead end.

"How..." She muttered. "He was right there!"

After that incident, Viya tried to return to her run, but she couldn't seem to get back into it, and she found herself forgetting her way. She was eventually forced to make the decision to turn around and call it a day.

"Do you think I'm insane?" Viya asked Watcher as she entered. "I could've sworn he was there. I saw him! He was standing right at the end of the hallway." Viya threw her running vest into the corner and plopped down into the chair that sat next to Watcher.

"It's fine," She said as she rested her head in her palm, "It's fine, I'm fine!"

"I never cared for Jax anyways, I did wish for him to be dead, so I got what I wanted!" Viya told herself, she was desperately trying to convince herself that Jax's death did not bother her at all.

"He was bad, and bad people deserve to be banished," Viya argued, "Look at you and me!"
Viya grabbed her water bottle off of the floor and slumped back into her chair as she started to drink.

"I'm fine..."

She looked up at the ceiling.

"Yeah, I'm fine, why wouldn't I be?"

—----

Nash's body laid on the bed inside of the stick hut. He had been given the hut by the builders after the incident. He was embarrassed that he needed a private hut, but without the lock on the door he couldn't sleep.

At first he didn't tell anyone about it, he assumed it would pass, but it never did. He passed out from exhaustion in the med-shack one day, and Jeff had diagnosed him with insomnia and paranoia.

Apparently it happened to griever sting survivors. Jeff had explained it as his body constantly being in 'defense' mode, but Nash wasn't sure how much of that was true.

Nash sat up in his bed, he took a quick glance around the room before he got up. He shuffled on his clothes, tied his shoes, and then stood in front of the mirror.

He couldn't get used to his face, no matter how many times he saw it.

His whole right eye had to have been removed. He missed it, but even if he still had it, he wouldn't be able to see out of it.

Though, the worst part had to have been the scarring around his eye. He had scars from the cut around his entire eye, but he also had scars from the surgery.

Clint and Jeff had to remove his eye, unfortunately it left some obvious scars behind. The good thing was that they had closed his eye lid so he didn't have to see where the eye wasn't. If he tried hard enough he could lift his eyelid, but he never did. He was too scared of what laid beneath it.

Jeff kept telling him that he was 'lucky', it was a miracle he had lived. He survived getting stabbed in the eye with a dirty knife, and also survived a surgery with medieval medical tools.

He didn't feel lucky though.

He felt ugly.

He hated how everyone looked at him like he was some hurt puppy, he hated how greenies would stare at him and whisper, and he hated how nobody dared to talk about what had happened around him.

In the early days he would wear an eyepatch over his eye, but then he realized he was just hiding it from himself.

Sometimes, at night, he'd still have dreams of Viya's angry, twisted face. She'd loom over him, and the dream would only end once he was dead.

Nash took a final deep breath to prepare himself for the day. He had started to work again three months ago, but he didn't enjoy it as much as he used to. It wasn't that he feared the room where he had been attacked, he feared the people. He despised how they'd come in and act like he was all 'brave' for coming back to work, sometimes he just wanted to beat the shit out of them.

Both Jeff and Clint had learnt on the first day that he did not like to be babied, it got to the point where they looked like they wanted to beat the shit out of the offender more.

Nash liked Clint and Jeff, they protected him, but not in the way of babying him, but to make sure that people would watch their tongues.

Nash took one more look at himself before he finally set off for the day.

She couldn't get him anymore.

He was safe.

He would be okay.