Antidote: A Maze Runner Fanfiction

p r o l o g u e

The end of her life started when she was six years old.

Sirens. Shouting. Screams of anger and anguish. She wades through a sea of legs blindly, gripping a woman's hand. The woman - her mother, that must be her mother - tugs her frantically through the frenzied crowd. She's clueless as to what's up ahead, and where they're going.

In her mother's other hand, a boy, almost as tiny as her, just as bewildered as her - her brother, that must be her brother - is being pulled through the bustling crowd alongside her. She glances over at him, searching for any kind of reassurance from an older boy. His fear simply matches her own.

Suddenly she breaks out of the wall of legs and stumbles to a halt. The yelling is incessant but behind her, as she stands in an empty space between the crowd and what she's faced with now - a huge, sky-scraping fence. Behind it, a massive compound, with people, in uniforms and armour and helmets with weapons and shields and hands, swarming the area outside.

She sees the fence slowly begin to part. It's a door, and it's opening right in front of her. A man in something of a hazmat suit is coming through. Coming through towards her.

Her mother grabs her arm and that of her brother. She spins them round to look at her and only then does she see the pain in her eyes. Something is happening.

"Whatever's going to happen," she says. "I'm so sorry. And I love you both very much." Her mother's voice cracked on 'very', and she didn't like it.

The guard is then beside them, and he bends down and rests a huge gloved hand on her shoulder. She looks at her brother and still he's the same, mirroring the fear in her own eyes. The guard scoops them up, one in each hand, and as he stands up with them her mother is so far away.

She stands at the front of the crowd, which is still crying and yelling as one. One shaking hand covers her mother's mouth as she manages to wave with the other. She waves back, seeing her brother do the same.

As the guard walks away, back into his side of the fence, away from the protesters and away from her mother, she starts to cry.

Soon, her mother's face melts into the rest of the crowd as she gets further away. Her brother, here with her in the arms of this man, is all she's got left. She looks at him, still radiating fear.

He doesn't speak but his tiny determined face stares back at her with we have to stick together now.

She can't see her mother but she swears she can hear her, still. She's calling their names.

She's shouting "Flo!" and she's shouting "Alex!" and neither of them can reply; only look at each other with we have to stick together now and hope that they do.

And they don't.