Reversion (n): A return to a former condition, belief, or interest.

Y/N's POV

About a week passed, and the Trials continued for each of us. It was hard to keep track of time passing; our meals were our only indication of whether or not a day had gone by.

My sessions continued with different doctors, but it was the same thing each time - anesthesia followed by random memories from the Maze. I hadn't seen Dr. Salvatore in my visions, and he hadn't been at any of my sessions either. I was beginning to wonder if I'd imagined the whole thing - both the visions of him when I was unconscious and what he'd said to me when I was awake.

Today, I could tell that Helen had had a particularly bad session. She hadn't said a word since she'd gotten back; she'd immediately crawled into her bunk above me, but I knew she wasn't sleeping. Harriett and Sonya hadn't returned from their session yet.

"Helen, are you awake?" I asked softly.

At first, she didn't answer. But after a moment, she said, "Yeah." Her voice was hoarse as though she'd been screaming a lot. I shuddered as I thought of what she had gone through.

"Come down here," I said. I sat up in my bunk, my back against the wall. I thought she was going to ignore me, but I heard a creaking as she climbed down her ladder and sat next to me on my bunk. "Tell me about space again," I said as she settled in next to me, her legs hanging over the edge of the bed.

Space was one of Helen's favorite topics. None of us could ever explain it, but somehow Helen possessed a wealth of information about space. Like everyone else, she had no memories, but when it came to space, she was the expert. We'd spent many nights in the Maze under the false sky contemplating the universe, wishing we could escape into its infinite depths, far away from the Maze and the Grievers.

"What do you want to hear about space?"

I hummed, considering my answer. "Black holes. They always fascinated me."

She crossed her arms and closed her eyes, a slight smile playing on her face. "Black holes exist in space. They're areas of gravity so intense that they suck everything in, including light. And once you go in, there's no coming out.

"Gravity is so intense there that it stretches everything out. It's actually called spaghettificaiton, because you'd look like spaghetti after you got stretched, though you'd probably die long before you ever got to that point."

"Well, isn't that a happy thought."

Helen let out a dry chuckle. "Yeah, black holes are dangerous that way. And mysterious. The laws of physics as we know them don't really exist inside of a black hole. Reality breaks down. They're unpredictable, chaotic, and...beautiful."

I scoffed. "Beautiful? Really?"

She shrugged. "Well, maybe beautiful isn't the right word. But you get what I mean - I just have sort of a morbid curiosity with them."

"Hey, I get it. There's nothing like thinking about life beyond where you are right now. It helps everything not seem so..."

"Awful," Helen finished.

"Yeah, that," I concurred weakly.

"I used to feel like this was hopeless. But now, I'm choosing to think differently. To think that there is a life somewhere out there for us, if we can just make it a few more days. That's what we said in the Maze and the Scorch. I won't let go now."

It made me happy to hear Helen have a little more optimism. I'd been worried about her lately, but she was never one to throw the towel in.

We sat for a little longer, talking about various memories from the Maze. Before we knew it, a guard told us that it was time for a meal. "How's Newt been?" Helen asked. "I haven't talked to him much since last week."

I sighed. "He's been better, but I can tell that he's still upset about his first Trial. The latest ones haven't been as intense as that. He's been kind of moody, but can you blame him? We've all been on edge."

Helen nodded. "Amen to that," she said as we entered the cafeteria and grabbed sandwiches. I immediately searched for Newt, picking out his blond hair in the crowd. Helen followed behind me as we sat down across from him. Minho wasn't with him, but Frypan was sitting by him this time.

Newt looked tired today. He was paler than normal, his features washed out. He was staring at an uneaten sandwich in front of him, unmoving. He didn't seem to know that we had sat down across from him. Frypan, on the other hand, was chowing down on what looked like his second sandwich, the crumbs scattered in a ring around him. "Hey guys, what's up?" he asked as he finished his last bite.

"Not much. How about you?" I asked.

Newt didn't answer, so Frypan shrugged and said, "Just trying to cope with the pain of Phase 3 through eating. You know the drill."

In spite of myself, I laughed. Dark humor really did help. "Newt, are you gonna eat anything?" I asked.

He didn't respond, continuing to stare at his food. "I think he's just disappointed because this doesn't even come close to my cooking."

I gave Frypan a weak smile, trying to mask my worry about Newt. Finally he said, "I'm not hungry."

"You need to eat."

He shrugged. "I'm fine."

I sat my sandwich down. "Ok. Then if you're not eating, neither am I."

Newt snapped his eyes to me. "What?"

"You heard me. Go ahead," I said, gesturing to his sandwich.

Frypan glanced at Helen. "This is getting intense," he whispered to her.

Newt rolled his eyes. "You're one stubborn shank. Fine," he said, biting into his sandwich with irritation.

I smiled and watched as his face softened while he chewed. "Your turn," he said after he swallowed. We took turns doing this until we both finished our sandwiches, while Helen regaled us with space facts per Frypan's request.

"And that's why fire burns in circles in space," Helen said as we finished our last few bites.

Frypan was listening to her intently with his hands under his chin. "You're like a walking encyclopedia of weirdness," he said after a while.

Helen grinned. "Hey, I didn't say this would be useful information. But at least it's cool. You blondies don't have anything on my space knowledge," she said smugly.

The guards told us we had to leave, so Helen and I wrapped up sandwiches for Sonya and Harriett in napkins. As we were walking away, Newt pulled me aside.

"Hey, Y/N...I just wanted to check in on ya. I feel like we haven't gotten to talk much lately."

I nodded. "Have you been doing ok?"

He looked down. "I've been handling it. Minho helps when he can, but he's goin' through his own buggin' stuff too. We're all just tryin' to bloody survive."

I sighed. Guilt crept up in me again. I didn't know what exactly Minho was dealing with, but I felt, once again, like whatever I was going through didn't match what they were. Like it wasn't as bad. Why would I be getting special treatment?

"What about you?" he asked.

"I've just been getting a lot of anesthesia. Seeing a lot of memories from the Maze. I've got a few bruises from where they've given me an IV," I said, stretching my arm out and showing him the bluish-purple bruises that spotted the middle of my arm.

His gaze darkened as he looked at it, and he lightly brushed his thumb over the bruises. Warmth crawled up my arm at his touch; I looked down, hoping he wouldn't see the blush that was surely climbing up my face. "It isn't right that they do this," he said angrily.

"I'm ok. It could be a lot worse." I once again felt as though I were hiding something from him by not telling him about my mysterious interaction with Dr. Salvatore. But it had only happened one time, so it couldn't be significant. Or at least that's what I told myself.

"So what if it could be a lot worse? It's bloody bad enough as it is! This isn't-"

"Hey Y/N, are you coming?" called Helen from the entrance of the cafeteria.

"Yeah!" I yelled back. I hastily looked at Newt again. His jaw was clenched, his lips pulled into a thin line. "Newt," I said, taking his hands.

He looked at our hands and then back at me. "Yeah?"

"I know it's not ok. But I can handle this. So can you. Even though none of us should have to. We're strong enough to overcome this."

He watched me closely for a moment before saying, "I hope you're right." With that, he squeezed my hands and let go, and we left the cafeteria.

____________________________________________________________________________

We had no sooner gotten back to our room when I was called away for another session. The WICKED staff member left me in the same medical office. I cringed as the harsh sterile smell hit my nostrils. The room was spotless as usual; I glared at the small camera hanging in the corner of the ceiling.

I was surprised to see Dr. Salvatore come into the room a few minutes later. He wore his signature smirk and black scrubs. "Y/N. Lovely to see you again."

My eyes widened. Seeing him sparked something in me, and I realized that even though I'd been denying whatever had happened between us the last time I'd seen him, I couldn't deny that we had some sort of connection. If only I could figure out what it was...

"How do I know you?" I blurted out, meeting his electric blue eyes.

"Shh shh shh, Y/N," he said, holding a finger up to his lips. "What did I tell you about saying you knew me? You don't want us to think you really lost it," he remarked sarcastically, raising his eyebrows.

I steeled myself against his quips. "I don't appreciate the gaslighting," I snapped. "I know what I saw, and I know that it was real."

This time, I was certain that I saw guilt flash in the doctor's eyes. But he quickly hid it with a smile as he walked over to the cabinet above me where they always went to retrieve gloves and armbands used to help them find my veins so they could inject me with the serum. As he opened the doors and searched for what he needed, he murmured, "I told you to trust me."

I didn't get a chance to respond before he said, "I'm assuming you know the drill now?"

I glared at him and wordlessly and stuck my arm out, and he wrapped the blue band around my arm. I gritted my teeth as he deftly stuck the needle in my arm, which was still tender from all the other IVs I'd had over the past few weeks. I laid down, covering my stomach with my free arm as Dr. Salvatore pushed the blue liquid into my vein. The world spun and faded away from me.

____________________________________________________________________________

I was back in the Hub. This time, I was sitting in the unsteady building that we'd begun to call the Hearth. From the looks of it, we'd been here a few months already, as I could tell that the Carpenters had made some modifications to the building to make it a little more sturdy.

I was in the room that had been designated for the Medical Officers and our patients. Right now, it looked like I was sitting with Helen, tending to one of her many wounds resulting from her accident-prone behaviors.

"What is it this time?" I asked her with a small laugh.

She grimaced. "I think I have a splinter buried in my thumb," she complained, holding up her right thumb.

With a quick glance, I could see that there was a small piece of wood stuck just under the surface of her skin. Though it didn't seem big, it was going to be difficult to get out. "Why did you wait so long to take care of this? It hasn't always been like this."

Helen rolled her eyes. "Well, I was sick of coming in here all the time, and I thought it would work its way out. But obviously that hasn't been the case."

"All right, sit down," I said, gesturing to a chair.

"Where is everyone?" Helen asked as she noticed the empty room.

"All the other Medical Officers are with Beth."

Helen went quiet after that as I gathered all the necessary supplies, likely not wanting to discuss the circumstances around Beth's illness.

"Hold out your thumb," I told Helen as I sat down next to her. I held up a magnifying glass that had been included in our medical supplies to her thumb, now able to get a better view of the splinter. I was going to have to use a needle to break the skin, which was a fact that I was sure Helen wouldn't be too keen on. "Yep, I'm going to have to poke it with this," I told her as I held up my needle.

She groaned. "Do you have to?"

"Unless you want to keep living with the splinter and eventually get an infection, then yes."

She huffed while I put on my gloves. "This isn't going to be pleasant, so I suggest talking about something to distract yourself."

She tilted her head and considered my statement for a moment. As she was thinking, I held up my magnifying glass again and stuck her with the needle right above the splinter. "Ow!" she yelled, jerking her hand away from me.

I sighed. "You can't do that or I'll never get it out."

She narrowed her eyes at me and shook out her hand. "Well, you're not the one getting your thumb stabbed!"

"I guess that's true. Hopefully I won't have to do it again. But in case I do, did you think of anything to talk about?"

She slowly held her hand back out to me. There was a small amount of blood coming from the incision I made, but I could now see the very tip of the splinter. "Actually, I think I did."

"Go ahead then."

"Ok. It's just that...it's kind of weird, you know?" she said hesitantly.

I raised my eyebrows as I wiped down my tweezers with alcohol to sterilize them. "Weird how?"

"I don't know. I mean, do you remember anything about your past life? Not like anything specific, but just facts about the world?"

I shrugged, wondering what she was getting at. "Not really. I mean, I obviously knew some stuff about medicine before we got here, but everyone seems to know how to do their jobs pretty well."

"Yeah, that's not what I meant. I know this is kind of crazy, but I remember all this stuff about space," she said shyly.

"Space?" I asked. "You mean like the moon and stars and all that stuff?"

She laughed. "Yep. All that. I remember things about it, and I don't know why. So far it hasn't been anything useful, like technology that's been developed to go to space or whether humans live on other planets. It's just a bunch of useless information."

"Like what?" I asked. I was vaguely curious, and beyond basic knowledge that everyone knew, I didn't know anything about space.

I began pulling on the splinter with the tweezers, easing it out a little at a time. Helen grimaced at first, but then she began telling me about black holes that existed in space. I grew more interested as she talked about them, especially when she told me about spaghettification, which would occur if someone were to fall into a black hole.

"Wait. So you're saying if someone was watching you fall into a black hole, they'd watch you stretch out like spaghetti? So thin that you'd have the width of a hair? That's so creepy."

She shook her head. "Actually, it doesn't work quite like that. If you were watching someone approach a black hole, you would only see them get closer and closer to it as they approached what is known as the event horizon.

"Remember how I said that the gravitational pull of black holes is so intense that not even light can escape? That's why you could never actually see someone fall in. To you, it would look like they would freeze right on the edge of the event horizon. Then, as the light they gave off slowly began to get sucked into the black hole, they would fade away until they ceased to exist altogether. Or, at least that's what it would look like to you.

"In reality, the person would fall into the black hole and then be spaghettified until they reached the singularity of the black hole. At its singularity, gravity becomes infinite - some scientists think that space-time as we know it just...collapses because it's so strong. But a singularity can't be observed by an outsider, so we'll never really know, unless they've come up with the technology to escape a singularity or safely observe it from the inside of a black hole. And I wouldn't know about that."

As she finished her explanation, I finally was able to extract the splinter from her thumb. She didn't even notice, still obviously deep in thought about black holes. "Well Helen, that certainly is more information about a specific subject than I have. Who knows. Maybe we're actually in space and that's why they let you keep your knowledge," I said as I cleaned off the wound the splinter left and put a bandaid on it.

She laughed. "Well, that would certainly explain the Grievers-"

A piercing scream in the room next to us cut her off. It was Beth. "Wait here," I told Helen as I stood up and ran to the adjacent room. "What's going on?" I asked breathlessly, as I saw two other Medical Officers named Caroline and Amelia fighting to hold a flailing Beth down.

"She just woke up," Caroline said through gritted teeth as one of Beth's arms smacked her in the face. "We can't get her to calm down!"

I peered down at Beth's face, holding down her shoulders as she thrashed. Her normally tan skin was pale and sallow, and I could tell that she had lost weight over the past few days. She was already thin to begin with, but her eyes were sunken in, her bones protruding sharply on her face. Her dark hair was matted and stuck to her forehead by sweat. "Beth, calm down!" I yelled, knowing that it wasn't going to do any good.

She continued to flail, and with a gasp, her eyes snapped open. They were feverishly bright, as though she were staring at something that the rest of us couldn't see. Her breathing was labored, her chest heaving up and down. "C-Cranks," she finally choked out. "They're everywhere...no! NO!" she screamed as her arm shot out and her hand formed a claw-like shape as she swung it wildly. "Get away from me!" she screamed.

"Beth, it's ok!" I said as Amelia and Caroline grabbed her arms and held them down. "There's no one there! You're safe."

Beth began coughing like she was choking on something.

"Do you think it's that Grief Serum stuff we gave her?" Amelia asked worriedly.

"I don't know!" I yelled over Beth's shrieks. "She's made it longer than the other sticks who got stung and didn't get any."

Mercifully, I felt a tug as I was pulled away from the scene. It broke apart before my eyes, and reassembled at both a different time and place.

I was in the same cleaning closet that I'd seen in one of my