Accents

My take on how Newt kept his British accent that we all know and love.

I don't live in America or England, so pardon if I make any mistakes.

The boy was tossed roughly into the backseat of a fancy looking car to join Lizzy, his sister, who was hugging her teddy bear close, terrified. He would have sniffled all the way to the huge Berg if he were alone, but he had to stay strong for his little sister.

"I'm scared." She whispered to him, tears brimming around the corners of her eyes. She had said that before to him countless times, when they first settled in this country and everyone around them spoke in strange accents, albeit kindly. But never like this. Not like this.

Their first encounter had been with the kind Mrs. Peterson next door, bringing muffins to welcome them. Their father had dozed off due to jet lag, and their mother in another section of the house, busy arranging furniture. He had opened the door, Lizzy peeking out from behind her big brother.

"Aww, hello! I'm your neighbor, I'm actually just dropping by to say hello and to give you these muffins as a welcome to America present. Anyway, feel free to drop by my home any time! I have two kids, a bit older than you, but it'll always be nice to have playmates, eh?"

The boy blinked up at her. Seven years old, turning eight in a month, he blurted out, "Why do you talk funny?"

The woman's smile faltered for a moment. "Ah. I should have expected that. To me, you talk weird too, so I suppose we're even?"

"I think you talk funny too!" Lizzy piped up. "Two to one!"

They would later realize that in this new home (not home) it was countless people to the four in their family.

"It's a different place, they're bound to speak differently." His father said one afternoon, sipping at a cup of tea.

"But they're speaking English!" He protested. "If they're speaking Japanese then it's okay, but they are speaking odd English!"

He had a Japanese friend back home (real home) who sounded Japanese when he spoke Japanese, but sounded perfectly English when speaking English.

"Well, you'd have to get used to their bloody accents then."

"John! Language!"

But he didn't mind his father saying bloody. It was a piece of home, a familiar thing to cling on to.

He started saying 'bloody' three months later.

"Well, then we'd bloody well be brave." The boy reassured his sister. Lizzy had started to lose the crisp accent they had, due to her impressionability as a young child, but he had managed to keep his, through Skype calls with his friends, which had gradually stopped, and conversations with his parents. He even put conscious effort into it, watching BBC instead of whatever American channel was on.

Lizzy giggled. "You sound like daddy. Mommy says you're not supposed to say that word."

The boy remembered with a shudder his mother's blood splattering on the walls, her form crumpling to the ground as the man stood over her, eyes hunting for the child of the woman he had just killed.

"Well, mommy's not here now." He tried to sound nonchalant. "I'll say that bloody word as many times as I want."

"Then I want to say it too!" Lizzy grew excited at the idea of joining the ranks of her father and brother. "Bloody, bloody, BLOODY!"

"Shut those fucking kids up!"

They fell silent, all previous bravado gone. The foreign accent of the man pulled them back to reality. They weren't safe in their home. They hadn't been home for a long, long time, and wouldn't be any time soon.

"I'm scared." Lizzy repeated, huddling close to her big brother, voice soft.

"Me too." He replied, and Lizzy started to thump him rhythmically on the back, clumsily attempting to comfort her last surviving relative.

They said nothing more for that entire journey.

Line break

He regretted not talking to his sister more during the time they had.

They had yanked them apart as soon as the Berg touched land, Lizzy screaming and him struggling. They wrestled the boy, kicking and screaming, into a room, and threatened him with a needle to calm down. When that didn't work, they made him sleep with the needle.

They gave him a new name, Isaac Newton. The boy didn't like it, asking what was wrong with his old name, but they said that Lizzy was changing her name too, it was what everyone had to do here. This is a safe place, they said. A place to start over.

They put him to sleep again when he asked why starting over entailed murdering his parents.

"Call me Newt." He said on the third day at the base. His own way of rebelling. They insisted on calling him Isaac, but he stubbornly refused to answer to that name.

They caved, but the fourth day, a new team came in, and the process started all over.

By the third week, they either ran out of teams, or decided to just leave him be, moving on to the next step of 'starting over'.

They wanted him to meet the other kids.

They had run countless tests on him during the time they were trying to coax him into his new name, and by now Newt was bored from being cooped up in the room for so long.

"I want to see Lizzy first."

He was met with a blank look. "Who's Lizzy?"

"My sister!" He fought the urge to tears his hair out. "Blonde hair, likes braids, six years old. Some people said we look alike."

"Oh, you mean Diana?"

Newt looked blankly at her. Right. Lizzy had a new name here. Named after the goddess of the moon.

"You can't see her. Boys and girls are to be separated."

Newt didn't question it until he saw Thomas and Teresa huddled together at a table over lunch, Teresa's long hair glaringly obvious in the room full of cropped cut boys.

When he confronted the scientist during his next session, the scientist said,

"She's being integrated. If you see her now, she might revert."

Newt swore then and there that he would not allow himself to be integrated. He didn't want to blend in. He didn't want to be manipulated and molded to fit their criteria. He didn't want to lose part of himself. He didn't want to lose what he had left of home.

There wasn't BBC here. He was the only British who kept his accent. Gally had been British once, but they moved when he was three, and now he was as American as anybody else. The only thing he kept was the habit of drinking tea.

WICKED had no tea.

Newt practiced. He whispered words to himself at night. He dredged up fading memories of his parents and tried to recall their voices. Words.

Months, then years, passed. Minho grew tired of teasing him. Alby found out about his practice sessions at night and promised to keep quiet about it. Gally stopped going tea-hunting with him.

Thomas and Teresa didn't show up to group activities anymore. Then Alby, Minho, Ben, Nick and a handful of others disappeared too. The lunch hall was strangely empty and quiet, with so many of them gone.

"There're rumors about wiping our memories." Gally whispered in Newt's ear under the pretense of leaning over to steal a hot dog. They'd learned long ago that the cameras were always watching.

"Stop stealing my food, you big oaf!"

Line break

Gally was gone the next month.

Newt sat alone in the lunch hall, contemplating the possibilities. Memory wiping? He would lose everything he was, depending on what they wiped. He would forget his friends. Forget everything he had studied for in the mandatory classes WICKED had made them attend. Forget his family. Forget Lizzy.

Lizzy.

He hadn't thought about her in a long time.

What if they were doing the same thing to Lizzy? What was she like even now?

He imagined a long haired girl with sandy blonde hair, Lizzy's chubby face looking out of place in that image. He tried to imagine Lizzy with the baby fat gone, past puberty, but try as he might, womanly curves did not go on his mental image of his baby sister.

They wouldn't even recognize each other now, let alone with wiped memories.

"Pass me your tray, dude." Siggy's voice snapped him out of his thinking.

"Oh. Thanks."

"Anytime, bro."

The sound of his own voice opened a door.

He still had his accent.

British accents were extinct around here. Lizzy's subconscious would remember, even if they integrated her, even if they wiped her memories.

That would have to be enough.

Line break

"Stop the muttering, shank! I can't concentrate!" Minho yelled. "I'm Mapping a Maze here!"

"Sorry. I didn't even know I was doing it. Habit, I guess." Newt grinned sheepishly.

Minho shot him a strange look as they skidded past a turn. "Bit of a weird habit you have there. Muttering words that don't make klunk sense."

Line break

"He's been talking in his sleep again. And the fever hasn't broken."

"That piece of klunk…I swear I'll knock him into tomorrow when he wakes up."

"If he wakes up."

Minho chose to ignore Jeff's last comment. "What did he say?"

Jeff shrugged. "He's been saying bloody a lot."

Line break

Newt kept looking for a chance to talk to Sonya. Minho teased him about it, but Newt frustratedly explained that it wasn't that way.

Then when he finally talked to her, even just a short sentence of, "We need more supplies," he came away disappointed.

"What am I even looking for?" He muttered to himself one night.

Line break

Harriet had heard that accent somewhere before. Granted, this one was thicker and more masculine, but it was similar.

She only remembered with a start at Paradise, that little blonde girl who had thumped everyone's backs to comfort them during the first night of Griever attacks, only to be carried away the second.

She wondered if they knew each other before. The blond boy who was the Glue and the blonde girl who was the comforter.

Line break

It was Diana that sought Thomas out, the second day at Paradise.

"I didn't have a chance to speak to you before, and you were busy saving people, but do you happen to know whether Isaac made it?"

Thomas racked his brain for an 'Isaac', coming up with a blank, and also wondering why this girl before him could have a way of speaking that sent pangs through his heart.

"Um, I'm sorry, but I don't know him…you could ask the others though, maybe he was an older Glader?"

"No! I swear, I remember him from before I got my memories back. He has a British accent, and there's no bloody way I won't remember that."

"…are you sure his name is Isaac?" Thomas had a horrible, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"I…think so? That was what they told me, anyway. They named him Isaac Newton. Changed his name the way they changed mine from Elizabeth to Diana."

"He calls himself Newt." Minho quietly interjected. "And…he's a Crank."

Thomas' heart wrenched and twisted at the use of present tense.

"No." Diana-Elizabeth whispered, taking a step back. "I remember them calling names, but I didn't pay attention, I didn't even know who he was, I only remembered his accent, but..."

"You remember him from before?" Thomas asked, to distract himself from the guilt clawing at him.

"He's my brother! We share the same genetic base, he should have been immune too!" Diana-Elizabeth frantically scrubbed at her tears. "We can get him back, right? I should help him, I might be able to help him, he's my brother after all-"

"I killed him. I'm sorry."

Dead silence as Minho and Diana turned to look at him. Thomas couldn't meet Diana's eyes-eyes that Newt shared.

"He left me a note. Told me to kill him. He was mad at me in the Crank Palace, when I haven't read the note yet. We ran into each other, after…he put a gun in my hand. Made me point it at him."

"But you pulled the trigger." Minho's voice was cold and icy. Thomas never lifted his eyes from his feet.

"I…I pulled the trigger."

A fist collided with his jaw, hard, and instinctively, he lashed out, grabbing and twisting the offending arm, to hear a girl's cry and familiar, oh so familiar blue eyes staring at him.

If you've ever been my friend,

"You killed my brother. I can't…I don't…"

Kill me.

"You're a piece of klunk. Why didn't you tell me?!" Minho growled from somewhere out of his line of sight.

Thomas let go of Diana. She stumbled backwards, glaring at Thomas. Then her gaze softened.

"Joe always had a way of getting what he wanted."

"What?" Minho asked, before realizing he had just heard Newt's 'before' name.

"He'd say please, and in that tone, with those eyes, we always had extra candy for Halloween." Diana continued, sobs hitching in her throat. "Even his own death was handed to him, I suppose."

"I'm sorry." Thomas couldn't think of anything else to say.

"He loved saying bloody. Learnt it from our father." She was trembling all over, suppressing sobs.

Minho looked at Thomas, an expression of unfathomable sadness on his face.

"You know what?" The girl asked Thomas, tears flowing down her cheeks. "He used to call me Lizzy."

Wails of grief echoed all over the land of Paradise.

If you don't understand, there are two endings. Newt survives in neither, Lizzy survives in one. Also, I wanted more flashbacks, but I don't have a copy of the Death Cure, so I made do with fragments of my memories. Hence, I apologize for any inaccuracies.

Thank you for reading!

Ps: Formatting this story on iPad fanfiction is really a pain.