"Stay still now, gorgeous."

Thick fingers pressed to the thumping pulse on her wrist, pressed with slowly increasing pressure until she almost gasped past the rubber guard lodged in her mouth. She didn't of course- she kept her composure, just as he wanted her to. He grinned, a roughly hewn split across the jagged planes of his face. A show of false bright crowns, yellow down to their rotten cores- pride without reason. They were covered then, with chapped reptilian lips and the peek of his swollen, purple tongue, slippery with foul, poison drool.

Often, she likened her grandfather to a Komodo Dragon. Always stalking in the shadows, bulbous stomach rattling in time with his slow, deliberate steps until his prey stepped into range. It was then that he would chomp down with his fetid maw, vicious and unrelenting until he had his fill. Then it was back to the shadows, to watch his victim squirm and screech from a safe distance.

"Ready?"

This, she understands, is still part of the hunt. Pulling the restraints tight against her wrists, her ankles, his favourite- her neck. There are new ones at the crease of her thighs, uncomfortable and unnecessary. Made for him, for his quickening breath and clammy, scaled palms.

"We'll set it off in ten minutes."

He only calls it once he's past the safety of the double sided mirror, through the microphone that makes his domineering voice tinny and unsettling, like a circus announcement gone wrong. This is the sinking of the Komodo Dragons teeth into its prey, the mind game, the terror of knowledge. Soon, electricity will surge through her body. It will burn; it will burn agonisingly through each and every nerve, her teeth will try to chatter through the rubber guard, the world will turn white and after all that the voltage will go higher, higher, higher-

Until she wakes up in the infirmary; confused, hurt, terrified. Nobody will be there at first, only the thrumming pain in her flesh and the question why. If she has a Persona, why doesn't it help? Why does it sit, and dawdle, and trim its nails or whatever it may be a Persona does, locked away in the mind, instead of helping her? Why does it sit through the pain of the electricity, the torture of waiting for it, the laboratory simulated danger and the real one creeping into her bedroom every night? If it is a manifestation of her self, where is its sense of self-preservation?

Certainly, it must hate her. And that indeed means that she in turn, hates herself.

"Here it comes, Mitsuru."

When she awakes, there will be nothing but the steady beat of the heart monitor by her side, and the annoyance of a high pitched sound. Helium escaping a miniscule hole, whistling her to awareness, tied to the cold steel borders of her laboratory bed.

'Happy 6th Birthday!'

Nobody will stand by her bedside, nobody will call, and nobody will write. After another month of the summer holidays pass by she will be wheeled back into the laboratory and her grandfathers coiled presence. He will pace with claws unsheathed, insanity unreined, power unbound and venom for all to see.

"Stay still now, gorgeous."