The little boy looked around the poster covered walls of the hallway with curious grey eyes. His parents were poor, unable to take care of all of their children. As he was the youngest and unable to work, he was sent to the Little Wonder's Orphanage. There were more girls than boys, he'd noticed, a lot of the boys disappearing after they went to Papa Suchong's clinic. But a lot of the girls that went there came back okay. He didn't really understand it, and he was a little scared of going to the clinic himself. Mama Tenenbaum told them it was only for some flu shots, but if that was true then why did the boys not come back?
"Will you play with me?" the boy heard, causing him to give a startled glance to the red-haired girl that now stood beside him. She wore a blue dress and no shoes, and her eyes were a pretty ocean color.
"Sure!" he replied with a smile.
"Yay! I'm Cleo! What's your name?" the ginger girl returned his smile excitedly.
"Antony, but my mama just called me Tony."
"We're friends now." Cleo said with a firm and very adult tone, crossing her arms.
"Oh. Okay." Tony simply smiled at her. He was fine with having a friend.
Cleo grabbed his hand excitedly and pulled him off to the girls' hallway. He wasn't supposed to go there, but he figured it was okay if it was to play. Tony didn't understand why the boys weren't supposed to go to the girls' rooms anyways. Cleo pulled him into a bedroom that he assumed was her's. It was violently pink, making her brilliant red hair stand out like a sore thumb. Scattered all about the floor were different toys, teddy bears and a doll of the Big Daddies from the Learning Room. Without thinking about it, Tony immediately picked up the doll, remembering that Daddy was good and Mommy was bad.
"What do you wanna play?" he asked, sitting down on the floor and looking at the doll.
"Let's go shopping!" Cleo declared. "I'm the mama and you're the baby!"
"Why do I gotta be the baby?"
"Cuz I'm the mama."
"Oh. Okay." Tony set the doll down and stood up, following the red-haired girl as she began pretending to push around a cart and walked around her room.
"Do you remember what we need, baby Tony?" Cleo asked in a very good mama tone. Tony replied by making baby gurgles, which made Cleo break character for a moment. "You can talk, silly!"
"Oh. Okay." Tony paused, trying to think of things that you would buy at a store. "Uhh...cake!"
"Do you want me to make a cake when we get done shopping?"
"Yes! I like cake." Tony smiled at her happily, and Cleo smiled back. Their game continued, oblivious to the adult things happening all around them.
"The Little Brother program is a failure, Tenenbaum, just admit it!" Suchong snapped at the female scientist. "These brats are too violent, like feral dogs."
"They produce more ADAM than the girls do, we can't just end the entire program," Tenenbaum retorted. "The boys we have changed so far have been older, and I believe that is why they are so violent. We have a boy here who is as young as the girls. He may be the solution."
"It will be nothing but another waste of time," Suchong spat. "We have lost three of the Little Sisters and two of my nurses to these menaces. What if they get loose before we are able to put them down?"
"He will be docile, I swear to you," Tenenbaum replied, trying to remain calm even though she dearly wanted to smack the Korean doctor right across his face. "If not, we will kill the program and send the remaining boys to Persephone."
Suchong sent some of Fontaine's muscle bound goons to retrieve the little blond boy that Tenenbaum swore was the savior of the Little Brothers program. In his opinion, Tenenbaum was too attached to the little monsters, letting her feminine emotions cloud her scientific judgement. They found the boy in one of the girls' room, much to his annoyance, playing some silly little game with one of the girls that hadn't gone through the implantation procedure just yet. The brats started screaming and crying as the goons grabbed the boy and began to carry him to the surgery room. Hopefully after he was done proving Tenenbaum wrong, he would have the day free to finish working on the Big Daddies. That damned protection bond was still flawed.
Antony struggled against the grown men, but it was utterly useless to even try. They were three times his size, and saw the little boy as nothing more than an inconvenience.
"I d-don't wanna, Papa Suchong!" he cried as the men made him sit on a surgery bed. Suchong sighed with annoyance, ignoring the child's crying as he strapped the mask onto him to introduce the anesthetic to his system. The opiates were so strong, Antony was out in moments.
Suchong strapped the boy's arms and legs to the surgery bed as a precaution, and put his surgical mask on. It was a very quick and simple procedure, but they could only do so many a day as they mental conditioning had to be advanced to a certain point before the children would be calm enough that their bodies wouldn't reject the implantation. The nurse that had entered the surgery room to assist him unbuttoned the boy's shirt and cleaned the incision area with a wet cloth. Suchong took a scalpel and made a simple, clean incision across the boy's stomach, blood immediately welling up. He pulled the skin apart and took the ADAM producing slug from the nurse, carefully placing it against the lining of the young boy's stomach. After that, the ADAM did the rest. Immediately the slug embedded itself against his stomach, and the skin and tissue mended seamlessly, encasing it inside Antony's body. The nurse took a new wet cloth and cleaned the blood off the boy, then buttoned his shirt back up.
"Take him to the isolation chamber," Suchong ordered the woman in a bored tone. He knew this boy would be no different from the others, and wanted him to cause as little damage as possible when he snapped. The nurse nodded and unstrapped the unconscious boy from the surgery table, picking him up and carrying him out of the room. The anesthetic was very strong, and kept even the quick-to-heal Little Ones unconscious for a good thirty minutes.
Suchong leaned down to check the tank of gas that had knocked the boy out, figuring he would need to refill it soon. Queerly, it read as empty. He tilted his head and pulled down his glasses to make sure he was reading it correctly. If it was already empty, then the boy couldn't have gotten the full dosage…
"Nurse?" The doctor stood up quickly, picking up his emergency Placation Plasmid and walking quickly towards the door. He heard a scream, and rushed to the door to find the emergency security system had locked it. Suchong looked through the window of the door to see the little boy scrambling into one of those blasted vents, the nurse that had been carrying him bleeding heavily and missing a chunk from her neck. Her eyes were glazed over in death, terror on her face.
"NURSE!"