CHAPTER 4: By the heart that was torn by the darkness

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"Don't you tink you ver a bit harsh?" Lutianna asked the tall cyborg man as he walked away from the door he had just slammed shut. She had never been the best of friends with Karsh but it was rather unnerving to see him practically cower before the Porre assassin. She couldn't help but feel somewhat sorry for the Dragoon deva.

"No." Gyadarun answered curtly as he walked up to the main examination table, fixing Lutianna with a piercing stare. "Will-you-perform-the- modifications-now?"

The word 'modifications' lit up a giddy fire in the eccentric scientist's eyes and she let out a loud, haughty cackle. "Ohhohoho! But of course! Lay down on de examination table." she ordered as she turned around and began pulling parts out of the box she'd brought with her and putting them together. Gyadarun stared at the examination table and raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"Is-the-table-sterilized?" he asked, watching a small bug-like thing that, by the look of it, was an escapee from one of the other cages, crawl across the examination table he had been told to lay down on.

"Of course. Vhy?" the violet haired woman asked, not turning around as she set a thin metal IV holding hook up next to her and went to work on filling an IV bag with some clear liquid that Gyadarun recognized as a sedative. He was wary to take her word for it but, having turned his back on Porre, he had no choice if he wanted the modifications he desired.

Very-well. he thought as he easily sat himself on the examination table and, casting one last look at Lutianna, who was hanging the IV bag on the hook, he lay himself down and closed his eyes.

"This vill sting a bit." was the last thing he heard her say before he felt a pinch in his organic arm of the needle. He waited calmly for the drug to take effect and tried to relax himself. Tension would only slow the effects of the sedative and he wanted the modifications done as soon as possible.

The feeling of a foreign liquid entering his bloodstream was familiar to him. He'd spent most of the past 4 years before his encounter with Serge in a laboratory being sedated and experimented on. Blood was constantly being drawn from his repeatedly punctured veins. One more needle wouldn't make that much of a difference. Besides, Lutianna was more sympathetic and 'humane' then most of the Porre scientists that he'd known.

His eyes felt heavy...which meant the sedative was taking effect. The ceiling above him grew steadily blurry and suddenly changed colors inexplicably, turning from the gray roughened granite to smooth white...just like the laboratories in Porre; clean, perfect and full of painful memories. Gyadarun blinked, his dulled mind suddenly taking in the fact that he was now seeing the Porre lab instead of Lutianna's beat up mad scientists haven.

A-side-effect-of-the-sedative. he thought, the mechanical dauntlessness that was installed in his mind through years of conditioning and experiments clashed against the cold human fear that was welling up in the pit of his stomach. Fear wasn't something he was accustomed to feeling as of late, but the Porre labs was a time he preferred not to remember.

Hundreds of scientists, all clad in pristine white; their faces silhouetted by the blinding lights from above that were aimed directly at him, observing him like the laboratory specimen he was. White walls and dark figures clad in white with needles other complex-looking instruments that looked as if their use would be painful; which it always was.

White rooms meant pain.

Scientists promised to deliver that pain.

Gyadarun squeezed his eyes shut, hating the loss of mental control that he used to keep memories of the white labs in Porre out of his waking mind as it slowly slipped into merciful unconsciousness, blocking out the sound of the lab door opening and Lutianna's cry of alarm.

TBC!