Blood

He finally decided the men had stopped testing him, when they strapped him to a table and bled him out.

He had thought that, once they were done demonstrating his arms could still grow back even with the growth plates obliterated, they had enough evidence to prove his regeneration. Then they took out his eyes--both of them, not just one--a brief cruelty, but a necessary one in their minds. Comparatively, the extensive testing they'd done to show that his body could reduce compound fractures without outside interference was a minor irritation.

It had been six months since that, the longest they had left him alone. He had even stopped flinching whenever one of the men in white coats stepped into the barracks, since they inevitably never came for him.

When at last they did, it was morning. His time. He had already been out of bed for an hour, watching the dawn--and then reading, waiting for the others to wake up. One of the men stepped in. He didn't look up, paging through a storybook on his Connection Gear.

"Unit 667." Then he looked up, feigning innocence as he shut off the Gear. The man didn't even bother to look at it, before grabbing him by the wrist and hustling him off to the labs. There, he was summarily stripped of his uniform and led to a table. He made only a token protest as they strapped him down; he knew what was coming, and fighting never made it easier.

The pain as they cut him open from groin to throat wasn't unexpected, either. They never used painkillers or sedatives, of course; it would impair the vital stress reactions his body underwent to repair damage at an accelerated rate. (Or so they said.) What happened next--was.

"Clamp that." A physician gestured over his stomach, where runnels of blood were already leaking from torn skin and damaged muscle. He wasn't paying attention; as always, he bit his tongue, let the tears flow, tried to make the pain simply pass through him. Screaming, like struggling, made it no easier.

He was shocked back to reality by the feel of one of his tormentors reaching around inside his cut-open belly, as if looking for something. Then another burning line of pain, and awareness seemed to bleed out of him. Then he tried to scream, but he had no voice. --And his consciousness jumped, reaching for his brothers and finding nothing but dead-headed men between him and them.

It went for the nearest target. There was a moment of double-vision, as he/his host looked down at the little white-haired boy on the table--how could such a small body hold that much blood?--pale from exsanguination, writhing with the terrible pain besetting him.

His host staggered from the sudden mental invasion, collapsed. "He jumped, the little bastard! Turn the dampeners on!" he heard, through two sets of ears.

Then his world collapsed back down to the empty black of a body fast bleeding to death, and he whimpered. He was dying--he didn't want to die--he knew he was going to die...

Over the course of minutes, the sense of emptiness began to fade. His vision cleared a little, the pain ebbing from searing to a simple dull roar. A rush of endorphins flooded his system as his body got the bleeding under control, transmuting pain to fleeting pleasure. He gulped and took a breath, unable to believe that he was alive, after all that.

Once they had made their data entries and dragged the body of their dead comrade out of the room, the men got around to unstrapping him. He was shivering, hollow-eyed, naked except for a second skin of his own drying blood. They gave him a towel and sent him roughly back to the barracks.

He didn't explain to Rubedo or Nigredo why he slept through sunrise the next three mornings.