Disclaimer: Nope. Not mine. And unless I get really rich, never mine.

A/n: I thought this would take a lot longer to explain...guess I'm not good at dragging things out. Oops. Oh yeah, and this is an OC's point of view, not that it matters too much, but I know some people don't like them.

000

He stares at the bare, white walls, and wonders if this was how the people he "helped" had felt. Then he remembers the flash of gold, and he knows that yes, this was how they felt, every second of every minute of every hour, day and night, from the moment they came to the Reformatory to the day they left, whether in a car or a coffin.

He knows which way he'll leave; his sentence was for life.

He can't remember the trial. He and all of his fellow scientists who had worked on Patient #513-200 had still been wrapped in golden light. It was letting go of them, one by one, oh so slowly, torturing them less and less every day, returning to its host. It had left him almost completely, although at night he still heard Rekatil three cells over screaming.

Rekatil had worked the most with #513-200, but she hadn't been hit the hardest. Jorat, who's practices has always been efficient, if harsh, had turned into dust, even though nobody had believed them when they were lucid enough to say. People don't just disappear, the therapists said, he must have escaped, you made a mistake. The therapists were wrong, though. The therapists thought that #513-200 was just a powerful, if latent, psychic who had lashed out when the pain became too much.

Patient #513-200 was not a latent psychic, and he doubted that it—she, he corrected as gold flickered on the edge of his vision—had any telepathic ability at all. If she had, they would have sensed it. They had gone pretty deep in her mind, after all, and even if they weren't looking closely at what they saw, telepathic ability was distinctive. No, #513-200 was a cage, and they had broken her.

The aim hadn't been to destroy her. They were scientists at the Reformatory, not psychopaths, not that the public agreed. They meant to do what their name said, reform her, rehabilitate her, send her back into society with the correct morals and thought patterns. They only used the tools they were sure were safe and each and every scientist at the Reformatory had been rigorously trained in their species' natural psychic ability.

But none of the training had prepared them for what lay at rest inside of #513-200. They had known she would be special—anybody who could get to the innermost core of the Reformatory without being seen or tripping any of the alarms had to be (and it was only a pity that they couldn't help the man with her, but his telepathic ability was too strong to contain, and he had to be expelled with the standard treatment). Nobody had noticed during the preliminary testing, and even after the first few surface treatments—impressing the Code into the patient's mind, getting rid of anything that went against the Code, nothing too invasive—nobody saw anything out too far out of the ordinary.

Then, during one of the more intense treatments, Jorat had gone deep into #513-200's subconscious and found the door. He had shown the others who had already worked on #513-200, and they each tried to open the door, using every technique they had learned in training and a few invented on the spot.

The door didn't budge.

They spent weeks on the damn thing, searching through her mind for the slightest inkling of how to break through. It was a matter of pride, and nobody was above hurting the patient to reach their goal. After all, they were only going to heal her, she wouldn't even remember the pain. No harm done, so who cares if her mind's a wreck?

And then, in an effort that he, as director of the Reformatory, coordinated when all other efforts had been exhausted, the most powerful psychics in the whole Reformatory joined together and entered patient #513-200's mind to crack open the door.

He shuddered to think of what whould have happened if they had succeeded in creating more than a small crack.

Out of the crack squeezed a golden beast, a tiny fraction of the power that remained locked away. It was beautiful, but within moments it hadsmashed through all of their shields and ripped through their minds with the same precision as they had done to its host. Instead of the Code, it wrote its name, over and over until none of them could think, feel, breathe.

He had remembered the man's face then, who had been with the patient when they had first taken her, and as he watched his colleagues writhe and scream, felt their pain just as intensely as he felt his own, he wondered if he had known if this was what would happen to his friend.

He would never know why the golden beast of light chose that moment to retreat back into the depths of #513-200's mind.

Of course, it didn't leave completely; part of its awareness has stayed, to watch, to torture, to teach. He learns every day of the horrors he inflicted on the victims he had pretended to help. While everyone was still trapped in pain and self-destruction, the authorities had discovered the truth of the Reformatory. His moment of power, of control, is gone now.

Three cells down, Rekatil screams.