Chapter Text
Juno shut his eyes tighter, though it did nothing to stop the noise. Of course it didn't. "We should stop. This probably breaches the Geneva Convention." Mr. Pathos suggested. "It's nearly there. It'd be a waste to back down now." Dr. Logos countered. Juno wasn't surprised at the answer. Apollo had quite a hard time stopping when he made up his mind. Especially when it took sympathy to see the problem. This made Juno wonder how he even got here.
Juno parked his car near the lab. Apollo's frantic texts earlier meant they finally had permission to go on with the tests. It would be a massive medical achievement to find a way to reconnect severed limbs.
Juno used his keys to unlock the door. He was greeted with a neat lab that smelled of bleach. He huffed at the smell, though he'd rather smell bleach than work in a dirty facility.
He made his way to a lab room and opened the door. Apollo was organizing syringes and vials, his lab coat flowing with his movements. "I'm here, Dr. Logos." Juno said, his higher pitched voice floating across the room. Apollo set a vial down and turned to face his visitor. "Can you grab the syringes from the box over there? Not enough of them can be mixed, so we'll have to time the doses." He explained, motioning to a cardboard box.
Juno picked up five, one for each of the vials he saw. He stepped to the table, his platform shoes tapping the floor softly. He set down each of the syringes. "We'll lower the amount of injections needed, right?" They asked, taking the syringe that was handed to him. The liquid was a deep red, and from what they recalled, it wasn't that dark the day before. "Yes. But it'd useless to mix together drugs if they don't do what they were engineered to do." Apollo said, filling an empty syringe with a clear liquid.
Juno turned to the person they had in the containment cylinder. The person had willingly given their live body to science. Still, Juno's stomach turned when he saw the girl leaning against the wall. She was asleep, so the severing of her limb wouldn't hurt as much.
"Mr. Pathos, press the button to sever the limb." Apollo's cold and robotic voice cut through Juno's thoughts. He swiftly made his way to the button and pressed it. The robotic arms moved the body into place, shifting arms and keeping her head raised. The body set into place. Apollo stepped closer and took in the placement. With confirmation, Juno pressed the button again. A knife moved slowly to the woman's right arm, just above the elbow. It cut down agonizingly slow. Juno looked away, glad the woman couldn't scream. The arm was held by a table. The robotic arms moved to kept the severed limb and the body aligned.
Apollo took the syringes and slotted them into the machine. An arm took the syringes and stuck them into the woman's skin. The arm pressed down the syringes, waiting the time between each dose. By the looks of it, it would all go well.
Then the woman started to scream.
A bang brought Juno to the present. The woman was bloody now, her screams piercing through her containment cylinder. They couldn't look at the bloody cell. "Dr. Logos, this is bad." They reiterated, looking into his eyes for any sympathy. Surprisingly, Apollo seemed perturbed by the scene before them. "It'll be impossible for the doses to work now." He agreed.
With the tap of a button, the machine stopped, pulling the syringes from the woman and tucking back into the roof of the cylinder. The woman stopped screaming, falling limp in the cell. "Did we kill her?" Juno whispered. The cell opened, and the woman fell on the floor. Her blood spilled onto the floor, and if Juno was any more apathetic, he'd care more about the mess than the death.
Apollo sighed. "I believe so. I'll get a stretcher to put the body on while you grab the documents." He started to the door. Juno followed close behind, just as eager to get away from the body as he was to write the death off as a science failure.
Silently, without either scientists knowing, the woman lunged at her killers.