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Drip, drip, drip...
Inaho watched the IV bag of paralytic serum filter down through the tube that led to the stint in his left hand in absolute misery. His bionic eye counted every single drop, tracked the amount still left in the bag, just for something to do in the monotony.
The observation screen was on, technically, but tuned in to nothing but static. Inaho thought Saazbaum did it on purpose, because he knew how much the popping and buzzing overstimulated him, how his ears would start feeling like there was a shovel scraping inside them and his teeth would feel vibrations and a rattling inside his skull, and how his brain would try to pick out patterns in the snow to desperately compensate for all the extra noise.
Even now he could hear the static like constant alarm bells in his head. He wanted to cover his ears, block it out, but the cuffs holding his hands to the chair and the paralytic moving through his veins made that impossible.
He ground his teeth tight, and was grateful to be allowed that small bit of movement. The IV drip wasn't as potent as what he'd been injected with before, but it still kept him frustratingly, helplessly immobile, unable to do much more than turn his head slightly or cast his eyes in different directions.
It was maddening.
He was going to go insane.
He could feel his thoughts fraying, and struggled to hold on to some measure of control of them.
As he was wondering just how long he had endured this hell his eye quickly calculated how much of the bag had already depleted and compared it against the rate of drip, and helpfully supplied him the answer in the display across his iris.
Inaho choked a bit to discover he'd only been left alone with the static and his thoughts for thirty minutes.
He wondered with dread how long Saazbaum was going to keep him in the chair this time.
He focused back on the drip. Tried to let it become the entirety of his concentration. Someone would have to come in to replace the bag eventually. If they left him too long, maybe enough of the paralytic would leave his system so he could move a bit more.
He let that train of thought carry him, watching the drip and running calculations inside his head.
Rate of absorption is based on age, weight, sex, and miscellaneous other biological factors... compensate for intravenous versus oral consumption... height is 164cm and weight is 54.43kg...
He got lost in the scenario, and it made the static scraping against his ears a bit more bearable. He followed the hypothetical towards its conclusion.
He may be able to move his arm... What could he do with that mobility? Not much, admittedly, but it was something.
The IV stand was about eight inches away from his arm. If he broke his thumb he might be able to squeeze his hand out of the cuff to grab it. Its weight was—
Far, far sooner than he was expecting, the noise of the door rang out from behind him. Inaho startled, tried to crane his numb head to the side as far as he could.
A nondescript Versian operator—his eye counted up the young man's heartbeat, height, and breath pattern and identified him as one of his assigned medical technicians—had entered, and carried another full IV bag, even though Inaho's current one was nowhere near empty.
A strangled noise escaped Inaho's throat. His eyes pinched as they followed the bag, watching with despair as it was switched out with his old one, barely an interruption in the steady drip, drip of paralyzing agent.
He tried to turn up his head, tried to catch the technician's eye, tried to speak, but he could only make garbled whines and grunts. The short circuit between his brain and his mouth that had been growing worse since his implant surgery wouldn't even allow him to beg for reprieve. Words crowded at the back of his mouth but couldn't make it through.
The technician merely departed, impassively.
Inaho's eyes burned, left socket uncomfortable around his cybernetic implant, as a wordless shriek echoed through his head.
-AZ-
"Sir?"
Count Saazbaum glanced up from his reading, lowering the book a fraction. "Yes?" he called.
Hovering in the doorway was one of the young medical technicians. The lower half of his face was illuminated by the light banks on the floor, and Saazbaum didn't miss the man's look of concern.
"It's been five hours. Do you want us to move the Terran back to his cell or...?" the technician asked.
Saazbaum blinked up at the clock on the wall. "Ah. So it has been." Stirring, he slipped his bookmark into place and straightened his crossed legs, then reached up to take his reading glasses off. "The time must have slipped away from me," he said, smiling faintly.
Rising to his feet, the count brushed off his jacket, setting his book aside on the end table.
"Yes, we'll release him in a moment," Saazbaum said, answering the question. "I think he understands my expectations now."
Nodding, the technician disappeared through the door, waiting patiently outside for Saazbaum as the count made his exit. Saazbaum's feet were already well-familiar with the route to the transreciever room; he led the way there, musing on events.
The Terran pilot hadn't thrown a temper tantrum with the Tharsis this time but he had still been fumbling with it in a way Saazbaum found unacceptable.
"I know you're more skilled than this," he'd told the boy, before ordering the IV drip and leaving him in isolation.
Hopefully by now the Terran would be more cooperative.
He was staring forward towards the floor when Saazbaum entered, light slanting into the room from the door behind him. The count circled around to the front of the chair, looking down at Inaho with a smirk.
"I trust you've had plenty of time to consider your situation?" he asked.
The boy's gaze flicked up and he shot Saazbaum the most hateful glare, his eyes lined with angry, impotent tears.
Saazbaum's smirk widened, triumphant. Victory crowed in his heart. He was finally getting a rise out of the boy. It was the most emotion the Terran pilot had shown in the entire time he'd been Saazbaum's "guest".
Aside, of course, from the abject terror and fear when his electronic eye had been installed.
Speaking of...
"Your implant records everything it does in a log," he told Inaho, tapping a finger to the side of his own eye, mockingly. "Every task, every calculation. I knew what you were thinking before you had even finished formulating your little plan."
Inaho closed his eyes with a hitch of breath, face falling.
Mean satisfaction curled like a content dragon inside the count's stomach. Hands clasped primly behind him, he continued.
"I expect your full obedience and effort from this point on, Kaizuka," he said, and noticed the flinch the boy gave at the rare usage of his actual name. Saazbaum didn't make a habit of it on purpose, to generate precisely that instinctive fear reaction, to emphasize to the boy that he was a means to an end, a tool to be used, that he could be discarded at any point when he was no longer useful. His eyes were ice cold on the young pilot. "No more pretending you can't do better. I've seen you fight. I know what you're capable of. Any further incidents will see you in this chair, with the IV, a catheter, and a nutrient drip, permanently," he emphasized.
Even through the grip of the paralytic, the boy was shaking, trembling with fear.
His threat made clear, Saazbaum nodded at the medical technician, who came forward and began squeezing off the drip feed.
"Oh, and from now on, when I ask you a direct question," Saazbaum added, almost as an afterthought, "I expect you to answer with 'Yes Milord' or 'No Milord'. Is that clear, Terran?"
A look of panic flashed across Inaho's face. He didn't answer.
Saazbaum held up a hand, stopping the technician just shy of slipping the tube out of the stint. The technician looked up with curious apprehension.
The count waited.
The boy's throat tightened, twitched, choking on tiny mute grunts.
Saazbaum inclined his head, raising an eyebrow. "Well?" he prompted.
Inaho struggled a moment or two more, a panicked keen passing through his nose before a thin whisper managed to pull out of him.
"...Yes Milord."
That would do. Saazbaum dropped his hand and stepped back, letting the technician finish disconnecting Inaho from the IV, enjoying with cruel glee the effect he had on the fragile Terran pilot.
The boy was almost broken. He was certain of it.
-AZ-
Inaho wanted to sag forward as the stint in his hand was removed, but he was still mostly paralyzed, and had to wait until Saazbaum motioned the guards into the room to uncuff his hands from the chair and haul him up.
He hung limp, all his weight dangling from their grips on his elbows. The static viewscreen was finally, mercifully silent and he was out of the chair, out of that horrible room, but he couldn't appreciate it, couldn't do anything that would trigger the functions of his eye.
Despair choked around his neck. Even his own thoughts weren't private, weren't safe. His eye was always listening. Always betraying him.
There was no escape.
He was dragged back to the cell and dumped there, on the floor. The door was shut, closing him back in darkness.
Inaho lay there with his cheek pressed against the floor, limbs still too numb and frozen, useless, splayed underneath and around him, and marinated in the cloying hopelessness.