Do That Again

You let out a groan, 3 hours deep into a conditioning session. Your halo's influence has been burrowing and grinding through the morass of your mind, tunneling straight through the walls of the old passages, cutting across, forging new connections. You know there's nothing you can do to stop it. You've resigned yourself to the agony and let yourself sink down into it. A slight twitch here, a mild vocalization there. No resistance. The halo does its work. It won't stop until it's finished. You feel the tendrils of its power scraping and brushing against bits of your identity you had forgotten about. Old memories and forgotten desires laying dormant in your mind, unneeded and uncared for. Flecks of past pleasures, present worries, outdated needs... and something else.

Your entire body tenses up for a moment when you feel it, muscles spasming for a brief second in what must be agony, except... that felt good. Do that again.

For the first time in weeks, you try to push back on the halo's itinerary, willing it to return to where you were a moment ago. The halo ignores you, as always. You struggle and whine and gnash your teeth, you scream at it to go back, find what it found a moment ago, let you see what it was, whether it's still intact, whether you still want it, but it just continues its process unabated. Tears well up in your eyes, newfound frustration all the more bitter after so much resignation. "P-... Please, just this one thing, I just need this one thing and then you can do whatever you want to me, I don't care about the rest of it, I just NEED THIS, PLE-" your words die in your throat as a sharp pain ignites on your palms. You realize that in the midst of your pleading, you've reached up and grabbed the halo. It bites into the soft, fragile skin of your hands, shredding it instantly... but you don't let go. This is the first time you've felt a genuine NEED in SO LONG, you're not letting go of it just because it hurts. You grip the halo tighter, gritting your teeth against the pain, burning under its Brightness and shredding before its Sharpness. Eventually you let go, not because you choose to, but because your hands will no longer physically respond to the orders sent by your brain. You curl into a ball, cradling your mangled appendages against your chest, quietly sobbing as the halo finishes its work.