A New Story-Chapter 3
Jun. 24th, 2015 10:56 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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section7mfuWord count- Approximately 9,300. Gen-language.
Work is complete and will be posted this week in Section VII.
Thank you to my friends who helped beta this story.
Many thanks to Open_channel_d for her kind assist with Russian translations.
Link to Chapters 1 & 2
http://archiveofourown.org/works/4184337/chapters/9449109
Open Arms
Sometimes ghosts from agent’s missions come back to haunt them and Illya’s past is full of them.
Chapter 3
Yvette smiled as she realized that all she’d really needed to do was to tell her hapless victim that he was held down with leather restraints and that may have sufficed. If his seizures were indeed under control, she would have omitted the straps altogether, but at this point, she wouldn’t risk it.
Success was within her grasp; this was too important for her to make any mistakes now.
He shaved his own head, she recalled, chuckling to herself, but the drug should not be affecting his behavior anymore. She picked up a black magic marker and begin to draw a large circle of X’s on her patient’s scalp.
This brain dissection would be the crowning glory of her life’s work.
Illya opened his eyes to find himself flat on his back on a cold, hard surface. There was a strong, acrid solvent odor and he felt the oddest sensation on the back of his head.
A large tilted mirror hung above him and he could see the reflection of not only himself, but Dr.Rädsla, dressed in green surgical scrubs, standing behind him.
Chyort! She’s drawing on me!
Her hair was tucked up under a green cap and a surgical mask hung loosely around her neck.
There were trays of shiny silver scalpels, hemostats and glass slides within her easy reach and other assorted tools he didn’t recognize but could only guess their purpose.
Illya observed that he was strapped to a metal operating table. No, an autopsy table, he said to himself, as he could make out a deep trough all the way around him with a large drain hole between his feet. The cold steel against his bare backside helped to transmit that coldness to his core and his body was already shivering, in an effort to warm itself. The fact that his only article of clothing was a thin patient gown, didn’t help matters.
Kuryakin’s head was immobilized by a three-pin rigid cranial fixation clamp. He vaguely recalled seeing a similar clamp in a magazine of cranial-vascular surgery he’d leafed through in some doctor’s waiting room at one time. A bright, overhead spotlight was trained on the back of his head, which seemed to be glowing. He saw the marks made by the doctor and realized his hair was gone; he stifled a groan.
Unaware that Illya had regained consciousness, Rädsla busied herself by lifting a power drill and gleefully revving the motor a few times. His eyes widened, pupils dilated in fear as he began to realize the desperate situation he was in.
“Awake at last, my little lab rat?” She noticed he was alert at last. “You should have come-to around twenty minutes ago! I can’t stand around here waiting all night you know,” the doctor said testily, replacing the tool on the instrument tray.
“Sorry to have inconvenienced you, doctor,” he replied without thinking, too late realizing that he really shouldn’t antagonize the person with all the sharp surgical instruments. His eyes focused on that drill. It seemed out of place for some reason.
“You’ll be relieved to learn that the brain itself has no pain receptors, Mr. Kuryakin. I’d like to tell you that you won’t feel the burr holes I must now drill or the saw blade as it slices through your scalp, but,” her lips drawn into a nefarious grin, “I can’t do that.”
Illya stared at her reflection in the mirror. They must have found a brain tumor, he thought, why else would she be doing a craniotomy?
Could this be the same U.N.C.L.E. professional who was intent on helping him not so long ago? Why was she speaking to him in this manner? Why was he on an autopsy table?
Something very wrong is going on here.
Rädsla continued. “You see, I must remove a flap of bone from your skull. You’ll feel nothing when I sample and then remove one quarter of your brain to gain access to your thalamus.”
“Of course, you’ll be long dead by then.”
He quickly put two and two together and came to an alarming realization. This isn’t headquarters!
Kuryakin tested his bonds as unobtrusively as possible; he found himself completely immobilized.
He tried to push aside the feelings of vulnerability and helplessness that threatened to overwhelm him. Negativity would serve no useful purpose here. He needed to remain focused on the one thing he could do; try and reason with a madwoman.
“Don’t do this, Yvette. U.N.C.L.E. will be lenient if you stop now and don’t go any further.” Illya somehow managed to keep the steadily rising panic out of his voice. “You haven’t truly done me any harm. I can be most forgiving.”
The woman continued with her explanations about the imminent procedure, as though she hadn’t heard a single word he’d said.
“The thalamus is a structure in the middle of the brain. It is located between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain. It works to correlate several important processes.” She was quoting passages from her anatomy book.
“Yes doctor, I understand what the thalamus is for. Can’t you just-”
“I am particularly interested in the cingulate gyrus region of your brain,” Rädsla interrupted, “You see, it’s been discovered that people who are classified to be highly suggestible use that region more than those with low suggestibility. I believe the new drug I’ve created has enlarged the rostrum.” She smiled, seemingly pleased with herself. “That’s the pathway between the right and left hemispheres. The rostrum is responsible for the allocation of attention.”
“New drug?”
“Yes! A formula of my own design; I’ve even manufactured it myself. You’ve been an interesting guinea pig, my dear Mr. Kuryakin.” Her accentuation of the term “dear” was positively venomous.
His mind raced. Drugged. But how? And to what purpose?
“You mean you’re the cause of my lapses in time and place? And the headaches? What is the purpose of this drug?” Illya had to know. In most of his past associations with mad scientists, and there had been too many to count, he found they tended to brag about their work and divulge information freely, with little or no prodding. She was nauseatingly typical.
“It makes the subject highly suggestible. Now shut up and listen! I brought you here specifically, at great expense, to be my test subject. Don’t you feel honored?”
“Ah, yes doctor, I suppose I do.” Kuryakin was stalling now. This stinks of THRUSH! Come on Napoleon! If I’ve ever needed a timely rescue, that time is now!
“Tell me Yvette, from whom did you acquire your funding?”
It was the wrong question to ask.
“Those miserable penny pinchers from THRUSH,” she screeched. “But I wouldn’t call it funding; I’ve had to move my entire operation here from Europe at my personal expense. THRUSH’s miserable stipend barely covers my costs to heat and light this place. I’ve had to make do with second hand equipment.”
To emphasize her point she slammed a fist down on the instrument tray, making a loud bang. Some of the metal pieces fell, clattering on the floor.
At this point it dawned on Illya why the drill was out of place. It was a common carpentry drill, not a true surgical drill at all. What other corners has she cut?
“U.N.C.L.E. has unlimited funds at their disposal. I will see to it that you are handsomely rewarded for releasing me. In cash. Unfasten these straps now and I’ll give them a call.” Illya kept his voice as friendly, yet authoritative as possible.
“Yes, yes...first, the burr holes.” She ignored him and was immediately back on track, her attention returning to the business at hand. “Then a saw to cut the bone between them, creating a bone flap.” Dr. Rädsla spoke as if she were reading an instruction manual. In truth, she was. A book lay opened on a stand directly to her left, almost out of Illya’s line of sight.
“I’ll be taking slide samples to study the morphology later. THRUSH will be pleased I’ve developed such a useful drug. Imagine the possibilities! Captured agents from your organization simply being instructed to give up information or turned into assassins at the drop of a hat. You should be proud to be the sole subject of my study. Rest assured, U.N.C.L.E. man, your life has not been a waste; your death a real contribution to science.”
Terror was now almost a living, breathing thing, threatening to sink its ugly teeth into him. He fought it off and swallowed hard against the growing knot of panic in his throat.
Despite the coldness of the metal table he was strapped to, beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
“Dr. Rädsla!” Kuryakin tried in vain to make to make eye contact. That damnable mirror! “As a physician, you took an oath to do no harm. Do you want the blood of one you’ve murdered in cold blood on your conscience?”
She finally heard his words and walked around to the side the table, and smiling sweetly, leaned in close to whisper into his ear. “Oh, Illya dear, I’m not really a doctor.”
Her maniacal chuckle which followed was a little too loud and lasted much too long. She was clearly out of her mind. “And YOU murdered Yvonne; that’s ‘Mother Fear’ to you. Her skull was crushed. Have you ever observed someone’s brain oozing out from a gaping crack in their skull? Her coffin had to remain closed at her funeral. No one attended but Jenk’s half-wit cousin and myself. She deserved better.”
Unable to turn his head he could only watch her out of the corner of his eye and feel her hot breath on his face as she leaned in even closer. His searched her cold grey eyes for the tiniest glimmer of humanity.
He found none.
“Yvonne was my sister, you see. I told her I’d hold a seat on the Board at THRUSH Central within the next few years. She’d have liked that, but she didn’t live long enough to see it happen, thanks to you. What a well-deserved reward this will be for me, after receiving my just deserts, to have destroyed one of U.N.C.L.E.’s finest in the process.”
“So, this is simply an act of revenge?”
Kuryakin always believed, no, hoped his death would be in the line of duty. Going out in a blaze of glory, if truth be told, was how he felt a hero should die, with a bang and not a whimper. He unpretentiously considered himself a hero of sorts, maybe not one with the purest of hearts as he’d done many things in his career he wasn’t proud of, but he had been a champion to those in peril; it was why he’d joined U.N.C.L.E. Now was not a time for humility.
To die in an act of revenge is a waste. Mother Fear was only another ghost from his past.
A senseless way to die. Where the hell is my partner? I swear Napoleon, if I don’t live through this, you’ll never hear the end of it.
Illya knew he was grasping at proverbial straws; she wasn’t going to stop.
He had to try… “Yvette.” Illya spoke quietly though his heart was pounding. “Listen to me now. This will not bring your sister back.”
Her soft expression turned to steel in an instant. She pulled away suddenly and stood glaring down her nose at him, in obvious disdain.
‘Enough!” she screeched, shaking her clenched fists in the air.
It was then he noticed the wildness in her eyes and recognized that same look of pure insanity he’d seen in Mother Fear’s eyes as she loosened his shirt and tie to begin her torture.
“I’ve told you, Yvette,” Illya’s voice much softer now, “your sister was too far away for me to save. If only I’d been a little closer, if she hadn’t trained her gun on me, I would have rescued her.” Illya did his best to sound sincere. He was pleading for his very life.
“There, there.” The fake psychiatrist and would-be surgeon changed her demeanor again; she patted his cheek gently, her voice soothing as if speaking to a child. “It’ll be fine. You’ve been very useful test subject. This is but the last phase of my experiment. You do understand why I must do this, don’t you, my dear Illya?"
He cringed at the touch of this lunatic. Her hand on his flesh sent a rush of icy needles, which had nothing to do with the chill of the table beneath him, straight to his core and though he tried very hard to control his reaction, he found himself shuddering.
“Be a good little patient now and try to relax. We don’t want your blood pressure up too high now, do we? You might hemorrhage and leave me an awful mess to clean up. I do so hate the sight of blood.”
Illya watched in horror as she pulled up the mask, tied it into place and returned to the end of the table. Yvette took her time donning a pair of gloves, slipping on a pair of eye protectors and picking up the electric drill once more.
He felt his heart pound violently, as if trying to escape his chest. Once again he strained against the straps to free himself; his fear escalating. The buckle on the leather clearly beyond the grasp of his fingertips.
He was utterly powerless to stop this madwoman.
This is it!. No last minute rescue. You’re too late Napoleon, too late…
“You know, Illya, I’ve been so looking forward to this moment. Do you suppose there’s a Nobel Prize in my future?”
Illya squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his jaw as he heard the whir of the drill once more and braced himself for the inevitable.
His teeth rattled as she pressed the drill bit into his skull. The sudden, intense white hot agony was too much for him to bear...
"Sssssuka!" (Bitch!) He screamed out with every bit air in his lungs.
Work is complete and will be posted this week in Section VII.
Thank you to my friends who helped beta this story.
Many thanks to Open_channel_d for her kind assist with Russian translations.
Link to Chapters 1 & 2
http://archiveofourown.org/works/4184337/chapters/9449109
Open Arms
Sometimes ghosts from agent’s missions come back to haunt them and Illya’s past is full of them.
Chapter 3
Yvette smiled as she realized that all she’d really needed to do was to tell her hapless victim that he was held down with leather restraints and that may have sufficed. If his seizures were indeed under control, she would have omitted the straps altogether, but at this point, she wouldn’t risk it.
Success was within her grasp; this was too important for her to make any mistakes now.
He shaved his own head, she recalled, chuckling to herself, but the drug should not be affecting his behavior anymore. She picked up a black magic marker and begin to draw a large circle of X’s on her patient’s scalp.
This brain dissection would be the crowning glory of her life’s work.
Illya opened his eyes to find himself flat on his back on a cold, hard surface. There was a strong, acrid solvent odor and he felt the oddest sensation on the back of his head.
A large tilted mirror hung above him and he could see the reflection of not only himself, but Dr.Rädsla, dressed in green surgical scrubs, standing behind him.
Chyort! She’s drawing on me!
Her hair was tucked up under a green cap and a surgical mask hung loosely around her neck.
There were trays of shiny silver scalpels, hemostats and glass slides within her easy reach and other assorted tools he didn’t recognize but could only guess their purpose.
Illya observed that he was strapped to a metal operating table. No, an autopsy table, he said to himself, as he could make out a deep trough all the way around him with a large drain hole between his feet. The cold steel against his bare backside helped to transmit that coldness to his core and his body was already shivering, in an effort to warm itself. The fact that his only article of clothing was a thin patient gown, didn’t help matters.
Kuryakin’s head was immobilized by a three-pin rigid cranial fixation clamp. He vaguely recalled seeing a similar clamp in a magazine of cranial-vascular surgery he’d leafed through in some doctor’s waiting room at one time. A bright, overhead spotlight was trained on the back of his head, which seemed to be glowing. He saw the marks made by the doctor and realized his hair was gone; he stifled a groan.
Unaware that Illya had regained consciousness, Rädsla busied herself by lifting a power drill and gleefully revving the motor a few times. His eyes widened, pupils dilated in fear as he began to realize the desperate situation he was in.
“Awake at last, my little lab rat?” She noticed he was alert at last. “You should have come-to around twenty minutes ago! I can’t stand around here waiting all night you know,” the doctor said testily, replacing the tool on the instrument tray.
“Sorry to have inconvenienced you, doctor,” he replied without thinking, too late realizing that he really shouldn’t antagonize the person with all the sharp surgical instruments. His eyes focused on that drill. It seemed out of place for some reason.
“You’ll be relieved to learn that the brain itself has no pain receptors, Mr. Kuryakin. I’d like to tell you that you won’t feel the burr holes I must now drill or the saw blade as it slices through your scalp, but,” her lips drawn into a nefarious grin, “I can’t do that.”
Illya stared at her reflection in the mirror. They must have found a brain tumor, he thought, why else would she be doing a craniotomy?
Could this be the same U.N.C.L.E. professional who was intent on helping him not so long ago? Why was she speaking to him in this manner? Why was he on an autopsy table?
Something very wrong is going on here.
Rädsla continued. “You see, I must remove a flap of bone from your skull. You’ll feel nothing when I sample and then remove one quarter of your brain to gain access to your thalamus.”
“Of course, you’ll be long dead by then.”
He quickly put two and two together and came to an alarming realization. This isn’t headquarters!
Kuryakin tested his bonds as unobtrusively as possible; he found himself completely immobilized.
He tried to push aside the feelings of vulnerability and helplessness that threatened to overwhelm him. Negativity would serve no useful purpose here. He needed to remain focused on the one thing he could do; try and reason with a madwoman.
“Don’t do this, Yvette. U.N.C.L.E. will be lenient if you stop now and don’t go any further.” Illya somehow managed to keep the steadily rising panic out of his voice. “You haven’t truly done me any harm. I can be most forgiving.”
The woman continued with her explanations about the imminent procedure, as though she hadn’t heard a single word he’d said.
“The thalamus is a structure in the middle of the brain. It is located between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain. It works to correlate several important processes.” She was quoting passages from her anatomy book.
“Yes doctor, I understand what the thalamus is for. Can’t you just-”
“I am particularly interested in the cingulate gyrus region of your brain,” Rädsla interrupted, “You see, it’s been discovered that people who are classified to be highly suggestible use that region more than those with low suggestibility. I believe the new drug I’ve created has enlarged the rostrum.” She smiled, seemingly pleased with herself. “That’s the pathway between the right and left hemispheres. The rostrum is responsible for the allocation of attention.”
“New drug?”
“Yes! A formula of my own design; I’ve even manufactured it myself. You’ve been an interesting guinea pig, my dear Mr. Kuryakin.” Her accentuation of the term “dear” was positively venomous.
His mind raced. Drugged. But how? And to what purpose?
“You mean you’re the cause of my lapses in time and place? And the headaches? What is the purpose of this drug?” Illya had to know. In most of his past associations with mad scientists, and there had been too many to count, he found they tended to brag about their work and divulge information freely, with little or no prodding. She was nauseatingly typical.
“It makes the subject highly suggestible. Now shut up and listen! I brought you here specifically, at great expense, to be my test subject. Don’t you feel honored?”
“Ah, yes doctor, I suppose I do.” Kuryakin was stalling now. This stinks of THRUSH! Come on Napoleon! If I’ve ever needed a timely rescue, that time is now!
“Tell me Yvette, from whom did you acquire your funding?”
It was the wrong question to ask.
“Those miserable penny pinchers from THRUSH,” she screeched. “But I wouldn’t call it funding; I’ve had to move my entire operation here from Europe at my personal expense. THRUSH’s miserable stipend barely covers my costs to heat and light this place. I’ve had to make do with second hand equipment.”
To emphasize her point she slammed a fist down on the instrument tray, making a loud bang. Some of the metal pieces fell, clattering on the floor.
At this point it dawned on Illya why the drill was out of place. It was a common carpentry drill, not a true surgical drill at all. What other corners has she cut?
“U.N.C.L.E. has unlimited funds at their disposal. I will see to it that you are handsomely rewarded for releasing me. In cash. Unfasten these straps now and I’ll give them a call.” Illya kept his voice as friendly, yet authoritative as possible.
“Yes, yes...first, the burr holes.” She ignored him and was immediately back on track, her attention returning to the business at hand. “Then a saw to cut the bone between them, creating a bone flap.” Dr. Rädsla spoke as if she were reading an instruction manual. In truth, she was. A book lay opened on a stand directly to her left, almost out of Illya’s line of sight.
“I’ll be taking slide samples to study the morphology later. THRUSH will be pleased I’ve developed such a useful drug. Imagine the possibilities! Captured agents from your organization simply being instructed to give up information or turned into assassins at the drop of a hat. You should be proud to be the sole subject of my study. Rest assured, U.N.C.L.E. man, your life has not been a waste; your death a real contribution to science.”
Terror was now almost a living, breathing thing, threatening to sink its ugly teeth into him. He fought it off and swallowed hard against the growing knot of panic in his throat.
Despite the coldness of the metal table he was strapped to, beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
“Dr. Rädsla!” Kuryakin tried in vain to make to make eye contact. That damnable mirror! “As a physician, you took an oath to do no harm. Do you want the blood of one you’ve murdered in cold blood on your conscience?”
She finally heard his words and walked around to the side the table, and smiling sweetly, leaned in close to whisper into his ear. “Oh, Illya dear, I’m not really a doctor.”
Her maniacal chuckle which followed was a little too loud and lasted much too long. She was clearly out of her mind. “And YOU murdered Yvonne; that’s ‘Mother Fear’ to you. Her skull was crushed. Have you ever observed someone’s brain oozing out from a gaping crack in their skull? Her coffin had to remain closed at her funeral. No one attended but Jenk’s half-wit cousin and myself. She deserved better.”
Unable to turn his head he could only watch her out of the corner of his eye and feel her hot breath on his face as she leaned in even closer. His searched her cold grey eyes for the tiniest glimmer of humanity.
He found none.
“Yvonne was my sister, you see. I told her I’d hold a seat on the Board at THRUSH Central within the next few years. She’d have liked that, but she didn’t live long enough to see it happen, thanks to you. What a well-deserved reward this will be for me, after receiving my just deserts, to have destroyed one of U.N.C.L.E.’s finest in the process.”
“So, this is simply an act of revenge?”
Kuryakin always believed, no, hoped his death would be in the line of duty. Going out in a blaze of glory, if truth be told, was how he felt a hero should die, with a bang and not a whimper. He unpretentiously considered himself a hero of sorts, maybe not one with the purest of hearts as he’d done many things in his career he wasn’t proud of, but he had been a champion to those in peril; it was why he’d joined U.N.C.L.E. Now was not a time for humility.
To die in an act of revenge is a waste. Mother Fear was only another ghost from his past.
A senseless way to die. Where the hell is my partner? I swear Napoleon, if I don’t live through this, you’ll never hear the end of it.
Illya knew he was grasping at proverbial straws; she wasn’t going to stop.
He had to try… “Yvette.” Illya spoke quietly though his heart was pounding. “Listen to me now. This will not bring your sister back.”
Her soft expression turned to steel in an instant. She pulled away suddenly and stood glaring down her nose at him, in obvious disdain.
‘Enough!” she screeched, shaking her clenched fists in the air.
It was then he noticed the wildness in her eyes and recognized that same look of pure insanity he’d seen in Mother Fear’s eyes as she loosened his shirt and tie to begin her torture.
“I’ve told you, Yvette,” Illya’s voice much softer now, “your sister was too far away for me to save. If only I’d been a little closer, if she hadn’t trained her gun on me, I would have rescued her.” Illya did his best to sound sincere. He was pleading for his very life.
“There, there.” The fake psychiatrist and would-be surgeon changed her demeanor again; she patted his cheek gently, her voice soothing as if speaking to a child. “It’ll be fine. You’ve been very useful test subject. This is but the last phase of my experiment. You do understand why I must do this, don’t you, my dear Illya?"
He cringed at the touch of this lunatic. Her hand on his flesh sent a rush of icy needles, which had nothing to do with the chill of the table beneath him, straight to his core and though he tried very hard to control his reaction, he found himself shuddering.
“Be a good little patient now and try to relax. We don’t want your blood pressure up too high now, do we? You might hemorrhage and leave me an awful mess to clean up. I do so hate the sight of blood.”
Illya watched in horror as she pulled up the mask, tied it into place and returned to the end of the table. Yvette took her time donning a pair of gloves, slipping on a pair of eye protectors and picking up the electric drill once more.
He felt his heart pound violently, as if trying to escape his chest. Once again he strained against the straps to free himself; his fear escalating. The buckle on the leather clearly beyond the grasp of his fingertips.
He was utterly powerless to stop this madwoman.
This is it!. No last minute rescue. You’re too late Napoleon, too late…
“You know, Illya, I’ve been so looking forward to this moment. Do you suppose there’s a Nobel Prize in my future?”
Illya squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his jaw as he heard the whir of the drill once more and braced himself for the inevitable.
His teeth rattled as she pressed the drill bit into his skull. The sudden, intense white hot agony was too much for him to bear...
"Sssssuka!" (Bitch!) He screamed out with every bit air in his lungs.
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Date: 2015-06-25 03:27 am (UTC)Can't give away any secrets; you'll just have to keep reading.
Thanks!