A/N: A Koichi scene. Warning, eye gore. (Igor?)
I’m scared.
Strapped in. The metal jaw clamp, thinly padded. Turn the knob. Once. Twice.
It’s important not to move, they tell me. As if I don’t already know. As if I hadn’t helped them develop this procedure, this serum.
It’s important to remain still, or you might damage your eye. Ever had lasik eye surgery?
I wear glasses. Of course I haven’t. They know that.
It’s like that, they say. Sort of.
They clamp my eyelids back. The tube comes down from the ceiling. The needle, impossibly long. One more clamp to push my eye out of the way.
I can only imagine how horrific I must look right now.
The needle—the grotesquely-long needle—needs to pass behind the eye, through where the optic nerve goes in, through the membranes and into the frontal lobe.
It’s the easiest way to do what we have to do. The safest.
I know already. I’ve performed the same procedure on rats.
I know.
I don’t ask if I can be put under for the surgery. I know they need my brain responsive, in case something goes wrong.
They numb the area but it still hurts.
It still makes that sound. I still feel that pressure in my brain where I’ve never felt pain before.
I see dazzling lights in some spots and the absence of space in others.
It’ll go on longer than you’d think.
Like every exploratory surgery I’ve ever had. Search for some way to do the impossible.
Where each means a week or more recovery in the hospital.
Where each means telling the bad news to my mom again. Seeing her nod bravely and then escape to the bathroom for a few minutes to cry in frustration.
Always the same. The tumor’s too deep.
If we try to remove it, Koichi may never speak again. But we’ll do whatever we can.
(As long as you keep paying us), they don’t add. But Mom’s not dense and neither am I. I know how much she’s spending, grasping at empty promises, strung along on maybes and hopefullys.
I was bald by the time I was twenty. I looked like Frankenstein’s monster by twenty-one. Stitches all over my head, some on my face.
A search history of everything they’ve tried.
At least my glasses hide some of it. I specifically chose the ones I have now for their wide frames.
I’m afraid my eye is going to fall out, but that’s ridiculous. It’s held in by layers of tissue and muscle. It’s not just going to pop out.
Just relax, Koichi, says Paul. We still have two more hours of doses. One every fifteen minutes.
Relax. You’re doing just fine.
It’s cruel, come to think of it. My colleagues bringing up the tumor in order to get me to do this. This serum that caused regeneration in rats with growths, hijacking the cells back and forcing them to perform twice as well as penance.
They know how desperate I am. I do too. I’ve always known.
It’s never been a secret.
A/N: Just relax Koichi, gosh. It’s not like we’re performing horrifying experiments on you while you’re awake or anything…
Here’s a little soliloquying glimpse of Koichi Sato before he was KOICHI SATO (with trembling emphasis~). Just an intern who has trouble saying no. I like who Koichi’s becoming. As you know, I’ve been doing quite a bit of hammering to get him to resemble a real person. And he’s finally starting to relent.
Want to read something similar? Here’s something about Paul the Surgeon.
Want to read something completely different? Have some nature spirits and necromancers.
Protagonized. 
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