Valentine's Treatment

The light bursts against his retinas, blindingly bright and disorienting. He has only seconds to take in the vague impressions of the room--the light green walls, the bed he's lying on, the polished linoleum floor--before they come for him. There are only two of them, but they're so strong and he feels so incredibly weak. He tries to stand, but his muscles seem rubbery, his legs barely able to support his weight. It's almost a relief when they pick him up by the shoulders and half-carry, half-drag him out of the room.

"I don't understand," he mutters, as they bring him down a hallway to a tiled room with a metal bar along one wall at waist height. "What's going on, I don't remember..." They bring him over to the railing and press his hands against it. Neither man makes eye contact. Neither man responds to his question. But as his eyes clear, the fuzzy silhouettes they make against the harsh light look vaguely familiar.

He's startled out of his realization by their hands, yanking down the cotton pants he only just now notices he was wearing. Pajama pants. He doesn't remember going to sleep. He starts to speak again, but one of the men blasts him with a spray of warm water from a hose on the wall, and he grips the railing tightly in surprise. He notices a plastic bracelet on his wrist. It has a barcode on it that looks like every other barcode he's ever seen.

He feels like he's trying to solve a puzzle without enough pieces and without enough sleep. His thoughts seem sluggish, like he's been running for days on nothing but black coffee and his brain is all gummed up. He doesn't know if there's a way any of this could make sense, but the strung-out feeling makes it impossible to work out what's going on. One of the men begins scrubbing him with a sponge on the end of a stick, working up a thick and soapy lather all over his body. Every time he tries to cover himself or push it away, they spray him with more warm water. After a while, he forces himself to concentrate on staying upright.

They finally finish, leaving him dripping wet and shivering despite the warm, humid air. "What's happening?" he splutters, as they once again grab his arms and pull him away from the railing with almost comical ease. "Where am I, who...who are you people?" They don't answer. They simply carry him out of the room with surprisingly careful hands, supporting him with their bodies as they bring him into another room, this one with bare white walls and a cement floor. He feels the water soaking into their clothes. They don't seem to mind. They don't seem to notice him at all.

They set him in a chair in the center of the room, and strap his arms and legs in with leather restraints. They step back, then back again out of his field of vision. He tries to look at them, but when he turns his head it feels strange on his shoulders, heavy and floating at the same time. Moving it too quickly makes him so dizzy that he has to stop and let it hang down for a moment.

Then he hears the door close. He looks up to see a man in a white suit--impeccably white, almost so white that it hurts to look at. His hair is ginger, as is his neatly trimmed goatee. His eyes are startlingly green behind a pair of wire-frame glasses. "Hello, Mister Valentine," the man says, pulling a chair up from the corner of the room and sitting down distressingly close. "How are you feeling today?"

Valentine furrows his brow in confusion. The voice seems familiar, achingly so. He can hear it in his head, but the words that go with it don't want to materialize. "I'm not...sure," he says, his voice sounding dazed and groggy in his ear. "What's happening to me? How did I...how did I get here?" He lets his head sag back down a little, the effort of holding it up exhausting him.

"You're under treatment," the man in the white suit says, patting Valentine's hand reassuringly. "Memory loss is one of the symptoms. You'll understand soon." The touch is gentle, lingering, but the words...Valentine remembers them echoing in his head, distorted and garbled. 'You'll understand soon.' He remembers the fuzzy silhouettes of the two men behind him, holding him tightly, forcing a cloth against his mouth. Valentine recalls seeing the white suit slowly fade into shadow as his vision grayed out...

"You...drugged me, kidnapped me," he slurs out, realizing as he says it that the drugs are still in his system, fogging up his thoughts and leaving him weak as a kitten. "Why, what's going on, what are you--"

"That's another of the symptoms," the man interrupts, crossing one leg over the other and leaning in to caress Valentine's thigh. "You're experiencing false memories as your mind attempts to fill in the gaps in your known experiences with concepts that fit into your current paranoid worldview. You need to let go of those constructs. You are here entirely of your own volition."

Valentine can't stop looking at the man's hand. It's warm against his wet, chilly skin, and he's moving it in slow, almost-imperceptible circles that trace a lazy pattern into Valentine's flesh. "I don't believe you," he says, suddenly very aware of how little he can move due to the restraints. "I don't, I..." He tenses up, but the effort exhausts him almost immediately. "I don't believe you."

The man smiles. "Of course you don't. You said you wouldn't. That's why you made this video." He nods to one of the men behind Valentine, who rolls a cart from the back corner to where Valentine can see it. There's a television on it, an older model that probably would have been state of the art when Valentine was a child. The larger man turns it on, revealing a freeze-frame image of Valentine's face.

There's a DVD player below the television, on another shelf of the cart. The larger man presses play. "Hello," Valentine hears himself say. "I, Michael Valentine, formally consent to any and all therapeutic procedures of Doctor Jakob Gooding. I do so of my own free will, with the understanding that I may at some stages of the treatment find myself confused and disoriented and attempt to revoke this consent. I give Doctor Gooding permission to ignore anything I say or do while I am in such a state, and continue with the treatment as he sees fit."

Valentine studies his own image as he speaks, watching the beatific smile on his own face, the shining happiness in his hazel eyes. His dark brown hair appears wet, just as it is right now, but not quite as shaggy and long. Valentine keeps having to jerk his head to keep it from falling into his face, the motion making him so dizzy he can barely think. He closes his eyes tightly, willing the sight away. "You, you did something to me," he says, his voice dull but steady. "You made me say that. With drugs or hypnosis or something."

"Let's talk about that," the man in the white suit says, his hand encircling Valentine's cock. "Do you feel like you could be hypnotized into agreeing to do and say whatever I asked?" Valentine squirms, his body responding instinctively to the gentle stroking motion even as he tries to ignore it. He feels himself stiffening, and he wants to tell the man to stop, but the question hangs in the air like a challenge.

"N-no," he says, opening his eyes and glaring at Doctor Gooding as half-thoughts of falling asleep to the sound of the man's voice stray through his head. "No, you can't...can't make me do things. I'd resist. I'll resist." Valentine tries to make his voice sound forceful and determined, but the notes of confusion ring deep, undermining his fortitude. He's uncomfortably aware of how hard he is. "You can't make me..." He pauses, the silence filled with all the possibilities that 'complete control' implies. The fog that lies over Valentine's memory make him uncertain that any of his responses are really his own. "You can't," he finishes desperately.

"So we're in agreement, then," Doctor Gooding says. His thumb rolls back and forth over the head of Valentine's cock, painting it with tiny trickles of precum. "You can't be made to do anything. The man in the video wasn't hypnotized. You agreed to surrender yourself to my treatments of your own free will." His smile is warm and welcoming. Valentine feels inexplicably terrified of that comfort, like a mouse gazing into the stare of a snake. He can't close his eyes, though. He can't look down, not without seeing his own body betraying him. He has to keep looking straight ahead.

Or is that what he's supposed to do? Confused, Valentine lets his head hang down again. He watches the hand tugging his cock up and down, the sharp crease of the cuff ever so slightly darkened where it brushes against Valentine's damp skin. His breathing begins to fall into the rhythm of Doctor Gooding's strokes.

"I...you drugged me," he whispers, his voice surprisingly plaintive. He can still feel the fuzziness in his head, the cotton-candy stickiness that captures his thoughts. "You put something in my, in my...you injected me, or..." The conviction slowly fades, crumbling under waves of pleasure and confusion. He doesn't remember the man on the video screen. He doesn't remember being made to say those things. Surely he'd remember being drugged to forget?

"You're on medication, Mister Valentine," Doctor Gooding says. He plants both feet on the floor and leans down to flick his tongue against the sensitive frenulum of Valentine's penis, licking rapidly until a gush of precum bubbles up from the head of Valentine's cock. Then he leans back and continues speaking as if nothing happened. "Disorientation and confusion are some of the side effects. That's why you made the video, to remind yourself of how foggy and vulnerable your mind could be. Think about it, Mister Valentine. Do you really feel more clear-headed now than you looked in that video?"

Valentine blinks heavily, struggling to push through the muzziness and surges of hot, tingling arousal that keep threatening to lull his brain into a lazy reverie. He looks up at the man in the video, the man with the perfect smile and the joyous eyes. The Valentine on the screen seems so happy. The Valentine on the screen looks like everything makes sense to him. "I, I don't--nnnh!"

Valentine jerks bolt upright as he feels hands behind him, wrapping around his chest to play with his nipples. They're astonishingly sensitive, and so hard that the man behind him can barely squeeze the tight, firm buds between his fingers. Valentine's eyes roll back in his head, the question that hung in the air moments ago distorting like a television screen halfway between channels. "G-g-guhh..." he murmurs, trying to turn his growls of pleasure back into speech and failing.

"It's alright, Mister Valentine," Doctor Gooding says, pulling on Valentine's cock until his hand slides up and over the glans before putting his other hand at the base to continue the endless stroking motion. "You're simply very confused. That's normal at this stage of the treatment. That's all part of getting better. The more you let go of those paranoid impressions and trust us, the sooner you'll be on the path to recovery. You want to get better, don't you?"

"Y-yuhhh," Valentine slurs, as a wave of bliss hits him like a wave rocking an overloaded boat. His head sinks forward again, and he feels tiny droplets of his saliva drip onto his cock. His mouth hangs open, vacant. He wonders why he can't stop his mouth from watering. He wonders why he can't stop thinking of his open mouth as 'vacant'. He wonders why it's so hard to stop wondering.

"Of course you do, Mister Valentine," Doctor Gooding says. "It gets easier and easier every time, now. You're getting so much better, Mister Valentine. You're very confused, but it gets clearer and clearer with every treatment, doesn't it?"

"I, hnh, I...I..." Valentine struggles, trying to shut out the constant tingles of pleasure and make his drugged brain think. He can feel an inexplicable certainty that he mustn't agree with Doctor Gooding, that giving in and accepting the soft, soothing words will only make it that much harder to resist next time even if he can't remember a next time or a last time or anything but the warm, drifting pleasure of hands on his cock...his eyes are closed. He doesn't remember closing them. "Yes," he says, utterly defeated.

"That's right," Doctor Gooding says. "Now cum." He accompanies the words with a sharp tug, and Valentine's world goes white as he feels himself spurt like a fountain all over his chest and thighs. The orgasm is like a pulse of pleasure, a bomb detonating in his head and shattering every last thought as he slumps in the chair and goes blissfully blank. The afterglow stretches into eternity, a ceaseless plateau of mindless ecstasy. Valentine doesn't remember it, but the sensation is intimately familiar.

"That's it," Doctor Gooding says, as the orderlies release Valentine from the chair and help him down to his knees. "Now, Mister Valentine...you know what to do." Valentine opens his mouth, his eyes still sealed shut with bliss. He smiles beatifically, grateful that his treatments are proceeding so well, as Doctor Gooding finally fills it up again.

THE END