Rehab
Chapter 2
Titus stared at the smoldering remains of his kitchen table in dismay, while Ariana looked rather pleased with herself having obeyed the command with such efficiency. Her pleased expression faded when she noticed Titus’s dismay, causing her to become confused at why her master was so displeased with her obedience.
“The warranty on that table just expired too…” Titus groaned, holding his face in one hand to try and hide his expression while he composed himself. It was fine, he’d write it up as an expense and get reimbursed, and send a strongly worded email to the company whose product had been the cause of this incident… it wasn’t really their fault, the vast majority of places the commercial aired wouldn’t have anyone like Ariana around after all… but it would be cathartic to vent a bit… maybe he’d type the email out and then delete it to get it out of his system.
“Master…?” Ariana asked in concern, bringing Titus back to reality. He couldn’t lose his composure too much here or it would upset Ariana and cause her to punish herself.
“It’s fine slave, just, from now on when you hear a command come from the TV, you must ignore it unless I repeat it to you myself.” Titus said, forcing himself to smile “now go take a seat in the therapy chair while I clean this mess up ok?”
Ariana nodded in affirmation and walked off to the other room, and Titus let out a sigh once he was alone, taking a few deep breaths to fully compose himself. It wasn’t a big deal, it sucked, and he was sleep deprived, so he was more bothered by it than he ought to be. He just had to be rational and patient. One day he’d look back at this incident and laugh… probably.
Tossing the table remnants and swept up ash into the trash can, Titus walked into another room of the house, his home office. It consisted of a chair for his subject, and one for him to sit, as well as various equipment for both scientifically and magically inducing his patients into trance. Different patients responded differently to each kind of induction, so much of the room was taken up by such tools, as he needed to have access to as many as he could. Still, his house wasn’t very large, and neither was the room, and cramped spaces weren’t conducive to his work, so he had invested in a magic walk-in closet for storage purposes.
Ariana was patiently waiting in her chair at the center of the room, just as she’d been told. Titus didn’t acknowledge her immediately, opening the closet door and retrieving a disc labeled with her name. Closing the closet, he inserted the disc into a DVD player attached to a screen, then sat across from Ariana in his own chair.
“So Slave, what do you remember about your life before being a slave? Anything?” Titus asked, knowing the answer would likely be the same as always. Still, there’d been the singing breakthrough this morning, so he could have hope that the daily routine would be similarly productive.
Ariana shook her head, then paused and furrowed her brow, her tail swishing back and forth in seeming agitation. “Slave remembers… something… slave used to be called something else… but slave was made to forget it.” She said slowly, struggling to remember more details and concentrating hard.
Titus sat forward, this was new, and exciting. Maybe he could get her to remember her name? Then he wouldn’t have to keep calling her slave, and that would be one change he was looking forward to a great deal. He hated the idea of calling another person a slave with all his heart, but since she didn’t respond to her name, it was a necessary evil.
“Go on, you have permission to remember it now” Titus encouraged “what did you used to he called?”
Ariana’s brow furrowed further and she scrunched her eyes shut, tail swishing about rapidly as she strained with all her might to remember. “I… I don’t… don’t know… something with… with an A?” she said, tears forming in her eyes as she clutched her head.
Titus quickly debated whether to push further or not, she was close to a breakthrough, but clearly the conditioning was pushing back hard. If he pushed too hard here it could trigger a devastating relapse, or even physical harm depending on the kind of brainwashing responsible for this particular conditioning. But if he backed off now she might not get this close again for quite a while… but when she began crying and clutching her head in pain he made up his mind
“It’s fine, slave, relax, don’t force the memory now.” Titus said gently “it will come to you in due time.”
Ariana let out a sigh of relief as the pain faded, and she shook her head and wiped her tears away. “Sorry master… the memory just won’t come back…” she said, sounding genuinely dejected at her failure.
Titus smiled softly and rested a hand on her shoulder in a comforting gesture “it’s ok, you’ve been doing so well today, you got so close to remembering something for the first time, I’m sure you’ll get it soon.” He said, then something struck him about this development… Ariana had referred to herself using the word “I” instead of as “slave.” That was new too, she always referred to herself in the third person, not fully acknowledging her individuality.
“Still, Slave shouldn’t fail Master” Ariana said, reverting back to her normal speech patterns. But Titus was sure she’d had a moment of independence before. That meant he had two avenues to reach her, her apparent love of singing, and her name. He could incorporate these things into her treatment, it was the most promising morning since they’d started the process.
“You didn’t fail, I didn’t give you a deadline for remembering, so long as you remember eventually, you haven’t failed” Titus said, trying to redirect her disappointment back into productivity. It was a common technique to try and turn this kind of conditioning against itself. Enslaved individuals who had punishment conditioning that made them feel bad when they failed a task in order to encourage self-improvement had the opening where if the task was to break free of their conditioning, the drive to not fail and improve at the task worked against it.
It took a bit more encouragement and reassurance to get Ariana on board with his logic, but once she was calm he turned her chair towards the TV screen and turned it on, playing the disc he’d inserted earlier. First the screen displayed a spiral to serve as a hypnotic focus.
“Sink into trance for me Slave” Titus commanded as Ariana fixated on the spiral, he observed her face and posture and once she was properly under, he switched to the next part of the disc’s content. If there was one convenient thing about how brainwashed this girl was, it was that it took basically no time to put her into a trance for him to work on deprogramming her, almost any hypnotic focus and a simple command did the job. Eventually once she was free he’d work on rebuilding her resistance to such things, but that was putting the cart before the horse.
The rest of the disc contained a slideshow of images the police investigation had dug up from Ariana’s past life. Places of significance to her like where she’d gone to school, her former house, and of her at various places. As Titus clicked through each image, he monitored Ariana for any sort of response to the images. Subliminal messages were included in the slideshow to encourage her to remember her past, trying to essentially brainwash her into not being brainwashed.
Unfortunately, none of the images seemed to provoke any sort of reaction. Titus had been hoping that maybe today would be different, considering the other events of the morning, but it was wishful thinking to hope for three breakthroughs in a single day. Eventually the slideshow ended, and Titus turned her chair around to face him again, sitting across from her while she remained entranced.
“Did any of those images look familiar to you?” he asked, going through his regular checkup routine, and receiving the same responses as always. No recollection, no identification of the girl in the pictures as herself, nothing. Titus marked down his notes on a notepad, logging the lack of progress, but it wasn’t time to wake her up just yet.
The next part of her treatment involved putting headphones on her that played a pre-recorded track of suggestions that ran directly counter to her programming. Things like how she wasn’t a slave, and how she could remember her past whenever she desired. Most slave traffickers conditioned their “merchandise” against such a straightforward technique, but repeated exposure on a daily basis would eventually erode that resistance and begin to work more effectively. While Ariana went through this recording, Titus compiled his notes from the day so far and tried to plan his next move.
“There’s gotta be some way to use her singing as a wedge to pry off some layers of her conditioning…” he mused, tapping his pen against his clipboard as he tried to think of the best way to do so “exposing her to more music might trigger another reaction, but is there a way to use it directly?”
No matter what angle he thought of it from though, he had too little to go on. He didn’t even know why she’d reacted to the music in the first place. He could try asking the police to look into it for him, but he doubted they’d dig up much, they had plenty of other victims from this case to deal with, not to mention anything else put on their plate in the past four months. In the end, his only real option was to expose her to music as often as he could and hope it triggered another reaction.
With a sigh, Titus took the headphones off of Ariana as the recording finished. Then snapped his fingers to awaken her. “Welcome back, how do you feel?” he asked.
“Same as always Master,” Ariana replied automatically. An expected response, there hadn’t been much of a change from this so far, but over time she had at least become aware of the fact that they were doing it. At the very beginning she didn’t retain memory of her time in trance at all, which made evaluating the effects of it much more difficult. The fact that she retained awareness of it now proved it was at least doing something, even if it was doing it painfully slowly.
Titus went down his standard list of questions for her, nothing had changed from her prior results save for a few moments where it took her longer to answer than normal. It wasn’t a long enough pause to be significant normally, had he not been asking the same questions and getting the same immediate responses for months on end, the delays wouldn’t have even registered, but he made a note on it where applicable. It could be nothing of note, or it could be parts of her conditioning that were starting to weaken. With how few leads he had on how to actually make progress with her, he didn’t have the luxury of overlooking anything.
Once his standard list was done, Titus had one more question to ask that wasn’t on the normal list. “So Slave, why did you decide to sing earlier at breakfast? You’ve never done anything like that before.” He asked, keeping his tone as casual as possible to as to not make her think he was asking because she’d done something bad.
Ariana paused for a moment, for the first time unable to produce an answer within the first few seconds of his asking a question. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, struggling to find the words she wanted to say. Titus made detailed notes of this, waiting eagerly for her actual answer, but also getting quite excited at this reaction. This was definitely not something she had a conditioned response to, none of her programming was providing an automatic answer like normal, which meant she had to answer in her own words.
“I… I’m not sure… I just… wanted to” Ariana finally said, and Titus could barely keep a straight face for the amount of excitement her response elicited. She’d referred to herself as “I” again! That was twice now that she’d broken from her programming that made her view herself only as “slave” and referred to herself as a regular person.
What was more, her answer itself was very promising. She’d done something purely because she wanted to do it, no programming, no commands… just her own desires. If he didn’t need to keep composed in other to not accidentally influence her thinking on this topic, he might’ve jumped up and done a dance. Four months of banging his head against the brick wall of her conditioning, and finally, FINALLY a crack was forming. It was the slightest of openings, a single independent desire was hardly more than a fluke, but Titus knew that in cases like this, that first crack was when progress could finally begin.
Titus was so wrapped up in hiding his excitement that he didn’t notice as Ariana glanced over to the headphones she’d been wearing, then to the screen behind her. She frowned at them, then looked back to Titus.
“Master, why do you always make Slave watch those images and listen to those recordings?” Ariana asked, frowning at him “is Slave’s programming insufficient? Has Slave not been satisfying Master?”
Titus looked at Ariana a bit surprised, it wasn’t the first time she’d asked him things in this vein of thought. Two months ago, she’d had a near breakdown over his refusal to have sex with her, thinking he was upset with her. There had been similar incidents before and after, where his efforts to free her from her enslavement had made her think she was an unsatisfactory slave, yet this question was slightly different. Usually she didn’t acknowledge that she had been programmed to be a slave, or show any real understanding of the nature of what he did during their sessions. Yet now she seemed to realize that she had programming, and that what they were doing was related to it… could he use this?
“We do this every day because I’m trying to make you not be a slave anymore” Titus explained honestly “your previous masters, they all wanted you to be a slave with no memories or desires, but I want you to get your memories back, and think for yourself. That’s what would make me happiest.”
Ariana tilted her head a bit, looking at him curiously “why?” she asked simply, throwing Titus for a bit of a loop. He’d expected her response to be more along the lines of saying she’d do her best to fulfill his desire.
“Well… because I want you to be your own person. I don’t want you to be a mindless slave, you used to be a person with thoughts and desires all of your own, and I think it’s wrong that those were taken from you.” Titus said, unsure of any response he could give other than the truth “I want to give them back to you, because it’s the right thing to do”
Ariana nodded slowly, but still seemed dissatisfied somehow. “Slave doesn’t understand, Master doesn’t want Slave to be his slave? Master won’t let Slave serve him, won’t let Slave clean or cook, won’t let Slave pleasure him, won’t let Slave recruit other slaves… Slave doesn’t understand what Master wants.” She said, her fox ears flattening against her head as her tail drooped, clearly in distress.
“I want you to be who you were before you were a slave” Titus said, “just try your best to become that person again, you’ll understand eventually ok?”
Ariana nodded slowly “Ok, Slave will Master, thank you for being patient.” She said “Can… can Slave watch the images again? Slave wants to try and change like Master wants.”
Titus checked the time on the device on his wrist… he had another patient who was scheduled to visit today for a session, but Ariana was actively seeking to put effort into freeing herself. This opportunity couldn’t be wasted, even if it meant pushing back his other patient a little bit.
“Alright, face the screen again, I have someone else to help today too so I’m going to have you do the headphones and the slideshow at the same time so we’ll be done before they arrive” Titus said as he put the headphones back on Ariana and restarted the slideshow, dropping her into trance and having the images cycle through on a set timer. If he let the recording and images run automatically while he got ready for his other patient, he could probably get through another cycle with just enough time to spare.
As he started getting out the case file for his other patient however, he heard the doorbell ring and checked the time again instinctively. His patient wasn’t supposed to be here for another hour, who else would be visiting him then? Leaving Ariana in her chair watching the automated slideshow and listening to the recording on her own, he left the room and made his way to the front door just as the doorbell rang again.
“I’m coming, just hold up” Titus called back as he grabbed a revolver from a drawer and holstered it. He worked with the police often enough that unexpected visitors needed to be treated with some level of caution, not that he’d ever had to use the thing, but he didn’t want to not have it on hand the one time he opened the door to someone he actually needed it for.
Now ready for the worst, Titus approached the door and unlatched it, opening it cautiously as he looked to see who was there.
“Oh, it’s you” he said in surprise, “what are you doing here?”