***This chapter is also difficult to read, so just like the last one, if you feel uncomfortable with harsh themes, just skip over the italicized part. I will try to not make it majorly affect the plot in the future of this story.***

Chapter 46 - Paranoia

Third Person

Tris wakes from the light rest that she had; her eyes wide and alert as David's voice is still heard in her mind.

She blinks rapidly, the world around her completely dark.

The drugs that David put up her nasal passage weeks before she was rescued have finally just started kicking in; just like he had desired.

Now, her world lies dark to her because of her blindness, and she cannot keep anything in her stomach.

She cowers, squeezing herself into the small corner as few tears slip down her face.

She's never felt so useless and lifeless in her life.

Her mind haunts her because of these dreams that seem like nightmares to her, replaying themselves over and over; but in reality, they're memories.

Marie Scott was worried that she might have had slight memory loss from her severe concussion, and she also had thought that she might have been in a coma at one point.

As she begins to have her surroundings change, more pieces of these memories come back to her.

More terrors.

She shivers, the small room freezing from the cool mid January temperatures outside.

The injured muscles in her left leg clench from the cold. It throbs erratically, stinging furiously with each throb.

Strangely, the pain is quite normal to her, and although it hurts her terribly, she's almost use to it at the time.

It was the middle of winter, and the doctors couldn't trust her with blankets because they had no clue if she was suicidal or not.

At one point, she was, but not anymore.

They tried turning on the small radiator in the room the day earlier, but the small noises it made terrified her, so they had to turn it off.

All she has is herself, and the small mattress against the wall in the room.

Some people could confuse her room for a prison, but in reality, Tris had never felt more safe.

At least, for the moment.

She shivers feverishly, her small frame having nothing but skin and bones from her unable to keep any kind of food down.

And now, because they don't have access to IV meal supplements, she's starving and the emptiness makes her stomach heave, causing her to constantly be nauseated.

Everyone wishes that there was something they could do to help her.

They want to be able to make her feel comfortable.

But who knows if she'll ever be comfortable with anyone, and anywhere ever again.

In a gentle current, a light wave of warm air touches over her skin, causing goose bumps to form and make her shiver.

The small current came from the radiator, but she cannot see that. Lightly, she peels herself away from the corner, dragging her left leg that is wrapped up from her hip down behind her, she moves on her two arms and one leg across the extremely small room.

Upon reaching the other side of the room, she shivers in warmth. She's a few steps away from the radiator, but close enough to it for her body to feel completely warm. She relaxes slightly and sighs.

Inside his office, Ken sees into her room from a camera in the corner of her room. He smiles when seeing that she has come accustomed to the radiator now.

Back inside her room, Tris rests her head on the light grey wall. She rests there for a while, her body in shock still from her move across the room.

Her left leg in the cast still continues to throb though; a light sting coming with each throb.

Curiosity taunts her as she questions what is giving off such warmth, and she lightly moves her scrawny, bony arm blindly towards the radiator.

The metal rungs on the outside of the radiator are just lightly warm to the touch, unlike the rungs on the deep inside that create the actual heat.

She touches the old metal rung on the outside, but flinches back to feel it's slight wariness.

The temperature of the metal sends her mind back into a memory she didn't remember until this point.

"Lie still, Beatrice. This will only hurt, well, a lot. I guess we will find out for the first time with you though, because we've never done this on anyone yet." He snickers, heating some kind of metal over a fire; the metal glowing bright orange in the flames.

She lays on the hard, cold cement ground inside one of the miscellaneous rooms in this huge building.

Her heart races with terror, wondering what he plans on doing to her. The lack of memory she has before this moment in time makes her mind scoundrel for answers that she can't find.

"Get her ready," David says to the men he has working for him. Five men come from behind Tris and hold her down; three holding onto her left leg and foot, one having her upper body, and one holding her head still.

Through all the people around her, she cannot see much. She struggles against the hands on her, tossing her head left and right as she yanks against the men.

"You ready to feel the worst thing you will have ever felt before, Beatrice?"

Breathing heavily, she strains her eyes to look to the right where she can see David removing the almost red metal from the flame. He makes eye contact with her, no look of regret in his whatsoever.

He moves out of her sight range and towards her bare feet.

Her ears fall numb as her blood curling scream makes all of the people in the room flinch when the metal touches the bottom of her left foot.

He burned her in two other areas that day, not counting her foot.

It was referred to as branding.

He branded her with a circle filled with a smaller square, and then a smaller circle in that square on the bottom of her left foot.

That would later be the symbol of Chicago's enemies.

He then began on her right arm, placing the lines that meant she was genetically pure just above her wrist. She remembered it as a symbol from the Bureau, but she knew she wasn't in the Bureau's hands anymore.

Her skin boiled angrily in those areas; the maximum degree burns clearly eating away at her flesh as they burned for the next eleven days.

The skin in those areas would never be the same.

Along with her mind from the experience of it.

She lays in the middle of the room, stuck from her body being paralyzed in fear from the memory as she tried to get away from the radiator.

She uses her left hand and runs it down her right forearm; blindly feeling the unevenness of the scarred skin.

She also touches the center of her left palm lightly, yet again feeling the unevenness of the scarred skin.

Her heart races as her blindness makes her paranoid.

She screams.