Ashton was more aware of Willow's nerves than he probably should have been - he noticed her hands uneasily tensing and untensing, so he put on a gentler tone. "Yeah, it's true, but.. if we don't talk about it with people, they might not know that this sort of terrible thing even happens. When my roommate got taken.. I'd just learned about it that day. If I hadn't have known, I wouldn't have been able to find him that night," he said matter-of-factly. It was true. There was no way to prevent stuff like this, but there was education, and education was important.

He swallowed, his throat dry. "But we're not talking about him, I guess. We're talking about me."

Steeling himself, the swordsman began his story evenly, and (as yet) without care as to how horrible it sounded. "They - I was in a wheelchair that day from some injuries the night before, so they just wheeled me out of my room and stuck a needle in me. When I came to, I was lying face-down, and I couldn't move my head."

He blushed a little to think of what came next - it was so terrible, and so very personal. "Then.. I felt them taking some of the hair off of the back of my head. It was really terrible, that loss of control.. almost as bad as the scalpel, and then the drill, and then the saw. And all - and all the blood."

It was harder retelling this than he'd expected it to. He stared at his lap, eyes wide open, hair falling around his face like it had done that night. "There were voices, too, but.. they were friendly, they weren't bad. Not as bad as feeling them taken away from me. I.." He trailed off, then shook his head. Saying more was too hard right now.