Chapter Text
You were sick. That’s what everyone told you, anyways.
Though, you never felt unwell or were in any sort of discomfort. In fact, you felt past the average on scale, and proceeded to show no prior or following signs that something was wrong or well—out of the ordinary. Though, your persistence that everything was alright and that you’ve never felt healthier was easily dismissed or taken with reservation once they saw you were bound to a wheelchair as a result of a vehicle accident a few years prior.
Your caregiver had sent you off to a care center a few hours out of town. Explaining to you that it was for your own benefit and not hers, but you knew she was just beginning to lose patience from your parents’ dwindle in money, the only people who paid her frequently to take care of you while they were gone, and they were gone often, Ironically enough.
Rhode’s Hill Chronic Care Center was cold and sterile to a nauseating degree. It stunk of antiseptics, latex, and underlying smells of human waste. The sounds of constant beeping of monitors and machines that you didn’t even know existed were always heard no matter where you were. Nurses and staff were always too nice and always asked how you were feeling. They always came into your room at the most unnecessary times of the day to check your vitals and make sure everything was still functioning properly. Whether it be in the later hours of the night when you were actually getting a decent amount of sleep, early in the mornings, after lunch,and before dinner.
And then, there was your doctor.
He asked that you call him Dr. Gideon. It didn’t take a fool to note that Dr. Gideon was an odd sort. Whether it be the rather oddity of an appearance he acquired or how he talked to you, how he always talked to you.
You remember when you were first introduced to him, you couldn’t help but find yourself intimated and even disoriented by his overwhelming height, looking like a giant compared to the rest of the nurses that had stood alongside him. You couldn’t see his eyes for the large metal visor that shaded over where they would’ve been, where multiple lenses and nodules seemed to jut out from, imaginably counting well enough for eyesight as you could feel his heated gaze on you immediately following.
He had the skin of a corpse, pale with multiple grafts of scar tissue lined along his face, even a large scar fractioned in the center of his bottom lip, down the core of his chin and divided what part of his chest was exposed. You thought that maybe he had fallen victim to some sort of accident but you still couldn’t have helped how spurts of chills had managed to hike up the trail of your spine as you looked back at him, watching as he smiled at you, exposing his uneven and unkept teeth.
He scared you a little bit, and you had a feeling he knew that.
That’s why you made sure when you came down with the common cold or a mere fit of congestion, you flared your clogged nostrils, breathed with your whole chest and played it well off as if you weren’t even sick at all, which you weren’t in the first place.
Because, when something was wrong, or the nurse was even so slightly concerned, when you needed to be examined—he was there. Almost as if waiting to have an excuse to come into your room and make himself useful to you.
But you didn’t want it, you didn’t want any of this.
You didn’t want to be poked and prodded like some sort of testee, being undressed so he could press a stethoscope against your left breast while hungrily eying the other. His hands sultry but rough against your skin, taking as many chances as he could get to knead, touch, and caress your flesh as if it were dough,
It was mortifying...
However, One day, there were no nurses, no staff, no inquiries about your wellbeing and no vital checks. It was odd, and at first you had assumed you had woken up so early that the nurses hadn't even thought about coming across your door then.
And an hour passed, and then two, and then three.
No one.
You could still hear the clicking of blunt heels against the hard and cold tile floor from outside, the grating sound of beeping machines, the humming of distant exchanges back and forth, wherever that would’ve been.
But no nurses.
No visitors…
But then, you thought too soon, and the mere sound of a door opening sent your head spinning to who had come in.
Not a nurse apologizing profusely about “forgetting” you despite your personal preference to what actually stood in the doorway.
It was Dr. Gideon.
He nearly had to lean over and tilt his head slightly in order to pass through the door as a whole. But, once he got through and purchased a few steps in he looked at you and smiled that same smile that wavered you uneasy.
The horror you felt was wordless when you saw his hand draw up to your door’s lock, large fingers pinching around it and twisting it with a gutted latch, making you shudder.
“Hello, dearest.”