Chapter Text
Sometimes, you dream of a place you don’t know of.
The dreams aren’t anything spectacular; they are pitch black and you are alone. You think they come to you like memories, memories that somehow don’t even belong to you, but they come so sudden and fast and they feel so real. As a doctor, you explain matters by logic, and so you explain the dreams as a form of hypnagogic hallucination; a common phenomenon that occurs during the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep. Mind you, it’s not pathological in itself, most people experience them at some point, but in your case, they’re stubbornly persistent.
It all points to the brain’s limbic system firing inappropriately, possibly during REM rebound or disrupted sleep cycles.
From a neurological standpoint, you consider the possibility that the dreams are generated by a convergence of fragmented long-term memory traces and emotionally salient but unprocessed data, some of it likely stored in the hippocampus without contextual markers. You’ve read studies about the default mode network, how it remains active in rest states, reassembling fragments of past experiences, sometimes even blending them with imagined scenarios or suppressed material.
However, what truly unsettles you most isn’t the science, it’s actually the consistency and the repetition. Your dreams never change, and how each time, despite knowing better, you wake up with the distinct sense that you’ve returned from somewhere.
You’re spacing out again today at work, for what must be the tenth or maybe even twentieth time in the last six months. It’s happening more frequently, and while you’d prefer to chalk it up to stress or post-call fatigue, deep down you suspect something more unsettling. A part of you, the more rational part, wonders if your intelligence quite literally died the day the meteorite struck.
You haven’t told anyone, of course. You would not jeopardize your position because that was an invitation to have a conversation with a psych consult, or worse, go on an administrative leave. You found it smart to keep your mouth shut and keep doing your job, even when your mind blanks out for seconds at a time or when you’re staring at a patient’s chart and realize you’ve been tracing the edge of the clipboard for three whole minutes without absorbing a word.
You told yourself these transient lapses in attentional processing never escalated into overt dysfunction, which made them easy to rationalize as something related to fatigue. Still, their increasing regularity suggested something less benign and you were not prepared to reach a conclusion.
You slip the stethoscope into your ears and glance at the little girl before the usual check-in. She’s sitting upright and for a second you think about how unnaturally still it is for a child her age. You hope to see squirming, pulling at the IV, and a barrage of questions about the machines with childlike curiosity instead of staring into marble-dark eyes. Her vitals improved overnight, as the nurses’ notes had reported and you want to be happy.
“Good morning, Aiko-san,” you greet kindly and crouch a little to meet her at eye level, careful not to startle her. “How are we feeling today?” You receive no response as you expected and the father’s eyes meet yours with diminishing optimism. You recognize it as the kind that is frequently shown in the early stages of diagnoses, when hope hadn’t yet calcified into resignation but has started to. Aiko should’ve been running around in a park with a wide smile and muddy shoes from chasing butterflies.
You offer a slight smile and set the chart aside. “Let’s take a quick listen, yes?” You slip the diaphragm of the stethoscope under her hospital gown and make sure not to let it drag against her skin. You move from the precordial points to auscultate the lungs, noting that her breaths are symmetrical but shallow; most likely from reduced physical activity.
“S-She hasn’t eaten much,” her father finally said. “A few bites of rice yesterday. The nurse said it’s normal after chemo, but…”
“It’s normal, sir,” you affirmed, already mentally reviewing the antiemetics and nutritional supplementation orders. “Her neutrophil count is recovering, but we’ll keep her on prophylaxis until we’re past the nadir. I’ll have the dietitian come by again today, maybe look into flavor aversions and textures. Kids often respond better to unconventional options.”
His shoulders relax a fraction and you think about how many nights he had stood right there, watching over her, praying she’d ask for a snack or say she was hungry again.
“She used to love strawberries. Now she says they taste like metal...”
You offer him a nod. Cisplatin, no wonder. You’ve read the textbooks, heard the lectures and memorized the side effect profiles. It includes metallic taste, mucositis and anorexia; textbooks never mentioned the part where a four-year-old forgets how to smile because her world now revolves around nausea, injections and suffering.
As you gently pull the gown back over Aiko’s chest, you adjust her IV line and check the infusion rate, watching the descent of the saline in the drip chamber. “We’re reducing the steroid dose today. You may notice some mood changes, and her appetite might dip further for a day or two, but that’s expected and I ask you not to worry. I’ll write a PRN for nausea if she refuses food again,” you add. “We’ll review her labs this evening and re-assess for discharge potential end of week if she remains stable. Please press the call button if she spikes a fever or starts vomiting again.”
“Yes, Doctor,” he said, with the same fragile hope in his voice.
You stand and bow to her father before taking your leave. Medicine can fight pathogens. It can shrink tumors and raise blood counts and manage electrolyte levels. It can’t always revive the small, subtle things life steals from a child during treatment, which is the sound of laughter, the will to play and the ability to forget pain even for a moment. The tragedy of it, what you can’t say to her father, is that the best you can offer isn’t a guarantee. It is a protocol and a balance of toxicity and time.
As you walk down the corridor and past a mural painted in crayon colors, you think about how in medicine the statistics always tell you most pediatric cancers have an excellent prognosis if caught early but they never tell you what’s left behind.
“Oh, there you are.”
You head turns and you find your supervisor.
Wrinkly and kindhearted Dr. Rintarou continues offhandedly, “Would you mind coming to talk to me in my office this afternoon? After lunch?”
You have a good feeling about your meeting with Dr. Rintarou. It’s not intuition, more of an analytical inference. His inflection lacked any subtle tension that usually precedes disciplinary feedback or administrative reprimands. More importantly, the timing; post-lunch rather than early morning, suggests a conversational, rather than corrective, intent. If you were to be interpreting the recent shifts in your caseload correctly, such as the more complex procedures, increased autonomy, observational notes marked with favorable metrics then it’s likely he wants to discuss advancement, or at least preceptor-led development.
After you finish your lunch, you mentally catalogue the possible contingencies one last time; performance reviews, fellowship recommendations and departmental restructuring. Whatever the agenda, you’re prepared.
This is it.
Dr. Rintarou has to be calling you in to discuss the raise you’ve been quietly manifesting through three months of unacknowledged overtime, a flawless run of patient outcomes, and that one weekend you spent reformatting the pediatric cardio protocols without being asked. You’re certain he’s finally going to recognize your contributions to the department; your well made documentation, your growing procedural independence, your professional and polite emails that begin with “Apologies for the delay” even when you reply within 18 minutes.
This will be the moment he slides a discreet envelope across the desk, and tells you “The department has noticed your efforts, and we believe this adjustment is overdue.” You can imagine lots of heavy yen bills, your rent-paid yen, no-more-instant-ramen yen, and steak-for-dinner yen.
Logically speaking, perhaps not steak. You’re still junior staff, but definitely the chicken thighs in the bargain bin aisle, the ones with a bright red discount sticker that reads consume by tomorrow, because hat’s practically gourmet compared to your usual miso-and-air diet.
Your thoughts are interrupted by a voice behind you.
“Lady, are you almost done?”
You step aside to let the custodian wheel her mop past you. You consider asking how long she’s been standing there, but before you can form the words, she glances at your reflection with a perfect level of your late mother’s judgement and says, “Supermarket down the street is running a sale on beef.”
You should feel embarrassed since you were caught hyping yourself up in the mirror like some intern prepping for a TED Talk, but honestly? You don’t care.
You’re walking into a career milestone.
A raise is practically diagnosed at this point.
Prognosis: excellent.
Treatment plan: reward yourself with something that didn’t come from the instant aisle.
You decide to fix your appearance a little so you remove your scrub cap and undo the ties holding your hair in place, watching as the structured coils of your space buns give way, gravity reclaiming each strand until your hair falls in loose waves across your shoulders. Your fingers move through the locks automatically, untangling as if you were palpating soft tissue for abnormalities, and then, you go still.
Your hand pauses in mid-motion, and strangely enough, is caught not by any physical obstruction but by the sudden onset of cognitive drift. You feel a momentary dissociation; one you’ve come to recognize as familiar. Based on your findings, you deem it to be mild and non-disruptive, although strange all the same.
Your gaze slides away from your own reflection in the mirror and it focuses somewhere nondescript along the wall. Your pupils dilate as your surroundings soften at the periphery. You’re aware of the lights above and the residual scent of the chlorhexidine you can smell, but they are also distant.
A neurochemical fugue? A fragment of memory misfiring under stress? You catalogue the symptoms absently: deceleration of thought, mild derealization, emotional neutrality. There’s no vertigo, no cardiac irregularity and no signs of deficits in proprioception. Despite that, your brain is flagging something that seems to be beneath conscious recall.
You take a deep breath and try regulating your autonomic response as your fingers resume their motion. As always, you deduct this is likely stress-induced that has been caused by the meteorite that struck six months ago. You believe the trauma triggers a benign episode and nothing actionable.
Yet, as your eyes return to the mirror, you can’t help but wonder if you’d let that cognitive loop run its course instead of snapping back to the here and now, what memory, what hallucination, what truth might have emerged from it.
You shake your head and tell yourself you have important matters to attend to. You fix your hair then use a quick swish of antiseptic mouthwash (chlorhexidine, alcohol-free, of course; wouldn’t want mucosal irritation before a professional meeting) and you rinse it out. With that, you’re prepared to face the world.
“I hope this doesn’t come as too much of a surprise,” Dr. Rintarou clears his throat. It takes your cognition a beat too long to recalibrate; you'd been mid-reverie, revisiting the chaos of the meteorite incident once more. He chuckles as he catches your momentary lapse. “I don’t think you caught any of that, did you? Dr. [L/N], I’m retiring.”
You maintain a mask of indifference and sit up marginally straighter, folding your hands over your lap like you’re prepping for a ward round presentation, but internally, synapses fire off in startled succession. Again, you’re not sure when you started feeling your emotions so much.
This wasn’t what you were expecting.
“Dr. Rintarou, may I ask if this is immediate?”
He stands and walks to his window so he can stare out at the sprawling metropolis below. You swear you hear his bones creak as he walks and suddenly he seems old, not in the pejorative sense, but in the way that time inevitably settles into the bones of those who’ve given their entire lives to the profession. “I’ve been due to retire for a few years now and I’ve put it off, but Mimiko has had enough. She wants to spend more time with our grandchildren and travel while they still think we’re interesting. When the meteorite struck...I guess that was a wake-up call. What’s the use of socking away all our savings if we aren’t even going to use it?” He smiles faintly and the lines around his eyes deepen. “I finally decided to listen to my wife.”
You press your palms together in your lap and resist the urge to bite the inside of your cheek. It’s actually a childhood habit long since trained out during medical school.
You need him to stay just a little longer, long enough for your nest egg to resemble something more substantial than metaphorical yolk. A nest chicken, if you will. You weren’t financially reckless; you also weren’t quite financially secure as of yet. Deep down, you were well aware of Dr. Rintarou’s quiet endorsements around the hospital. His subtle yet consistent advocacy, carried more power than you could replicate on paper.
The man exhales deeply and turns back to face you. “Dr. [L/N], I can hardly ever tell what’s going on in that head of yours. I never know what you’re thinking or how you’re really reacting to anything. All I know is, you’re a good doctor. A very good junior. I assure you I’m not going to leave you without options.”
You manage a semblance of a smile. “I appreciate your confidence in me, Dr. Rintarou, and I’d be lying if I said the timing doesn’t concern me. I’ve only just stabilized my case portfolio and begun longitudinal follow-up on our Fontan cohort. With two active Kawasaki recoveries under my wing and a post-op HLHS patient in Stage II interstage surveillance, continuity of care is something I’m very conscious of, both for the patients and…myself.”
Dr. Rintarou nods his head as if lost in his thoughts. He knew your relationship went beyond the long hours or surgical assists. It’s the mentorship, his mentorship that’s helped you build a name in this department. He’s a cornerstone of the way you approach differential review and post-op protocols.
“There are five other cardiovascular surgeons at this hospital,” he says.
“Yes,” you confirm, already anticipating where this conversation is headed.
“So all we need to do is connect you with one of them. I’ve spoken highly of you to my colleagues. They’d be foolish not to take you on.” As he speaks, the mental roster of remaining cardiovascular surgeons assembles in your mind. Dr. Okazaki is the first to appear; characterized by chronic facial erythema and a general puffiness that suggests long-standing hypertension or perhaps an allergy to professional decorum. His assistants look like they’ve been recruited from a pageant circuit, and the overt favoritism borders on actionable. You quickly dismiss him. There’s Dr. Yashiro who has an unremarkable personality and is professionally solid. He’s closest to Dr. Rintarou in both age and surgical philosophy. His OR is well-known, well-run, and free from boundary-blurring behaviors. To put it short, he’s reliable and a definite contender.
Dr. Pole (yes, legally and quite literally, “Pole”) is another possibility. You’ve never heard him utter a word, yet his work speaks for itself and he has achieved a mythical status among the staff. He’s rail-thin, almost ascetic in appearance, and operates exclusively to classical compositions. Mahler and Rachmaninoff always echo through his theater while octogenarian aortas are carefully sutured back together under his bony hands. He’s highly selective with his cases, but if admitted to his orbit, you’d be assured a adequate, if slightly eerie, apprenticeship.
There’s Dr. Pohei...there was Dr. Pohei, to be exact. He submitted his retirement paperwork just yesterday and effectively eliminated himself from contention.
In short: options exist, however, no one can quite replicate the ecosystem you’ve grown under with Dr. Rintarou. Each path forward has its merits and its complications; none of them include a mentor who would believe in you as much as he does.
“Let’s start with Dr. Yashiro and proceed from there,” you say, attempting to strike a tone of reasoned pragmatism. He nods once and steps away from the window, and in that pause, you finally gather the nerve to reintroduce the question he’s been deftly sidestepping. “How soon are you leaving?”
“A few days.”
“A few days.” Goodness, you hardly conceal the dissonance. He had used the word “immediate” before, yes, but you’d clung perhaps naïvely to the hope that “immediate” still left room for weeks. Preferably, months, even. A man who has practiced here for four decades doesn’t simply exit stage left over a long weekend. “What about your cases?”
He sighs, although it’s not impatient. “Haven’t you noticed? I stopped accepting new consults three weeks ago. I’ve only got a handful of operative cases left, post-ops mostly. Everything else has been either reassigned or discharged. Mimiko wants me to be done within three days, max,” he adds. “She’s booked us a short trip, and after that we’ll be visiting the grandkids for the holidays.”
Good for Dr. Rintarou, truly. He’ll be headed to pumpkin patches, go on long-haul flights, build family portraits with matching sweaters. He’ll be stringing up Christmas lights while you’re fielding emergent aortic dissections and trying to remember which attending’s OR etiquette includes mandatory silence during induction. It’s a shame because the man standing before you has filled a paternal role your own father never quite managed when you were attending med school and the thought of navigating this institution without his reassurance feels as disorienting as it does inevitable.
“You know, I will say this again, for someone so technically gifted, you’re remarkably opaque. I’ve never quite figured out what you’re thinking.”
You offer a neutral smile. You’ve heard the critique before, often couched in more flattering terms, but always the same conclusion: detached.
“I’ve spoken with the others, as I said before,” he continues, coming to the main topic. “I made inquiries on your behalf. Unfortunately, no one seems to be expanding their team at the moment.”
You nod once, not surprised. The cardiovascular department has been tight with its intake this quarter. No one wants the burden of onboarding amid holiday caseloads and conference season.
Dr. Rintarou adjusts his posture slightly, as though preparing for a reaction, though you give him none. “That said, Dr. Chishiya is currently under Dr. Subaru, and I’ve put in a word. If you're willing, you’ll be placed under him as well.”
You hadn’t even considered Dr. Subaru. For lack of a more professional term, the man was a jackass. Brilliant, yes, but notoriously dickish and a know-it-all, and not in a way that bred excellence. He was the sort of attending who demanded submission rather than inquiry, deference rather than dialogue. Dr. Chishiya, by contrast, was an anomaly. He was extremely perceptive, and unusually reserved for someone in the early stages of his surgical career. He possessed excellence in both judgment and hands that were difficult to ignore, and though a junior, he navigated Dr. Subaru’s orbit with a perfect finesse. You’d noted his surgical notes; they were concise, diagnostic acumen above average, with a distinct ability to anticipate complications before they arose. However, you did not like him and you have butted heads with him many times, though one sided.
If you’d taken a sip of coffee, you would have performed a spit take all over his face.
“I take it you two still don’t get along?” Dr. Rintarou asks.
You’re not shocked he remembers your one-sided rivalry. You don’t think you ever gave him a briefing, but your facial expressions never say a lot in front of your seniors, though the cold shoulder you give Chishiya is hardly unnoticeable. You’d kept it professional, of course, but cold professionalism isn’t hard to spot in a field that demands teamwork under pressure.
“Can someone that arrogant get along with anyone?” You joke, trying to push the blame where it appropriately belongs: on Chishiya.
He laughs. “You were the only one to have a problem with him. Frankly, we never could figure it out. There was even a rumor going around that—”
You raise a hand with your palm up in dismissal. “If that’s the pathway forward, I’ll make the necessary adjustments.”
He falls silent, but the corners of his mouth twitch upward. He knows that your neutrality is as much performance as it is armor.
You say nothing more because regardless of what rumor Dr. Rintarou was about to resurrect, be it petty rivalry or something more insinuating, you already know what matters: the assignment has been made, and personal bias has no place in the OR.
You shift your stethoscope around your neck and bow in farewell and head toward the doctors’ lounge. Normally, you would going there (too many opinionated specialists arguing over hospital policy, and too many coffee-stained jokes passed around) but lately, the catering has been uncharacteristically impressive, and on days when your appetite isn’t suppressed by exhaustion or subconscious dread, it’s reason enough to show up. The hospital struck some deal with a local company known for using seasonal produce and balanced macronutrients, and honestly, it’s been the only part of your day that feels remotely nourishing.
The bad news you received was another reason why you wanted to have a good meal.
You step inside, bypassing a pair of interns half-asleep at the corner table, and make your way to the buffet. Today’s spread is traditional and clearly curated with nutritional value in mind. You reach for the bamboo tongs and begin assembling your plate: A scoop of hijiki seaweed salad, lightly dressed in sesame oil. Excellent, since it was loaded with insoluble fiber, calcium, and iron. It was perfect for gut health and keeping your ferritin levels up, especially given your tendency to skip meals on call days. Next: a perfectly grilled saba fillet with skin crisped, meat oily and plain delicious. Appreciated, for it was rich in omega-3 fatty acids, particularly DHA and EPA. It’s a neuroprotective food, one you’ve been gravitating toward more frequently. You tell yourself it’s just a healthy habit, when the truth is, there’s something appealing about the idea of feeding your brain what it needs to work properly.
You spot the last few slices of takuan, your absolute favourite, especially when it’s glistening with the right amount of pickling brine, and reach instinctively for the chopsticks. Unfortunately, when your fingers brush the lacquered wood, another hand gets there first.
“Takuan is high in fiber and promotes digestive motility. The fermentation process enhances gut microbiota diversity, is what—” the man glances at the tray and then at you, “—you were thinking.”
You turn, already suspecting who it is, and sure enough, there he stands with his white coat neatly buttoned, ID badge straight and smugness oozing out of him. His irritably handsome face only makes your blood boil.
Your eyes narrow.
“Dr. Chishiya.”
“Dr. [L/N].” He glances at the badge you have pinned on your left chest (he has a habit of doing that whenever he passes you in the halls): Running on Caffeine and Echocardiograms. Dr. Rintarou says he can never tell what you’re thinking. Chishiya must be on a whole other level because you can never guess what’s going on in his brilliant mind.
“I see your talents extend beyond cardiothoracic surgery and into psychic nutrition assessments,” you strike coolly. While he’s looking at you with his signature pokerface, you quickly pluck the last slices of takuan off the tray before he can and count it as a win. “Must be exhausting knowing everything all the time.”
His lips quirk in what might’ve been a smirk, if his facial muscles ever committed to an emotion. “Only when someone else is pretending they weren’t thinking the same thing.” You take a breath and will yourself not to let this moment spiral into one of your infamous one-sided sparring matches. You decide the best course of action is to maintain professionalism, go sit and have your lunch, as you planned.
He takes the seat across from you without asking, sliding his tray into place like he owns the table and possibly the room. He doesn’t make a comment on how you will be under Dr. Subaru along with him, and you don’t bring it up either. You know he knows because nothing ever escapes him. In fact, you’re willing to bet he read the rotation list twice over, memorized it, and made five strategic predictions on how the workload will be distributed.
You chew your fish and stare at him from the corner of your eye. There’s this feeling in your chest that’s inherently persistent, similar to you trying to recall the details of the dream you keep having, that dissolved the moment you woke. Your hippocampus isn’t helping. It keeps flagging him as relevant, but your prefrontal cortex refuses to decode why you’re supposed to remember something about him on a personal level.
There’s this…familiarity and the sense that your body knows something your brain has forgotten.
For a brief period in the past six months, you considered the possibility that maybe, in some hazy, sleep-deprived moment off-call or after a drink too many, you had sex with him because that would explain the inexplicable heat under your skin when he’s near. However, you’ve dissected that hypothesis thoroughly and ruled it out. There are no signs of that kind of intimacy. There are no gaps in your memory large enough to house such a monumental mistake.
Your eyes flicker to his mouth for an imperceptible scan, call it a subconscious assessment, if you must. The tissue is soft, well-vascularized and...and...
You redirect your gaze immediately, as though caught in an act your frontal lobe would rather disown.
No, your body doesn’t register any tactile familiarity. There’s no somatic memory triggered by the sight of his lips. You don’t recall any phantom imprint on skin or musculature. There’s no surge of cortisol or oxytocin, no involuntary flush, no dopamine signal in the nucleus accumbens either. Considering your findings, you’re nearly certain they’ve never made contact with any part of your skin in a way that would bypass professional boundaries.
“You’ve been dissociating more often.”
Your chopsticks pause mid-air. You should have expected him to notice because as mentioned before, nothing escapes his brilliant mind. You lean in with a saccharine smile that screams fake. “I’m sorry, are you doing psych evals now between lunch and endoscopy consults?” To think Dr. Rintarou labels you as detached.
Chishiya leans back just slightly, head tilting in that way he does, like he’s both amused and studying you under a microscope. “You exhibit prolonged gaze latency and environmental unresponsiveness at least twice daily. They’re five-second windows, though sometimes longer.”
Your shake your head. “Observing me that closely, Doctor? Should I be flattered or concerned?”
“I’m just surprised you haven’t charted it yourself. You’re punctilious, almost pathologically so.”
“I’m also functional,” you snap at him. “Which is more than I can say for someone who diagnoses people based on hallway glances and cafeteria seating patterns.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “Patterns are data, Dr. [L/N]. Repetition is diagnostic.”
“Ego is not a substitute for evidence, Dr. Chishiya. You talk like you invented clinical reasoning, but all you’re doing is dressing conjecture in vocabulary.”
Chishiya picks up a slice of takuan and chews it calmly. You feel like you’re nothing more than dust. “And yet, I’m usually right.”
“That’s not the same as being infallible.” You study the expression he has on and though he’s not saying anything, the look in his eyes state that he considers himself to be statistically superior. “What do you want, Doctor? A pat on the back? A medal? A thank-you note for diagnosing something that hasn’t even been confirmed?”
Again, he doesn’t entertain you with a response and that gets on your nerves.
Fuck, you hate how smart he is.
He looks away from you and you think you’ve won, but you’re mistaken. “You should eat the takuan, Doctor. It’ll help your gut and might even untangle a few things in your head.”
Your instincts tell you to smash your plate in his face and feign innocence, but then you remember you’re 25; legal and board-certified. You have been an adult for years now but only he stirs your emotions this way.
You click your tongue. “Actually, if we’re going to speak in systems, it’s my central nervous system that feels dysregulated, not my enteric one.” you continue, “The gut-brain axis is a two-way street, but let’s not overestimate the role of fermented radish in resolving potential disruptions to executive function or declarative memory processing. I’d need more than takuan to fix what feels like a chronic, low-grade neurological anomaly.” His shoulders shift enough for you to know he’s listening. “And before you assign psychosomatic qualifiers to my cognitive lapses, maybe consider that not every unexplained neurological pattern is rooted in unprocessed trauma or psychological repression. Some of us are experiencing symptoms outside the current diagnostic lexicon. I suggest you rein in the compulsion to pathologize everyone who doesn’t function on your preferred wavelength. It’s a common cognitive bias. Even in high-performing physicians.”
You return to your meal, realizing you said everything in a single breath. “Though I’ll grant you this,” you add, as an afterthought, “for someone who clearly prides himself on emotional detachment, your fixation is bordering on... intrusive.” You reach for the takuan without looking at it and pop it into your mouth and it’s not because he told you to but because you want every cognitive advantage when the time comes to prove him wrong.
Chishiya wipes his fingers with a napkin as though clearing away something unsanitary; not food, but perhaps your rebuttal. “You’re correct,” he says finally, placid as ever. “The gut-brain axis isn’t a magic wand. However, you’re oversimplifying your own dysregulation by implying it’s either psychological or novel. The binary isn’t real. It never was.”
You glance up mid-chew, already bracing yourself.
“Multifactorial dysfunction is still dysfunction, Dr. [L/N]. You talk like an academic paper trying to out-argue its own citation list, but what you’re describing...impaired memory encoding, temporal dissociation, executive delay, it all fits within several established frameworks. We can call it subclinical seizure activity, microglial inflammation, or yes, trauma.”
He brings a fingertip up to idly press into his temple as if conducting a neuro exam on himself. “I’m not interested in labeling you. I’m interested in the discrepancy between your cognitive ability and your behavioral output. You perform at 98th percentile levels but your latency spikes during moments of low cognitive load. That’s not inefficiency. That’s avoidance and avoidance, Doctor, is never random.”
You stop chewing.
“You don’t have to like the diagnosis. You just have to acknowledge the presentation.”
“I haven’t been presented,” you shoot back after swallowing. “You’re interpreting a dataset you were never invited to collect.”
“Fair.” He nods once. “Although, let’s not pretend you didn’t want to be observed.”
You hate it because he’s right and he’s infuriating and he’s watching you like he already knows what page of your file to open to next.
“You make it sound pathological to be human,” you mutter. “You flatten everything into patterns and metrics. Not everything has to be studied.”
“True,” he concedes, standing now, collecting his tray with him. “Tell me this: if you’re bleeding internally, would you rather I call it ‘being human’ or run the scan?”
You say nothing, and he starts to walk away, satisfied with your lack of response. The ash blonde takes five steps before he pauses and looks over his shoulder.
“For the record, Dr. [L/N], my fixation isn’t emotional, it’s neurological. You’re an outlier.”
When Chishiya leaves the doctors’ lounge, you eat the remaining fermented radish with a grimace. Being right wasn’t just a habit for him, it was pathology. The diagnostic certainty paraded as virtue, when really, it was just his favorite form of control.
You pinch the bridge of your nose.
“Fuck you.”