Subject: Dr. Ayuna Hartman
Document Type: Personal Diary Extract
Original Date: Day 2563 of Restraint
Location Found: Private Study, Hidden Drawer
Security Level: RESTRICTED
Authentication: VERIFIED
The Insider’s Briefing: This entry reveals a shift in Dr. Hartman’s psyche: restraint gives way to attachment. Patient: Gabriel [REDACTED] becomes more than a case, his “unreasonable tenderness” disrupting her control. Surveillance confirms she lingered at his bedside beyond protocol, echoing her fixation. The “red collector” she once obeyed falls silent in his presence, replaced by desire. For the first time, Hartman concedes: “I am not immune.”
Administration remains unaware. We will watch for escalation.
Her private thoughts…
Then there was Gabriel. At first, a case file, another failing heart, another body to open and close. He arrived as a case before he arrived as a man. But he lingered in my thoughts longer than the others. His history read like contradiction: fragile, yet stubborn; weak heart, yet vivid soul.
I studied his vitals, yet my eyes strayed to his sketches left on the bedside table. Artists leave evidence the way surgeons leave scars. Art where there should have been despair. Color where there should have been resignation. It offended statistics and pleased something in me that prefers rebellion when it is beautiful. I found myself tracing his lines in memory, more than his arteries.
He answered with warmth unperformed. Subject displays unreasonable tenderness under duress. That tenderness irritated my inheritance and soothed it, both. I wanted to leave the room. I stayed.
Gentleness is a posture I distrust. His was not removable. When he slept, his face forgot to perform. It still glowed. I stood in the doorway longer than protocol permits. I called it vigilance. The truth felt like heat.
A heart was promised to no one. It promised itself to him. I forbade the part of me that collects red to speak. I closed the seam as if shutting a book I had not finished reading.
It unsettles me. He is supposed to be a patient, nothing more. He makes it easy for everyone to be kind. He makes it harder for me to be only a surgeon. But I find myself returning to him, not for the case, but for the anomaly of who he is. I measured the distance between curiosity and attachment and found it had no length.
I am not immune. I did not plan to want gentleness. I want it.
