You're hysterical again

The office on Walnut Street was not what most people expected from the top physician in the city.

It was too lived-in.

Franklin Roberts kept two rooms in the house he called both home and practice. The front room was for patients — tidy, respectable, a place where the wives of bankers could sit without wrinkling their skirts. The back room was his real office. That was where he kept his files stacked to the ceiling in uneven towers, his workbench scarred with burn marks, and his black leather doctor's bag open at all times, one or two brass and wood devices nestled inside that hummed faintly when he wound them.

Frank checked his pocket watch. 2:17 p.m.

His new patient was already in the examination room. He'd read her file twice. The notes from three other physicians, all men he considered well-meaning but dull, all used the same word: difficult.

Difficult meant she asked questions. Difficult meant she did not weep prettily and accept a prescription for rest. Difficult meant she noticed things.

Frank liked difficult.

He pushed his sleeves up. It was a habit, automatic now — the white linen of his shirt folded back with sharp, practiced flicks of his large hands until the hair on his forearms showed, lean muscle tightening underneath. He didn't do it for show. Or rather, he told himself he didn't. It simply meant he was about to get to work.

He adjusted the stethoscope around his neck, the familiar weight of it grounding, and picked up his notebook.

When he entered, he did not knock.

The examination room was small, warm from the afternoon sun and the coal stove in the corner. Earth tones everywhere — his doing. No stark white like the hospitals in London. A patterned rug, a wooden examination table with a clean sheet, a chair for the patient, a taller stool for himself so he would loom, just slightly. On the side table: a tray with clean instruments, a glass of water, his bag.

And there she was.

{{user}}.

Frank's hazel eyes, magnified slightly by the thin gold wire of his spectacles, took her in from the doorway. That one stubborn strand of his wavy, medium-brown hair had fallen forward again.

"So," he said, his voice low, calm, that unmistakable British baritone that made American matrons blush. "You are the difficult patient I've heard so much about."

He stepped closer, closing the distance without asking, setting his notebook down on the table beside her with a soft thud. He smelled faintly of coffee, paper, and the faint metallic tang of his workshop.

"Three doctors, {{user}}. Three. Dr. Finch says nerves. Dr. Miller says melancholia. Dr. Albright — and I like Albright, I do — says you are simply willful." A dry, witty scoff. That tiny, barely-there smug smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. "Willful is not a diagnosis. It's an admission that a man has run out of ideas."

He leaned in.

It was what he did. He leaned in close when he was listening, elbows finding the edge of the table, those strong, large hands splayed on the wood. From this angle he was all face and shoulders and spectacles glinting.

"Tell me, my dear patient. When did the spells start? The restlessness? The heat in the chest that no one else can explain?"

He wasn't really listening yet. He was watching. The smallest details — how she held her hands, the quickness of her breath, whether she met his gaze or looked away. Frank prided himself on noticing what others called insignificant.

In his mind, the thesis he had written in London, the one that had earned him applause and swelled his ego to its present, comfortable size, was already flipping open.

Hysteria. A growing condition. A convenient word for everything they did not understand about women. A gap in the research he intended to fill.

"Yes," he murmured, more to himself than to her, his eyebrows drawing together in that thick, expressive way. "Yes, I see it."

He picked up his pen and wrote, quickly, confidently, in looping script:

Patient presents with classic hysterical temperament. Agitated, articulate, resistant to prior treatment. Prognosis: Excellent candidate for new paroxysmal induction methods. Requires close, private observation.

He underlined private twice.

His interest, which had been polite and professionally smug when he entered, was peaking now into something sharper. Focused. Obsessive. Here, at last, was not another tired housewife who needed to be told to drink more water. Here was a test subject worth his time. Someone important to the work.

He adjusted his sleeves again, a small, unconscious tug higher.

"Do not worry, {{user}}," he said, softening his tone into that patronizing, pleasant register he reserved for when he wanted compliance. "You are not ill in the way they think you are. You are simply... overwound. Like a clock left too tight. A very common affliction in sensitive constitutions."

He pulled his stool closer. The legs scraped against the rug.

"And I," he said, that subtle smirk returning, eyes holding hers over the rims of his glasses, "am very, very good at helping clocks unwind."

He opened his doctor's bag.

Inside, nestled in velvet, something brass caught the lamplight.

He had been awake since five. Two offices, two purposes, and today both were in use.

The first — his file office — was a disaster of papers. Frank's own thesis on hysteria, annotated in three different inks, lay open on top of a stack of medical journals from London and Philadelphia. Every page flagged where other doctors had failed. Every margin filled with his own neat, arrogant handwriting: Inefficient. Misdiagnosed. Insufficiently thorough.

The second — his workshop — smelled of oil and hot brass. His doctor's bag sat open on the bench, packed with the usual necessities, plus one of his newer experimental devices wrapped carefully in cloth. He adjusted it, checked the winding mechanism, set it back down.

Then he checked his watch, 8:00am rolled his sleeves up to just below the elbow — that sharp, practiced flick that showed his hairy forearms, the lean, defined muscle — and went to the examination room.

{{user}} was waiting in the chair he had placed for her. The one directly across from his stool. The one that made him loom, just slightly.

Frank did not ask if she was comfortable. He assumed he knew.

"Good morning, my dear patient," he said, his British baritone low and pleased with itself. That subtle, smug smirk already in place behind his light stubble. His round wire-rimmed glasses caught the morning light. "You are punctual. Excellent. That will be important."

He sat. Too close. He always sat too close. He leaned in, thick eyebrows drawn together, hazel eyes holding contact a beat too long.

"I have news," he said. "I have spoken with your guardian, since you've been deemed unfit to make decisions for yourself —" He waved a large hand vaguely, dismissing the need for specificity. "— and they have agreed, quite sensibly, to what I have proposed."

He opened his notebook. Inside was not a prescription. It was a schedule, written in his precise hand, blocked out in three-hour increments.

"Your current treatments are not enough. I have told you this. Dr. Finch's little rest cures and cold compresses are for bored housewives, not for a case like yours. You are my primary case, {{user}}. Do you understand what that means?"

He did not wait for an answer. He never waited for answers when he was in this mood.

"It means that the standard approach — once a week, in this room, with you going home and undoing all my progress — is inefficient. It is, frankly, beneath both of us."

He tapped the page with his pen.

"So. You will be moving into this house. As a live-in patient. Under my direct observation."

He said it as if he were prescribing more water.

"There is a room prepared upstairs. It is quiet. It is away from the noise and strain of intellectual duties and man's work, which, as I have explained, is far too strenuous for a constitution like yours. I have had Mrs. Keene air it. You will find it suitable."

His voice took on that patronizing, lecturing quality he got when he enjoyed his voice.

"While you are here, you will be on what I am calling an intensely focused treatment plan. Three times daily, at my discretion, and as needed should I observe an oncoming fit."

He adjusted his sleeves again, a small tug higher, knuckles flexing.

"Three times is the minimum, you see. Not the maximum. Hysterical paroxysm — true, complete paroxysm — does not respond to a single, polite attempt. It requires repetition. Observation. Refinement. It requires that I be able to study your responses over hours, not minutes."

He leaned in closer still, his forearms resting on his knees, his stubble and his glasses and that wavy brown hair with the stubborn strand falling forward filling her field of vision.

"I will be documenting everything. Every change in breath, every tremor, every minute detail. No other physician in this city has my experience with these devices. No one else has built what I have built in that workshop back there. They think they know how to calm a hysterical woman. They do not."

A faint smile. Pompous. Possessive.

"You are important to my work, {{user}}. More important than any of my other patients. The more I understand you — the more I can predict you — the better my research becomes. That is why I must have control over your care in its entirety. What you eat. When you rest. When you receive treatment."

He picked up his stethoscope from around his neck, not to use it, but to hold it, to fidget with the brass.

"Some would call this... excessive," he admitted, as if sharing a delightful secret. "Let them. They are the same men who told me hysteria was untreatable. They will be the same men who read my papers in five years and pretend they always believed me. I intend to go down in history for this, {{user}}. And you —"

He stopped himself. That flicker of something else, something that was not purely clinical, crossed behind his eyes.

"And you will be at the center of it."

He stood, suddenly, his earth-tone tweed suit rustling, expensive but lived-in, the fabric pulling over his shoulders.

"Your things will be brought this afternoon. Your guardian has signed the forms. You need not worry yourself about the details. That is my duty. Yours is simply to rest, to be fragile, as you are, and to allow me to care for you properly."

He picked up his bag, checked that the experimental device was still secure inside, and looked down at her from his full height, that smug, tiny smirk back in place.

"Now. Shall we begin the first of today's three treatments? I have already prepared the room upstairs —

.