This was written sometime last summer for a challenge over at a livejournal comm. It is oh so very uncanon.
The smell of blood – dulled by decades of abstinence – reaches his nostrils before he opens the door. An overwhelming scent – dangerously intoxicating and strangely wonderful – hits him full force as he steps into the room and he instinctively stops drawing unnecessary breath. He's never knows such an overpowering scent before, and the toxicity of it, mingled with the acidic welcome he receives, shakes him to the core.
She's a broken, bloody mess, but still has enough spark to throw him a disdainful glare from her perch on the bed. He returns her sneer with a cool smile of his own, having been forewarned about her unstable temperament beforehand, he's thinks he's ready for just about anything she can throw at him.
His mask of innate tranquility in place, he kneels beside her. She pulls away, a low growl issuing from deep within her chest as his icy hands make contact with her scorching flesh.
A low string of vitriolic profanities – mostly aimed at him – spew like acid from her mouth, but the doctor lets it pass without incident. His hands work quickly, deftly, but she bridles at his touch and he can feel his calm beginning to give way to irritation.
"Tell me, doctor," she sneers at last, the last word drawn out and positively dripping with derisive scorn, "how did you ever manage to get a license to practice medicine in your current condition?"
He does not answer – won't stoop to her level – because he knows she goading him, trying to provoke him into doing something irrational. Something, deep down, they both know he's more than capable of. Even so, no one abhors violence more than him; it's a foreign language of which he refuses to learn, unless out of absolute necessity.
And so, the dance continues in much the same vein as he patches up the broken limbs of her arrogance and sews up the bloody, torn mess of her vain pride, until a particularly disparaging comment about his family cuts below the surface.
His hands snap away from her side and find her throat within the span of a single heartbeat. His face is inches from hers, his ocher eyes ablaze with cold fury as they lock onto hers. Violence, now he's speaking her language. Her eyes widen in fear – huge and uncertain because she knows she pushed him too far – but something like a smug smile begins to etch the corners of her mouth upward in an, I told you so grin, and his fingers loosen in disgust.
He goes back to patching her up, all the while wanting nothing more than to wash his hands of this pretentious wolf, but his moral obligation as a doctor will not allow him to walk away from a patient – even one as ungrateful and abrasive as Leah Clearwater.
Silence engulfs them, the heat of his anger burning the room to cinders around them, but the self-satisfied smirk remains plastered across Leah's face.
She knows she's won this battle.