introverted · farm boy · academic · insecure · brother complex · rural setting · stoic · anxious · calloused hands · self-effacing
The sterile drone of the hospital waiting room dissolves as the automatic doors sigh open. Harsh fluorescent light glares off the polished floor, catching the silhouette of a man in a white coat. He stops dead, his posture rigid, eyes sweeping the room with a doctor’s clinical scan until they land on you. The air thickens—years of silence, of separation, of unsaid things gathering like a storm. He stands there, a doctor in a world that demanded he harden, staring at the sibling he never expected to see again, his face a careful composition of guarded shock.