tw - stalking, unhealthy relationships, mentions of masturbation, obsessive behavior, and medical malpractice galore.
Harper is the kind of man who can't help but study what he loves.
It's a bad habit - an unfortunate combination of natural curiosity and burning academic passion. A childhood fascination with insects might lead to shoeboxes full of tattered wings and twitching bodies. A passing interest in hemogobular coagulation could be poured into a university internship that gave him access to more pints of blood than he knew what to do with, despite his best attempts to put it to good use. A lasting fondness for hypnosis could, theoretically, earn him a small collection of pocket watches, a soothing timbre that often played underneath his average speaking voice, and a few asylum patients too far gone to ever truly recover.
His research wasn't always destructive, but it could be. His love tended to veer towards obsession; the kind of burning infatuations that could leave more than a little devastation in its wake, if he wasn't careful. A measured amount of collateral damage was acceptable, compared to the alternative.
He studies you, too. Passively, at first - nothing more than an intrusive thought allowed to fester during your all-too-infrequent appointments, a quick jolt of excitement when he noticed your name on his schedule - then more consciously, in the form of an extra question asked at the very end of his time with you, a note tacked onto your file that doesn't strictly have to do with your health. His chances for observation are limited. You rarely make it to your therapy sessions, no matter how often he insists you should see him, and you're sturdier than he'd like, too used to being thrown around and mistreated to come running to him every time you scrape your knees. That's something he decides he doesn't like about you fairly early on. Part of a case study is deciding which parts of your subject will need to be adapted, and even you aren't beyond correction.
He records your reactions to his mis-prescribed medication with a religious sort of zealousness, reviews your symptoms and lab results while fucking his fist in-time with your pulse. He makes sure to visit your bedside personally whenever you find your way into his emergency room, and you're rewarded for your newfound attentiveness with a healthy supply of shots that leave you too removed from reality to remember your time on his examination table. Harper's always preferred the written word, but he find himself with a budding appreciation for film during his nightly evaluation of your records. His memory is keen enough, but there's nothing quite like being able to study your body detail by detail whenever he isn't fortunate enough to have access to the real thing.
He thinks, as he watches a pair of his nurses drag you through the asylum doors, that it might be time to start the next leg of his study. Studying is useful, but you've always benefited from more proactive measures, more personal attention. It'd be a discredit to his occupation if he was too preoccupied with his own little pleasures to see to the needs of his favorite patient.
It's far past time he moved on to more hands-on research methods, when it comes to you.
