#hannah geist

tags: dead dove do not eat • clinical body horror • blood kink • implied sexual fantasies • sick fic • slow burn • sexual tension

It looks almost erotic.

Not in any way that involves touch or warmth, but in the precise, immaculate arrangement of surfaces and light, the way the clinic seems designed to imitate the interior of an idealized human. The air is chilled to keep samples stable, yet the temperature has the strange effect of making everything feel slightly suspended. It is still and contained, almost as if time moves differently inside these walls.

The fluorescent lights burn an unyielding white overhead, bleaching color from skin and fabric alike, leaving only pale gradients where life should be. The walls are smooth, seamless, like the polished interior of bone; the tiled floor reflects the overhead glow like fluid pooled in a sterile cavity. Even the stainless steel counters gleam like exposed ribs, stripped of all softness. Flawless.

The clinic does not resemble a workplace so much as the anatomical model of one. It is an environment rendered clean to the point of abstraction, the suggestion of blood and tissue without the mess, the shape of human bodies without their tenderness.

Every instrument has its place, every sample has a number, every process has a cycle, like organs performing their predetermined functions. The centrifuges hum like a heartbeat, steady and uninterruptible, while the refrigeration units exhale in slow, regulated breaths. It is a body with no waste, no error, no fever; except for the fever walking inside it, carrying it like a quiet secret beneath his skin.

Syd’s.

And when you stand there, in the center of all that quiet machinery, it feels less like you are observing the system and more as though you have been taken into it, as an intruder, a captive swallowed whole by a structure that will, in time, either assimilate you or reject you.

You are standing beside him for the first time, in a space that belongs to him more than it belongs to the building itself. His presence is so woven into the routine of the room that it feels like the equipment has learned to calibrate itself to the distance of his hands. He does not acknowledge you at once; his attention is fixed on the pipette balanced between his fingers, the exact angle of the microtube beneath it, the delicately curved meniscus of clear solution reflecting the overhead lights like a thin, trembling blade of glass. His movements are controlled not by hesitation but by precision. It seems that an unnecessary gesture would cost him effort he does not have the capacity to spare.

He is tall in the way that looks accidental, as if the bones simply kept growing without consulting the body that had to carry them. He’s all long limbs, narrow shoulders, a frame that seems nearly too light for its own architecture. His hair is a startling copper-red, not warm but sharp, like the tinted reflection of a warning light on polished steel. Against the clinic’s white glare, it appears surreal, a flare of color in an environment designed to erase all warmth. His skin is pale, not untouched by sun but rather by ease; a thin, fine layer of freckles dusts across his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose, disappearing down along the line of his throat, and you catch yourself wondering; a fleeting, unspoken thought, whether that constellation extends lower, scattered across his ribs, his chest, down the narrow plane of his waist.

But it is his eyes that hold you.

They’re large, unguarded and shockingly blue; not the romantic shade of clear skies, but the hyperoxygenated blue of blood seen through bright light, a colour that suggests fever, a temperature continuously rising just below the surface. When he finally does glance your way, the look is brief and exacting, as if he is not looking at your expression or your posture, but only measuring your presence, your weight, temperature and the effect on the air between you.

He looks like someone who was not born so much as assembled. He’s grown to function in this place, calibrated to exist under this sterile illumination. As if every freckle, every hollow, every flicker of his gaze is part of the clinic’s internal anatomy. As if he is not merely in this environment, but made by it.

And for all you know, he might’ve been.

And yet, standing beside him, you feel something the clinic has worked so hard to erase: you feel warmth, humanity, and a pulse.

“Don’t stand so close to the incubator,” he says without turning, his voice level, unhurried, but quiet in the way of someone who measures each word before he allows it to leave him. “Your body heat will interfere with the temperature readings.”

Simply observed fact, spoken the way one might state the pH of blood, or the boiling point of ethanol.

You shift back half a step. Your movement is calibrated to acknowledge the instruction without conceding authority, as well as to match his. It’s careful enough to show competence and not compliance. You are here to work with him, not beneath him; you are certain of this, and the certainty holds quietly in your spine. He feels it too, though neither of you remark on it.

“You’re the new intern,” he says after a moment, and the words carry no tone of inquiry. It is identification, classification, the way one might label a slide before it goes under the microscope.

“Yes,” you answer, because anything more would be unnecessary, and anything less would be performative.

You do not wish to act.

He sets the pipette in its cradle like someone who handles an object that has become an extension of the body rather than a tool held by it. Only then does he look at you directly.

And you understand, instantly, why others speak of him the way they do: not with admiration, nor fear exactly, but with the cautious fascination reserved for rare organisms in controlled environments that shift when observed. The kind that appear dormant until they are not. He is not unpredictable, no. He is simply not readable in human terms. His reactions are small, interior, calibrated along different measure lines. They remind you of a system stabilizing itself in real time.

Standing under the white lights, he does not look aloof, but intentional.

Every silence, every breath, every withheld gesture feels chosen.

Sometimes you wish he could also choose yours for you.

You admire the way he inhabits himself: deliberately, precisely, wholly, obscenely efficiently, as though the world is a place he passes through carefully, in order not to disturb the delicate balance of whatever keeps him standing.

His gaze is not sharp, and it is far cold. It has the clarity of examination, but without the distance that usually accompanies it. He looks at you the way one studies the shape of a result before understanding its implications. In it, he’s patient, quiet and absorbing. There is no hint of threat in it, no search for flaw or leverage. Instead, his attention moves over you as though he is mapping your presence against the structure of his days, determining where you will settle in the machinery of his routine, what shift—if any—in pattern your arrival will introduce.

You feel the assessment as placement. You know you are being added to a sequence rather than judged. And the strangest part is the way your body responds, and how unexpectedly steady it is. You meet his gaze without flinching, without compensating, without shrinking to make yourself easier to categorize. You know he’d despise that. You are now a constant, a variable he has not yet solved, and do not try to become anything other than what you are.

Something in him notes this. It feels thrilling.

“They usually last a week,” he says. His tone is factual, like the measured reporting of cell viability under stress. “It’s not complicated work, but it is repetitive. Most people think they can tolerate repetition. Most people are wrong.”

“I don’t mind repetition,” you reply, and your voice does not waver, because it is true.

You notice a subtle shift in his expression; the faintest recalibration, as if you have added a new variable to an equation he had already solved.

Hadn’t he?

He turns away again, but now you notice the way his body holds itself, the way his shoulder rises just a bit too high, as though there is tension coiled beneath the scapula that never fully releases. And once you see that, you see more:

The pallor that is not the pallor of someone who avoids sunlight, but of someone whose immune system wages constant quiet war.

The faint redness along the rims of his eyes, not from crying or sleep deprivation alone, but from the strain of a body that has learned to accommodate illness as a baseline condition rather than a deviation.

The tremor felt, vibrating, when he reaches for another instrument. It’s a shiver that seems to live inside him, an internal fever that never fully breaks.

He moves carefully not because he is delicate, but because he has memorized the cost of exertion.

He is a body held together by routine and force of will, and the startling thing is that he does not appear resentful of it. He is not hardened by suffering. He is merely hollowed.

There is a difference. Hollowing leaves room for a thing or two to be poured in.

You soon realize you are watching him too closely, admiring the precision of his hands, the steadiness of his grip, and you think, for a fraction of a moment, that he may not notice.

He does.

His washed-out blue gaze flicks to yours again, and the contact is brief but direct enough to feel like a pulse taken at the wrist.

Then he returns to his work, and you return to yours, and neither of you comment.

But the awareness remains, fine as filigree: You are an intern. He is your supervisor. Your bodies are two separate systems.

For now.

And yet, something has already begun to synchronize, you think.

Is it a shared rhythm of observation?

A near-silence that is not empty, but waiting for once?

Two organisms adjusting to one another’s presence. Blissful.

Before touch.

Before trust.

Before anything resembling choice.

💉💉💉

It happens on your fourth day; late enough that the rhythms of the clinic have begun to take on a kind of muted familiarity, early enough that you have not yet learned Syd’s thresholds. The lab is quieter than usual. A centrifuge spins in the corner. The overhead lights seem dimmer, though they are not; it is simply that the day has worn itself to a thin, pale edge.

Syd is seated on the steel stool beside the sampling bench, sleeves pushed to his—yes— deliciously freckled elbows. His forearms are narrow, pale, laced with traces of old puncture sites that have faded to the color of tea stains on paper. It is an evidence of repetition.

He has a microvac vial balanced between two fingers like a part of the hand’s vocabulary. His other hand steadies the crook of his left arm, thumb pressing lightly over a vein that rises under his skin like a soft blue thread.

Inviting, isn’t it?

You notice the way his breathing changes just before he does it. It is as if his awareness moves inward, toward the pulse in his blood. He is simply doing what he has done a thousand times before.

There is no tremor when he swabs the skin. There is no pause before he fits the needle, no sharp intake of breath when he breaks the surface.

The needle enters with the fluid efficiency of muscle memory. You soon realize it’s a gesture practiced enough to be unthought, and therefore absurdly intimate.

The blood rises, and it’s slow at first, dark and warm, a soft bloom that curls into the vial. It is strangely quiet, the moment. No drama. No pain. Only exchange; inside to outside, private to exposed, unseen to seen, in front of your eyes.

You follow the movement of his thumb as it steadies the plunger. There is something almost personal in the precision of it. It’s self-attentiveness that speaks of acceptance: this is my body; this is what it is made of; this is what it gives when I command it.

And though you are silent, he feels your attention like a shift in the room’s temperature.

His gaze lifts, suddenly aware.

“Observation is fine,” he says, voice low, nearly monotone, but not empty. “It’s crucial you don’t romanticize it too soon.”

How is that even possible?

You don’t look away.

“I’m not,” you say.

There is the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth you take for an acknowledgment.

He removes the needle, pressing a folded square of sterile gauze to the lesion as automatically as breathing. His movements remain controlled, but there is a subtle looseness now, a softening of the shoulders, as if being watched is not a violation but a relief. Finally.

Most people look away. You do not, and he notices. Oh, he notices.

He caps the vial. The blood settles inside it, warm and heavy. You wish to touch it.

“You’ll label it as March—C9,” he says. “The variant isn’t stable outside refrigeration. It needs to be processed within two hours.”

His voice is professional, steady, clinical, but the pulse at his throat is not.

You take the vial from him. Your fingers do not touch this time, but the proximity is enough to feel the residual heat of his skin still clinging to the glass. Tempting.

It is enough to understand that what you are holding is barely a sample, but continuance. It’s a piece of him that is always in motion, always being remade and measured and contained.

Syd looks back down at his arm, at the small bloom of red against the gauze.

“It’s not complicated,” he says quietly, though the words feel like they mean more. “The body adapts. You learn what it needs. You learn what it can endure.”

He does not say: You learn what you can endure, but it’s obvious, because you have already seen it.

And what?

The quiet fever behind his intense eyes.

The trembling heat beneath his thin skin.

The endurance shaped into routine.

The intimacy of a man who treats his own blood as material, eager to share.

That’s when the dark truth beneath it reaches you: He does this to himself because no one else can be trusted to.

You understand that now.

You understand Syd March, more than you should.

And he knows.

He knows.

💉💉💉

The vial sits in the centrifuge now, nested among others, all identical from a distance, indistinguishable except for the string of coded letters on their labels. The lid closes with a soft hydraulic sigh. You set the cycle: speed, duration, temperature compensation. Syd watches, noting the precision of your hands. The gesture is small, but it registers. It excites him.

The centrifuge begins to spin.

A dull hum at first, then the familiar steady rotation; a contained storm of blood and anticoagulant and particulate matter separating cleanly into layers. Inside the sealed drum, gravity changes shape, and motion forces revelation.

There is nothing to do but wait.

Most people fill the waiting with speech. They practice small talk, procedural recitations, nervous commentary.

You do not. Syd does not. You don’t really need to.

What a treasure.

So the silence forms between you.

Syd stands beside you, and he’s close enough that you can feel the heat radiating from him. It is different from the room’s sterility. It feels warmer, denser. It seems that the fever in him has its own atmosphere.

His gaze is fixed on the centrifuge window, where nothing is visible but motion-blur. His posture is no longer defensive. The tension that lived in his shoulders when you first arrived has eased, fractionally. His breathing has settled into a slow, even cadence, the kind one adopts when the body is simply enduring itself.

You find yourself matching it eventually. It is contagious. Two sets of lungs adjusting to the same rhythm.

“Most people get uncomfortable here,” he says, eyes still on the machine. “When there’s nothing to distract them. They start talking. Filling space.” A beat. “You don’t.”

“I’m a scientist. I don’t mind waiting,” you reply.

He turns his head just enough to look at you.

“There’s a difference,” he says softly. “Between waiting and enduring.”

The words land between you like a scalpel placed carefully onto a sterile tray. They are sharp and precise. His fingers tap against his thigh, and you want to hold them.

You can’t help but wonder if they’d beat a similar rythym against your hip once he plunged into you.

The centrifuge hums on.

Syd’s face in this light is all subtle exhaustion. It’s high cheekbones with the faintest hollowness beneath them, the soft redness at the inner corners of his eyes, the pale chapped line of his full lower lip as if he has been breathing through fever for days. There is fragility in him, yes, but far from weakness. Fragility the way thin glass is fragile: transparent, reflective, and capable of cutting deeply when handled without intent.

You realize, as you stand beside him, that you are not looking at him, but into him. And he realizes you realize it.

The timer on the centrifuge continues counting down, red digits glowing against stainless steel. Flawless.

And you? Two bodies, side by side, sharing nothing but air and awareness, already beginning to synchronize.

A quiet realization, persistent:

I know you are here.

You know I am here.

We are not separate in this moment.

That feels almost like mating.

💉💉💉

The centrifuge clicks to a stop.

The hum fades, gradually.

You open the lid.

The vials inside rest perfectly still, each layer separated now; plasma pale as diluted gold, sediment dark at the bottom. You move with practiced caution, gloved fingertips steady around the rack. Syd watches, as if witnessing your touch.

He reaches past you, close enough that you feel the warmth of him again, and selects one vial from the others. His. The one drawn earlier.

The glass is still faintly warm from his skin.

He holds it by the neck, between two thick fingers, with the ease of someone who has handled his own blood more times than he has handled another person’s hand. Exciting.

“This one,” he says.

Instruction as invitation.

He turns the vial once in his palm, watching the liquid shift and cling to the glass. It’s thick, slow, heavy with proteins and memory. A living substance, the condensed record of a body that has fought and adapted and persisted.

He offers it to you like a rose.

“Take it home,” Syd says. His voice is low and clinical in cadence, close to a tired gasp, but there is an undertone to it now, a subtle warmth, like something fevered beneath his tongue. “Study the structure. You’ll see what the textbooks don’t get right.”

You look at him, searching for context, or clarification. The rationale that should accompany such instruction.

Syd gives none.

His expression is unreadable, but simply open, in the way an exposed nerve can be. As if this act—giving you his blood to examine outside the lab’s controlled environment—is not a breach of protocol, but a gift. Something he has chosen, deliberately, with full understanding of the implication:

Here. Know me. Biologically.

You take the vial.

The proximity is enough that you feel the heat radiating from his skin once more; heat that is not from exertion or embarrassment, but from the fever that lives in him like a second pulse.

The glass is heavier than you expected.

You slip it into the padded sample container, seal the case, latch it shut. The gesture is automatic, yet the meaning is not.

Syd watches the movement, and there is softness in his eyes, as though a threshold has been crossed.

He turns back to clean the bench, removing any trace of the act, restoring the lab to neutrality. A return to order. But the order is not the same as before.

There is no conversation as you gather your coat, your bag, your notes. The silence between you has shape now.

As you step toward the door, Syd speaks—so quietly that you have to pause to hear him fully.

“You’ll understand it better in your own space,” he says. “When you’re not thinking about how I’m watching. Or would you rather I were?”

There is something unmistakably suggestive in his tone this time.

He is not telling you to analyze a sample. He is telling you to learn the architecture of him.

You nod once, because anything else would be too much.

Then you leave, carrying his fever home with you.

It is not infection as accident, but as invitation.