[===||Hypochondriac||>----------

[ωΘĿƒ]

The clock ticked, cogs behind the large flat disk cranking together, forming some kind of working device used to measure time. It was funny, that people would like so much to measure time, when in fact time is relative. Perceptively speaking and otherwise, time was not a constant. Yet, it was easier to keep appointments with the assumption that time is a constant, wasn't it? Flawed though the thought was, time telling devices could be very useful in modern day society.

The time telling device Le Cyll was looking at told him he had fifteen more minutes of clinic duty left. Tragic, seeing as his last case was that of a trypanophobic child. She was a dragon - a small one. She was currently curled up, wings tucked over tail, in the dragon equivalent of a fetal position on the table in front of him, rocking back and forth gently and trying not to open her eyes.

The wolf sighed, needle in hand. Why was she making this so hard for him?

"I promise, it won't hurt a bit," he said, softly, trying to pacify her with his natural inclination towards sounding like he cared.

Sweet and affectionate though his tone was, the dragon would not uncurl from her ball.

"No! It stings! And it's so big! Don't touch me!"

Le Cyll glanced again at the clock. Fourteen more minutes. It was nice that he was able to actively practice medicine at this school, but the patient-doctor communication he could do without.

Doctor Manner rushed by him, holding up a phoenix that looked like it had been in a bad sporting accident.

"Damn it, kid, just grab the brat and hold her down! I don't have time for you to be nice!"

Rushing off just as he had came, he left Le Cyll with even more of a headache than he had originally had due to the child. Nice? Manner thought he was being nice? It was not niceness that prompted him to be so patient - it was a bad memory.

Dragons could get big. A dragon had attacked him recently. If it weren't for Kendryek, he might have fulfilled his role on the food chain.

"Please?" Le Cyll tried, beseechingly. "It'll only take a second."

"No!"

There was a small flicker of flame from the dragon's nostrils, and the wolf nearly jumped out of his lab coat. Bad memories... Bad, bad, terrible memories... He needed a nice meal and a warm bath. None of this dragon nonsense.

And then, a wonderful idea came to him.

"Do you know where doctors keep their candy?"

The little dragon's eye opened, a round crimson orb staring at him.

"Oh, come now. You must know that every doctor has candy."

The wings twitched, unfolding little by little until the shiny black scales could be seen beneath them.

"And there is a lot of it too. A whole box full of toys and chocolate."

"I don't like chocolate." the small dragon said.

"Bubblegum then?"

A quick, eager nod. Children were so predictable...

"Okay, you can have some bubblegum, but only if I can give you your shot. Is that a deal?"

There was no time for thinking. When a simple minded creature fixates on an object, however small, all else is obscured from it. The wolf could have offered to saw her arm off for a treat, and she would have said yes. It was so easy, it was actually tedious.

"Okay, now hold out your front leg."

The dragon did so, and Le Cyll slid the needle in between the cracks in the developing armored plates. The dragon squeaked, but as soon as the needle was gone, she shook the table, demanding her treats.

"Bubblegum!"

"Over there."

He pointed toward one of the lower cabinets. The dragon bolted to it, rummaging around like a starved animal until she found what she wanted. Then, without a second thought for her grievous needle wound, she walked out the door.

The wolf sighed. Five more minutes. That gave him jsut enough time to wash up.

Going to the sink, he turned the hot water tap all the way up, the cold metal sink hissing as the water hit it. He washed several times over with the specially formulated disinfectant soap. First palms, then fingers, then knuckles, then nails. Everything was thorough to the point of obsession, and when he was done, the skin of his human hands was pink and irritated. Still, it was better that then have them dirty.

The little dragon wasn't the only one with an irrational fear to tame.
[/color]

[Elle]

Clutching her hand to her chest, Elle scurried down the hall, quickly glancing at everyone she passed with suspicion, as if she thought they knew how foolish she had been and were silently laughing at her. Biting her lip, she tightened the cloth that was tied around her wounded hand and picked up her pace even further.

She knew how stupid it was that she had injured herself. Yes, she actually managed to injure herself. She had been all alone, with no one else around. It was during times like those when she actually felt safe, and yet something like this happens. It was just her luck. Of course, she was no stranger to misfortune, but there was something else that made this incident particularly embarrassing. That was that she had been injured so close to the water. Though, it wasn't as if she had somehow almost managed to drown herself (though that did sound like it could happen to her) it was the principle of things!

The area in and around the water was supposed to be like a sanctuary for water dragons. And there she had been, minding her own business taking a quiet stroll around Nymph's Lake - one of her favorite places on campus - when she had managed to trip over her own feet and tumble to the ground, slicing her had open pretty good on a particularly sharp rock. It felt like a blow to her race's honor, and that stung more than the wound itself did.

Sighing, she opened the infirmary door, stopping short when she noticed the man standing by the sink. Hadn't she met him before? Yes, in the library, right? And... Oh, what was his name... She remembered it had sounded a bit odd... Butwait, wasn't he a student? Maybe he was like an intern here...

"Um... Hi," She said quietly, walking further into the room but still looking down, "My... Um, hand..." Elle had to wince at her words. She always sounded so weak! She absolutely hated her voice.

[ωΘĿƒ]

Le Cyll had just grabbed one of the neatly folded towels to dry his hands off when he heard a sound - a very small, ashamed sound. And a familiar sound at that.

He peeked over his shoulder, checking through the list of faces he'd memorized since coming here, and sure enough, this girl matched one of those faces. She was a dragon, water; shy and with an exceptionally low self esteem. He dug up the memories of her as if he was mentally pulling a file, and it occurred to him that she had the memory-equivalent of a sticky note on her file:

She was a follower, not a leader. Hard to find in this school, as it turned out. He had liked her when he first met her. It was so hard to find real, genuine sheep like this girl. She was a veritable rarity.

Le Cyll turned around, immediately seeing the unruly gash on her hand. He resisted the urge to shudder. Just after he had made himself all nice and clean... It was an atrocity.

Still, he had a job to do, and it had only taken him four minutes to wash his hands. The girl was still within the limits of the time frame for his clinic duty, and that meant he was obligated to help her.

Well, to be fair, he would have helped her either way. That cut was so... ugly. It needed fixing. He snatched a handful of gauze and some disinfectant from the nearby countertop, trying to pull up the girl's name as he did.

Elle

Yes, that's right. Elle.

"Elle, hello again. Can you sit on the table for me? That cut looks deep."

As he took out a few strips of cloth to clean the wound, he pointed with his full hand to the examination table that the small dragon had just fled. It was nothing more than a padded platform specifically made to handle injured people. The little dragon had just needed a scheduled shot; whereas Elle was a bit more in need of help.

He finished collecting the supplies he needed, then set them on the table where Elle would sit.

Dragons... All these dragons. What was it with dragons? Le Cyll took one last, wistful look at the clock before he began to prep the materials to fix Elle. It would have been time to leave now.

[Elle]

Nodding, Elle walked over to the table he had pointed at and slid on top of it, all the while wracking her brain, trying to remember what his name was. She only felt worse about forgetting when she noticed that he had remembered her name. But... But she had an excuse! She never did like memorizing things... Even if those things were kinda important. Like dates. And names. Maybe she should try to change that...

Well, maybe she could get through this despite her poor memory. She never said much, so it'd probably work out in the end. Although she had just decided that she was going to try to be more outgoing. Eh, she'd make good on that decision tomorrow. Or next week. Or maybe she'd just wait until she was done with 12th grade and start with a clean slate in college.

Removing the cloth around her hand, she looked at her wound with a frown. It did look pretty ugly, but it didn't hurt so bad. It was just messy. Hm, hadn't there been a time when she got pretty sqeamish at the sight of blood? And yet she was quite used to it now. As long as it was hers, of course. On the other hand, some of the things that she had seen since coming to this school was pretty messed up. That gash in her hand was the least of her worries.

[ωΘĿƒ]

He began automatically, but with a worked-in beside manner that had been ingrained into him since the beginning of his medical career.

Hmm.... That had been so long ago. What had made him first want to be a doctor? The disease that plagued his little Canadian wolf tribe? The constant sights of his fellow wolves being mowed down by the huge bull moose and caribou that they hunted? Or had it been his mother, felled by a cocktail of starvation, weakness, cold, infection, and illness?

No - none of them. He had become a doctor because he liked to know what made things "tick" so to speak. It was fascinating. Immensely fascinating. All the miles of nerves and endocrine and ligaments and tendons; the slough of colorful organs, the array of systems in the body cavity; and who could forget the blood? So messy... and yet so intricate and perfect in its design. It was made to function properly, and it quite frankly bothered the wolf when something so intricate did not function at it's fullest. There was that incessant need to fix it.

And so medical school... and then this place. He had learned well.

Le Cyll worked quickly over cleaning the unsightly gash, swabbing it with absorbent cloth and disinfectant materials. Then he seamlessly moved to the repairs. The cut did not need stitches. He had been wrong - it only looked deep because of the blood and the position of the wound on the hand. The cut was actually very shallow, and would heal up relatively quickly.

He threw a few rolls of gauze and linen bandages around it, and finished. All the while, he had never stopped looking at Elle, making sure eye contact was maintained.

It was important, for some odd reason, to reassure the people he healed. Why? He never understood the why - if he had intended harm, there was not particularly a variety of choices to prevent such an occasion - however, he needed to be polite and kind to them. This was key as a doctor.

He could do polite, and he could fake kind. There was always the semblance of a small smile as he did any medical work.

"There, I believe I'm done," he said, after only a few minutes. "It isn't bad at all, just a scrape. I hope you'll stay away from whatever you were doing to give you such an injury though."

Should he? Ask what it was? He didn't care, but for the sake of oh so important appearance, why not?

He had already missed his scheduled leave time, so there wasn't much use in hurrying to make up the lost minutes.

"What were you doing, if I'm allowed to ask?"

[Elle]

As he began working on her hand, Elle kept her eyes down and just watched his progress. It was kind of unnerving that he kept looking at her. Well, it wasn't really that weird, but she still didn't like eye contact! Though every now and then she glanced up into his eyes, but only for a fraction of a second before she looked down once again.

When he was finished, she inspected her bandaged hand with a shy smile and a mumbled "Thank you."

She then looked up, but only slightly, when he asked about what had happened to her. She could feel the heat rush into her cheeks as she let her hands fall into her lap. He wouldn't know how disgraced she felt (or maybe he would, she wasn't that hard to read) but it was still an embarrasing story to tell anyway.

"Um, well... I was just walking... By the lake. And, um, I fell... On a rock."

Her face contorted as if she were in pain as she explained what had happened. Geez, she was such a loser. After all, if that story sounded stupid to her, juat imagine how it would sound to someone else!

[ωΘĿƒ]

Despite the obvious agony that seemed to pervade every orifice of Elle's dragon body as she spoke her story allowed, Le Cyll kept a straight face.

How interesting could it be, after all?

He only half listened, going through some minor calculations in his head. Now let's see... A week to get the skin closed, and another week and a half for the mark to be completely gone. That sounded about right, if taking into consideration the fact that Elle did not seem a healing dragon.

Some dragons associated with water were also healers. Elle did not seem to have this capability, however. She was simply a dragon.

...and then Elle finished telling her story about how she got the wound, and Le Cyll's absent mind snapped into focus.

A smite twitched at the ends of his mouth, but he didn't completely look like he wanted to laugh. It was funny; no- it was hilarious, but that would be rude to laugh, wouldn't it?

Le Cyll waited for the small spasm of hilarity to subside, and double checked her hand, just to make sure.

"I'm terribly sorry. Those rocks are sharp at the lakeshore, aren't they?"

Yes, they were sharp. He'd scratched his paws a few times getting out of the water, but he'd never slipped. That was just funny. If he could feel anything, he was sure he would have felt pity for Elle. She did seem particularly helpless, and he'd noticed the new students here. They were all fairly... aggressive.

What childish riffraff. Le Cyll wouldn't mind if they all disappeared one day. It would have been nice if the school had been full of Elles. Then he could eat anything he wanted, whenever he wanted.

But such is life. Le Cyll looked at the clock, and noticed that not only was it time for him to leave, but it was also nearing the end of the dinner hour at the Dining Hall.

He looked back at Elle, deciding it might be better if he walked her out of the clinic. No need for her to stab herself on a scalpel or such.

"would you like to join me? It's getting late, and I've yet to eat anything. We should go to the dining hall."

[Elle]

Elle tapped her fingers together uncomfortably when she finished her story. Stupid... It was just so stupid! And even though he didn't say anything, she knew he thought so too. How could someone not? It was all just so... Well, you know.

The entire time, she simply kept her eyes down, looking at her hands. That was always the safest position for Elle. Not that eye contact would hurt her, of course. But some part of her always felt as though it kept her safe - or safer, at least - from having people notice her discomfort whenever someone spoke to her. Of course she knew that simply looking down wouldn't hide the blush that seemed to be a permanent fixture on her face, but she still managed to trick herself into believing that it did, and that was good enough for her.

As he walked away, he stopped to ask if she wanted to join him in the Dining Hall. Nervous, she glanced around the room, wondering if there was a polite way to get out of this.

Though he was right, it was late, and she hadn't eaten yet either. She should probably head down to the Dining Hall as well. Although, she'd prefer it if he left without her while she waited a bit before going down herself and proceeding to enter and leave without having anymore contact with anyone else... No. Now that was stupid.

"Um... Okay, sure..." She agreed with a small smile.

As she slid off of the table, she made sure to do it slowly. She'd already slipped once today. Well, at least there hadn't been anyone around at that time.