Chapter 125: S7E2: The Consultation That No Longer Looked Medical
The cool, sterile air of Landspítali smelled of antiseptic, floor polish, and a faint, underlying note of anxiety. Aelyth moved through the corridors with the unerring precision of someone who had studied the schematics. Her presence—the faint bioluminescence beneath her skin, the uncanny stillness of her posture—drew glances that slid away the moment her mercury-eyed gaze met them. She was a puzzle they couldn’t solve, so they chose not to look.
The door to Dr. Skellir Anthonysson’s consultation room was ajar. From within, she heard the low, warm murmur of his voice, a sound designed to calm and disarm. She paused at the threshold.
Edith Duadottir was perched on the edge of the examination table, a sheet of paper clutched in both hands. Her knuckles were white. She was staring at it, her posture curved inward as if trying to fold herself around the list. Skellir stood beside her, not in the professional space of a doctor behind a desk, but within the intimate radius reserved for comfort. His hip leaned against the table, his body angled toward hers. One hand rested near her thigh, not touching, but the proximity was a statement.
“…and the tingling in your left foot,” he was saying, his voice a soft, confidential rumble. “We did the nerve conduction study. It was completely normal, Edith. See? Nothing to pin it on.” He tapped the paper gently with a finger. “Sometimes the body just… speaks in mysteries. It doesn’t mean there’s a monster in the basement.”
Edith didn’t look up. “But the dizziness when I stand up too fast. And the heart palpitations last Tuesday night, when I was just reading. Olaf was asleep. It felt… it felt like it was going to just stop.”
“Palpitations are common. Especially with anxiety.” His tone softened further, became almost proprietary. “You carry so much, Edith. In here.” He lightly tapped his own temple. “The mind can build a very convincing prison. My job is to show you the door isn’t locked.”
He was too close. Speaking too softly. The concern in his eyes had shed its clinical detachment and taken on a warmer, more personal weight. Edith, for her part, looked fraught with a familiar tension, but beneath it, Aelyth observed a subtle uncoiling. A relief. Not the relief of a clean bill of health, but the relief of being seen, of having her internal chaos witnessed and held by someone whose attention felt like a sanctuary. Her boyfriend Olaf’s buoyant optimism would have offered a distraction. Skellir’s attention offered validation.
Aelyth stepped into the room.
The change was instantaneous. Skellir straightened, putting a full foot of cool, professional air between himself and Edith. He cleared his throat, the intimate cadence vanishing into something brisk and cheerful. “Ah! Our visitor. Right on time.”
Edith flinched, her head snapping up. She hurriedly smoothed the crumpled symptom list against her leg, as if caught with something illicit. “Aelyth. Hello. I was just… finishing up.”
“I see,” Aelyth said, her voice giving nothing away.
“Edith was just leaving,” Skellir said, his smile wide but not quite reaching the slight tightness at the corners of his eyes. “Weren’t you? Remember, water. Less coffee. And try the mindfulness app I sent you. Ten minutes a day.”
“Yes. Of course. Thank you, Skellir.” Edith slid off the table, avoiding Aelyth’s eyes. She moved toward the door, a phantom of her listed ailments clinging to her.
Aelyth watched her go, then turned her focus to Skellir. He was busying himself at a sink, washing hands that didn’t need washing. The room was standard issue: framed diplomas, a model of the human ear, a comfortable chair for patients that now seemed to underscore the recent violation of space.
“She is a frequent patient,” Aelyth stated.
Skellir dried his hands with excessive care. “Oh, Edith? Yes. Bright woman. Anxious system. It’s common. The human body is a noisy instrument sometimes. Hard to distinguish the signal from the somatic static.”
“She trusts you.”
“I hope so. That’s the job.” He gestured to the chair Edith had vacated. “Please. What can I do for you? Everything on schedule? No unforeseen… terrestrial illnesses?” He attempted a joke, but it landed with a hollow thud in the quiet room.
Aelyth remained standing. She let the silence stretch, watching him fill it with a slight shift of his weight, a glance toward the door. “I observed your dynamic,” she said finally. “Your methodology. You build rapport. You minimize distance. You become… a safe harbor.”
Skellir’s smile became fixed. “It’s called bedside manner.”
“It is called crossing a boundary.” Aelyth’s tone was analytical, not accusatory. “You offer her a diagnosis of anxiety because it is un-disprovable. It keeps the conversation open. It guarantees her return.” She tilted her head slightly. “My question is for her, but you may have the answer. Does she come here because she is afraid of being sick… or because she is afraid of having no reason to come here? Of losing this… sanctuary?”
The air in the room solidified. Skellir’s face underwent a subtle transformation. The practiced, charming levity drained away, leaving something exposed and momentarily uncertain. The joke he’d been about to make about professional ethics died unformed on his lips. He looked at the door, then back at the empty space where Edith had been sitting.
In the hallway, visible through the open door, Edith hadn’t left. She was standing just outside, the symptom list held to her chest. She had heard. Her face, pale and strained, was turned downward, studying the linoleum floor as if the patterns held an answer she couldn’t bear to read.
Aelyth followed his gaze, then returned her own to him. No line had been fully crossed. No overt confession, no tangible breach of ethics. But the scene was clear: the too-close proximity, the softened voice, the relief on Edith’s face that had nothing to do with medical reassurance.
They were both already standing on the line. And now, they were acutely aware of it.
Skellir found his voice, but it was quieter, stripped of its performative warmth. “I think,” he said slowly, “our meeting today is about the project. Not my patient consultations.”
“Everything is about the project,” Aelyth replied, her words final. “You are a variable within it. Your predictability just decreased.”
She waited, allowing the weight of the observation to settle. Outside, Edith finally moved, her footsteps a soft, hurried shuffle fading down the hall. Skellir did not watch her go. He looked at Aelyth, and for the first time, his expression held no charm at all. It held calculation, and a dawning, cold understanding of the scrutiny he was now under. The door to his sanctuary had just been opened from the outside, letting in a very different kind of light.
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Landspítali hospital area, Reykjavík, Iceland — staff break room and side corridor near Skellir’s consultation rooms.
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Landspítali hospital area, Reykjavík, Iceland — staff break room and side corridor near Skellir’s consultation rooms.
Aelyth left the silence of Skellir’s office thick behind her, the doctor’s unspoken calculations hanging in the air like stale perfume. The hallway buzzed with the low-grade hum of fluorescent lights and distant intercom pages, a mundane soundtrack to the intimate fracture she’d just witnessed. She turned a corner, her soft-soled boots making no sound on the linoleum, following the scent of stale coffee and microwave meals.
The staff break room was a small, cluttered rectangle of fake wood and fading motivational posters. Iva was its frantic, beating heart, a whirl of pastel scrubs and flying paper. She was attempting to wedge a stack of patient files under one arm while balancing two steaming mugs of tea and a sleeve of butter cookies clenched in her teeth.
“Oh!” she gasped around the cookies, her eyes wide as she registered Aelyth in the doorway. The files slipped. She caught them with her knee, bobbling the mugs, sending a wave of hot tea sloshing over her fingers. “Sorry! Hi! One second—”
Aelyth stepped forward and plucked the sleeve of cookies from Iva’s mouth. “You are coordinating a complex logistical operation.”
Iva giggled, a breathless, slightly pained sound. “It’s just Berg’s break. He gets hangry. And Skellir likes ginger tea after his last consult. Helps him… decompress.” She finally corralled the files onto a table, shaking her stung hand. “Did you just see him? Skellir?”
“I did.” Aelyth placed the cookies neatly beside the files. “His last consult was with Edith Duadottir.”
“Oh, Edith.” Iva’s expression softened with genuine, uncomplicated sympathy as she carefully wiped the mugs. “Poor thing. Her system is so sensitive. She feels everything.”
“How often does she feel the need for a consultation?” Aelyth asked, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe. Her tone was idle, conversational.
Iva blew on her reddened fingers. “Lately? It’s been a lot. More than usual, I think.” She frowned, her brow knitting as she mentally flipped through an invisible schedule. “Yeah. Like… four times in the last two weeks? At least.”
Four visits. Aelyth stored the number. “For urgent matters?”
“Well, the first one was for the dizziness and the tingling foot.” Iva’s voice took on a practiced, clinical recap, then faltered into uncertainty. “The second one was… I think she said her scalp felt strange? Like a crawling sensation. Then there was the heart palpitations last Tuesday.” She paused, her eyes losing focus as she remembered. “And yesterday she came in right at the end of the day, just before shift change. Said she had a new pain in her ribcage when she breathed deep.”
Two visits without clear urgency. One at the end of Skellir’s shift. The report was perfect in its accidental detail.
“Does Dr. Anthonysson schedule other patients for fifteen-minute slots after his shift concludes?” Aelyth asked.
Iva blinked. “No. Not really. He’s usually rushing out.” The implication landed a moment later, causing a faint flush to rise on her cheeks. “He’s just… he’s really kind. He doesn’t like to turn anyone away if they’re scared.”
“Is he kinder to Edith?”
The question hung in the steam from the mugs. Iva grew still, her cheerful energy dimming into something more pensive. She looked at the tan gingery liquid destined for Skellir, then at the closed door down the hall. “He’s kind to everyone,” she said softly, loyally. Then she amended, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. “But with Edith… he’s careful. Not like a doctor careful. More… quiet. He listens differently. He leans in. He talks softer.” She met Aelyth’s gaze, her own eyes clouded with a confusion that was beginning to crystallize into understanding. “It’s like he’s not just listening to her symptoms. He’s listening to the way she’s afraid.”
The answer was naive. It was also devastatingly precise, cutting to the core of the dynamic Aelyth had just observed.
Iva hugged herself, as if suddenly cold in the over-warm room. “Is that wrong?”
“It is a variable,” Aelyth said, pushing off from the doorframe. She moved fully into the room, the space feeling smaller with her presence. “Variables must be monitored. I require your assistance.”
“My assistance?” Iva’s voice was a squeak.
“You see the patterns in this place. The rhythms. You notice who stays late, who arrives flustered, who seeks which kind of comfort.” Aelyth stopped in front of her, her mercury eyes holding Iva’s. “If you see anything else unusual—any pattern that breaks, any meeting that seems more than clinical, any detail that doesn’t fit—you will tell me.”
Iva stared, her mouth slightly open. The request wasn’t for gossip. It was for intelligence. The cheerful disaster energy was gone, replaced by a slow, dawning solemnity. She wasn’t being asked to betray her friend or her boss. She was being asked to see the machinery underneath the kindness.
“Okay,” Iva breathed out, the word a commitment. She nodded, not out of fear, but out of a surprising, stubborn clarity. “Okay, I will.”
She agreed not out of malice, but because she was beginning to understand that the warmth in Skellir’s voice, the safe harbor he offered, could itself be a symptom of a deeper, more dangerous condition.
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Reykjavík, Iceland — indoor recreation center lounge, after Olaf’s shift.
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Reykjavík, Iceland — indoor recreation center lounge, after Olaf’s shift.
The air in the lounge was warm and carried the tang of chlorine from the adjacent pool, mixed with the scent of synthetic carpet and stale popcorn from the vending machine in the corner. Olaf emerged from the staff door, his hair still damp, a gym bag slung over his broad shoulder. He looked younger without the performative energy of his animator persona, just a tired man in track pants rubbing a towel over his neck.
He stopped when he saw Aelyth waiting, leaning against the far wall beneath a poster for a children’s surf camp. Her stillness was a stark contrast to the echoing shouts and splashes from the pool area.
“Oh. Hey,” he said, forcing a smile. “Didn’t expect a debrief here. Everything okay?”
“I have a question,” Aelyth said, pushing off the wall. She didn’t move closer, leaving a buffer of space between them. “It is not about the project.”
Olaf’s smile held, but it became wary. “Shoot.”
“Are you and Edith happy?”
The laugh that burst from him was automatic, a short, bright sound he used to dispel heaviness. “Yeah. Yeah, of course we’re happy. Edith is… she’s wonderful. You’ve met her. She’s just… her mind works hard. She gets anxious. I try to help lighten it up, you know?” He shrugged, the gesture too loose. “It’s what you do.”
But the smile was tiring as he spoke, the muscles around his eyes fighting to maintain it against a creeping gravity Aelyth’s silence amplified.
She watched the fight on his face. “Has she changed lately?”
The last of the smile dissolved. Olaf looked down at the towel in his hands, twisting the fabric. The noises from the pool seemed to recede, swallowed by the quiet between them. He finally nodded, his voice dropping. “Yeah. She has.”
He was quiet for so long Aelyth thought he might not continue. He studied the geometric pattern of the carpet as if it were a map to a place he’d lost.
“She checks her phone more,” he said, the words coming slowly, painfully. “But not like, for messages. For notes. She writes longer lists. Symptoms, questions, things to research. It’s like she’s building a case against her own body.” He swallowed. “She finds reasons to go to the hospital. A new twinge, a weird sensation. And when she comes back from seeing him… from seeing Skellir…”
He couldn’t finish for a moment. He ran a hand over his face.
“She’s calmer. In this… settled way. It’s not the relief I can give her. I can distract her, make her laugh for a bit. This is different. It’s like he gives her permission to be still inside all that noise. And I can’t… I can’t compete with that. I just make jokes.”
“You’ve asked her about it.”
It wasn’t a question. Olaf winced, acknowledging the truth of it. “I tried. Last week. I said, ‘You and Skellir are getting to be real pen pals, huh?’” He let out a breath that was almost a laugh, full of self-disgust. “It was a bad joke. A coward’s question. She got this closed-off look, said it wasn’t funny, and went to make tea. I let it die. I always let it die because I don’t want to be the guy who’s jealous of his girlfriend’s doctor. I don’t want to be that fragile.”
Aelyth considered him, this man who weaponized levity because he feared the weight of his own feelings would drive people away. He was breaking, not with drama, but with a quiet, corrosive regret.
“Kindness is not the same as passivity,” she said, her voice clear in the chlorinated air. “You are confusing them. You are being passive, and calling it kindness to avoid the conflict.”
Olaf looked up, stung.
“If you love her,” Aelyth continued, mercilessly precise, “you must be brave enough to hear a truth that does not make you funny. You must ask the real question, and you must be prepared for the answer. Even if the answer is about another man. Even if the answer hurts. What you are doing now is not kindness. It is abandonment. You are abandoning her to her anxiety, and you are abandoning yourself to a joke that is no longer working.”
Olaf stared at her, his jaw tight, his eyes shining with a mixture of anger and devastating recognition. He had no quippy retort. The facade had been peeled back, and the raw, uncertain man beneath was exposed, trembling on the edge of a choice he’d been avoiding for weeks.
He looked away, towards the vending machine’s glowing lights, his shoulders slumping not in defeat, but in the first acknowledgment of a real burden. “What if the answer is that she doesn’t need my jokes anymore?”
“Then you will know,” Aelyth said simply. She didn’t offer comfort. She offered the inevitable consequence of truth. “And you can stop performing.”
She turned and walked towards the exit, leaving him alone in the warm, chemical-scented lounge. Behind her, Olaf didn’t move. He stood there, the towel hanging limp from his hand, listening to the distant, echoing fun from the pools, a sound that now felt like it came from another world entirely. The first pressure had been applied. The fracture, now named, would begin to spread.