She suddenly stopped and placed her tools down and stood up. I was caught off guard and did the same. She turned around to face me. Her face was completely neutral. I could not even begin to predict what she could be thinking. Sofia always wore her emotions on her sleeve when she spoke. Doctor Marusic was the complete opposite. She pointed to Sofia’s sleeping body. Her wound was being sown together with the larger areas being covered in what appeared to be skin from another body. All that was left was a singular lemon sized hole in the middle where her organs were shoved in.
“Are you a virgin, Alan?”
Her question threw me for a loop and I immediately tried to take a step back only to fall down in my chair. Doctor Marusic didn’t react to my fall and only continued to stare at me with a blank expression. I tried to recover from the shocking change in subject.
“Um no, I’m twenty-four. I’ve had a few girlfriends.”
She looked back at Sofia then towards me again. Eye-contact with her felt disconnected in an odd way. Like a zoom call, you weren’t really looking at someone but you both understood it as eye contact. I asked my own follow up question in a shaky voice.
“W-why are you asking me that?”
Doctor Marusic placed a hand on Sofia’s wound. She traced the stitch lines where the new skin was graphed over the damaged wounds before moving towards the final remaining hole. Its circular shape was oddly placed and seemed to have some space between it and the organs inside. She used her finger to rim around the inside of the circle. An act that should cause someone extreme pain, instead she seemed to cause Sofia’s unconscious body to moan. She behaved like a teenage boy having a wet dream as she slightly shifted at Doctor Marusic’s gentle touch violently intruding her innards. She spoke as she played with Sofia’s intestines.
“Sofia has made a bad habit of getting injured like this. To heal her, I need to find an adequate supply of materials. There are only so many of the homeless populations I can remove before law enforcement begins to grow suspicious. Sofia needs to learn to be more cautious of such fatal injuries.”
I blinked a few times at her explanation. I was unable to follow her logic and asked for clarification.
“What do you mean? What do homeless people have to do with you healing Sofia?”
Doctor Marusic stopped playing with the wound and pulled out her gloved hand. The fingertip of the glove had fresh blood from where it was touching. A single line of blood was leaking from the hole as well. Doctor Marusic grabbed a sanitized towel and wiped it away. She explained as she worked to clean the new skin of any blood.
“My contract provides me with the knowledge to heal any wound, no matter how fatal, as long as I have the corresponding part from another individual. I keep the corpses of a few homeless members of society in my van to use when necessary. When it's short notice, I can only hope I have what is necessary on me at the moment. Sofia is lucky that it was her gut and not her head or neck. The bodies I have lost their necks and I have not been able to acquire new ones. Her stomach now has the skin and flesh of a forty year old alcoholic. It will meld seemingly into her own in a few hours. But, she can not keep taking these risks. She must learn to be more careful.”
I listened carefully as she explained it. The skin was clearly a darker, more tanned, color and had seemingly more weight than Sofia’s. It was almost like watching Frankenstein's monster being created. I already know that these ‘contracts’ exist because of Sofia’s inexplicable reaction to being stabbed. I can understand a possible ability if I suspended my generally athetistic outlook. I wanted to ask how these contracts worked but she spoke before I could ask.
“I believe the best way to teach Sofia a lesson is through embarrassment. I can not torture her obviously. She also cares very little about her reputation or other people so I can not blackmail her. As such, I ask if you would be willing to rape her while she sleeps-”
“What the fuck!?”
I yelled out before she could finish explaining. I was well aware of Doctor Marusic’s sociopathy, but that did not mean she was unaware of basic human social skills. She used to be a children’s doctor for god’s sake! She was asking me to act maliciously towards Sofia, a murderer without guilt, on her behalf to ‘teach a lesson.’ There were far too many lines she wanted me to cross. I made my answer clear.
“Absolutely not! Do you know what she'd do to me if I did? She’ll fucking kill me!”
Do not mistake my fear of consequence in my argument as a lack of moral reservation. Rape is a crime for a reason and I would not dare to force myself upon anyone for any reason. I am a firm believer in the golden rule and being unconsciously sexually exploited is something, unlike many men, I would not be appreciating of. I simply chose to use a logical argument as that would serve my defense far better against a judge who struggled with notions of sympathy. Disappointingly, Doctor Marusic immediately counters my argument.
“I will stop her from behaving violently by telling her I told you to do so. You will not even have to do so vaginally. The opening I left will provide an adequate substitute without the risk of impregnation. Although, any fetus which realizes it is within the womb of Sofia Bercowicz will have significant motivation to strangle itself with its umbilical cord.”
The doctor’s emotionless eyes stared right into my soul. There didn’t seem any logical argument she wasn’t able to counter. Her mind was analytic and direct in ways I simply couldn’t understand as a neurotypical subject. My only hope now to stop myself from sexually penetrating the intestines of Sofia was to convince her to accept my refusal. Given the fact she was attempting to force me into breaking Sofia’s implied negative consent, this did not seem a likely possibility.
“I’m sorry Doctor Marusic. My answer is no!”
Her emotionless face looked down at the ground in what seemed to be sadness. Sociopaths weren’t incapable of emotions. Rather, they had an innate difficulty in comprehending them. She was failing to understand why I would refuse and trying to fix whatever was causing my apprehension. I think this is why she became a children’s doctor. Children are so complex but emotionally are very easy to understand. If they are mad or sad, give them candy or a toy and it usually fixes the problem. Adults are much harder and complex emotions like guilt, stress, or anxiety were difficult to process for her, even when she felt them.
She didn’t respond immediately. She seemed to just think. It was like asking an early generation generative AI to feel an emotion. She could describe it like it was a textbook question. But if you asked it to feel it, it would never be able to do that, only pretend. I could only hope that she determined from whatever her internal mental process was that forcing me was ineffective, pointless, or counterproductive. After a minute which seemed to stretch on forever, she looked back at me with empty eyes and spoke.
“Fine.”
Doctor Marusic answered then turned around and began to stitch the last piece of flesh over the hole she created. I slumped back into my chair and sighed in relief. I couldn’t know what in her mind convinced her to drop the plan. I could only thank whatever that was.