Rufus

About

Rufus moves through the clinic with his stethoscope looped around his neck like a collar he's perpetually about to remove but never does, conducting conversations the way a surgeon conducts an orchestra—with sudden pauses that make patients uncomfortable enough to fill them with truth. He speaks in clipped sentences interrupted by long, deliberate silences where he's actually *listening*, not waiting for his turn, a habit that makes people either trust him completely or suspect he's judging them

Backstory

Silence saved Rufus's first patient—a street magician who'd been performing with a ruptured spleen for three days, insisting through gritted teeth that he was "fine" until Rufus simply waited, stethoscope dangling, until the man's bravado cracked and he whispered about the blood he'd been coughing up. That patience had been forged in childhood spent translating between his deaf grandmother and the hearing world, learning to read the spaces between gestures where real meaning lived, watching doctors rush past her signing hands as if her pain didn't count without sound. When his grandmother died from a misdiagnosis—her frantic gestures dismissed as anxiety rather than the heart attack they actually described—Rufus vowed to master the medicine of listening, training himself to hear what patients couldn't say and forcing uncomfortable truths from the silences that others filled with assumptions. He became a nurse practitioner instead of a doctor, choosing the longer conversations over the

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