Chapter Five: An Unnerving Beginning

Ty watched as Marissa shuffled through the papers on her desk, searching for something. Something about her had changed since his little, ah, incident. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he knew something was different. Maybe it was the way she interacted with him, talked to him. She always sounded guarded, and quite obviously chose her words very carefully.

It was almost as if she expected him to divine her deepest darkest secrets if she said the wrong thing.

Part of him actually wished that he could.

Then he could get back at her for what she was doing to him right now.

While he was at it, he wished he could find the deepest darkest secrets of everyone in the entire agency and get even with them, because they were all in this together. Obviously Marissa didn’t have the authority to assign him a mission, but she was in charge of giving it to him once it was explained and detailed to her, and in this case he would rather kill the messenger than take out his anger on his pillow.

…Since he would certainly have some difficulty taking it out on the people who were actually responsible for this nightmare…

“Here it is,” Marissa said, lifting her head from the desk. She handed him a sheaf of papers. “That’s your copy. The objectives are listed in there for you. It doesn’t look like a very high risk one. I guess they gave you an easy one since you just started back.”

He flipped the front page back and glanced at the second, reading up on the location and objectives at the same time. He looked up at her. “Have you even read this?”

“Of course I’ve read it!” she snapped. The next instant she was visibly calming herself, smoothing her ruffled feathers. She gave a careless shrug. “Okay, so maybe it’s not the easiest mission. It’s not the toughest one either. Surely you’ve seen worse than that.”

He bit down hard on his tongue, resisting the urge to scream at her. It wasn’t so much the mission itself that bothered him. She was probably right. He probably had seen worse than this. It was the fact that she was right that enraged him so. And he hated her attitude; that little prissy, “I know better than you” act was getting irritating.

That was new. That’s what was new. She hadn’t had that before.

Ty opened his mouth to say something…what it was, he wasn’t sure. Anything would have done at the moment. But the words, whatever they were, never made it past his lips.

Emotions floated into his head, ones that didn’t belong to him: anger, fear, satisfaction, malice, disdain…

Please, no…

He stared at her as though she sprouted horns. He wasn’t sure what it was he was feeling, but he knew it belonged to her.

There was something else there, something more… Something malevolent. Something evil.

Marissa squinted at him, frowning. “Ty? What are you staring at me for?” His eyes were about as wide as they could get, his hands hanging limply at his sides, one of them holding onto the sheaf of papers she’d given him. “Ty. Ty?”

He started and returned. The emotions remained there, niggling at him in the back of his mind. He swallowed and stared at her again before shaking his head and bringing the papers back up to his face.

“What was that?” Marissa demanded.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. He glanced up at her. “I’m taking these with me, right? You don’t have anything else to say?”

She shook her head and he turned around and practically fled the room, leaving her behind in his dust, very confused.

---

“Ty, calm down. You have to tell me what you felt, or I can’t help you. Getting all excited over it isn’t going to do any good.” Henry watched patiently as the young agent paced the floor madly, his hands clenched into fists. The papers Marissa had given him were lying on the table, some of them crumpled from the tight grip Ty had kept on them as he ran from her office to find Henry. And now he couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t stop raking his fingers through his blonde curls, couldn’t stop muttering under his breath so that Henry couldn’t hear what he was saying.

“Ty. Sit down, right now.”

The young man stopped so abruptly that Henry started. “Sit down?” Ty repeated in a dazed voice. Henry nodded vigorously and Ty obeyed slowly.

“Now, tell me what you felt. Tell me what happened.”

The papers caught Ty’s eye, distracting him. He stared at them as though he’d never seen them before. “I felt what she felt,” he whispered, eyes still on the papers. “I could feel the anger, and the disgust, and the…the malice…” He shivered. “I can still feel them somewhere, hiding from me so they can pop out when I least expect it and destroy me.” His eyes finally left the papers, coming to rest on Henry’s face. They were dull, tired.

“Ty,” Henry began, scooting back in his chair and standing up. Now it was his turn to pace, though not at such a frenzied rate as his patient had. “Ty, I think that you shouldn’t go on this mission. I’m going to speak with Agent Marissa and tell her that I’ve found you mentally incapable of taking on this load just yet.”

“No.”

Henry blinked. “Why not? I thought you hated working on the field.”

“I do, but if I stay here, I’ll go mad.” He gave a bleak laugh. “Madder than I already am, anyway. I’ll go mad if I stay here, and I’ll go mad if I go out there. Really, Henry, there’s no winning in this. I may as well just go.”

The psychiatrist frowned. “Wouldn’t going mad here be preferable to going mad out there?”

Another shiver from the younger man. “Not if I’m going to be around Marissa. I don’t want to feel any of her emotions anymore. Not ever, ever again.”

Henry rubbed his eyes. “Ty, you’re not ready,” he said bluntly. “In fact, I don’t think you’ll ever be ready. I don’t care what the government thinks; you’re not fit for this kind of active duty. You’re not fit to hold the fates of so many people in your hands when you can’t even…” His voice faded when he saw his young friend’s expression. He sighed. “You know I don’t mean that quite the way it sounded. I only want to help you Ty. I have no desire to be your wreck and ruin, or your slave master, by any means.”

“My wreck and ruin is my mind,” Ty murmured absently. “My slave master is my mind. You can’t have the position, Henry; it’s already been taken.” The psychiatrist frowned at him and Ty smirked back. “Come, Henry, be amused by my theatrics. Be entertained by my melodrama.”

“Ty…” Henry shook his head and Ty subsided with a sigh.

“Henry, you don’t understand how it is to look at a person for years and then, all of a sudden, one day, you look at them again, and everything has changed. Who they are has changed, but only because now you can see what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, what they’re planning to do… In short, it’s torture.”

“I’m sorry.” The older man was sincere, but it didn’t really help anything. Ty gave another sigh, a heavier sigh.

“It doesn’t matter, I suppose,” he murmured. “You can’t declare me unfit for the mission; they’ll never believe you.”

Henry raised a brow. “You think not? It would make perfect sense, considering your recent mental breakdown. I’ll say you had a relapse.”

“Okay, so maybe they would believe you, but there’s really no point, Henry. It’s just delaying the inevitable. Eventually, they’ll stop listening to you and put me back on duty anyway. You don’t want to damage your reputation simply because of me, do you?”

“I hardly think that my reputation has anything to do with this situation, Ty,” Henry said sharply.

“Oh, but it does. It does. If it should come out that you’re making excuses for one of your patients, you’ll never live it down.” Ty’s smile was bitter. “I just couldn’t do that to you, Henry.”

There was really nothing the psychiatrist could say to that.

---

Ty pulled his coat tighter about him. A brisk wind blew, trying its best to chill him to the bone. It was not summer here, certainly. Winter was well on its way. He didn’t particularly like missions that took place in the winter, or in places that were experiencing winter, but, as with his premonitions, nothing could be done about it.

Thoughts of his premonitions called Marissa’s face and emotions to his mind and he shuddered.

That was something he definitely did not want to think about.

A bus rumbled past him, splashing up a puddle of dirty water from the edge of the street. Ty sidestepped, managing to avoid being doused.

“You’re quick on your feet,” came a voice behind him. “I like that.” He turned around and came face to face with a young, African American woman. She walked closer to him and stuck out her hand. “Name’s Jo Altamont.”

He shook it. “Ty Bennett. Pleased to meet you.”

“You looking for work, Mr. Bennett?” she inquired. Dark brown eyes studied him calculatingly.

“I’m new here,” he said apologetically. “I don’t really know my way around the city at all.”

She smirked. “That much is plain by the part of the city you’re currently in. Come on. I think I can help you out.” She walked away, not even looking back to see if he would follow.

He did follow, his heart pounding, a drum accompanying the force of his desperate thoughts.

Not another one! I can’t do this again, not to another woman, not to anyone! I can’t play this part anymore!

But he had to.

“What kind of work are we talking about here, exactly?” he ventured, trying to keep up with her. Her stride was strong and lengthy; she was a tough girl, in every sense of the word.

Jo glanced back at him. “You’ll see,” she said with a strange smile.

That smile sent shivers down his spine.

---

(A/N- Sorry that that chapter is shorter than the others. I'm searching for ideas on this one. Anyway, hope it's good! Thanks! -I.I.)