The alarm clock didn't buzz; it rattled, vibrating against a nightstand that was one spilled beer away from collapsing entirely.
I hit it, missed, knocked it onto the floor, and let it scream for another thirty seconds before dragging myself out of bed. The mirror in the bathroom confirmed what I already knew: I looked exactly like a therapist who held a solid zero-star rating on every online directory. Unshaven, heavy bags under the eyes, wearing a tie that had already surrendered to gravity.
I unlocked the door to my office at exactly 8:59 AM. The air smelled like stale cigarettes and unfulfilled potential. The faux-leather therapy couch still had the sweat stain from Friday's client—a guy who spent forty-five minutes crying about his mother while I mentally calculated if I could afford decent scotch that week.
At 9:00 AM, the door clicked open. Arthur walked in.
Arthur was a textbook case of fearful-avoidant attachment wrapped in a gray middle-management suit. Sweating, twitching, constantly checking his watch. His wife had left him six months ago, and he had been paying me a hundred bucks an hour to listen to him refuse to take responsibility for it.
I dropped into my chair, didn't bother opening my notepad, and picked up my cold, leftover coffee.
"Alright, Arthur," I said, my voice like sandpaper. "Let's skip the part where you pretend you were a victim of circumstance. You drove her away because your crippling fear of intimacy made you emotionally unavailable. You pushed her out the door so you wouldn't have to risk being the one left behind. It's a classic preemptive strike. Can we move on to something interesting today, or are you going to weep onto my carpet again?"
Usually, this was the part where Arthur's lower lip trembled.
Today, Arthur stopped breathing.
The air pressure in the office violently plummeted. My ears popped. The cold coffee in my mug began to vibrate, then slowly levitated in a perfect, muddy sphere out of the ceramic.
I paused, blinking at the floating liquid. Okay. That's new.
Arthur's spine snapped terrifyingly straight. The slouching, pathetic middle manager was gone. His jaw clenched so hard I heard the teeth grind, and when he looked up, the capillaries in his eyes were glowing a faint, toxic violet.
"Arthur is weak," a voice hissed out of his throat. It wasn't Arthur's voice. It sounded like two sheets of metal grinding together. "Arthur cowers. I am the apex of his rage. I am the sovereign."
The wallpaper behind him began to peel and blacken, curling like dead leaves. The gravity in the room shifted, pinning me back against my chair with the weight of a small car.
Before I could even process the impossibility of what I was looking at, Arthur's body violently convulsed. He grabbed his own throat. The violet light in his left eye shifted to a freezing, brilliant white.
"No!" a second, shrill voice screamed from the same mouth. The air in the room suddenly dropped to freezing, frost spreading across my desk. "Don't let them look at us! Hide! We have to destroy everything so they can't see us fail!"
Arthur collapsed to his knees, screaming in dual, overlapping tones. The violet and white energies began violently clashing, tearing the drywall to shreds. His skin was cracking, smoking at the edges as the raw power of the two fractured minds fought for dominance over a single nervous system. He was burning out. In about thirty seconds, he was going to explode and take my entire building with him.
I couldn't move my arms. The pressure was crushing my chest. But my brain—the cynical, highly-trained, utterly exhausted part of my brain—clicked into gear. I wasn't looking at a monster. I was looking at a severely untreated dissociative break.
"Hey!" I barked, fighting for breath. "Hey, you glowing, melodramatic idiots! Look at me!"
Arthur's head snapped up. Both the violently angry Ego and the paranoid, cowardly Ego paused, glaring at me through dual-colored eyes.
"You think you're gods?" I wheezed, forcing a mocking laugh. "You're a pair of walking temper tantrums. Let's break this down, shall we?"
I locked eyes with the violet one. "Ego Number One. The 'Apex of Rage.' Please. You aren't a sovereign, you're a textbook maladaptive defense mechanism. You exist solely to overcompensate for Arthur's profound feelings of inadequacy. You project dominance because the host ego is so utterly terrified of being perceived as weak that it fractured to create you as a shield. You're a security blanket with a god complex."
The violent pressure pinning me to the chair wavered. The violet eye widened, flashing with sudden, violent cognitive dissonance. "I am—I am power!"
"You're a coping mechanism!" I yelled back over the sound of the cracking walls. I shifted my gaze to the freezing white eye. "And you! Ego Number Two. The paranoid one trying to freeze the room. You're exhibiting severe regression. You think hiding and destroying your environment protects you? You're a manifestation of his unresolved childhood neglect. You're reenacting a trauma loop where isolation feels safer than vulnerability. Neither of you are real entities. You are hysterical somatic symptoms of Arthur's inability to process his divorce!"
The air in the room stopped spinning.
The clinical, brutal deconstruction hit them harder than a physical blow. You can't maintain a delusion when the architect points out the structural flaws. By stripping away their grandiosity and reducing them to clinical textbook definitions, I was directly attacking the dissociative barriers keeping them separated from Arthur's core consciousness.
"You're both pathetic!" I shouted, leaning forward as the gravity finally released me. "You're burning out his nervous system because you're fighting over the steering wheel of a parked car! The threat is gone! His wife is gone! There is no one left to protect him from! Now synchronize your fragmented neural pathways and get back into his subconscious before I write you a prescription for antipsychotics!"
A profound, suffocating silence slammed into the room.
The violent light in Arthur's eyes flickered, panicked, and then shattered like glass. The telekinetic pressure vanished. The frost melted into dirty puddles on the carpet.
Arthur's eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he face-planted onto the floor, completely unconscious, snoring softly.
I sat in my chair for a long time. The office was a disaster zone. The drywall was ripped to shreds, my coffee was splattered across the ceiling, and my client had just turned into a two-headed psychic nuke before collapsing.
I stared at Arthur's unconscious form for a full minute, half-expecting his head to rotate three hundred and sixty degrees or for a third, even more annoying personality to pop out and demand a glass of water.
Nothing. Just the heavy, rhythmic snoring of a man who had just experienced a metabolic car crash.
I stood up, my knees popping like bubble wrap. My legs felt like lead, a lingering gift from whatever localized gravity field those two " personas" or whatnot had whipped up. I stepped over a jagged shard of drywall that looked suspiciously like a tombstone and navigated the minefield of soaked carpet toward my desk.
The silence in the room was heavy, thick with the smell of ozone and burnt dust. It's the kind of silence that usually follows a gunshot or a particularly brutal breakup. In my line of work, I was used to the latter; the former was usually reserved for the neighborhoods I couldn't afford to live in.
I reached for my notepad, which was currently pinned under a fallen bookshelf. I hauled the wood aside with a grunt, revealing the yellowed pages. I didn't write down "client exhibited Class-IV telekinetic manifestations." Instead, I scribbled: *Patient showed extreme resistance to breakthrough. Dissociative barriers collapsed under direct confrontation. Recommended follow-up: Intensive inpatient care or a priest.*
I paused, looking at the "Intensive" part. Who was I kidding? Arthur didn't have the insurance for the good wards, and I didn't have the energy to call them.
I looked at my reflection in the one part of the window that hadn't cracked. My tie was ruined, my coffee was on the ceiling, and I had a bruise forming on my ribs from where the air pressure had tried to fold me in half.
"Twenty minutes," I whispered to the wreckage. "I gave him twenty minutes of my life, and he gave me a construction project."
I slowly pulled a crumpled cigarette from my pocket, stuck it between my lips, and lit it with a trembling hand.
"Well," I muttered to the empty, ruined room. "That's definitely going to be an out-of-network billing."