Chapter 2: The First Session
The chair was too small. It always was. Marcus sat in the center of the observation room, the one-way mirrors reflecting a fractured, distorted image of his own hulking form back at him. The air was cold, recycled, carrying the faint hum of the monitors. He kept his eyes on the floor, on the scuff marks near the door where boots had dragged in and out for years.
The door clicked open.
Daniel walked in, a leather-bound notebook in one hand, a simple pen in the other. He didn’t look at Marcus. He moved to a chair placed against the wall, well outside of arm’s reach, and sat. He crossed his legs, opened the notebook, and clicked the pen once. The sound was like a gunshot in the silence.
“Session begins at 10:04 AM,” Daniel said, his voice flat, a recording. “State your name for the record.”
“You know my name.”
“Protocol, Titan. State your name.”
Marcus lifted his head. Daniel was staring at him now, but his eyes were different. They were the cool, assessing eyes of a surgeon, not the warm, laughing eyes that had once watched him over a shared breakfast. “Marcus Ashcroft. Formerly known as Titan.”
“Thank you.” Daniel made a note. “This session is for initial assessment and to establish a baseline for your behavioral recalibration. I’ve reviewed your file. Extensively. The casualty reports from San Francisco. The structural collapse in Dubai. The… incident in Prague.” He spoke the words like he was reading a grocery list, but a tiny muscle in his jaw flickered. “The file states you exhibited not just proficiency with your powers, but a clear… relish in their application. You enjoyed it.”
Marcus said nothing. He watched Daniel’s hand move across the page.
“Talk about that,” Daniel said, looking up. “The enjoyment. What did it feel like?”
“Why?”
“Because understanding the motivation is the first step toward managing it. So. You grow. Hundreds of feet tall. You are, for all intents and purposes, a god. Indestructible. What does that feel like in the moment?”
Marcus leaned back, the cheap chair groaning in protest. He looked past Daniel, at the dark glass, imagining the empty training floor beyond. “It feels like truth,” he said, the words coming slowly, pulled from a deep, rusted place. “All the little lies people tell themselves… about safety, about order, about control… they just vanish. You step on a parked car and it becomes a pancake. You swipe your hand through a facade and the whole building groans. You look down and see them running. Like ants. And you realize you’re not one of them. You never were. The power… it’s a fucking drug. The crunch of concrete, the screams that are so small from up there… it’s not that I liked the pain. I liked the simplicity. I was a force of nature. A hurricane doesn’t hate the houses it destroys. It just is.”
Daniel wrote, his expression impassive. “And then you stopped. You vanished. The most powerful seismic villain on the planet just… walked away. Withdrew a fortune from untraceable accounts and ghosted. Why?”
“I got tired.”
“Of what?”
“Of the silence,” Marcus whispered, his gaze dropping to his own massive hands. “Up there, hundreds of feet tall, invulnerable… it’s the quietest place in the world. No one can touch you. No one can reach you. You’re utterly alone. I lived for that solitude, for years. Until I started to drown in it.” He looked up, meeting Daniel’s clinical stare. “I wanted a sound that wasn’t crumbling stone. I wanted to feel something that wasn’t the recoil of my own fist through steel.”
“So you ran. You became Garrett. You lived comfortably. You evaded capture for a long time. What was the plan?”
“There wasn’t one. Just… to live. To be small. To buy groceries. To watch bad movies. To…” He stopped, the sentence hanging.
“To find what you were looking for,” Daniel finished for him, his tone still neutral, but something flickered in his eyes—a memory, quickly suppressed.
“Yes.”
“And did you?”
Marcus held his gaze. The room felt smaller, the air thicker. “Yeah. I did.”
“What was it?”
“You know what it was, Danny.” The name slipped out, raw and unprofessional.
Daniel didn’t correct him. He just waited.
“It was a Tuesday,” Marcus said, the memory washing over him, vivid and brutal. “You had a late patient. You came home smelling like that mint soap from your office and cheap coffee. You were complaining about the clinic’s paperwork. I was making pasta. You came up behind me, wrapped your arms around my waist, pressed your face against my back. You didn’t say ‘I love you.’ You just sighed. Like you’d been holding your breath all day and could finally let go.” His own voice grew rough. “That was it. That was the sound. That was the feeling. It was peace. It was so fucking simple.”
He saw Daniel’s knuckles whiten around the pen.
“And then you left it,” Daniel stated.
“I had to. My past. The people looking for Titan… they were getting close. They’d tracked a money trail to the city. If they’d found me, they’d have found you. They would have used you. They would have broken you open to get to me. Leaving was the only weapon I had left to protect you. So I used it.”
“You made a choice.”
“I made the only choice I could!” Marcus’s voice rose, bouncing off the mirrors. He forced it back down. “You think I wanted to? You think walking out of that apartment wasn’t the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever done? Harder than bringing down a tower? I left my heart in that bed with you, and I walked out the door. For you.”
For a long minute, the only sound was the hum of the lights. Daniel looked down at his notebook, but he wasn’t writing. He was just staring at the page.
“The clinical assessment,” Daniel began, his voice regaining its steady, professional rhythm, “is that you experienced a profound cognitive shift. Your villainy was driven by a need to assert a isolated, monumental self. Your departure from that life was motivated by the discovery of an anchoring empathy. Your subsequent sacrifice, while traumatic, indicates a latent capacity for altruism. It’s a foundation we can work with. The path forward involves reconciling the Titan’s power with Garrett’s conscience. You must learn to see the people not as ants, but as… people. As individuals with sighs of their own.”
It was a beautiful, cold, perfectly reasoned speech. It sliced Marcus open more cleanly than any blade.
“Is that all I am to you now?” Marcus asked, his voice hollow. “A clinical assessment? A foundation to work with?”
Daniel finally closed the notebook. The session was over. “For the purposes of this program, yes. That is what we are. It’s what we have to be.”
“And for us? Is there anything left to salvage?”
Daniel stood up. He walked to the door, placing his hand on the handle. He didn’t turn around. “No. There can’t be. It’s a conflict of interest I can’t afford, and a pain you don’t deserve to re-live.” He paused, his head dipping slightly. “But for what it’s worth, Garrett… it is good to see you. Alive. In one piece.”
It was the first humane thing he’d said in an hour. It was a tiny crack in the clinical facade, and it let all the ache pour in.
“I’m sorry,” Marcus said, the words heavy and final. “For all of it. But mostly for leaving you alone with that note. I’m so sorry, Danny.”
Daniel didn’t acknowledge the apology. He just opened the door. “Your next physical training is in twenty minutes. Don’t be late.”
Marcus stood, his body unfolding from the tiny chair. He walked past Daniel, filling the doorway, and stepped out into the bright, empty hallway. The door sighed shut behind him, cutting off the room, the mirrors, and the man inside.
Alone, Daniel Morales leaned back against the closed door. He slid down until he was sitting on the cold linoleum floor. His notebook fell from his limp hand. He brought his knees up, buried his face in them, and for the first time since Marcus had walked back into his life, he took a deep, shuddering, unobstructed breath. It sounded like a sob. It felt like the beginning of an ache that would never end.