What if the Animorphs had a therapist in the know? If you don't want to make an OC, perhaps make Cassie a burgeoning amateur one, more than she is in the books.
Jo watches the clock tick past 10:00, to 10:01, to 10:05. It's not a shock — no-shows are even more common in therapy than in any other medical field. She specializes in anxiety disorders. It'd be silly to get shocked that sometimes clients get too anxious to show up to talk about their worst fears with a near-stranger. So she makes eye contact with Will, their receptionist, and he nods to indicate he understands to call back if her 10AM does show. Then she goes back to her office, locks the door, and gets to work typing up her notes from her 9AM session.
At 10:08, she looks up and startles so badly that her pen snaps in her hand. There's a teenage boy sitting in the chair across her desk.
Breathing in deep, then letting it out, Jo gives herself three full seconds to don her professional face. She is familiar with boundary-testing, of course, and clients trying to get a rise out of her is also not new. It's just this particular client's choice of test that got to her. "Marco Ray?" she says.
"Please, call me Jo," she says.
"Jo," he repeats. "That short for Josephine? Jolene? Jocelyn?"
"Johnathan? Joaquin? Jodadiah?"
She keeps her professional face on. "Jocasta," she says, mostly to get them off this topic. "But I go by Jo. Do you prefer a derivative of Marco?"
"Jocasta." His smirk becomes a grin. "What an oedipal name, as your man Freud would say. That why you decided to become a headshrinker, to figure out why you want to boink your own kid?"
Okay, that's enough. There's establishing rapport, and then there's countertransferrence. "Marco," she says. "If you'd like to proceed with this course of therapy, then we will need to talk about you rather than about me. If that's not something you're comfortable with, then we can discuss other topics first, see if we can come back to it later. But if you're not prepared to discuss yourself..."
"I thought you said we could talk about whatever I wanted." He mock-pouts. "It's why I picked you."
That is not why he picked her, since it applies to almost any therapist on the planet. He picked her because she's an ex-controller whose Peace Movement yeerk died six months ago, but not before putting her in contact with Illim who put her in contact with the Animorphs. That, and her tour of duty in Iraq in '91. He picked her because last week she had conversations with Ax and Tobias, the week before with Cassie, and none of them has been killed or infested in the interim. Presumably there were other tests over the last month, given how many times she's noticed birds of prey hanging around outside her house, but she's not privy to what those would be.
Marco tilts his head back, looking around the room. Reading the degrees she posted on the walls, the titles of her books. "How to Lie with Statistics, huh?" he asks.
"Interesting choice," she says, "to comment on." She does find that interesting, given that it's a tenth the size of the textbooks and — unlike a lot of the volumes about gender roles — doesn't contain the word Sex in the title. But she also wants to see what he'll say next.
"I love lying," he insists, stridently enough that she suspects a lie. "And I hate statistics." That one also seems like a lie. Very interesting.
"Tell me about how you came to love lying, then," she says.
"But it'd be a lie." He widens his eyes.
"Marco." Her next move is calculated, and requires her to hold onto her show no fear face with all ten fingernails. But she stands up, and walks around her desk to lean against its front. Putting herself within arm's reach of easily the most dangerous client she's ever had. "We don't have to talk about you," Jo says. "But if we don't, then this will be a waste of time and money for us both." She does have some Gestalt training, it's true, but right now she's also being this blunt because she senses it's what Marco needs.
The assessment portfolio his school counselor sent over paints a picture of a young man smart enough to be dangerous in a traditional classroom, one who went from mischief-maker to potential threat around the time his mom died. He needs a straight-shooter, and he needs dependability more than affirmation right now.
There's also the problem of his needing some kind of diagnosis for the paperwork's sake. There's the family history of depression, but that's not the sense she's getting from him. Of course she can't put PTSD or ADHD on the insurance forms, would raise too many questions. Reactive Attachment Disorder? She hasn't seen anything for herself, but that seems to be the way the assessment is pointing. She'll probably just go for Oppositional Defiant Disorder, though she hates to toss yet another whip-smart brown boy into that trash pile of a diagnosis.
Marco considers his own thoughts, as she considers all this. At last he looks up at her, and what comes out sounds honest: "Is it okay if we talk about Jake instead?"
"Yes." Finally some progress, twenty-two minutes into the fifty-five she has with him. "Tell me about Jake."
"And you'll keep it to yourself." He squints at her. "Or else we'll have to kill you."
Jo really really wishes she could tell whether that second part was a joke. "I'll keep it to myself," she says, "on pain of losing my license."
"Okay." Marco blows out a breath. "Guess I'm betting on you not hating your job, then. So here's the thing about my boy Jake. He thinks he has to take responsibility for the entire world, and then some. Never mind that he's fifteen, never mind that he's just some dumb jock who never asked for any of this. He's been backed into a corner where someone has got to pick up the slack, and he's doing it. But it's leaving nothing behind for him, you know? And he won't even admit that anything is wrong, not even when we can all see it."
If she'd known it'd be this easy, she would've made her first question about... mentally she searches her notes. Jake Berenson, she's pretty sure. The Animorphs' informal war-prince. "That can't be easy," she says. "For him."
"Yeah," Marco says. "And people mistake him for being all grown-up and mature, you know? Which he is, but only because he has to be. You can just tell that what he wants is to be a kid. Play Sega. Goof off in class. All of that. But not only is he one of the six — freakin' six — dumb losers stuck trying to keep the human species around, he's also got a friggin' controller in his own family! That has got to mess with a guy's head, no way it doesn't. Knowing that there's nowhere safe, that those damn slugs already got into your home, that they've been there for years, and you thought you were oh-so-smart but it turns out that nothing you think you know can be trusted, not even your own memories..."
"And what do you think Jake would say," she says, "if I got him into this office and asked him what he needs from all of you?"
Marco takes a breath. She can't tell, not for sure, if he even knows he's doing it. But she does her best to remember every word, as he starts talking again.
"You all right?" her supervisor asks, sitting down on the front step of the office next to her later that afternoon.
"New client this morning," Jo admits, stubbing out the cigarette she's swearing yet again will be her last. "Hard one."
If the client in question had signed the release form, then Jo would be able to talk this over in more detail. Since he didn't, she's going to have to be more circumspect.
"SLS," Jo says, which about sums it up.
You're not supposed to use the phrase Shit Life Syndrome, not even with fellow practitioners. It's too defeatist, too judgmental. But it lingers anyway, because sometimes that really is the presenting problem. Sometimes the client is sad because her husband is a piece of shit and her manager's abusive, sometimes a client's scared because his parents hit him and his teachers don't listen. But all the therapist can do is let them talk for a while about how bad it sucks, before sending them right back into the same morass of bullshit that gave them depression in the first place.
And sometimes the client's fighting in a war with no one on his side but a couple fellow kids. Sometimes he's being forced to defend his life six times a month with fists and teeth. Sometimes he's lying awake at night because his mom is a hostage for the other side and sometimes you really do have to let the hostages die.
"Ah, damn," her supervisor says. Her smile is sad. "Work with what you have, okay? Don't rush it."
"I should become one of those people who hoards kittens," Jo jokes weakly. "Only the kittens are clients, and I bring them all home."
"And hoarding isn't considered a disorder because the kittens in question get good quality of life once they're there."
She stubs out her cigarette unfinished, folding the butt underfoot before putting it in the trash. "I hate when you talk sense."
"Secure my own oxygen mask!" Jo blurts overtop her. "The wounded healer too can have compassion fatigue! Trust the process!"
At first it's halfway to anger, but by the time she's done they're both half-laughing with released tension.
"Take care of yourself, okay?" her supervisor calls, as she heads to her car. "And call if you need anything."
Jo snaps off a salute of acknowledgement, and then she walks out to her car. Off to trust her wounded mask, or some such shit, one compassion at a time.
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