Countertransference (Ch. 3)
Tim Wright x gn!reader x Brian Thomas
Youād already reached for the door handle before frowning.
You stared at the locked entrance of your office building before trying the handle again. Nothing. Peered through the glass. Dark. Empty. The reception desk abandoned, chairs stacked.
You'd seen the calendar reminders, the emails about office closures, heard the way your coworkers had been buzzing all week about travel plans and family dinners. You just... hadn't registered any of it. Frankly, why would you? You didnāt exactly have any exciting plans. No family to visit, no friends to host.
You stood there for a long moment, breath fogging slightly in the cool morning air, feeling genuinely pathetic.
Going home meant sitting on your couch, scrolling through your phone, watching everyone else post gratitude photos while you ate leftovers from two nights ago. Pretty depressing.Ā
Your therapist podcast hosts always said that āwalking is good for both the body and the mind. It reduces cortisol. It improves mood. It's a form of active meditation.ā
And you'd said those exact words to patients at least a dozen times. This might be a sign that itās time to stop being a hypocrite and actually take your own advice for once.
You turned away from the locked door, adjusting your bag on your shoulder, and started walking.Ā
The park wasn't far. A fifteen-minute stroll through the quieter part of town.
The weather was nice, at least. A bit cloudy, but not cold.Ā
You walked for a while, letting your mind drift. Thinking about nothing. Thinking about everything. Thinking about Tim, mostly, because apparently he lived in your head rent-free now.
Not romantically, of course. You would never think romantically of one of your patients, that was a big no-no.Ā
You were thinking about his dead friends, mostly. Ever since youād dug that up it was the only thing your mind could focus on. After all, your patient might be a serial killer, that was hard not to think about.
Stop that. It's your day off. Stop thinking about work.
You were rounding a bend in the path, the trees thinning out to reveal a small clearing with benches and a fountain, when you saw him.
Red flannel, dark hair, sideburns.
Gosh, speak of the devil.
He was standing near one of the benches, talking to another guy.Taller than him, lighter hair. You couldn't see his face from this angleājust the back of his head. But Tim looked pretty comfortable around him.
Brian, you thought immediately.Ā
You ducked behind the nearest tree.
Your back pressed against the bark, heart beating at a pace slightly faster than normal. Why the hell were you hiding behind a tree like a spy in a bad movie? Because you saw your patient in public?
This was a public park! You had every right to be here at the same time as him, there was nothing weird about you running into each other, People ran into others in public all the time! It was normal! You were supposed to wait for the person to acknowledge you first, or pretend you didn't see each other.
You peered around the trunk.
Tim was laughing at something Brian said. You'd never seen him laugh before. Not really. A huff here, a dry chuckle there, maybe.
You watched them start walking toward the park exit.
And then, without any conscious decision on your part, you started following.
This is stalking. This is quite literally, definitionally stalking. You are following your patient through a public park like a creep. Stop it.Ā
Your feet kept moving, staying a careful distance behind, weaving between other park-goers, never letting them out of your sight. You told yourself it wasn't weird. It was coincidental. You were both going the same direction. The park had one main exit. That was all.
Then they turned into a supermarket, and you followed them inside, not so coincidentally.
The automatic doors hissed open.
And immediately locked eyes with Tim.
He was standing right there. Right inside the entrance, next to the pharmacy counter. Brian was beside him.
Act normal.. You're just a person buying things. You live around here. This is your supermarket too. You have every right to be here as well.
You stood there like a deer in headlights, eyes wide, bag clutched to your chest, looking exactly as guilty as you felt.
Tim's expression shifted from surprise to something softerāalmost concerned. He raised a hand in a small wave.
"Oh, hey," he said, "Doing some holiday shopping?"
You noticed the bottle in his other hand. White prescription bottle. He was holding it loosely, like he'd just picked it up, while Brianāyou caught a glimpse of movementāshoved something into his pocket before you could see what it was.
You snapped out of your frozen state, forcing an awkward smile. You waved back, walking closer.
"Hi. Uh, yeah!" You gestured vaguely at the shelves behind you. "Just... grabbing a few things. You know how it is. Holidays."
Tim nodded, and your gaze dropped to the bottle in his hand before you could stop it.
The name registered somewhere in the back of your brain. Not a medication you recognized. Definitely not something you'd prescribed. You'd given him standard sleep aids and sent him on his way.Ā
Why is he taking something you didn't prescribe?
Tim noticed you staring. His fingers tightened around the bottle for a fraction of a second before he slid it into his back pocket, casual as anything.
"So," he said, clearing his throat, "uh, this is my friend Brian. Brian, this is..." He paused, seeming to realize how strange this was. IntroducingĀ his friend to his therapist. In a supermarket. "This is my therapist."
You turned to Brian properly for the first time.Ā He gave a small nod and a sly smile.
Wait. You recognized him. Where do you recognize him from? That smirk, those dimples- oh.Ā
Brian, his smile widening as he saw the realization hit you, spoke up.
"Oh," he said, and his voice was exactly the same. Low. Casual. "We've met before, right, Doc?"
Tim's head swiveled between the two of you in confusion. "What? Really? How?"
Your palms went slick. Brian's eyes hadn't left yoursāamused.
Just as he opened his mouth to speak, you cut him off.
"Oh, you knowāmutual friends and such!" The words tumbled out too fast, too bright. "The world is a small place, after all!"
Tim, mercifully, seemed satisfied with that explanation. His shoulders relaxed. "Oh. Okay, then." He glanced toward the back of the store. "Well, I'm gonna use the bathroom real quick. Be right back."
You watched him walk away, rounding the corner toward the restrooms, and only when he was completely out of sight did you let yourself exhale.
Then you turned back to Brian.
"Mutual friends, huh?" He crossed his arms, leaning against the pharmacy counter like he owned the place. "Could that mutual friend be Tim 'Right'? His birthday just passed, actually. Shame I didn't see you there." he referenced your email, almost like it was an inside joke.
You rubbed the back of your neck, heat creeping up your cheeks. "Oh... that... haha..." A nervous laugh escaped you. "I'm guessing that means you're not gonna tell me anything new...?"
Brian snorted again, shaking his head. "I told you everything you needed to know." His voice dropped slightly, losing some of its amusement. "And I'll repeat it again: don't stick your nose where it doesn't belong. Or you'll regret it."
That made something hot flare in your chest. Who was this guyāthis chain-smoking, alley-lurking, vaguely threatening strangerāto tell you what to do? You were trying to help. You were Tim's therapist. You had a right to know about his past.
You crossed your arms, mirroring his posture. "Fine." The word came out sharper than you intended before you softened your voice again. "Just... you won't tell Tim, right...?"
Brian's eyebrow rose slightly. "Tell Tim about what?" he rubbed his stubbled chin as if in thought. "The fact that you spelled his last name wrong? Or the fact that you're trying to dig up his past and went to the lengths of contacting his friends about it?"
Well when he said it like that, it sounded bad. Really bad. Stalker-bad.
"Uh... both." You dropped your arms, trying to look earnest instead of cornered. "Listen, man. All I wanted to do was help him. I had no malicious intent whatsoever. So could we please just keep this between us?"
Brian didn't answer immediately. He just looked at you, head tilted, like he was trying to decide whether you were worth the effort of crushing.
Then you heard footsteps. Tim's footsteps, coming back from the bathroom.
This is it, you thought, heart plummeting. He's going to tell him. I'm going to get fired. I'm going to get sued. I'm going to go to jail forāwhat was the charge? Impersonating a therapist? Stalking? Both? More?
Brian's eyes flicked toward the sound, then back to you. His smirk returned, slower this time.
"Finally, you're back," he said, as Tim rounded the corner.
Tim rubbed his hands on his jeans, oblivious. "Sorry, there was a line."
Brian pushed off from the counter, stepping toward his friend.Ā
"Let's get going, yeah? We still have a turkey to bake."
Brian's eyes met yours over Tim's shoulder. There was something unreadable in themānot kindness, exactly, but not cruelty either. A warning, maybe.
"Bye, Doc," he said, and turned away.
Tim nodded at you, a small, awkward wave, and followed Brian toward the exit.
After a few minutes of standing awkwardly in the middle of the store,you finally made your way home. The interaction kept replaying in your mind.
You stared at the leaves crunching below you and tried to remember everything you'd learned in those two years of university before you'd dropped out.
It really wasnāt much. You'd barely passed most of your psych classesātoo busy watching true crime, too lazy to study something that you didnāt really find any interest in, telling yourself you'd catch up next week. When you first rolled in you thought psychology would be this sick course that would teach you all about how the human mind works, how to profile people like in the movies. How to analyze every small detail: a twitch, a glance, a hesitation and know exactly what it meant.
You'd imagined yourself as some kind of detective-psychologist, cracking people open with nothing but your keen observational skills and a notepad.
Reality had been...a bit different.
Mostly it was theories about developmental stages, neurobiology, research methods, statistical analysis. Pages and pages of dense textbook language that made your eyes glaze over.Ā
You'd dropped out halfway through your second year. Told yourself it wasn't a big deal. Told yourself you didn't need a piece of paper to understand people.
And look where that got you.
You kicked at a leaf, watching it flip through the air.
Fine. So you didn't have a degree. So you'd barely passed the classes you did take. That didn't mean you'd learned nothing.
You thought back to the human behaviour lectures.
Pattern recognition. People fell into patterns. The way they talked, the way they moved, the way they reacted under stress. You'd met Brian twice now.
The first time was aggressive, direct, confrontational. He'd wanted you scared. He'd wanted you to back off.
The second time was more controlled. Amused. Watching you squirm while Tim was in the bathroom, enjoying your panic like it was entertainment.Ā
He faintly reminded you of a wild animal. Your overall impression of him was..Predatory.
You thought about the way Brian had smiled, a smile that said āI'm in control here, not you.ā
Power dynamics. Another thing you vaguely remembered from Psych 101. People who felt powerless tried to gain power over others. While people who had power didn't need to prove it.
And you had the feeling Brian wasn't as confident as he pretended to be.
Because if Brian was truly in control, if he truly had nothing to worry about, he wouldn't have bothered warning you in the first place. He would have ignored you. Laughed you off. Let you dig yourself into a hole and deal with the consequences.
He'd sought you out. Found you outside your office. Tracked you down to deliver a personal warning. And then, when you showed up again, he'd made sure you knew he remembered.
That's not confidence, you realized. That's anxiety.
Brian was worried about what you might find.
The thought made you giddy for half a secondāha, you got under his skinābefore the rest of your brain caught up and reminded you that a worried person was also a dangerous person. Worried people did stupid things. Desperate things. Violent things.Ā
That was the thing that kept circling back. Tim had no idea. He didn't know about the alley. He didn't know about the emails. He didn't know that his best friend had threatened his therapist behind his back.
Why wouldn't Brian tell him? If Brian was so worried about you digging into Tim's past, why not just... tell Tim? Let Tim fire you? Let Tim report you? It would have been so much simpler.Ā
You rubbed your temples, you could feel a headache starting to form. You needed more information, but every attempt to get more information seemed to put you in Brian's crosshairs. And one thing you knew for sure was that you should avoid him at all costs.
You found yourself back on your couch, laptop open, fingers already typing.
Just a quick look, you told yourself. Just to see what else is out there.
Tim had changed clinics. You'd noticed it before, in passing, while flipping through his file. A list of referrals, transfers, and new patient intakes spanning several years. He'd bounced around quite a bit before landing in your (admittedly questionable) care.
Most patients stuck with one therapist, one practice, unless something went wrong. Insurance changes, maybe. Moving cities. Or...if they were running from something.
You pulled up the list again, scanning the names. Most of the clinics were local, within an hour's drive. A few were further out. But there, at the very bottomāthe oldest entry, dated nearly fifteen years agoāwas a name.
You searched for it immediately, fingers flying across the keyboard. No website. No social media. Just a single Google Maps listing with a grainy street-view image and a handful of old reviews.
It was about a thirty minute drive, tucked away in a rural area surrounded by trees, next to Rosswood Park, as one wouldāve assumed.
You stared at the screen, chewing on your thumbnail.
This was where Tim had been as a child.. An actual mental institution, tucked away in the middle of nowhere.Ā
This place could have answers.
They wouldn't just hand over patient records to a random stranger claiming to be a therapist. You needed a story that would get you past the front desk.
If you showed up, said you were family. Said Tim was... what? Sick? Dying? Something dramatic enough to warrant releasing decades-old records but not so dramatic that they'd need proof.
Youād just say that he's been admitted to a new clinic, and they need his full medical history for treatment. The old records got lost in the transfer.Ā
It wasn't terrible. It wasn't good, but it wasn't terrible. right? Right.Ā
You pressed the gas pedal harder on the empty freeway, watching the speedometer climb, the trees blur past.. It was just starting to get dark and you really didn't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere at night. Seriously, who builds a hospital so far from the city? Let alone in a forest? The trees had been closing in for the last few minutes, thick and dark, their branches reaching toward the road like grasping fingers.
You just hoped they werenāt on holiday break as well. Or what if they close soon. They shouldnāt be, itās a hospital after all, theyāre always working. So there was still hope that you werenāt completely wasting your time.
So there was still hope that you weren't completely wasting your time.
That hope died the moment you rounded the final bend.
You slowed the car to a stop, staring through the windshield at the building ahead.
Not "closed for renovations" abandoned. Not "temporarily shut down" abandoned. Abandoned abandoned.Ā
Vines crawled up the walls. Windows were boarded overāor broken, glass glittering on the ground. The parking lot was cracked and overgrown with weeds.
You wanted to bang your head on the steering wheel. Instead, you let your forehead rest against it gently, eyes closed, breathing slowly through your nose.
Of course it's abandoned. Of COURSE it's abandoned! You drove half an hour to an abandoned mental institution because you couldn't be bothered to do five extra minutes of research.
Honestly, if you had just done a teeny tiny bit more diggingāchecked the news articles, read the full reviews, maybe called ahead like a normal personāthis would not have been a problem.
You sat there for a long moment, the engine ticking as it cooled, the wind rustling through the trees.Ā
Well. You came all this way. You might as well get something out of it. Explore a bit, maybe youāll magically find all of Timās past written on a wall, who knows. You still had some time before it was fully dark.
The air was cold and stale, thick with dust and the smell of rot. Peeling wallpaper, overturned furniture, the scattered remains of what might have once been a waiting room, graffiti covered the walls. Tag after tag, layer over layerāsome artistic, some crude, some just illegible scrawls. It was almost comforting. People had been here. Teens, probably. Exploring, just like you used to.
This is fine, you told yourself, stepping over a fallen ceiling tile. You've done this before.
And you had. As a teenager, you and a few friends used to sneak into abandoned buildings all the time. Factories, schools, old houses with sagging roofs and broken windows. You'd wander through the ruins, making up stories about who had lived there, what had happened, why they'd left.
It had felt like an adventure back then. Exciting. A little dangerous, but in a safe way.
The hallway opened into a larger roomāwhat might have once been a common area, or maybe a rec room. Chairs were stacked in a corner, a shattered television hung from a wall mount. The room led to a few other smaller rooms.Ā
As you walkedĀ towards them you heard something. Or more specifically, someone.
"ācan't believe that bastard. I just hope Seth's doing alright. Hopefully that psycho won't be able to get to him."
You stopped breathing. You should probably leave. But the voice sounded familiar. Your feet carried you toward the sound, soft and slow, placing each step carefully to avoid the creaking floorboards.
You're walking toward the stranger in the abandoned mental institution. This is how people DIE.
The voice was coming from a room at the end of the hall. One without a doorājust an open archway, dark and gaping. You pressed yourself against the wall, inching closer, and peered inside.
One had his back to the doorway. He was wearing a mustard yellow hoodie, the hood pulled up, and a black ski mask you couldnāt see fully since his back was turned to you. His shoulders were tense, his posture coiled.
The other man stood facing him, a bit shorter but on the bulkier side, half-turned, wore a beige jacket and a white mask. Plain, except for facial features painted in black. Eyes, lips and eyebrows.
the yellow hoodie said, his voice muffled by the mask but still sharp, frustrated. "We need to actually do something. Lying low doesn't help if he finds us first."
The white mask nodded slowly, but didn't speak.
"We need to find him beforeā"
The white mask turned and looked right at you.
You were frozen, caught like a deer in headlights, staring into the hollow black eyes of that painted face.
He was on you before you could run, before you could scream, before you could do anything except stumble backward. His hands grabbed your shoulders, shoving you hardāyour back hit the floor, the wind knocked out of you, and then he was on top of you, fists swinging.
Fight back. You need to fight back.
Except you weren't a fighter. You'd never been in a real fight in your life. But panic is a powerful thing, it takes over, makes your body move before your brain can catch up.
Your hands flew up, trying to block. Your legs kicked, trying to push him off. You managed to catch his arm, shove it aside, and for a split second, you had enough space to try to roll away.
But he was stronger. He grabbed your jacket, yanked you back down, and his fist connected with your jaw.
Get off get off get offā
You couldn't think. Couldn't do anything except struggle, clawing at his arms, his chest, anything you could reach.
Your fingers scrambled and found the edge of his mask.
You pulled and the white mask came off in your hands.
And you were staring up at Tim.
Tim's face, twisted with rage, eyes wild and unfocused like he wasn't seeing you, like he was seeing something else entirely. His fist was raised for another blow, frozen mid-swing, his chest heaving.
His expression shifted. How you knew this you didnāt know, it was like his body language changed.
Then the other guy moved.
Tim scrambled off you after snatching the mask back, backing away, but you couldn't look at him. Couldn't look away from the man in the yellow hoodie, your heart was thumping so loud you were sure he could hear it as well as you stared up at him with fear.
He'd been standing there. Watching. Doing nothing while his friendāhis partner, whatever he wasābeat you into the floor. But now he walked forward, slow and deliberate.
He stopped right in front of you. Looked down. He stood over your prone body and you felt impossibly small, vulnerable.
You couldn't see his faceājust the black fabric of the ski mask and a red smiley face on it. Then the bat caught the fading light from the broken window behind you, glinting once.
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