Disclaimer: Heck, these are both my own characters--well, that's a switch.

Author's notes: Follows on after chapter five. It's Paul Hanley and Dr. Westerfield, so some of you may just want to just jump ahead to number seven.

Thanks again, Cheri and Owl, for this one and #7—finding time to beta in the midst of a whole lot of other stuff.

Sessions—6

Westerfield had talked to him directly just once, on the phone the day before. Paul had seemed unusually self-possessed, though his voice was still reedy enough to betray his age. And, much to the doctor's surprise, he didn't seem to share Mark's antipathy toward office visits.

But the kid didn't drive, except in instances of flagrant necessity. So, Westerfield found himself on the steps of the university's library, at nearly noon the next day.

He saw him in the vestibule, sitting on one of the benches; nose buried in a book, and knew him as if by sight. Gangly, with an intense, bespectacled expression, and young, even by college freshman standards—he might as well have had 'prodigy' stamped on his forehead. Westerfield stepped inside and walked over to him. The kid looked up, almost before the shadow crossed the page.

He blinked once, as though he'd almost forgotten he was here for an appointment. Then there was a sudden and unexpected smile.

"Dr. Westerfield?"

The psychiatrist nodded and said 'yes', and Paul held out his hand and introduced himself with a certain degree of formality.

Westerfield thought he must've let a little of his surprise slip out into his expression because the kid quickly grinned and added, "I've been properly trained by a Polish academician. Don't worry; I can control it around people my own age."

Westerfield chuckled and Paul made a gesture back toward the inner doors of the library. "I reserved us a room." Then he was on his feet, leading the way through the bunches of students.

"I tutor here," he added, in a nonchalant but quiet aside as he fielded a set of keys and a puzzled look from one of the librarians. "So far, I think Mark's been my oldest. They probably think you're taking an adult ed course." He stepped down the corridor to the third door on the right and unlocked it. "I didn't explain this to them. I didn't think they'd want me using the place for therapy."

There'd been no particular emphasis on the last word, no hint of reserve. Westerfield gave him an appraising look and then said, "You're okay with that? The idea of getting help from a psychiatrist?"

Paul shrugged, then flashed a small smile. "That's Mark's hang-up, huh? I figured it was something like that. Nah, I'm okay with it." He frowned. "Not sure it'll do any good." The frown had gone to a more distant look, and then, "What'd he tell you about me?"

Westerfield was caught a little off-balance by this much directness. He hesitated a moment, taking a seat and gesturing Paul to the chair across from him. "Just some background," he admitted.

He sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and tried not to look too analytical. He thought the kid might be analytical enough for the both of them. He was grateful, for once, not to have to be juggling a menu at the same time as the conversation.

"My mom, huh?" Paul said flatly, after a moment of expectant silence. "He met her once, a couple of years ago. Though I'm not sure 'meet' is the right word. It's sort of a one-way transaction with mom. The hebephrenic bits used to be a little scary, but the catatonic episodes . . ." He shook his head. "It's like visiting a corpse."

That comment, delivered with flat resignation, hung in the air for a moment, as though Paul was waiting to see how it would be received. When Westerfield expressed no shock, nor any inclination to disagree, he continued on.

"I left when I was about twelve. She'd become kind of . . . unpredictable." He paused again, leaving that undefined. Westerfield merely nodded.

"Anyway," Paul finally sighed, "I wasn't doing her any good." Yet another pause, as though Paul was still working through the words before he spoke them. "I don't think I exist for her anymore."

"Do you have any other family?"

"None that she ever mentioned, not while I was growing up."

"Did you ever look, I mean, after you left?" Westerfield left the 'growing-up' part untouched. Another useful illusion, that he would think he'd done all of that before he was twelve.

Paul shrugged. "Hanley's a common name, and it's the only one on my birth certificate. If there was anyone she didn't mention, she must've had her reasons." He grimaced; Westerfield thought he might not even be aware he was doing it. "And I have a home."

"That's what Mark said. Someone from the university?"

"Professor Mlotkowski. He's retired." Paul smiled thinly. "You know it wasn't like I needed looking after. I was getting along okay."

"Isn't it easier, though?" Westerfield asked, in a tone of genuine curiosity. "To have a home, and someone to look out for you?"

Another shrug. "I suppose . . .yeah," he admitted, "it is." His expression went distant again. "As long as you remember everything is subject to change without notice . . . Mark gets that."

"Most people do," the psychiatrist agreed, "once it's happened to them. The rest of us just pretend it can't."

"Yeah," Paul shot him a sharp glance, as though he'd thought he would have to argue the point more.

"So," Westerfield finally said, "which change do you worry about the most?" Again he couldn't help it; it was frank curiosity.

Paul frowned. "Mark didn't tell you?"

"No."

"Well, that I'll wind up like her, of course." The frown persisted. "I would've thought that'd be pretty obvious."

"People don't always worry about the obvious thing," Westerfield replied. "Sometimes they do everything in their power to ignore the obvious."

"Not me," Paul said grimly. "I dwell on it. Damn near obsessive." He shook his head. "But I don't think I've ever mentioned it to anyone, except Mark."

"Not even Professor Mlotkowski?"

Anther quick shake of the head.

"How come?"

Paul sat there for a moment, saying nothing. When the answer finally came, it was very quiet, "He already worries too much, and most of it is about me." The kid's brows were knitted in worries of his own. "He's old, you know. Over seventy."

"In good health, though?"

Paul nodded. "But," he hesitated, "I can be a little hard on people." He tipped his head back and seemed to be studying the wall behind Westerfield. He started up again slowly. "If I were to start losing it, he wouldn't handle it too well."

"Eighty-seven percent," Westerfield said abruptly.

Paul gave him a sharp look.

Westerfield lifted his shoulders in a shrug. "Eighty-seven percent of children of schizophrenics do not develop schizophrenia."

Paul said nothing.

"I thought," the doctor continued, "that you've probably spent a lot of time thinking about it the other way."

"That thirteen percent do?"

"Yes. I think it sounds better the way I put it."

"But it's the same statistic," Paul pointed out. "Besides, I've never thought of myself as a lucky person."

"You've survived two outings with Mark McCormick and yet you think you're not lucky?" Westerfield smiled.

"Hah," Paul said, with a small smile of his own, "the first time, I kidnapped him."

"I believe he used the term 'coerced'."

"Yeah, well, he would put it that way," Paul grinned. Then almost as suddenly, the grin faded to something almost wistful. "He is lucky."

Westerfield's eyebrows went up—it was entirely involuntary.

"Yeah," Paul reiterated.

"You have an interesting definition of luck. I mean, beyond the ability to survive bad luck," the doctor mused.

"Yeah," Paul nodded, "there's that, but that wasn't what I meant."

Westerfield merely looked quizzical.

Paul's gaze roved over the room restlessly for a moment, as though he was searching for the explanation. He finally sighed, and looked back, directly at Westerfield.

"He can walk away from stuff; I've seen it. Yeah, he worries, but when it's over, it's over, and it's just behind him. He doesn't sit around and obsess about it. I swear, he's gotta be crazy to be that sane."

"That's a very interesting perspective," Westerfield said, after a moment's thought.

"I know, 'crazy' isn't an operative term for a shrink," Paul said grudgingly.

"'Shrink' isn't an operative term for a shrink, either,' Westerfield smiled.

This got him a conciliatory smile in return.

"But, anyway," the psychiatrist said, dragging the conversation back in the direction of constructive, "You and Mark seemed to have one thing in common."

Paul was giving him a stare of open doubt.

"You're both frighteningly well-adapted to living in interesting times," Westerfield said. "And I do not choose the term 'frightening' lightly."

"Well," Paul cocked his head, "I guess the thing with me is, what the hell, I'm probably going to be hearing the voices before I'm twenty. There really isn't anything else that comes even close to being that scary . . . except I don't want to take someone else down with me."

"Eighty-seven percent," Westerfield reminded him gently. "If you do something rash, and survive it, you might have another, say, seventy years of sanity in which to regret it."

Paul sat there, looking sober. The silence spun out for a few moments. He finally let out a breath and then said, "What we did last weekend, it was pretty damn rash."

"Well," Westerfield tilted his head a little, giving it some consideration, "It wasn't as though the alternative was any better, and the only really rash thing was Mark going into that building to bring out a man who was possibly already past saving."

"Yeah," Paul said with feeling, as though he was relieved to finally find someone who saw the obvious truth.

"—and the alternative there would have been setting fire to the structure with a man still in it. Could you have done that?"

Paul blanched.

"See, sometimes a choice involves so much sacrifice of moral principle, that even if a person survived, they really could not live with the outcome. That's what it is, to be altruistic.

"And all you did was to provide the data; he made the decision about how to act on it. The data was correct, wasn't it?'

Paul nodded slowly.

"So," the psychiatrist continued, "you are not responsible for his actions in this case, aside from providing information. He wasn't kidnapped or 'coerced' this time, was he?"

"No," Paul agreed reluctantly. "But I did make some pretty firm suggestions about how we should proceed."

"But they were based on the facts? And if you had concealed the facts, they would have been no less true, would they?"

Paul shook his head.

"He brought you evidence, and he asked you to explain it to him. You did the best you could, and then so did he. Neither one of you was responsible for what was in the box."

"I can see why Mark likes to talk to you," the boy said dryly.

Westerfield shrugged. "I'm just glad we're all still here to talk about it. And, anyway, the same thing happened to me."

Paul looked momentarily startled.

"Yes, it was about a year ago." The psychiatrist smiled. "He brought me a box of papers and asked me to figure them out. It was data about a chemical, very dangerous, something that the judge had been accidentally exposed to. I explained it to him, and then he went out and did something about it. It very nearly got him killed."

The boy frowned momentarily in silent thought. Then finally he mused, "It's not just me, huh. I thought maybe I was some kind of weird jinx for him."

"No," Westerfield cocked his head a little and looked thoughtful, "I'd have to say that if we are going to give credence to the idea of a jinx, I'd have to vote for Mark McCormick as the index case. I have it on pretty good authority that he can get into this kind of trouble entirely on his own."

"He sort of said that to me, you know, the first time . . . when I was apologizing for getting him into the middle of it." Paul sighed. "Well, that explains a lot, I suppose."

The psychiatrist gave him a questioning look.

"Oh," Paul continued, "about how he is—when things start to happen, I mean. You tell him you've put plutonium in his trunk, and a guy starts waving a Kalashnikov at him, and he looks a little worried and grumbles some, but that's it."

"Like I said," Westerfield nodded, "well adapted to interesting times. Maybe for different reasons than yourself, but adapted, nonetheless." He paused a moment, then cast Paul a sharp glance. "Are you familiar with Jung?"

"A little," the kid shrugged. "In translation. From when I was younger, you know, when my mom started getting worse. I read everything I could . . . What a crock. Freud, too. She's not the way she is because her inner consciousness is in disharmony. She doesn't have a damn inner consciousness anymore." He spat the words out bitterly. "You can't talk someone better from that."

"No, psychosis has a biochemical basis," Westerfield agreed. "But some of what Jung said, about the unconscious self, the 'shadow' self, being the opposite of what we think we are. It's an awfully useful explanation for some behaviors.

"Mark, for example, I would say he is a very decent person, and very much inclined to take action, no matter what the personal cost, when something bad is happening."

Paul said nothing.

"Jung would say he must have an equally powerful shadow self, in this case, a dark version," Westerfield said speculatively.

"And you think he needs to get that out in the open?" Paul asked doubtfully

"Hell, no," the psychiatrist said with a sharp grin. "I'm not that much of a Jungian. There's such a thing a functional repression, in my book." Then he looked at Paul even more intently. "Now you—"

Paul's expression went a little tighter, but again he said nothing.

"I would wager a guess that your childhood was . . . chaotic."

The continuing silence was itself an answer.

"And now you study the hardest of hard sciences, the one which tries to reduce all behavior of matter and energy to understandable rules. Am I right so far?"

A nod. A seeming reluctance to have his own behavior reduced to simple rules.

"Don't worry; I won't take the analogy too far." Westerfield smiled. "But you did give up a life of gypsy-like freedom for something a lot more structured, right?"

"Yes," Paul said. Then he added insistently, "but I had to."

"And it's a good thing," Westerfield added. "You'll probably live a lot longer eating three meals a day and sleeping under a roof. And that'll give you more time to figure out how it all fits together." He smiled reassuringly. "And I'd say your shadow self isn't particularly dark, just impulsive, and it's a lot closer to the surface than Mark's. But I do think it recognized a kindred spirit when it saw one."

"Sometimes," Paul hesitated, then went forward in what was almost a rush, "I just want to turn it off. The thinking. I just want to do stuff without . . ."

Paul hesitated again, looking very uncomfortable.

"That's a high performance engine you're working with there. It even idles fast."

"Wrong guy for that analogy," Paul said ruefully. "I'm the one with too few graphite rods in the reactor core."

"That, too," Westerfield nodded. "Try to accept it for what it is. And you are entitled to an impulse once in a while. Not every potential action needs to be given the same amount of thought. And Mark's entitled to get angry now and then, too. I just hope both of you can avoid anything permanently destructive when you cut loose."

"Let it out a little at a time? Avoid the big tectonic shifts?"

"Precisely," Westerfield smiled, then he glanced down at his watch. "Enough thinking for one day. You hungry?"

Paul didn't give that much apparent thought before he nodded.

"I've still got some time before I have to head back. Come on, I'll take you to lunch. It's traditional." He smiled as he stood. "Do you like Mongolian barbeque?"