Private Mind Games: The Interrogation of Dr. Grene

[Braze]

Tags: Tannor Grene ​

Aziraphale listened until the doctor's words had spent themselves, then he gave a soft, pitying tsk.

"It must be very soothing," he murmured, "to believe every room becomes yours if you can describe it well enough." His gaze settled on Tannor with a courtesy too delicate to be kind.

"But I suspect you have little interest in integrity, or in the labor required to earn the truth. You collect phrases, and repeat what clever men before you have written, then mistake the echo for your own brilliance. No… I suspect you are not concerned with truth. You are concerned with seeming positively brilliant.

You wish to see through me, yet it is you who is only reaching through darkened waters, hoping to blindly grasp something useful. Perhaps you think all this psychoanalysis makes you seem profound."

His eyes lowered over Tannor, then returned to his face.

"How unfortunate, then, that it has made you seem so very shallow... And yet to have found yourself so far beyond your depth."

Aziraphale tilted his head, studying him with mild disappointment.

"Where is the tension, Doctor? Where is the chemistry? You speak as though revelation can be summoned by reciting the proper terms, but even a poor stage magician knows suspense must be earned.... No audience applauds a man for walking onstage and declaring himself magnificent nor clever...

Perhaps this is projection. Could it be that you are the lonely one? The one so desperate to be witnessed? To be praised for naming things you do not understand?"

Another tsk followed in a chiding manner.

"How graceless of you, Doctor, to paint your own insecurities onto me and dub it insight."

Aziraphale leaned back, and with that small distance, whatever warmth had touched the room seemed to leave with him.

"Here I expected a brilliant mind…" His expression settled into something almost bored. "…and all I have found is a mirror with borrowed words."

 

[Tannor Grene]

Aziraphale’s words lingered in the air long after they were spoken. Not because they carried weight on their own, but because of the deliberate way that they were placed; each sentence arranged like a careful incision meant to test where skin had already been weakened. The room, already stripped of warmth, seemed to narrow further around Tannor as the creature leaned back, withdrawing not just proximity but any pretense of engagement. The absence of it left something colder behind.

For a moment, Tannor did not respond. Not because he had nothing to say, but because something had shifted beneath the surface of his awareness. It was subtle at first, like a misalignment in thought rather than a break. The creature’s cadence, the phrasing, the rhythm of dismissal wrapped in intellectual superiority; it pressed against something familiar in a way that did not belong in the present.

His fingers tightened faintly against the restraints. It wasn’t pain that surfaced first. It was recognition without context. A corridor. White walls, too clean in the way places tried to disguise what happened inside them. A chair that did not adjust to comfort, only to compliance. Voices speaking to him as though he were already classified, and already concluded. There had been questions then too, phrased gently at first, then repeated with the same certainty each time he failed to provide the answer that they wanted. You are concerned with seeming brilliant. You are not as stable as you believe. The cadence of it echoed now in Aziraphale’s voice so precisely that the present and the past began to overlap in ways that should not have been possible.

Tannor’s breath caught, just slightly. Not a gasp - something more controlled than that - but the smallest fracture in his composure. For the first time since waking, his attention faltered. Not outwardly toward the creature, but inward, as though something had been pulled loose behind his eyes and refused to stay buried.

A second memory followed the first without permission. Not the interrogation itself, but of what came after. The restraint of a padded room. The dullness of medication that turned time into something soft and unreliable. A white coat standing at the edge of his vision, repeating phrases he now realized he had heard before tonight. Projection. Resistance to truth. Delusional reconstruction of narrative. The words were not identical; but the tone was. The certainty that he was being reduced into something explainable, something manageable, something that did not get to define itself.

Tannor's jaw tightened. For a brief moment, something inside him tried to push upward; something sharp, defensive, and conditioned. A refusal not of the creature, but of the memory resurfacing itself. The sensation of being placed back into a version of himself he had long since built walls around, long since chosen to become someone else to escape.

And then the unsettling realization settled in more fully: he did not immediately remember leaving that place. Only that he had. Eventually. And somehow.

Tannor’s gaze lifted again toward Aziraphale, but it was no longer entirely anchored in the present room. There was a thin strain at the edges of his composure now; not visible as panic, but as the effort of maintaining continuity where continuity had begun to fail. “...You are repeating the language that you did not originate,” he said quietly at last, though the certainty in it was diminished, as though he were still testing whether his own thought belonged to him. His voice remained controlled, but there was a new edge beneath it now; less analytical, and more guarded. “That is not insight. It is mimicry.”

A pause followed, longer than the last, and just as silent. When he spoke again, it was softer, as though the words were being chosen from a place that had just become harder to reach. “....Where did you learn to speak like that?”

Tag: Braze

 

[Braze]

Tags: Tannor Grene ​

For the first time that evening, the doctor had offered something resembling an honest question. Not just another diagnosis dressed in borrowed authority, nor some rehearsed pronouncement delivered as some grand revelation.

Where did you learn to speak like that?

Aziraphale's smile returned, briefly...

"Oh, Doctor…"

He reached toward the collection of instruments beside him, though his fingers passed over the blade without interest. Instead, they settled upon a narrow silver canister, small enough to disappear within the curl of his palm.

"You still believe you have earned an answer... Very well." Aziraphale regarded him for a moment… then chuckled.

From somewhere beyond Tannor's view, he retrieved a breathing mask and brought it gently over the doctor's face, fastening the straps behind his head before arranging the attached tubing across his shoulders.

"I simply adore those late-night holodramas," he said, his smile turning almost fond. "Especially the ones with Dr. Hotbody."

He adjusted the mask with delicate care, ensuring it sat snugly over Tannor's nose and mouth.

"Now then... You have made mistakes all night, mister. You have mistaken my face for familiarity, my attention for intimacy," he continued softly, "and my questions for confession…"

His smile sharpened by the smallest degree. "I think we have had quite enough insight into one another for one evening." Aziraphale's hand slipped behind the chair, where the tubing fed into the waiting canister.

"And when you wake in your little office, surrounded by all those books that taught you how to name the world you live in and place labels upon all those pesky little problems… perhaps you will decide this was merely some private fracture of the mind."

His gaze lowered over Tannor, calm and faintly disappointed.

"Or perhaps you will spend every waking hour wondering whether I was ever here at all..." His thumb pressed against the canister's release.

Should the sedative take hold, Aziraphale intended to return the doctor to his office without ceremony: seated behind his desk, his clothing arranged, his possessions restored precisely where they had been found. He was however... clean shaven, and missing something he couldn't quite remember...

 

[Tannor Grene]

The mask settled over Tannor’s face with unsettling gentleness. The straps were adjusted with the same careful precision that had marked everything else this evening; the towel, the razor, the conversation itself. Even now, there was something ritualistic about it. Deliberate. The hiss of gas began quietly.

Tannor felt it almost immediately. His thoughts, already frayed by sedation and memory, seemed to loosen further at the edges. The room softened. The light above him blurred slightly. Somewhere behind Aziraphale's face, behind the mask and the straps and the growing heaviness, he could feel the shape of something missing. Not the memory itself. Just the absence of it. Like a word resting on the tip of his tongue that would never quite arrive. A strange sadness accompanied it.

His gaze remained fixed on the creature as long as he was able. "You know..." Tannor murmured through the mask, his voice quieter now, the effort of speaking beginning to show. "For someone so interested in what survives when people are alone..." A faint breath escaped him. "...you spend an awful lot of time hiding." The words were not sharp enough to be an attack. Nor confident enough to be a challenge. They sounded almost tired. Almost sincere.

His eyelids felt heavier. The room tilted gently. "I won't remember all of this," he continued after a moment, the admission arriving without bitterness. "Perhaps that's the point." His brow furrowed faintly. There had been something important. Someone important. A window. Tea. The feeling of being seen. He could no longer grasp it. Only the shape it had left behind.

For the first time since waking in this place, Tannor looked genuinely unsettled by that realization. Not frightened. But grieving. The sensation passed through him quietly. Then, slowly, he lifted his eyes back toward Aziraphale. "But whatever you took..." he said softly, struggling now to keep his focus anchored. "It mattered because it happened. The memory isn't the thing itself." His voice had become little more than a murmur. "The connection was."

The darkness pressed closer. Tannor's gaze drifted once toward the knife, then the towel, then finally back to the creature wearing another person's face. Something almost resembling a weary smile touched the corner of his mouth. "You should have asked him yourself." The words lingered between them. Braze. It was not the weakness. Nor the wound. But the person.

Then the last of his strength slipped away. His eyes closed. The tension gradually left his shoulders. And at last, silence reclaimed him.

When Tannor eventually awoke behind his desk, clean-shaven and surrounded by the familiar order of his office, he would find everything precisely where it belonged. Everything except one small thing. A memory that he knew he had lost. And the deeply unsettling certainty that somewhere in the dark, something had been watching him mourn it.

Tag: Braze