"Don't play his game. Or don't let him win, at any rate." Smokey whispered, even before Marcus spoke this last provocation. "Remember: he's reading you, and learning your tells. He's trying to shock emotions out of you."
Temmit placed a binding on his mental chest, as he had long since come to model his emotional containment upon. Smokey's words serverd very well as those bindings.
"Damn, man!" Temmit laughed quietly. "You're sick!" He forced an 'inadvertant' snort, which made him cough on the cracker he had been eating, and he laughed a bit more in the doing. "How they squirm!" He whispered in echoe to Marcus's perversion.
"I guess you have more experience than I do." Temmit admitted, still lauging slightly. He took a drink to wash down his cracker and to give his face something to do as he steeled himself for Marcus's next assault.
"You can learn an awful lot about what makes a person fearful by observing what he uses to scare you." Smokey observed.
The truth in these words spoke volumes to Temmit. Marcus was trying to make Temmit angry, and the tactics that the doppleganger used told Temmit quite a lot, really. He wondered what might be next on Marcus's salvo.