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During one particularly complex and baffling case, Shawn becomes an insomniac. He complains loudly and frequently to anyone who will listen about his trouble sleeping, claiming that the spirits are so worked up over the case that they won't give him a minute's rest. It's a lie, but there's enough truth in it that Gus is sympathetic to his friend's struggle.
It's been two full days since the last time Shawn slept last when a solution finally presents itself.
They're in the station, Shawn leaning over Juliet's shoulder as she goes through the file for the three-hundred and forty-second time, his fingers kneading at his forehead. He's had a headache for the last thirty hours and it refuses to be tamed by any form of pharmaceutical help. There are dark circles beneath his eyes that stand out so strongly they almost seem like they've been cut and pasted onto his face. His hands tremble.
In other words, he looks terrible.
Huffing in annoyance, he straightens up abruptly, slamming his hand down on the desk, rattling the pens in Juliet's cup. “Dammit, this isn't helping!”
His temper's short, both because of the lack of sleep and the pain in his head.
Juliet sighs as Lassiter's shoulders tense. “Shawn...”
“I know, I know,” he says impatiently. “Sorry. I just—” He makes a noise of intense frustration and shoves his hands into his hair.
Juliet watches him as he starts to pace, concern and pity warring for prominence on her face. Shawn is beyond needing sleep. He has to get sleep soon, or he's going to lose his mind. She and Gus exchange a look. He's as worried as she is.
“We've tried everything I have,” Gus says. “Even a few things that are just supposed to have drowsiness as a side effect. Nothing has worked.”
Shawn makes another noise in his throat, this one a little more like a cry than anything else. Juliet's heart goes out to him.
“What about sedation?” Lassiter demands. “Take him to the hospital—where he belongs—and have him sedated.”
Gus sighs. “That wouldn't do any good, Lassiter. There's no real rest in sedation. He needs sleep.”
“I want sleep,” Shawn says, voice throbbing with the desire of it. He slams back against the pillar near their desks and slides down to the ground, legs splaying out in front of him, one knee bent so his foot can press against the side of Juliet's desk. “Is that so much to ask?” He sounds pitiful, almost as though he's on the verge of tears.
“It can't help to have him out here, wandering around,” Lassiter says, waving a hand. “He should be at home, in bed.”
Shawn groans at the very idea. “Do you want me to kill myself, Lassie? That's the last place I want to be.”
Gus shrugs. He knows it doesn't make any sense, but he also understands. Lying bed with insomnia only seems to compound the problem. “We were hoping that maybe going over the case again would help quiet the spirits down.”
“Noisy bastards,” Lassiter mutters.
“What are we going to do?” Juliet asks, lowering her voice. “He can't go on like this for much longer.” She steps closer to Gus, her eyes worried. “Sleep deprivation can be fatal.”
“I know,” Gus says, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “I don't know.”
“If we could just solve this case—”
“Don't start with that,” Gus says wearily. “That's what got Shawn in this position in the first place.”
They're silent for a moment, commiserating over their problem.
Then Lassiter speaks up, voice soft. “Well, I'll be damned.”
They turn to look at him and he points to the floor at the base of the pillar where Shawn dropped down moments before. The psychic is slumped over his bent knee, one arm curled beneath his bent leg, the other hanging limply on the other side of his body. His face is slack, eyelids tinted a faint lavender.
Juliet gasps softly. “Oh my god.”
“He's asleep,” Gus says and his voice is weak with amazement and relief.
Shawn sleeps for two hours there on the floor, with Gus, Juliet, and even Lassiter guarding him from any and all possible disturbances. When he wakes with a groan, dark lashes fluttering and a grimace creasing his forehead, Juliet is there to help him sit up again.
“Ow,” he mumbles, wincing as he leans back against the pillar. “What happened?”
Juliet beams at him, patting his knee. “You fell asleep.”
Shawn blinks, shaking his head. “No. I just closed my eyes. The light was killing my head.”
Holding her wrist so that Shawn can read her watch, she says, “No, Shawn, you fell asleep. Two whole hours.”
Shawn blinks, drawing his eyes wide and blinking again at the watch face, trying to make it make sense. Then he laughs and scrubs at his face. “Two hours. Jeez. It felt like a few seconds.”
“But at least you got some sleep,” Gus says, “That's great.”
“Yeah,” Shawn says, though he obviously doesn't think it's that great. He's still exhausted. His head is still throbbing too.
“It's a good sign, Shawn.”
“Yeah,” Shawn repeats and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I'll agree with you when I don't feel like stabbing myself in the head will make me feel better.”
Shawn still doesn't sleep later that night, but the next day when the four of them go out to reinterview several of their key witnesses, Shawn sits down in the stairwell of the apartment complex at one point. He drifts off again, this time with one arm through the bars of the guardrail and his head tipped against the bars at just the right angle to provide him enough support to hold him in place. The others return and find him there and Lassiter groans because he knows as well as they do that they can't wake the sleeping psychic up.
For the next hour and a half, they sit and play cards in the stairwell, Lassiter whipping out his badge from time to time to demand that the residents attempting to use the stairwell find another way.
Shawn woke with a snuffle, turning his head sharply and groaning as it clanged against the bars. Juliet and Gus winced, the former moving to tenderly touch a hand to the spot on his forehead. “'d I fall 'sleep again?” Shawn mumbles, rubbing at his eyes with a grimace.
Juliet has to stifle a smile. There's a long red stripe going diagonally across his forehead from where it had been pressed against the bar of the guardrail. “You sure did,” she says.
“That's twice now.” Gus sounds positively delighted.
A little further up on the stairs Lassiter grunts, a wince flickering across his face as he gets to his feet, one hand kneading his left knee.
Shawn blinks blearily and shakes his head a little. “Did we get any new information?”
Juliet shakes her head, mouth pulling down at one corner. “Nobody had anything new to tell us.”
A sigh and Shawn reaches up for the top bar of the guardrail. Juliet helps him pull to his feet.
“We'll figure this out, Shawn,” she assures him.
The next day Shawn falls asleep in the backseat of Lassiter's car five minutes after they pile in to go pay a visit to the coroner's office. His face is pressed up against the glass, one foot pulled up onto the seat and tucked beneath his knee, hands awkwardly cradled in his lap. He drools a little and Lassiter rants about how it's going to ruin the detailing, but he does it in a voice low enough to keep from waking the psychic.
He wakes when they get to the coroner's office, but later that afternoon back at the station when they spread out in one of the conference rooms, he passes out in his chair, a photo from the crime scene slipping from slack fingers. Somehow he's managed to jam himself into the chair sideways, his right leg dangling over the arm and the left crammed up against his body, the toe of his Converse sneaker poking out underneath the arm rest.
It looks horrifically uncomfortable, but he sleeps for nearly three hours that way.
Lassiter grimaces at his contorted figure. “He's going to need a damned good chiropractor when this is all over with.”
Gus snuffs out a low chuckle. “That's for sure.”
Shawn twitches and then lets out a soft groan. He shifts and hisses sharply. “Ow. Frigging...ow.”
“Hey there,” Juliet says and gets to her feet, helping him to extract himself from the prison he's made of the chair. His hissing and grunting making it clear that while he'd gotten some sleep, it had definitely come at a price.
“Ow,” he says again, brow knitted as he rubs at his left knee. “Jeez.”
Juliet presses her fingers into his shoulders and he groans again.
“Ow. Ow, god, owww...”
She hesitates but he shakes his head. “No, don't stop. Please.”
She smiles again and tells him cheerfully, “You made it a whole three hours this time!”
“Awesome,” he breathes. He looks like he could sleep for another three days, easy, though.
Gus comes into the office at eight the next morning and Shawn's already there, scribbling away at the glass board with a rainbow of markers. He lets his eyes skim over some of the writing, but most of it is illegible, or reads as complete nonsense. Even as sleep deprived as Shawn is, he assumes it must mean something to him. He doesn't try to understand.
“No sleep last night?” he asks, though he's pretty sure he already knows the answer.
Shawn doesn't stop writing. “No.”
Gus sighs, wishes he could chastise him for it, then moves to his desk and pulls out his laptop. For a few hours they work, the silence only broken when Shawn starts muttering to himself. One of the markers fumbles out of Shawn's hand, dropping to the floor and rolling under his desk. Shawn's head drops and he mutters a curse, but he puts the other three markers in his hand down on the edge of the board and skirts around his desk. Gus pays no attention as he drops to his knees, disappearing behind the desk.
Five minutes later he finally notices that Shawn hasn't gotten back up.
He frowns and gets up, crossing the room to check on his friend. He can't help smiling when he finds Shawn still under the desk, curled up on his side, half propped up by the back panel, fingers wrapped loosely around a hot pink marker.
He doesn't sleep like that for long, slipping and waking with a jerk after maybe three or four minutes, but Gus is encouraged nonetheless. Sleeping a little is better than not sleeping at all.
Two days after that, the four of them are gathered in Karen's office to discuss their (lack of) progress and decide whether or not it now needs to be shuffled back to accommodate for other, fresher cases. Lassiter and Juliet are doing all the talking with occasional interjections from Gus on behalf of Shawn, who stands in the back, half hidden by the large ficus in the corner. He's trying to pay attention, to focus on what's being said, because he knows he can't let this case go yet, not when it's wreaking this much havoc on him physically, but his body refuses to listen.
Heavy blinking leads to a lolling head and it doesn't take long after his head touches the glass for everything else to fade away.
Lassiter is grudgingly telling Karen that they're completely stymied when he's interrupted by a loud crash from the back of the room, and the sound of a body hitting the floor.
“Shawn?!” Juliet and Gus cry in unison, lunging to where he's now sprawled on the floor.
Karen is alarmed, pushing to her feet to try and better see what's going on. “Is he all right?” she asks, aghast.
Juliet and Gus jerk back in surprise as Shawn sits up abruptly, eyes wild. Blood is streaming down the side of his face from just above his eyebrow.
“Sweet justice, Spencer—”
“Detective O'Hara, go—”
“I've got it!” Shawn blurts out and starts scrambling to his feet. He nearly takes another header into the floor, only saved from breaking his nose by Gus and Juliet's quick reactions. The moment he's on his feet he stumbles to her desk and starts tearing through the papers, flinging them in all directions.
“Mr. Spencer!” Karen exclaims, now shocked.
“Shawn, you're bleeding!” Juliet tries to tell him, reaching for his head. But he finally finds the paper he's looking for and he thrusts it out, brandishing it at Karen.
“Ilene Fitzgerald! She was blackmailing Daniel Weatherby.”
For a long moment, the psychic is pinned with four very incredulous looks, blood dripping sluggishly from his chin onto the papers scattered across the desk.
Then Juliet's eyes widen and she says, “Oh my god.” She looks at Lassiter and his expression begins to mimic her own.
“Holy mother of justice.”
“That's it,” Juliet says, excitement leeching into her voice. “Oh my god, Shawn, that's it!”
He shakes the page in her face. “YES.”
“Someone explain to me what this means, now,” Karen says, her gaze meeting each of theirs sharply. And then the three of them are tripping over their explanations, Juliet dragging Shawn into a chair and pressing a huge wad of tissues to the bleeding cut over his eye, even as she babbles out what Shawn has just made so clear. Their elation makes the entire room feel buoyant.
Ilene Fitzgerald is arrested that afternoon, adrenaline making Shawn the live wire that he hasn't been for over a week. When it's all over with though, he stands with Gus, Juliet, and Lassiter, ready to explode with the pleasure of finally having the puzzle solved and he can barely keep his eyes open. He sways on his feet and Gus has to prop him up with his shoulder.
Juliet is smiling when she says, “Go home, Shawn. Sleep.”
“Give us all a break,” Lassiter grumbles, but he's just as thrilled about this bust as the rest of them and he can't even fake the malice right now.
Shawn shakes his head, blinking widely to keep from dropping where he stands and Gus smiles. “I take it the spirits have finally shut up?”
A tired smile crosses Shawn's face, almost blissful. “All's quiet on the western front. And the eastern, and the southern, and the northern...”
Juliet gives him a quick hug. “You did good, Shawn. Now go. Sleep.”
Lassiter nods and adds gruffly, “I had better not see your ass in this station for at least three days, understand?”
“Mhm,” Shawn says. He's quickly losing the battle to stay conscious.
Gus puts a hand on his back and begins steering him toward the door. “Don't worry, Detectives. I doubt he'll even be conscious in that time.”
“Sleep well, Shawn!” Juliet calls and then they're out the door and into the sun.
Back at his apartment, Shawn sheds his clothes in movements he'll never remember and then sinks into bed, slipping away into oblivion with a smile on his face.