Work Text:
The slamming of the front door reverberated through the beach-front house. Henry Spencer, police detective extraordinaire and (rather tired) single father, gave a heavy sigh as he stopped a few bare millimeters from the heavy wood impacting with the tip of his nose. Another deep breath, his thumb and forefinger being raised to pinch at the bridge of his nose, and he opened the door after his dramatic teenage son just in time to hear a second slam. Shawn’s bedroom door, presumably.
“Shawn, we have to talk about this!” he called up the stairs. The framed photographs still shifted slightly in the wake of the teenager who had brushed past them violently. They would settle soon, Henry knew, but none of them would be razor straight until he fixed them.
(He had asked Shawn to do it once when he’d first begun the habit. Every frame had been fixed to be ever so slightly off balance. It had been enough to give Henry a tension headache for the bare 24 hours that he’d managed to leave them.)
(The smirk Shawn had directed his way, the teen standing at the top of the stairs as Henry leveled each frame out, had almost been enough to make Henry take the frames down and pack them away.)
“No, we don’t!” Shawn called back.
Henry huffed, glancing up towards the ceiling of the home he’d shared with his wife, Maddie, until she’d packed up and left him. Left them. He silently asked for strength, directing the request out into the universe to an intangible god he’d never quite believed in.
Shawn had always been a handful. He’d crawled early, ran before he walked, and had never been one to stay still under any circumstances. Henry had tried to curb that energy in the child, directing it to a laser focus on details that the older man had had to learn through self-training on the job. Shawn had picked it up easily, the eidetic memory he’d inherited from his psychologist mother a boon in police work.
It had been all fun and games for much of the boy’s childhood, but he had begun to chafe at Henry’s teachings as he’d grown older, as he’d gained other interests and made friends and wanted to be a normal kid. He’d still been game, though, and indulged his father (when he couldn’t get out of it, that is.)
It had become even more difficult to keep Shawn’s interest once Maddie went away for work - a trip that had turned permanent once she was out of Santa Barbara, California. Henry had been the one to have to sit down with the brash, hormonal boy he had little in common with now and tell him that his mother wasn’t coming back.
He’d taken the blame, of course. He was well aware Maddie left because of him, because of his dedication to his career and how he’d become detached from his family, delving deeper into solving crimes in an effort to bring order to something in his life. (Had he known even then that his marriage couldn’t be fixed?)
He wouldn’t have blamed it on Shawn anyway even with the hijinks he’d managed to get himself into.
(Deep inside, he had wondered if the stress Shawn brought into their marriage as he’d hit puberty might be a potential factor he didn’t know about.)
Maddie had always been the glue of their family, effortlessly juggling her work, the house, their child, and Henry himself. He hadn’t realized just how much she’d done until she wasn’t there.
He hadn’t realized how bad it was until she’d called him and coolly informed him in that clinically detached tone that she wasn’t returning to them, to him. She had an offer to travel across the country to work in police departments everywhere, to help stem the rising political problems from the inside before they hit a boiling point.
It was a good move for her, career wise.
(He hadn’t argued that she could use Santa Barbara as her home base. Once Maddie made her mind up, she rarely changed it. He’d always appreciated that about her until that moment.)
Shawn hadn’t seen it that way. He hadn’t shouldered any of the responsibility as Henry had half-feared. No, instead he’d blamed his father. The atmosphere of the Spencer household had become frigid overnight, the coldness only alleviated by red-hot explosive outbursts when Shawn couldn’t get out of a confrontation.
Once the family portraits were straight, Henry once again resisting the urge to remove any that showcased the ex-wife he still had feelings for, he knocked on the only door in the hallway decorated with a homemade ‘stay out!’ sign. Every time Henry saw it, he wanted to rip it into shreds and stomp on it (not that he’d ever do such a childish act.)
There was no response and he knocked again, knuckles rapping just a touch harder in a show of impatience.
Silence.
He knocked a third time, resolving that he’d be opening the door one way or another if he didn’t get a response.
“Go away!” Shawn finally shouted through the door. There was the squeak of his bedsprings and the detective was half relieved his son hadn’t already snuck out the second story bedroom window to get away from him.
Swallowing the demands that automatically rose, Henry sighed. He shouldn’t push Shawn too much, he knew, not when the boy was already doing his best to push away his father.
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“I said go away!” Shawn responded, music immediately beginning to blast from inside the room.
Henry bit back the admonishment to tell him to turn it down so he wouldn’t disturb the neighbors (similar scenes had proved their neighbors didn’t much care about the noise, not when they lived right on the beach and often had groups of rambunctious vacationers letting loose.)
“Dinner at 7. I’ll bring something back. Do your homework.” The automatic list may go largely ignored, but Shawn often competed against his brainy best friend in the homework department. Burton Guster had long been rubbed the wrong way that Shawn could ignore the teachers, skip most of the reading, and still somehow come out ahead in academics.
“Just go away!” was shouted over the music before the volume was turned up louder.
With another sigh, Henry made his way back downstairs and out the door. If he left work for the day every time there was a problem with Shawn, he might as well retire early.