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“July 2006”
Shawn Spencer arrives in Santa Barbara on a nine-year-old motorcycle, in four-day old clothes, and with a bottle of painkillers in his backpack.
He cracks his knuckles and asks, “Where’s the fire?”
“Beginnings”
Burton Guster and Shawn Spencer met when they were six months old.
Both the Gusters and the Spencers put their children in pumpkin costumes on Halloween and rolled them in wagons to Trick-or-Treat. Burton’s older sister Joy, barely four, saw another baby pumpkin down the sidewalk and grabbed him from his wagon, placing him with her brother.
“Like twins,” Joy had announced.
Madeleine and Henry Spencer, of course, ran to collect their child, but the two pumpkins were staring at each other intently, as if they knew something their parents didn’t.
Turns out, the Gusters lived down the street from the Spencers. And with the boys being the same age, why shouldn’t they be friends?
“Seven Years”
Gus still works at the same pharmaceutical company that he did the last time Shawn saw him. He had been in Peru so he couldn’t make it to Gus’s college graduation itself, but he came a couple months later to visit.
It’s been a while.
Gus is still in the same office, too, and it’s almost too easy for Shawn to sneak in.
“Testosterone”
Henry hadn’t planned on coming back to Santa Barbara, but he never sold the house so maybe deep down, he knew.
When Henry opens his front door on a random Saturday he sees a man he doesn’t recognize on the other side.
And then he does recognize him, and he remembers the charges made to his insurance that he had to confirm to the company as legitimate, despite them coming from some city in Wisconsin.
“Hi, Dad,” the young man says.
“Fine Motors”
Shawn loves his bike. He polishes her once a week because he appreciates the finer things in life. Motorcycles. Women. Men, occasionally. He wears fingerless gloves when he rides.
He doesn’t complain when Gus drives his little blue company car, though. It’s nice being driven around.
“Rom-Com”
Shawn Spencer, age twenty-nine, walks into a bar that’s technically a diner and orders a drink.
There’s no punchline, but there’s Juliet O’Hara in his seat.
“Grip Strength”
Henry makes him build a dog house and when Shawn gets home that night he can’t feel his fingers. He keeps cracking his knuckles anyway.
“Memory”
“Don’t be the missing scene of Sauron’s physical form in Return of the King.” Shawn taps his forehead. “I’ve got it all up here, you know.”
“I don’t know,” Gus reminds him. “But I do know you somehow remember these things, so I’m trusting you to figure this out and not get us arrested.”
Shawn doesn’t remember some stuff, though. Stuff he should.
“Chicken-scratch”
All students at Santa Barbara Central have to learn cursive in third grade and use it throughout fourth grade. It’s standard curriculum so they know cursive for the future.
The exception who proves the rule is Shawn Spencer, whose handwriting was already so bad in print that when he tried cursive, not even he could read it. Burton Guster could, but he wasn’t the one grading his papers. So they let Shawn keep printing.
“Complaint”
“Chief, I want to express some concerns.”
“Yes, Detective Lassiter?”
“Our consultant Shawn Spencer-”
“You can’t just keep telling me he’s a fake when he gets us real results. If you want to keep complaining, get new material.”
“I have some! I do!”
“…You do?”
“Chief… Karen- Chief, well, I’m concerned that he’s under the influence.”
“You think he’s high?”
“Or maybe coming down from it. His hands shake constantly, Chief, and you can’t tell me you haven’t at least considered drugs as a cause for his behavior.”
“He is eccentric. I’ll give you that.”
“…So?”
“He’s not high, Lassiter. Nor is he in withdrawal.”
“Then why does he- Chief-”
“Don’t whine. Go work on your real cases, Detective. Dismissed.”
“Passenger Princess”
Shawn loves his motorcycle. But he likes driving cars because when he needs to, he can always use his left foot to hold the brake at a stoplight while he pops his right knee. And he has space to stretch his left leg out completely.
He likes riding shotgun even more because Gus drives slowly and Shawn has all the leg room in the world. Plus Gus can’t stop him from changing the station from NPR to something good because he’s so determined to drive with his hands on ten and two.
“Lassiter Laments”
“He’s obnoxious, and doesn’t have any sense of decorum, and-”
Juliet thinks he’s charming, really, but she nods along as her partner rants. Shawn, very obviously listening from across the room, doesn’t seem too worried about it. He flexes his knee a few times until it pops and winks at Juliet when he sees her watching.
She waves.
“In Poor Taste”
“Hey, I may need a cane sooner or later, but at least I didn’t start balding at thirty,” Shawn jokes.
“Shawn,” Henry chides. “Why would you say something like that?”
Shawn stares at him blankly. Henry doesn’t know what he’s missing.
“Painkillers”
On good days, Shawn doesn’t need any. On okay days, he’ll take one. On bad days, he’ll take four.
On worse days, he’ll take six and won’t get out of bed for good measure.
“What’s in a Name?”
Shawn started calling Burton “Gus” when they were six and he decided Burton was too stuffy. Gus started calling Shawn “Shawn” when they were ten and Shawn informed him that he was a boy, actually, and that he was going to play on the boys t-ball team.
Gus didn’t have any qualms with Shawn being a boy. He did, however, worry about Shawn sliding, because of when he fell in the woods with Mr. Spencer that one time. His knee still acted funny sometimes.
“Gory”
Juliet can barely stomach looking at this crime scene, and she chose this field of work. Shawn’s got his head cocked and his brow furrowed and he’s just standing there, staring.
“Shawn,” Juliet says. “Hey, Shawn, you alright?”
He blinks and looks up at her. “Hey, Jules,” he says. “Just, you know. Psychic waves.” He taps his forehead.
Then he shakes out his whole body, but not in one fluid motion. It’s… stilted. He flexes his knees and then rolls his shoulders and then stretches his back and then cracks his knuckles, one by one.
“Gus’s Prayer”
“God, if you’re listening, please keep Shawn from getting himself killed. I’m starting to worry for his well being with this job.
“I’m worried for mine as well, but I think Shawn might need an extra prayer or two.”
“Twenty-six”
Shawn spends a lot of his time away from Santa Barbara alone. He spends a lot of his time with people, too, lots and lots of people, but he spends a lot of time alone.
There’s a clinic offering free checkups somewhere in Georgia and he walks in, figuring that staying up to date on his health is good when he’s transitioning and traveling and sexually active.
He cracks his knuckles four times in thirty minutes and the nurse starts side-eyeing him. He leaves before the doctor comes in.
“Father Knows Best”
Vick isn’t one for fishing, but she visits the docks early one Saturday morning. She gets some weird looks since she’s eight months pregnant, but she pushes on to Henry Spencer’s boat.
She has a question for him.
“Aches”
Shawn remembers both the time he hurt his right knee (eight, running through the woods with his dad to practice escaping and tripping over a root) and his left (twenty-two, took a wrong step off a porch and landed on it funny). He remembers the first time he hurt his shoulder (thirteen), the time he had a heart attack (fourteen), and the time he broke his ankle playing soccer (nine).
He doesn’t remember when he started cracking his knuckles.
“Morning Rituals”
Juliet misses the coffee shop by her apartment in Florida.
She would listen to a tiny radio station run by some fresh-out-of-college kids in the morning and would get the same order from her coffee shop (a caramel latte and a blueberry bagel) every morning. Juliet likes her routines. Always has.
She has new ones now that she’s in California. She stops at a new coffee shop. She listens to different radio.
Juliet has started to consider Shawn Spencer lounging in a chair by her desk around ten a routine, too.
“Chicken-scratch II”
Shawn gets a whiteboard for Psych and sets it up in the middle of the room. Gus very quickly moves it to the side room where clients won’t see it.
“Your handwriting somehow got worse over time,” Gus muses. It was already pretty bad before Shawn left when they were seventeen but now it’s practically illegible.
Shawn grins, shrugs, and throws up his hands as if to say what can ya do? Gus watches them tremble.
“Secrets”
Gus went through his desk, Shawn realizes.
He confronts him about it, and Gus says something about some W-form for taxes that he needed. Shawn has never filed his taxes in his whole life so he doesn’t know what Gus is talking about.
But Shawn isn’t sure that Gus is telling the truth. After lying about things for a living, he can kind of tell.
“Twenty-two”
There’s a young man standing at Madeleine’s doorstep. It isn’t until she opens the door and he says, “Hi, Mom,” that she really believes it.
“Goose!” she exclaims.
“Would it be okay if I stay here for a couple days?” he asks. “I really miss you.”
He’s got his weight shifted off one leg and Madeleine knows he’s not telling her everything.
“Of course, honey,” she says, and opens the door a little wider.
“Technology”
“I hate these stupid, terrible…” Shawn mutters. “These awful little things.”
“Cell phones?” Gus asks.
“Yeah,” Shawn says, and tosses his own over his shoulder.
“Stiff”
Sometimes, when Shawn can’t bring himself to ride back to his apartment, he camps out at Psych.
Gus always offers to drive him home in the Blueberry but Shawn never takes him up on it because that would be admitting defeat and also abandoning his bike. So he camps.
Sometimes he genuinely loses track of time but sometimes he just can’t shake his hands out enough to feel confident on the road. Sometimes his knees hurt so bad he can’t imagine being able to leave.
“Just In Case”
Shawn has three heating pads: one on the floor next to his bed, one on his couch, and one under his desk at Psych.
“Just In Case II”
Juliet has recently bought a new heating pad. She keeps it in her desk drawer at the precinct.
“As You Wish”
“C’mon, Spencer. We need your statement, even though I told the Chief that your last statement was just the entire script of Ferris Bueller.” Lassiter huffs and Shawn smiles—that was one of his finer moments. “You’re no longer allowed to bring your statement home to finish it after that.”
Shawn decides that that’s fine, he’ll give Lassie The Princess Bride right here in the precinct. But the thing is, his hands are being particularly stubborn today. So.
He clears his throat, stalls, and shakes his hands out under the desk.
“Love”
Gus remembers when Shawn started complaining about his hands; they were fifteen, shortly after the heart attack.
He gave Shawn a pair of nice compression fingerless gloves before Shawn ran off to wherever-the-hell for twelve years. When Shawn came back he was still wearing them.
“Cause & Effect”
Shawn goes to the shooting range and makes every shot.
His hands shake a lot when he’s done, though.
“Nineteen”
Shawn’s in the passenger seat of a stranger’s car and his bad knee is aching like there’s no tomorrow.
He stretches it out, and then kicks his leg forward to pop it but it doesn’t catch. So he kicks again, and again, until finally on the sixth try it clicks and he feels like he can breathe.
“The hell was that?” the stranger driving asks. He was nice to pick Shawn up off the road but he doesn’t mince words.
“Just an old injury,” Shawn tells him.
“Intervention”
“We need to get Shawn a checkup,” Gus says.
“He’s a grown man,” Henry replies. “He can handle himself.”
“Gus’s Prayer II”
“Respectfully, God, what were you thinking when you made two boneheaded Spencers?”
“Interrogation”
Juliet, very politely, asks what’s up with his hands.
“Ah, just stubborn sometimes,” Shawn says lightheartedly. He cracks his knuckles and then shakes out his hands.
Juliet presses about the shaking, the tremors.
Shawn shrugs. “They’ve just been doing that lately. Not all the time.”
Juliet hums. She isn’t sure what she expected.
“Dock Conversation”
“My husband has arthritis,” Vick says. “He’s young for it, but it runs in his family. He started noticing it in his twenties.”
Henry looks down at his hands, which have been more stubborn lately.
“Twenty-seven”
Shawn doesn’t know the girl in his bed’s name but she’s got her shirt off so really he knows all he needs to.
He pauses on his way down to crack his knuckles. He’ll need his full range of motion.
“Secrets, Resolved”
“Shawn,” Gus says, “when’s the last time you saw a doctor?”
Shawn shrugs, focusing on the paper airplane he’s making.
“I was trying to find your medical records,” Gus admits. “In your desk.”
“I knew you had an ulterior motive!” Shawn declares triumphantly. “Wait, why?”
“I figured we should see someone about your hands.”
Shawn pauses. “They’re really fine,” he says. “Just weird.”
“And your knees?”
“Old injuries. You know that one. They just hurt sometimes.”
Gus says, “Alright.”
“Aches II”
Here’s the thing: his hands hurt almost all the time. And they’ve been shaking off and on since he was twenty-eight. If he doesn’t crack his knuckles they hurt worse and feel weak but he feels sick cracking them. He doesn’t like it. It makes him feel weird.
And if he doesn’t stretch out his knees every couple minutes to pop them he won’t be able to move after a while. Sometimes he knows he has to pop his knee but it just keeps stuttering so he has to keep kicking over and over until it finally goes through and calms down.
Some mornings his hands are so stiff he can barely brush his teeth. Some mornings he limps around his apartment until his knee cooperates.
He doesn’t think about it, though, because thinking about it just makes it worse. It’s really not that bad. He can handle it.
“With a Little Help From My Friends”
Juliet sees Shawn pull a face after jumping out of his chair and plugs in her heating pad.
“Your knee, right?” she asks.
Shawn pulls another face at that, but then says “Left, actually,” and she laughs. He takes the heating pad.
“Love II”
Gus starts leaving hand exercise toys on Shawn’s desk, because they’re supposed to help. Shawn plays with them when he’s bored.
“Phone Calls”
“Henry?”
“Maddy?”
“What’s the matter? Why are you…?”
“Does arthritis run on your side of the family?”
“…And Your Enemies Closer”
Carlton approaches Juliet’s desk with a purpose. She raises an eyebrow.
“What’s up with Spencer today?” he asks shortly. He isn’t meeting her eyes.
Juliet slowly starts to smile. “Are you worried?” she asks slyly. “I thought you hated him, Lassie.”
Carlton glares at her.
“He’s fine,” Juliet says. “I think he’s just got some old knee injuries that act up in the cold.”
Carlton continues to glare, but when he side-eyes Shawn who’s got his leg propped up directly on Carlton’s desk, he doesn’t look as angry as he probably should.
“Improvement”
Shawn schedules an appointment. He doesn’t tell anyone.
“Love III”
Gus knows. He sees Shawn write it on his calendar, which is in plain sight in the Psych office.
He lets him have it.