Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Functionally, Shawn Spencer is fine. 

He’s solved the case, he knows that much; the disgruntled mumblings of Detective Lassiter behind him are evidence enough of that. 

Better still, he can firmly account for all ten fingers and toes, and everything seems to move when he tells it to, so he knows he can’t be in the most dire of straits. He lets something asinine slip out of his mouth when Gus gives him the look in an attempt to pretend that he feels fine, that everything feels normal, that his perception hasn’t shifted dramatically in the last five minutes to disorientation and discomfort. 

Because the thing is, everything does feel strange, not quite right. He’s never had an out-of-body experience before—the closest he’s ever gotten was a particularly potent joint that he’d smoked an hour and a half out of Houston, and that experience was so scarring that he’d sworn off weed for the next decade without a second thought. This, though…

He knows his legs are moving, knows he’s making his way to Gus’ car, where he’ll proceed to sink into the passenger seat and immediately check the glove compartment for snacks, but it doesn’t feel like he’s the one who’s told his legs to move. In fact, if he had to guess, he would almost assume that he was being guided there instead of going of his own accord—

“...and there has to be a better way to—Shawn! Are you listening to me? I’m responsible for filling the tank on this car, we will not be using it for your newest hobby,” a voice beside him offers. 

Shawn nods absently, not really paying attention to the words that his best friend is saying. 

Gus will come around eventually; after all, it had been four thousand, three hundred and fifty-seven days between when Shawn had snuck out of his childhood bedroom to take the world’s least efficient route to San Pedro and when he’d shown up in Gus’ office to read the boredom rolling off of his friend in waves and convince him to consider investing in a psych detective agency as a side-gig, just for fun. 

Gus had barely blinked.

That’s the good thing about Gus—great thing, if Shawn’s honest with himself. He always knows where he stands with his friend, and it’s usually somewhere between “what the hell are you doing?” and “what the hell are we doing?” 

Comfortably consistent companionship, really. 

Except—for some reason as Shawn watches his own person stepping into Gus’ Echo, he finds himself wondering if this was a bad idea. 

He hadn’t thought so far ahead as to think about the consequences of making an enemy of the SBPD, or of having subjected Gus to the same, and suddenly he’s not entirely sure whether the queasiness he’s been feeling since Detective Lassiter released him is from the raging headache that had materialized almost immediately after being slammed against the car, or the idea that he might’ve put Gus’ legitimate livelihood in jeopardy. 

He’s turning to Gus before he can stop himself, trying to find the words to say that they don’t have to do this, not as adults, that Gus doesn’t have to commit to the nonsensical bit that Shawn’s proposed if he doesn’t want to. 

Except what comes out is a stifled gag, and Gus’ face turns horrified. 

“You are not throwing up in my car, Shawn,” he says, and in a flurry of motion that he must have practiced—Shawn can’t imagine any other way that his friend would have become so adept at the maneuver—he retrieves what looks like an airline’s vomit bag from behind his seat and holds it out for Shawn to take. 

“Out of the car,” he says, repeating a shooing gesture until Shawn begrudgingly takes the hint and opens the car door. 

The air feels thicker now than it did when they’d walked over to the car, and it takes most of Shawn’s admittedly-dwindling self-control to not throw up as soon as he stands from his seat.

“Hey Gus?” he calls out, closing his eyes and taking as measured of a breath as he feels capable of, the metal of Gus’ car door pinching his palm as he tightens his grip. 

“No, Shawn. You can’t come back in until you can confidently say that you’re not going to throw up in my car,” Gus retorts from the driver’s seat, and Shawn holds back a groan. 

“Not trying to throw up in your car, buddy,” Shawn offers weakly, “just think I might need some help on the way down.” 

Shawn feels his arms go slack after that, and the oddly weightless feeling he’d experienced earlier comes back in full force as the world becomes fuzzy and dark around him.

“...I was under the impression that I’d been called here to be a reference for my son, not to be convinced that I shouldn’t bring battery charges against your head detective, Karen.” 

Shawn pinches his eyebrows together in irritation. What is his dad doing here? 

Actually, scratch that question. 

Where is here, exactly, and why is he here? 

An attempt at opening his eyes only offers shooting pain, and a vaguely Gus-sounding part of his mind reminds him that he should’ve known that. What the ‘that’ in question is isn’t apparent, though, and while his dad is still serving up pointed jabs towards someone named Karen, he lets his mind drift to his memories to see whether anything can give him more context. 

McCallum house, bags of money, the horrified daughter…

A “vision,” that’s right—that’s what he’d ended up going with. He’d practically needed to prostrate himself to get anyone to take him seriously, and God, wasn’t his dad going to hate that when they inevitably talked it through later. But there’s a hazy wash over the memories, a sort of ache that he doesn’t usually get when he looks back into his recollection, almost as if he’d—

The detective. The police car. The just-too-hard smack of his forehead against the metal car frame as Lassiter had tried to get him into the back of the vehicle. Blinking desperately hard to focus as he’d let the words tumble out in a manner that he hoped made sense, that he hoped was coherent enough to get the point across, even as he tossed himself onto the lawn and was bodily hoisted up by the Detective and carried back to the car. 

Dog bite. Bandage. Long sleeves. Doctors. Consumine. Fresh wound. Check, please.  

It had been easy enough to screw his eyes shut and claim to “see” the things as he spoke, what with the spots dancing in and out of his vision even as Detective Lassiter continued to press him against the door of the car. 

And then—fresh smells. New car and new leather and new shirt and new air freshener and newly cut grass and—

And nothing. There weren’t even sights to put to those smells, just conceptually vague ideas of what likely happened. It’s strange to not be able to see the inside of his brain in the way he’s used to, like a film reel running and re-running until he’s found exactly the bit of the movie he wants to recall. He’s always wondered if this is what a normal person’s mind felt like, more beige than technicolor, more empty than full of file cabinets and VHS tapes to re-read and re-play on endless loops. Just senses, all disconnected and jumbled until they’re nearly meaningless. 

It’s terrifying, he realizes. 

He doesn’t like it, and yet he doesn’t want to say anything at present for fear of his dad’s anger turning on him—not to mention the raging headache he has, and how much worse he suspects it’ll feel if he tries to speak up. Besides, Karen is still being scolded, just in whispered tones now. Shawn hears ‘psychic powers’ and ‘do I look like a liar to you’ and ‘symptoms of concussion’ and ‘if there’s brain damage, I swear to God’ and ‘head detective better not dare’ before he stops trying to link the phrases together. 

His head hurts. His dad is there. Something’s gone wrong, but he’s not particularly inclined to string together the facts to deduce what it is, not when he feels like this. He presses his eyes more tightly together and releases their tension on a eight-count cycle; somewhere between 56 and 64 he falls back asleep.

“You’re sure he’s fine?”

Gus is around, Shawn can smell his cologne—some woodsy thing that Shawn suspects he could trace back to one of his pharmaceutical coworkers, if his brain was working correctly.

Quickly. At all. 

That last one is a bit of a stretch, but to Shawn’s credit, it hardly feels like his mind is working, even as he hears a voice he knows to be his dad’s claiming that he’s seen worse. Maybe Henry Spencer has, but Shawn himself hadn’t exactly prided himself on being an expert in recovering from head injuries, so he’s hesitant to assume that his dad is right. 

At least that hasn’t changed. 

He’s somewhere familiar now, at least. Wherever they were when he last woke up was stiff and scratchy and smelled like fluorescent lights. Or maybe it had sounded like them. He couldn’t be sure which of his senses had gotten him to that conclusion, but he felt confident it was correct. This surface is well worn, though, a smooth texture against his forehead even as Shawn feels himself become flushed with warmth. His mind offers up a memory, unprovoked, of being home sick from school as a kid. His dad’s old uniform still looks new in it, and the couch is only a few weeks old, if Shawn had to guess. A throw blanket is wrapped around him as he shivers, and his mother shoos his dad away before gently placing a cold compress on his forehead. Shawn Spencer, aged five, blinks weakly at the twenty-seven-year-old version of himself and tries to tell his mother that there’s someone else in the house with them. Madeleine Spencer tuts quietly at the temperature readout on the thermometer and murmurs something in his father’s direction that neither version of Shawn can hear. 

His dad’s house, then. 

Incredible that the couch would feel exactly the same at five years old and at twenty-seven, but Shawn assumes that he ought to be wasting less mental energy on figuring out why he’s been brought here and more on getting Gus’ attention to give him the out from his idea that he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about since he’s woken up. 

For him to sustain this level of dedicated focus on the matter means it has to be meaningful, right? 

“Gus, aren’t you the one who said you had a conversation with him on the drive to the station?”

Shawn can picture his dad’s face, pulled tight with frustration at the fact that he’s being forced to repeat himself. If there’s one thing Henry Spencer can’t stand…

“Sure, but it was practically nonsense,” Gus counters. Shawn predicts his dad’s scoff before he hears it, and winces as the noise coincides with a glass being dropped harshly onto the kitchen table. 

“Since when has my son spouted off anything but nonsense, Gus?” he asks, and Shawn swears he can feel the shift in Gus’ mood as it occurs. 

“It was a rapid-fire listing of all of the things I’d changed in the car between Wednesday and today, Mr. Spencer, not a made-up language,” he says coolly. “It was only nonsense in the sense that I hadn’t realized at the time what he meant, and none of them were particularly relevant to the conversation I’d been trying to have with him.”

Shawn, having been about to reposition himself on the couch, pauses at that. 

He didn’t remember conversing with Gus in the car at all, although it would explain the list of scents that his mind had supplied earlier. The car had just been cleaned, Gus’ pink shirt had been new, and the tiny tree hanging from the rearview had been concerningly fragrant—maybe the combination had made him nauseous? He didn’t think the churning in his stomach had started then, but if the overwhelming number of scents had come right after he’d been hit in the head…

“Then why would you say it was?” his dad huffs. “If he had a conversation with you and was awake and coherent, there’s likely nothing wrong—a low grade concussion at best. He’s just trying to get himself a sick day after doing four hours of police work.”

Shawn can hear the moment his dad moves his glass by the sink, and his mind unhelpfully supplies the exact stance that Henry Spencer has adopted. It’s a classic, really. Arms crossed, back leaned against the counter, an appraisingly disappointed expression aimed at the subject of his conversation. Shawn’s been on the receiving end of it far too many times to feel good about the fact that it’s currently being directed at Gus. 

“It’s what he’s always done. He learns what an honest day’s work really looks like and immediately tries to get out of it. He's been doing this since you two were eight years old and started being assigned book reports.”

A choked sound comes from somewhere behind Shawn—a chuckle, maybe?—but Gus doesn’t entirely back down, regardless of the accuracy that he’s identified in Henry’s statement.

“You said the Chief of Police was concerned about a battery charge, though.”

“Standard procedure. An officer hits an innocent civilian and the department is liable to be sued, she was covering her ass.”

“But if you think Shawn is fine, then why would you tell the Chief that—”

Gus stops himself, and Shawn nearly has to hold back a laugh at how bad his friend has gotten at lying to his dad. Gus hadn’t been particularly good at it when they were children, but Shawn had assumed that with a college degree and at least five years of gainful employment under his belt, his friend  would’ve at least learned how to spin things better. 

“Are you going to finish that sentence, or are we going to pretend that you weren’t eavesdropping on a private conversation?” 

Gus doesn’t respond and Shawn almost feels bad, but then eau de Gus disappears with a brief rush of cool air and he hears a quiet exchange between his best friend and his dad at the front door before it closes. When his head stops throbbing, he realizes that his dad has paused near the chair beside the couch, the leather of it squeaking quietly as it catches against his shorts. 

“I don’t know if you’re asleep or out of it again,” his dad says, surprising Shawn by gently draping a light blanket over him, “but I’m going to say this once, because I know you’ll hear it either way.”

“I covered for you with the chief,” he says quietly, and Shawn hears him sink into the chair with a sigh, “but if you’re going to do this full time, you’re going to have to be less of an idiot when you’re working cases.”

“There’s only so much patience that an officer can exercise before he ends up wanting to smack you upside the head for the kind of histrionics you pulled today.”

Shawn nearly opens his eyes to roll them, but at the last second has a moment of painful recall and decides against it. 

Of course that’s what his dad wants to focus on. 

Not the fact that he helped solve a case, not the fact that he’s finally—finally—found a use for those godforsaken memory exercises he’d been forced to do as a kid, not the fact that the Head Detective slammed him into a police car for fun despite Shawn’s correct assessment of a murderer’s identity.  

His histrionics. The only sort of behavior that Henry Spencer has ever deemed worthwhile to comment on. The chair squeaks again, but this time Shawn recognizes the sound of it reclining, and finds himself surprised for the second time that day by his dad’s actions. Maybe the third, if he’s willing to cast his mind back to the hushed phrases he’d heard earlier, at what he’s now realized was the police station.

“And Shawn?” his dad starts to add, before pausing with what Shawn can only assume is the best Detective Henry Spencer expression on his face that he can generate after fourteen years of retirement. 

“If you’re going to do this, do it right.”

Chapter Text

It’s eleven forty-seven at night and Shawn is fuming. 

He’s already made the world’s most idiotic looking dog house, but apparently it wasn’t enough—could never be enough for Henry Spencer. 

No, Henry Spencer expects perfection, nothing less. 

Perfection, but at the cost of Shawn’s sanity as the measurements seemed to float aimlessly around in his mind. He’s never been a fan of numbers, never found them to be as easy as words, as images—as sounds, even. And here, even now, at twenty-seven, his best efforts aren’t enough. 

Doing it right? That sort of focus? That sort of singular attention to detail? 

He’s hardwired to notice that sort of thing, not to execute it. 

Henry Spencer doesn’t care, though—has never cared that spatial reasoning and Shawn are about as distantly related as Shirley Temple is to Clint Eastwood. He wants things “done right” and if there’s one thing Shawn can be reliably counted on for, it’s to not do things right by way of Henry Spencer. 

He’d even tried, this time. Had gone to Home Depot and gotten extra nails, had tried to figure out what the ratios and proportions would be. He’d gotten half a roof on the house by the time his dad had gotten back from poker, and had been almost proud of the thing—if only for the sheer mental effort it had taken him to focus on building the thing well. 

But apparently, his not having adhered to specifications offered sixteen years prior “wasn’t what his dad had asked for,” and he should “do better”. 

He shouldn’t have been surprised, really. Because there was always a “do better” with his dad, never a “great effort” or “you’ve done enough”—not unless the “enough” in question was causing enough havoc that his dad threatened to ban Gus from visiting for an entire summer if he didn’t curb his behavior. 

So he’d kicked the thing down, in a fit of frustration. So he’d thrown the hammer to the ground, and left the mess there for his dad to deal with the next morning. So he’d hopped onto his Norton and gone for a long drive to clear his mind. 

Except his mind isn’t clear, not at all. It’s spinning and churning and coming up with comeback after comeback that he can throw in his dad’s face when this case wraps up and he solves it without needing an assist at all, least of all an assist from his dad. Who’d have thought that his dad would be less likely to help him when he’d actually asked for assistance as an adult than he’d have been when Shawn was a kid?

Not Shawn, evidently. 

When he lets himself breathe for a moment, he forces himself to loosen his grip on the handlebars a bit more before taking the next curve with a gentle twist forward of his wrist. His bike didn’t do anything to him, there’s no need for him to be choking it like this. 

It’s infuriating that he can so quickly be transported to being thirteen and living with his dad again, that one break in the tree coverage can resemble the view from his childhood bedroom and instantly remind him of the disappointment on his dad’s face when he’d seen his childish attempt at a dog house at the time. 

It hadn’t been good, but that should’ve been a given. 

Shawn had been thirteen and barely had the attention span to sit still for a full day of classes, but somehow—miraculously—he’d been able and willing to try to make that dog house. He’d made a blueprint, even, had given the imaginary dog he intended to adopt a name, then set to work on building the house. 

Of course it wasn’t perfect, but his dad hadn’t told him to build a perfect dog house, just a dog house. He’d known from the moment his dad’s car door had slammed that the thing wouldn’t get the Henry Spencer seal of approval, though. His dad had laughed at the thing at first, before proceeding to list off all of its inadequacies in a way that felt less like an appraisal of the structure and more like an itemized list of Shawn’s own failings as a son. 

Of course it hadn’t been what his dad had asked for then. 

Of course it isn’t what his dad wants now. 

The faint whistle of another car makes Shawn shake his head, ridding his mind of memorized recollections as he turns his focus back to the road, teeth clenched with frustration as he squints to see the approaching vehicle. It’s a van, and it’s swerving—some asshole who decided to drink and drive, Shawn suspects, so he lets himself drift further towards the guardrail as the van gets closer. 

But the van is moving towards him now, and all at once Shawn realizes the bind he’s put himself in. Swerve right and risk getting crushed against the rail; swerve left and risk getting himself run off the road and into the tall grasses of the field he’d been following the contours of for his evening drive.

There’s a moment of calculation where he attempts to consider how much frustration either choice will bring, but before he has time to weigh his options fully, the van is too close, and he makes a split-second decision to go left and avoid whatever discomfort the equation of metal plus skin multiplied by force would yield. 

He’s at the roadside in an instant, his bike jumping the curb and tossing him into the grass with a jolt that he’s sure will come with a fair few bruises. 

He stays there for a minute after he hears the van drive off, trying to get back some of the air that’s been knocked out of him from his collision with the ground. 

There are hardly any clouds, he notices as he looks up. The weather is practically perfect for a ride around town, and the ride itself would’ve been perfect if not for—

He shifts himself upwards and groans—first at his already swelling wrist, but then at the suspiciously acute twinge of his knee. It doesn’t feel so painful as to be permanently damaged, but there’s an unwelcome tenderness there that speaks to a need to be attended to by a legitimate medical professional, rather than the ibuprofen and elastic bandage he would otherwise be tempted to make do with. 

He struggles to his feet and limps to his bike, inspecting it for damage and breathing a sigh of relief when the only visible flaw he can see is a jagged scratch along the side, where the body of the thing must’ve dragged across the asphalt when it fell. 

He could get back on it—should, if he wants to avoid leaving his prized possession on the side of a field bounded by back roads. The idea of driving it feels unwise, though, and for once in his life, Shawn forces himself to follow a train of logic to its reasonable conclusion without distraction: he’s injured, he ought to be looked at by a doctor, and the only way to get himself to one at present involves a short ride on a heavy bike. 

Alternatives, then.

He considers calling Gus, but remembers that his friend had planned on an early night to prepare for a series of solicitation calls the next day, and nixes that option. His dad is out of the picture, for both obvious reasons and the fact that he’ll only find a way to make this about Shawn not having taken proper precautions while riding, despite the fact that someone had intentionally run him off of the road. 

They’re both out, then. Who else can he—a low beeping sound from behind alerts him to the fact that he’s dropped his phone, and he scowls before turning around and retracing his steps to retrieve it from the grass. 

It’s a text from McNab. 

Meant to tell you earlier in the week that Francine and I had a few glasses of the wine you got us and loved it. Thanks again, man!

Shawn chuckles before tossing the phone into his back pocket. He’d taken a bartending job at a steakhouse in Omaha what felt like a lifetime ago, eventually convincing his supervisor to let him try his hand at sommelier certification. That he’d quit after discovering the process would take a year —or more— was hardly relevant, he’d still walked away with a basic knowledge of the sorts of reds and whites that could appeal to different tastes. McNab and his wife had been sure to like the mid-level french brand that Shawn had gotten them as a wedding gift, and as a result, the message hardly comes as a surprise. 

But McNab…Too-trusting, doesn’t-ask-questions Buzz McNab. 

Now that’s an option. 

Clenching his jaw in determination as he makes his way back to his bike, Shawn flips open his phone, scrolls through his contacts, and dials.

“So let me get this straight,” Gus says as he follows Shawn on the way out of his hospital room. 

“Your dad is making you rebuild a dog house for a non-existent dog, you crashed your bike last night, and now you want to interrogate Brendan Vu in his hospital bed?” 

Shawn can hear the disbelief dripping from Gus’ tone, but elects to not dignify that with a response. 

“I need to talk to him, Gus, I need to see—”

“You need to tell your dad that you were in an accident.”

“I don’t need to tell my dad anything,” Shawn shoots back, “because my dad won’t care. Besides, he hates my bike.”

Gus’ eye roll is almost audible and Shawn stops to shoot him a glare as he leans against a wall in a poorly disguised attempt at catching his breath. 

“Your dad will want to know that you’re okay,” Gus offers, scanning Shawn once and gesturing vaguely at his person, “which you’re clearly not, if I might add.”

“I’m fine,” Shawn huffs, turning back towards the hallway and squinting at the rooms’ labels. 

“You’re delirious!” Gus protests, “And it makes sense—you were distracted when you left your dad’s last night, you lost control of the bike, and then you had to be held overnight for observation. You’re not—”

An unwelcome tingle darts down Shawn’s spine and he freezes, spinning around to face Gus in the middle of the hallway. 

“I didn’t lose control,” he says slowly, “someone tried to kill me—or was trying to send a serious message—by running me off the road, which can only mean that I’m getting too close for our killer’s comfort.”

A moment passes, one where Gus’ face is almost indecipherable—it’s a strange experience for Shawn, but he elects to chalk that up to the world’s mildest concussion that he has, one that he’d internally sworn to ignore after the doctor had made him aware of it last night. 

“And you’re still not going to tell your dad,” Gus offers incredulously, but Shawn merely shakes his head and proceeds to undo the loosely wrapped bandage a nurse named Shelby had put on his wrist before darting to a window and peering through it. 

“My dad cares about results, just like any of these spelling bee parents do,” he says shortly, before gesturing to his leg, uncomfortably tight beneath the knee brace the doctor had “strongly suggested” he wear for the next couple of weeks.

“This? Not results.”

“No, it’s just evidence of a murder scheme,” Gus mutters under his breath, but Shawn can hear him following as he walks into the room with Brendan’s name on it.

There’s nothing in the inhaler, Shawn is nearly certain, but despite being loathe to admit it to his father, he knows damn well that good police work is the thing that’ll close the case, so he follows up with the kid and his mom, makes a stupid comment that’s far too pointed about the spelling bee being completely restarted, then bolts from the room before Gus can force him to snap out of his mood. 

The hallway isn’t large, though, and Gus is quick to catch up and force his hand. 

“Did you see the inhaler?” Shawn says, and Gus’ head shake tells him all that he needs to know. 

“It’s not his, the boy next to him must’ve—”

“It’s the Czech kid,” Gus interrupts, “I looked up the name of the doctor on his inhaler and the man doesn’t exist.”

Shawn’s mind feels like it’s whirring, then—100 miles an hour as the details all fall into place. The inhaler, the poison, the murder—it’s all there, knit together at the edge of his subconscious into a web of a plot that he and Gus had nearly gotten ensnared in as they’d inched closer to the center of it all. The only thing he needs now is evidence, and the only piece of evidence he’s yet to obtain…

He groans. 

“Shawn? What is it?” Gus asks, and Shawn hates that he can envision the concerned once-over he’s getting from his best friend without seeing it. 

“I need to go back to my dad’s,” he says eventually, trying not to make his expression look as glum as he feels about the idea. 

“For what?”

“I have to finish a dog house.”

“What’s this?” 

Ignoring his dad’s comment is easier when he has something to do with his hands, Shawn discovers, and he grabs a try square and holds it against the frame of the roof to see how he’s done. 

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like you decided not to give up, against all odds,” his dad says, taking a sip of his coffee as he glances over the frame of the dog house, then at Shawn. 

Shawn pretends not to notice that he can hear a difference in his dad’s voice when he speaks again, and moves the tool further up the roof in an attempt to look like he’s doing something worthwhile. 

“What happened to your leg?” 

“Absolutely nothing,” Shawn shoots back, expecting his dad to chuckle at the obvious deception, or maybe just at Shawn’s third wayward attempt to build the dog house—except his dad isn’t chuckling, he’s walking away, and even stranger, he’s returning with a piece of wood and positioning it between the two peaks of the roofing frame that Shawn has constructed.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks, half hoping his dad will drop the answer and the wood right there, then retreat into his house and leave Shawn to finish up the thing on his own, like he’d intended. He’d been focusing so nicely, too.

“I’m helping. You need a ridge beam if you’re going to run your roofing vertically.”

“You’ve never helped me before. Ever.”

A strange expression passes over his dad’s face, but it’s gone before Shawn can properly identify it. 

“You’ve never asked.”

There’s a mystifyingly uncomfortable moment of silence between them, but eventually, his dad breaks it, all the while gesturing for Shawn to drive a nail into the junction of the ridge beam and the roofing framework. 

“Is the bike alright?” 

Shawn freezes. He doesn’t want to talk about this, not with his dad. His dad doesn’t get to know about Shawn’s life, not if he can avoid it. 

So what if he and McNab had barely been able to hoist his bike into the back of Buzz’s pickup truck? Henry Spencer doesn’t need to know about it. 

And so what if he’d been targeted because of his attention to detail with this case? Henry Spencer doesn’t need one iota of ammunition he didn’t already have. 

Absolutely not. Shawn is not having this conversation. 

“How long’s it meant to be on for?” his dad asks, gesturing at the knee brace in apparent dissatisfaction with Shawn’s lack of response. 

“Long enough,” Shawn answers shortly, his mood dropping further for every minute that he’s forced to collaborate on a construction project with his dad. 

“No lasting damage, then?” His dad offers, and Shawn looks up in confusion. 

“What? No. It’s just a knee thing, everyone has a knee thing,” he says, but his dad is looking at him a bit too intensely for him to feel comfortable. 

“It wasn’t an accident, then,” his dad says quietly, before swearing, “damn it, Shawn—you were always at the top of your class in driving courses, what happened?” 

Reaching for another nail, Shawn tries to ignore the strange burning in his chest at his father’s words, and nearly succeeds as Henry removes his hands from their support of the ridge beam and stalks into his house. 

He returns a few minutes later with a file, with lab results—

“The poison is a derivative of methyl parathion,” his dad says darkly, “that’s high-grade stuff.” 

Shawn watches as his dad— his dad, the unflappable Henry Spencer—seems to falter. 

“Whatever you’ve gotten yourself into, I want you to get out quick, Shawn,” he says, hand still holding fast to the file as he extends it in Shawn’s direction.

He doesn’t like this, doesn’t like the way his dad seems to know that something has happened. Henry Spencer isn’t meant to be apprised of the way in which he chooses to conduct himself, and Shawn’s asking for his assistance has thrown a wrench directly into a nearly fifteen-year long plan to keep him at an arm’s length. 

He never should’ve asked for his dad’s help. 

He shakes his head once, pulling the file from his dad’s hand as he pushes himself up with an unfortunate wince. The police station isn’t so far that he can’t walk to it, and he can’t imagine that his leg will be harmed by the extra exercise. Or at least not the extra exercise that it’ll take to get himself to Gus’ apartment, where he can convince his friend to be his chauffeur to the station. 

“Shawn,” his dad calls out mid-step, and Shawn tries his best to ignore it. 

“Shawn!”

He stops, frowns. Grits his teeth before spinning around to face his father and casting his hands out in frustration.

“What, dad?” 

For what might be the first time in Shawn’s memory, his dad looks…Almost concerned. His eyebrows are knit together in a way that Shawn is more used to seeing directed at a police report than at him. 

“Just—be careful.”

Chapter Text

Shawn is perfectly calm, feels magnificent, really. 

Juliet is dating the world’s most annoying police officer—and Shawn’s met plenty of them, so he feels sufficiently qualified to make that assessment—his best friend is currently being held at gunpoint in a bank, and he can’t find a single better thing to do than pace back and forth by the barricade in between each rejected impassioned plea that he makes to Lassiter and the Chief. 

He feels like he can’t focus, can’t breathe—he’s honestly surprised that he’s still walking and talking in what strikes him as at least a passable attempt at coherence. 

Realistically, Gus shouldn’t be in this situation at all—it should be him. He’s practically a professional hostage at this point, having stared down the barrel of a gun at least thrice without fear—or…without admitting fear. With bad humor, certainly, but a special sort of je-ne-sais-quoi that often drove criminals to hasty decision-making, unfortunate admissions of guilt, and the ever-looming consequences of their own actions. 

But this? 

This is squarely within Shawn Spencer’s territory. Causing a distraction to get people out, making a scene to get a criminal’s attention off of an innocent civilian, stalling for time until the bad guy thinks he’s gotten off easy before Lassiter and Juliet break down a door…This is his bread and butter. 

Worse still, not only does this situation fall firmly within Shawn’s area of expertise, but he was supposed to have dropped off this check two weeks ago. It had only been Gus’ questioning of the office’s rent payment that had reminded Shawn of the check at all, and then of the fact that he’d picked it up from the station, folded it, and promptly shoved it under a pile of papers on his desk to create a level surface for an arm wrestling match with their latest’s client’s ten-year-old step-son. 

Naturally. 

They’d established early on that Shawn would only turn their checks in when it was a Thursday afternoon, the temperature was between seventy-five and seventy-seven degrees, and he’d already purchased—and drank most of—a smoothie, which unsurprisingly meant that Gus had been responsible for most of their paycheck’s deposits—and likely the continued success in holding down a leased property at all. 

Except the thing is… 

Today is a Thursday, the temperature in Santa Barbara is a balmy seventy-six degrees, and somehow, incredibly, Shawn is currently feeling the uncomfortable after-effects of his Orange Julius mixing with anxiety-induced nausea as they churn uncomfortably in his stomach. He’d had no reason to say no to going in the bank other than his own childish desire to not be forced to run an errand. 

Gus is only inside this specific bank because they’d been driving past it and he’d mentioned a new “interior feature” that he’d been meaning to stop by and see—a feature which Shawn suspected was a new bank teller named “Andrea”. Gus had even asked him if he wanted to join, but Shawn had trotted out an excuse about the small business loan that the bank had denied him, all the while thinking about the somewhat idiotic partnership agreement that the two of them had signed, and how mad Gus would be if Shawn elected to recite portions of it from memory in that moment. 

None of that matters now, though, because this isn’t where they normally bank. 

It isn’t their normal bank, and Gus isn’t supposed to be in there alone.

Shawn is going to be sick if someone on this team doesn’t let him in the doors of that building soon.

“Guster’s in there?” 

Shawn can barely hear his dad’s voice above the noise of the growing crowd, the one that Luntz has annoyingly placed between Shawn and the SWAT team so he can’t interfere with their operations. 

“And Shawn’s not in there with him?” 

There’s a flurry of disgruntled noises from behind him, and then—

“Shawn!” 

Henry Spencer, right on time. 

Shawn doesn’t turn around, his eyes never leaving the nearest window, the one that he’d swear—to anyone who might ask—he can see the top of Gus’ head through. 

There’s got to be a better way to get through to their gunman than by trying to force his hand like this. The added pressure is bound to make him snap sooner or later, and Shawn simply isn’t willing to risk the safety of his best friend for the sake of “proper police procedures”. 

“Juliet said they’ve got a line into the bank, they—”

“They won’t let me in,” Shawn interrupts. “Gus is inside and they won’t let me in. I already tried.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Shawn thinks he can see the moment his dad decides to hold back an eye roll. 

“You’re a civilian, of course they’re not going to send you in, Shawn,” he says shortly, “be reasonable.”

There’s an immediate obstinance that Shawn can feel welling up in him, even as he’s trying to keep his composure. 

“Maybe come back to me when your best friend is being held at gunpoint, okay, Dad? Is that something you can do? Because in the meantime, I’m really not interested in hearing about how the police have to do this and the SWAT team needs to do that when no one seems to be doing much of anything, because they haven’t been able to get me any real updates on whether anyone in that bank is okay!”

It takes a moment for Shawn to realize that he’s panting, that a small portion of the crowd has looked in his direction with alarm, and that he must have been shouting. 

It takes even longer for him to realize that his dad’s hand is on his shoulder and that he’s being guided around the nearest corner until he’s out of sight. 

“Shawn, you’re going to need to calm down,” his dad says slowly, and Shawn holds back every fiber of his being that’s itching to punch his dad for offering up such an unnecessary suggestion. 

Maybe that’s the point, though. 

Maybe the world’s most straightforward advice is a means to an end—if he can make himself look professional and polished enough, the SWAT team won’t be so hesitant about involving him in whatever their plans are. 

It’s enough to make him consider taking his dad’s advice; it’s not enough to make him more comfortable with the hand resting too heavily on his shoulder. 

He shrugs jerkily to escape his dad’s grasp, sniffing once and swiping a hand over his face before taking a quick look around to find Lassiter and cracking his neck. 

Time to readjust. Time to reconfigure his plans. Time to set things into motion.

“Lassie,” he yells, turning on his heel and not bothering to look back at his dad’s reaction. He focuses instead on the single raised eyebrow that Lassiter is offering him—an olive branch, a final chance to make himself a part of this mess.

“I’m having a vision,” he shouts, and before Lassiter can shake his head and turn away, he jogs forward so he can lower his voice, be more subtle about this. 

“And it involves you coming out on top over Juliet’s septuagenarian SWAT sweetheart.”

Lassiter freezes at that, lowering his sunglasses.

“Spencer, if you’re wasting my time, so help me—”

“The spirits, they’re sending me a strong message about what’s going on in there,” he continues, letting his nerves fuel his motions as his hand shakily darts to his temple. 

“Seventeen hostages—thirteen civilians, four employees of the bank, plus one robber makes eighteen,” he spouts off, letting the footage that he’d caught over Juliet’s shoulder fuel his commentary. 

“There are eleven men and six women among the hostages—most of them are doing fine, but the one with the light blue button-down is a diabetic and you’re going to need to get him food sooner than not.” 

Lassiter stares at him in suspicion, but Shawn can recognize an in-road when he sees one. 

“I don’t know how you know that,” Lassiter says darkly, “but Luntz is already arranging for food to be brought. You haven’t said anything we don’t already know.”

“But has Luntz figured out that his pal Phillip isn’t the one robbing the bank?”

The words are hardly out of his mouth before Lassiter starts shaking his head and muttering quiet curses under his breath. 

“I’m not about to circumvent police procedure because you want to play psychic, Spencer,” he seethes.

“I know in your world, ideas arrive in your mind like puffs of fog, but in the real one? Where the rest of us detectives live? We have to operate based on the facts. And the facts here are that Phillip Stubbins is the one in the bank with a gun; Stubbins plus gun plus bank equals robbery.”

Shawn rolls his eyes. He should’ve known that Lassiter wouldn’t have been willing to take him at his word. He hadn’t wanted to reveal what he’d seen from the security cameras, but if it was the only way to convince Lassiter to convince Luntz that he should be inside that bank…

“If he’s robbing the bank, then why has he kept the gun’s safety on?” he says defeatedly. 

“And why…are the spirits telling me that the bank manager knew he was coming?”

“How do you—”

“What reason do I have to lie?” Shawn asks slowly. 

“Give me one reason to lie when my best friend is in that bank, Lassiter, and I’ll step away.”

Something in Lassiter’s face softens, and Shawn sees the moment that he’s won. Lassie’s a good cop, he’s not going to let anything happen to Gus or the other hostages, especially not if keeping them safe can bolster his own reputation as a detective. 

He feels his breathing hitch as he exhales in relief, even as Lassiter glances heavenward as if to send a prayer up for what he’s about to say. 

“What do you have in mind, Spencer? And don’t say disguises.”

It’s when Shawn gets half of the hostages released to the police that he realizes he might have underestimated the severity of the situation. 

Stubbins is cooperative, yes, but he’s anxious, he’s panicky, and Shawn is well aware that people do stupid things when they’re anxious. 

Case in point: he’s in the bank, and he’s not so overwhelmed by the fact that Gus is fine to have not noticed that the safety has been clicked off of Stubbins’ weapon. It’s live now, there’s a legitimate threat. 

Gus is gone too, sent out to the police with the three women who were pregnant, the three others who had children or grandchildren at daycare, and the diabetic man who Shawn had identified earlier. Which is great, really, except for the fact that Shawn himself is now considered a hostage. It’s ten on one, which could be worse odds, he supposes, except for the fact that the individuals he’s been left with don’t entirely seem the types to want to stage a coup against their captor. 

To be fair, he wouldn't have asked them to do that anyway—he hadn’t been so blinded by his desire to get Gus out of this situation that his instincts had turned toward asking civilians to take what would be a frankly stupid risk in an attempt to save themselves.

He closes his eyes and thinks back to what his dad had said a few moments before he’d been selected to bring the pizzas to the bank’s door.

The guy doing the negotiating—he’s done negotiating. He’s ready to take this guy out. 

If Shawn tips his head to his shoulder and cracks his neck, he can just see Lassiter’s cruiser out the window now. No clear shot of Juliet or of Luntz though, and Shawn can only hope that the hostages’ release has bought him—and Stubbins—more time. 

He’s gathered that at least one of the remaining hostages isn’t who he’s purporting to be, although he’s relatively certain that it’s not the bank’s manager. The man is a terrible actor, but Shawn hasn’t been able to pinpoint anything that ties him more acutely to the kidnapping of Stubbins’ wife. At worst, he’s an accessory, but he’s not an accomplice—whoever took Stubbins’ wife is the one who was puppeteering both the bank’s manager and the bank’s robber. Nobody can be in two places at once—even science fiction warns against that sort of thing, to a degree—so Shawn must be missing something. 

Stubbins had said that he felt certain someone in the bank was watching him, though, and Shawn had dismissed exactly zero individuals who were eligible candidates to have been his criminal overseer. Of the remaining hostages, he’d only suitably ruled out himself and the bank manager, leaving him…about where he’d started, something he can’t bring himself to be too distracted by for fear of missing something crucial, something important to the way this scheme had been set up and executed. 

Stubbins’ wife has been kidnapped, and Shawn feels largely certain that he’s passed along the correct address—or the correct series of addresses—to Lassiter and Juliet, but he’s got no way of knowing if his hunches have been substantiated, if they’ve found and rescued the woman from whatever sort of captivity she’s being held in. He’s hopeful, but not confident, and he doesn’t like the feeling of instability that he’s being forced to reckon with due to his choice to remain in the bank. 

The phone rings from the back room and Shawn starts, too lost in his thoughts to have noticed that Stubbins isn’t pacing anymore, that he’s dragging Gresling, the bank manager, into the back room. Shawn glances around and curses under his breath at Gus’ absence before jumping to his feet and following the sound of heated voices to Gresling’s office, only to find Stubbins holding the man at gunpoint as the phone rings on. 

“Phillip,” he says slowly, “this man isn’t the reason your wife was kidnapped.”

“How do you know that?” Stubbins chokes. “I heard you tell the police earlier that he was in on all this. How do you know he’s not the one who took her?”

“I’m a psychic, remember?” Shawn offers, tossing his hands up in a brief surrender as he inches towards the phone, taking care to position it behind him and jostle the handset off of the base. 

“Gresling? He’s a douche, and sure, he knew you were the person coming to rob this place, but he’s been at the bank all morning, Phil. He can’t have been the one to kidnap your wife.”

 A number of things seem to happen in quick succession. 

First, there’s a discordant crash from the bank’s lobby. Shawn knows what that sound means, and ducks his head around the doorframe to see a series of smoke grenades rolling across the floor. He braces himself with an internalized countdown, waiting for the inevitable bangs that are sure to elicit screams from the rest of the hostages.

Second, Lassiter’s voice comes out over the receiver—a sound that would be barely audible but for the volume at which the head detective is clearly screaming at the phone. 

“We’ve got Joanna,” he says, “but she didn’t recognize Gresling when we showed a photo to her. All she could recall was that the man who’d taken her had brown wingtips.” 

The comment makes Shawn’s brain whir unpleasantly, and he feels the details he’d collected about the bank lobby’s occupants shoot to the forefront of his mind. Seventeen other hostages, just under half of them women. Two of the men had been older, their socks showing evidence of orthotics in their shoes. Too old to kidnap a woman in her thirties, not enough physical strength for the endeavor. The bank manager had a clear uniform, black shoes only. Gus’ were black too, and Shawn’s own converse brought his options down to eight remaining men. 

He casts his mind further back, to a different set of facts that he’d considered alongside his first impressions of the hostages—the pile of shoes in the middle of the lobby. He studies the pile in his mind for a moment before realizing that the shoes in question are there, that they’re of a wider fit than any of the other pairs, and that they’ve got an imbalance in the soles—the wearer is left foot dominant, and perhaps left-handed. That’s something to work with, and he takes those observations and starts laying them over the remaining eight hostages before landing on the man in question. It’s the one who Gus said had identified his phone as ringing when Shawn had called. No wonder he’d refused to band together with Gus and the other hostages.

Third, Stubbins falters. The gun he’s aiming at Gresling starts to drop—whether at Shawn’s words or the sound of breaking glass, and Shawn sees Gresling’s eyes follow the weapon before he can fully react. He’s not prepared enough, his body still catching up to everything that his mind has synthesized, and it’s only when he hears the struggle that he realizes what a terrible position he’s in. 

Gresling has turned Stubbins around, they’re back to front before Shawn clocks that the gun in Stubbins’ hand is currently pointed at the ceiling, that it’s rapidly being pulled down by Gresling, that Stubbins’ finger is still on the trigger, that he’s in the line of—

Shawn’s never been shot before, but he’d always imagined it would feel a bit more dizzying than this.

Then again, he’s hardly one to be offering up a rating of the experience when he’s supine, with no real memory of having gotten to that position. Stubbins and Gresling are long gone, and there’s a white-hot burning in his stomach, something that’s steadily seeming to spread across his midsection as he breathes heavily. 

The ceiling tiles have those odd little specks on them, the ones that have always reminded Shawn of wormed apples, and he chuckles at the sight of a small drawing tucked in between the metal framework and a tile near the corner of the room, evidence of someone’s child having been a frequent visitor of the room. 

The laugh hurts more than Shawn had expected, and he gathers enough strength to lift his head slightly and peer downward—only to immediately regret the action. For the first time in his life, he finds himself with an acute understanding of Gus’ vesuvius response, or whatever the medical term is for the way his friend has always reacted at the sight of a dead body. 

There’s blood on the floor, and on his shirt, and his hand, and the top of his pants; he doesn’t doubt that all of it is his. He drops his head back against the floor and slams his eyes shut, trying to recall Gus’ Lamaze breathing techniques, but all that his mind seems to be able to focus on is that his insides don’t exactly feel like they’re on the inside anymore, and that to die of blood loss would be a profoundly stupid way to go.

He’s ready to recant his previous notion about dizziness, though, because even as he blinks, the room seems to spin in his sight. The smoke from the lobby is finally rolling into the back room, and Shawn feels his lungs start to seize at the hindrance to his usual oxygen-replete breaths. His vision blurs further—the ceiling tiles look less like a randomized series of divots and more like an intentionally designed pattern—he sees words, letters, but they don’t make any sense, they don’t spell out something coherent, they’re a jumble of symbols that feel closer to a foreign language than to English, they don’t make any—

Shawn is fairly certain that he’s dead. 

He doesn’t hear Lassiter and Juliet when they come into the backroom. Doesn’t flinch at the gentle probing the EMTs give his stomach, doesn’t open his eyes at the concerned commentary of his best friend and father tag-teaming to detail his medical history to the paramedics. He’s only convinced that he’s still alive when, what feels like a few lifetimes later,  he hears the world’s most obnoxious beeping noise, goes to move, and discovers every part of his body feels simultaneously weightless and weighed down.

“Don’t try to move,” his dad’s voice says, “you’ll pull the stitches.”

Shawn bites back a groan, not bothering to open his eyes. He knows what he’ll see, anyhow, there’s no need to sear the vision into his mind for the rest of his life. 

Then again, maybe he is dead. It would make some sort of twisted sense that the universe would serve him up with his dad’s judgment upon his arrival to the afterlife. 

“And if you don’t think I know when you’re faking sleep, you’re an idiot,” his dad adds.

Shawn really does groan at that, a sound that’s rewarded by a huff of laughter from the corner of the room where he’s suspected his father is sitting. 

He opens his eyes slowly, wanting to complain about the effort it takes, but finding the words a bit too far out of reach for his present state of mind. He’d been right, his dad is situated in the corner of the room, arms crossed as his gaze lazily sweeps over Shawn before jumping back to the newspaper. 

“Thanks Dad,” he murmurs tiredly, “love you too.”

“Love didn’t keep you from making stupid decisions, Shawn,” his dad says shortly, dropping the pretense—and the newspaper—as he leans forward onto his knees. 

“What were you thinking?” he asks. “Gee, an armed robber is holding up the bank, I ought to get myself a piece of the action.” 

“Yeah, because my usual instinct is to put myself between a gun and its target,” Shawn mutters bitterly, but his dad is clearly disinterested in his sarcasm. 

“I understand you wanted to save Guster—and you did that, it was very benevolent of you—but you couldn’t stop, could you? You had to push the envelope, had to follow Stubbins into the back room, had to—”

“He’d taken the safety off of his gun, and you and I both know that he was too anxious to be making rational decisions,” Shawn interjected. “I couldn’t just walk out of there, could I?”

As Shawn watches, his dad stands from the chair and begins pacing back and forth in front of his bed.

“You could’ve, though, and you should have,” his dad continues. “You’re not a cop—you’ve made that painfully clear to me and the whole of the SBPD. You had no obligation to go in there, and even less of one to stay and meddle in a robber’s affairs.”

“An innocent man could’ve been killed!” Shawn cries out, but he’s wholly unprepared for the look of conflicted anguish on his father’s face when he spins around to face his son. 

“You could’ve been killed, Shawn,” he says flatly.

“Every other person who’d been in that bank—all eighteen of them—came out unscathed. Not a scratch on any of them. Not Stubbins. Not Gresling. Not Morgan Phelps, the one who orchestrated the whole thing.”

Shawn swallows. This isn’t right—his dad’s words, tone, posture—all of it speaks to a depth of concern that Shawn is certain he’s never seen leveled in his direction. 

“My son, though? My son walks into a bank to save his friend and leaves on a stretcher after having been shot.” 

“Do you know how many times I was shot while on the force, Shawn?” he asks, but his voice seems to falter, and Shawn knows he’s either dead or dreaming now. There’s not a chance in hell that his dad is standing at the foot of his bed near tears over Shawn. No, this is some sort of weird drug-induced hallucination that Shawn will wake up, tell everyone about, and they’ll all laugh. 

Then again, to Shawn’s knowledge, hallucinations aren’t usually punctuated by the steady beeping of a heart monitor, or accompanied by a dull pain growing ever-sharper as his dad speaks.  

“Not once in twenty years, kid.”

Henry returns to his chair and sinks into it. “I know you’re brilliant, but that wasn’t a record I ever needed you to top for me.”

“I’m confused,” Shawn says groggily. “Who died and made you Jimmy Stewart? Since when do you say that I'm—say things like “I didn’t need you to top that record” to me?”

He’s repeated the phrasing wrong, but surely his dad will get what he’s going for, which really is a bone-deep sort of confusion at this behavior. Shawn’s faced down guns before, he’s even been injured on a case before—this is hardly new territory. Considering the fact that he hasn’t heard the inconsolable sobbing of his best friend, he’s also fairly certain that he’s not actually dead, which makes all of this even more confusing. Henry Spencer should be yelling at him about recovery times and insurance costs, not sitting at Shawn’s bedside and looking at him like he’s a ghost. 

Had he really been that injured? 

He casts back for his memory of the shooting and finds an empty shelf where the footage should be; something that might’ve concerned him once. At this stage, he’s barely surprised—his mother had spoken enough about trauma and memories that people block out when she’d been reviewing her talks with him and his dad on her last visit, so he’s far less worried about the missing time itself than he is about the bits and pieces of the shooting that he has retained in his mind. 

Stubbins’ look of horror. 

The specks on the ceiling coalescing into shapes and symbols that Shawn couldn’t recognize. 

A glance down at his stomach only to see more blood than he’d expected or felt confident seeing for long without throwing up. 

He’s been operating under the assumption that the shooting was a flesh wound, that the bullet had gone in one side and out the other. Logic seems to dictate that he’d be in far worse shape now if it hadn’t been, that he’d be having a harder time breathing, or moving, or—

He is having a hard time moving, now that he thinks about it, but that seems to be more attributable to whatever painkillers they’ve given him than to his body’s inability to do so. 

No, he’s about 87% confident that medically, he’s fine. 

Aside from whatever hole the bullet has left in his side. 

But somehow, Henry Spencer’s face isn’t telegraphing any of that. The near-90% confidence rate that Shawn has in his assessment of his health is threatening to make a hasty nosedive if his dad doesn’t say something more normal.

“Can we go back to the bit where you were blaming me for getting shot?” Shawn tries out, offering a slow blink in his dad’s direction as he rolls his head over on the pillow. His dad looks less than amused, but leans forward again as if he’s about to share some treasured secret with his son. 

“I taught you to be careful, Shawn, not reckless,” he says, but the tone isn’t nearly as harsh as the words would’ve otherwise implied. 

“If you keep up with this, you’re going to get yourself killed,” his dad continues, “and I’m not going to sit around and watch you throw your life away like that.”

Shawn doesn’t have a response ready for that sort of honesty, but he doesn’t need one—by the time he’s begun to consider what to say, his dad is already long gone from the room.

Chapter Text

It’s far too late at night for Shawn to be discovering the inside of Lassiter’s apartment for the first time. 

He’d wanted this to happen during the daytime, when he wasn’t freshly punched and was firing on all cylinders. He’s sure there’s a witty repartee to be had between him and Gus—and maybe even Juliet—about the state of Lassiter’s decor choices. Either that, or about the amount of books Lassie owns about the Civil War. Even with his knowledge of his colleague’s interest in military strategy, the sheer number of books Lassiter owns about the subject is…disconcerting. 

Shawn would go so far as to call it weird. 

He will, too, if the back of his head would stop pulsing long enough for him to get a thought out coherently. 

Drimmer is sitting opposite him, gray shirt still sweat-stained and half-tucked into his pants. 

Of course. He’d been mere meters from the Psych office when he’d been downed, naturally he’d needed to be taken to a second location. 

The ache in his head only intensifies when Drimmer pulls out the gun, and Shawn feels his mouth running on autopilot as he tries to subtly gain a sense of the room, unwinding the con that Drimmer had pulled on the rest of the department even as he tries to keep his breathing under control.

Despite his best attempts at getting on Chief Vick’s good side, he’s only barely back in commission after what had happened at the bank. “Risky behaviors” and “civilian injuries” and a whole host of combinations of other SAT words that Gus had repeated with increasing frustration on their drive back from the station had been thrown about liberally during the meeting Karen had informally called between the three of them after Shawn had gotten back on his feet. 

It had been a bit on the nose for Chief Vick to cite a desire for him to stay out of harm’s way, frankly, but the then-healing stitches hadn’t exactly underscored any sort of defense that he could think of, and he’d walked away from her office both suitably chastised and thoroughly put out that he’d be expected to “fully recover” before the SBPD would even consider hiring him and Gus on another case. Jules still hasn’t stopped giving Shawn cautious once-overs whenever she thought he wasn’t looking, and if Shawn was less of a coward, he’d have told her to knock it off six weeks ago, when he’d gotten the stitches removed. 

He is a coward though, because for all that her concern is a bit annoying, it’s at least subtle. Unobtrusive. The same can’t be said of his own anxiety, which has led his mind to relive the day with a variety of alternate outcomes on the regular and has made him at least partly immune to the effects of energy drinks for how intently he’s committed himself to avoiding sleep as much as possible. 

Unfortunate side-effects all around, really. 

It’s more frustrating than he’d ever be willing to admit—not even to Gus, who’s taken a surprisingly restrained approach to Shawn’s wellbeing in the months since he’d been released from the hospital. The wound hadn’t been pretty, but his initial assessments had been correct—miraculously, the bullet had gone straight through him without causing major damage to anything vital. 

Somehow, though, despite the excellent prognosis that he’d been given for a full recovery, he’d spent the subsequent weeks muttering angrily about a lack of casework to review during the day and trying his best to stave off sleep at night, all too aware of what he’ll see when he closes his eyes. He’s supposed to be good at this sort of thing, at brushing off pain or tragedy in favor of stupid jokes or references to lighten the mood, but for whatever reason, he’s been terrible at applying the Shawn Spencer Principles of Socializing to his own psyche. 

All things considered, he thinks as he swallows thickly, he figures the average person in his situation would be at least half as terrified by the gun as he is now, and that the average person who’s survived being shot at point-blank range would likely come out around even with him. It’s a nebulous sort of mental math that he’s doing as he lets his mouth run unchecked, and when Drimmer shakes his head in irritation, Shawn tries not to remember Gresling’s face, or the feeling of cold air hitting his abdomen, or the flashes of sound and light and pain that never quite resurfaced in his mind as proper memories.

He nears the end of his ramble, makes an ill-timed—albeit clever, where was Gus when you needed him for comedic support—Kenny Loggins joke and waits, eyes fixed on the firearm in Drimmer’s hand. 

His finger is inching towards the trigger, and Shawn knows he’s more likely to be shot than he is to avoid that fate by now; he’s too close. Any attempt to startle or charge Drimmer will only lead to the pistol firing, and to Shawn discovering just how far his tolerance for pain really extends—only with due warning, with time to remember what the burn of a bullet feels like as it pierces the skin and tears through him. 

Then Drimmer says he’s not going to kill him, and it’s a relief, for a second. 

Only just. 

It only takes another moment for Shawn to realize what the alternative is, and his back stiffens in tense anticipation as he waits for Drimmer’s next move.

When Lassiter walks in the door, Shawn tries to convey with his eyes that there’s another intruder, but apparently, Lassiter hasn’t taken it upon himself to become fluent in the Shawn Spencer Language of Eye Contact.

Rude, given that they’ve worked together for three years, but Shawn figures that if all goes well, they’ll have time to work on it more. 

It’s only a few seconds before the facade crumbles. Lassiter walks to the middle of the room, predictably scolding Shawn for having his feet on the table, and then—

Drimmer, with a gun, in the living room. God, Shawn hates when the Clue solution doesn’t match up to his initial deductions. 

Worse still, Lassiter’s unarmed. Shawn’s confident that his colleague keeps a gun hidden somewhere in the place, but frankly, he’d been far more focused on the gun being waved in his own face than on doing a proper visual sweep of the apartment without drawing unnecessary suspicion. So he does what he’s best at while Drimmer stares down Lassiter, the pistol between the two locked and loaded in a way that’s made even Lassie hesitant.

He stalls. 

“I can’t believe you thought that text was actually from me,” he spits out, shaking his head in disappointment.

“It lacked all nuance, my signature mocking tone, and was utterly devoid of emoticons,” he goes on, and Lassiter cocks his head in confusion before turning back to face Drimmer. 

Shawn curses quietly under his breath as Lassiter and Drimmer hash it out between the two of them, only deciding to move when Drimmer unceremoniously drops a notepad onto the coffee table in front of him and calls it a suicide note. 

He can hardly keep himself from laughing, but it tastes bitter and nervous even as it dies in his throat. 

Lassiter? Suicide? 

Shawn himself was at least an easier mark, everyone knew that his emotions could run amok, but Lassie? Carlton Lassiter? It was so implausible that Shawn can’t help but interrupt Drimmer when he says that Lassiter would write that Shawn had ‘psychically figured out’ that Lassiter was responsible for Kenny Loggins’ death—as if Lassiter would admit that, even on his deathbed, and even if it had been truthful. 

“I believe the term you’re looking for there is divined,” he interjects, but is quickly rewarded with a swift hit upside the head from Drimmer’s gun-laden hand. 

Note to self: correcting semantics of a murderer with a gun? Not the wisest choice. He’ll be sure to make a more permanent note of it when he’s done gingerly prodding the back of his head with his hand to assess the damage. 

No blood, which is a small mercy, he supposes, although Lassiter’s concerned expression certainly doesn’t assuage the notion that something else is going to go terribly wrong tonight. He tries to keep himself from yelling again, having realized somewhere in between the pistol whip and the makeshift fetal position he’s pulled himself into that the noise only made things worse, but finds himself—again—unable to resist comment at Drimmer’s insinuation that anyone would believe he and Lassiter to have been romantically involved. It’s a nervous habit, at this point, and he really can’t convince himself to shut up, even as Drimmer sends a scowl in his direction. 

“Former lovers, really?”

Drimmer doesn’t respond to the comment, instead, it’s Lassiter’s voice that offers him an explanation. 

“It’s called misinformation, Spencer,” he says tightly, “Drimmer’s hoping they won’t look too closely.”

Shawn’s only just determined that he can sit upright again without feeling dizzy when he sees Drimmer shift the gun away from Lassiter and towards him again, and he feels his mind go into overdrive before he can help himself.

So he rambles. 

Again.

Second note to self: improv skills under pressure could use a tune-up.

“Something in the way you look tonight,” he says lazily, trying to ignore how quickly he can feel his heart racing, how warm the back of his head feels, how blurry Lassiter and Drimmer each look, even though they’re hardly more than five feet from him. 

He keeps going, aimless, pointless, hoping that Lassiter has an ace up his sleeve—but he doesn’t seem to, or at least, Drimmer seems to think he’s got Lassiter cornered. 

But then—in a moment that feels like divine clarity—Shawn knows otherwise, can see a hint of black peeking out from within the bowl of nuts on Lassiter’s counter. There’s another gun in the room, and if Shawn can only distract Drimmer for long enough, Lassiter should be able to inch close enough and—

It’s over in seconds, Shawn knows, but there’s a brief moment as he pushes Drimmer’s gun hand towards the sky where the barrel points at him. When Lassiter fires shortly thereafter, Shawn falls against the couch with Drimmer’s gun in hand, not entirely sure that he isn’t the one who’s been shot himself. 

Lassiter hardly looks over, and Shawn tries to shake himself free of the dimly lit vision of his own death that his mind had supplied before darting across the coffee table and holding out Drimmer’s gun blindly for Lassiter to take. He’s only partly successful, stumbling in the execution and leaning heavily against Lassie’s counter as he catches bits and pieces of Lassiter’s description of other hidden weapons. Even amid the disorientation, he has the foresight to pause mid-massage of the bruise that’s quickly forming on the back of his head, and scowl at Lassiter’s mention of a Hi-Fi system. 

“Hi-Fi?” he questions, even as his dad’s arm comes up to gesture at his bruised cheek in concern.

He hadn’t even noticed his dad enter—what does that say about how functional his powers of observation are at present, or for working cases again? He doesn’t want to know the answer, and pushes the question from his mind so violently that the room starts to spin around him. 

On second thought, maybe that was the concussion. 

“Lassie, you were so cool a second ago.”

He feels himself falling before he can stop it, and the hand that was previously near his cheek suddenly catches him from behind as he stumbles. Another hand is on his shoulder, but Lassiter doesn’t have a gun pointed at him any longer, and within minutes Shawn is allowed to pass out in the backseat of his dad’s pickup truck.

“Your dad was worried sick about you, you know,” Gus says when Shawn takes it upon himself to blink slowly to wakefulness and sit up from the couch. 

“My dad has never been worried sick over anything, Gus,” he mumbles, rubbing the back of his head with a wince. “I’m pretty sure the man has never been sick a day in his life, actually. You should ask him about his technique.”

Gus scowls at Shawn from over a bowl of cereal. 

“I’m serious,” he repeats, and Shawn looks over, utterly unsurprised. 

“My dad got me a first aid kit for christmas one year and told me I’d better learn how to use it because he wasn’t going to tend to every scraped knee I got,” Shawn shoots back, swinging his legs around to the front of the couch and sighing in relief at the sight of the two painkillers someone—likely Gus—had already laid out for him on the coffee table. 

“I was eight,” he continues, adjusting the pressure with which he’s rubbing the back of his head until it’s barely there as he swallows the first pill, then the second, in close succession. 

“I’m not saying your dad’s methods always make sense—or that they even made sense when we were kids,” Gus starts, then pauses as if he’s intentionally holding something back. 

“I know that look,” Shawn probes, standing up to get a better glimpse of his friend’s face. 

“What are you hiding?”

“Nothing,” Gus says, but it’s too fast, too decisive. He knows something that he doesn’t want to tell Shawn, and it’s going to eat him alive if he doesn’t find out what it is. 

“Gus,” he whines, but his friend just shakes his head. 

“No way, Shawn,” he says firmly, “your dad and I shared an experience as men that night. I will not betray his confidence just because you want to make sad puppy dog eyes at me.”

“What if I tell him that you were the one who stole his Walter Payton Wheaties box,” Shawn counters, “I’ve never mentioned it in all these years, but you know…”

He trails off and gestures weakly at his head, chuckling at the look of pure irritation on Gus’ face. 

“This concussion business is making it hard to keep all my thoughts straight, I might accidentally let something…slip.”

“Shawn, no,” Gus repeats, “it’s been twenty years since that box came out, your dad got over it.”

“After he accused me of throwing it in the trash, and after I charitably didn’t correct him,” Shawn offers, perching on the back of the couch and crossing his arms petulantly. 

Gus had to be willing to bend at that one—he’d told Shawn as teens that it was the only thing he and Shawn had ever done that he was afraid of Henry finding out about. Once, he’d even said that if Shawn’s dad found out that he’d stolen the box and not owned up to it, he didn’t think he’d ever be able to step foot in the Spencer house again. 

The method has to work, there are simply no other angles for Shawn to use. 

“Gus, come on—what did he tell you?” 

There’s a heavy sigh from the table, but a grin splits Shawn’s face as he watches Gus push his cereal away from him and steel himself to divulge what his dad had said. 

“We went to the station and I told Juliet you were missing, but your dad corrected me to say that you hadn’t been gone for twenty-four hours, so you couldn’t technically be a missing persons case yet,” Gus says, and Shawn finds himself fighting an eye roll. 

“Gee thanks Dad, I’m certain that that level of technicality would’ve really helped if Drimmer had been dead set on killing the two of us more quickly than he had been,” Shawn grouses, but at Gus’ unamused glare, he quiets and gestures for his friend to go on. 

“Except when we left the station, it was like your dad was Liam Neeson,” Gus says slowly, as if he’s still in a state of disbelief over what he’d witnessed. 

“He asks me who I’d seen you talking with, I say Drimmer; he calls an old police buddy of his to get the guy’s address, Juliet tracks the phone,” Gus shakes his head, “he was breaking every speed limit to get there. I think we ran four red lights.”

“I’m sure I’ll be billed accordingly for his traffic citations,” Shawn says, letting himself flop against the couch with a groan. 

“I’m not hearing “worried” or “sick” in any of this, you know. I’m hearing “my child was a dumbass and now I have to deal with the fallout of his actions,” if anything.”

“I don’t understand you two,” Gus says quietly, shaking his head. “Anyone else would take that level of concern as a sign of love for their family member, but you take it as—”

“Another Tuesday in the Spencer household, Gus,” Shawn replies easily, although the words catch in his throat a bit even as he says them. 

Gus is right, in more ways than one, but there’s something too foreign about his dad caring that much, something strange and uncomfortable that he doesn’t want to have to reckon with—not now, and not ever. 

“After what happened at the bank, he’s been different and you know it.”

Shawn rolls his eyes.

“There’s nothing different about my dad except for those two hideous shirts that he wore when he stopped by last week.”

The tinkling sound of cereal in Gus’ bowl lulls Shawn into thinking that he’s won, that there’s nothing more to be said between them. 

Except the cereal bowl is placed on the coffee table in front of him as Gus situates himself at the other end of the couch, forcing Shawn to twist somewhat uncomfortably to face his friend. 

“He’s been by every week—sometimes twice a week—since you were released from the hospital, Shawn,” Gus says slowly. 

“Yeah, to tell me to get off my ass and stop being lazy,” Shawn says, reaching for the cereal bowl blindly and frowning at the fact that Gus hadn’t brought him a spoon. 

Gus shoots him another unamused look, but stands from the couch to retrieve a spoon from their drying rack before returning to his seat.   

“No,” he says sharply, “he’s been coming around to offer you distractions from boredom.”

“Gus, don’t be the—”

“He’s tried to hire you out on what any other version of yourself would’ve called pity cases no less than four times now,” Gus interrupts,  “and you’ve said yes to each of them without bothering to come up with a single snappy retort.”

“Is that what this is about?” Shawn asks. 

“If I'd known you were so concerned about the health of my funny bone, I would’ve tried harder to exercise it for you.”

Gus doesn’t respond, and Shawn can tell his friend is waiting for him to keep talking—or more specifically, that he’s waiting for Shawn to offer up a lie that Gus can call him out on. Against his better instincts, he obliges. 

“Look, he’s my dad! He’s gotten bored in his retirement; I’m just humoring him in the way a dutiful son should,” Shawn argues, but Gus shakes his head and fixes Shawn with a firm look. 

“Humoring your dad was going back to make that dog house to get his help,” Gus says pointedly, “this is avoidance.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shawn says, but Gus’ eyes have become increasingly harder to meet, and he glances down at the bowl of cereal his friend had poured for him. 

It’s a combination of Apple Jacks and Captain Crunch, and it’s perfect—a true testament to how well Gus knows him, one that’s followed by a near-immediate gut punch of the realization that Gus knows him well enough to know that he’s lying. 

Which explains the stern look he’s still being fixed with. 

The truth is, Shawn hasn’t known what to feel about his dad for years now. 

He’s been carefully avoiding the subject, letting himself settle for surface level interpretations of words and actions instead of considering the uncomfortable truth that his father might just contain multitudes himself. And it’s hard, in a weird sort of way, in the way that a tongue traces the outline of a chipped tooth unconsciously. He knows there’s more to his father than what he saw as a kid—hell, he knew that as a kid, he just hadn’t been willing to accept the idea that his father was simultaneously learning how to live and how to parent for the first time. 

He’d been a stubborn kid, something that he was perhaps unable to recognize while experiencing his youth in real time, but that he’s all too aware of now. There are plenty of officers who’ve introduced him to their kids in passing, and he’s seen so few of them who seem to push their parents’ boundaries of patience and thoughtfulness the way he felt like he was always doing while growing up. Maybe that was why he’d found his father so stifling, the rules and strictures he’d heard about from the earliest of ages searing into his mind for the sole purpose of learning to circumvent them. A young Shawn had once thought the rules to be some elaborate test, a chance to show off the unique approach he could take to puzzling and problem-solving. 

Except creative rule-flouting wasn’t an achievement to be celebrated in the Spencer household, it was a cause for punishment over praise, for reprimand over reward. 

So he’d let the instincts to be crafty and clever for the sake of approval drain out of him, not realizing that the blood-letting process would be a decade-long and perhaps more laborious than it would have been to simply cling to the hope that someone in his life would appreciate the way he saw the world more than his dad did. Even his mother, as wonderful as he’d found her, could only answer for so much of his dad’s disdain for his rule-breaking—between the travel to conferences and police stations up and down the coast throughout his childhood, she certainly hadn’t been inclined to disabuse Shawn of childish insecurities with what limited time she spent with him and his dad. No, she was far more inclined to tell him that his father was simply testing him, trying to hone his gift—never to excuse it, but to rationalize the choices, to make an academic exercise out of something that Shawn had only ever wanted to understand emotionally.  

Except he’d hit his senior year and his mother, the most brilliant person he’d ever met, was suddenly gone. He’d been seventeen and idiotic, and suddenly the cleverness and ingenuity that he’d been ever so willing to flex as a party trick were weapons he could wield against the nearest and most vicious enemy he could find. His dad had thrown himself into his work, evidently more invested in the state of his reputation as a cop than he was in the devastation he’d wrought in Shawn’s life, and Shawn hadn’t had anything close to insightfulness that could’ve sworn him off of his hare-brained attempts at avenging his mother’s marriage.

It was petty theft at first, just to see if he could do it—at least until the guilt kicked in and he found himself feeling even worse than he’d expected about the candy bars he’d stolen only to hide in the drawers of his bedroom. He’d returned most things after discovering what he was capable of, like some off-brand version of Spiderman who’d learned about the great responsibility that came with great power just a little too late. To this day, he’s half-convinced his father was aware of his attempts to con Mr. Singh, the local convenience store owner, and had simply ignored it when he realized the items were never missing from the shelves for longer than twenty-four hours. 

Furious at being ignored, Shawn went bigger, bolder—went out and got himself an ear piercing and waited for his dad to comment. Adjusted his entire presentation to be something edgier, more chaotic than his dad would ever approve of. Took the money that he’d been given to register for classes at UC-Santa Barbara and acquired a motorcycle instead. Barring the almost defeatist talking-to that he’d been on the receiving end of regarding the bike, though, Shawn hardly seemed to make a dent in his dad’s facade, which had only made things worse, in his eyes. How could his dad possibly think that ruining his life, alienating his mother, and being the world’s least invested parent was going to end well? How could he possibly expect Shawn to show him respect when all Henry had done was show that he didn’t deserve it, that he hadn’t earned an ounce of it?

He’d tried—unsuccessfully—to stop caring, at that point. He’d been tired of his father’s less than enthusiastic attempts at feigning interest in Shawn’s life, miserable about his mother electing to go halfway across the country after his dad had kicked her out of the house, and near-furious at the persistent assumption that Shawn’s innate personality was going to bend to Henry Spencer’s desires simply because they lived at the same address. So he found other ways to spend his time, other extracurricular activities that didn’t need to set him up for college or careers or much of anything after then. And if his girlfriend at the time had decided to borrow her neighbor’s car so they could go someplace private? So what. 

Except he suddenly had an arrest record, and for all that he’d truthfully told his father that he hadn’t wanted to be a cop, he hadn’t wanted to be barred from having any job at all. So after a fond evening of being tossed in the back of his dad’s cruiser, manhandled on his way into the station and down to the holding cells, and an evening spent sharing oxygen with a man who’d actually committed a crime of intent, Shawn had decided he’d reached his limit. Graduations were for people who had plans, and he’d abandoned any of those the day his mom had left. 

So he’d gone home, confirmed that his dad was working a late shift, and packed up a bag. He hadn’t allowed himself space or time to be sentimental, instead electing to grab the bare minimum of basic necessities and clothing before zipping up the duffle bag, swinging a leg over his bike, and heading to Gus’. Even then, he’d barely gotten it into his head that what he was doing would be considered “drastic measures” by an average person’s metrics. 

It wasn’t until he’d settled down in Austin and gotten a somewhat frantic phone call from his mother that he’d realized he may have taken things a bit far, but by then, he’d already committed to the game of it all, and had hardly been inclined to go back to Santa Barbara for the sake of his dad. So he didn’t, and he let almost twelve years spin out without attempting a single dial of the phone number he’d memorized when he was five or sending even one postcard. When his mom had mentioned his dad moving to Miami in their last phone call before he’d come back to Santa Barbara, he’d been relieved to hear it—marking his dad’s move off as good riddance was easy, considering he hadn’t wanted to run into his dad if he could avoid it, and Miami was most definitely an avoidable place for Shawn. 

Except Henry Spencer had apparently been lying in wait for Shawn to return to his hometown, because he’d hardly been there for a week before he’d been accosted with the knowledge that his dad had moved back to the area. Then came the scolding. The “hat challenge” that had stopped being fun when Shawn was eight years old and still of the belief that he could be a superhero if he tried hard enough. It had been easy to blame his father for the messes he’d made—in Santa Barbara, certainly, but across the rest of the country if he tried hard enough—so he’d let himself do it. Had fired off a few too-pointed jabs at his dad when he first revisited his childhood home, had let his dad spout off abuse about how much he hated psychics and how he couldn’t just keep changing the rules to suit his lifestyle before beating Henry at his own game.

And it had all been fine, really. He could handle being cordial with his father in public, so long as he wasn’t being asked to consider him as a fellow human being, as another adult trying just as hard to trace out the steps to the dance of life as Shawn had been doing for a decade. No, so long as his dad stayed some mythical phenomenon, this larger than life figure who couldn’t bear to look upon his children with pride—Shawn would be golden. He’d made a god of a man, then a devil of a god, and it had been fine. Better than fine, actually, it had worked a bit too well, because he’d found himself short circuiting over the last two years in ways he’d never foreseen. 

Because what was he to make of a dad who suddenly, somehow, seemed to care about his health and wellbeing? When had Henry Spencer become this dichotomy of a man that Shawn couldn’t understand anymore? How had his brain altered his perception of his dad so fundamentally that the caricatured descriptions he’d always been inclined to rely upon no longer felt accurate?

In keeping with his own personal commitment to refrain from examining familial trauma for longer than necessary, Shawn had sat on the questions only as they’d arisen, but for minutes, not hours—never letting himself get too close to answers that he didn’t want to have to accept. 

Until Madeleine Spencer had come into town and flipped Shawn’s world on its head. 

His dad hadn’t been the one to cause the divorce. His dad had fought for a marriage that his mother had elected to leave. His dad had—

Shawn still can’t wrap his head around it, as hard as he’s trying to. 

Henry Spencer, begging his wife to keep going to counseling. Henry Spencer, saying that they could work things out. Henry Spencer, picking up the pieces of a miserable teenaged Shawn that Madeleine had left behind. Henry Spencer, having spent Shawn’s whole childhood picking up the slack for his oft-absent wife. 

When his mother had told him, Shawn had been almost certain he needed a drink, or perhaps a long nap, to try and reconcile her words with the father that he’d known. But there’d been a deal at the local cinema, and he’d finally convinced Gus to go see the newest Indiana Jones film with him. Lightning didn’t strike twice, and Shawn hadn’t been about to let the chance to see Harrison Ford restore treasure to its rightful owners slip away from him because of some confusing feelings about something that had happened over a decade earlier. 

But then they’d gone to the bank. 

Then Shawn had found his dad guiding him away from the crowd to allow him to process his emotions as messily as he’d wanted, albeit with a tight reminder that the police didn’t have a habit of using civilians as bait for robbers who were holding other civilians hostage. His dad had offered advice to keep him safe, and then…

Well, then Shawn had gone and gotten himself shot anyway. 

That it was an accidental discharge of Stubbins’ weapon hadn’t seemed to matter to Henry, who had—amongst a series of other, uncharacteristically vulnerable moments shared in Shawn’s too-dim hospital room—voiced concern that Shawn was throwing his life away before stalking out in frustration. 

Shawn hasn’t known what to do with that knowledge since, and their subsequent conversations have been sufficiently stilted to the extent that Shawn thinks they might actually be better off if they tried not to talk to each other at all. Except his dad keeps stopping by, and Gus is right—he’s throwing softballs in Shawn’s direction, the sorts of things he could’ve—and would’ve, if he’d been allowed—solved as a child. It was ‘where did Ms. Miller’s cat go?’ and ‘I have this friend with a drinking problem who swears he wasn’t in the room when this theft occurred’ and ‘Come on, Shawn, you’ve got to keep your mind alert’. 

Shawn himself has been told in no uncertain terms that Psych won’t be hired on cases for a few months, Chief Vick citing some ‘two-severe-injuries-a-year’ cap that she had for all of her employees as she’d noted that she would continue refuse to give him any new cases long after he’d recovered from the Drimmer ordeal until he could convincingly say that he wouldn’t go rushing headlong into danger without backup. 

Never mind that Drimmer had kidnapped him.

He shakes his head in frustration and tries to reorient himself to the point at hand. 

His dad. Changes in behavior. 

If he’d felt more normal about any of this, he would’ve made a stupid joke about them bringing Henry back to Glorious Pines, except—he doesn’t feel normal about it. The longer he thinks about it, the more conflicted he feels—about what he knows about his dad, about what he’s always assumed about his dad, about what his dad actually thinks of him. He wonders, somewhat morbidly, if the recent developments in their relationship are more attributable to what his father had seen as a near-death experience than to deeply buried instincts finally pushing through the dirt and being allowed to bloom. 

He feels himself gritting his teeth, and has to forcibly remind his jaw to release some of its tension before he blinks aimlessly a few times in Gus’ direction. 

“I know that look,” Gus says, a smile pulling the corner of his mouth up before he stands from the couch and grabbing the near-empty bowl from Shawn’s hands and walking over to the sink. 

“You think I’m onto something,” he says once the dishes have been rinsed, turning around to lean against the counter and cross his arms in barely restrained delight. Shawn rolls his eyes and turns his head in an attempt to broadcast his thoughts a little less transparently to Gus. 

“Gus, don’t be the Winnipeg Jets before they became the Arizona Coyotes,” he tosses out, hoping Gus is content to know that Shawn agrees with him and will move on. He really doesn’t want to think about this for much longer, the risk of him feeling compelled to call his dad and apologize for misunderstanding him is simply too high.

“I’ve got another observation for you, if you want to hear it,” Gus says, and Shawn huffs quietly but gestures for his friend to go ahead.

“He’s kept coming around here since the bank because he feels guilty about you being shot,” Gus says slowly, “and he’s turned the behavior up a notch because he feels even more responsible for the fact that you were kidnapped while he was sitting seventy feet away from you.”

“So were you, and I don’t see you stopping by to give me a Macromedia Brown case to solve every two days,” Shawn shoots back at his friend, who snorts quietly and shakes his head. 

“Encyclopedia Brown, Shawn, and the only reason I’m not doing that is because I have a full-time job to be at on most days,” he says, and Shawn thinks he sees his friend’s expression tighten before Gus spins around to busy himself with another dish in the sink. 

Shawn’s about to say something, to peel back the wallpaper to discover what Gus isn’t saying, when there’s a knock at the door and he quietly curses his luck under his breath.

“That’s my dad, isn’t it.”

Gus shrugs, but gestures with his head at the door. 

“I don’t know, Shawn, but my hands are currently full, so you’ll have to answer it.”

Asshole, Shawn thinks, but there’s no malice in it. 

If he’s right—and really, when isn’t he—Gus had known when Henry was coming by all along, has been planning for this moment all morning in order to give Shawn an opportunity to think about how he wanted to conduct himself before his dad walks through the door. 

The door that’s still being knocked on, although if Shawn strains his ears, he can hear a faint muttering on the other side, his dad’s voice bemoaning the fact that Shawn hasn’t answered his phone all morning. 

He takes a deep breath, and stands up, trying to shake his mind clear of some of the fog. It’s only half successful, because his brain is going to be playing a seemingly endless loop of ‘he feels responsible’ in Gus’ voice until he falls asleep tonight, but it’s a start, and he walks over to the door with a bit less reluctance than he’d expected, unlocking and pulling the handle back to reveal his dad facing the ocean, apparently finishing a phone call.

“...so if you’d bother yourself to open the door, it’d be nice,” Shawn catches, and takes it upon himself to clear his throat and chuckle at his dad’s shocked expression when he sees him. 

He doesn’t miss the way his dad’s eyes dart from his face to his chest, or how his dad’s shoulders sag in relief for half of a second before he adopts an irritated expression and starts going on about how Shawn could’ve at least let him know he was home before forcing him to stand on the doorstep like a lost girl scout. 

“Do you want to come in?” he interrupts, and his dad’s scolding pauses somewhere between a chastisement for keeping his phone on silent and the feigned urgency of something that he “needs Shawn to take a look at”. 

Shawn has to hold back a laugh as his father picks up the bag he’d brought with him with a grumpy-sounding huff only to ever-so-gently edge around Shawn to get through the doorway. 

Gus was right, his dad does care—and maybe today, for a little while, he can indulge them both by engaging with his dad’s efforts to reconstruct bits of his childhood. 

At least until his dad brings up that damn Walter Payton Wheaties box again. 

Then, Gus is on his own.

Chapter Text

It’s Friday night, and for the first time in a long time, Shawn’s considering whether he might need help.

Up until this case, he’d been enjoying the run of good fortune that he and Gus had experienced since coming back to work at the station in March. They’d been given a handful of casual cases—nothing homicide-related, a clear message from Chief Vick that Psych was employed in a solely probationary capacity until she deemed him fit for more serious duties—all of which he and Gus had flown through. A bank robbery here, a kidnapping there; Shawn had almost allowed himself to get bored with the monotony of it all, but had tried to remind himself that the Chief was only being cautious because she cared, even if his pride was still recovering from the insinuation that he didn’t know when to draw the line between brilliant and reckless behavior.

‘Abigail is a real person, Shawn, that’s no joke.” 

He’s been playing back memories from the past twenty-four hours over in his head and trying to find the moment where things changed, where the circumstances went from tense to dire without him noticing. Considering that the morning had started with pancakes, a day off, and a date when the evening ended with none of those things in his life any longer, he suspects this analysis should be easier than it’s coming, but the beer he’s been slowly nursing likely isn’t helping matters, exactly. 

He’d asked Abigail to see him again only that morning, something he’d thought was a good idea at the time, but is now heartily regretting. To be fair, he’d have needed to be an actual psychic to have predicted the events of the day, but it didn’t help that he’d been honest when he’d said that he wanted to see her again—or when he’d eventually told her that they couldn’t see each other that night. 

God, he’s an idiot. 

Worse, he’s an idiot who’s spent all day flexing his mental prowess to its limits to try and keep a sociopath from killing both an innocent waitress and his mother. If he knew his father—and unfortunately for everyone in his circle, he did—he’d be getting the world’s most infuriated scolding about that later, one that was likely only barely less scathing than the myriad of responses his dad had offered to Chief Vick after hearing that Shawn was being hired on the Yang case. 

Shawn had been hovering near the Chief’s office when he’d seen his father storm in, and had hardly needed to press his ear against the wall to pick up on his father’s fury from the other side of the glass. Henry had almost immediately gone in on the Chief for attempting to use Shawn as a pawn in Yang’s game, citing the fate of an officer that even she seemed to dance around. Shawn hadn’t wanted to know what, exactly, “he lost” meant, if it wasn’t the fact that a young girl had been killed, but then the Chief had mentioned Shawn as “the only shot the department had,” and Shawn had felt his throat tighten in a way he couldn’t quite explain. And then—

“And Shawn is the only son I have,” his dad had interrupted, his voice reminiscent of something that had seemed faintly familiar to Shawn at the time, but try as he might, he hadn’t been able to place it.  

“You needing more assistance to solve your casework isn’t my problem, not unless you start involving my son with the most notorious serial killer Santa Barbara has ever seen. Because if you do, Karen, and if Shawn gets hurt, or—heaven forbid—killed? I’ll become the biggest damn problem this department has ever seen.”

Shawn had barely had thirty seconds to try and diagnose the strange feeling in his stomach when his father emerged from Chief Vick’s office, and the vague image of a cartoon character with steam pouring from his ears crossed Shawn’s mind in amusement before his father was herding him out of the main lobby of the station. 

“I forbid you to be a part of this case,” he’d said sharply, offering no explanation for his words aside from a look that told Shawn he wasn’t about to convince his father otherwise. 

“You’re coming with me.”

Shawn had frowned, had tried to think of a comeback, but had found himself faltering as his dad started to drag him away from where the briefing had just been held. 

“Dad, I appreciate this new hands-on approach to parenting that you’ve adopted, but I’m not twenty-seven anymore. You can’t just order me not to take on a case—and besides, aren’t you the one who’s been telling me for months that I need to keep my mind alert?”

Henry hadn’t flinched, his expression unchanging as he’d tried to tug Shawn away from where they were standing to somewhere more private. 

“Not with this sick bastard, Shawn,” he’d said darkly, “this guy knows you, he knows about everybody you care about—think about that.”

Shawn had been trying not to think about that, a feat that was becoming largely impossible due to how many people kept reminding him of it. 

“You don’t catch this son of a bitch, kid, you’re never going to sleep again,” his dad had said, trying to catch his son’s gaze even as Shawn was actively trying to avoid it. 

He had been able to avoid the reality of that situation…For all of five minutes.

And wouldn’t you know, his dad had been right. Even after having caught Yang, Shawn isn’t sure he’ll be able to sleep comfortably for weeks yet. Every time he’s closed his eyes since getting home, all he sees is his mother belted into the car with a bomb in her hands, or the waitress he’d carelessly flirted with tied to a chair, gagged, wrists rubbed raw from her attempts to escape. 

He’d spoken to the woman for seconds—a minute, tops—and Yang had found the time, energy, and audacity to kidnap her, dangle a death sentence over her head. He knows about everyone you know, his dad had warned him, and look—there it was, confirmation of Henry’s habitually ill-heeded advice, a rescue site doubling as the scene of a kidnapping all wrapped up in a bow for Shawn to replay again and again in his mind until he feels sick. 

It’s why he’d canceled the date with Abigail, if he’s honest. Because he knows that there could be a second actor, and the fact that he still hasn’t been able to figure out if there is one is making him feel more unmoored than usual. He’d told Gus earlier that if Yang got into his head, they’d lose, that he couldn’t show weakness or else the girl would die. 

Well, the girl is safe. Traumatized, certainly, but alive—which is about as encouraging of an outcome as Shawn could’ve asked for. 

They’d won. He’s helped the department put away someone who’d been on their ‘Most Wanted’ list for over twenty years. This all should feel like a victory, a celebration of good triumphing over evil. 

Shawn’s not entirely sure he didn’t lose something along the way.

He’s thinking back to the pier, replaying if there was something else he’d missed—if Yang’s accomplice had been lurking somewhere behind him, in front of him, beside him—when his phone buzzes, breaking off his chain of thought mid-analysis of the other beach-going strangers that had been around at the time. 

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to remember,” he’d told Gus frantically as they’d squatted down to examine the mouse cage that the station had received, “and I don’t have enough time to figure it out.”

Nothing had improved by the time they’d arrived at the pier—in fact, Shawn had only felt the churning of his stomach rise to disastrous levels as Lassiter had threatened him with an accessory to murder charge, as Juliet had looked on in concern. 

“Shawn, I hope to God you know what you’re doing,” she’d said quietly, but that was the problem— he’d never known what he was doing, not really. A life being on the line didn’t change that fact, it only made it that much more nerve-wracking to consider the consequences of his failure, and for all of the bravado that he’d tap into around Lassiter and the Chief when he wanted to push buttons or be put onto a case, he’d known full well what his failure rate was when it came to his initial “psychic visions,” and it was far closer to one hundred than it was to zero. 

So he’d been grasping for straws when he saw the glint of light in the Psych office, sue him. The Chief was liable to have done it years ago, anyway, and Shawn is honestly surprised that his own father hasn’t made any strides in that department since he’d begun this whole charade. By the time their team had gotten there, Shawn hadn’t felt like he could focus, had in fact felt like he could barely think or speak—except those were all precisely the things that the rest of the room had been counting on him being able to do, and with a not-insignificant amount of skill, at that.  

Observing, connecting, commentating; it was all what he’d been doing for a little over three years now with the police, but suddenly there was a mental block in place, a neon sign in his mind that wouldn’t stop blinking as it pointed towards their waitress from the morning, crying as she was tied to a chair. 

Open 24 Hours—Come Out and Play, Shawn. 

He’d hit the desk harder than he’d meant to in an effort to get the image out of his head, but even Gus’ distractions hadn’t quite gotten him there. He’d seen hostages before, he’d been a hostage before, but there had been an element of control in those instances that could be shifted in his favor, whereas here…

“I’m not going,” he’d said quietly, interrupting Juliet’s suggestion that they head back to the station. 

“What?”

“I’m nobody’s puppet, okay?” he’d said, feeling himself start to pant as the words came out more quickly than he could control them, censor them. 

“I’m done playing his little game. I solved his puzzles, I talked to a rat, I even chased a train. I’m finished,” he’d said, trying not to meet Juliet’s gaze as he finished lamely. Mary had thrown a keenly interested look in his direction before offering up an excuse for Yang’s behavior—something about games and evenly matched foes and signs of respect, and Shawn had allowed himself to meet the man's eye when he spoke again, unable to keep his frustration in check. 

“He’s too good—isn’t that right, Mary? He’s better than me, and we never had a chance in the first place because he’s going to kill that girl either way, and whether I help or I don’t—it isn’t going to matter,” he’d shouted, swallowing awkwardly in an attempt to clear his airway. It hadn’t worked, he’d only felt more like he was choking, but if he was able to get the rest of them out of the office, maybe he could—

“Maybe, maybe not,” Jules had offered, and in any other universe—any other moment, he would’ve been glad for the interruption. But then? There? He’d felt like he was about to pass out, and her saying that she knew he wouldn't give up certainly wasn’t helping matters. 

His phone buzzes again on the bed next to him and he glances down absently, his mind still wading through the murky waters of this afternoon’s memories and getting mired in the filth of it all. 

2 Missed Calls from Bruton Gaster, 1 Text Message from Detective Jules.

“Tell you what, Jules,” his own mind supplies harshly as he considers glancing at her message. Past him is barely breathing in the memory, is wound so tightly that Shawn had known even then that the words about to leave his mouth were going to be a step too far, a line he couldn’t uncross once he’d stepped over it.  

“The next time a serial killer calls you out, personally? You can pick up your little pom-poms and you can rally the troops to never say die, but I’m out,” he’d said bitterly, before forcing everyone but Gus to leave.  

He’s come up with an almost passable excuse for Gus, although he’s certain now that Gus hadn’t believed it—had only believed in him, and what he was capable of even when his mind was waging a civil war against itself. That had been the problem, at the time—that’s still the problem now, if he lets his mind zoom out to see the bigger picture of the collection of scenes he’s been mentally replaying. 

For all of his acting, all of the dramatic gestures and gimmicky shticks that he’d somehow managed to get by the Chief and her lead homicide detectives—they all believe in his ability to get results. Gus had believed it then, and Juliet had always harbored a sort of blind confidence in his ability to solve whatever puzzle had been dropped in front of them. Even Lassiter, who he’s sure is currently writing up some pointedly phrased paperwork about the department’s Psychic Consultant being an 'embarrassment to police procedure but somehow managing to string a series of clues together and aid the police in catching Yang'. 

The pressure is blindingly weighty, and it’s not until his phone buzzes again— but with an audible ringtone accompanying it this time—that he realizes he’s pressed his palms up against his hands, as if keeping his eyes closed would make the emotional toll of the night disappear.

It doesn’t. It hasn’t.

But his phone is still ringing, and he’s reaching for it on instinct before he can convince himself otherwise, his breathing still ragged and harsh as he remembers Lassiter’s furious admission that the department didn’t need him—that they could solve the case without his help.

“Judd Nelson,” he says faintly, hoping to God that it’s not Abigail calling to read him the riot act over the date he’d blown off. 

“Shawn? Where are you?” 

Hearing Gus’ voice is only slightly better, he supposes, than hearing a furious Lassiter’s or an uncomfortable Juliet’s, but is certainly better than having to replay the way Abigail’s eyes had fallen when she’d arrived at the drive-in and seen him on the bench, head in his hands. The way she’d seemed to know where the conversation was going before Shawn had even had the opportunity to begin. The resignation in her expression as Shawn had realized that she’d never expected him to follow through on his promise, that he’d doomed himself to being the same scared seventeen-year-old who’d abandoned her on the pier for the rest of their lives. 

“Does it matter?” he answers, feeling his breathing hitch at the end of the phrase and hoping Gus doesn’t question it. 

When Gus speaks again, he seems to have something else on his mind, though—or more likely, if Shawn’s being thoughtful about everything that’s happened today, he’s found himself to have exceeded whatever tolerance he usually has for Shawn’s antics and is merely calling out of obligation; nothing more, nothing less. 

“Considering the day we’ve had, I’d say it does, yeah,” Gus replies, although his voice seems gentler now than it did when Shawn had first answered the line. 

“We got Yang, man,” Shawn shoots back, trying to affect his voice in a way that won’t make it obvious that he feels like he might die if asked to draw in normal amounts of oxygen with each breath. 

“That’s the part that matters.”

Gus is silent for too long on the other end of the line, and Shawn wonders for a moment if the call has dropped. But then—

“It’s not the only part that matters, Shawn,” Gus murmurs, and Shawn has to cover his mouth to mask the choking sort of gasp he draws in at the change in Gus’ tone from irritated to concerned. He’s known Gus for nearly twenty-five years now, he can picture exactly the face his friend is making, the way his posture has shifted to something tighter and more private so nearby onlookers can’t overhear their conversation. 

“I’m at home,” Shawn admits quietly, trying not to let a breathless sort of chuckle escape him at Gus’ audibly relieved exhale of breath.

“I just needed to be—” he trails off, not knowing where to start in describing the sort of panicked isolation he’d thought he’d needed after watching Yang be driven off in the back of a police cruiser. He’s beginning to suspect that his instincts were wrong—and really, wouldn’t that be the cherry on top of an already miserable day—but he can’t admit it, can’t let Gus see exactly how disturbed this whole case has left him. There’s a half-drunk beer bottle somewhere past where his free hand is extended, and he fumbles blindly for it before taking a sip and pressing his eyes shut. 

“I wanted to be alone for a bit,” he tries again, but Gus isn’t having it. 

“You blew off Abigail,” he says sternly, “and we both know that you’d been looking forward to going out with her.”

“Yeah, well, circumstances changed,” Shawn offers bitterly, “as far as ‘wrenches being thrown into plans’ go, I think Yang kidnapping my mother was a bit more significant of a hiccup than either of us had predicted.”

Gus sighs on the other end of the line, and Shawn thinks he can see him now, if he closes his eyes tightly enough. He’s leaning against one of the arches of the police station, Juliet hovering nearby as Gus tries to relay the general message that Shawn is fine without compromising the confidentiality of their conversation. 

“You didn’t tell her that, though,” Gus says slowly, “you just told her that you ‘couldn’t go through with it’ and ran off so abruptly that she assumed something was wrong.”

Shawn can’t help but snort. 

“Something was wrong?” he repeats incredulously, “yeah, I think I can name at least one thing, if not a running tally of about two dozen things that have been distinctly wrong since we went out for lunch this afternoon.”

“She thought I should check on you, as did both of your parents,” Gus continues evenly, and Shawn has the sudden realization that at least one of the three mentioned parties is likely standing nearby. 

“Oh, so they’re agreeing on things now? That’s a first, ought to call up Guinness and note the date, we all know that won’t happen again in our lifetimes and—”

“Be serious, Shawn,” Gus cuts him off, voice sharper than Shawn had expected, “people are worried about you.”

Shawn scowls, placing the beer back on his bedside table and pushing himself up a bit more on his bed. 

“Well, tell people to worry about their own lives,” he spits out, “I can be alone for one night without needing a babysitter.”

He hangs up the phone before Gus can offer a retort, turns it completely off, then yanks open the bedside table’s drawer to shove the phone inside it. His hand brushes against a blister pack, and he frowns before turning to pull it out, examining what it is, and groaning quietly. 

After the incident at the bank, the Chief had forced him to visit with the resident police psychologist and undergo a psych exam—something he’d found funny at the time given who his parents were and how early on in his childhood he’d been taught about how to pass one of the department’s evaluations. He’d shown up, prepared to answer the same twenty to thirty questions that his dad had drilled into him, that he’d heard his mother repeat as she’d prepared her paperwork before leaving for work. 

Except Jonathan Menendez hadn’t led with “Mister Spencer, how would you describe your job here at the SBPD?” but instead with “Mister Spencer, how has your sleep been lately?” 

Ninety minutes and far too many invasive questions later, Shawn had been recommended as a “likely candidate” for PTSD and handed a prescription for something that sounded like a rejected Transformer’s name. Under Chief Vick’s watchful eye, he’d agreed to get the thing filled, and he had—but he’d been too afraid to use it regularly, moderately convinced that forcing himself to sleep one night would only make matters worse for himself the next, and utterly terrified by the notion that he could have PTSD from what had happened earlier on in the year after having sworn for over a decade that he’d never grow up and force himself to deal with adult matters. 

So he hadn’t fully adhered to the directions for use that had been on the package; there were still more than enough pills in the blister pack for him to avail himself of a dosage to try and get a decent night’s sleep for the first time in months. 

He pops the pills out, absently wondering if he’s in the proper mood to take them—or if he has the coordination needed to swallow them at all. He’s exhausted, he realizes, and the sleeping pills feel so large in his palm that he isn’t particularly inclined to force himself to take them. He chuckles quietly as his mind supplies what must be the twentieth excuse to not take the medication he’d been prescribed, and tightens his palm around the two pills instead, squeezing his hand so hard that he can feel the outline of every ridge and carving on each pill. 

They’re still in his hand when he eventually drifts off, gaze shifting in and out of focus as he stares at the reflective surfaces of his blinds and wills himself to fall asleep, desperately hoping his dreams won’t be in blinding technicolor when he does.

Shawn’s moving when he wakes up, and it takes a moment for him to realize that there’s an arm behind his shoulders that’s pulling him upwards and attempting a full on shake-down of his person. 

“What’s going—”

“Shawn!” Henry says, his voice shifting from irritated to worried in a split second and only serving to disorient a groggy Shawn further. 

“How many of these did you take?” his dad is asking, holding something blurry and white between his fingers and breathing heavily as he waits for Shawn’s response. 

“What’s that?” Shawn slurs, glancing between his dad’s face and the pills before the dots connect themselves, “oh the—I didn’t.”

Henry freezes, letting Shawn fall back against his pillows somewhat. 

“What do you mean?” Henry asks tightly, “did you not take any of the Trazodone?” 

Trazodone, that was the Transformer’s name. Shawn shakes his head, trying not to move it too hastily. He’s spent enough time today focusing on his memories that he’s triggered a brutal sort of headache, and he certainly doesn’t need to worsen that condition with any sudden movements. 

Henry sags against the bed in clear relief. 

“I’m going to take these,” he says tightly, and Shawn can hear him collecting the rest of the blister packs of the drug as he blinks sluggishly to focus his vision. 

“So you, what—came home, grabbed a beer? That’s it?” Henry asks again, and Shawn finds himself nodding more than he’d strictly recommend to anyone, given the circumstances. His dad’s tone is a bit too frantic for it to feel appropriate to do much of anything else. 

“Jesus, kid,” Henry says after a moment passes, “you didn’t seem to be—you looked like—”

He breaks off, and runs a hand slowly over his own head before dropping it to run through Shawn’s hair, pausing mid-way to gently massage his son’s scalp as he adjusts his position so he’s sitting beside Shawn on the bed. 

Two men, refusing to face each other but exhausted after the day’s events. 

This is new territory for Shawn, but he can’t find the energy to examine it further, his brain still slowly piecing the facts of what's happening together as he shifts against his pillow and turns towards the center of the bed—towards his dad. Shawn can feel himself relaxing into his dad’s touch, finding the drowsiness beckoning him to come within reach again even as his father starts whispering things that he likely would’ve been keeping to himself if the circumstances had been different. 

“I’ve had to respond to ODs before, Shawn," Henry says quietly after a minute goes by, "you should know better than to mix this sort of stuff."

Shawn forces himself to nod once against his dad’s side to show that he’s listening—except that’s about as far as the conversation goes. 

Shawn’s perched on the brink of sleep, waiting for his father to lecture him further about the dangers they were all in today, or the recklessness of having forgotten about the side effects that could've occurred if he'd taken his medication after drinking, but he doesn’t.

He just sits there, next to Shawn, on his unmade bed. Letting Shawn curl into his side and running a hand through his hair like Shawn was an eight-year-old calling off from school with a sick day. There’s something in that fact that Shawn feels certain he should be more concerned by than he is, but he’s tired and his head hurts, and he’s been woken up rather unceremoniously from his nap, so he lifts his head to offer a quiet explanation of what he’s doing before sinking back into his pillows again. 

“Going back to sleep now,” he mumbles, letting his voice be muffled by the fabric of the pillow as he falls into it more heavily.

“That’s fine son,” Henry says softly, and if Shawn was more alert, he would’ve sworn he felt his dad’s position shift so Shawn was more firmly settled in his arms, “get some rest and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

The next time Shawn wakes, he's alone in his bed and his breathing is so labored that he’s convinced he’s going to die. 

“I—” he tries to find words, but the breath to support them simply isn’t there, and he’s simultaneously choking on air and nothing at all as images from the previous day’s case cross his mind. 

He’s got my mom. I know what he wants me to watch. She’s strapped. 

It’s a hell of a record scratch for his mind to be skipping on, and even as he tries to blink his way out of the film, Shawn feels his vision start to darken at the edges. 

He’s got my mom. 

“...and I think— Shawn!” 

There’s someone in his place. Funny, he doesn’t remember having invited anyone over. Then again, considering he’s currently struggling to breathe, an intruder in his place hardly seems like it should be the highest priority when it comes to things he should be worrying about. 

There’s a Yin-Yang symbol on the wall, arranged out of various paraphernalia that Maddie Spencer had kept in her bag. His mind is running haywire, categorizing everything he sees. 

Four makeup products, but six for personal grooming. Her readers and the case she carries them in. A twenty dollar bill. A packet of gum with five of the tablets popped out. A single tissue. A single receipt. 

A single photo of Shawn, aged nine. 

“Kid, I’m going to need you to calm down,” the voice is saying, and Shawn belatedly recognizes it as his dad’s. Huh. Strange that his guardian angel would sound so much like his father, although he supposes if there was anyone better suited to guide him into whatever afterlife he was destined for…

I know exactly what he wants me to watch. 

The bathroom is a mess as his anxious mind walks through it, but at least he’s alone this time—no Mary sitting eerily atop the rim of the bathtub as Shawn tries to take in everything he’s seeing. The lipstick—it’s not his mother’s, she doesn’t wear reds. And there are only a few toiletries on the counter—not her face wash, not her makeup, not her toothpaste. This isn’t his mother’s room, she’s staying somewhere else, this is—

“Shawn!” his dad’s voice interrupts, “I need you to breathe for me, alright, kid? In for four, out for four.” 

There’s a gentle grip on his shoulder now, and Shawn absently wonders when the dying process became so corporeal, so vivid. He’d expected to flash through the highlights of his life, not to be stuck in an endless loop of recalling the danger he’d put his mother in. 

Dad, she’s strapped. 

The red light is blinking—too quickly, too frantically for Shawn to be able to think straight. He hardly has the energy to revel in the fact that his dad is following his orders alongside the sedan because his mother is—she could—she’s going to—

“Shawn, can you hear me?” 

His dad’s voice is speaking again, but strangely, it’s not coming from the man he can only barely make out next to him in the drive-in park, it’s coming from in front of him. There’s a weight on his chest that seems to be getting worse—it’s pressing and twisting and threatening to push all of the oxygen from his lungs. He can hear his own ragged breaths, although he’s not sure if they’re from his memory or from his present—whatever that present is, exactly. 

Except suddenly, there’s music. 

The strange feeling of tangled wires between his fingers when he knows full well there hadn’t been any visible wires at the Cinema-Vue. He shifts his head, but pauses when he feels an earbud threaten to drop from his ear. 

I could be happy, I could be quite naive. It's only me and my shadows, happy in our make believe.

Curt Smith? There hadn’t been a soundtrack to the terror he’d felt when he’d seen Yang at the drive-in, and even if there had been, Shawn is confident it wouldn’t have been Tears for Fears. 

So why, then, is Advice for the Young at Heart currently making its best efforts to drown out his thoughts? And how is it possible that his heart rate is slowing to match the pace of the song? And when did his father get here, staring daggers at Shawn’s iPod while he attempts to change the song's volume?

Shawn takes stock of what’s around him, a profound sense of embarrassment welling up in him as he connects the dots of what’s happened. He leans back against the bed and closes his eyes, grabbing a fistful of blankets with each hand to give him something to focus on as he tries not to jostle the earbuds and subject himself to one of the greater agonies known to mankind. 

The mattress dips beside him, but Shawn doesn’t look over, not even when his dad slowly pries the blankets from his left hand for easier access and checks his heart rate. 

“How does breathing feel?” his dad says as the song fades out, and Shawn finds himself absently wondering if his dad had actually enjoyed his son’s taste in music before he’d moved out, a faint smile pulling at the corner of his mouth as he tugs the earbuds from his ears. 

“More possible than not, but less comfortable than it usually is,” he mutters, hearing his dad’s sigh and bracing himself for whatever telling-off he has coming. 

But one never comes. Instead, Henry’s hand comes up to rest on Shawn’s forehead, a feeling that Shawn seems to recall as a drunken hallucination from the night before. Had his dad actually come to check on him? Had he spent the night here? 

“You got her, Shawn,” his dad says softly, “everything’s going to be okay.”

His dad’s hand shifts, brushing a piece of hair from Shawn’s eye before moving to gently massage his son’s temples, and Shawn tries not to react so transparently at how welcome the feeling is amidst the backdrop of the incessant pounding inside his brain, or how surprised he is to hear his father offering words of comfort. 

“You experienced something traumatic yesterday, and sometimes the body has to go into shock before it can start to process this—”

“What are you doing here, dad?” Shawn interrupts, not daring to open his eyes and see the look of disappointment that he’s sure is being sent his way. He doesn’t want to know how furious Henry is with him—he can imagine the abject dismay written on his dad’s face well enough, thanks. 

“I came to check on you last night,” he says calmly, “Gus was worried when you hung up on him.”

Shawn resists the urge to say something foolish, and instead focuses his energy on trying to smooth the wrinkles out of the bit of comforter still held in his right hand. It’s a Sisyphean task, but it’s a distraction, and that’s what Shawn needs more than anything if he’s about to have this conversation with his father. 

“Shouldn’t you be with mom? I got her into this whole—”

“No,” Henry interrupts sharply, and Shawn feels the pressure on his temples increase as if his dad was trying to convince Shawn through mere force that he’d made the right decision. 

“You’re not the one who kidnapped her, or strapped her into the car, or placed a bomb in her hands, Shawn,” he says, his voice firm and clear and practically daring Shawn to disagree. 

“Those were the actions of a criminal,” he says simply, “and you weren't responsible for a single one of them.”

“But if I’d jumped on the case—” Shawn starts to protest, but Henry cuts him off there too. 

“If you’d jumped on the case, that waitress still might’ve died— she might’ve been Yang’s final act, not your mother.”

Shawn inhales sharply, his dad really isn’t doing much to assuage his guilt here.

Of course the waitress could’ve been Yang’s final victim, but selfishly, Shawn thinks he would’ve preferred that. At least then, there wouldn’t have been a straight line between his inaction and his mother’s abduction. The kidnapping and murder of a woman Shawn had only ever spoken to for a few seconds could be chalked up as the work of a deranged psychopath, the capture of his mother…that had been personal, an act of intentional baiting to force Shawn to play Yang’s game.  

He realizes he’s going to be sick before he’s fully registered that he’s shot up in bed, but his dad seems to have predicted this, because there’s a lined waste bin already between his knees when he sits up, and he clings to it desperately as the remnants of yesterday’s meals make a reappearance. 

“There you go,” his dad says gently, "get it all out."

Shawn doesn’t have it in him to be surprised anymore, not when he feels like this. He lets his dad rub his back slowly as the tremors fade out, accepting the offer of a small mint when he’s finished with the bin even as he moves to lay back against his mattress, eyes closing before he's even made it all the way down. 

“Why aren’t you with mom?” he asks again, because that’s the bit that’s most confusing to him, really.

His dad knowing how to respond to…whatever it was that he’d just experienced, that at least makes sense—Henry had been a cop, he’d seen plenty of things that would’ve turned a person’s stomach. Of course he’d learned how to help people through their panic, and even in his confusion, Shawn can’t help but acknowledge that his dad had done exactly that for him.

But his dad should be with his mother, and that’s what he doesn’t understand. Madeleine Spencer is, by all accounts, the enduring love of Henry’s life, and in the last twenty-four hours, she’d been chloroformed, abducted, and strapped with a bomb. An image of Juliet’s face swims in Shawn’s mind, and he knows without question that he wouldn’t have left her side if something like that had happened to her. 

So why is his dad here instead? 

His dad almost seems intent to dodge the question, Shawn realizes as he hears Henry sigh heavily before his hand returns to Shawn’s temples—an action that Shawn is tempted to allow to serve as an explanation in itself, given how sharp and deep the ache in his head is still pulsing. 

“Because your mother is a grown woman, Shawn,” his dad says eventually. 

Shawn snorts weakly. 

“And I’m a grown man,” he shoots back. 

“You’re also my son,” Henry murmurs, “and that means it’s my job, above all else, to make sure you’re alright.”

Shawn had already considered his ability to breathe to be passable at best, but at his dad’s words he feels his throat start to tighten again, and his lungs threaten to stop providing him with the air he needs to function. 

“But she—” 

“Is a clinical psychologist with three decades worth of experience in knowing how to process trauma,” his dad offers, “while you are my twenty-nine year old son who’s blaming himself for things he had no hand in.”

There’s a dampness pooling at the corners of Shawn’s eyes, and he clenches his eyelids shut even tighter than before. 

“She was there, Dad,” he whispers, the breath still caught in his throat making the words come out with an almost choked delivery. 

“Yang was there the whole time, watching us. Watching me.”

“And you still got her, Shawn,” his dad says tightly, “the game’s over, you won.”

The thing is—Shawn wants to believe his dad, wants to be able to say that the deed has been done and move on with his life, but it doesn’t seem possible. There’s too much to consider—the countless lives he’d put in jeopardy by simply existing, the fact that if he hadn’t been so foolish as to try and change the game, his mother would’ve never been kidnapped. 

He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to recover from that level of guilt, and he’s not sure that there’s anything his dad could say to change that. He'd spent the better part of last night trying to wrap his mind around the idea of being blameless for what's happened, but all he'd succeeded in doing was making himself feel worse. Every scenario he'd thought of could have been improved by either his absence or his action, and for somewhat obvious reasons, he had neither been missing nor inactive during any of them. Everything comes back to his own involvement in placing the people he loved in danger, and that realization was the one that had driven him to grab a drink in the first place. 

He frowns as his headache crests again, wondering if explaining himself to his father will help, or if it would just result in a classic Henry "you should've known better"-type lecture. His dad has been shockingly mild since his arrival, though, so maybe this choice, this attempt at vulnerability with Henry won't blow up in his face. 

Then again, even if it did, he'd already gotten halfway there with yesterday's events.

“I’ve spent the last three years trying to help the police,” Shawn murmurs, "because I thought that if I could use all of this for something good, it would make everything else worthwhile.”

Henry’s gentle massage of Shawn’s temple pauses, as if he’s being hit by some sort of revelation while his son speaks. 

“But what good is any of it if I can’t catch the criminals before they hurt or terrorize the people I care about?” 

Shawn doesn’t have time to feel self-conscious about the fact that his voice had broken as he’d talked, he’s being pulled up and into his father’s arms before he can fully comprehend what’s happening. 

He can’t remember ever being held by his dad like this, not even as a kid. His memories of hugs are few and far between—something quick and awkward for the sake of a family photo that his mother had wanted to memorialize, but never this, never the sort of thing that Shawn’s afraid he could get lost in if he lets go just a bit more than he already has. 

“Shawn,” Henry says quietly, and Shawn forces himself to make some sort of noise in acknowledgment that his dad has spoken, even as he’s trying his damndest to hold himself together while the panic takes its sweet time in draining from his chest, his lungs, his throat.   

“You’re much more like your mother than you are like me,” Henry says, and Shawn isn’t sure what to make of that, really. He isn’t sure if he agrees, but his dad is clearly trying to communicate something important, so he elects to not interrupt the moment.

“I’ve always been like this, you know? Came out of the womb ready to fight for what I thought was right without much concern for whether myself or others would end up hurt along the way as a result of my actions.”

Shawn swallows uncomfortably. He has a feeling he knows where this anecdote is going now. 

“But you—your mother’s the one who’s good with feelings, it’s why she’s done what she has with her career, and—you’re just like her, Shawn. You’ve never known how to let a win be a win unless everyone was happy and no one was hurting,” Henry says, sighing as Shawn feels his father’s hand begin to drift up and down his back gently, "you always wanted everyone to be okay, to have their happy ending."

“I spent almost seventeen years trying to train those instincts out of you, trying to get you to see that the world was rarely that idyllic, that there were hardly ever days when everybody would win, where doing good would lead to complete satisfaction.”

He chuckles. 

“I should’ve known you were too stubborn to let that sink in, shouldn’t I?” he asks lightly, and Shawn feels the embrace tighten around him as his father pulls his head into his chest. 

“You’ve been brilliant, kid,” he says slowly, “but life is more than catching bad guys. It has to be, because otherwise, you’re right—it’s not worth it.”

Shawn feels his breathing hitch again, even as his dad puts some distance between them to give him space to process what he’s said. 

“You did something good today, and you’ll do something good tomorrow, and you'll keep doing good for the police department for as long as they'll have you—I know you will,” Henry says quietly, “but you can’t let yourself get caught up in the thrill of the chase, because if you do…”

His dad sends a sad sort of half-smile in Shawn’s direction, and all at once he realizes that this advice is being spoken from experience. 

“If you do, you risk pushing away the people who love you the most. Fear has a way of making you feel alone even when you aren't, and if you let yourself believe it for too long, you risk making it a reality.”

“Dad, I—” Shawn starts, but he doesn’t know where the sentence ends, and the words die on his tongue even as his dad offers an almost tender expression in response to his son’s attempt to understand. He's thinking back to being a child, to seeing his dad come home after a long day of work and silently sit at their kitchen table with his head in his hands for a while before coming to join Shawn for a movie in the living room. To the way Henry had thrown himself into his work after his mom had left, how Shawn had come home more nights than not to find the house empty and a note saying 'don't wait up, you've got class tomorrow' pinned to the refrigerator. 

He's anxious and miserable and a little bit nauseous still, but he gets it, suddenly. His dad has been here, has seen the way Yang drove his fellow officers to drastic measures. What had his mom told him?

I did psych evals of several officers who were involved in the first round of this maniac's game.

It wasn't pretty.

He doesn't blame her, he can appreciate that now. If he'd been forced to witness this level of breakdown—or worse—for a number of officers, he wouldn't advise his loved ones to go anywhere near it either. 

But in typical Shawn fashion, he'd ignored the warnings. Had been so confident that he was different, that he could catch Yang, that he hadn't stopped to think of what the aftermath could look like. He's never been the best at foresight, he's got a still-foreign to him scar on his stomach that's a testament to that, but in his mind, he'd viewed Yang's twisted gameplay as some sort of elevated challenge, like the ones that his father had set for him as a child. 

Training wheels, meet your older sibling: the dirt bike. 

He turns to look at his dad again, and for the first time sees a begrudging sort of solidarity in Henry's eyes. He hadn't become a cop, no, but the look on his dad's face says that he'd stopped caring about that particular detail years ago. That all he was concerned with now was making sure his son didn't run himself into the ground without having someone there to pull him back from an early grave. 

“You don’t have to be there yet,” his dad says softly, and Shawn finds himself blinking abruptly to bring himself back to the conversation they'd been having, "although I wouldn’t suggest holding off on finding what that balance is for long.”

A wry smile pulls his father’s eyebrow up with it, and Shawn narrows his eyes in confusion. 

“After all, I heard a certain junior detective asked to take you out tonight, and that’s not something you’re going to want to fumble.”

Shawn can feel the moment his face goes red, but he lets his father take the teasing out to what’s already been a more emotionally vulnerable conversation than he remembers ever having with Henry.  

“I’m not talking to you about Jules,” he mumbles, but his reaction is automatic, the corners of his mouth quirking into a brief, fond smile before he can help himself. 

His dad’s own smile is wider now, relieved—something Shawn’s seen before, something he can work with. He stands from the bed as Shawn watches, carefully replacing Shawn’s iPod on the table where he’d retrieved it from before turning to face his son.

“I’m going to make myself some coffee, do you want anything?” 

There’s a bitterness in the back of Shawn’s throat that he suspects will linger long past whatever beverage he chooses, but he nods once to give his dad the answer he wants to see. 

“Tea would be great, Dad,” he says, pausing as his father begins to leave the room.

“And Dad?” 

Henry pauses in the doorway, turning back to face Shawn in anticipation of whatever he might say next. 

“Thanks for coming.”