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It would be wrong to assume that just because Shawn keeps a lot of knickknacks at the office — toys, games, things he can generally fiddle with — he must own things. Shawn may indulge in the aesthetics of materialism on occasion, but when push comes to shove, his bugout bag is his second best friend, next to Gus.
All he really needs is a change of clothes, some personal care items, cash, Naproxen, and maybe a phone charger, now, depending on the situation. The last time Shawn skipped town, he wouldn’t have taken a cell phone even if they’d been accessible to broke 18-year-olds. Hell, he didn’t even have his motorcycle last time. He took a bus down to Whittier, where he clerked in an auto shop and bought his first vehicle clean-title for $200 from someone who may or may not have owned it.
He learned more about math in those three months than he did in his entire seventh grade algebra class. It helped that they did their books on paper with lines separating out each number, so that they were way less likely to get mixed up in the actual mathing process, but still: suck it, Mrs. Mayberry.
Point being, Shawn isn’t a material girl in a material world, and in the end, it only took about three hours to pack up, move, and unpack. Part of that three hours included stopping at a good taqueria. Gus is trapped in Hell today — or, as he calls it, his real job — but that’s fine. Shawn had his motorcycle, and anyway Jules is off today so now she’s in the kitchen with his parents while he futzes with an old toy he’s never going to move from its longstanding but strangely dust-free position on his childhood desk.
This house has ghosts in it. One of them might be him. It should be easy to go out, paste a smile on his face, rescue Jules from his parents (or his parents from Jules), but instead he’s hiding from the past and the future and the bright noise of inevitability and there’s a light set of footsteps and a shadow — but he’s familiar with this lighting despite over a decade away, it’s not his father’s breadth and his mother’s too tall for this so when Jules wraps her arms around him from behind, it’s only weird because she didn’t close the door.
“I didn’t think it took this long to unpack a single duffel bag,” she comments lightly, dragging her fingertips under the hem of his shirt. He’s becoming familiar with her fingertips, too, callused and strong from work but softened with that scent-free lotion that definitely does have a scent.
Shawn sort of wants to lean back and sag into her arms, but she’s short, so he rubs his thumbs over the firm curves of her wrists against his stomach. It’s nice that she lets him cling — people don’t really understand how much he needs it, sometimes, just to be touched, and maybe she doesn’t either, but at the very least she indulges him. “I was holding a fascinating conversation with Mr. Trilby here. Did you know he’s being bullied by Han Solo and the Lego man with yellow hair?”
“That’s tragic, Shawn, you have to save him,” she returns seriously. That’s what he likes about Jules. Well, there’s a lot he likes about her, but one of the things he likes about her is that she’s as silly as he is, she just doesn’t let on very often. She might roll her eyes when he gets upset about losing a Nintendo, but she’s 2,000% onboard to watch how long it takes for a grape to hit the ground.
(Unless — maybe she’s teasing him. It’s hard to tell sometimes the difference between somebody having fun with him and somebody making fun of him. He’s aware he’s not as dumb as people think he is, but there’s a reason, beyond the clueless persona he cultivated for general survival purposes, that they do.)
“I wouldn’t know how,” he finds himself saying, despite wanting to look cool. “I was usually the one getting bullied, until I learned how to run away.”
Her arms tighten. Her voice is muffled when she asks, “Even though your dad was a cop?”
He laughs in his throat. “Trust me, that’s not protection, that’s object humiliation. Besides, half the time he was the one bullying me. Guess I ended up paying him back for it.”
“Shawn.” She reaches down to tug on his hand, and he follows her lead, allowing her to spin him like they’re dancing. Once he’s facing her, she grabs his other hand too, though whether it’s for some kind of comfort or to keep him from running away is unclear. “This wasn’t your fault.”
He frowns. “He was shot, Jules. My dad was shot because I got lazy.”
She shakes her head and squeezes his hands. “Give us some credit. If you hadn’t been here, we would’ve found them anyway. Maybe not as fast, but we would have. We solve cases without you all the time.”
“Okay, ouch,” he says blandly.
“Anyway, you consulted on the case, but you’re not a cop. It’s never going to be your fault unless you actively interfere — you understand that, right?” At his silence, she makes some kind of noise in her throat and presses, “This is a top-down outfit. If you’re consulting on my case, you’re my responsibility. Any mistakes are mine, even if you make them.”
That’s uncomfortable to hear, for a lot of reasons, none of which Shawn particularly wants to deal with right now. Or ever. So he switches gears, presses a long kiss to the side of her head, and asks quietly, “You saying I’m yours, Detective?”
“I dunno, psychic, read my mind,” she shoots back. She leans up to press her smile into his lips, and it’s as contagious as anything else he might catch that way. The sound of her tongue and teeth is tiny and quiet and she’s here. She could be anywhere else, but she chose to be here. It blows his mind that he managed to fall in love in the first place — with her, and with Abigail, for that matter, but mostly with Jules, because Jules is a cop — and it’s ridiculous that she loves him back. She chose to stick with him.
Their timing has been awful. Right face, wrong time, but instead of drifting apart, they’ve got closer. Shawn will quote When Harry Met Sally any day of the week but he doesn’t actually believe that men and women can’t be friends — he just understands that his relationship with Jules is built on years of friendship and probably wouldn’t work unless they’d been friends first. She’s as silly as he is, but she needs permission to let loose, and a few weeks of acquaintanceship isn’t enough.
Good God, he loves her so much. He could kiss her forever. He doesn’t even need background noise to focus on her. That’s almost never the case.
“Reply hazy,” he murmurs. He leans in for another. “Try again.”
“That was terrible. I would’ve bullied you,” she says into his mouth.
“Betrayal!” He brings her hand up and kisses that, too, right on her knuckles. “I’m into it.”
“You’d beg me to bully you.”
“You know that’s right.”
It’s maybe a little too breathless to be a joke. One of these days they’ll talk about that. Maybe the day they talk about when he developed his psychic powers. Jules, unaware that he’s being a little more serious than he let on, just says, “I still can’t believe you’re moving back in with your dad, though. It’s not like you can’t live on your own.”
“I—” He pauses. He doesn’t want to explain it, because then he’d have to think about it. “I told you, it’s a whole…step forward in becoming a man. Thing.”
“Man-thing?”
“Yeah, man-thing. I’m letting you in on a dark secret, so don’t go blabbing it everywhere, but a crucial step in every psychic’s life is when we spend six months communing with objects from our childhood to become one with our inner childs. Children? Bambini. Those of us who are successful can become a man-thing, which is like a werewolf but-”
“Much less cool.”
“...Yeah,” he agrees, because that’s absolutely true. “Aside from the whole…murdering people on the full moon thing.”
“And you still haven’t answered my question.” She tugs him again, this time toward the bed. He has no complaints, other than — again — that the door is open. In the dim lighting, Jules looks soft. He wonders if he looks soft too, or if the shadows make him look harsh and threatening. She’s a detective and carries a gun and went to college and is smart and badass and the fifth coolest person in the state of California, maybe the first and/or sixth depending on which celebrities or art thieves are also here, so maybe she doesn’t react to shadows in the same way that somebody who spent over a decade in and out of homelessness does. “Why are you doing this?”
He looks up at the ceiling for a moment. It’s dark enough that the shadows pool up there, too. It’s hard to look at Jules while he answers. “I wasn’t playing — this is a big step. We…my dad and I haven’t always had the best relationship.”
“I may have noticed some tension at the station,” she acknowledges, patting his thigh.
“I wrote him off. Did you know — I left the country for years. I left the state for ten years. I left the city for longer. I know, that means I left as soon as I graduated high school, I know, that means I was stupid and reckless and I took a long time to get my head on straight. My mom sort of left all the parenting to him; she was the fun parent who’d come home from work trips with toys and hugs, and he was the one who had to deal with my delinquency and make me run drills or learn how to escape a locked trunk or, I dunno, dig through broken glass to find Easter eggs-”
“Oh my God, Shawn-”
“It’s fine.” He waves away her concern before it can go anywhere. If there’s one thing he knows how to do, it’s redirect. “He cared enough about me to want me to be able to survive any situation, and he wanted me to be a cop like him, which I wanted too at the time, so…y’know, he’d make cases for me to solve. Easter and Christmas are just consumer holidays, right? And I was a hard kid. Couldn’t focus, couldn’t stop asking questions, I can still recite Back to the Future word for word but getting a book report out of me was like pulling teeth. He didn’t know what to do with me and I didn’t know what to do with him.”
Shawn can handle silence when he’s alone, but history has proven that silence when he’s with someone usually means he’s being judged, or that he’s made a mistake somewhere. It falls in thick, heavy layers between them, maybe comfortable but maybe not, maybe empty but maybe full of hidden things that’ll come back to bite him later, and it’s not lost on him that his own secrets are the ones that have teeth but that doesn’t keep him from thinking here, this is what that author of those vampire romance books meant by pregnant pause, you can’t exactly stab it because you have no idea what might come oozing out—
“I think I’m starting to understand some things about you.” Jules leans her head on his shoulder. “You know, you make a lot of excuses for a lot of people.”
“I do not!”
“Maybe you don’t. Maybe I’m wrong. Just…Shawn, promise me that you’ll take care of you, too?”
He’s not sure he follows. He doesn’t have to. Dad’s never going to apologize for anything, and Shawn’s not a minor child anymore: he’s not under any obligation to apologize either. Mom’s never going to fill the hole she left long before she physically left the house, and Shawn’s not dependent on her anymore: he doesn’t have to hold himself apart just to hold himself together. Moving forward doesn’t need to mean fixing things. It doesn’t need to mean apologies or heart-to-hearts. It doesn’t need to mean making up for lost time. Shawn’s got a second chance to have a relationship with his parents, and he’s much less irritating in his thirties than he was in his teens.
Maybe it won’t work. Maybe they’ll self-destruct. But Shawn, he’s come to understand, checked out when Mom did, when he was just about 16; he may have an eidetic memory, but he doesn’t have the greatest understanding of his own feelings. Or other people’s feelings in relation to him. There are plenty of ways he can recall perfectly and remember wrong.