Chapter Text
1985
“I don’t like this game.” Shawn mumbled, face buried in the carpet.
“It’s not a game, it’s a thought experiment. Sit up, son.” Henry said.
Between him and his father laid bastardized the Wild West toy set Shawn had gotten for his birthday yesterday. Shawn had been visibly ecstatic to receive the gift and maybe that was his first mistake. If he’d remembered his fathers goal in life was to suck the fun from everything that brought him joy, maybe he would have pretended not to care about the toy and snuck it off to the Gusters. Instead, it had been stolen from his hands minutes after being opened and crafted into one of his fathers ‘life lessons.’
Shawn floppily obeyed, sitting up criss-cross and resting his head on his hands. The train was on a track which split down two rails. Down one rail a singular townsperson figurine was set across the tracks. Down the other, there were three. A cowboy atop his horse mid-gallop, Shawn's figurine of choice, was stationed in front of the toothpick wedged in the space between two rails to act as a makeshift track lever.
Every second spent looking at it made Shawn's stomach crawlier. What he had wanted was to make up cowboy stories and have pretend gun fights, not daydream about real people being actually run over. After pushing the crawlies down, Shawn closed his eyes and made as earnest an attempt to concentrate as he could at eight years and one day old.
“I would shoot the wheel and wedge the bullet betwe-”
“No, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t stop the train.”
“...Then my horse half would chew through the rope on the one guy while I-”
“You can’t take anyone off the tracks, either.”
Shawn whined and starfished once again onto the living room floor.
“That’s not fair, you’re making up rules!”
“Life’s not fair! When you’re a cop you’re going to have to make plenty of hard choices.” Henry gestured to the toys briefly before firmly crossing his arms. “So, choose.”
“I choose to question what role you play as the cruel God of this world. Did the saloon guy even do anything to deserve being run over?”
“Would it change your answer if he did?”
Shawn groaned and flipped over so he was face down.
“How do you expect to be able to handle making decisions in the field when you can’t even handle making a decision in a hypothetical?”
“A hypo-what?”
Deep breaths of shag carpet helped tune out his fathers subsequent lecture. Logically, he knew he’s supposed to flip the lever. Save the lives of three or the life one. Either be a hypo-coward who’s too afraid to get hypo-blood on their hypo-hands or a hypo-hero taking tragic yet noble action for the good of the hypo-many. It’s a simple choice.
Except it’s really obviously not, or it wouldn’t be if the situation was realistic at all. But it isn’t supposed to be realistic. It’s supposed to make reality seem easy so you get to feel good about yourself.
Shawn knew his dad knew that. Henry was just trying to make a point. A really stupid point because Shawn was never going to be a cop and neither was figurine-represented Hypo-Shawn.
Hypo-Shawn was a mutated cowboy-minotaur (cowboytaur) outlaw perfectly capable of chewing through rope faster than a train.
Real-Shawn would have never let anyone get tied to the tracks in the first place.
Gus was the one who had been pestering Shawn to find a case in the first place. Which wasn’t something Shawn opposed, not by any means, it was the principle of it that was annoying. He didn't want Shawn to find a case because he wanted to spend time with him solving it, no, all he cared about was the money. Far more than usual, Gus was suddenly and inexplicably obsessed with making and, most annoyingly, saving money.
Gus was a man of patterns. Shawn was used to planning his own plans around those patterns. If his work schedule stuck to a routine, it was predictable, and so too was the amount of time they’d get together each week. It's frustrating, then, whenever Gus strays from his usual pattern. Not impossible to deal with or anything, but still. Frustrating. Once the new pattern was communicated, Shawn figured things out.
This once sacred dynamic stood no chance of survival against the vengeful Scrooge McDuck-esc spirit which had taken over the body once belonging to his best friend. There was no pattern anymore. No routines, just constant and therefore impossible to communicate changes. By starting to take any chance he could get at overtime and slotting every new client made available into his route, Gus had effectively made himself entirely unpredictable. This would not stand, could not stand, and Shawn was not afraid to tell him as much.
When he did, cross and holy water in hand for the exorcism that would be required if reason did not prevail, Gus simply sighed and agreed he would start coming in at his regular time again once Shawn found them a case.
So he did! They had a consultation scheduled for today! It was on the shared calendar and everything!
It wasn’t uncommon for Shawn to be first in the office on a weekday. Under usual circumstances he preferred to be, but these were not usual circumstances. The silence of the Psych office was starting to feel less like a comforting void waiting to be filled with nostalgic music and sitcom reruns and more like… well, a void.
Everything felt easier with Gus there. What they needed was for this consultation to work out into a proper case. A case was just the thing to restore some normalcy to their dynamic. The money would be nice too.
“You still have those?” Gus said. The interruption almost made Shawn topple from his precariously leaned office chair. He’d been patiently sitting and musing over their childhood doomsday-preparation binders for the better part of the last hour.
“You can’t insist that I find us a case and still be late to work when I do.” Shawn said.
“I’m not late, I’m fifteen minutes early.” Late by Gus standards. “… Are these new?” He picked up a couple of the loose papers scattered around the second binder on Shawn's desk.
They had begun their doomsday preparations at 11 years old following a showing of The Return of the Living Dead. After sneaking back in through Gus' bedroom window, they cracked open a notebook and shakily got to work. By 7th grade they had two binders worth of well-curated preparations for classic apocalypse scenarios.
Zombies, check. Lube up the blueberry and fight with fire. Machine uprising, check. Integrate with the cyborgs and infiltrate from within. Even in the event of something sudden and totally unsurvivable, e.g. nuclear fallout, they're ready with their coolest sunglasses and a playlist pre-downloaded on Shawn’s iPod to go out to.
Or, they’re supposed to be ready with all of that.
Neither of them have touched the binders much since middle school.
Shawn and Gus both always knew that as fun as it was to take seriously, the binders were never actually supposed to be that serious. Zombies aren't real. AI is not artificial, not intelligent, and can only do as much as we tell it to. The chance of nuclear war in their lifetime is, fortunately, close to zero.
The project was really just a way to have fun and to tell stories until they weren’t too scared to go to sleep anymore. They did a lot of things like that as kids.
“They’re far overdue for an update” Shawn said. “We completely neglected to account for an instinctually-motivated Alien Invasion scenario.”
“You’re not freaking out about the ArcLight probe splashing down, are you?”
Ah yes, that. Gus sure loved bringing that up.
All Shawn knew about the ArcLight mission was what Gus had told him combined with the bits he’d picked up on passing newspapers. He enjoyed his fair share of Star-Trek but space had always been Gus’ arena. Legitimate astronomy was never of particular interest to Shawn and a thin may-or-may-not-be-alien streak of light wasn’t going to suddenly change that.
Maybe they’re munching the sun, maybe they’re not. It’s all ‘maybe’s right now and historically the big brainy nerds of the world get those figured out before they become concern-worthy certainties.
“Gus, don’t be ridiculous, that was like two whole weeks ago. I happened across these in a box of stuff that my dad fished out of the attic and I saved from a fate as landfill trash.”
“Yeah, alright.” Gus shoveled the portion of the mess that had found it’s way onto his adjacent desk back over to Shawn's so he could get settled. “You need to clean this up before the client gets here, they’re going to think you’ve gone all ‘Beautiful Mind.’”
“If Ms. King is the type of person to hire a psychic then I doubt she’s the type to criticize the state of someone’s office. Besides, I need you back on this project, man!” He tapped Gus’ pec emphatically.
“I’m not doing that.”
“What? Come on, these were originally your idea.”
“When we were ten.” Gus slid into his seat and powered on the computer. “We’re grown men now and we have better things to do, like preparing for the client we’re supposed to meet in twenty minutes.”
Before Shawn could argue there was a jingle at the front door. By the sound of it, two people were walking into the Psych lobby. Gus stood up and, polite as always, greeted them from his desk.
"Good morning, girls." Gus said, in the practiced and friendly tone Shawn had only heard him use with kids of past girlfriends. To get a better look at their guests, he spun around in his chair and craned over the partition. "If you're looking for the Kumon, you went a block too far."
In the lobby were two girls (sisters?). Judging by the time and the backpacks, they're fresh out of class for the day (middle– maybe high school?). The younger one was gripping a Kumon folder like it’d been declared a flight risk. Good eye, Gus.
"… Are you Shawn Spencer?" The younger girl said.
"He wishes." Shawn stood up from his chair. "Which makes you Ms. Olivia King."
Shawn ignored Gus' exasperated eye roll and accepted a surprisingly firm handshake from Olivia. "Is it alright that I'm early? I made the appointment accounting for the chance I had to take the bus from school."
"We actually-" Gus started.
"-Totally fine!"
"Shawn."
Shawn finally made eye contact with Gus' who, ever so subtly, called him over for a quick talk. The older girl of the two planted herself on the couch while the younger waited at Shawn’s desk.
"We are not taking a case from a middle schooler." Gus whispered over Shawn's shoulder, their backs to the room.
"You know it's rude to assume a woman's age, Gus."
"Why would you even book a consultation with literal children? Time is money and we need to be saving money."
"Obviously I didn't know.” Not technically a lie. The sound of Olivia's voice over the phone raised suspicions, but he had made the executive choice not to question it. “We took that case from the ambassador's kid's friend."
"That kid was rich. How is she going to pay us?"
"I wouldn't be opposed to a sillybandz per hour agreement.”
"Excuse me?" Shawn and Gus turned around to the older girl who’d interrupted them. "I have some money. I don't know if it's enough, but I can pay you something."
"As much as we appreciate that, we’re professional detectives,” Gus said. “We work with the real police department on serious criminal cases."
"We are serious." Olivia said after taking a steady breath.
"We're sure this is very important to you. Maybe you should try talking to your parents or a teacher about-"
"Our teacher was kidnapped." The older girl snapped. "By the government.”
Olivia passed a bewildered Gus the Kumon folder she had been guarding. The contents, which Shawn obnoxiously observed over his shoulder, made it immediately clear that these girls had already done a fair amount of investigating on their own.
Inside, among other things, was a collection of poor-quality black and white photographs on printer paper. Most of them were of the same man. The blue ID on the lanyard he’s wearing in one confirmed what the older girl, who introduced herself as Olivia's sister Joyce, had begun to explain.
‘Mr. Ryland Grace’ of Grover Cleveland Middle School.
A seventh grade science teacher and faculty sponsor of the after school STEM club. Well spoken, if a bit corny, and beloved by the student body.
Shawn invited Olivia to sit with her sister. Gus didn’t protest.
Two weeks ago, Joyce explained, on her usual bike route home she saw four men in suits hop out of a black SUV, snatch Mr. Grace off his bike, and swiftly cram him into the vehicle before driving away. Faster than they appeared they vanished and no one else had been around to see the abduction take place.
“What did the police say?” Gus asked.
“...Nothing.” Joyce said.
“Nothing?” Gus repeated. “That’s hard to believe, I’d expect Lassie to be all over a case like this.”
The girls shifted uncomfortably. In the following taught silence, Shawn had a realization, or, as he’d grown accustomed to calling them, a vision.
“They couldn’t have said anything, because you never called them.”
Gus glanced at Shawn, still finger to temple, then back to the girls. Neither of them denied it.
“You watched your teacher get kidnapped and didn’t report it?” Gus said. “You’re just now, two weeks later, coming to us?”
“Better late than never.” Shawn dropped his finger-eyebrow devices but kept his eyes fixed on the girls. Going forward, information gathered from their body language would be just as important as their statements.
“It’s been two weeks, Shawn! Most kidnapping victims are presumed dead after forty-eight hours!”
“We’ve been doing everything we can!” Olivia raised her voice with an inflection that teetered between anger and dejection. Joyce stayed calm, almost unusually so, and placed a hand over one of her sisters to stop it’s shaking.
“The SUV that took Mr. Grace had government license plates.” Joyce said. “The police could be in on this.”
“My sister is so crazy lucky these guys didn’t see her.” Olivia said, still visibly nervous.
“You do realize that sounds… kind of paranoid?” Gus said.
The obvious is often misinterpreted. This worked both for and against Joyce.
It’s a common misconception that kidnappings only happen in the dead of night and dark alleyways. Daylight can offer unique advantages to criminals who know what they’re doing.
“I used to get in trouble a lot, okay?” Joyce began. “Like four years ago, after our mom died, I guess I just didn’t care about anything anymore.”
Most people don’t expect to witness a crime in the middle of the day, especially in places they feel safe, so they don’t. Even when it happens right in front of them.
“But that didn’t matter to anybody at school. They didn’t care about why I was acting out, they’d just yell at me and suspend me so they didn't have to deal with me for a while.”
That being said, the idea of a large group of well dressed men tossing a mild-mannered middle school teacher into an expensive car and swiftly disappearing was… a little too cinematic. Santa Barbara no longer had mob presence required for stories like that to be regarded as plausible.
“Mr. Grace wasn’t like that. He, like… saved my life. I won’t get into all of it, just know that I never would have gotten through middle school without him.”
It was obvious that the girls believed what they were saying. Olivia had been holding back tears since they’d first said the teacher's name. Joyce, despite her determined exterior, was desperate for Shawn and Gus not to dismiss her. They’re terrified of their situation and that certainly counted for something.
“It’s not just the government thing. I didn't report it because I knew nobody besides my sister would believe me. We wanted to try and find some kind of evidence of what I saw, or some reason that this would happen… but we couldn’t..”
At minimum, it was true that when Ryland Grace left work two weeks ago he’d gotten into a car and hadn’t shown back up to work since.
“You came to the right place.” Shawn said. Joyce smiled for the first time since they’d arrived. “We believe you.”
“We’ve believed crazier.” Gus shrugged.
“I know!” Olivia said, nerves just barely subsiding. “That’s why we came to you first. I read everything I could find about you guys in the news and everything on your website- even your blog,” She gestured to Gus, “which was actually pretty cool.”
He was briefly taken aback by the compliment so soon after the emotional barrage Joyce had delivered, but was quickly able to gather himself enough to shoot Shawn a confident glare… Olivia must be functionally illiterate. Poor thing. If only Mr. Grace had become an English teacher.
Shawn decided to change the subject before Gus realized the same and had his ego bruised. “Do you know if your teacher had any enemies?” he asked. “Other teachers, ex-girlfriends, disgruntled pairs of laboratory mice?”
“No way. Everybody loves him.” Olivia said.
“We don’t really know anything personal about him honestly,” Joyce said. “He talks a lot but never about himself. We couldn’t even find any of his social media.”
“Did you look for a LinkedIn?” Gus asked. Shawn recoiled.
“LinkedIn does not count as social media.”
“Yes it does, Shawn.”
“It doesn't,” Joyce said. “But we did look for that and there was nothing.”
“Nobody who knows Mr. Grace would ever want to hurt him,” Olivia interrupted. “Something really bad is happening, I know it.”
Despite the increasingly worse job Joyce’s hand was doing at grounding her sister, it stayed anchored atop Olivia's. The question of motive was an upsetting one to most adult clients, nevermind a preteen. They needed to interview Joyce separately–Olivia was only going to get more upset as the conversation went on. Shawn needed to calm things down before it was out of control.
It’s really hard to comfort kids, though. Like, seriously, taming a rabid bird levels of impossible.
“We’re finally supposed to have an actual science fair this year.” Olivia said as she finally started to cry. Shawn took in the scene, feeling deeply unequipped. She was staring daggers into the coffee table, which was new but welcome behavior. “Our school is so lame, they’ve never let us do anything like that, but when everyone told him how much we wanted him to host one he made it like, his sole mission for a whole year! He wouldn’t just leave us!”
Joyce seemed the protective type, she was going to chime in and slow things down at any second. She’d calmed her sister down successfully once already, when she did it again Gus would get some tissues while Shawn pivot them towards one-on-one conversations.
“You’ve solved stuff involving the government before,” Olivia continued, desperation spewing from her puppy-dog eyes, “and stuff without the police, so you can solve this without them too!”
Mercifully, and sort of impressively, she stopped herself to take a deep breath. Surely, now, Joyce was going to say something.
“Please, promise that you’ll find him.” Olivia whispered through her tears. “And that you won’t talk to the police until you absolutely have to.”
Shawn hated when people asked him to do that. You can never promise a client or a victim anything, that’s a cardinal rule of detective work. He’d have to find something to say that avoided promising anything while still giving the middle schooler sobbing on his couch a sense of solace.
“We promise.” Gus said through tears.
Before Shawn could finish saying ‘We promise to try,” the thing he was going to say before his sympathetic crier of a partner broke, Olivia jumped off the couch to grab them both into a hug.
“Thank you!” She said into Gus’ shoulder. “Thank you so much.”
The hug lasted only long enough for Shawn and Gus to share a disoriented glance. Olivia hopped back up and wiped her face on her jacket sleeve, immediately peppier than she’d been just moments ago.
“I have soccer in like fifteen minutes so we have to run,” She and her sister threw on their backpacks, “but everything we know is the folder!”
“Text us if you have any questions but if you make any progress, call!” Joyce said while they all but ran out of the office.
The sound of the door closing behind them shook Shawn out of his surprise. Gus grimaced at the tear stain left over on his button up.
Well. They had a case. Gus promised.