musicalluna

Title: Words I Can Never Say
Fandom: Psych
Author: MusicalLuna
Rating: T
Characters/Pairings: Lassiter, Juliet, Shawn
Genre: Angst
Warnings: Mention of child abuse.
Complete: Yes
Summary: Sometimes being a fake psychic isn't all it's cracked up to be.
A/N: I begged s_c for a good angsty idea and this is what she came up with for me. I <3 her, because everyone in the chat freaked out when they heard the idea LOL. Hopefully you'll enjoy the fleshed out version. It took two drafts to get it right. XDDD
Disclaimer: Nope, still not mine.

Shawn leads the way up the stairs, grinning and saying brightly, “I wonder if she had any My Little Ponies? Gus collects them, you know. I can compare! See how complete collection his is.”

“God, Spencer,” Lassiter mutters disgustedly from behind him. “You have no sense of decorum, do you?”

“What do you want me to do Lassie?” he asks, upper body tipping slightly to the right as he peers into a door cracked open on that side of the hall. “She’s dead. Tip toeing around the fact or pretending like she wasn’t a human being isn’t going to change that.”

Lassiter grunts, “Still,” and Shawn half smiles to himself because he knows his logic is sound.

“It’s the door at the end, on the left,” Juliet tells them and he immediately adjusts his trajectory, heading for the closed door at the end of the hall.

“What do you think Jules?” he asks. “My Little Ponies?” The knob turns at the brush of his (gloved) fingers and swings slowly open, a sharp knife of light cutting through the gloom inside.

“Focus, Shawn,” Juliet says and as his eyes adjust to the light, he does, shoulders stiffening.

“Oh, god,” slips out of his mouth before he can stop it.

He doesn’t move, frozen in place, and Lassiter says irritably, “Why the hell is he in front anyway? Exactly who the hell are the detectives here?” Pushing his way through the doorway, Lassiter flicks on the switch with a careful pass of his knuckle. Shawn almost flinches as light fills the room. The evidence of the atrocity that took place in this room is everywhere and he wonders why Lassiter isn’t swearing. Half a second later he realizes that Lassiter can’t see it. He can’t see what happened here the way he can.

“Shawn?” Juliet prompts gently from behind him. There is something questioning in her voice.

For just an instant he considers leaving. Considers turning around and walking right out of the house because he’s already seen too much as far as he’s concerned. But this is his job and who does he have a responsibility to if not this little girl?

He steps into the room, sneakers quiet on the hardwood floor, Juliet and Lassiter’s low voices fading into the background.

On the bedside table, a little pink and purple lamp glows, chasing the shadows away, but not the demons.

It looks like a typical little girl’s bedroom, pale pink and littered with dolls, books, plastic jewelry, an enormous pile of stuffed animals tossed against the wall to his right. The bed is neatly made with a frilly pillow and a matching pink comforter splashed with a larger-than-life image of Sleeping Beauty. He does a single turn in the center of the room and in exactly thirty-six seconds, all of the pieces have fallen into place.

His fingers drift to his temple, purely out of reflex.

“I know what happened here,” he says and his voice sounds flat and far away. Juliet looks at him expectantly, but there’s something curious in her expression, an emotion he can’t quite pin down. Lassiter, as usual, is ignoring him in favor of inspecting the door frame.

“There are gouges here O’Hara,” he says and she glances at him, torn between the two investigators.

“She tried to blockade the door,” Shawn says, answering the unspoken question. “They forced it open.”

Juliet’s hand covers her mouth and her eyes turn back to him; he’s caught her undivided attention. Lassiter glares at him.

“Why would a child blockade the door against her own parents?” he asks derisively.

“Because her father was molesting her.” He notes Lassiter’s thunderstruck look, notes the slight horrified shake of Juliet’s head, notes the suddenly uncomfortable shift of Lassiter’s feet and the way his eyes sweep over the room again, looking for signs that will confirm this accusation.

It’s pointless to tell them that there’s a girl-shaped hollow in the pile of stuffed animals and that some of them look mashed because he suspects the girl was sleeping there in favor of her desecrated bed. It’s also pointless to mention the faint smudge on the doorway from where he thinks the mother stood, face pressed against the doorframe, watching and doing nothing as her daughter’s life was torn apart again and again. Those are details that the detectives can’t do anything with and they’re terrible, private things that they don’t need to know—that he shouldn’t know.

“The evidence you’ll need to prove it is stuffed under her bureau and on the floor in the corner in the closet. Check the sheets too, they haven’t been washed recently. She wasn’t murdered here. That should be everything you need.” Without another word, he walks out of the room.

He’s at the end of the hall when Juliet calls his name. He looks back, a smile stiffly turning up the corners of his mouth and opens his mouth to say something when a strange feeling in his chest suddenly makes itself known. He turns away again, his body doubles over automatically, and he throws up there on the side of the hall.

“Shawn?” Juliet sounds mildly alarmed but he brushes her away when she tries to touch him, breathing heavily through his mouth. He straightens a little only to stumble and braces himself against the wall, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Juliet is in front of him now.

“Whoa,” he mutters, not looking at her. “What was in my Wheaties this morning?”

“Sit down Shawn,” she says firmly, and despite his urge to get out, he lets her push him down onto the steps. “What happened?” she asks, hand brushing the fringe of hair on his forehead. “I’ve never seen you react like that before.”

“Hazard of the job,” he replies and finally looks into her face. Her blue eyes are focused on his face, filled with concern and sympathy and understanding. His mouth slips open of its own volition and he almost tells her. He wants to tell her everything.

He wants to tell her that he didn’t even realize he was nauseous until he was throwing up, that he invaded that little girl’s room, saw her only sanctuary and her only friends, saw every detail of the most humiliating, horrific moments of her entire short life. That those awful intimate details are going to be there, lurking in the back of his mind for as long as he lives and nothing he can do, nothing he can think, nothing else he’ll ever see will erase them.

But he can’t do that and he knows it.

“Your gift must be so painful,” Juliet murmurs, rubbing a hand lightly along his arm. He stifles a slightly hysterical laugh because she’s right. This “gift” is painful.

It’s really no kind of gift at all.

They’re not wrong, believing that the victims are speaking to him. They are, just not in the way they think. It’s the evidence they leave behind, the little pieces of themselves that they leave for him to find that form their voices, the clues that speak for the little girl.

He’d give anything to tell Juliet the truth about how he does it because he can see in her face that she would listen, that she might even understand what a burden it is, having the ability to see into the most intimate and terrible details of people’s lives. But she can’t know and he can’t tell her and her misdirected sympathy is worse than if she didn’t care at all because it makes the urge to confess and share the weight with someone else almost unbearable. He wants to scream at the injustice of it all.

Instead he pastes on a little smile because this is what he signed up for, isn’t it? This is what he thought would be so much fun.

And it’s too late to come clean now.