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Fandom: Psych
Author: MusicalLuna
Rating: T
Characters/Pairings: Shawn, Juliet, Lassiter
Genre: Angst, Drama, Hurt/Comfort
Warnings: None
Complete: Yes
Summary: Look Out sequel.
Now that Shawn's awake, he's determined to stay that way.
A/N: Apparently I just can't leave the world of Look Out alone. Here is yet another sequel, lol.
Edited to add: A google of thanks to Skysalla, without whom this fic would have never seen the light of day.
Disclaimer: I do not own Psych or the characters.
Shawn stood next to the window in the shadows, all but a small sliver of his face behind the protective cover of the apartment wall as he watched the world outside. His arm lay against his chest, cradled in a sling that she and Carlton had crafted out of one of the apartment's bedsheets in an effort to alleviate some of the pain from his previously-dislocated shoulder. Despite the obvious strain it was causing the nasty wounds on his side and leg, Shawn refused to sit down, refused to look away from the window for even one second.
As Juliet had feared, now that Shawn was awake, he was determined to stay that way.
He nudged the curtain open a little further with his fingertips, widening the gash of light on the carpet.
“Black Escalade,” he reported tonelessly a second later. “Back windows are tinted. I can't tell if there's anyone inside. Driver's a woman. There's a family of five and a dog in those little white clingy stickers on the back window. Probably not him,” he concluded.
“Probably not,” Lassiter agreed from where he stood in the shadows behind the sofa. There was something about his voice that unnerved Juliet.
Shawn was bad enough with his dry, emotionless and completely factual descriptions of each and every living thing that passed in front of the apartment, but what she had been hearing in Carlton's voice that bothered her even more.
She was scrutinizing his face, studying the grave expression that had become an almost permanent fixture on it when she finally figured it out.
There was no derision in his voice.
No mockery, no contempt, not even exasperation.
Carlton Lassiter was treating Shawn like another cop—better, even.
And that difference made it clear just how messed up Shawn really was. How thoroughly wrecked the balance of their little world was. If Carlton felt like he needed to treat Shawn with overt compassion, then things were truly bad.
But by letting Shawn continue to play watch dog, by letting him deprive himself of desperately needed sleep, by letting him further abuse his already abused body, they were just enabling his fears. They needed to be dealt with, not humored.
And if Carlton wasn't going to do it, she would have to.
Steeling herself for a fight, Juliet got to her feet, moving across the room to Shawn's side.
His face turned minutely toward her, but his eyes never left the street, scanning carefully back and forth. “Jules, you shouldn't stand in front of the window,” he told her quietly.
Juliet stepped through the blinding light to his side, lifting her hand to brush his elbow. “Shawn,” she said softly, “They're more likely to see you standing here peeking out than they are me.”
“O'Hara,” her partner started in a low voice.
She cut him off by flashing the palm of her hand at him, keeping her eyes focused on Shawn's face. His eyes twitched toward her for the briefest of moments before fixing themselves back on the outside.
The lines on his forehead gathered a little tighter. “Just because they can't see you doesn't mean they can't shoot you.”
Juliet shook her head, squeezing his elbow gently between her fingers. “No one even knows we're here, Shawn. No one.”
“The Chief knows,” he replied and normally his voice would have been teasing. Implying things that he knew weren't true. But there was none of that now.
“You think the Chief is going to sell you out?” she asked, astonished.
Shawn sighed, a bone-deep, exhausted sigh, his eyes fluttering closed for just a second, and said, “No, Jules.”
She softened, and slid her hand down to cover the back of his hand with hers. “Then what are you afraid of? No one is going to find us. There isn't a trail to follow. It simply doesn't exist. There is nothing that connects you, or the police, to this apartment. We would have to be ratted out by the Chief or Buzz McNab if someone were going to find us.”
Shawn's head tipped forward, his forehead pressing into the frame of the window and his shoulders hunching, blocking her out physically in an attempt to do the same mentally. Outside a streetlight flickered to life, washing the side of his face in a watery orange glow. “I know...” he said and Juliet's heart clenched at how similar he sounded to her little nephews.
“Then why do you insist on doing this to yourself?” she asked, very nearly resorting to pleading. The urge to touch him was almost irresistible and she reached up to curl her hand around the back of his neck, hesitating just shy of his skin.
“'Cause,” he muttered, pushing closer to the wall and trying to refocus on the window in front of him. His hand clenched around the edge of the thick, burgundy curtain until his knuckles turned white.
“Because why?” she pressed and touched his shoulder.
“BECAUSE I'M SCARED!” he shouted, jerking away from her. The movement tore the curtain from the rod with several loud pops, metal clanging noisily overhead, a sharp hiss sliding out between his teeth. Juliet winced sympathetically, her forehead crumpling.
“Shawn...” she said, voice soft, aching for him. She pulled her hand back and tried, again, to be reassuring. “Everything will be okay. We won't let anything happen to you. You have to know that.”
Shawn's hand fisted around the material of the ruined curtain and he pulled it up toward his chest, shoulders hunching forward again as he turned his head away from her.
Juliet let her eyes close briefly and then nodded slightly to herself and backed away. She saw Shawn's hand flex around the curtain, his chest rising and falling visibly as he breathed, too fast, and then his eyes were on the street again, watery orange light flattening the planes of his face.
She moved to where Lassiter stood and cut off whatever he had his mouth opened to say by speaking first. “Make a cup of hot chocolate—more milk less chocolate.”
Lassiter frowned at her, started to open his mouth again, and she added a firm, “Please.”
He sighed, but set his mug on the bar counter and strode into the kitchen. Juliet then collected the maroon upholstered chair Carlton had claimed upon their arrival, but which now sat unused and carried it over to where Shawn stood at the window's edge, clutching the curtain.
“Sit,” she murmured, and set the chair down as close to the backs of his legs as she dared. When he didn't sit immediately she said, “I know your leg hurts, Shawn. Please. Just sit and take some of the strain off it.”
Another long moment of silence, not looking at her, and then he eased down into the chair, letting out a long breath.
“O'Hara,” Lassiter said from her shoulder a moment later, voice muted.
“Thank you,” she murmured back at him and took the mug in his hands, only to hold it out to Shawn, along with a fresh painkiller.
Shawn glanced at them out of the corner of his eye and then released his hold on the curtain with a wince, letting it fall open and allowing a stream of the milky light from the sodium-vapor lamp at the sidewalk to spill across the living room floor. He swallowed the pill dry and then took a sip of the hot chocolate, eyes focusing outward again, even as she stretched up to replace the curtain, making do with the now-empty rings.
The light disappeared again.
Then Juliet pulled up a second chair, sitting close, but not too close, her own mug of coffee in hand. She looked out the window.
For several long moments they sat there in silence, Juliet's back straight as a board as she tried to focus on everything but the man sitting next to her.
And finally, he spoke.
His voice was pitched low, as it had been for the past few days. She'd been surprised to discover that Shawn had one of those voices that came from deep in his chest, rather than the higher, less remarkable one she was used to. The chest voice only seemed to come out when he was feeling particularly vulnerable though and that made it very hard to view it positively, no matter how good it sounded.
“Woman jogger,” he said. “iPod, small dog. Has a husband, waiting at home.”
A few seconds passed and then, through the sliver of the window Juliet could see out, a woman in black lycra shorts and a hot pink tank top jogged past with a little dog that looked more like a puff of fur than a real animal.
A car rolled past as she disappeared from view and Shawn reported, “Little blue Echo.” For mere seconds she saw the longing in his face and then it was gone, replaced by the flat, emotionless mask. “Not Gus. 104.5 bumper sticker. Driver might be male? Hard to tell. Lights in the house across the street. Looks like dinner time.”
Juliet was so wrapped up in watching the goings-on outside with Shawn that she jumped when Lassiter said from behind them, “You getting any psychic readings from any of these people?”
Shawn started to laugh. Low chuckles from deep in his chest that grew and built and morphed into full-bodied laughter that buckled him in half. The lights of a passing car crossed suddenly over his face, the momentary illumination catching on something glistening at the corner of his eyes. Tears. He was laughing so hard there were tears in his eyes. Juliet sat back, alarmed, throwing a glance over her shoulder at her partner. He shrugged, looking just as bewildered as she felt. His finger twirled once around his ear and she scowled at him.
Turning back around, Juliet said anxiously, “Shawn?”
Her voice seemed to break the spell and Shawn sobered in a hurry, the smile dissolving like so much dust washed away in the rain.
“The 'spirits'—” he said the word with a sneer the likes of which usually came from Lassiter. “—don't exist.”
“Shawn,” Juliet said, shaking her head. “Don't be silly. I've seen what you—”
He barreled on as though she hadn't spoken, but the way he raised his voice made it clear he had heard her. “I don't get visions of anything—I'm just hyper-observant. I know where to look and how to fit the pieces together. I can read people.” His voice turned bitter. “But I can't see the future.”
Juliet froze for a moment, brain stumbling over itself trying to process what Shawn was saying. If he wasn't psychic then—
She looked to Lassiter to see how he was handling this news and was surprised to see that he didn't look particularly shocked. And that was even more perplexing than Shawn's confession. What did it mean that he looked as though Shawn had just confirmed that it was dark outside instead of confessing that he'd been lying to them for over five and a half years now?
Something was missing.
And if Lassiter wasn't leaping at the chance to put Shawn in jail, then right now was not the time for figuring out how to deal with it. She brushed away her questions and her confusion and turned her attention to the, apparently, fake psychic. “Shawn,” she said, leaning towards him. “It doesn't matter.”
Shawn looked up at her, expression incredulous.
She pushed on, meeting his gaze without blinking. “Clearly you don't need to see the future to be good at what you do, Shawn. Your record speaks to that.”
“This is different,” Shawn said, voice barely a whisper.
“How?” she prompted.
Frustration rippled across his face and Shawn looked away, his fingers seeking out the frayed edge of his make-shift sling and starting to tug at the loose strings there. “Usually...usually there's a puzzle, Jules. Something to figure out, a bunch of stuff that doesn't make sense. Stuff that I can make sense out of. This—“ His fingers pinched harder at the stubborn threads, fingernails going white. “There's nothing to figure out. Just—waiting.”
Juliet was trying to figure out how to respond to that when Lassiter spoke up from where he'd settled onto the arm of the couch, long legs crossed at the ankles and pointed toward them.
“Spencer, why do you call me when you've gone and done something really stupid that ends with you staring down the barrel of a gun?”
The question seemed completely out of left field, but Shawn's eyes flicked up, fingers going still. He and Lassiter stared at one another for a long moment.
“Well?” Lassiter finally said, a trace of his usual impatience creeping into his voice.
“Because you're the last person I want to talk to if I'm going to die?” Shawn said finally and it took Lassiter's eye roll to realize that that had been a joke. A real joke.
“Exactly,” Lassiter drawled and she was amazed to see the faintest hint of a smile at the corner of Shawn's mouth. She looked between them, having no idea what had just passed between them, but the effects were obvious enough. The stiffness in Shawn's body had eased out, draining the room of tension in mere seconds.
She turned, trying to catch Lassiter's eye, but he was stretching, a grimace crossing his face as his shoulder popped, the moment already gone.
Looking at a newly relaxed Shawn, she decided it was worth the risk and reached out to brush his knee. “I'm pretty sure I saw The Breakfast Club on demand...” She tipped her head invitingly toward the plush sofa, leaving the invitation unspoken.
Shawn glanced out the window, staring out for just a moment longer and then turned back to her, meeting her eyes. “Did Buzz bring pudding pops?”
Juliet smiled and let out the breath she'd been holding. They were going to be okay. She and Lassiter could get him through this.
