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Fandom: Psych
Author: MusicalLuna
Rating: T
Characters/Pairings: Shawn, Lassiter
Genre: Hurt/Comfort
Warnings: None
Complete: Yes
Summary: Shawn's brain freaks out.
A/N: Migraine!fic yay!
Disclaimer: As much as I love making these guys bleed, I am sadly not their owner.
Spencer has been acting weird for nearly an hour.
And not normal weird; Spencer weird. So essentially he's been acting normal (ish) for almost the entire time he's been at the crime scene. But of course, by “normal” Lassiter means “quiet”.
The younger man (Lassiter refuses to think of him as “the psychic” on the grounds that he isn't) had arrived without his partner in tow and at first everything had been normal: needling, touching things that were not supposed to be touched, obscure pop culture references—the usual. But then Spencer had gotten absorbed in the goings-on at the scene. Lassiter had brushed him off gratefully and just prayed that the moron wouldn't do anything to compromise any evidence.
But then Spencer had grown quiet.
His voice had stopped carrying across the open space in the middle of the pet store where the crime scene was located. For twenty minutes, he thought Spencer had left without so much as a parting shot.
He'd never admit it, but he had been a little offended.
Then just a few minutes later, he had just about tripped over the fake psychic, who was crouched down an aisle where a terrarium had been shattered into a thousand gleaming shards. One hand was at the back of his head, rubbing purposefully at the juncture between his neck and skull.
“SPENCER!” he had barked. “What the hell?”
Shawn had looked up from the destroyed merchandise, squinted at him and then screwed his eyes shut, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Lassie?”
“Who the hell else would you be pissing off?” he'd demanded.
“You're right,” Spencer had agreed, still squinting. “Not enough sarcasm to be my dad.”
“Don't touch the evidence, Spencer,” he had growled. He expected a smart response, but Spencer just grunted. Lassiter had stalked past him and put it out of his mind.
Until now.
Spencer has just overbalanced stepping over a plastic dog toy lying in the aisle across from the body.
Lassiter expects him to right himself and carry on straight towards him with a twirl or other ridiculous thing to erase the moment of clumsiness from the forefront of any witnesses' minds, but instead he further off-balances himself and plummets forward.
His palms hit the concrete floor, skidding across it and a second later a little whoof of expelled breath is not quite covered up by the crack when his chin impacts. Lassiter winces involuntarily.
One of the uniforms gets there before he does, but he hears the stringy, croaked, “Ow...” Spencer manages to whimper.
“Mr. Spencer, are you all right?” the uniformed officer asks, putting a hand between his shoulder blades.
“'M fine,” Shawn mutters breathlessly and then hisses through his teeth as he levers himself up. “Ow,” he repeats.
“Are you ill or something?” Lassiter demands, planting his hands on his hips and watching with a critical eye as the idiot works to get his feet under him again. His chin is flushed bright red and already darkening toward purple, but the skin is unbroken. The palms of his hands are a different story. They've been scraped raw and blood is already beading up across them. Finally, Spencer straightens—and nearly goes down again.
Lassiter lunges forward, positioning himself between Spencer and another hard impact with the unforgiving gray floor. The man in question wraps his hands around Lassiter's arms, grip almost painfully tight. He growls in the back of his throat, clearly frustrated.
“All right, Spencer, what's going on?” Lassiter asks, peevish because something is clearly wrong and the fake is stupid enough to continue trying to ignore it.
“I'm fine,” he insists. “I just...tripped.” Another attempt to stand on his own results in a dramatic sway and his fingers clenching painfully into Lassiter's biceps.
Lassiter snorts, righting him again. “Like hell you did.” Spencer's face is pinched and instead of trying to stand again, one of his hands releases Lassiter's arm, moving to knead at the base of his skull. He watches the younger man for another minute and then guesses, “Headache?”
Reluctantly, Spencer nods. “But 'm fine,” he insists. Lassiter's mouth pulls tight. He's definitely slurring. “I's just a headache.”
“Oh, sure. You can't stand up on your own and if the squinting is any indication, your vision is blurred or doubled or maybe you're seeing weird shapes, and you're slurring like a drunk, but you're just fine.” The sarcasm in his voice is thick enough to cut with a butter knife.
“Well, if you're gonna be like that Lassie...” For a second Lassiter thinks he's going to actually tell him exactly what the hell's the matter with him, but instead his other hand lets go, moving to cup the back of his neck, too. He doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that he's leaning—hard—against Lassiter's shoulder, eyes screwing shut and his arms straining as he puts pressure on the back of his head.
Lassiter suspects he knows what's wrong. “Getting worse?”
Spencer lets out a breath he's been holding and nods once, no nonsense. “Yeah,” he breathes out.
“And are you seeing things?”
Spencer grimaces, his entire face pulling in toward the bridge of his nose, but he gives another single nod. “Yeah,” he says again. “Zig zags. Weird, freaky—nnhff.” He cuts off with a little noise and the hands at the back of his neck curl into claws, dragging at the hair at the base of his skull and raising red lines along the skin of his neck.
“Hey,” Lassiter says sharply, batting his hands away. “Don't do that.”
“Lassie,” Shawn grits through his teeth, trying to get his hands back where he can try to fight the pressure, “it hurts, okay?”
Lassiter acknowledges that with a nod. “It's a migraine, I can imagine it does.”
“Well, that would explain why it feels like my skull is going to explode.” Lassiter grabs his wrist in one hand when he tries to wrap it around the hair at the base of his skull again and pulls it out of reach.
“Stop being an idiot. More pain is not going to help,” he says severely and then, to try and distract him from more self-mutilation, “My sister gets migraines so I did a little research a while back. 'Visual disturbances' are one of the symptoms.”
“I'd say these are little more than 'disturbances',” Shawn mutters and then screws up his face again, baring his teeth. “Nngghh.”
“Come on, you need to sit down before you fall down,” Lassiter says, and starts pulling him along toward the front of the store, his grip making the statement non-optional.
They're halfway through one of the check-out stalls when Shawn's hand suddenly implements a death-grip on Lassiter's forearm.
He glances down in time to see the color drain out of the fake psychic's face like water swirling down a drain. “Gonna...” Spencer whispers but Lassiter already knows and he grabs him under the arms a split second before the younger man's eyes roll back in his head, his entire body going limp. They nearly wind up on the floor anyway, the shock of Spencer's dead weight in his arms worse than he had anticipated, but he grunts and heaves backward and they wobble, but stay upright.
“Detective?!”
“Help me, you idiot!” Lassiter barks at the uniform gawking, tentatively just out of range. That's enough to get him moving and he steps forward, hoisting Spencer's legs up under one arm.
“Where are we taking him, sir?” he puffs out.
“Car,” Lassiter says and jerks his head toward the parking lot.
They maneuver through the automatic doors of the shop, moving as quickly as they dare. When they finally reach Lassiter's brand-new shiny dark blue car, he digs into his pocket with one hand, struggling to hold Spencer up with the other. Finally he manages to switch open the locks.
His assisting officer pulls open the back door and feeds Spencer's feet in through the opening.
“Watch the pleather!” Lassiter snaps and then a second later he's hoisting Spencer's upper body into the car.
The fake psychic's knees are bent akimbo, dribbling off the side of the seat bonelessly and his shirt has been shoved up nearly past his ribs—enough so that Lassiter can see the way Spencer's stomach expands and contracts as he breathes. Being able to see the physical movement of the action reassures him that the migraine isn't something more severe masquerading as a painful, if not deadly, headache.
It takes a few more gentle shoves to get Shawn far enough in to lay his head down on the seat, but finally it's done and Lassiter leans against the door frame. As he works to catch his breath, he inspects Shawn's pale face, standing out starkly against the dark interior of his car.
He closes his eyes briefly and mutters, “Idiot.”
“Sir—”
Lassiter turns, his annoyance ratcheting up about fifteen notches when he sees the officer still standing there like an idiot. “Do I look like I need your help?” he demands. Before the flustered officer can respond, he barks, “Get inside and make sure CSU is doing their job!”
The officer straightens and nods crisply. “Yessir.”
He turns on his heel and hurries back toward the pet store and Lassiter leans against the door frame again. He glances down and—
Spencer is coming to. The pleather creaks quietly beneath him as he shifts, dark eyelashes fluttering open. His brows draw in toward the bridge of his nose. Lassiter waits patiently as they open, immediately squinting defensively against the light. “Lassie? he murmurs muzzily. “Tell me I didn'...”
“Yep. Fainted. Dead away.” He smirks.
Shawn grimaces and reaches for the back of his neck. “Thought so...”
Crouching, Lassiter digs around underneath the seat for the first aid kit he keeps in the car for emergencies.
“Did you carry me all the way out here on your lonesome, Lassie?” Shawn asks, finally seeming to notice where he is. The words are appropriately teasing, but the tone of voice isn't quite cutting it. He's struggling to maintain nonchalance in the face of the agony throbbing at the base of his skull.
Lassiter rolls his eyes anyway and says, “Don't be an idiot.” The painkillers are found in little packets buried beneath all of the other junk in the first aid kit and he pulls one out. A twist of his wrist and the packet is torn open. He presses it into Spencer's hand. “Take these. And drink this.” A bottle of water (forced on him by O'Hara) is now foisted upon the man sprawled on his back seat.
“My hero,” Shawn deadpans, but he swallows the pills all at once, shifting up onto one elbow in order to take a sip out of the water bottle. “Am I going to get Lassie cooties now?”
“You can only hope that something of me might rub off on you, Spencer,” he says, then, after a brief pause: “How's the vision?”
“Headaches mess with the psychic receptors, so it's a little fuzzy, but—”
“I meant your eyes,” he growls, clarifying even though he knows as well as Spencer does that none was needed.
A ghost of a smile flits across the younger man's face and he says, “Better. The zig zags aren't showing up as much.” His fingers are still kneading at the back of his head though, so it's obvious the pain hasn't dissolved yet. “Don't you have a crime scene to get back to?”
Lassiter snorts. “Like I'm going to leave you here, alone with my car. Keep dreaming.”
“I was only thinking of you,” Spencer says. His arm is now slung over his eyes.
“Sure you were.” Pulling open the front door, Lassiter slides into the driver's seat to wait and catches the fake psychic peeking out at him from beneath his arm in the rear view mirror. There's a furrow between his eyes that's not normally there.
Lassiter reaches over to the glove box and pulls it open, drawing out a small towel he usually uses for dusting the interior. He tosses it back over the seat at Spencer. “Wet that and put it over your eyes,” he orders.
Spencer quirks an eyebrow at him, but the comment Lassiter can see brewing behind his eyes vanishes when the muscles around them tense—most likely in response to a throb of pain from the back of his skull. Dexterous fingers fold the cloth into a square and then the bottle is pressed against it and overturned. Spencer repeats the process until the cloth is damp all the way through and then unfolds it into a long rectangle.
He glances into the rear view mirror one more time, the cloth hovering above his eyes. “This isn't a trick, is it? Are you going to drive me down to the docks and dump me in the ocean?”
“Don't be ridiculous. If I were going to do something to you, it would be a hell of a lot more creative than this,” Lassiter says.
Spencer processes this, nods, and then settles the cloth over his eyes with a soft sigh.
Lassiter turns around, reaching into his jacket for his phone as it vibrates, letting him know he's received a text. It's from O'Hara, ETA, five minutes.
As soon as she gets here, Spencer is transferring vehicles and they're getting back to work.
