Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Shawn Spencer slid into the barstool, ordering a drink before glancing around at the occupied seats in order to find a suitable personage to hit on. The blonde girl with a cute smile but an awful tan was married; she had evidently forgotten to take off her ring before soaking up the rays, and a sliver of pale skin on her finger gave it away quite easily. The man on his left was paying for a drink and looked promising, but had a fancy gym membership sticking out of his wallet, and Shawn really didn’t want to talk about sports and veganism for the next hour and a half, unless it was sure to end in really incredible sex, and he wasn’t even sure the guy was gay. The girl two seats from his left was one of Gina Repauch’s friends, so he promptly turned around, shielding himself from her line of sight and finding himself trapped under the icy blue gaze of a certain Head Detective.

“Hey, Lassie!” he said, shooting him a big grin as the other man scowled.

“What is it? Come to gloat about today’s case?”

Lassiter had done a great deal of paperwork on some kidnapping case, only to track down, corner, and threaten an innocent woman who’d had nothing to do with the whole affair in the first place. About five minutes later he’d gotten a call from Spencer, who had found all three of the victims and knew the exact location of the kidnapper. All he’d gotten to do was cuff him.

“Nah, that was all you. Well, three-quarters you. Maybe one-sixty-fourth you.”

Carlton sighed, and Shawn sipped from his glass.

“In the mood for some heavy drinking, then?”

“I lost my wallet.”

Spencer had stolen and hidden it earlier that day, but now he felt a twinge of guilt deep in his stomach (or maybe he was just hungry), and raised his hand to his temple, a smirk playing across his lips.

“I’m sensing...it’s at the station, in the bottom drawer of your desk. Hidden in a box of...those clippy things.”

“Paper clips?”

“Bingo. Good sport, Lassie. I’ll buy you a drink for playing along.”

“Scotch. On the rocks,” the detective said to the bartender, and he obliged.

Carlton downed the whole thing in one go before requesting another.

“I said a drink, Lassie-face.”

“I know how much you got paid for this case. You can pay for a few extra scotches.”

“That’s fair. But I was really looking forward to buying a zipline for the office, and you’re wasting all my half on alcohol.”

“I’ll pay you back,” Lassiter grumbled.

“Thanks, Lassie. You can come by sometime and zip from one end of the office to the other. Sounds thrilling, I know, but you are quite the daredevil.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Cool,” Shawn said, and they sat in content silence as they both sipped at their third drink.

He drank as they listened to the bustle of the waitresses and the sound of the door opening and shutting until there were only a few people left sitting around the bar, and the room looked fairly blurrier than it had a while ago, and everything seemed a bit warmer, and Spencer was quite a bit closer than he had been.

“I’ve got to get home,” Lassiter said, sounding unsure of himself.

Sitting with Spencer quietly was a lot nicer than he would’ve liked to admit, especially when his hazel eyes were sparkling in the light and he was looking at him in that way…

“Don’t go now. You haven’t gotten totally wasted yet.”

“And I’d prefer not to. Now I’m driving home.”

“You know that’s illegal. I’ll drive.”

“No.”

“Come on, can’t friends give friends a hand? I learned that from the Fresh Beat Band, and let me tell you, it’s one hell of a children’s show. Now, I know you’re more into Civil War documentaries and gun lube infomercials, but Twist can really drop a beat, not to mention he looks like my doppelganger from some kind of alternate dimension where I’m a rapper with a passion for-”

“Shut up!” Lassiter barked, before closing his eyes and counting off ten long seconds before standing and continuing. “I’m fine. I’ll call a cab.”

“You lost your wallet, remember?”

He swore under his breath before retorting, “Well, it’s not like you’re in any condition to drive me home in the first place. That’s your fifth drink.”

“I’m drinking pineapple juice.”

“Oh,” the other man responded, stumbling a bit and steadying himself by gripping Spencer’s shoulder. “Oh, well-”

“Exactly. Let’s go.”

“On your bike?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lassie. As much as I’d like to have your strong, toned policeman arms tight around my waist as we ride off into the night, the wind whipping through our hair and romance alive in our hearts, I took Gus’s company car here. Don’t vomit in it, or he probably won’t let me buy that zipline.”

“Just come on, then,” the detective said, walking shakily towards the door before Spencer slung an arm around him, and he would’ve objected if his legs didn’t feel as if they were going to melt into the sticky tile floor.

He felt a blush rising in his cheeks, but night was gracious and quite pitch black, thank sweet Lady Justice for that. When he finally stumbled into the faux-psychic’s car seat, he was somehow exhausted, opening his mouth in a yawn as his eyes blinked sleepily and Spencer peered at him with a look of...endearment on his face? As he clicked his seatbelt, his eyelids fell shut.

-

Someone was flicking his ear and calling his name softly, and if Lassiter hadn’t felt so tired, he probably would’ve jumped to attention and reflexively reached for his holster.

“Mmnn,” was all he could manage before the aforementioned person leaned up close and pressed their lips against his.

It was a good kiss, too, soft but not too light either, and there was a hint of tongue teasing at his lower lip. He opened his mouth and accepted the gentle warm heat and the taste of...pineapple?

His eyes shot open.

“Spencer!”

“Rise and shine, Lassie. We’re home.”

He glanced around. The night sky was still pitch black, but the streetlamps illuminated the building in front of him, and it definitely wasn’t his house.

“We’re at...a dry cleaner’s.”

“Relax, it’s my apartment. You took a nap while we drove, but I’ve been trying to wake you up for five minutes straight, and no matter how cute you are when you’re asleep, I had to resort to desperate measures here.”

“Like...kissing me?”

“Exactly.”

“Take me home.”

“Nope. A good friend doesn’t leave a drunk friend alone.”

“A good friend doesn’t kiss their drunk friend and then not give any explanation.”

“I explained. Desperate measures, Lassie. Just come inside, you look pretty beat and it’s best to sleep it off anyway, right? I’ve got this perfect hangover remedy too; you dump a shitload of canned pineapple into a blender, add a generous amount of almond milk, mix in three packets of Blue Razz Pop Rocks, put it on high, and wait until -”

“Do it again.”

He paused, mouth still open and looking somewhat confused, an expression that was rarely genuine for him.

“Do what again?”

Lassiter slid a hand roughly into his hair (more roughly than he’d intended to, but his coordination wasn’t the best at the moment) and drew him in for a kiss, this one a lot wetter and breathier than the former one, and a lot more drawn out. He trailed from Spencer’s lips to his jaw to his collarbone, eliciting gasps from the so-called psychic.

“Love you,” Carlton whispered into his neck, and it wasn’t until Shawn stiffened, pulled back and exhaled deeply into the cold midnight air, refusing to meet his eyes, that Carlton realised he had fucked up entirely.

“Come on, I’ll take you back home now, really.” he said, keeping emotion out of his voice, more rigid than he’d ever seen him before.

They rode to Lassiter’s house with tension hanging in the air, and when Carlton got out, Shawn didn’t meet his gaze.

“Bye,” he whispered, no pet name attached, and the blue car sped off into the distance.

-

The next day, Lassiter’s wallet was discovered inside of his trusty box of paperclips, with a heart-shaped sticky note on it with ‘Gotcha, Lassie!’ scrawled on it in purple Sharpie. Shawn, however, did not turn up.

Chapter Text

“He told you he loves you, you can’t just ignore him forever,” Burton Guster said, shoving a stack of papers into a manilla folder and putting them into his briefcase.

“Some things need to be ignored, Gus, like the The Lion King 2, and the last season of Scrubs.”

“This is serious, Shawn,” Gus said. “I’ve gotta get back to my other job now, because someone bought an overpriced zipline for the office and then proceeded to not go to work for the next three days.”

“Gus, don’t be Riley Finn,” he was saying, but the other man had already left, and Shawn Spencer was sitting in a desk chair eating pineapple fruit snacks and feeling very much alone.

His phone buzzed as he tossed the wrapper into the trash and he picked it up, spinning in the chair and putting his hand to his head automatically before proclaiming loudly,

“Let me guess...it’s Jules.”

“Hi, Shawn.”

“Impressed by my psychic prediction?”

“It’s called caller ID.”

“I’ve heard it both ways.”

She sighed audibly.

“Where are you?”

“At the office. I was about to go pick up some fruit snacks from the grocery store, but if you want me that badly, who am I to deny you an afternoon of-”

“Shawn, there’s a crime scene.”

“Intriguing. But I’ll have to pass you up on that one. These fruit snacks are delicious. They’re even shaped like little pineapples.”

“Cut the crap, Shawn, I know you’re avoiding something.”

“I’m not! I’m not avoiding!”

“All right. But this case involves The Breakfast Club, so-”

“I’ll be right there.”

-

When Shawn Spencer sauntered into his crime scene, Lassiter pretended not to be shocked. It was his job, after all, he wasn’t going to quit being a psychic detective just because of one drunk slip-up. Maybe he wasn’t mad at all, and he’d just gotten a cold or something.

Still, Shawn breezed right past him and towards O’Hara without any sort of teasing or skill-flaunting (or flaunting of any other type, really) involved.

“You said this involved The Breakfast Club, but I don’t see Molly Ringwald anywhere in this building,” he said mock-seriously, eyebrows raised.

“The victim was watching The Breakfast Club while she was murdered,” Juliet said. “She was shot in the back of the head sometime during the final scene of the movie.”

“That’s how I want to die,” Shawn quipped.

“No, it’s really not. The shooter nearly missed their mark and our victim slowly bled to death as the movie ended.”

“At least she got to finish it. It’s a classic, you know.”

He was reaching for jokes, Carlton realised, out of nervousness. He had more than a slight hint of vibrato in his voice (he’d learned to detect that from one smarmy Commander Lutz), and he was emphasising on words way too much to seem at all calm. O’Hara didn’t seem to notice, so maybe he was just being his typical obnoxious self, but this felt different. He seemed tense.

Shut up, he told himself. It’s not like you’re the psychic.

In fact, Lassiter could barely pick up on other people’s emotions at all. When he was still married, he could never tell when Victoria was frustrated with him, or even upset. He had no idea if that’d played into the destruction of their relationship, but he did know that this empathising thing wasn’t normal for him. Maybe Shawn was different, too obvious a faker. Or maybe they were closer than they seemed.

“Love you,” he had said.

Not even a full sentence, merely a fragment, and still it had pushed them apart for three days, to the point where Lassiter nearly missed the pet names and the touching and the dramatic episode.

Nearly.

And yet Shawn’s sparkling eyes drew him in without even making eye contact, so much that he almost wanted to take the two simple strides across the girl’s living room and kiss him, hard.

“Romantic, Lassie, but we’re at a crime scene,”  he imagined him saying, but Spencer was still flirting with O’Hara without an ounce of shame.

Carlton tried very hard to focus on a spatter of blood on the hardwood floor as the smooth brunette tucked a lock of hair behind his partner’s ear and watched her giggle and turn red.

He remembered blushing that night, vaguely, but most of it was a cloudy blur, and the bits he did remember were filled with him staring into Spencer’s eyes way too obviously and kissing a lot more messily than he did sober.

He wondered if he’d ever get to kiss the other man sober in the first place.

Or, really, in any state, drunk or not, he wasn’t too picky.

“Spencer, are you going to lounge around flirting with top-notch detectives, or are you going to get to work?”

Lassiter barely registered the surprise in the other man’s eyes before it flickered away, hiding behind a confident grin that he knew was fake.

“I mean, I could do that, but, really, what’s the point when the top-notch detectives around here are so dazzled by my charm?”

“Are you sensing anything or not?”

“Oh, I’m sensing something all right. Something very strong, and smelling of hard liquor and gunpowder and diabetes-inducing coffee.”

“About the murder.”

“Her boyfriend did it,” Shawn said, boredly.

“What? We haven’t even questioned him yet.”

“Check it out, there’s a suicide note over there, right?”

“It’s forged. The handwriting doesn’t match up with the victim’s.”

“Yeah, but it does match up with her latest boytoy’s. Look at the birthday card from him on her desk. See the way the ‘l’s are all loopy and pretty in both notes?”

“All right, fine. O’Hara, get this guy’s address. I’ll get a confession from him.”

“Oh, no, Lassie, I’m afraid you won’t. Not without a translator.”

“What?”

“He’s deaf.”

“How do you know?”

Spencer raised his fingers to his temple and smirked.

-

“I solved a case in record time, Gus. Record time!”

“You were just trying to one-up Lassie again because you were all flustered and embarrassed around him, weren’t you?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“You’re enunciating too much again.”

“I am not,” said Shawn, putting emphasis on each word.

“Besides, why’d you have to tell him that the guy was deaf anyway? How was that relevant?”

“Because then we know he was watching the movie with her. The subtitles were left on. Plus, she had all these ASL books lying around her apartment. It was too easy.”

“A lot of people want to learn ASL, Shawn. It’s a very useful language to know.”

“Ziplines are proven to be useful tools in an office environment, and you wouldn’t listen to me.”

“That’s completely unrelated and you know it.”

“It is not. I’m agreeing with you that many things can be useful in one’s everyday life, and ziplines just happen to be one of those things, along with having a fair amount of experience as a stripper, and knowing how to crack eggs.”

“Please don’t tell me you actually used that coupon for pole dancing lessons.”

“I did. I also took a five week course on perfecting the breakage of an egg.”

“Shawn.”

“We’ll never have bits of shell in our brownies again.”

“That’s not what I’m Shawn-ing you about.”

“Aren’t you proud of me for cracking this case perfectly? Dare I say, like an egg?:

“No, Shawn. You need to talk to Lassie.”

“I did.”

“Seriously. You need to talk to him alone, no joking around, no one-upping.”

“Alone, along with the ragtag band of raccoons that I set loose in Lassie’s attic.”

“What?”

“I’m joking. They were squirrels, and they were hardly ragtag; they were actually quite posh, in fact.”

“Shawn.”

“Fine.”

-

Lassiter was pouring himself a glass of scotch and loosening his tie when he heard a sharp rap on his front door. He headed towards the door, slightly cautious and more than a bit wary; just last week he’d been pranked by a couple of snarky teenagers, and besides, he was fairly certain that half the criminals in Santa Barbara had his address memorised.

He peered through the peephole only to see a beaming face and a pair of gleaming green eyes staring back.

“Hey, Lassie!” said Shawn Spencer, his voice muffled through the heavy door.

He unlocked it and swung it open, barring the doorway with his arm and denying Spencer direct entrance into his house.

Of course, he disregarded this entirely, weaseling his way underneath the other man’s arm and somehow getting past the barrier as well as not setting off his quick reflexes.

“What’s up?” Shawn said, making his way into Lassiter’s living room. “I almost got killed here once, remember? When that guy said we were secret sexy lovers in the nighttime? Good times, Lassie, good times.”

“Shut up,” he said, suddenly angry.

“Aw, Lassie-face, I know it was devastating with me being hurt and all, but-”

“Stop joking about how much I like you. It’s mean, Spencer, that’s what it is, and you’re really being an asshole, and I certainly can’t stand it for one more-”

The other man leaned in and kissed him, one hand digging into his hair and the other sliding warmly around his neck.

Lassiter pulled back, turning away and scowling at the ground.

“If you aren’t going to take any of this seriously, then stop wasting my time.”

“I can’t take anything seriously,” said the other, laughing derisively at himself. “I can’t do it, okay, Lassie? Everything’s a game to me, and maybe you’re the prize at the bottom of the cereal box that I can’t turn upside-down and cheat with, but I desperately want to, even if it means spilling Cheerios all over the floor, and even if it means skipping all the serious junk, I want you. But I’m not too good with being committed and following all those weird relationship rules, like not having a ringtone that contains the word ‘booty,’ and not taking someone on a date to a crime scene, and I don’t know if I’m good enough for you, really.”

“Spencer,” he said, leaning in close. “You can take me on a date to a crime scene any time.”

-

Lassie woke up in a soft bed with toned arms loosely wrapped around his waist and a certain psychic’s warm breath ghosting over his ear.

“Morning,” Shawn said, and met his mouth with unbridled enthusiasm.

-

About a week later, Lassiter was searching through his desk drawers for his wallet. He finally found it under a box of pineapple-flavoured condoms, with a familiar sticky note reading “Gotcha, Lassie!”