A/N: Psych the Musical totally made Mary/Yang canon. Some people might say "Oh, Promised Land was just a song that Shawn wrote for his play-within-a-play," or "Oh, Yang didn't see a real angel; that was just a hallucination she had while she was dying."
I say, screw those arguments, because that scene was totally real and Yang and Mary are in love and they're going to have a thousand angel/demon hybrid babies together in the afterlife.
Consider that your prelude to this piece.
I hope you enjoy it! Please R&R!
Running, running, oh, it felt nice to run. It didn't feel great. It didn't feel awful. Yang was just running through the woods, away from the authorities, to wherever her feet led her, and that was just nice.
This was freedom, wasn't it? Her entire life, she'd wondered what it felt like beyond the brief moments that she could barely recall: she'd played in her father's backyard as a child, but was never allowed more than thirty minutes a week. Six years ago, she'd fallen in love with a man who was doomed from the start to be murdered horribly, a fate which his caring about her freedom only made crueler and more gruesome. And even once her father had finally died, she had been carted straight back to the asylum.
Everyone talked about freedom like it was a prize. But since she'd escaped, it hadn't been more than running.
She ran too fast and tripped on a root. Her elbows and her forehead struck the hard ground and, while she tried her hardest not to grunt in pain, the shackles around her wrists jangled discordantly together beneath her chest. The woods were too dark for anyone to successfully follow the sound. But the fall did slow Yang down.
She wearily pushed herself up, bending over her dirt-scraped knees and trying to recall what she had just done. None of this had been planned. The shock of being practically alone and so very close to a dark and fresh outdoors had brought forth the primal question, "Why am I in this cage?" and in a burst of suppressed insanity Yang had hit the guard over the head with her bag of treats and gifts. There had been some heavy stuff in that bag; she really could have hurt him.
No, don't think that. Killing one man in her life – her own father, to boot – was enough for her, and although she grinned whenever she was called a "serial killer," the last thing she wanted was for those words to be true.
Everyone thought they were true, didn't they?
With a cursory look over her shoulder, she produced the key she'd stolen from the guard's pocket. As she fumbled with her shackles, she hummed to herself:
I'll be back in the cell, my marshmallow hell... dee-dee, dee-dee... If only this were a musical; that would be an apt reprise to her adorable establishing number. It occurred to her that if someone caught her, she would not be going back to kind and cozy Willowbrooke but somewhere much more punitive – like her old solitary chamber. She needed to hide.
But where? Was there a single person she could go to who wouldn't report her immediately? No.
Shawn, as much as he believed in her, was obligated to bring her back to the hospital.
Z was kind of going through his own stuff at the moment.
Everyone else she had once known would only see the girl on the cover of the book staring back at them. They would scream and scramble for their phones, unable to separate her face from those black words stamped across it: Serial Killer.
Just as she was realizing this, the shackles came undone. Yang let them drop to the ground and let go of the key, which disappeared into the night, never to be found.
She wrapped the shawl she'd taken from her goody bag around her shoulders and started running – she was so much more efficient now – towards the dull light in the distance that, with any luck, came from Elisa's house. Yes, freedom had been a worthy experiment, but it was a bust. If she turned herself in, her punishment probably wouldn't be so horrible.
But when Yang reached the edge of the woods, she found that her light was only a street lamp overlooking a fast food restaurant. She had stumbled upon a commercial street, where most of the stores were still open but the customers were beginning to drift away. There was no Shawn in sight. No cops, either; not even a Willowbrooke orderly.
Fighting the urge to cry, Yang knelt down on the pavement. Civilization was not her environment – the cold ground made her legs shake. Even though the veil of florescent lights made it appear shallow and dank, the evening sky still stretched farther out from this parking lot than it ever did from the hospital's gate. This was Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara did not want her to sit comfortably in a white room filled with all the medication she could swallow and people who wanted to cure her and keep her there.
It wanted her to run.
She hugged her shawl around herself, using the edges to dab the sweat from her face as she thought. There had to have been a good reason for this, some sort of concrete plan that she'd forgotten the moment she got out of the car. Maybe she had unfinished business. Whatever it was, she decided she might as well honor it. She certainly wasn't about to go back into the forest; she could just see herself getting lost there forever, popping out at different edges but never finding her prison.
The adrenaline had worn off. As Yang tried to stand, she felt the effects of tripping and falling in the woods: burning hands, scratched and aching shins. Not to mention the pangs in her chest, although those were no doubt from sorrow.
No more running. She was ready to just lie down in the middle of that parking lot and stay there when she saw it across the street, like a prayer straight from Heaven.
A bus stop.
"So! Where are you headed?" Having settled herself in a hard blue chair three rows from the driver, Yang turned with a half-smile to the old woman sitting across the aisle and feigned conversation.
The neckless woman twisted her head around like an owl. She glared at Yang for several seconds before answering curtly, "I'm headed home."
Yang had sat down across from this person because her hideous yellow and purple and brown coat was a sign of either intense senility or an insanity so deep that even Yang herself could not fathom it. The woman's glasses were half an inch thick, too, so there was no chance she would recognize her and start shouting for the police. Still, as the woman stared at her with disdain, Yang felt the phantom presence of .
Eventually, the woman glanced at Yang's orange shawl and turned away, and Yang relaxed. She was a master of disguise.
A calm suburban image of Santa Barbara blurred along the windows of the bus. Yang had no idea where they were going, but she was glad to be under the will of the bus driver. She would keep riding until he chose to stop in the vicinity of the police station or the hospital – she'd certainly paid him enough to keep on driving until morning. A five dollar bill in that little bus fare box, and the driver was so tired he didn't even bat an eyelash at her generosity.
Yang absentmindedly rubbed her wrist. The five dollar bill was the only cash she'd found on the sidewalk by the bus stop. But you still did a good deed, she told herself. You are so not a serial killer.
She turned again to the old woman. Not knowing where she was going really was making her nuts. "Um," she said hoarsely, "where, exactly, is home for you?"
The woman harumphed. "What are you, writing a book? I get off two stops from here, if that's any help."
"Oh." It wasn't. But it was a good thing Yang had asked – just as she was sheepishly turning to the window, there was a screech under her feet and the scenery came into focus. And the setting was unmistakable.
The bus driver hollered the name of the university, the very school where Yang's father had been a professor. Word had gotten to her that "Mr. Yin" had been buried somewhere on campus, but, being incarcerated and all, she had never been able to see the grave. As the bus came to a stop at the sidewalk, Yang jumped to her feet and went running down the aisle.
"Keep the change!" she said to the bus driver as she rammed her way through the door.
They'd cremated Mr. Yin and dumped his ashes in a hole outside the building where he'd taught. She'd been told that the grave was unmarked, but that its location was no secret to the populace. The first student she found – an obviously stoned freshman reclining on a bench – pointed her straight to it.
"Hey, lady!" he called after her as she started walking away. "Aren't you, like, the other one?" He laughed. "Yeah, you're the 'How Murder Kept Me Skinny' chick!"
Yang froze. In that moment, she was ready to hold out her arms so this bum could tie her up and drag her back to jail. But somehow, she resisted. She put a hand up to her chin and muttered, "No, I'm not."
The kid laughed again. "Nice."
The grave was unmistakable. What used to be a craggy slab of granite had long been overtaken by stalks of grass about a foot tall. The site was watered daily by the students, families, and tourists who came by the school to spit on his remains. Making her own contribution had been Yang's dream for about five minutes now, and when she turned the corner to find the morgue, just after feeling her heart fall into her stomach, she immediately prepared to expectorate.
But her mouth was completely dry.
She shrugged it off and approached her father's grave. She felt pretty confident. The man under that grass was manipulative, egotistical, and ruthless, and despite all that, she had bested him. She'd taken his life for Shawn's sake, and now she was going to confront him again, this time for no one's sake but her own. She would tell him everything she'd been unable to tell him.
She knelt down and took a deep breath, preparing to lower her voice so she wouldn't be overheard. Indeed, she spoke so quietly that no sound came out whatsoever.
Every time she started to say something, she thought better of it.
Everything she wanted to say was, ultimately, pointless.
Her father had been a genius. What could she possibly say to him that he didn't already know?
I hate you, Daddy. You were an evil, evil man and I'm glad I killed you.
"I know, dear."
I could have been normal, Daddy. There are people at the hospital who were born the way they are, but you made me crazy.
"I know, dear."
I was always so lonely, Daddy. You never let me have any friends, and then you murdered the man I loved...
Mary.
Oh God, Mary! Yang gasped as guilt flooded over her. What was she doing here? Her one night of freedom, and she was choosing to spend it with a monster instead of a prince. With her heart pumping violently, she got to her feet and started running.
She barely got ten feet away before she remembered: Mary was buried upstate, in his family's plot. She could run all night and wouldn't reach him. For the second time that night, Yang fell to her knees and swallowed the urge to cry.
She looked over her shoulder. Mr. Yin's grave was unmarked.
It would have to do.
"I want to talk to Mary Lightly," she said breathlessly as she crawled back towards the tombstone. She was careful to kneel before the side without the overgrown grass. "Mary? Mary, it's me..."
Yang closed her eyes. No one had called her by her real name in so long; she could barely remember it. "It's me. Pauline. I'm sorry I didn't make it to your funeral. I wanted to go, but... well, you know why. I won't get into that.
"I really do miss you. It hurts, that's how much I miss you. I mean, I haven't even tried to talk to you like this before, because it hurts so much. The way you were taken from me... I've been deprived of so many joys of life, and that's not fair, but with you I actually had something before it was taken from me, and that's just painful. If I'm being completely honest, I've actually tried to make myself forget about you. Don't worry – it doesn't work. You're constantly showing up in my dreams.
"There is not another living soul out there who knows about us." Yang felt a smile flicker on her lips as she said, "Actually, everyone who's read my book is apparently convinced that you were a major homo."
She drifted off on that thought. There was a tangible silence between her and the blank tombstone as she realized that she could have left him a better legacy than an ambiguously gay character based on him. She'd had plenty of chances, hundreds of opportunities to offer up a kind word for him, but she hadn't followed through.
She bit her lip and cursed silently to the ground before resuming her speech quietly. "Listen, Mary, there's something I never told you when you were alive, and I don't know if I wish you'd known or if I'm glad you didn't... Maybe everything would have been different if I'd told you. Who knows." She gulped. "Um. I got pregnant. With your kid, Mary, the last time I visited you. Um..."
Yang hesitated. This story was not exactly a secret – excluding the father's name, every detail was well-documented in the mental hospital's medical records. But telling Mary, whether or not he could actually hear her, was somehow almost too difficult. She fiddled with her scarf as she tried to come up with the right words. She wasn't sure that there were any.
But this was something he would want to hear.
"I... I was pregnant when they arrested me. I had a baby in an insane asylum. A baby boy. You have a son. My cute nurse friend – remember her? – and her husband, they're raising him, but I made sure that they named him Mary. They let me see him sometimes, and he looks just like you. Blond. A little disheveled, but secretly very handsome. He plays sports, all kinds of kiddie sports, and he's kind of a little genius. I think he's going to be a... be a doctor..."
The words started coming out in whispers as Yang broke into tears. She collapsed over her knees and latched her hand onto the top of the tombstone, the closest she could get to grabbing Mary by the shoulders and shaking him. "I'm sorry," she blubbered. "I got on a tangent. I... I'm really just here to say goodbye, finally. I wasn't there for you when you died and I've been avoiding you ever since, because on top of being a lousy serial killer and a lousy mother, I was a lousy girlfriend, too. For the love of God, if you're planning on doing some 'guardian angel' shit when I die, don't. I don't deserve it."
She cried onto the grass until she was physically too tired to cry anymore. She fell asleep right there, huddled into the ground, and entered a dream of the last time she and Mary had been alone together.
It was a memory she had successfully suppressed until now. In its place, she recalled the final time they'd seen each other but not spoken – Shawn and Gus had been there with them, and while Yang remembered there being a bitter anger between herself and Mary, they'd not been able to express it openly with Psych around and, thus, she couldn't remember why it was there.
The fight had occurred two weeks earlier. Minus Shawn and Gus, the scene was nearly the same: Yang, tied to the unnaturally white walls as she dealt with the poorest mental health state of her life, sat captive before Mary and his disturbed optimism.
"But I'm still very allergic to them, which I learned the hard way. The doctors were not as understanding as they could have been." He leaned against the wall and quietly counted something out on his fingers. "Apples, Minnie Mouse, rain, my mother, the Dachshund... yes, that was my month."
His stories were so inane. Yang loved them, and if listening to him tell them could be a daily part of her life, she would have been happy. Of course, he knew that, which was why he visited her as often as he could. For some reason, he wanted her to be happy.
That was what she couldn't stand.
"What about you?" Mary continued, kneeling before the glass. "What kind of shenanigans have you been up to?"
Yang crossed her arms. "Relaxation therapy. Electroshock therapy. Lots of pills." She flashed him a psychotic little smile. "It's delicious."
"Oh God." Mary closed his eyes and grimaced. "That's not fair. Why do you put up with this, Paul?"
"Please don't call me that..."
"You and I both know that you're not the person who should be enduring this torture. You just won't admit it."
"Mary, don't start this again," Yang pleaded. She clasped her hands together and shook her head so he might get the message. But he didn't.
"No, no, I get it. You're trying to protect the real Mr. Yang, whoever he may be. Just remember that he's the true evil here. You shouldn't have to be his martyr."
I'mbeing the martyr? Yang thought to herself. If anyone was being a martyr, it was Mary. How many times had she tried to tell him she belonged in this prison? Every time he started talking like this, she wanted to cry. And she would have, if she hadn't long ago forgotten how.
Mary pressed the back of his hand gently against the glass. "If you're not ready to tell the truth to the world, at least tell it to –"
"Stop coming to see me."
"Excuse me?"
Yang gasped. She hadn't meant to say it, but now that she had, she realized how much she meant it. She stood on her feet with her eyes wide and her hands balled up in stress. "You shouldn't see me anymore. I think I'm bad for you, and it's in your best interests to stay away from me."
Mary stared at her blankly. "I don't understand..."
"I don't understand you, either! So you dated a girl for a year and a half just to find out that she's secretly the serial killer you've been chasing for ten times as long. And that doesn't make you hate her? Or at least want to dump her?"
The corners of Mary's mouth ticked up – from him, that was pretty much a grin. "What can I say?" he said. "I love you."
"But why?" Yang shouted, putting her face up to the glass as if she could tell by looking at him closer. "Look, I know you don't want to see it. But I am crazy. I'm unstable and depressed... I can't even name all the things that are wrong with me. I'm not this flawless little ingenue that you think I am, okay? I might not be the real killer, but I'm still broken beyond repair and –"
"Back up, Paul! Did you just say what I think you said?" Mary jumped to his feet with an actual grin on his face.
Oh no. Yang suddenly found that her lungs had been squeezed empty. She looked at the floor in fear.
"There is someone else!" Mary said, pointing his index finger straight at her – a strong, deliberate gesture of the hand. "You admit it! Oh God, you have no clue how happy I am right now. Look at me." He struck a fist against the glass, making Yang jerk her head up, and walked up so close to her that she could look into his eyes without seeing the rims of his spectacles. "I believe you when you say you have issues. Everybody has issues. But yours are not bad enough for solitary confinement. So I can leave you physically, but I will never stop asserting your innocence or praying for your happiness, because I love you more than life."
Yang shook off her fear for just long enough to shout, "So you're more insane than I am!"
"Well. That was embarrassing."
Yang opened her eyes when she heard the voice. She was in the same place where she'd fallen asleep: kneeling behind her father's grave, though much, much later at night. Everything about it seemed real. But at the same time, for some reason, she knew that she was still dreaming.
She turned around and saw the reason why. Mary was standing behind her, or was doing something akin to standing; the soles of his feet were an inch off the ground. Dressed completely in white (pants and a T-shirt, no baggy jumpsuit like he had to wear at the asylum), he seemed to emit his own light – even in the dark of night, Yang could see every detail of his form.
"We were both different back then," he said in a voice that echoed subtly. "Scared. Weirdly pale. Both living in the same plane of existence. But things change."
He walked on air until he was floating right next to her. Yang looked at him, rubbed her tired eyes, and looked at him again. The man she saw was unmistakably Mary, but a slimmer, healthier, happier Mary. He seemed genuinely calm, with very little of the silent intensity that had once sent chills down the spine of an entire police precinct. These were no hallucinatory alterations to the truth, but changes that could occur naturally to a man after three years in paradise.
Yang opened her mouth to say something, anything to him: a greeting, a question, an apology; it didn't matter as long as they were conversing face-to-face again. But she found that she was mute.
The spirit had enough words for the both of them. "I think back to that last conversation of ours all the time," he said. "And after a good deal of consideration, I believe I know what you were thinking. My manner was atrocious, but besides that, I was being willfully blind. You really were quite broken back then, and seeing that made me learn my lesson. You'll be happy to know I listened very carefully to every word you just said. And I still know you were wrong about everything.
"First of all, that last request you made is impossible for me to honor. See, they assign guardian angels. You can beg all you want, but I don't have a choice. You're my true love, and they are obsessed with love up there."
With a sigh, he knelt down and rested an arm over her father's tombstone. His arm did not actually touch the stone, coming to a definite stop an inch away from its surface. And even in kneeling position, he still floated above the grass. He was like a projection that wasn't aligned perfectly with the screen. He was like an actor in a movie, and although it seemed like their gazes had met, Yang felt for sure she was following the eyes of someone who couldn't really look back.
"I know you lied, Paul," he said with sympathy. "The story you told about our son? That's not what happened. There is no baby Mary; you had an abortion. Is that correct?"
Or maybe Yang was the actress with whom Mary was trying to connect. She wanted to explain it all: how she couldn't trust herself with her child, how she couldn't trust anyone with her child, how it was all due to her father's abuses. At the very least, she wanted to answer "Yes, but..." before Mary interrupted her. But she couldn't do anything but nod and watch him react.
"You shouldn't have lied about that," he said sternly. He looked to the side and fiddled with his glasses, and then, to Yang's surprise, he cracked a smile. "And you lied so badly, too; if no one else alive knows we were lovers, how could you possibly convince someone to curse a baby boy with my name? I would expect a bit more from a woman who passed off pure fiction as her autobiography."
In life, his laugh had typically just been a sharp exhale hiding behind a thin smile. And that it still was, although now, it had an angelic ring to it that lit up the lawn and made Yang laugh too in spite of herself. Blushing, she looked down at her hands.
"Hey. Look at me," said Mary. She did. "From way up there, you can see everything. I know exactly who you are. What you've done. But that doesn't change a thing. At this point there is nothing, short of maybe digging up and desecrating my father's grave, that could convince me not to love you."
Their eyes met. Yang still couldn't say he was really there, holding her gaze with his sad blue eyes. But he murmured, "Ask yourself this, for me: What would you do with one day to live and absolute freedom? Then go do it. You deserve it." And she knew it was advice she could – and had to – take to heart.
She also knew that his touch would never come as he hesitantly cupped his hand to place it underneath her chin. But her breath caught in anticipation nonetheless. Just the giddy warmth of seeing him there made her respond in kind as he moved his lips towards hers for an impossible kiss.
Immediately, she opened her eyes to the earliest light of dawn. Her forearms and shins were sore from her sleeping on top of them. Her hair was wet with dew. There was no indication she had done anything but sleep through the entire night, except for the subtle taste of sardines on her breath.
The taste made her smile. Some things really didn't change.
That was the first night Yang had spent with Mary in ages, and she woke up from it well-rested. It was early – no later than six in the morning – but her eyes took in enough general light to make out the details of her surroundings. The stone she kicked as she stood up was her father's headstone; she was stretching behind a relatively old brick building; and to her right, there was a cluster of deciduous trees with a stream running through it, watering the purple flowers that lined the bank. Before her was a Santa Barbara she could navigate.
Hugging her shawl around her shoulders, Yang set out. Her task now was simple: she would go to the police, help them find Z and, if it was possible, clear her friend's name. Shawn would see she'd redeemed herself, she would definitely be in Z's good graces again, and she would be living the life she was comfortable with.
But just as she reached the quad, she recalled the advice she'd gotten from her vision. Was she really just going to turn herself in? That wouldn't be any fun!
That wouldn't be her.
With a timid smirk inching across her face, she pickpocketed a cell phone from the jeans of the first hung-over co-ed she spotted stumbling around the quad. In merely moments, she retrieved a brilliant hiding spot, a series of riddles, and Shawn's phone number from her memory, and then she went running into the city.
Yang was going to play a little game. And for the first time in her life, it was undoubtedly the right thing to do.
A/N: Yup.
I worked pretty long and hard on this fic, so I really hope you liked it! Reviews are always appreciated!