Hey everyone. I come bearing another multichapter Psych fic for you all. Unlike my previous fics, there's no slash in this or really any romance planned at all. It's more of a hurt/comfort/drama/family/friends fic This first chapter takes place in the beginning of season one.
Lawyers: Our client does not own Psych, nor is she gaining any profit by writing this fic. Don't sue her.
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Chapter One
A million different thoughts raced through his head and he couldn't focus on a single one of them.
'This isn't possib- not real- how am I going to- have to quit- must be wrong, he can't be, I can't be- what will I tell- can't tell anyone- isn't happening. It's not happening. No, not to me."
"Here," Dr. Field said, holding out a pamphlet that Shawn didn't even care to read the title of before he folded it up and slipped it into his back pocket. "I know this is a lot to process, but you have my number and you can call me if you have questions. I want to schedule you for a few more tests next week just to make sure this isn't-"
Shawn's mind fell into a fog. He barely heard the rest of the doctor's words before he drifted back out into the waiting room; his arms hanging lifelessly by his sides. He would have left, completely forgetting to schedule another appointment if the secretary at the front desk hadn't called him over.
After telling her that he didn't care about the time or day he came back, she filled out a small appointment card that he put into his back pocket along with the pamphlet. As he left the small office, the secretary, who had been so rude to him before when he was checking in for his appointment, gave him a kind smile.
Shawn slipped his helmet over his head before hopping on his bike to go. As he turned the key in the ignition and the bike roared to life, he could practically hear his dad's voice asking, "Should you really be driving that death trap in your condition?"
His condition.
Silently fuming, Shawn pulled out of the parking lot. He didn't care what the doctor or anybody else said, he didn't have a condition. The diagnosis was wrong. He wasn't-
His motorcycle rumbled angrily as he traveled the side roads around Santa Barbara traffic, passing through different neighborhoods. He didn't really have a destination in mind. He was simply driving for the sake of driving; a mindless task he could focus on.
Blinker on, turn left. Slow down to stop at the stop sign. Continue going straight. Blinker on again, turn right this time.
He didn't want to go home because then he would be alone with nothing to focus on but thoughts he didn't want to be thinking about. He also didn't really want to be around anybody; not Gus, not anyone at the station, especially not his father. How was it possible for someone to want to be alone and yet not want to be alone at the same time?
'I suppose it makes sense' he thought distantly, his mind drifting back to what he had been trying to avoid thinking about. 'It would explain why I've been missing certain details that I usually would have noticed in a passing glance.'
'No' a part of his mind snarled at him. 'You were just distracted. Everyone has a few off days. Stop trying to accept it! And it doesn't make sense, nobody in our family's ever had- what the hell is it even called?'
'The doctor said almost half of all cases occur in families where there is no history of the disease,' he pointed out, unable to find it in himself to care that he was talking to himself.
'The doctor's a quack! Don't you think we would have noticed something like-'
'It's so gradual, I couldn't even tell...'
Suddenly aware that he was going sixty on a thirty miles per hour road, he slowed down and forced himself to focus more on driving, though he still couldn't keep his thoughts from wandering.
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It was supposed to be a routine checkup; one that he had been putting off for awhile partly because he had been so busy traveling the country, but also because he hadn't really seen the point. When he finally did get back to Santa Barbara, the whole psychic thing made his life even more busy and the last thing he wanted to do was spend an hour of his day at the eye doctors. Still, it needed to be done, and if he ever wanted them to stop sending him letters about his long-past-due checkup -how his old eye doctor ever found out about his new apartment address was completely beyond him- he'd have to bite the bullet and go in to see them.
Not counting the time spent in the waiting room, it was also supposed to be a fairly quick visit. He's in, he reads some letters and numbers off of a chart, they give him those annoying eye drops, shine a light in his eyes, and he's good to go.
His first clue that something was off was when the doctor was using one of their ridiculously large contraptions to shine a little light into his eyes and, examining them closely, he hummed questionably. Adjusting the light's direction, he continued the examination for several more minutes, making curious sound effects the whole time.
"What?" Shawn finally asked.
Pulling the contraption away, along with the one Shawn had to rest his chin on to hold his head in place, the doctor sat down on a rolling chair and asked, "Do you had a history of night blindness, Mr. Spencer?"
"Yeah, a little bit, I guess," Shawn said, not quite sure where this conversation was going.
The eye doctor, Dr. Field, asked several more questions, many of which Shawn answered 'no' to, before pulling out yet another eye chart to hang up across the room. Instructing Shawn to look straight on at the chart and to not move his head at all, he had Shawn read off the numbers on the chart from left to right and then right to left. Several more tests like this one were performed before Shawn was shooed back out into the waiting room while the doctor checked something.
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'I should have just left then' he thought, taking a left down another random street.
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His next clue that this checkup was turning out to be not so routine was when he caught a glimpse of Dr. Field talking rather animatedly on the phone with someone while looking through his medical files. When the looks the secretary shot him became more concerned than annoyed, Shawn started to get a little nervous and wanted jump up and ask what was wrong with everybody. Did he somehow step into the twilight zone? It sure felt like it.
Dr. Field was anything but a ray of sunshine when he came back out into the waiting room. He took Shawn into his office and explained that he wanted to run another test, a more thorough one, but it would take about an hour to perform and if Shawn didn't have the time, they should reschedule for another day.
"Would you just come out and tell me what the hell this test is supposed to explain?" Shawn asked, frustrated with the whole situation.
Folding his hands on his lap, Dr. Field said, "I think you may have something called retinitis pigmentosa. It's an inherited eye disease that can be caused by a number of genetic defects and causes damage to the retina."
"But I already told you, nobody in my family has major eye problems," Shawn said.
Nobody that he knew of, at least.
"It can still develop even though you have no previous family history of vision loss," Dr. Field said.
Shawn sucked in a breath as the severity of the matter slowly sunk in. "Vision loss? How... how bad are we talking here?"
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As he drove through yet another neighborhood, tears welled up at the surface, threatening to spill free from his eyes. His stupid, stupid eyes.
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"Well, the disease and its progression is different in each case," Dr. Field explained. "But until we do the test and know that this is what it is for sure, I don't want to worry you with the details."
'Too late, Doc.'
"I'll take the test."
He had to know.
So he was brought into yet another room for this test. It was called an electroretinogram, and if the name wasn't enough to deter him, the brief description of the procedure was enough to make him want to go running out the door. He would rather not have electrodes placed on his eyes and if they were just like contacts, then why were numbing eye drops required?
Despite all this, Shawn still sat down in the chair and let them numb his eyes with the eye drops. It was the weirdest feeling he's ever had the displeasure of experiencing. His eyes were propped open after that and an electrical sensor was placed on each eye. It kind of felt like a fly landed on his eye, sat down and decided to take a nap. Following all of this was a series of flashing lights and his response to normal room light and darkness.
Almost an hour later, he was led back into the waiting room under the instructions that he couldn't rub his eyes for an hour afterward. Sitting in a waiting room chair that he found quite uncomfortable at this point, he twisted a magazine up in his hands to distract himself from the urge to rub his eyes.
While Shawn waited for Dr. Field to come and get him to explain the results, it occurred to him that this was the perfect form of torture. Not only was he at his nerves end waiting for these results, the feeling in his eyes was driving him crazy. Maybe he should go put on his motorcycle helmet and make a show of clawing at it dramatically in a failed attempt at rubbing his eyes.
He blinked rapidly and one eye twitched. Maybe it was a whole mind-over-matter thing and he only wanted to rub his eyes because they told him not to.
The secretary smiled at him and gave him a look that made him feel like a toddler who just got a shot and didn't even cry. Just as he was about to suggest to her that they give out lollipops after tests like these, Dr. Field called him back.
As he walked back to the man's office, he went through a slew of different emotions. First and foremost was fear, an 'Oh my god, I must have it, why else would the secretary do a complete one-eighty on her attitude and act so freakishly nice to me?' type-of-fear. Then there was an 'after all I've done, why is there even a possible chance of this happening to me' anger, followed by a hysterical 'This can't be happening, my eye-sight is everything to me!' All of this was wrapped up by a calm 'Everything will be fine. Stuff like that just doesn't happen to me.'
Shawn sat down in the same chair he sat in the first time he was in Dr. Field's office. One hand curled around the chair's arm until his knuckles turned white and the other hand rested on his leg; his fingers pulling at a loose thread in his jeans.
Dr. Field sat down across from him, sighing quietly through his nose before he said, "Your tests came back positive."
"Positive," Shawn breathed, looking down. "That's not so positive, is it?"
"You had abnormal results in response to each flash and based on your previous symptoms along with what I saw when I examined your eyes, I'd have to go with my original diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa," Dr. Field explained. "There are a few more tests I could try if you want more proof, but-"
"Just... Tell me," Shawn said, stopping the man. "What does this mean? You said vision loss."
"As I said before, the disease and its progression differ in each case," the man said, getting into doctor-mode. "In the most common form of retinitis pigmentosa, loss of night vision would be the first thing to occur."
He hadn't realized that there was something off about how he saw during the night. It was night, it was supposed to be dark out and therefore hard to see things. So yeah, it was harder to see things in the dark now then when he was a kid, but couldn't you just chalk that up to getting older?
"Following that would be a loss of your peripheral vision which, judging from the field tests you did earlier with the charts, has already started," he said.
"What?" Shawn asked, looking up at the man. "Field tests?"
"Yes, with the long number charts," the doctor said. "When I told you to read off the numbers from left to right and vice-versa, you skipped past the first and last five numbers on the charts. The other tests showed similar results."
How could he not notice something like that?
"What about treatment?" he asked, grasping at straws.
"Wearing sunglasses outside may help preserve some vision," The doctor said. "Although there are some studies being done on possible treatment, there's no actual cure at the moment."
"Is that all?" Shawn asked after a moment of silence, the hand on his lap curled into a fist with his nails digging into his palm. "I'll just... just have night blindness and lose my peripheral vision?"
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Suddenly a dog seemed to emerge from nowhere, walking directly into his path. His heart leaped into his throat as he swerved the bike around it, breaking once he was clear. Thankfully, there was no traffic on this road, so he didn't have to worry about plowing into an oncoming car. He looked over his shoulder in the direct of the dog, but he couldn't see it. Had he hit it anyway?
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"Let me assure you, Mr. Spencer, that this is only in extreme cases and usually doesn't happen for years, but the last symptom is a very restricted tunnel vision and in some cases blindness, though not usually."
Usually. That was the problem, wasn't it? Not definitely, but usually.
The room was suddenly far too hot and the air too thick.
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Shawn twisted around on the bike until he was practically facing the direction the dog was in. The animal was fine and it looked at him curiously before walking away. Shawn breathed a sigh of relief before an icy dread shivered in the pit of his stomach as the situation fully hit him.
He almost hadn't seen it in time. The dog had probably been walking toward the road at a leisurely pace and he hadn't seen it until it was almost too late.
"I'm just distracted," he mumbled. "That's all."
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"I'm... I'm going to go blind?"
"You will retain some of your sight."
Probably was the unspoken word there. He wouldn't definitely keep some of his sight, he would probably keep some of his sight.
"It will be very restricted though. I'm sorry Mr. Spencer."
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Shawn decided to head back to his apartment after the whole dog incident. Though he still didn't like the idea of being alone with his thoughts, at the moment he didn't like the idea of driving even more. Turning on all the lights, he paced his apartment, trying to decide what his next move should be.
"I don't need to figure out my next move because everything's fine," he said adamantly. "Nothing's changed."
Eyeing the empty wall on the far side of the living room, Shawn suddenly had an idea. Grabbing a marker, he started at one end of the wall and, moving across it horizontally, he evenly numbered the wall from one to forty. When he was done, the wall looked almost like an eye doctor's chart, just with more numbers. Grabbing some duct tape from a drawer, he taped down an X at a central point in his living room where he a good enough distance away from the wall as well as centered.
"If anything does change, I'll know and be able to adjust accordingly," he said as he stood over the X and stared straight forward at the wall.
He could see between the numbers three and thirty-six.
Marking the points where his vision cut off on the living room wall, he capped the marker and mumbled to himself, "This isn't that big of a deal. Losing some of my peripheral vision just means I can't catch clues out of the corner of my eye. I'll just have to look around a bit more, that's all."
'And no one has to know about this...'
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That's all for chapter one. I pretty much randomly came up with this like two days ago, details of the plot and stuff like that. I know the blind thing has been done before, but I want to go deeper into the emotion of something like this. Also, I'm not a doctor, so please excuse any medical mistakes.
Tell me if you like it so far. Review please!