A/N: More fun times with Lassie and Shawn. Basically the inspiration behind this chapter was all the ideas I've had for this fandom as I watched the show. I'm hoping to get rid of the old ones so new ones can take over. This seemed like a good way to let them out.

I don't own the guys. I do own the good doctor, not that that's anything to be proud of.


Lassiter had known that there was a chance of this happening when Shawn had suggested that they play this nearly straight, going in as themselves. Things had gotten too real too fast, but if he tried to stop now, the shrink would get suspicious. There was no way out, and things were getting out of hand.

Shawn looked at him, all the jokes and the laughter gone from his face. "Sometimes, it feels like you don't trust me."

"And why should I? I've known you for years, Shawn; I've watched you flit from one girl to the next like a hummingbird, all the while having a crush on my partner—."

"You knew about that?"

"Everyone knew about that! You're not exactly Capt. Subtlety of the USS Secret Keeper, you dope. And why should I think that things will be any different with us? Why should I believe anything aside from the idea that you're going to wake up one morning, decide you're done with me, and move on to the next bar floozy you meet?"

"Is-Is that what this is about? You think I'm going to get bored with you?"

"Why would I think anything else?"

"Because this is different, Lassie, because this is you. I've been waiting for you ever since…do you remember after the separation? That night at the bar, the night you'd been separated for two years?"

"Not really."

"That's because you were really, really drunk. I was at this bar, flirting with some engaged woman, and I saw you from across the room, yelling at the empty space behind the bar like you thought the bartender was still there. I went over, and we talked, and you told me…you told me you missed having someone to go home to, someone who could pick you up from the bar when you were too drunk to drive, someone to give you a reason to stay home instead of going to get drunk in the first place. The whole time, you kept insisting you weren't drunk, and that you were fine to drive home, and that that wasn't the point. But I took your keys out of your pocket when you passed out on me, and I drove you home in your car. You woke up once I had pulled into your driveway, and once you figured out what was going on, you told me that I should stay with you that night, and you'd take me back to the bar to get my bike in the morning. I woke up on your couch with your gun in my face because you didn't remember inviting me in and you thought I had broken in to sleep on your favorite couch." Shawn grinned at the memory, his eyes never leaving Carlton's face. "I've been waiting for you ever since, Lassie. Now that I finally have you, I'm not going to screw this up, and I am not going to get bored."

Carlton blinked. It was the most sincere thing Shawn had ever said to him, which probably should have told him something deep and unsettling about their long association, considering he knew it was all a lie, but for a moment, for a moment, he almost let himself believe. The truth was, he remembered waking up with Shawn in his house, he remembered driving Shawn back to the bar, and he remembered some story Shawn had sold him about walking to his house because it was closer. He also remembered that he had never told Shawn where he lived.

"And don't say floozy," Shawn finished with a grimace. "It makes you sound too much like my dad."

"You've spent a lot of time in casual relationships, Shawn?" the therapist asked, drawing both their attention once more.

"Let's call them what they were, doc, one night stands."

"Why do you think that might be?"

Shawn grinned, shaking his head, but Lassiter could see the seriousness in his eyes. "I can't remember the last functional relationship I was even aware of. I've never had any solid role models for healthy, long-lasting relationships, and before Lassie, I thought they were invented by Hollywood so they could dangle one more thing in front of us that we could delude ourselves into believing we could have. Now…now I don't know what I think."

"Carlton, is there anything you'd like to share at this point?" He glared at the woman sitting across the rug from them. "Perhaps if you told Shawn when you first knew you wanted to be with him?"

Lassiter sighed. He didn't know when the conversation had become something more than an act for the therapist's benefit, but he knew the answer he would have to give. "Let me start this by saying that any police information shared or referenced during this session is completely confidential."

"Of course."

He turned back to face Shawn. "Do you remember that speed dating case?"

"Only like it was yesterday," Shawn told him, bouncing only slightly on the couch, his grin nearly splitting his face in two.

"We were undercover," Carlton continued unnecessarily, "and you kept unbuttoning my shirt and touching me and talking about my chest hair."

"And you loved every second of it, right?" He snapped his fingers. "I knew the stern bush would get you," Shawn pronounced, grinning.

Lassiter tried to scowl, but he couldn't hide the ghost of a smile he knew from the other man's expression Shawn had seen. "Actually, it made me want to shoot you a little bit. But that was when I realized that yelling at you was the one thing in my life that I could do without being reminded of…Victoria," he admitted, looking down at the floor. And the truth will set me free, he thought wistfully.

"Victoria?"

"His ex-wife," Shawn clarified, his voice lighter than the subject should have allowed.

"You were married?" she asked with just a little too much shock in her voice, turning back to Lassiter.

"She was a bitch," Shawn interjected.

Carlton looked at him as though he wanted to argue, but could find no flaw in the younger man's reasoning. "Anyway," he said forcefully, changing the topic as quickly as possible, "that was when I realized…that you meant something to me. That you were important. That I wanted to keep you around."

Shawn grinned and took Lassiter's hand. He had to try less and less not to flinch away from the younger man's touch. "Lassie, as sweet as it is for you to say that, I want the people we care about to know it, too."

Lassiter saw the opportunity in Shawn's words and pounced on it. He kept his tone dark and accusatory. "Then why doesn't your father know about us, Shawn?" Carlton had to work to keep the grin off his face as the other man's eyes rounded in shock. If Lassiter was going to keep inventing a relationship, he was at least going to make it an interesting one.

Dr. Forest turned her chair to face Shawn more directly. "Shawn, have you kept your relationship with Carlton a secret from your father?"

The reddening of Shawn's face was beyond priceless, and Carlton was determined to remember every second of the look. "Yes, but it's more complicated than that. It's not like I'm ashamed of anything, I just don't think he'd be able to handle it." He turned in his seat to face Lassiter. "My dad and I just got to a good place in our relationship again. I'd really hate to have to go back to never speaking to him again because he didn't know how to deal with us."

"What do you mean, go back to never speaking to him again, Shawn?" The woman asked it with a gently confused look in her eye.

"My dad and I…we have a complicated relationship. When I was young, he and my mom got divorced. I blamed him. He spent the next few years trying to control me, I spent them rebelling, and when I graduated I moved to Argentina for a while. When I came back to Santa Barbara a few years ago, my dad and I started working on…fixing things. Now, we're almost okay again. If he can't handle my relationship with Carlsbad Caverns over here, then I don't want to have him as a part of my life, so for now I'm not giving him the option. Maybe once he and I have had a little more time to build the "father son" thing back up, I'll give it a try, but for now he hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt." He turned in place to face Lassiter once again, putting a hand on the older man's knee. "This isn't an issue of me or you, this is all about him and his small-minded, thick-headed control freak ways." Shawn grinned. "But let's get back to the matter at hand. It took you all the way up to the speed dating case for you to realize you wanted me?"

Lassiter could feel his eyes narrowing. "…Yes."

That infuriating grin of his widened. "Come on, Lassie, even I knew you had the hots for me before that."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you remember the case with all those suicides that looked like murders?"

"You mean the murders that looked like suicides?"

"I've—."

"No you haven't."

"Anyway," Shawn stressed, moving the conversation forward. "that was the first time I ever sat in your lap."

"And?"

"Well," Shawn said slowly, glancing over at the doctor, "the evidence was a little…hard to ignore."

Lassiter could feel himself turning bright red, all the way up to his ears, and as he glanced over, the therapist found something very interesting to stare at on the tip of her shoe.

"Not that you'd ever let me know any other way," Shawn said, glaring just a little.

"What do you mean by that, Shawn?" Dr. Forest asked, intrigued and all too glad to be on another topic.

Shawn sighed, looking at Lassiter. "He treats me like he hates me."

"You can't really thing that," Lassiter said, feeling something like shock spreading across his face.

"How could I not? You take any excuse to distance yourself, you yell all the time, you're always telling me how annoying I am, you once compared me to drier lint!"

"Look, Shawn, just because I yell at you and you annoy the hell out of me and I want to shoot you sometimes, and—."

"Does this have a point?"

"None of that means that I don't love you."

"You…you love me?"

Lassiter rolled his eyes, grumbling, "Of course I do, you idiot."

"You see that? He's taking a beautiful moment and…Lassitering it up!"

"Stop using my name as a verb! It's not catching on, it's not funny, and I don't find it endearing!"

"It is catching on. Gus and Jules use it all the time. Gus and I are working on a letter to Webster's. What do you think of the official definition?" Shawn cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter. "To Lassiter: to make a situation more hostile than necessary."

Lassiter just glared, and after a moment Dr. Forest interceded. "And if I may ask, who are Jules and Gus?"

"Well, Gus is my best friend, and Jules in Lassie's partner in the department."

She nodded. "So you share a peer group; that's healthy. And do these friends of yours know about your relationship?"

Lassiter scoffed. "Probably. Not much gets by O'Hara, and Shawn hasn't kept a secret from Guster since…ever?" he asked, turning to Shawn.

Shawn nodded. "Secrets that don't involve him," he clarified. "Yeah, ever."

They would know. Every time the phantom of the idea of Spencer had popped into Lassiter's head, that thought had deterred him. It had stopped him from doing anything other than his patented scowl and growl every time Shawn landed haphazardly in his lap, or rubbed up against him like a deranged cat, or grabbed him and refused to let go. They would know. And lately he was wondering more and more if that bothered him enough not to try.

"But you haven't told them?" the doctor asked, seeming almost incredulous.

"No," Lassiter said as if it should be obvious.

"And Shawn's family doesn't know."

"No," Lassiter repeated, eyes narrow.

"Who exactly have you told?"

"Including you?" Shawn asked.

She gave a small nod. "If you like."

Shawn nodded in return. "You." He flashed a smile that only Lassiter fully understood. This was the first time he had allowed himself to imagine what a real relationship with Spencer would be like. Apparently it was complicated and therapy-worthy.

"That-that's it? You haven't told the most important people in your lives about your relationship?"

Lassiter jumped in defensively. "It isn't that simple. There are protocols to be considered. Telling people…would interfere with our work."

"Come on, Carlito, my Dad loves me and he still gets to work with me. I don't see the difference."

"That is both very disturbing and very unsurprising," Lassiter returned, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"I'm sorry, just…let me be sure that I understand this all clearly. You," she started, pointing at Lassiter, "are a detective with the Santa Barbara police department."

"Head detective," he corrected her with both an air of annoyance and habit.

"And you," she continued, pointing now to Shawn, "are a private investigator—."

"Psychic detective," he interrupted, looking at Carlton from the corner of his eye with a private grin.

"Who also works with the police department."

"Yup," Shawn confirmed.

"And you work cases together."

"That's right," Lassiter told her, suspicion in his eyes.

"And your father also works with you, but he doesn't know that you two are a couple."

"Uh-huh," Lassiter replied slowly.

"And neither do your partner," she said, gesturing to Lassiter, "or your best friend," she added, pointing to Shawn, "who also work with you both."

Shawn nodded. "That's about the size of it."

"Well," she said, eyebrows high, "that must…complicate things a bit." When her answer was a confused chorus of "not really" and "you have no idea", she nodded and made a note. "Well, gentlemen, it seems our time has run out for the day. I'd like to schedule another session with you, if you're both able to meet with me again."

Lassiter glared as Shawn started outlining his schedule, sighing deeply. He wouldn't have agreed to this if he didn't know that it was always the second session that saw the couples disappearing.

"My schedule is…somewhat difficult at the moment. Several of my clients recently…cancelled on me, and I…well, I imagine you know all about that, working with the police as you do."

"About that. Doctor, no one can know that we were here. No one," Lassiter reiterated, hoping to distance them from the investigation.

The doctor shook her head, holding her hands up defensively. "Doctor patient confidentiality, detective. My lips are sealed, you have my word. Now, I have an opening for the same time on Wednesday. I realize two days is something of short notice, but I'd like to pick this back up as soon as possible."


Has any of this really helped them solve this case? Is the next session going to go any better than this one? Who's been killing these poor couples? Only one way to find out.

I had a ton of fun with this one, with more to come. If you liked it, or even if you didn't, there's a quick and easy way to let me know.