The soul is silent. If it speaks at all, it speaks in dreams. Louise Gluck
.***.
You couldn't really call what Shawn Spencer had that night a dream or even a nightmare. The colors were too harsh, too real, for it to be anything so simple as his own imagination. He was caught in a gaudy unreality, feeding off the good painkillers, the stuff they'd given him for the surgery. Feeding off the sheer pain of it all.
In the (dream/imagination/reality?) he was with Gus and they were younger. Sixteen. Seventeen. They were at the beach and Shawn was hating it. He always got burnt. Always. But Gus for once had been the one cajoling him into doing something, and they went down to the sea too early in May, too early in the day. They were alone.
And then, in the way of dreams, it shifted, moved, changed in a way that made sense only to the dreamer, a way that would never quite fit in if they ever had the inclination to retell the story. Suddenly, there was a car on the beach, one pulling up to younger Shawn and Gus, a Shawn and Gus on the cusp of adulthood and trying to cling to their last dredges of innocence, a Shawn of Gus who really knew nothing about the harsh realities of the world aside from what happened in bitter divorces and on the afternoon soaps.
The man in the car, shadowed, hooded, dark, pointed one long finger in their direction and beckoned to Gus, and suddenly the sunshine spilling over the horizon wasn't warm at all and the very air seemed grey and foreboding.
"Don't go, dude." Younger Shawn said, and younger Gus made a noise in the back of his throat, one that was supposed to be nonchalant to say of course not but ended up sounding scared. They both tried walking away, but no matter how far they walked, how quickly, there was that car and that dark man and that one long finger always pointing.
Shawn pulled up short, stepping in front of Gus and tipping his friend a familiar smirk, the look he always gave when he thought he had the situation under control. "Yo, man, what'cha following us for? You keep chasing us away from all the places where the girls hang out and, frankly, the fact that you only seem to want my friend here is offensive and, dare I say, a little racist."
"Shawn!" Gus hissed, jerking his arm, and the lurid half-reality of the dream flared bright, the sun becoming a harsh, impossible yellow, the sea a stormy mix of grey and blue that could never have really existed.
"Him." The shadow said, and the finger left no room for error.
"I'm not going with you!" Gus shouted, voice definitely scared now but also holding some of the teenage belief that nothing in the world could really hurt him.
Except his words seemed to die in his throat when something else came out of the car. The cruel barrel of a gun pointed, safety off and ready to go, directly at Shawn.
What could they do? Young Shawn glanced helplessly at young Gus even as he raised his hands, an automatic gesture that he hoped fruitlessly would ward the man off. And young Gus swallowed hard at the sight of the naked fear in the eyes of his friend that was usually so incredibly together.
"Fine." Gus said, stepping towards the dark man in the dark car even as Shawn's hands scrambled to grab his arm and pull him back. What could Gus do? Better give himself up than watch Shawn die, watch his best friend's guts and blood and brain spill out over the beach that had once been so beautiful.
"No!" Shawn screamed, the same word that was on his lips when he woke up in the hospital room, older now, with a shoulder that was mostly metal and a throbbing heart.
His scream he managed to catch and swallow back down, but the tears that poured down his cheeks would not be stopped for anything.
.***.
Henry Spencer woke up with a jerk when he heard Shawn's mostly-muffled groan and was out of the uncomfortable chair in an instant, bad back be damned. He'd spent the early hours of the morning gnawing at his fingernails as his son went through surgery, anxiously checking his phone every fifteen seconds. He'd called the Gusters, but the outgoing message said, in voices too cheery for the current predicament, that they were in Singapore with Gus's sister, getting her settled in at a new job there.
He'd finally collapsed into the chair in Shawn's room around four in the morning right after a doctor had wheeled Shawn back in, saying that the surgery went well, though they'd had to take out the shattered shoulder bones and replace them with something like metal, which made Henry think idly of the old comic books Shawn and Gus used to read, the ones about cyborgs. But Shawn was alive…alive.
"Hey," Henry said, at Shawn's side in an instant. The clock on the wall said it was eight o'clock, which meant he'd only gotten four hours of sleep, but never before had he ever felt so awake. "Don't try to move, Shawn, you're only going to hurt that arm. Shawn!"
This last word was screamed because his son, in strict violation of Henry's last words, was struggling out of bed, eyes darting around the room. Henry pressed him back into bed at the same time as he looked around for a doctor, anyone. "Can we get a doctor in here?" He snapped, pushing Shawn down again. His hand rubbed against the bandages and Shawn turned so pale with pain that Henry was sure he was going to pass out. "Damn. Shawn!"
Fifteen minutes later, Shawn had been looked over by the same man who'd performed his surgery. "I hear you were in a pretty nasty spot." The man said pleasantly as he pressed lightly on certain points of the bandages. "But you came out of it all right. No significant trauma to the head, shoulder's looking good…it's going to be painful and physical therapy is a must, but if there's someone to look after you I see no reason why you shouldn't be released today."
"Today?" Henry asked, aghast. "My son was just kidnapped by a lunatic who tortured his best friend right in front of him. He's barely coherent, has more metal in his arm than the six-million-dollar man…and you're saying he can go today?"
"There's not much the hospital can do for emotional trauma." The doctor said gently, looping his stethoscope around his neck. "I can prescribe some anti-anxiety medication…maybe something to help him sleep…"
"Gus." Shawn said, grabbing the doctor's arm. It was the first word he'd managed to get out since he'd woken up. His throat felt strange, like it was filled with cotton and gum at the same time, and once that feeling passed he was afraid that if he said the word he'd start to cry in front of his father, and he wouldn't, couldn't do that. As if was, when he finally got the word out after fifteen minutes of trying, a few traitorous tears sprung, unbidden, from his eyes.
The doctor opened his mouth, closed it again, and then looked at Henry. "Can I talk to you outside?" He asked, and for the first time Henry noticed that the man who'd fixed his son's shattered shoulder was no older than Shawn, might, in fact, be younger. He looked tired, uncomfortable, and in need of a good long nap.
"Gus…" Shawn pleaded again, eyes wide, and Henry gestured to his son, a motion that meant that the doc might as well talk in front of Shawn, because he wasn't going anywhere.
"I wasn't his surgeon." The too-young doctor said apologetically, but Henry found himself liking the man for sitting down in the chair on the other side of Shawn's bed, for taking the time to talk to them at all. "But…well, you know how it is. We talk."
Henry nodded. He knew what the young man meant by "talk." Whenever a particularly nasty case came through the SBPD, they used to make jokes. Harmless jokes, small jokes, but if you didn't joke your way through some things you would burst with the seriousness of the situation.
"He's alive." The doctor said, rubbing his hand across his forehead. "In the ICU. Unstable. Needs two more surgeries before he's out of the woods. But he survived the night and that's a good sign. A really good sign." The doctor looked at Shawn, and Henry thought that the young man understood that they were the same age, that the man in the bed and the man with the doctors' official lab coat could very easily have had different destinies.
"I heard he saved your life. Shot the guy who busted your shoulder." And Henry found himself liking the man even more for touching Shawn's good hand as he said this. "That's some friend, man."
"Yeah." Shawn croaked, his mouth filling up with that cotton feeling again. "My best friend."
"Keep him around. You can't really put a price on best friends." The young man stood up and hovered in the doorway for a second, looking back at Shawn, too pale on the bed, and Henry with his fiercely protective look on his face. "This might be a bad time, but there's some police waiting outside. They say they know you."
"We'll talk to them later. At home." Henry laced his fingers through Shawn's and held onto them tight even as Shawn lost his battle with consciousness and went back into the hazy world of half-dreams. "I don't think my son has to go through re-living that ordeal so soon."
"Right." The young doctor said, ducking out of the room. He leaned against the wall for a second, just breathing, thinking about the black guy in the ICU and the man who's shoulder he'd spent the night fixing up, the one the EMTs said had been so distraught over the state of his best friend he'd nearly torn his fingernails off trying to get back through the ambulance door, the one who looked so frightfully pale right now.
The young doctor let out a huge breath and shook out the goose-pimply feeling that had spread up his arms before rushing down the corridor, thinking that right now he really, really needed to see his own best friend.
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