Disclaimer—Characters belong to Steve Franks. No copyright infringement intended. Any similarity to events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Author's Notes—This isn't beta'ed. I really ought to find a Psych beta... All my usual betas for other fandoms aren't Psych-o's.
Through the Looking Glass—Now even the familiar seemed peculiar to Carlton. A follow-up to Alice. Post-ep for Yin 3 in 2D.
He was certain that he hadn't seen what he just saw. That it was a figment of his overactive imagination. But, Buzz had told him he was a robot.
One thing he knew about robots was that they didn't have imaginations.
Flights of fancy had no place in his world. And seeing Juliet with Shawn, well...that... that simply wasn't true. It couldn't be. Sure, Shawn was annoying and awful. Shawn was, on a good day, grating, but Juliet was strong enough to withstand the psychic's advances, that she wouldn't succumb to his slick talk.
His partner was better than that.
Except, as he walked away from the two-way glass, as he numbly put one foot in front of the other, he wondered if he'd been wrong.
As he made his way back to the main office floor, he took solace in the normalcy of the place. The sounds of phones ringing off the hook, of uniform shoes on the tile, of fingers dancing across keyboards. The smells of scalding coffee, of something microwavable that some desk sergeant had brought for lunch, of justice. The police station, the headquarters for Santa Barbara's best and brightest, had always been a place of comfort, of solace for him.
Now even the familiar seemed peculiar. The once beloved place seemed so foreign to him.
As he dropped his ceramic coffee cup into the trash, still beyond distracted, still on autopilot, he continued on to his desk. He just needed to get a grip, to find his reality and focus on it.
His reality was a partner who trusted him, one who, while not always agreeing with him, backed him up, one hundred percent without fail. And Shawn Spencer, while occasionally seeming to be on top of everything, couldn't possibly have some kind of supernatural gift. It was just parlor trick hooey.
And his partner was just too smart to fall for that.
But, she was more than that to him, than just a coworker. She was a friend, and he didn't have many of those. In fact, she was the only one, really. But, friends didn't keep secrets like that from each other. Friends were honest and they would seek assistance from each other.
And maybe that was why he felt so lost, deep within the scary and confusing wilds of Wonderland. He had no one to go to, no one to process with.
His partner and his best friend had kept something from him. Something that was of monumental importance to her. He knew how much value she put into interpersonal relationships.
And Shawn... If he was honest, if he got down to the heart of the matter, it wasn't actually the psychic part of the equation that was bothering him. He was just there, on the periphery of the big picture.
It was because she didn't trust him. Because, clearly, she didn't feel the same way about him as he felt about her.
He dropped into his chair, trying to determine what had happened, or how it happened, or, most importantly, what it was that was now wrong with him. As his heart pounded in his chest, faster and faster, as his blood pressure made its skyrocketing ascent, it felt familiar. The realization hit him like a freight train.
He felt the same way he had when Victoria left him.
Betrayal, heartache, and despair all wrapped up into one awful, miserable emotion. It seemed to live in his chest, multiplying in intensity and becoming heavier by the second, much like the growing tension in his shoulders.
But, he didn't love Juliet, not the way he had loved his wife. She was more like Lauren to him, like his little sister. But, Juliet was closer to him than even Lauren was. He rarely saw his sister. Occasionally there were emails or phone calls, but she usually had plans on holidays that didn't include her big brother. It wasn't that he blamed her.
Juliet, on the other hand, he talked to daily. Juliet, he spent the majority of his time with.
More than all of that, he realized that whatever it was between Juliet and Shawn made him a pretty poor head detective. It had to have been going on for a while between them. Right under his nose.
His whole world was shaken, rocked to the core. Up was down, left was right, and his day, which had been pretty bright until just moments ago, now seemed dark as night.
He'd warned her about falling through the rabbit hole. When he'd told her that, he never imagined he would've tumbled right down after her.
End.
