Gus: Are you crazy?

Shawn: I wouldn't say crazy. Maybe an eccentric who looks good in jeans...

.***.

Gus couldn't believe his good fortune.

Yes, his good fortune. He was tied to a chair and had been turned into a black version of nine-fingered Frodo, but at least he knew where he was. There were very few places in and around Santa Barbara that a case hadn't led them, and this abandoned lot hadn't been so abandoned around Christmastime. So he was bruised and bleeding and in pain (so much pain) but at least he could identify the dingy warehouse.

See, hanging around Shawn was starting to rub off on him.

And when Shawn finally did call, as Gus knew he would if he'd been released as his captors promised he had, Gus willed his best friend to give him an opportunity. And Shawn did, as he normally did, because the two had been around each other for so long that they always operated on the same wavelength. So Gus slipped in his clue.

Shawn would get it - Shawn was smarter than all of them, realy. Should have gone to college with that brain. Could have been a leginatmate CSI guy instead of playing up the scam. Gus remembered the day so well, the day Shawn decided not to go to college, not to join the police force, just to get on his bike and keep going. He'd come to Gus's house and hugged him. Gus had thought he was dying.

Once, perhaps a year ago, they had gone for a walk on the boardwalk, waiting for another case. It was twilight, and they'd had the wooden slats almost entirely to themselves.

Shawn had been poking fun at Gus's lack of love life again, after Gus made the mistake of telling him about the witch he'd tried to spend a pleasant evening with. Gus remembered throwing his cone to the seagulls and rounding on his friend. "It's not funny, Shawn. I'm seriously going to end up alone."

"Well, not completely alone. You'll always have me." Shawn gave him a fond look that always reminded him of a dopey dog he'd had as a kid. Then the look changed, became troubled and serious. "My biggest fear is ending up in some lab in Rowell being poked at for the rest of my life."

"Roswell is for aliens," Gus said, "And you can always just stop lying." Shawn had looked offended and launched into a different subject, but not before Gus realized that Shawn was actually, seriously, really worried about beiing snatched by the FBI or CIA or whoever he thought would take him away.

And from that day on Shawn's greatest fear became Gus's, too. Isn't that what having a best friend really is? Their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Their fears are your fears.

Gus thought about the plan the drug lords around him had been gloating about all day. They'd thought it was fool-proof, knocking out Shawn and Gus, dragging them to very different parts of the city, putting Shawn in a room with absolutely no distinctive features...

That's what made Gus think of that time on the boardwalk. How terrified Shawn must have been, to wake up to his worst nightmare...in a white room, confronted by a man in a suit. Alone. The rest of his life a long string of days where scientists tried to find out the secret behind his non-existent psychic abilities, not taking his denial of them for an answer.

Just before the phone call, when Gus was finally able to think beyond the terrible pain in his hand (which had bled so much that Gus, always a bit of a hypochondriac, began to think he was dying) he'd asked what seemed to be the leader a question they appeared to have not thought of. "Look, Shawn's psychic -" no sense in blowing the game now "-and we've been best friends since we were about four. Why wouldn't he just use his psychic powers to find me instead of your drugs?"

"We'll kill him." One of the henchmen said after a long pause. The other men nodded, looking pleased with this answer. "Or we'll kill you."

"Leverage is always a good thing." Another one said, as if this was a rule all children learn in school.

For good measure, the one closest to Gus gave him a good punch to the face, instantly making his lip swell.

When Shawn finally did call, he did his best to sound okay. When he dropped the hint, and one of the brighter men guessed it was a hint, he did his best not to make any noise as they soundly beat the breath out of his body.

After all, when you have a best friend, their pain is your pain. And Gus didn't want to heap any more pain on Shawn Spencer. Not when he desperately needed his friend to come up with a plan.

.***.

"So what's the plan?" Shawn asked once he finished explaining, twice, how he knew where Gus was. (Lassie had pointed out that Gus might be too injured to actually have accurate information, and Juliet hit him on the arm, hard, because Shawn had suddenly gone pale and scared at the thought. After that, everyone just assumed Gus was safe, even if it was his finger sitting in a box between them.)

But Shawn's question made everyone stop. Shawn never asked for advice, and if it was given he never followed it. The only person who could get him to do anything was the very person whose absense was so noticable. To have a suddenly complacent Shawn accentuated the situation, made it somehow worse.

"Well, it looks like we have two options." Henry said, pushing himself out of the chair and pacing the room, but not before clapping his son on the shoulder. He'd imagined this scenario, with Shawn being the one missing, often enough in the years since the boys started running around with the SBPD, and sometimes laughed at his younger self who desperately wanted a son in law enforcement. The risks Shawn took sometimes literally kept him up at night. What would he do if, God forbid, Shawn was the one in Gus's position, and it was his son's finger on the table in front of him? What mountains would he move to make sure his child was alive and safe? And shouldn't he move those same mountains for the man who had been a boy that had sat at his dinner table and been a rock for Shawn during the divorce? Being a parent was keeping your kid safe at all costs, but being a human being was keeping everyone else's kid safe, too.

Everyone was looking at Henry, who was so caught up in thought that he'd left the room silent for five seconds...ten... "Two options," he repeated, trying to find that train of thought that seemed to have already left the station. "We know where Gus is. We can get him."

"They'll kill him." The pain in Shawn's voice made Henry wince at the rawness of it.

"We'll do it fast," Lassiter said, completely serious. "I've heard of it working for other departments. If we have the right preperation and the element of surprise -"

"No." Shawn said, "If it were me dad, you wouldn't even be listening to this. I'm being you for Gus. No. He's not dying. He's not getting close to dying." He stopped, looked around, knocked on wood because Gus was trying to teach him when it was appropriate to do that sort of thing. Shawn usually just did it whenever he felt like he needed some extra luck, and right now they needed luck more than ever. "What's the other option?"

"Do what they want. Find the drugs. Lead it to them. Have a responsible and trustworthy middle-man to keep Gus safe after the deal goes down. SBPD won't go after them," he looked at Lassie, daring him to say something to upset his son again, "we'll get other departments. Anyone else. We'll make it safe."

"There's so much that could go wrong." Shawn said, sounding young and afraid, and suddenly Henry had a vision of an eight-year-old who'd have nightmares and crawl onto his daddy's side of the bed.

Juliet put her arm around Shawn's neck and he let her, leaning into the embrace. "We'll get him back, Shawn. We'll make this work." She was thinking about the what-ifs too, except she wasn't imagining her life without Shawn (when did life without the psychic detective become so unimaginable that she literally could not bring herself to think about it? When had she started to allow herself to plan her life around this man?) No, she was thinking the worst-case-scenario what-ifs that cops are so liable to think about...

...What if Gus died? What if they tried their best and it wasn't good enough and Gus died? She couldn't imagine her life without Shawn, but she really couldn't imagine Shawn without Gus. Sometimes, if Lassie was in one of his spiteful moods, he'd call them an old married couple, but even that wasn't right. They knew how to press each other's buttons, sure but they also helped each other without thinking about, surprised each other, knew each other so well that Juliet wasn't entirely sure if one could exist without the other. People liked to toss around the term 'best friend.' Oh, she's my best friend. We do everything together. But Juliet hadn't been using that term, not since she met Shawn and Gus.

Shawn looked up at her and managed one of those quick not-smiles that people flash sometimes when they want to make the other person feel better. "Yeah, Jules. If our lives were a tv show I'm pretty sure it'd be a comedy."

"You do know that most comedies end in weddings." Lassiter literally hit his forehead with the palm of his hand after he said that. Why was he always setting Spencer up for jokes?

But he didn't take one this time, just sat there thoughtfully. "It would just be really great if this didn't end like Hamlet. Gus gave me the summary of it Senior year and I'm pretty sure everyone dies at the end." He looked around at then all, smiling a smile that looked so sad it broke even Lassiter's heart. "It would be really great if our lives turned out like a comedy, guys. Hamlet was a major downer."

.***.

we're going absolutely crazy, because our school decided to block the website we were using to watch netflix here in jolly old england. so now we have no psych. this is very, very sad for us.

good for you all, though. no psych for us means more psych stories for you.