Disclaimer: I don't own Psych or any of its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other Psych-Os like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.

Rating: T

Spoilers: Through current episodes, particularly strong from Heeeeere's Lassie.

Chapter there is NO chapter Thirteen: In Dreams

"A candy-colored clown they call the sandman tiptoes to my room every night just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper, 'Go to sleep, everything is all right.' I close my eyes, and I drift away into the magic night. I softly say a silent prayer, like dreamers do, then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you."

"Damn, Maurice, you do like the Big O, don't you?" Lassiter mumbled sleepily, unaware that he was, in actual fact, sound asleep and dreaming. He did not, as a rule, dream - at least not dreams he would ever remember, even vaguely, upon waking - but since moving into the top-floor condominium at 1101 Prospect Gardens he'd had some intensely vivid dreams. He'd thought it was the drugs. Certainly that may well have been a factor at first.

"Actually you do, or so I gather from the fact that you have seven records and four CDs. Only two artists you've got more of are Frank Sinatra and Warren Zevon. I don't suppose you can explain the commonality between those two to me?"

Lassiter opened his eyes - again, only in the dream as his actual physical eyes remained closed although they rolled and twitched in REM. He recognized the scruffy, bearded figure who sat at the other end of the couch. It was himself.

He was not happy to see this manifestation. In the first incredibly unsettling dream he'd had after moving in, this version of himself had scared the living hell out of him in fine Amityville Horror style.

"Relax, that wasn't actually me," Amityville Lassiter said, reading his thoughts or at least his body language. "Well, it was me, but only in so much as I'm you and it was your drugged-out brain that created that dream. I hope that makes more sense to you than it does to me. You're the Zevon fan, so it ought to."

"Who are you?" Lassiter demanded, although he thought he already knew.

"Maurice," Amityville Lassiter said. "Or at least that works for me. If there is a me, which there really isn't, you know. Not in a personal pronoun sort of way, anyway."

Maybe there was something to the idea that being a fan of Warren Zevon helped to make convoluted, macabre concepts clearer, because Lassiter actually thought he understood that. "So…what are you, really?" he asked.

Maurice shrugged. "If you wanted to be very technically accurate you might just as well call me 1101 Prospect Gardens, but that's not exactly right, either," he said. "A building is just brick and stone, after all. Maybe the truest sense of what amounts to the me-ness of me would be to say that I am the sum collaboration of all the lives that have passed through these halls. This structure has seen a lot of human energy, a lot of it very traumatic. That leaves a stain. You should know that well enough - in your line of work you're routinely exposed to the darkest aspect of human nature. But it hasn't all been bad. There've been births, weddings, parties, love, happiness…that all leaves a mark, too. So I'm…all of that. Mixed up with a whole lot of you."

"So if you're me, what's with the, uh…" Lassiter made an all-encompassing gesture at his face and head.

Maurice shrugged. "Search me. I guess this is just how you expected me to look."

"Are you really here, or is this a dream?"

"Both. You're dreaming, yes, but you've got music on the brain - my fault, I guess - and you called me in. It's a way of communicating more directly, but to be honest with you I'd sooner stick to the metaphysical DJ-ing. It's hard to keep the difference between you-you and you-me clear when I'm actually in your head."

"The cattle all have brucellosis. We'll get through somehow."

"See? Now you're the one putting records on," Maurice observed.

"Wait a minute, just tell me one thing. Why are we talking at all? In dreams or otherwise? There are forty-seven other occupied units, and nobody else seems to be having conversations with the radio. Why me?"

"There are a lot of reasons, actually. You got rid of that psycho bitch who kept killing tenants, that was a big one."

"That wasn't me," Lassiter admitted, shamefaced.

"Well, you brought in those turds that caught her, so that's close enough for me, especially since you were about three deep breaths from being the next suicide - or maybe murderer, in your case." Maurice seemed blissfully unconcerned about either possibility. Apparently he could read Lassiter's mind, probably because he was actually in it, because the next thing he said was, "Understand, I don't actually have a concept of right and wrong. I just absorb things. That particular tenant caused me to absorb a lot of things I'd rather not have, so I'm grateful she's no longer living here. What she did and what it did to you and the others really doesn't register with me in terms of human morality. I consider you did me a good turn by causing her to be not here, so I'd like to do you a good turn in exchange. I've picked up something of a sense of quid pro quo over the years."

"So you want to repay me by humiliating me in front of my partner?"

Maurice shook his head. "I want to help you get what you want. I've absorbed a lot of your emotions in the short time you've lived here, and I know you want her."

"And what makes you an expert on human relationships?" Lassiter asked, a little ruffled.

"I've absorbed thousands of them over the decades," Maurice said simply.

"And have you…'helped out' in the past?"

"No."

"So I reiterate: Why me?"

"Well that brings me back to all the other reasons I have for communicating with you. And the biggest one of those is probably just the simple fact that I can."

"You…can?"

"There's a lot going on with you, Detective. Most of it well below the surface. Repression might be polite but it's also at least a little bit dangerous, don't you think? Frankly I'm surprised you haven't triggered a little poltergeist activity long before me."

"Are you trying to say I created you? By…being repressed?"

"It certainly helped. I don't think I ever once thought in terms of 'I' and 'me' before you came along, for one thing, and I definitely never had so much ability to make myself heard and understood. I was here, in some form, but you're the one who gave that form substance."

Lassiter blinked. "How?"

"Hell if I know. But you've got at least a touch of the dramatic temperament in you, and that might have been all you needed for there to be a connection between us. You see, in the end I'm really nothing more than a building, but I'm a building whose creator poured every ounce of his artistic vision into creating, and frankly, it didn't work out well for him. And I think that was the start of me, all that hope and despair and crushing disappointment, all culminating in a murder/suicide. You even look a little bit like my architect, in so much as he was tall and thin and intense, with light eyes and dark hair. And you've known more than your share of crushing disappointment, although I think you'd no sooner eat a bullet than you'd ever actually have killed that man who shrieked like a lady. You're tougher than that. Tougher than him. The architect, not the lady-man - I figured that went without saying."

Lassiter sat silently for a long moment, then said, "I wonder what Warren Zevon would have made of this situation?"

"Probably a full album," Maurice replied. "Surely you'd rate at least one song of the 'Roland the Headless Thompson-Gunner' flavor."

"Complete with a semi-incoherent reference to Patty Hearst."

"Given that the shrieking lady-man would probably make at least a token appearance in the lyric, I would bet more on Shelly Duvall. Or Jamie Lee Curtis."

Lassiter yawned widely. "Damn, sorry. Didn't know it was possible to feel sleepy when you're already asleep."

"This is probably not the most restful sort of sleep you could be getting," Maurice said, "and you haven't slept in a long time. I'll see if I can back off. We can 'talk' more later. Like I said, I prefer interacting when you're awake."