Chapter Text
Nestled in the Psych office, safe from the cold, sharp storms outside, Shawn and Gus sit next to each other on the couch. Shawn is sunken so deep into the couch that the back of his head meets the middle of the cushion beneath him, a position that would surely ache in the morning if he were, God forbid, to fall asleep in. He rests with his legs spread wide and his arms crossed over his chest, and his head is tipped over. He’s just about to fall asleep, until Gus poses to him a striking question.
“Shawn,” Gus whispers. “you there?”
“Yeah-” Shawn groggily murmurs, lifting his head soon thereafter. Realizing the pure insanity of his position, he quickly sits back up like a regular person would. “Yeah, I am.”
Gus begins. “Okay, so, hear me out on this-”
“Dude, you know that when you start out like that, it immediately makes me not want to listen to you,” Shawn immediately interjects, not bothering to let the other man speak. “If this is about astronomy or science, I’ll be heading back to dreamland, thank you very much.”
Gus scoffs. “Shawn, you haven’t even let me start yet!”
Shawn side-eyes Gus. “Do I want to?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Gus states. “Now, let me actually continue, I have a question for you. A good one.”
“How good?”
“Just- okay. Hypothetically, if anyone we knew was a vampire, but we didn’t know who exactly, who would it be?”
Shawn looks at Gus, bewildered. The question is less outlandish than anything Shawn would’ve asked at this moment if he was to switch positions with Gus, but it’s still interesting nonetheless. He wants to ask Gus what could’ve propelled him to even ask such a question, but he puts his response to the question as a priority. It’s something he has to take a second to think about, letting a “hmm” escape his lips.
Then, he has it, after approximately two seconds.
“Lassie,” Shawn chirps. “Definitely Lassie. Or- wait, Lassie and my dad.”
“I knew it!” Gus exclaims. “See, I’m not the only one who thinks Lassie just kind of has this…vampiric energy to him. I asked Juliet yesterday, too, and she also said she’d think it would be Lassie!”
“You asked Jules before me?” Shawn asks, frowning, with a sarcastic hint of melancholy in his voice.
“Shawn, I wanted to test-drive the question before I asked you. I wanted to know that other people agreed, too!”
“Oh yeah? Who else did you ask?” Shawn raises an eyebrow.
“Well, I asked Chief Vick and Lassie himself, too.” Gus recalls.
Shawn’s eyes widen, and he nearly jumps out of his seat. “You got Vick to answer this, too!? Wait- you asked Lassie?” he pauses. “Well, obviously he wouldn’t say himself, would he?”
“That’s the point, Shawn. I asked him to see how he’d react. Y’know, so I could tell if he was hiding anything based on his reaction.”
“Ohhhh,” Shawn nods. “Smart, smart, smart.” he mumbles, trailing off into an endless abyss of the word “smart”. “...So was he?”
Gus tilts his head, adjusting his position on the couch. “Was he wh- oh. Well…I can’t say for sure he wasn’t.”
Shawn stays silent for a couple of deafeningly-quiet seconds, both of them feeling like individual years. “...You’re messing with me, aren’t you? Don’t think I can’t tell.”
“I wish I was,” Gus shivers. “It was surprising to me, too. He tried to avoid the question completely! Then, when he actually answered me, he just blurted out your name!”
“My n- aww, that’s sweet, he thought of me first!” Shawn giggles like a schoolgirl.
“The weirdest part was that he started laughing, too! He was like, oh, nonsense, nobody here’s a vampire!”
Shawn stops laughing, and his eyes narrow a bit. “But if it’s just a hypothetical question…”
“...then why do you have to clarify you’re not a real vampire?” Gus finishes Shawn’s sentence.
One second of silence.
Another one passes by.
A third one starts to dawn, and neither Shawn nor Gus can handle the noise anymore.
“...No way any of that’s true, though,” Shawn awkwardly chortles, his eyebrows raising as he scratches the nape of his neck. “He was probably like, busy or something.”
“Mhm,” Gus hums in agreement, though it sounds more like a whisper. When Shawn looks over to Gus, Gus is holding a pillow close to his torso and holding his knees up against it, too. He rocks back and forth like a scared child.
—
The dawn of December brings a chill to Santa Barbara’s air, a chill unmatched by any winters of the previous years. This year is unexpectedly and unusually cold, and somehow, as if a Christmas miracle, the city saw a very light fall of snow just a week back. No weatherman had been able to explain the sudden shift in Santa Barbara’s weather, only advising citizens to invest in heavier coats.
Luckily, Carlton had invested. He’d invested such a long time ago, that he forgets the year he bought his favorite jacket. Sixteen-thirty-something? It wasn’t of much use remembering.
Carlton always wonders why he keeps up the job that he does. It was exhausting, frankly, to have to create new personalities every hundred-or-so years. A little bit over a century ago, Carlton was a painter. He remembers it like yesterday. He always does. And he knew perfectly well that he didn’t actually need to do anything, that he could live in the shadows and become nothing more than a myth parents told their children to scare them into eating their vegetables, but oh, it was just too fun to mess with humans. It always was.
In this life, Carlton is a detective. When the dawn of a new era came, he’d decided to step out of his comfort zone a bit. After all, there can only be so many composers and painters all with the family name Lassiter, right?
—
A woman clad entirely in red and black makes her way through the streets of late-night Santa Barbara, a stumble in her step and a quiver in her voice. She rolls her ankle on a stray piece of pavement, toppling over and landing face-first onto the ground.
“Shit…” she hisses. She supports her body weight on her arms, shakily pushing up until a hand reaches out to her.
“Are you okay, miss?” the man with the extended arm questions. He wears a heavy trench coat, and his face is engulfed in darkness. The streetlights above don’t do much to illuminate the features of his face, only shining off the top of his head and his coat.
The woman only stares. In her foggy, drunken vision, God has just come down to her and offered her a deal of eternal life. She swoons, taking the hand and leaning into the man without hesitation. “Praise be to God!” she shouts, hugging the trenched figure. “I knew you’d save me…”
Playing into it, the man coos to the woman. “My child…” he hums, his voice dark and brooding. He leans his head towards the intoxicated woman’s collarbones, a cold, gloved hand of his lightly grazing the exposed skin.
“Forgive me, for I have led- hic- a l-lifetime full of sins…” she hiccups, swaying as she holds the man’s neck.
The man’s lips start to lower on her flesh, and he growls into her with an insatiable hunger in his voice. “My child, I forgive you, for you have something much more useful to offer me.”
“What is it, God? What can I do? Any -cough- anything you command, I shall…”
The man interlocks his mouth with the woman’s ripe skin, piercing a sharp set of fangs through it. His tongue laps up the blood flowing from her arteries and veins as she gasps, falling to her knees as she’s slowly drained of life.
“Ah -hic- agh…hng…” she chokes, her limp body leaning into that of the vampire holding her. Her milky-white skin, once glowing with life, turns paler and paler by the second.
“There, there,” the man comforts. “It is in blood you have repaid me, and for that…”
The man doesn’t finish his sentence.