Author's Note: This is the de-aging fic I kept expecting someone else to write so I wouldn't have to. The title is somewhat ironic, since it absolutely failed to exceed expectations in any way. (More like the opposite.) Also, it was almost titled "you get all your coffee for free," but the lack of coffee made that one less plausible.
Shawn
Shawn Spencer was having the time of his life. He was ten years old, and he'd traveled to the future. He wasn't quite sure how it had happened -- one minute he'd been on the bus, the next he'd been back in Santa Barbara, in the police station.
The good news about the future: Computers were going to be awesome.
The bad news about the future: Nobody seemed surprised to see him at the station, so either he was a criminal, or Detective O'Hara was telling the truth and he actually worked for the police. Also, Gus got old.
Shawn swiveled in Detective Lassiter's chair as he listened to the grown-ups arguing. They all wanted to know how and why, which was silly -- after all, he hadn't been de-aged, he'd been switched. (He was wearing the same shirt he'd put on that morning in 1987; it was a dead giveaway.) Which meant his 32-year old self would've had the memories of his 10-year old self, and known what was going to happen. The real question was: where would he have left the note?
He studied the adults around him. If he'd given it to one of them, they would have said something by now. It had to be somewhere close by, but hidden enough so no one would find it by accident. And it had to be somewhere he'd think to look. Shawn inched the chair closer to the desk and reached a hand up to feel under the drawer. Sure enough, he could feel a piece of paper taped there.
Picking the tape off was easy. Sliding the paper into his pocket without anyone noticing was harder -- Gus kept looking over at him, and Shawn couldn't be positive old-Gus would keep quiet and not mess everything up by asking what he was doing. He liked Detective McNabb, though, who'd brought him a pineapple smoothie and winked at him. Shawn stood up and sidled over to where he was standing, on the outskirts of the group. "Detective McNabb," he said, tugging on the Detective's sleeve and using his most innocent expression. "I have to go to the bathroom."
Detective McNabb smiled. "Sure, Shawn. I'll take you." Shawn tried to look cute and not like he had a plan.
"That's okay, I know the way. It'll just take a minute." Detective O'Hara was talking about calling his dad again. All of them had mentioned his dad. No one mentioned his mom. He wondered how long he had before the divorce.
Gus' loud objection to the "call Henry" plan got McNabb's attention, and he waved Shawn off with a distracted, "Be careful." Shawn just grinned. Gus would cave eventually, and he couldn't figure out Detective Lassiter at all. He had to read the note, and he wanted to be ready to ditch the grown-ups afterwards.
Of everything in the station, the bathroom looked the same. Just like he remembered it -- Shawn couldn't decide whether that was reassuring or disturbing. He shook his head to clear the thought and took out the paper.
Congratulations! You're in the future, dude! Here's the scoop -- you'll be there for three weeks, then we switch back. I never told anyone (not even Gus). The house is empty all week, Dad's out of town. Oh, and everyone thinks you're psychic.
(PS: Don't worry, our hair still looks awesome.)
It wasn't quite as informative as he'd expected. The hair thing was cool, but everyone thought he was psychic? Why? After a few minutes consideration, Shawn pushed the bathroom door open carefully, checking to see if anyone was watching. It was time to do some exploring.
Gus
And to think, when he'd woken up that morning, he'd thought it would be another normal day. Well, as normal as any days were, when Shawn was involved. Being de-aged was new, though. Gus looked over to where young-Shawn was sitting -- only to see an empty chair. Uh-oh. "Where's Shawn?" he asked.
Everyone looked around, as if somehow he might appear in front of them. "He said he had to go to the bathroom," McNabb said uncertainly.
Lassiter frowned. "How long ago?"
"I don't know, five minutes? Maybe ten?"
Gus reminded himself to breathe. Obviously, Shawn made it through this, or else he wouldn't have been around years later. Years earlier? Years older? Trust Shawn to get caught up in something out of a comic book. Still, someone had to keep an eye on him. "Okay, this is bad," he said.
Juliet put a hand on his arm. "We'll find him," she said. "We can put out an APB, get the units on the street looking for him."
As usual, Lassiter disagreed. Gus sometimes wondered if he just did it to be contrary. "Hold on, O'Hara. Let's not jump to conclusions here. He's ten; how far could he have gotten?"
Gus considered. How much of Santa Barbara would look familiar to a ten-year-old Shawn?
"I ran away once when I was little," Mcnabb said, looking lost in memory. "I made it to the end of the driveway before my younger brother caught up with me."
"Yeah, well, Shawn doesn't have a little brother. He ran away three times when he was ten." Gus was pretty sure his impatience was showing.
Juliet looked appalled. Clearly she'd never run away as a child. Lassiter just looked pissed off, which was normal for him. "What happened?" Juliet asked.
"After the second time, Henry was pretty upset. He told Shawn if he took off again, he wasn't going to go after him." It would be less weird to tell these stories if Lassiter didn't always look like he was trying to figure out a way to arrest someone. Gus moved closer to Juliet. "So he didn't. Shawn came back on his own."
"See? He'll be back; he's probably just wandering around the station."
Lassiter looked smug, and Gus glared at him. "He came back three weeks later, and wouldn't tell anyone where he'd been! I don't know about you, but I'd prefer it if Shawn wasn't running around Santa Barbara as a ten-year-old for the next three weeks!"
Even Lassiter looked a little taken aback by that idea, but he recovered quickly. "Look, Henry will be back at the end of the week," he said. "All we have to do is find Shawn, sit on him till then, and then hand him back to his father until we can figure out how to undo... whatever this is." Gus didn't think Lassiter really thought it would be that easy, but his tone did seem to reassure Juliet and McNabb, along with the sizable crowd they'd managed to gather. Lassiter took in the group with his customary stern expression. "What are you waiting for? Go!"
They went. Gus waited until it was just him and Lassiter, then raised an eyebrow. He knew that Lassiter knew that Shawn wasn't exactly an average ten-year-old -- even if he wasn't, technically, "psychic." "You know this is Shawn we're talking about, right?" Gus said. "If he doesn't want to be found, you'll never catch him."
Lassiter just raised an eyebrow right back at him. "I would've said that's the one thing you can count on with Spencer -- he always wants to be found."
Lassiter
It probably shouldn't have surprised him. They'd spent the afternoon canvassing the streets, looking anywhere Shawn might have gone -- Henry's house, his old school, even the Psych office. Clearly, he should have just come home.
Shawn turned around when he dropped his keys on the counter. He was sitting on the couch, with the television on silent, showing a 24-hour news channel. "You have a lot of guns," he said nonchalantly. "And you're out of peanut butter."
"How did you get in here?"
"Spare key over your neighbor's door sill? Not very creative for a cop."
Carlton decided he didn't want to know how Shawn had reached the door sill. "I just moved," he said.
"More than six months ago," Shawn countered. Your geranium's been dead since last winter."
It also occurred to him that Shawn shouldn't have known his address. He tried a different approach. "Why here?" he asked.
Shawn just shrugged. "You're interesting." Carlton didn't say anything, and they stared at each other for a long moment before before Shawn dropped his eyes and looked back at the television. "And I left a note for myself, and I said I should come here."
It took two replays of that sentence in his head before Carlton decided that Shawn had really said what he thought he said. "You left a note for yourself?" he repeated. "You really expect me to believe that you -- grown-up you, although I can hardly believe I'm using those words in relation to any version of you -- knew what was going to happen ahead of time, and instead of telling anyone about it, you wrote letters to yourself?"
Shawn sighed, suddenly sounding closer to 30 than ten. "You always do that," he complained. "Do you want to see the note I left for you?" He pulled an only slightly crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, but otherwise didn't move from the couch.
Carlton took a deep breath. Then he counted to ten, and reminded himself that he was the one who'd actually wanted children back when he'd been married. Then he said, "Yes, Spencer --"
The expression on Shawn's face at being called "Spencer" was priceless. "Shawn," he amended. "Yes, I want to see the note."
"Okay." Shawn climbed off the couch and handed him the paper.
It was short. He read it twice. Then he frowned at Shawn. "Did you read this?"
The quick, "Of course not!" was followed by a shrug. "Yeah. Will you do it?"
It seemed crazy -- using his accrued vacation time to babysit a ten-year-old? Jaunting around the country (and he couldn't believe he had just used the word 'jaunting,' even in his head) instead of trying to figure out what had happened? "According to this, I already have," he said.
"But I haven't," Shawn insisted, like he could actually work out all the past-self, future-self confusion of time travel. Or else even at ten he understood just how much he could get away with by sounding confident. "And I only have three weeks!"
Three weeks -- it hit him all of a sudden. Shawn had run away from home when he was ten, and stayed gone for three weeks, and wouldn't tell anyone what happened. Which seemed obvious now, since "I was in the future" didn't seem like an explanation that would hold water in the Spencer household.
"Right," he said, trying to gather his thoughts. "I need to call the Chief. And O'Hara. You need to call Guster; I'm not explaining this to him too."
Shawn just grinned and bounced back towards the couch with the cordless phone. He was already talking a mile a minute, with hand gestures to match. Carlton shook his head. What had he gotten himself into?