A New Perspective on an Old Theme

Gus sat down in a chair in the office, and placed his head in his hands. He had often called Shawn crazy, and had even meant it a few times. But to hear that Shawn may really have gone insane . . .well, that was almost too much for him to take.

Shawn was his absolute best friend, and he knew that to most people it looked like Shawn was the dominant one in the friendship. He also knew that it looked as if Shawn was the one who controlled the direction the friendship took, up to and including controlling Gus himself.

Gus knew for a fact that things didn’t work that way.

Gus knew that he had more than was probably fair of his share of strength, both physical and mental, and incredibly enough, even emotional, when it came to reigning Shawn in. He also knew that he had no compunction against using any of it when it suited his purposes -- his birthday being a perfect example of that.

However, by the same token, he didn‘t use his advantages over Shawn -- also when it suited his purposes.

He smiled sadly and knew that he and Shawn were the perfect balance of one to the other. Shawn brought out the playfulness he had been, to a certain extent, taught to hide, while he would, and could, bring Shawn back to Earth. Granted, it wasn’t easy to do and didn’t happen all that often, but it did happen.

Yet, now, their perfect partnership, no, their very friendship itself, had been threatened by a gun toting mad-woman who had literally been gunning for the only other three people Shawn, and incidentally he, actually respected. Although Shawn would never admit that part of things . . . especially when it came to a certain hard-assed detective. Gus couldn't help but chuckle at the absolute truth of his innocent analogy, though he sobered a moment later.

He sighed and shifted his feet as he remembered the others’ drawn, pinched, worried, angry, and even frightened faces as they’d fought to save Shawn’s life, and he couldn’t bring himself to blame them for Shawn’s condition, no matter how he much wanted to.

And now, now everyone was convinced that Shawn was insane. They were all equally convinced that Shawn was hallucinating . . . or worse, actually seeing what he said he was, though they were all sure it was nothing more than his imagination.

However, one thing being Shawn’s best friend over the years had done, was to have given Gus a more open mind than most, despite what it seemed sometimes. He also knew Shawn far better than anyone else did, and easily recognized when Shawn was telling the complete truth, a half truth, or even a truth that only Shawn himself believed, and knew that the dead people that Shawn said he saw fell into that last category.

However, since the doctors had ruled out any physical reasons for the hallucinations, the only logical conclusion anyone could really come to, was that Shawn’s hallucinations absolutely had to be caused by a mental failure of some sort.

However, Gus had spent a lot of time in the company of doctors. He had also been around all kinds of medicines, and had to attend innumerable amounts of conferences on said meds, up to and including the ‘head meds’, and liked to think he was something of an expert on the causes of what might make someone in need of any of the drugs.

He also knew that if they dosed Shawn with any of them, then the friend he knew and cared for would be gone under a haze of drugs and their effects, and that thought was intolerable.

Not to mention the fact that trauma could only explain the bizarre ‘visions’ only so much, and even if the licensed doctors refused to admit that something other than trauma could be causing Shawn’s hallucinations, well, that certainly didn’t mean that he couldn’t. And, since he refused to accept the fact that Shawn had gone nuts, well, that left only one possibility.

And when one has exhausted all the probable causes, then it was time to examine the improbable.
Which meant that it was time to stop feeling sorry for what he couldn’t do anything about, and do one of the one things that he did best.

Since he knew that no one else wanted to face the possibility that Shawn actually had turned psychic for real, then it was up to him to not only find out the possible explanation for Shawn’s sudden abilities, but also a solution to handling it . . . if there was one.

Oh yeah. It was definitely time to hit the internet.

He cracked his knuckles, set his chin and his incredible ability to focus on one thing at a time, and tapped away at the keys of the computer before him, doggedly determined not to fail Shawn.