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: Intense, and possible through series finale, though Trout doesn't exist and Vick remains chief. Marlowe also does not exist, not because I don't like her or what they did with her (I do) but because they left so little to the imagination of the fanficker by giving Lassy his Happy Ever After. Takes place in a nebulous gray zone of Never Gonna Happen. Eventual LASSIET. You were warned.

Chapter One: Irish Eyes

"Gus, dude, come with me. We've got to check out the new surf shop up the boardwalk," Shawn said as he flounced into the Psych offices.

Gus glanced up from his laptop at his neatly kept desk. His expression wavered somewhere between incredulity and well duh.

"Neither of us surf, Shawn."

"Immaterial, Gus. Do you know what the place is named? 'Erin-go-Board.' It's an Irish surf shop, Gus, run by an actual Irish surfer. How novel is that? We've got to meet him. He's like…an endangered species. Like a California Condor or a Labradoodle."

"Labradoodles aren't an endangered species, Shawn."

"No, but they're adorable, and an Irish surfer could not but be adorable. Come on. There's a churro stand between here and there."

Gus immediately stood up. "I hear that," he said, and followed his friend out of the office.

Churros in hand, they sauntered up to the open-fronted surf shop. A trim of green shamrocks decorated the entrance, and from the two speakers hung over the service counter piped a reedy voice singing "Mother Macree." A tall man stood with his head bent over the cash register, his bushy hair improbably black. Shawn immediately suspected Grecian Formula, but it looked pretty good, all things considered. He was wearing a green striped polo shirt and wore a shamrock on a gold chain around his neck. A thick bush of black hair peeked out from under the neck of the polo but the man's bare, tanned forearms were relatively devoid of fur. Shawn felt a sense of surreality wash over him, a feeling like seeing something wildly out of its element, like a tanker ship on State Street, and he didn't immediately understand the cause.

Not until the man looked up, a smile of professional welcome on his face that reached all the way to his shining blue Irish eyes.

Dear.

God.

It was Lassy.

Gus dropped his churro in his shock. Shawn's jaw came unhinged.

"Can I help you laddies?" Lassiter said in a passable Irish accent. Shawn was astonished. After hearing horror stories of his undercover work, he wouldn't have expected him to seem so…so…smooth. He didn't give a sign that he recognized them, not so much as a flash of those bonny blues.

Shawn got his jaw back under control and smacked Gus on the arm. They held a swift whispered conversation unintelligible to outsiders and stepped toward the counter as one. They both leaned over it to bring themselves into conspiratorial distance.

"What's the case, Lass?" Shawn asked in a whisper. "Please, please tell me there's a ring of diamond-smuggling surfers and that Jules is going to walk in any minute wearing a bikini and talking about Sex Wax."

Lassiter just looked confused. "Excuse me?" he said.

"Is that a spray-on tan you've got?" Gus asked, ignoring his confusion and his question. "It looks remarkably genuine."

"Come on, buddy, you can let us in on it. We're on the boardwalk every day. We can be your extra eyes and extra ears and extrasensory perception," Shawn said. "We'll help you bring these dastardly degenerate probably-vegan surfer smugglers to justice."

Lassiter's expression changed from confused to speculative, and then finally he nodded in understanding.

"I see what's going on here. You think I'm undercover," Lassiter said, in his natural voice, pretense of an accent dropped. "I'm not. I'm not even a cop. You guys know CJ, don't you?"

Shawn and Gus shared a look. "CJ?" they asked as one.

"Yeah. My brother. We kind of look alike."

Shawn, his expression one of mild shock and some degree of chagrin, took a closer look at the man. The resemblance was remarkable, but there was a telling difference: this man's nose was straight, not crooked. He raised a hand to his forehead. He knew it was ridiculous to pretend it was a psychic intuition but he did it anyway, out of force of habit.

"Yes. CJ. Carlton…James…Lassiter," he said.

"Jebediah," not-Lassiter said.

"Really?" Shawn asked.

"Really. Just one of many crosses he's had to bear."

"I'm Shawn Spencer, psychic detective. This is my partner, Horse - oh hell, screw it. His name is Burton Guster. We call him Gus. You're Lassy's twin brother. I am astonished and chagrined. I'm astonagrined. I never even got the faintest psychic tickle that Lassy even had a brother, let alone a twin."

Not-Lassiter's face twisted up in a brief show of disgust. "We're not twins. I'm six years younger than he is. And he actually lets you call him Lassie?"

"I wouldn't say he lets us," Gus said.

"More unwillingly tolerates, with occasional threats or outbursts of violence," Shawn said. "Hello, Lassy's little brother. It's nice to meet you."

Not-Lassiter held out his hand. "Lincoln," he said.

"Your name is Lincoln?" Gus said, eyes wide. He suppressed a snicker. Shawn reached out for the offered handshake with an unsuppressed laugh.

"What's your middle name? Zebulon?" he asked.

"No. Sean."

"What?" Shawn asked.

"Sean."

"Yes. What?" Shawn asked again.

"No, my middle name. It's Sean."

"Gus, what a coincidence. Lassy's little brother's middle name is the same as my first name. Bet it's not spelled the same, though. I can hear the Irish in it. I'm thinking it's the Irish spelling. Like Sean Connery."

"Sean Connery is Scottish, Shawn," Gus said.

"You guys work with CJ, then?" Lincoln Lassiter said. "I kind of find that hard to believe. CJ working with a psychic seems kind of out there."

"Detective Lassiter doesn't believe Shawn's psychic," Gus said. Shawn smacked him on the chest. Gus glared at him and smacked him back. They started smacking each other wildly.

"Now that, I believe," Lincoln said, ignoring the tussle. "He works with you anyway? You must be good. CJ has high standards." He watched them continue to smack each other for a moment, and then said, "Unless he's slipping a little in his dotage."

Shawn and Gus stopped smacking each other at the same instant, shared a mutual glare, smacked each other once more for good measure, and then turned their attention back to this most fascinating new acquaintance. Shawn raised that hand to his brow again.

"Lincoln, I'm sensing an estrangement. You haven't seen or spoken with your brother in quite some time, have you?"

"Almost fifteen years," Lincoln said.

Gus whistled. "Dayum. Not even a Christmas card? Birthday wishes?"

"You don't really know CJ all that well, do you?" Lincoln said.

Shawn made a derisive noise with his lips. "We know Lassy just fine, don't we, Gus? We've known him for years. He's our brutha from anutha mutha." Gus made a similar sound of derision and flapped a hand in the air. Lincoln cocked his head in a familiarly inquisitive manner and regarded them silently for a few moments.

"If you really knew CJ, and I mean really knew CJ, you'd know there are some…underlying issues in our family that I doubt he talks about. I left Santa Barbara to get away from those issues, not to get away from my brother. The fact that he never tracked me down and dragged my ass back home always seemed to indicate to me his tacit approval of my decision to make for the hills."

"But you came back," Shawn said. "You want to reconnect."

Lincoln shrugged. "Doesn't take a psychic to figure that out. Life is fun out on the road, but it gets kind of lonely after awhile. Enough years go by, and even the dysfunctional family starts looking good again."

"How long have you been back in town?" Gus asked.

"About five weeks."

"And you still haven't talked to your brother?" Shawn said.

Lincoln's well-tanned face blanched slightly. "Uh, no. You see, the only way back into the family without it seeming like a major surgical procedure - sans anesthesia - is through CJ, and I can't talk to CJ until my shop is up and running so he doesn't take me for a degenerate homeless person looking for a handout. I mean, I'm living in a van in the parking lot. And it's not even my van. I can't go up to him like this and say, 'Hey, guess what, bro, I'm back!' I sank everything I've got into this venture. I've got to have something to show for it before I go knocking on his door."

Shawn and Gus shared another look. "Dude. It's a surf shop. In Santa Barbara. There's…a lot of competition," Shawn said, as delicately as possible.

"Yeah, but I'm Irish. I figure the novelty factor has to be worth something," Lincoln said.

"You're afraid to face your brother, aren't you?" Shawn said. "Afraid to face his thunderous Lassiterian disapproval of your life choices."

"Not that anyone could blame you," Gus said. "The guy is seriously scary."

Lincoln held up a hand. "Don't get me wrong, I love my brother. He practically raised me. It's just…he's such a…hardass."

Shawn half-closed his eyes and let his head roll to the side as he spoke. "Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln." He gestured from himself to Gus and back again. "We understand. Well do we know the terrors inflicted by that whip-crack voice, the itchy trigger finger, the Death Star laser beam glare of disapprobation."

"I never thought I'd hear you use the word 'disapprobation' in a sentence," Gus said in astonishment. "Correctly, too."

"Thank you, Gus. The point is, Lincoln, we can help you. Let us smooth the way forward. Ease the tension. Like a bridge over troubled water, let us lay me down."

Shawn turned his head to look at Gus, and as one they both started to sing. "Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down."

Lincoln looked at them skeptically. "You two, smooth the way between me and CJ?" he said. "No offense, guys, but you look to me more like the kind of people who are liable to wind him up real tight. CJ always had kind of a low threshold for…slapstick."

Shawn scoffed again. "Please. We regularly play Lassy like a fiddle."

"Like a bass viol," Gus said.

"He loves us. We're his best buddies in the whole wide world," Shawn said. Gus made a faint mewl of demurral. "Well, he likes us, at any rate."

Lincoln looked from Shawn to Gus and back again, bright blue eyes wide and faintly disbelieving. "Wow. CJ must have…mellowed."

"Lincoln, trust me, you won't recognize the guy. The stick in his ass has shrunk by…well, I'd say as much as thirty percent in the time I've known him," Shawn said.

"You guys are sure you can make this gold for me?" Lincoln said. "I mean, I'm not looking forward to hearing what Mom's going to have to say to me after all this time, but if I get the nod from CJ it will be more like talking to a gorgon than a dragon."

Gus made a face. "I don't know that it's really all that much better to talk to a gorgon than a dragon. Gorgons can turn you to stone."

"Only if you look 'em dead in the eye, Man," Lincoln said, with a shake of the head. "Dragons can burn your ass to a crisp from any angle."