Quick note: This is my first psych fanfic! *hushed cheers in the background* I'm only barely into season two so that's where we at kids. I want you guys to please, please dear god PLEASE review this! I need to know what I'm doing wrong, what I'm doing right, what you want to see, and what is total shit. So do it kids!

Pairing: Shassie

warnings: suicidal thoughts, suicidal actions, depression, possible self harm, basically shawns depressed and suicidal which is oc but idgaf

Shawn Spencer told lies like most people gave names. He told people he was psychic, or that he was a vacuum salesman. He told Gus that he was going one place then went somewhere else. He told his father he was moving for a job to Nebraska, and went to Wyoming. These were the lies he told people, the many different, crazy, changing lies of his life; but then there was the lie he showed people.

The lie that was the smile he perfected, the smile he showed with every inch of his body. The laugh he gave everyone, the joke that fell from his lips as a reply. The lie of happiness, of smiles, of being a carefree man child. The lie everyone believed, everyone was sure of.

Shawn knew he sold it well. He jumped and moved, planning everything he did, never letting a moment pass that he wasn't pretending. His body unattached, separate from his mind. The body of a happy, content man who smiled all day, who could make people like him or hate him with a twitch. His happiness was so convincing he could believe himself, well in a way. He would believe it if he was seeing himself, seeing the body trained to be a lie. He wouldn't doubt that person for a second, and that was the real problem.

No one saw the truth.

The truth of his mind. Not the part that saw everything, could pick up details, could play Sherlock Holmes. No the part that was the darkness. It lurked, slinking around his thoughts like a poison waiting to strike. Hitting him in waves that drowned any happiness that dared enter it's sanctuary, burying him under a soil of wordless pain that never reached the part of him that the world saw. His mind was a graveyard, a mine field, a world that would scare anyone with sanity away.

Smoke turned inside of him, thick and gray plumes of acrid smoke. Choking him, crawling through him and burying itself in every crevice, every corner. Tying itself around the blizzard within his gut, the frozen tundra of his chest, and slipping through the flames that burnt through his heart.

It was a dramatic description, but Shawn knew it fit him. Oh it fit him like cinderella's slipper. Manic-depressive. The only part that didn't fit was the timeline. Most of them went high for a while then hit bottom for a long time, Shawn wasn't like that. He flew high every day, with the sun and the birds, fooling everyone; but at night when the velvet shadows of night took hold he hit the bottom like an addict. It's how he lived, flying high when anyone was looking, then falling and falling until he broke apart into shattered pieces across concrete.

So that's why he was standing above the world in the dead of night. He wasn't crying, or making a scene, so no one noticed the man near the edge. Near the breaking point, almost ready to fall and let his body break with his mind when the high ended.

It was coming on slowly, as it always did. Hiding near the edges, the darkness closing in slowly like a panther on the prowl, moving towards the helpless animal silently. It would take a while but soon the black beast would jump and take the pathetic, broken, baby animal down and rip it to shreds.

Then another baby would be born, just to go through the same thing.

This wasn't the first time Shawn had waited with the stars, watching the last bits of the day, of his reason to fly, to lose themselves around the world. To feel cold night air drag calm patient fingers through his hair and over his skin. To pull him that one inch closer to their arms, that inch closer to the emptiness that fell over the world below. The peaceful arms that would hold him until he hit the bottom in a flash of white, hot pain and then he would be gone. The smoke would fade, the graveyard grow silent, the blizzards calm, and lastly the flame would fizzle gently to an ember in his chest until it, too, left the world behind.

He'd come here as a teenager, had stood on the edge waiting for sirens. For his father to come and shout, for people to care, but nothing ever came. He always stood with the hands of the night, letting the world continue around him as he stared into the blankness in front of him. The peace of the 11th hour laid there for him, and he'd been ready. He'd stepped to the last bit of the roof, of the world, and turned so he wasn't looking at the street. He lifted his head to the sky, arms out wide like a cross. He smiled at the thought that he'd be going out with dramatics when he was attacked.

Not literally, but by that tiny part of his mind that survived every fall. The flower blossom of hope that kept him on the edge as the images assaulted him. One after the other, the little glow growing and growing, banishing smoke and darkness long enough to pull him from the night's arms.

Gus, packed and ready to go away, to discover independance that morning. They were meant to leave tonight. His father looking somewhat please with him, maybe for growing up or maybe for leaving he didn't know. His mother, rarely there but fleeting and beautiful, like an eclipse that blocked out all his pain for that short moment she was in view. Moments of his past, of smiling with his best friend, jokes and pineapples all invading the smoke and pushing it further and further.

Shawn had pulled himself back onto the world, back onto the roof of the office building he broke into, and took a breath that night. The bit of happiness gave him enough strength then to keep going. He went on for years, stopping occasionally in his moving around to stare a little longer at sleeping pills, or notice a blade's sharpness and imagining it against his skin. To stand ontop of buildings and say hello to his old friend in the ebony around him, but he always kept going.

Tonight would be like the rest, he would move from the building to the door and he'd pound down those stairs. He'd burst through the door and stop where his body would've laid and then the panther would pounce and the brightness would scream in agony, falling under the power of the beast.

The real Shawn showing just a moment, eyes deep with a sadness so deep the Atlantic would drown in it. Hands shaking and chest heaving as short, burning breaths would stop in his throat, never moving to his gasping lungs. He'd stand there for ten minutes usually, trying to breath, trying to remember what oxygen felt like. He'd get a bitter taste of it before his booming chest would expel the blessed air back into the night.

Then he'd control himself, he'd close his eyes and let the muscle memory take over. He'd saunter down the street, smiling like he belonged there and no one ever saw, or knew what Shawn did those nights.

At least they didn't until the night Carlton Lassiter followed him.