Hi everyone. Yeah, I know, there are so many things I should be updating instead of writing this new fic, but the plot bunny attacked me in the night, quite viciously as I was about to go to bed, and I just had to write this while I still had the inspiration for it. A lot of story ideas I come up with never get this far because after a day or two, I think to myself: Naw, that's a stupid idea. Forget it.

Anyway, this story will eventually be a crossover (not saying with what quite yet cause that'll spoil things), possibly by chapter three. It's not slash this time and it's more gen than it is het. First chapter is told from Shawn's perspective, but not first person. This story is rated for violence and general mind-fuckery. (man, first Dark Passenger, and now this story? There's gotta something wrong with me.) Seriously guys, I don't know what I was thinking when I came up with this one. You've been warned. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I don't own Psych, don't sue me.

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Chapter One

Shawn's feet pounded against the ground as he ran, traveling as quickly as he could across uneven terrain. Branches and underbrush clawed at him, trying to hamper his escape, leaving behind small scratches that he paid no mind to. He didn't have the time to stop and focus or whine about something so menial (No, not whine. He doesn't whine!), not when he could hear the pounding crunch of footsteps faintly in the distance, slowly growing louder as they drew closer.

The ground was still damp from a recent rain, and occasionally he would slip; not enough to actually fall over, but enough to slow his progress, and those few precious seconds he spent slipping on wet leaves were seconds he couldn't spare. The pounding of footsteps behind him grew louder, getting closer, and Shawn growled at his own clumsiness (No, no, he doesn't growl. People don't growl. They yell and they scream and they speak in a low, angry voice, but they do not growl!) He just wasn't fast enough, not against this man, and he didn't have enough time, he never had enough time, to escape, to find help, to leave this man and his cabin far behind.

A shot rang out from behind him, sounding deafening in the quiet forest surroundings, and as a stinging pain bit into his back, Shawn knew it was all over. The stinging sensation was quickly numbed as a pins and needles feeling spread across his back. Another shot rang out, this time hitting his leg. As his leg went numb, his run deteriorated into a slow, stumbling trot. Logic told him it was pointless to keep going and that he might as well sit down and wait to be retrieved before he fell down on top of the tranquilizer darts and jammed them in even further. His so-called 'escape' was so far past hopeless that the man behind him wouldn't even bother shooting anymore tranq darts at him. In fact, if he listened closely, he could hear that the man was no longer running but was walking calmly along as if they were taking a nice stroll through the forest.

Shawn and logic never agreed on too much in the past though, and as his mind screamed, 'Run! Run! Get away!', he figured why start now? However, as much as he wanted to keep running, his legs gave out from beneath him and he collapsed in a heap on the ground; thankfully on his stomach, not his back with the dart still stuck in it. He lay limp on the ground, panting heavily (Not panting, breathing, breathing heavily). Only a few minutes passed before he could hear the sound of footsteps approach him.

The owner of the footsteps chuckled as he knelt down next to Shawn. Patting the psychic on the head, the man said, "You did better this time, mutt. Didn't run in a straight line like a right moron. You must be learning from your mistakes. Pretty impressive!" the man chuckled again. "Or maybe I'm just training you right."

A growl escaped Shawn's throat before he could stop himself.

"Now, don't be like that," the man scolded. "or I'll have to take your food away again. And here I was thinking about rewarding you when we get back with something tasty."

"No," Shawn whispered, inwardly hating the man kneeling over him and hating himself for begging (Not begging! Pleading!). "No, please, I'll be good."

"Aww," the man cooed as he stroked a hand down Shawn's back before plucking the tranq dart out and tossing it to the side. "Is that a whine of apology?"

Shawn was silent, because he refused, absolutely refused to whine for this man. He didn't whine! He wasn't-

"No?" the man prodded. "Alright. Guess I'll have to save those treats for another time when you're-"

Shawn whined. He actually whined and prodded his head against the man's leg, just because he knew it would make his captor happy, and if his captor was happy, then Shawn was happy... The lowest form of happiness one could possibly be. What was left of Shawn's pride shriveled up and died.

"Good boy," the man said, patting Shawn on the head again. "We do a couple more trial runs like this and I think you'll be ready."

Ready for what, Shawn didn't know, and he had a feeling that he didn't want to know. Shawn could hear a slight jingling above him as the man pulled out a leash and locked it onto the thick leather collar wrapped around the psychic's neck. Standing up, the man tugged at the leash and Shawn suppressed a cough at the rough treatment.

Making a clicking noise with his mouth, the man tugged on the leash a few more times before saying, "C'mon, Ribbon, I ain't about to drag your dead weight all the way back to the cabin. I'll leave you chained up out here if I have to."

Resisting the urge to snarl, 'My name isn't 'Ribbon', it's Shawn, you sick freak!' (but not snarl, because he doesn't snarl), Shawn pulled the last dart out of his leg before shakily getting to his feet.

He still remembered the last time his captor made that threat. At the time, Shawn thought it sounded like a good idea; perhaps it would give him another chance to escape. So he had stayed laying on the ground and the man had dragged him a few yards, practically choking him the whole time, before giving up and leaving Shawn chained to a tree for the night. Shawn had struggled with the leash for a good couple of hours after his captor left, but one end was locked up to his collar, the other end was bolt-locked to a sturdy tree, and the leash itself was a link of chains wrapped up in thickly woven fabric. When he'd failed to free himself, Shawn had yelled for help until his voice gave out on him and nobody ever came. As the sun had set, it grew steadily colder and Shawn spent the rest of the night flinching at every nearby rustle of the leaves or snapping of the twigs littering the forest floor. Come morning, when the man finally returned to collect him, Shawn felt nearly hypothermic and he all-too-complacently followed the man back to the cabin where it was warm.

Feeling sluggish from the darts, Shawn stumbled the rest of his way back to the cabin and had to be tugged in the right direction more than once. When they finally reached the cabin, the man led Shawn over to the bolted down cage where he spent most of his free time locked up. He paused before the open door of the cage, like he always did, and listened to his mind scream at him, asking him why he didn't fight back, why he didn't struggle against being put in that cage. He had his hands free. He could punch and scratch and try to fight this man, so why didn't he? There was a time when he used to, so why didn't he now?

Perhaps it was logic working with him for once, or perhaps it was just exhaustion, but he knew from past experience that even at the top of his game, his captor could easily overpower him. With whatever tranquilizer the man used on him in his system, there was just no way he would win in a fight. After running for so long that day, he was just too tired.

'Besides,' he thought as he crawled into his cage that was only tall enough to sit up in, 'I really want that treat.'

He remembered a time in the past when a delicious treat would be a pineapple smoothie, or something pineapple related. Now though, a truly delicious treat would be anything that could be considered people food (Don't say it like that! You are a person. It's not 'people' food, it's just food!). As for the treats his captor actually gave him when he was being good...

"Your pop-pop's got something really special for you tonight," the man said cheerfully as he grabbed Shawn's empty plastic food dish out of the cage before closing and locking the door. Walking over to the fridge, the man pulled out what looked like a small tubbaware container. Without even cleaning the residue left over from Shawn's previous meal off the plastic dish, the man peeled off the seal from the small plastic container and dumped its contents into the food dish. Bringing it back over, the man slid the food dish in through a slot at the bottom of the cage.

Shawn stared down into the bowl at the fresh-looking chunks of meat and vegetables and rice all mixed together in a gravy-like substance. His mouth watered at the smell of it and he brought the bowl close to his face with one hand and shoveled the food into his mouth with the other. He liked to pretend that it was a cold casserole that he was eating, only not as good, but the truth or the matter was that he was eating gourmet dog food. Most people would cringe at the thought, but for him, it was as close to people food (food, just regular food) as he was going to get and it was so much better than dry dog food or the wet stuff that looked like brown mush.

'I'm not a dog,' he repeated over and over in his head as he did every time he ate the dog food. 'I'm not. I'm a person. A human being. Not a dog.'

He didn't really know how long he had been trapped like this, being held captive by a man that treated him like a dog. His captor never kept a calendar in sight, but Shawn knew it had been several months. He had first been kidnapped-

'Dog-napped,' his mind snorted in amusement before he mentally berated himself. He shouldn't be joking about this.

He had been taken during the beginning of spring. Everything had been in bloom, and while trapped at this cabin in the middle of who-knows-where, he had experienced the warmth of summer and the gradually approaching chill of fall. It now grew quite cold out at night, as he had learned the hard way when he was chained up outside that one time, so he figured it was either the middle of fall or sometime in the winter. That was a long time to be treated like a dog for, and as much as he would say to himself that he wasn't a dog, he sometimes felt like he was slipping up and forgetting.

'This wasn't supposed to happen,' he supposed he would say, or at least say something like that, to someone who wanted to hear the whole story from the beginning.

Although saying 'ruff ruff' would probably sum things up pretty well at this point.

Shawn held back a hysterical laugh even though this wasn't something to laugh or joke about. He shouldn't even be thinking, let alone saying, 'ruff ruff' or anything else that's equivalent to a dog's bark.

'Because I'm not a dog,' he reminded himself.

He hadn't even been working on a case when he had been taken. It had actually been a pretty slow month. He and Gus were getting low on money though, so Shawn had gone sniffing around the station for a case (Not sniffing. Dog's go sniffing and he is not a dog. He was snooping, not to be confused with Snoopy the dog.). There hadn't even been a case for him to work on there either, so with no better options, Shawn went looking through the cold case files. He came across a missing person's case, and even though the missing person had been missing for eight years, he still decided to look into it. He was always up for a challenge. Understandably, there weren't too many leads on it, and he barely even had a chance to look into the leads he did have on it before Cruella De Vil's ex-husband had him drugged up, collared, and shoved into a crate in the backseat of a van.

'Except I'm not a Dalmatian,' Shawn thought absentmindedly before suddenly shaking his head and thinking, 'A dog! I'm not a dog!'

He set down the food dish and shuffled to the back corner or his cage where a large pillow lay.

'Not a dog. Not a dog,' he repeated to himself as he curled up on his side.

At first, he had fought the man who insisted on being called 'master' or 'pop-pop.' From his cage, he tried talking sense into the man, he tried manipulating the man with words, and when that didn't work, he found himself yelling and screaming at his captor. It was a long and exhausting one-sided verbal battle in which the man would only respond with, "You're not going to get any food until you shut up," and "Quit your barking!" (a response that confused him up until the first time he needed to use the bathroom and had to be walked outside via leash with his hands bound in front of him and his ankles cuffed with only enough room to walk, past a perfectly functioning bathroom inside, and told to go in the bushes).

Eventually, Shawn gave in and shut up. He was just too hungry to yell anymore. After a couple of condescending words about how much of a "good boy" he was being, the man pulled out a plastic dish, much like the one already in his cage that contained water, poured some dry dog food into it and slid it through a slot at the bottom of the cage.

"I'm not a dog," Shawn had said. "How about something edible? Maybe something with pineapple in it?"

"Aren't you so cute? Yipping like you're people," the man had said, grinning.

"I am a person," Shawn had fumed, getting tired of saying it. "Not a dog, a person. Hence the opposable thumbs and my lack of tail and fur-"

He had started to babble and before he could stop himself, he was insulting the crazy man and the insults continued to get more and more vicious until, it seemed, the man had had enough. Suddenly Shawn was being dragged out of the cage with more strength than he expected from the man and was pinned down to the ground and beaten with a belt, all the while being called a "bad dog." He was soon shoved back into the cage and the dog food was taken away. As much as he hated to admit it, for the week following his punishment, he was a lot more obedient, and he was so hungry by the time the man put the dog food back into his cage that he ate it all.

Unfortunately for him, the dog food was drugged and during the hours that he was a drooling puddle of mush, the man would climb into the cage and pet him on the head, telling him what a good dog he was being; what a good dog 'Ribbon' was being. Shawn wasn't sure why the man felt the need to re-name him, and why, out of all the dog names there were out there, he had chosen Ribbon. Shawn could think of plenty of other names that were better suited for him than 'Ribbon,' which totally sounded like a girl's name.

And then he had to remind himself that his name was Shawn, that he was not a dog and that he didn't need to be renamed.

When Shawn's bruises began to heal, he became his usual difficult self again, but it wasn't long before he found himself on the receiving end of the man's belt, being called a "bad dog" and that the man "needed to nip this bad habit in the bud."

This cycle seemed to repeat over and over again. He'd behave and stay quite and eventually get his food privileges back. He'd avoid the dog food for as long as possible until he couldn't stand the hunger anymore, and then hed be drugged up to the gills on the floor of his cage and try to ignore the man petting him and calling him a "good dog." He'd slowly gain his confidence back, step out of line again, and find himself being punished with the man's belt again. This all would happen over and over again, and he wasn't sure how many times it had happened or when things began to change, but at some point, he just stopped talking back, he stopped being disobedient and doing things that would get him hit with the belt. He had wondered many times what his friends and family were currently doing, if they were close to finding him or had given up due to a lack of leads. He supposed the day he stopped being disobedient was the day he stopped believing that someone would magically swoop in and save him.

Some time had passed before Shawn's captor seemed satisfied that he wasn't going to act out anymore. The first time that the man gave Shawn a bowl of the gourmet dog food as reward for being such a good dog was the first time that he took Shawn out of the cage on a leash without any other restraints. He didn't feel at all woozy like he usually did after eating the dog food, and with the leash being held by his captor being his only restraint, Shawn's thoughts immediately jumped to him escaping.

Yet... he didn't.

He was suspicious and confused by his newfound freedom and he didn't really know how to react. His mind kept telling him to run, run, run, but he was... a little afraid of what might happen if he tried anything. If he tried to run, he would most likely fail, and then what would the man do to him? He didn't know how far the forest around the cabin ran. He could likely be running to his death. Plus, he didn't know his way around. Even if civilization was fairly close, he could easily get lost in the forest and his captor would most likely find him before he found anyone else that could help him.

So Shawn did nothing, and let the man walk him around the yard on the leash. It was apparently the right thing to do because the man was a lot nicer to him after that. Shawn was fed the gourmet dog food more often and his food wasn't always drugged. The man eventually brought Shawn a large pillow to sleep on in his cage. Granted, it was a dog pillow bed, but it was much more comfortable to sleep on than the cabin's cold, wood floor.

Then one day, when the man brought Shawn outside for the usual walk around the yard, he unlocked the leash from Shawn's collar and told the psychic to run. For a moment, Shawn simply stood there, confused and wondering if this was some sort of trap.

"What are you waiting for, mutt? Run!" the man snapped.

Shawn took off into the forest, his heart thundering in his chest. For a moment, he thought he was free. He thought the man had a change of heart and was letting him go. Shawn thought of all the people he would get to see again, and all the delicious food he'd get to taste again.

And then his captor came after him wielding a gun. It wasn't long before he caught up to Shawn, being in much better shape than the psychic who, for the most part, had been confined to a cage for X-amount of months.

'This is it,' Shawn had thought as the man gained on him. 'This is how it's going to end.'

A shot rang out and Shawn felt something hit him in the shoulder. It stung before it went numb, and his pace slowed as the numbness spread, but it wasn't a bullet that hit him. It was a small tranquilizer dart. A second shot rang out; this time the dart hit him in the lower back.

Shawn fell to the ground in a heap, and could only lay there and listen to the man walk up to him; his heart was about ready to burst with fear. He expected to be beat, to be yelled at for running away, but instead the man knelt down next to him, plucked out the darts, and called him a stupid mutt for running in a straight line. "Makes it too easy," the man had said, "Like shooting fish in a barrel."

Re-attaching the leash, the man lead a stumbling, dumbfounded Shawn back to the cabin. About a week later, he let Shawn out again, told him to get running, and took off after the psychic soon after. This happened again and again and each time, Shawn got a little bit better at evading capture, but he was never good enough to completely escape.

'He's hunting me,' Shawn thought on more than one occasion. 'Am I just some glorified game to him?'

It didn't make sense to him then, and it didn't make sense to him now. The weeks passed on as they usually did, with Shawn either stuck in the cage or being walked around outside on the lease. He was always tense when he was brought outside on the leash, because he never knew when he was actually being brought out for a hunt. Three more times of being hunted passed, and during the last hunt, he seriously almost thought for a moment that he might actually get away. He had been running and dodging for well over an hour when the darts hit him, three this time. It seemed that his captor was getting tired of their current hunt and added in the third dart for extra insurance. The man even seemed out of breath when he caught up to Shawn and plopped down on the ground next to the psychic. Petting Shawn on the head, the man laughed happily and praised the psychic.

"Good dog, you're such a good dog."

What Shawn hated most was that a small part of him actually enjoyed the praise, and that as much as he reminded himself over and over again that he wasn't a dog, that small childish, or perhaps brainless, part of him would say, 'Good dog. Good dog. I'm a good dog.'

And as if this wasn't frightening enough, the man said, "You're ready."

Ready for what though?

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End of chapter one. I had to cut it off here and split chapter one into two separate chapters because I was already at 7000 words and it wasn't even done yet (plus, I have animation HW that I really need to get started on and I wanted to post something for this before I did). If you think this was messed up, believe me guys, it gets weirder. Hopefully some of you out there like weird.

Review please and tell me what you think!