Lassie (and Shawn's) Great Adventure

4. You Know What Would Be Funny?

He'd been dreaming about sunflowers for some reason. Bright golden rings of petals that melted down in honey drops. They were beautiful and he couldn't stop himself from reaching out, only to have the drops burn where then stuck to his flesh, honey going richer, darker, melting into blood...

“Skuh!” Eyes snapped wide and saw wooden beams overhead. The steady hammer of rain scattered the odd vision of bleeding flowers and facts reestablished his reality within a blink or three. Rogers, mud, ouch, Lassie, radio. Got it. Best nutshelling eveeer...

He had a few moments of bland numbness before irritants began to trickle through his limbs. Itchy wet was the first one. His clothes had soaked the couch and he felt cocooned in soggy cloth. Freezing was the next, quickly overriding wet and was profound enough that he honestly wondered how he could have possibly noticed the waterlogged surroundings before anything else. Pain, blazing far – far into the front of the pack was the sensation that he'd forgotten about until he tried to move.

Grunt, hiss, and a cacophony of sounds usually found among barely weaned blood hounds, he forced his plank of a spine to relax flat. Falling asleep hunched over his legs was going right up there with top ten sleepy time no-nos; along with “in a bowl of jerk chicken” and “in the middle of...” insert activity of choice.

If he was expecting to pass out again it wasn't happening soon enough. Most likely his teeth were chattering too loud but it could also have been the crew coming off their lunch break and resuming their excavation of his inner ear. Dizziness was a pain even lying down and the warm glut of nausea that came with it added a twist of cruel to his misery.

He did not just hear a mouse scrabble across the floor.

Shawn winced and pulled trailing fingers off the hardwood and wrapped his arm across his chest while scanning his three foot bubble for weaponry. Damn, not even a rubber band. Furred and white and trapped behind glass they were acceptable and even cute. Gray and rabid and hungry for his digits, though...

The burst of lightning was so close, so loud, that it rattled the windows in their frames and lifted the small hairs across Shawn's forearms. He could practically taste the electrical charge that hummed in the air and felt some guilt smudging his gratefulness for being indoors. Granted, the guilt didn't last when he heard the back door shove into its frame – Lassy was quite fleet of foot now that he wasn't shackled to a limping anchor.

“You bring back any chips?” Question and glance ended in the whispered finish of his hunger-laden inquiry. Wet drops slid along dull metal and fell from the muzzle of the weapon held steady despite the shaking of the man behind it.

Rogers beamed at his guest.

“Why did you have to sit there? That was my favorite couch.”

And he pulled the trigger.

After the third time dragging his limbs from the gouging grip of nature – foliage all BDSM on every piece of bare flesh – he slowed his gallop to a fast jog. Still not enough light to see more than five feet through the downpour, the sun taking its sweet time rolling out of bed while his flashlight reflected on the sheet of rain – throwing a hazy cone into the black and offering itself as little more than a placebo against the dark.

First speck of luck all night that Carlton hadn't met an armed Rogers on the way to his car. Still, luck might be just as fleeting as the saying went if he couldn't keep the wild grope of spindly branches from debasing his person – already a line of welts to do a leather ensconced dominatrix proud had risen, red and throbbing, along the bulge of his jaw from that last battle through greenery.

He'd nearly lost his weapon to the trees before tucking it in his holster – at least he'd retained that during Rogers slap-dash theft of his property earlier. Why he couldn't have taken that extra second to snag the bottle of Advil from the glove compartment – Spencer better be in imminent danger of ventilating – the pounding in his skull so fierce he'd have traded his piece for a bottle of meds. Preferably laced with enough Vicodin to drop a steer.