Orizuru: Chapter Four
-FOUR-
Things aren't any better in the morning. On the upside, they're also not any worse. It comes as a small comfort when the top shelf of the bookcase in his living room resembles nothing more than a damned paper menagerie. The were-dog looks slightly more dog and less 'were' in good light and Jensen fingers the folds, the color of the paper worn through to white in places. Whoever made it obviously took their time, folding and re-folding until the corners matched and the right lines emerged, someone patient though not necessarily adept.
It feels wrong to destroy something so painstakingly crafted, so he hasn't pulled the dog apart yet, or the turtle. The cranes he'd cobbled back together through trial and error but the number of creases required for the others makes him a little dizzy to even think about. Now, with some distance between him and the find, Jensen can see the necessity of pulling them apart.
i will touch you with my mind.
Touch you and touch and touch
until you give
me suddenly a smile, shyly obscene [2]
The passage scrawled inside the dog is both weirder and more disturbing in the simplest of ways.
I will have you.
Those four words clue him in to the depth and breadth of what he's actually dealing with. It takes a specific kind of person to be so certain without encouragement, and suddenly he's wading through his list trying to find the floaters.
Before he drifts too deep, the doorbell saves him from catching the rip tide of his own suspicion, a long buzz that slots him back into his routine. Icarus paws at his shins, whining softly as he shoulders his bag. Jensen glances at the clock before he squats to give Ick a quick rubdown. Clif's a little early anyway, he can wait.
"Be good today, buddy," he says, smiling when Icarus arches into his hand. "Tell Selena to take it easy on you."
Icarus stares, tongue lolling, rear end sliding on the tile from wagging his tail so hard. Jensen has the sudden overwhelming urge to scoop him up and bring him along. Any other day he might, but Mondays are traditionally the hardest hitting, the schedule the most grueling. It's different with every director, but most want to get the tough stuff out of the way while the talent's still relatively fresh. Which means Mondays are a bitch.
Another long buzz sounds and Jensen frowns, turns his wrist over to look at his watch. Clif never bothers ringing twice. Must be a tighter schedule today than usual. He gives Ick one last pat and flicks the switch on all the lights but the one in the hall. It leaves a weird glow in his wake, a fresh crop of goosebumps prickling his skin as he backs out the front door and sets the alarm. Bumping into something solid on the stoop makes it worse, instinct taking over in the deep dark of pre-dawn, his elbow shooting out to land in the shadow's stomach.
The shadow grunts out a breathy, "Fuck," then staggers down and back until the motion sensors trip on the light above the garage.
When Jensen turns, he feels stupid. Awake, guilty, and very fucking stupid.
"Misha? What the hell?"
Misha holds up a hand, still bent at the waist and coughing as Jensen glances past him, sees the black SUV with the silhouette of Clif's head curved over the driver's seat and what must be Jared's on the passenger side. It throws him. Not just because he's usually the first-in, last-out but also because he took off in a kind of embarrassing hurry last night and someone in that car thought it would be a good idea to send Misha to the door.
Misha who just took an elbow in the gut. Shit.
"Jesus. Sorry, man. I didn't-" Jensen stammers, instinct also making him reach out to help. "You okay?"
His fingers fumble, clumsy with recently shaken off sleep and an unexpected adrenaline rush, but when they find a hold it happens skin to skin - the thin stalk of Misha's forearm flexing in his grip. It takes a lot more effort than it should not to snatch his hand back, and more than once he has to tell his brain to shut the fuck up. Misha's a friend. A friend he just gutchecked accidentally because he's a paranoid freak of nature. He bends to set his Thermos aside, obscenely grateful to find the contents still sloshing gently against the insulated walls, then lays a tentative hand against the flat of Misha's back. Jensen gets lost for a long stretch of seconds, the knobs of Misha's spine curved into the heel of his hand, the bunch of muscle and ribs beneath when he exhales and his wheezes transform into something else.
"So easy," Misha says, teeth glinting white in the bright fluorescent as he smiles and straightens.
A small part of him recognizes the humor, can track the reflection of it back down the months. Unfortunately, that part can't claim control of his mouth or his limbs.
Jensen pushes past roughly, irritated with himself as much as Misha, frustrated by his own reactions. Their shoulders bump, Misha twisting gracefully to absorb the blow and Jensen catches sight of that grin again, the one that says the joke's on him, the one he wants to wipe clean off Misha's mouth by any means necessary.
Thinking about the means only confuses the issue more, so Jensen has to settle for stalking down the drive towards the SUV.
He mutters, "Dick," under his breath as soon as he thinks he's out of earshot.
Misha's response comes from way too close - a snort and whispered, "Only when it suits me," that Jensen feels against the back of his ear. It's too fucking early and too fucking much on too little caffeine. To add insult to injury, Misha presses his abandoned Thermos into his hand before he moves away.
Wisely, Jensen keeps on walking.
Once they get to the car, there's a minor scuffle over shotgun. He wins, thank all that is holy. Jared's vibrating in the backseat like he downed a whole box of Sugar Smacks this morning and Misha's - well, Misha, and truth be told he's not feeling all that social what with the recent events piled on top of the running away fiasco. Clif grunts a cursory greeting and then gets them underway. The studio's only about twenty miles from his place, but he pops his earbuds in anyway then eases down into the seat to get that extra half hour of shuteye.
Even with his music cranked to tune them out, Jensen can hear the gentle rumble of Jared and Misha trading insults. It probably shouldn't lull him to sleep, but he doesn't traffic all that well in shouldn't where Jay's concerned. Or Misha for that matter. He drifts off easily to the sound of their voices and the rolling sway of the SUV taking curves just a hair too fast.
Jensen has a moment of blind panic when he starts himself awake - the bottom dropping out of his stomach as he scrambles and slaps his palm against the dashboard.
Rocks, walls of it not three feet from where his cheek was pressed up against the glass. Boulders and scrub brush and tiny eddies of runoff trickling down to the shoulder of a road they shouldn't be on. He glances in the rearview just to verify he is where he thought he was. Sure enough, Jared's slouched down behind him decked out in headphones and pounding on his PSP. Misha's alternately staring out the window and screwing with his phone. Their eyes meet in the mirror for a fraction of a second before Jensen averts his, running the back of his hand across his mouth in a compulsory drool check. Thankfully, he comes away dry.
Small favors.
Behind him, there's a quick rustle of fabric and a sharp intake of breath before Jared shouts, "Wha-oh!" and Misha murmurs, "Oh, thank fuck."
Apparently the Wonder Twins were getting sick of riding in silence.
He feels like Alice, through the looking glass with the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat and flamingo cricket. Everyone else seems to know exactly what's going on.
It sucks.
There are about a hundred questions tripping across the tip of his tongue, but he finally lands on one that will lead to all the other answers.
"Where are we?" he asks.
The results are predictable, if not particularly enlightening - Jared and Misha talking over each other until all Jensen catches are the words Disneyland and Magical Mystery Tour. Clif waits them out, guiding the SUV around a sharp hairpin with a practiced hand.
"'Bout ten miles south of Squamish," Clif says and sneaks a quick peek Jensen's direction. "You were down for the count."
"Yeah," Jensen replies, drags a hand through his hair. "Not sleeping all that great lately."
The clouds beyond Clif's window are bleeding pink to gold to white, the sun hidden by the soaring rock face beyond Jensen's. It answers when well enough, but what he can't pin down is why. Sure, he remembers vague references to another remote shoot, another lake tucked between mountain peaks that they had to get on film.
The fact that he forgot about it being this week bothers him more than the lack of clothes and creature comforts. Worst comes to worst, he's got a whole trailer full of Dean's jeans he knows will fit. There's a hoodie and a hat in his backpack, toiletries in his trailer. Anything else he can pick up once they hit Squamish if given time or a production assistant to do so.
Unprepared equates to unprofessional though, and Jensen hates to think that his personal bullshit has started interfering with his ability to do his job.
Just. Fuck.
Misha seems to take the silence as a cue to shove his face between the front seats.
"You had no idea we were on location this week."
True or not, rational or not, it bothers Jensen to be read so easily. With fans, yeah, he takes care to show them only what he wants them to see. Real life's a whole different kettle of fish - a transparent kettle full of those weird ass transparent fish. Being on guard all the time is exhausting and amongst friends Jensen prefers to be taken at face value. By and large, that face happens to be an honest one. When it isn't, Misha's always the one who sees through the bullshit and calls him on it.
There's no win here. Nothing he can say that Misha won't twist, so Jensen keeps his mouth shut.
Not to be outdone, Jared shifts forward in his seat too, leather creaking, and says," Dude, seriously? You're like the most prepared person on the planet."
He isn't, never has been. There's prepared and then there's Prepared, and it requires a lot more effort and attention to detail than Jensen ever intends to expend to be Prepared. Just so happens he's better at remembering shit than Jared is most of the time.
Misha leans in further, the jut of his chin catching against Jensen's shoulder all scrape and stubble.
"That's really all you brought," he says, his gaze flicking to the backpack situated between Jensen's feet as he clucks his tongue. "Whatever will we do with you?"
"We are not doing anything with me. I'm aces. Just pack light is all."
It's stretching the truth at the best of times.
"Dude, you're two pairs of strappy shoes and a straightener away from being a girl."
"Says the fucknut who lugged a suitcase the size of a small car to Rome for a day."
Misha edges closer, wedging his shoulder between the seats, his nose in dangerous proximity to Clif's elbow and his face screwed up into sympathetic shapes that waver between sincere and - not.
"Poor kitten," he says. "Mi suitcasa es su suitcasa. Within reason of course." The corner of his mouth twitches twice before he adds, "Sorry. Within my definition of reason."
Which, to be frank, is a much broader definition than Jensen's completely comfortable with because suddenly he's thinking about Misha's underwear, his subconscious settling in for a good long ponder on the ages-old question of boxers or briefs. Jensen kind of wants to punch Misha. Maybe a lot. In the face.
"Fuck you very much too, Boy Wonder. Told you twice already I'm not wearing one of your damned Sponge Bob T-shirts. Not even in the Canadian outback."
Misha huffs a laugh and sits back, says, "Suit yourself," softly, like he might actually give a shit.
Jensen bites back the compulsory apology because the last week has apparently been weird enough to drive him to rudeness. With any luck, the change of scenery will help, give him time to reap the spoils that close quarters have to offer. It's easier to investigate when all your suspects are occupying the same floor of a hotel in the middle of fucking nowhere.
It's an opportunity - one he's looking forward to taking advantage of when it fully presents itself.
By the time he and Jared wrap and get back to the hotel, it's ten 'til ten.
While today won't go down in history as the worst day ever, Jensen's still sporting a fantastic film of mud and corn syrup blood and his boots feel like they weigh about fifty pounds each and he's starving. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't be a big deal. Here though, the hotel restaurant closes at ten and the room service menu slims down to appetizers and alcohol half an hour later. Unless he wants to harass Clif or walk somewhere, he and Jared are both going to have to make do with the food they can get at the bar.
There are worse problems to have.
The wall of the elevator is cool at his back, grounding, and he watches the display shift from two to three as the bell dings and the doors slide open. He glances over at Jared who doesn't seem all that inclined to move, the sweat tracks cut through the dust on his face making him look more worn out than he probably is.
"Back here in twenty?" he asks, trying for a smile and mostly succeeding. He thinks.
Jared returns it, levering himself away from the wall on a grunt.
"It's too much to hope that the bar serves steak, isn't it?"
"Think that's probably about as likely as getting sweet tea, man," Jensen says, familiarity making his stomach knot up.
"Way to burst my bubble, Jen," Jared grumbles, but he's still smiling when he makes the hard left to head to his room. They're at opposite ends of the hall this time, and it's unusual enough for Jensen to take notice but not so much so he feels it needs mentioning.
Instead he just shouts, "Twenty minutes," at Jared's retreating back and accepts the hand he raises as an answer.
It takes Jensen less than that to strip out of his clothes and scrub himself pink. He even manages to scrape away the dirt and stage blood cocktail caught under his fingernails before he tugs on his hoodie and a pair of track pants he'd found shoved in the back of a drawer in his trailer. At some point he's going to have a problem with other stuff - socks and underwear - but he's pretty sure he can con Clif into running him down to the local superstore tomorrow between set-ups.
The message light on the phone flashes in his periphery when he sits on the end of the bed to pull on his sneakers, a bright red beacon that he ignores because it's probably just Selena calling to tell him she picked Icarus up and he's doing fine and that he owes her for the short notice. It's not like he can call her back now anyway since her kids are undoubtedly asleep. Regardless of the message content, it will sure as shit wait until he has food in his belly.
Jensen palms both key card and wallet, sliding them into his pocket as he slips out the door.
The cast and crew have commandeered most of the third floor, so the corridor buzzes with activity despite the hour. Several doors along the hallway stand ajar and he stops a couple of times on his way to the elevators to chat. Before long, he's spent another twenty minutes at it, his stomach trying really fucking hard to eat him from the inside out, but there's still no Jared.
Any other day Jensen might go bang on his door, make sure he hasn't fallen asleep. Today, he's not in the mood. Despite feeling more human than he did an hour ago, he's hungry and tired and still irritated at himself for forgetting they were making this trek to begin with.
Jay's a big boy. He can fend for himself.
The elevator ride back down is uneventful save the blasphemous Muzak version of Stairway to Heaven piped in through tinny speakers. Jensen finds himself humming along just to drown out the strains of a song that no one in their right mind would ever synthesize. In the lobby there's a quiet hum, an echo of the hallway upstairs that never quite matches its volume, small clusters of familiar faces milling around in mud-crusted boots. He waves without breaking stride, his stomach staging a full-on rebellion by now.
It's easy to find the bar, a modestly sized oblong box blocked off on one end of the restaurant so they can share a kitchen. Most of the high-tops are dirty, covered with half-eaten food on non-descript plates, beer glasses, and crumpled napkins, so Jensen doesn't have much choice when it comes to seating. He grabs the first one he comes to that's wiped down and plucks the small, sticky menu out from between the salt and pepper shakers, relieved to find that not only do they serve hamburgers, they play actual music instead of the Muzak shit he was subjected to in the elevator.
Across the room he hears the clanking of plates before he sees a tiny girl wrangling a bus tub. She looks too young to be tending bar, pixie-like features sharp in the glare of the big screen and neon, her dishwater blonde hair drawn up into a simple ponytail that bounces and shimmies when she tugs the cloth out of her apron to swipe the tabletop clean.
"Be with you in a minute," she says on the tail end of a sigh. It's obvious she's the only one working tonight and the rest of the horde has probably run her half-ragged.
Jensen bides his time, drumming his fingertips against the table and scoping out what they have on tap. He gets as far as the third handle before he sees them.
Cranes.
Two of them riding the ridge of the bar, both folded from grease-stained paper placemats spotted with ketchup. He doesn't make the conscious decision to stand up, not that he can remember anyway, but soon enough he has them in hand, his ass just starting to kiss the surface of his stool again.
His first instinct says to shove them in his pocket, wait until he's upstairs and can take his time to comb them for clues. Usually, his instincts don't stand a chance in the face of his urges - especially the need to know - but this time they win out, paper crinkling as he slides them in alongside his phone. A commotion at the opposite end of the bar makes him reconsider, laughter high and girlish tickling against his ears and when he looks up, Jensen understands why.
Misha's bent close, his smirk tripping between sly and sated as he flicks the bartender's ponytail back over her shoulder. It's a liberty Jensen would never take with someone he just met but Misha has boundary issues. Drunkenness only makes them worse and seeing as Misha finished his coverage around six, odds are that he's probably feeling really fucking good right about now.
He watches Misha lean closer, lips hovering just a breath away from her ear as he wavers on his feet. Whatever he says to her gets lost in the music and the sharp rattle of plates as the girl's neck flushes pink and she almost drops the bus tub. It's a move he's seen Misha make a thousand times over - inappropriately proprietary, completely indifferent to the answer that meets him after the fact because he's almost more interested in the reaction than the potential for sexual acrobatics.
Jensen's stomach lurches suddenly, and he's about to clear his throat to remind them both they have an audience when the bartender gives Misha a gentle shove.
"Maybe it's time for you to head up to your room. Sir," she says, but even from where Jensen's sitting he can tell she's biting her cheeks to keep from smiling.
Someone in the lobby shrieks, feet pounding past the open end of the bar, and if Misha answers her it's pitched too low for Jensen to catch. Not that it matters. And yet, he strains for the words without knowing why. Misha, of course, catches him staring before Jensen has the opportunity to pretend he isn't.
Getting caught has its own advantages. For one, he gets to watch Misha slink the length of the bar. On anyone else, it might be ridiculous, but the laws of nature and Misha aren't on speaking terms and he's just lithe enough to pull it off convincingly. His stride stutters though, when he's five steps away, his brow furrowed with some emotion Jensen can't immediately put a name to. If pressed he'd say Misha looks like he lost something, misplaced it in the jumble of plates and beer bottles. For a second, Jensen thinks, "Maybe," but in the next, Misha pats the pocket of his jeans and huffs a laugh, sliding his phone free just enough to make sure it's actually there.
The smile that chases the laugh means trouble.
But it also means that Jensen knows precisely who he's going to be dealing with before Misha perches on the stool opposite him. Considering the other uncertainties he's been fielding, it's a comfort.
When Misha says, "That'll be fifty dollars," what he really means is, "Enjoy the show?" He's used to being the king of this and every other fucking jungle he's ever walked into when he's drunk. Which, come to think, is actually ridiculous, just not the annoying kind.
"Not sure you earned it. For that kind of bank I usually demand nudity," Jensen says, eyeing the bottle Misha's sliding idly against the scarred tabletop, his fingers wet with condensation. It only gets weird when Jensen can't figure out if it's the beer he's longing for or something else. On cue, the bottle moves, tipping up to meet Misha's mouth and Jensen catches himself this time, tongue already darting out to wet his own lips as he studies the motion of Misha's throat, the curve of his hand.
Unfortunately it seems Misha's observational skills trump the speed of thought even when he's drunk. Not five seconds later he laughs a dark little laugh and says, "A private encore can be arranged. If you so desire."
Jensen feels it when his brain begins to shut down, the slow unspooling of his sanity as it wraps around that particular notion and sticks. He's too worn down, too hungry to shuffle it aside with a feint or sleight of hand, to displace the thought by wondering where Jared is or who the cranes in his pocket belong to. Life would be easier if he could.
Instead he stares silently at Misha's elbow, tracing the blue plaid pattern of his shirt cuffed around it until Tiny Bartender clears her throat a couple feet away.
"What can I get started for you?" she asks, sharp tap of pencil lead to paper acting as punctuation.
It figures that of all places, he'd be having a crisis of what-ever-the-fuck this crisis is in public when he's required to actually say things. As a stop-gap, he goes with licking his lips again, trying to work his way around the lump in his throat by force.
Turns out there's no need because Misha in all his inebriated grandeur turns to her and says, "Meat and beer. Something leafy or at least green to assuage his ridiculous gastro-guilt."
Tiny Bartender frowns at him, then Misha, then back at him. When she opens her mouth to ask whatever it is she feels she needs to, Misha makes a shooing motion that she obeys without protest.
"How do you do that?" Jensen asks, which is awesome, since at the very least it means there's been no permanent brain damage.
"Do what, exactly?"
"Make people do shit by being a prick."
Misha hums, a warm, thoughtful sound that gets lost under the opening strains of the hair metal ballad queuing up on the sound system, and Jensen tries very hard not to think about - well, anything. Especially not Misha and his prick.
But then Misha drops his voice an octave or ten and says, "Wouldn't you like to know?" in a way that leaves Jensen torn between breaking his nose and other much less fathomable things.
Jared saves him the trouble of trying to answer.
"Sorry," he mutters, footsteps fast and heavy.
Jensen checks his watch, knowing that it's a dick move when he does it. Considering it's been almost an hour since they parted ways and half an hour since Jay was supposed to meet him at the elevator upstairs, he's earned this much asshole tax and then some. At least Jared looks contrite when he swings in behind Misha to snag a stool and drag it into place between them. Jared must catch sight of the clock hanging over the bar when he does because he curses and apologizes again once he settles in.
"Gen set fire to the kitchen," is the only explanation he offers before he reaches across the table for the menu.
Jensen's, "On purpose?" comes out the same time as Misha's, "Cry for attention?" and Jensen glares.
Jay must have more practice at ignoring Misha, because he manages to answer without skipping a beat. More than likely, it's an inverse correlation to how much time Misha spends ignoring - or trying to ignore - Jared when they're filming. Odd that it doesn't work that way for Jensen.
When Jared says, "No, not on purpose," it comes across a little bitchier than it probably should, but it's late and they're both tired and he's probably worried about Gen. "I ordered a new fridge," he continues, "one of those French ones. She said she'd always kind of wanted one but never had a kitchen that needed it. It was supposed to be a surprise."
Misha snorts around a swallow of beer. "If nothing else, you managed that."
Jensen kicks at his shins beneath the table, but either Misha's a mind-reader or he's gotten predictable in his old age because he doesn't make contact. Or, he does, but scraping his ankle against the leg of the stool doesn't really count. As consolation, he squares a heel against one of the cross braces of Misha's stool and gives it a hearty shove. Misha rocks in place but doesn't slide off, so it's not as satisfying as it would otherwise be.
Shame.
Jared frowns at him, then Misha, then back at him again just like Tiny Bartender did. It's more subtle, but also more perceptive and Jensen wants to dig behind that expression and find out what the fuck Jared thinks he knows. He's tired of people looking at him like that.
Quickly as it came though, the frown disappears leaving behind a mask of worry and exhaustion.
"Anyway," Jared presses on, "The guy who installed it screwed the pooch." Misha coughs. "And no, Misha, I don't mean literally. Thanks for playing."
"So your new fridge is on fire?" Jensen asks.
"Just the wall behind it. Something with the circuit the old fridge was on and an overload and the breaker didn't trip. There's an electrician coming out in the morning."
And that's when Jensen realizes he can't even be pissed off about Jay being late. He still wants to be, and that in and of itself makes him a shitty friend.
Then Misha stretches his arms up over his head and yawns, and Jensen does not notice the wide band of belly bared above his belt. As it turns out, not noticing something is just as distracting as noticing it, and so he misses whatever Jared allegedly said while it was happening.
"Fascinating as this all is, I think I'll leave you two to knit tea cozies and swap recipes amongst yourselves. There's mischief afoot," Misha says, pushing up off his stool. His gaze flicks briefly past them out into the lobby and Jensen thinks he may fall over on his own once he has his feet, but in the end he just leans a little too far to place his empty bottle on the bar out of their way. He sobers abruptly, hand splayed against the curve of Jared's shoulder before he adds, "I'm glad Gen's okay," and stalks off.
Jensen tells himself twice that even in the face of terrifying new not-quite revelations there are lines he refuses to cross.
Watching Misha wander away is one of them.
Jared has no such qualms it seems, but the furrow creeps back between his brows as he follows Misha's meandering progress across the lobby.
"Don't think I'll ever get over what a nutcase Misha can be."
"Says the man who didn't walk in on him half naked and elbow deep in glow-in-the-dark finger paint."
Jared smiles and slides around the table to take the stool Misha just vacated.
"Everyone has hobbies."
Tiny Bartender appears at his elbow then, a frosted bottle of Misha's brand of beer clutched in one hand and a plate balanced on the other. He's loathe to admit it, but the cheeseburger and mixed greens look like a slice of heaven when she sets them down.
His stomach plays it a little less coy, growling loudly as soon as ceramic strikes wood.
She waves off his thanks with a smile, turning her attention to Jared who says simply, "Yes," and points at Jensen's plate. With any luck the grill's still warmed up.
The burger tastes as good as it looks, thick and juicy, and he only has to raise an eyebrow at Jared's incredulous, "You're really gonna eat in front of me," to shut him up. There's forgiveness and then there's madness. Jensen chooses the way of sanity, at least for now. He nods his way through his half of the conversation while Jared relates the rest of Gen's harrowing battle. How the dogs went nuts over the smoke alarm and that the sheetrock will have to be replaced.
Mostly he just focuses on chewing and swallowing, finding his way back to center. But there's a small part of him that can't get over how much things have changed and how fast. It's stupid and childish. He knows better. And it's not like they partied all that hard before. It's just -
It's never going to be the same.
Jensen keeps himself busy with the burger until he can't anymore, the last bite polished off too quickly when he licks a spot of mustard off his thumb. The beer goes down smooth and cold behind it, the fruit-infused afterburn clinging to the back of his tongue. As it turns out, Misha has decent taste.
Go figure.
Tiny Bartender takes about half as much time to show with Jared's food as she did with Jensen's. It lends credence to the theory that the grill was already warm, sure, but it also gives him ammunition to tease Jared mercilessly about preferential treatment and the trappings thereof.
Jensen's winding up to do exactly that when his pants vibrate. More specifically, his phone does and when he reaches into his pocket to slide it out, he comes away with two crumpled cranes in tow. No use hiding them now they're out in the open, but he does his best to make it look casual when he tosses them on the tabletop anyway. Making a bigger deal of it will only complicate matters that are already complicated enough, thank you very much.
He gives Jay a minute to choke and chuckle, content to delay the inevitable ribbing as much as he's allowed. It works a little too well. Jared squints at the birds for mere moments before he goes on chewing, the movement of his jaw slowed to half speed. Almost like he's trying to choose his words, let the lettuce buy him time.
Interesting.
Try as he might, Jensen can only come up with two reasons that Jared, of all people, would tread so carefully.
The first is to spare someone's feelings. While Jay's proven countless times that he cares, their friendship has never been about pulling punches. They make fun of each other's failings. Keep each other honest. Put each other back together when the seams start to unravel. Jared knows better than to pull that shit with him. They aren't kid glove guys.
The alternative is worse, because it means his best friend's getting ready to lie to his fucking face.
Jensen busies himself with his phone, trying to work through the logic in his head while Jay does his very best impression of a cow chewing cud. As it turns out, the text message came from Selena - or, not Selena but an 'anonymous' source demanding ransom with a picture of Ick imprisoned behind a baby gate attached. It's just what he needed. And even though he can't enjoy it fully, Jensen allows himself a small smile and a minute to wonder who the hell is to blame for the flashing light in his room if not Selena. Bigger fish to fry now, though. Time to do old Captain Ahab proud.
So long as he doesn't drown.
Or get eaten by a whale.
Jared swallows.
"So," Jensen says, spearing a hefty forkful of his own greens. "Let's just get the lie out of the way first. In my experience it makes the truth easier to find."
The corner of Jay's mouth twitches, beer bottle caught in stasis half way between the table and his lips.
For an actor, Jared sucks ass at this. Thankfully, Jensen does not. Waiting isn't any more of a hardship for him than breathing, so he's got all the time in the world. He shoves the monstrous mouthful past his lips, savors the tang of vinegar and mustard, the bitter bite of endive against the barely-there base of spinach. And he waits.
But Jared just says, "I don't know what you're talking about," and shovels another scoop in, doesn't even have the good grace to look guilty as he does it.
Jensen picks at the label on his beer bottle, willing to give Jay the benefit of the doubt as long as he's able. Doubt runs out when he plucks one of the misshapen paper creations from between their plates and Jared's eyes follow it like it's on fire.
He knows something.
"Really? 'Cause it looks like you might."
Jared shrugs and chews, glances over his shoulder at the big Wurlitzer sitting dark in the corner, takes time to catalog the minutiae of every bottle stacked against the wall behind the bar. What he won't do is look Jensen in the eye. And Jensen's done being dicked around tonight.
"Right," he says, palming his phone off the table and back into his pocket. The cranes follow closely, something sticky rubbing off on the back of his hand as he thrusts them in after. It's late - much too fucking late for high school bullshit and Jared's unexpected Marceau act. So Jensen does the sane thing and tosses back the last swallow of his beer. He can't say for sure if the wave of exhaustion that washes over him is symptom or side-effect, but it doesn't really matter.
He's done.
With a sigh, Jensen strips a couple of bills out of his wallet and tucks them under the lip of the plate. It should be more than enough to cover both dinners if need be, but right now he's not particularly inclined to wait for change.
"See you in the morning, Jay."
As he walks away, he hears Jared say his name once but with the late night bustle in the lobby, it's easy to pretend he doesn't. Even if doing it makes him a bitch.
The room's dark when Jensen turns the deadbolt behind him, nothing but the reflected glare of streetlights kicking up off the rain soaked parking lot to greet him. He remembers the placement of the phone on the nightstand because it's part of his job to notice things, evaluate and find the right stride to fit the blocking. No need though, to notice the message indicator or the fact it's not blinking.
That's one answer Jensen already has.
He'd made the mistake of stopping at the front desk on his way through the lobby. Since the light on the phone obviously wasn't Selena's doing, he thought there might be new pages for tomorrow maligning in a cube behind the desk downstairs. Most PAs would have stuck them in a manilla envelope and slid them under the door. There are new faces this year though, and one method was no better or worse than the other.
Anyway.
What he thought doesn't make a damn bit of difference because when he'd asked the night manager if there were any messages for him at the front desk, she'd wrinkled her nose, jabbed at a button behind the counter, and pushed a very different kind of paper across the counter at him.
A black, beetle-shaped piece of paper to be exact.
Jensen tosses it and the two cranes from the bar on the desk and decides, very pointedly, that morning will be soon enough to worry about their origins and undoubtedly innuendo-fueled offerings. Instead of pondering the three ring circus his life has become in the past week, he roots himself in routine. Peeling the hoodie off over his head, Jensen pads into the bathroom, the tile cool beneath bare feet. Two handfuls of water splashed across his face and thirty seconds with his trusty travel toothbrush make all the difference in the world.
Given the ridiculous length and complexity of this particular day, Jensen's tempted just to pass out - pull the covers up to his ears until they call the manager for the master key and kick him out of bed because he missed call. He's better than that though. So he slips his laptop out of its sleeve and pokes at the power button, spends the boot time sifting through the promotional materials scattered across the desk until he finds the information for the hotel's wireless.
He doesn't look at the paper animals lined up between the room service menu and table lamp. Can't and won't. If he does, he'll never get to sleep. In his experience, there's a lot of real estate between 'not right now' and 'never', and he'd rather live somewhere in that limbo tonight than be stuck staring at a bunch of cryptic chicken scratch designed to seduce him until the sun comes up.
Just because he's not immediately bound for an unconscious state doesn't mean he can't get comfortable. He can. He will. He's fucking earned it.
The track pants, of course, are the first to go and Jensen shucks them quickly, slinging them across the arm of the wingback in the corner. SportsCenter is the second order of business, muted for now because he's not all that interested in the hockey stats this early in the season. Finally, he snatches one of the pillows from the head of the bed and stretches out on his stomach with it tucked under his chin, the touchpad of his laptop slick and gleaming under his fingertips.
His mom, God love her, is the one and only reason for screwing with the laptop tonight at all. They'd played phone tag yesterday morning before he left for Jared's and broken down to base elements, his last message had been a rambling summary of his week followed by a promise to call during the dinner break Monday. A promise that he'd unintentionally reneged on since they hadn't had a break.
Semantics.
For a thirty second stretch, Jensen actually considers telling her about the origami, the stalker, Jared's probable involvement - everything he'd left out of the voicemail and some things he hadn't yet guessed at when he left it. When he looks up from tapping idly at the keyboard, there's a collection of gibberish splashed across the body of a new email he doesn't remember starting. Most of it could only be considered sentences by the most lenient of definitions. Some not even then. The vast majority has to do with were-dogs and dirty prose, his frustration over not being able to flush out the culprit.
The rest makes less sense, hiccups of adjectives and nouns strewn in amongst the rest that tug at his stomach and make him think about things better left to the dank corners of his imagination. Not a word of which is fit for a message to his mother.
Jensen learned long ago that sometimes the backspace key is man's best friend. No offense to Icarus.
When he selects the contents of the message and hits delete, the words duplicate instead of disappearing. Which is - weird. He tries again, adding the second set of text to the selection. It works. Sort of. All but fifteen of them vanish obediently. Those that remain, though, are huge and red and strobing on the display without quite tripping over the line into full-on flashing.
Blue. Blue. Blue. Mine. No. Crane. Shadows. Bow. He. Yes. Curve. Let it go. Know.
Jensen slaps the lid shut without powering the laptop down and slides it over the edge of the bed. The floor has more give to it than he remembers there being and the carpet squelches as it takes the weight of both the computer and his hand. He pats it gingerly, trying to figure out where the water's coming from, if the AC unit roaring away under the window has sprung a leak. His fingers come away dry.
It's fucking weird. Weird enough to drive him to early slumber anyway.
The remote vibrates in his hand when he grabs it to flick the TV off and the bedspread he could have sworn was a non-descript blue floral looks green and plaid no matter how furiously he rubs at his eyes.
When the knock comes, Jensen feels like he should be surprised but he isn't. His gut twists again, an echo of the tenuous tug from before. Briefly, he considers letting the knocker stay secreted beyond the pitted blue steel of the door. But his curiosity wins out in the end and he crosses the still squelching stretch of carpet with purpose.
The click of the deadbolt is just as heavy and metallic as he expects it to be, the tumblers in the knob groaning when he twists his wrist. Instead of sticking like logic says it might the door flies open of its own accord, impossibly weightless, missing the tip of his nose by no more than a quarter inch.
He also feels like it should surprise him to find Misha standing in the hall.
It doesn't.
Misha's state of undress does - bare feet and legs and chest, but even those can be explained away by the bright orange swim trunks slung low on his hips and the faded pink towel caught in the bend of his elbow. Jensen could have sworn the pool was outdoors instead of in though, and knows for a fact the staff would frown on anyone using it at this hour.
Misha smiles.
"Something I can help you with?" Jensen asks.
He starts to lean against the doorjamb but the paint has gone tacky when his elbow lands. It takes a minute to peel the skin away and when he does the texture's off, just wrong enough to raise his hackles. Rubbing his forearm makes it worse, the flesh there red and blotchy when he investigates, poking to see how far the hives go. Suddenly he's aware of his own state of undress, the chill of the air and the well-worn cotton of his favorite boxer briefs, and he's not sure which is worse - that or the fact that Misha's still smiling wide and silent.
Jensen can't quite decide if the silence is godsend or harbinger. Creepy ain't even a question.
The rash on his arm tingles as it spreads, and he's grateful for the distraction. The stillness with which Misha's standing creeps him out almost as much as the silence. Almost. If anyone asked, Jensen couldn't say why he's able to track the progress of the inflammation with microscopic precision, but he can. Especially when the back of his hand sears hot, a series of angry pink blisters blooming across his skin.
"Ought to have someone look at that," Misha says, still smiling, still just as creepy doing it.
"You offering?" Jensen asks, incredulous. Misha shrugs and does that Gumby thing with his face, the corners of his mouth pulled so far down they look poised to slide right off the edge of his jaw.
"A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell," Misha answers finally, chest heaving on a sigh.
Again, Jensen feels like it should bother him - both the content and the context of Misha's statement. It doesn't. For some unknowable reason it makes complete sense.
So he shuffles aside when Misha presses in, grabs at the door handle just to have something to hang on to. Their bare shoulders brush as Misha crosses the threshold and the spots on his skin flare bright and hot. Blinding. So much so he loses control, vision gone dark for a handful of terrifying seconds. Then the tiny hallway smashed between the closet and the bathroom erupts in a spray of sparks so tangible that Jensen glances up, trying to figure out who the fuck thought welding in his hotel room in the middle of the night was a good idea.
There's nothing there and when he levels his gaze, his sight's back to normal. Correction. His sight has returned, sure, but there's nothing about what he's seeing that qualifies as normal. Misha's rooted, smile faded down to a quiet little twist of lips that anyone else might read as indifference. Jensen knows better. But then Misha's also standing too close, Castiel close, their noses no more than an inch shy of bumping. His hands, Jensen realizes belatedly, aren't stilted on his hips anymore either, but only because they're cupped against either side of Jensen's face, every whorl of every fingerprint marked out against his cheekbones in heat.
In this case, there's no room for should anymore. He should have noticed, but didn't. Just like he should have noticed that Misha wasn't damp even though he'd presumably been at the pool. Or that Misha's skin is soft and smooth and taut and - that he should back the fuck off and breathe despite the fact he really doesn't want to.
The thought is too true for this rabbit hole he's tumbled down, too real to hang onto when Misha licks his lips and sways closer.
"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness," he whispers, and Jensen's caught too firmly between puzzled and pissed to protest the mouthful of Misha's tongue that follows.
It's both nothing and everything like he imagined, if he had actually imagined. He hasn't. But his ears are ringing, his heart thumping, the skin on his arm sizzling down to cinders, one big bright pink blister that Jensen couldn't care less about because Misha's kissing him.
Misha's kissing him.
And then he's not.
The ringing makes sense first. Jensen can vaguely make out the oblong lump of his phone, enough to tell who's calling. Jared's face blinks on the screen in time with the jangle. He starts to reach, but just as his fingertips land, the ringing stops and Jensen's left half asleep with a face full of keyboard and an inconvenient hard-on.
In retrospect he can reason through it, the dream obvious in the string of oddities his mind had tried so desperately to tame. As much as Jensen wants to explain them away, remind himself that he'd once dreamt of using a celery stalk to brush his great aunt's dead dachshund's teeth, he can't.
The dream lingers - the burn in his arm where it's tucked bloodless beneath his body, the frantic whump of his heart in his chest as the adrenaline works its way through his system. Mostly though, it's the shape of Misha's mouth tattooed against his lips, hot and slick and tasting exactly like the beer he'd tossed back at the bar earlier.
He blinks at the clock, the numbers smearing out into a blob that reads 3:23. Their call tomorrow may not be until ten, but Jay knows the rules as well as he does. Unless someone dies or needs bail money, the moratorium on phone calls begins promptly at midnight. Truthfully, Jensen can't decide whether to kiss or kill. There's no telling where the dream might have led, but wherever it was headed he's pretty sure his subconscious was the only one ready to go there.
Almost the only one.
But then, his dick has always been a contrary little bastard. In this particular instance, he's determined not to give it the satisfaction of being right, so he slaps the lid of his laptop closed for real this time and deposits it safely on the desk. Experience dictates that if he just turned over, he'd be less aware and as a result it would be more likely to go away. The only problem is that the slow, familiar roil in his gut seems to agree - the one that says he should give in, put his hands on himself with Misha still lodged in the sizable cracks of his subconscious.
Jensen rolls over anyway, pillow tucked tight against the back of his neck, and ignores it, tries to go back to sleep.
As soon as he closes his eyes, he drifts back down into the current of the dream, his awareness and purpose altering it in a thousand minute but instantly recognizable ways. For one, Misha feels more real, the sharp curve of hipbone more solid in Jensen's grip. Jensen himself can't tell yet whether he's pushing or pulling, but Misha makes a noise anyway - a dark little chuckle that gets choked off in a hiss when Jensen flexes his fingers.
Misha shifts closer and when he does Jensen feels everything, nothing more than the hard line of Misha's cock pressed against his thigh.
Dreaming works on very different principles, he knows that logically. In practice, it's disorienting to suddenly find himself not just horizontal but in his bed at home with Misha splayed beneath him. More confusing is how much he wants it, needs it, the ache in his chest bright and fierce when Misha's lashes flutter back, his eyes incandescent in the dark, and he says, "Tick tock, Jensen," tongue curled around the name like it knows things.
Then there are deft fingers, slender and strong, curling other places and Jensen starts awake.
The clock on the nightstand seems to think it's only 4:58, but there's no way in hell he's going back to sleep. Not now, maybe not ever. Setting aside the guy thing, on-set entanglements are a very, very bad idea. Sure, Gen and Jared had pulled it off, but that's because Jared's stupid and Gen's forgiving and - fuck, he's not actually thinking about this.
Not.
Because the guy thing can't be set aside, no matter how progressive he presumes himself to be or how vocally he will defend the right of two dudes to get it on. Things have happened before. He lived in Hollywood for fucks sake, spent years on daytime television before he was wizened enough to truly handle it. But an active attraction to a dude, one that might delve deeper than skin, is a brave new world. That's not even taking into account the fact that it's Misha. Misha, who could not be called average by the stretch of anyone's imagination. His abstract fondness and joie de vivre, his sharp tongue and sharper wit, his unapologetic otherness all held together by a constant, low-level amusement for the rigidity of the human race.
Misha comes part and parcel with complications even Satan would have a hard time justifying.
Jensen blames the underpants for this. It's not the sort of offer you extend to anyone and although Misha never officially extended anything, the implications were there and are apparently still there planting naked landmines in Jensen's brain.
He needs a diversion, something to hit reset on this perilously circuitous train of thought. Luck feeds Jensen the answer, his gaze searching and quickly landing on the cranes. Their wings are crumpled, necks bent over, but next to the beetle they're beautiful right down to the last grease stain. Apart from obviously being a beetle, the bug looks amateurish. Almost like he's dealing with two different folders, though the chances of that so slim as to be non-existent.
Curious.
Since sleep seems out of the question, Jensen happily abandons pretense and swings his legs over the side of the bed. His dick throbs as he stands, the weight of it urgent against the soft cotton of his boxer briefs. Just one more in a long line of things that need ignoring, he thinks, shuffling over to the desk.
The laptop sits idle, fans whirring quietly to keep it cool.
Research it is.
Jensen settles in the chair carefully, mindful of his proximity to the edge of the desk as much as the unflagging erection. Nonetheless, he ends up having to adjust himself twice, all knuckles and muttered curses before he finally gets comfortable.
The cranes get deconstructed first because they're easy - head and tail flipped out and under, flaps pulled back. Inside the first there's an address and phone number scribbled above what his brilliant deductive skills tell him is a day and time. Holmes would be proud.
395 Kingsway
(604) 555-8576
Sat 11P
He flips the laptop open, tapping it awake with a steady hand. Everything seems slow, the browser launching, the search running, the map compiling. It's so beyond frustrating he can't see straight, and more than once he's tempted to give up and go jack off in the shower like the fine upstanding, all-American boy he's supposed to be.
The mental movie he knows would accompany such a venture makes him think twice.
After what feels like a millennia, the street view finally loads to reveal a squat black building with a wide neon sign slapped against the brick. A venue. Not one he recognizes and not one he'd probably visit if given the choice, but desperate times.
Jensen peels a sheet off the hotel stationery and painstakingly transcribes the information before putting the bird back together. A search on the club's name turns up a website, a schedule, and an artist that he adds below the details on the gig. He stops short of Googling the band, then reconsiders.
Maybe he's coming at this all wrong. Maybe the cranes are bigger than themselves, bigger than whatever cryptic comment gets scrawled inside. Maybe instead of collecting bread crumbs he should take a step back and figure out what kind of person might be dropping them.
Maybe if his dick would behave he could get some shuteye instead of spending his precious down time hunting ghosts.
Jensen diligently types the band's name in the search box.
The results that surface are not what he expected. Apparently, they play punk-infused folk laid atop an undercurrent of funk, their influences ranging from The Replacements to Dylan. While not entirely in line with his own tastes, it's more refined, more evocative than he'd have imagined a note-passing stalker might listen to.
He'd have gone to the show either way, but knowing that it might not blow helps.
Inside the second crane he finds a passage that has absolutely nothing to do with him or the ridiculous paperbound courtship.
I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.
It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted- [3]
Words so personal, so internalized that it's obvious he was never meant to have these, see these. It makes Jensen question them all, especially their purpose. Were any of them meant for him or was it all a matter of chance? Was he just in the right place at the right time? Was Cheyenne responsible for tucking the crane in his jacket pocket too?
No way to know without asking, and no way to ask without looking like an obsessive-compulsive freak.
The other, more provocative, specimens are the only ones he can say with any certainty were intended for his eyes - the turtle in his trailer, the dog under his wiper blade, and now the beetle. Jensen refolds the second crane and tucks it in alongside the first, resolving to take another look at the ones littering the top of his bookcase when he gets home.
If he's right, it changes everything.
The beetle gives him pause. So far neither method nor madness have made a damn bit of difference in the state of things, the weight between his legs just as insistent as when he sat down. It's strange enough to pay attention to whether he wants to acknowledge it or not. Healthy sexual appetite notwithstanding, he's not eighteen anymore and so usually has a lot more control over the how long, when and why. And while he may not be actively thinking about the dream, his body doesn't seem to be coming along for the ride.
Jensen knows deep down what awaits him if he peels apart the beetle's paper carapace, that it won't help, couldn't possibly.
Curiosity inevitably wins out.
It takes longer to unfold the beetle, the paper ragged at the corners where it's been undone and redone already. Again the handwriting matches despite the vast differences in model quality, a fact that leads him to believe that while the cranes are compulsory, the other animals require time and practice to produce. It also implies a specific kind of person outside the words - careful, conscientious, tenacious with unfamiliar tasks.
As he suspected, the words paint an entirely different, though not contradictory, picture.
I find you in the spaces between -
the slope of your neck
the cut of your chin
the stillness that settles in your shoulders when you think you're alone.
I want you in the spaces between -
your hands
your lips
your tongue
your teeth
your passion turned on me with purpose but not thought.
I need you in the spaces between -
to drive me to madness
to possess and be possessed
to see
to know
to covet in all the forbidden ways.
Someday soon, I will find you in the spaces between.
Scrawled beneath it, there's another date and time, another place.
Sun 9A, Buntz Lk
Having a guaranteed opportunity to put a face and name to the culprit is all well and good, but that's not where his eye lingers.
On the third pass, he realizes he's touching himself, another squirming adjustment turned into something more. And Jensen lets it, gives himself over to the sensation because he can. Because this has nothing to do with dreaming. There's a real person on the other end of these words, whether they reveal themselves or not. Someone who wants. Someone who needs.
Jensen needs more than he's ready to own up to and this is better, safer - a carefully constructed fantasy replacing something, someone he would never-
So he doesn't. He uses the overactive imagination God gave him - sculpts her face from thin air, wide eyes, slender nose, pouty lips, long wheat-colored hair. He takes care to make her new and steers clear of any features that might remind him of someone else, her voice in his ear throaty but decidedly female.
It's only after he has the image firmly established that Jensen palms his dick for keeps, shimmying out of his underwear until they're caught in a bunch around his knees. His ass sticks to the chair and the arms of it dig into his thighs, but he can't risk losing her in the journey to the bed. The words spool through his head and he pictures the way her mouth would shape them, the graceful "O" that makes him want to slide his thumb across the curve of her lower lip and push in. Instead he slicks his thumb over the head of his cock and draws down, feels the sizzle start, urging him faster.
All things considered, he knows he won't last long. Here, with only himself to act as witness, he can almost admit the why, name the awkward ache that skitters under his skin.
Connection.
And so it isn't the vision of his manufactured shade that pulls him over the edge, but wanting to be wanted. Needed. In point of fact, the imaginary girl disappears before he takes the tumble, golden hair shot to ribbons on the tide of impulses sweeping from brain to groin and back again. At the end, when he's finally coming apart at the seams with a grunt and a shuddering sigh, the only things that stick are the sparks firing against the backdrop of his eyelids, a pair of grey blue eyes, and a short shock of wild, dark hair.
It takes Jensen a full thirty seconds to figure out how well and truly fucked he is, but he gets there.
Eventually.
( FIVE)
Things aren't any better in the morning. On the upside, they're also not any worse. It comes as a small comfort when the top shelf of the bookcase in his living room resembles nothing more than a damned paper menagerie. The were-dog looks slightly more dog and less 'were' in good light and Jensen fingers the folds, the color of the paper worn through to white in places. Whoever made it obviously took their time, folding and re-folding until the corners matched and the right lines emerged, someone patient though not necessarily adept.
It feels wrong to destroy something so painstakingly crafted, so he hasn't pulled the dog apart yet, or the turtle. The cranes he'd cobbled back together through trial and error but the number of creases required for the others makes him a little dizzy to even think about. Now, with some distance between him and the find, Jensen can see the necessity of pulling them apart.
i will touch you with my mind.
Touch you and touch and touch
until you give
me suddenly a smile, shyly obscene [2]
The passage scrawled inside the dog is both weirder and more disturbing in the simplest of ways.
I will have you.
Those four words clue him in to the depth and breadth of what he's actually dealing with. It takes a specific kind of person to be so certain without encouragement, and suddenly he's wading through his list trying to find the floaters.
Before he drifts too deep, the doorbell saves him from catching the rip tide of his own suspicion, a long buzz that slots him back into his routine. Icarus paws at his shins, whining softly as he shoulders his bag. Jensen glances at the clock before he squats to give Ick a quick rubdown. Clif's a little early anyway, he can wait.
"Be good today, buddy," he says, smiling when Icarus arches into his hand. "Tell Selena to take it easy on you."
Icarus stares, tongue lolling, rear end sliding on the tile from wagging his tail so hard. Jensen has the sudden overwhelming urge to scoop him up and bring him along. Any other day he might, but Mondays are traditionally the hardest hitting, the schedule the most grueling. It's different with every director, but most want to get the tough stuff out of the way while the talent's still relatively fresh. Which means Mondays are a bitch.
Another long buzz sounds and Jensen frowns, turns his wrist over to look at his watch. Clif never bothers ringing twice. Must be a tighter schedule today than usual. He gives Ick one last pat and flicks the switch on all the lights but the one in the hall. It leaves a weird glow in his wake, a fresh crop of goosebumps prickling his skin as he backs out the front door and sets the alarm. Bumping into something solid on the stoop makes it worse, instinct taking over in the deep dark of pre-dawn, his elbow shooting out to land in the shadow's stomach.
The shadow grunts out a breathy, "Fuck," then staggers down and back until the motion sensors trip on the light above the garage.
When Jensen turns, he feels stupid. Awake, guilty, and very fucking stupid.
"Misha? What the hell?"
Misha holds up a hand, still bent at the waist and coughing as Jensen glances past him, sees the black SUV with the silhouette of Clif's head curved over the driver's seat and what must be Jared's on the passenger side. It throws him. Not just because he's usually the first-in, last-out but also because he took off in a kind of embarrassing hurry last night and someone in that car thought it would be a good idea to send Misha to the door.
Misha who just took an elbow in the gut. Shit.
"Jesus. Sorry, man. I didn't-" Jensen stammers, instinct also making him reach out to help. "You okay?"
His fingers fumble, clumsy with recently shaken off sleep and an unexpected adrenaline rush, but when they find a hold it happens skin to skin - the thin stalk of Misha's forearm flexing in his grip. It takes a lot more effort than it should not to snatch his hand back, and more than once he has to tell his brain to shut the fuck up. Misha's a friend. A friend he just gutchecked accidentally because he's a paranoid freak of nature. He bends to set his Thermos aside, obscenely grateful to find the contents still sloshing gently against the insulated walls, then lays a tentative hand against the flat of Misha's back. Jensen gets lost for a long stretch of seconds, the knobs of Misha's spine curved into the heel of his hand, the bunch of muscle and ribs beneath when he exhales and his wheezes transform into something else.
"So easy," Misha says, teeth glinting white in the bright fluorescent as he smiles and straightens.
A small part of him recognizes the humor, can track the reflection of it back down the months. Unfortunately, that part can't claim control of his mouth or his limbs.
Jensen pushes past roughly, irritated with himself as much as Misha, frustrated by his own reactions. Their shoulders bump, Misha twisting gracefully to absorb the blow and Jensen catches sight of that grin again, the one that says the joke's on him, the one he wants to wipe clean off Misha's mouth by any means necessary.
Thinking about the means only confuses the issue more, so Jensen has to settle for stalking down the drive towards the SUV.
He mutters, "Dick," under his breath as soon as he thinks he's out of earshot.
Misha's response comes from way too close - a snort and whispered, "Only when it suits me," that Jensen feels against the back of his ear. It's too fucking early and too fucking much on too little caffeine. To add insult to injury, Misha presses his abandoned Thermos into his hand before he moves away.
Wisely, Jensen keeps on walking.
Once they get to the car, there's a minor scuffle over shotgun. He wins, thank all that is holy. Jared's vibrating in the backseat like he downed a whole box of Sugar Smacks this morning and Misha's - well, Misha, and truth be told he's not feeling all that social what with the recent events piled on top of the running away fiasco. Clif grunts a cursory greeting and then gets them underway. The studio's only about twenty miles from his place, but he pops his earbuds in anyway then eases down into the seat to get that extra half hour of shuteye.
Even with his music cranked to tune them out, Jensen can hear the gentle rumble of Jared and Misha trading insults. It probably shouldn't lull him to sleep, but he doesn't traffic all that well in shouldn't where Jay's concerned. Or Misha for that matter. He drifts off easily to the sound of their voices and the rolling sway of the SUV taking curves just a hair too fast.
Jensen has a moment of blind panic when he starts himself awake - the bottom dropping out of his stomach as he scrambles and slaps his palm against the dashboard.
Rocks, walls of it not three feet from where his cheek was pressed up against the glass. Boulders and scrub brush and tiny eddies of runoff trickling down to the shoulder of a road they shouldn't be on. He glances in the rearview just to verify he is where he thought he was. Sure enough, Jared's slouched down behind him decked out in headphones and pounding on his PSP. Misha's alternately staring out the window and screwing with his phone. Their eyes meet in the mirror for a fraction of a second before Jensen averts his, running the back of his hand across his mouth in a compulsory drool check. Thankfully, he comes away dry.
Small favors.
Behind him, there's a quick rustle of fabric and a sharp intake of breath before Jared shouts, "Wha-oh!" and Misha murmurs, "Oh, thank fuck."
Apparently the Wonder Twins were getting sick of riding in silence.
He feels like Alice, through the looking glass with the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat and flamingo cricket. Everyone else seems to know exactly what's going on.
It sucks.
There are about a hundred questions tripping across the tip of his tongue, but he finally lands on one that will lead to all the other answers.
"Where are we?" he asks.
The results are predictable, if not particularly enlightening - Jared and Misha talking over each other until all Jensen catches are the words Disneyland and Magical Mystery Tour. Clif waits them out, guiding the SUV around a sharp hairpin with a practiced hand.
"'Bout ten miles south of Squamish," Clif says and sneaks a quick peek Jensen's direction. "You were down for the count."
"Yeah," Jensen replies, drags a hand through his hair. "Not sleeping all that great lately."
The clouds beyond Clif's window are bleeding pink to gold to white, the sun hidden by the soaring rock face beyond Jensen's. It answers when well enough, but what he can't pin down is why. Sure, he remembers vague references to another remote shoot, another lake tucked between mountain peaks that they had to get on film.
The fact that he forgot about it being this week bothers him more than the lack of clothes and creature comforts. Worst comes to worst, he's got a whole trailer full of Dean's jeans he knows will fit. There's a hoodie and a hat in his backpack, toiletries in his trailer. Anything else he can pick up once they hit Squamish if given time or a production assistant to do so.
Unprepared equates to unprofessional though, and Jensen hates to think that his personal bullshit has started interfering with his ability to do his job.
Just. Fuck.
Misha seems to take the silence as a cue to shove his face between the front seats.
"You had no idea we were on location this week."
True or not, rational or not, it bothers Jensen to be read so easily. With fans, yeah, he takes care to show them only what he wants them to see. Real life's a whole different kettle of fish - a transparent kettle full of those weird ass transparent fish. Being on guard all the time is exhausting and amongst friends Jensen prefers to be taken at face value. By and large, that face happens to be an honest one. When it isn't, Misha's always the one who sees through the bullshit and calls him on it.
There's no win here. Nothing he can say that Misha won't twist, so Jensen keeps his mouth shut.
Not to be outdone, Jared shifts forward in his seat too, leather creaking, and says," Dude, seriously? You're like the most prepared person on the planet."
He isn't, never has been. There's prepared and then there's Prepared, and it requires a lot more effort and attention to detail than Jensen ever intends to expend to be Prepared. Just so happens he's better at remembering shit than Jared is most of the time.
Misha leans in further, the jut of his chin catching against Jensen's shoulder all scrape and stubble.
"That's really all you brought," he says, his gaze flicking to the backpack situated between Jensen's feet as he clucks his tongue. "Whatever will we do with you?"
"We are not doing anything with me. I'm aces. Just pack light is all."
It's stretching the truth at the best of times.
"Dude, you're two pairs of strappy shoes and a straightener away from being a girl."
"Says the fucknut who lugged a suitcase the size of a small car to Rome for a day."
Misha edges closer, wedging his shoulder between the seats, his nose in dangerous proximity to Clif's elbow and his face screwed up into sympathetic shapes that waver between sincere and - not.
"Poor kitten," he says. "Mi suitcasa es su suitcasa. Within reason of course." The corner of his mouth twitches twice before he adds, "Sorry. Within my definition of reason."
Which, to be frank, is a much broader definition than Jensen's completely comfortable with because suddenly he's thinking about Misha's underwear, his subconscious settling in for a good long ponder on the ages-old question of boxers or briefs. Jensen kind of wants to punch Misha. Maybe a lot. In the face.
"Fuck you very much too, Boy Wonder. Told you twice already I'm not wearing one of your damned Sponge Bob T-shirts. Not even in the Canadian outback."
Misha huffs a laugh and sits back, says, "Suit yourself," softly, like he might actually give a shit.
Jensen bites back the compulsory apology because the last week has apparently been weird enough to drive him to rudeness. With any luck, the change of scenery will help, give him time to reap the spoils that close quarters have to offer. It's easier to investigate when all your suspects are occupying the same floor of a hotel in the middle of fucking nowhere.
It's an opportunity - one he's looking forward to taking advantage of when it fully presents itself.
By the time he and Jared wrap and get back to the hotel, it's ten 'til ten.
While today won't go down in history as the worst day ever, Jensen's still sporting a fantastic film of mud and corn syrup blood and his boots feel like they weigh about fifty pounds each and he's starving. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't be a big deal. Here though, the hotel restaurant closes at ten and the room service menu slims down to appetizers and alcohol half an hour later. Unless he wants to harass Clif or walk somewhere, he and Jared are both going to have to make do with the food they can get at the bar.
There are worse problems to have.
The wall of the elevator is cool at his back, grounding, and he watches the display shift from two to three as the bell dings and the doors slide open. He glances over at Jared who doesn't seem all that inclined to move, the sweat tracks cut through the dust on his face making him look more worn out than he probably is.
"Back here in twenty?" he asks, trying for a smile and mostly succeeding. He thinks.
Jared returns it, levering himself away from the wall on a grunt.
"It's too much to hope that the bar serves steak, isn't it?"
"Think that's probably about as likely as getting sweet tea, man," Jensen says, familiarity making his stomach knot up.
"Way to burst my bubble, Jen," Jared grumbles, but he's still smiling when he makes the hard left to head to his room. They're at opposite ends of the hall this time, and it's unusual enough for Jensen to take notice but not so much so he feels it needs mentioning.
Instead he just shouts, "Twenty minutes," at Jared's retreating back and accepts the hand he raises as an answer.
It takes Jensen less than that to strip out of his clothes and scrub himself pink. He even manages to scrape away the dirt and stage blood cocktail caught under his fingernails before he tugs on his hoodie and a pair of track pants he'd found shoved in the back of a drawer in his trailer. At some point he's going to have a problem with other stuff - socks and underwear - but he's pretty sure he can con Clif into running him down to the local superstore tomorrow between set-ups.
The message light on the phone flashes in his periphery when he sits on the end of the bed to pull on his sneakers, a bright red beacon that he ignores because it's probably just Selena calling to tell him she picked Icarus up and he's doing fine and that he owes her for the short notice. It's not like he can call her back now anyway since her kids are undoubtedly asleep. Regardless of the message content, it will sure as shit wait until he has food in his belly.
Jensen palms both key card and wallet, sliding them into his pocket as he slips out the door.
The cast and crew have commandeered most of the third floor, so the corridor buzzes with activity despite the hour. Several doors along the hallway stand ajar and he stops a couple of times on his way to the elevators to chat. Before long, he's spent another twenty minutes at it, his stomach trying really fucking hard to eat him from the inside out, but there's still no Jared.
Any other day Jensen might go bang on his door, make sure he hasn't fallen asleep. Today, he's not in the mood. Despite feeling more human than he did an hour ago, he's hungry and tired and still irritated at himself for forgetting they were making this trek to begin with.
Jay's a big boy. He can fend for himself.
The elevator ride back down is uneventful save the blasphemous Muzak version of Stairway to Heaven piped in through tinny speakers. Jensen finds himself humming along just to drown out the strains of a song that no one in their right mind would ever synthesize. In the lobby there's a quiet hum, an echo of the hallway upstairs that never quite matches its volume, small clusters of familiar faces milling around in mud-crusted boots. He waves without breaking stride, his stomach staging a full-on rebellion by now.
It's easy to find the bar, a modestly sized oblong box blocked off on one end of the restaurant so they can share a kitchen. Most of the high-tops are dirty, covered with half-eaten food on non-descript plates, beer glasses, and crumpled napkins, so Jensen doesn't have much choice when it comes to seating. He grabs the first one he comes to that's wiped down and plucks the small, sticky menu out from between the salt and pepper shakers, relieved to find that not only do they serve hamburgers, they play actual music instead of the Muzak shit he was subjected to in the elevator.
Across the room he hears the clanking of plates before he sees a tiny girl wrangling a bus tub. She looks too young to be tending bar, pixie-like features sharp in the glare of the big screen and neon, her dishwater blonde hair drawn up into a simple ponytail that bounces and shimmies when she tugs the cloth out of her apron to swipe the tabletop clean.
"Be with you in a minute," she says on the tail end of a sigh. It's obvious she's the only one working tonight and the rest of the horde has probably run her half-ragged.
Jensen bides his time, drumming his fingertips against the table and scoping out what they have on tap. He gets as far as the third handle before he sees them.
Cranes.
Two of them riding the ridge of the bar, both folded from grease-stained paper placemats spotted with ketchup. He doesn't make the conscious decision to stand up, not that he can remember anyway, but soon enough he has them in hand, his ass just starting to kiss the surface of his stool again.
His first instinct says to shove them in his pocket, wait until he's upstairs and can take his time to comb them for clues. Usually, his instincts don't stand a chance in the face of his urges - especially the need to know - but this time they win out, paper crinkling as he slides them in alongside his phone. A commotion at the opposite end of the bar makes him reconsider, laughter high and girlish tickling against his ears and when he looks up, Jensen understands why.
Misha's bent close, his smirk tripping between sly and sated as he flicks the bartender's ponytail back over her shoulder. It's a liberty Jensen would never take with someone he just met but Misha has boundary issues. Drunkenness only makes them worse and seeing as Misha finished his coverage around six, odds are that he's probably feeling really fucking good right about now.
He watches Misha lean closer, lips hovering just a breath away from her ear as he wavers on his feet. Whatever he says to her gets lost in the music and the sharp rattle of plates as the girl's neck flushes pink and she almost drops the bus tub. It's a move he's seen Misha make a thousand times over - inappropriately proprietary, completely indifferent to the answer that meets him after the fact because he's almost more interested in the reaction than the potential for sexual acrobatics.
Jensen's stomach lurches suddenly, and he's about to clear his throat to remind them both they have an audience when the bartender gives Misha a gentle shove.
"Maybe it's time for you to head up to your room. Sir," she says, but even from where Jensen's sitting he can tell she's biting her cheeks to keep from smiling.
Someone in the lobby shrieks, feet pounding past the open end of the bar, and if Misha answers her it's pitched too low for Jensen to catch. Not that it matters. And yet, he strains for the words without knowing why. Misha, of course, catches him staring before Jensen has the opportunity to pretend he isn't.
Getting caught has its own advantages. For one, he gets to watch Misha slink the length of the bar. On anyone else, it might be ridiculous, but the laws of nature and Misha aren't on speaking terms and he's just lithe enough to pull it off convincingly. His stride stutters though, when he's five steps away, his brow furrowed with some emotion Jensen can't immediately put a name to. If pressed he'd say Misha looks like he lost something, misplaced it in the jumble of plates and beer bottles. For a second, Jensen thinks, "Maybe," but in the next, Misha pats the pocket of his jeans and huffs a laugh, sliding his phone free just enough to make sure it's actually there.
The smile that chases the laugh means trouble.
But it also means that Jensen knows precisely who he's going to be dealing with before Misha perches on the stool opposite him. Considering the other uncertainties he's been fielding, it's a comfort.
When Misha says, "That'll be fifty dollars," what he really means is, "Enjoy the show?" He's used to being the king of this and every other fucking jungle he's ever walked into when he's drunk. Which, come to think, is actually ridiculous, just not the annoying kind.
"Not sure you earned it. For that kind of bank I usually demand nudity," Jensen says, eyeing the bottle Misha's sliding idly against the scarred tabletop, his fingers wet with condensation. It only gets weird when Jensen can't figure out if it's the beer he's longing for or something else. On cue, the bottle moves, tipping up to meet Misha's mouth and Jensen catches himself this time, tongue already darting out to wet his own lips as he studies the motion of Misha's throat, the curve of his hand.
Unfortunately it seems Misha's observational skills trump the speed of thought even when he's drunk. Not five seconds later he laughs a dark little laugh and says, "A private encore can be arranged. If you so desire."
Jensen feels it when his brain begins to shut down, the slow unspooling of his sanity as it wraps around that particular notion and sticks. He's too worn down, too hungry to shuffle it aside with a feint or sleight of hand, to displace the thought by wondering where Jared is or who the cranes in his pocket belong to. Life would be easier if he could.
Instead he stares silently at Misha's elbow, tracing the blue plaid pattern of his shirt cuffed around it until Tiny Bartender clears her throat a couple feet away.
"What can I get started for you?" she asks, sharp tap of pencil lead to paper acting as punctuation.
It figures that of all places, he'd be having a crisis of what-ever-the-fuck this crisis is in public when he's required to actually say things. As a stop-gap, he goes with licking his lips again, trying to work his way around the lump in his throat by force.
Turns out there's no need because Misha in all his inebriated grandeur turns to her and says, "Meat and beer. Something leafy or at least green to assuage his ridiculous gastro-guilt."
Tiny Bartender frowns at him, then Misha, then back at him. When she opens her mouth to ask whatever it is she feels she needs to, Misha makes a shooing motion that she obeys without protest.
"How do you do that?" Jensen asks, which is awesome, since at the very least it means there's been no permanent brain damage.
"Do what, exactly?"
"Make people do shit by being a prick."
Misha hums, a warm, thoughtful sound that gets lost under the opening strains of the hair metal ballad queuing up on the sound system, and Jensen tries very hard not to think about - well, anything. Especially not Misha and his prick.
But then Misha drops his voice an octave or ten and says, "Wouldn't you like to know?" in a way that leaves Jensen torn between breaking his nose and other much less fathomable things.
Jared saves him the trouble of trying to answer.
"Sorry," he mutters, footsteps fast and heavy.
Jensen checks his watch, knowing that it's a dick move when he does it. Considering it's been almost an hour since they parted ways and half an hour since Jay was supposed to meet him at the elevator upstairs, he's earned this much asshole tax and then some. At least Jared looks contrite when he swings in behind Misha to snag a stool and drag it into place between them. Jared must catch sight of the clock hanging over the bar when he does because he curses and apologizes again once he settles in.
"Gen set fire to the kitchen," is the only explanation he offers before he reaches across the table for the menu.
Jensen's, "On purpose?" comes out the same time as Misha's, "Cry for attention?" and Jensen glares.
Jay must have more practice at ignoring Misha, because he manages to answer without skipping a beat. More than likely, it's an inverse correlation to how much time Misha spends ignoring - or trying to ignore - Jared when they're filming. Odd that it doesn't work that way for Jensen.
When Jared says, "No, not on purpose," it comes across a little bitchier than it probably should, but it's late and they're both tired and he's probably worried about Gen. "I ordered a new fridge," he continues, "one of those French ones. She said she'd always kind of wanted one but never had a kitchen that needed it. It was supposed to be a surprise."
Misha snorts around a swallow of beer. "If nothing else, you managed that."
Jensen kicks at his shins beneath the table, but either Misha's a mind-reader or he's gotten predictable in his old age because he doesn't make contact. Or, he does, but scraping his ankle against the leg of the stool doesn't really count. As consolation, he squares a heel against one of the cross braces of Misha's stool and gives it a hearty shove. Misha rocks in place but doesn't slide off, so it's not as satisfying as it would otherwise be.
Shame.
Jared frowns at him, then Misha, then back at him again just like Tiny Bartender did. It's more subtle, but also more perceptive and Jensen wants to dig behind that expression and find out what the fuck Jared thinks he knows. He's tired of people looking at him like that.
Quickly as it came though, the frown disappears leaving behind a mask of worry and exhaustion.
"Anyway," Jared presses on, "The guy who installed it screwed the pooch." Misha coughs. "And no, Misha, I don't mean literally. Thanks for playing."
"So your new fridge is on fire?" Jensen asks.
"Just the wall behind it. Something with the circuit the old fridge was on and an overload and the breaker didn't trip. There's an electrician coming out in the morning."
And that's when Jensen realizes he can't even be pissed off about Jay being late. He still wants to be, and that in and of itself makes him a shitty friend.
Then Misha stretches his arms up over his head and yawns, and Jensen does not notice the wide band of belly bared above his belt. As it turns out, not noticing something is just as distracting as noticing it, and so he misses whatever Jared allegedly said while it was happening.
"Fascinating as this all is, I think I'll leave you two to knit tea cozies and swap recipes amongst yourselves. There's mischief afoot," Misha says, pushing up off his stool. His gaze flicks briefly past them out into the lobby and Jensen thinks he may fall over on his own once he has his feet, but in the end he just leans a little too far to place his empty bottle on the bar out of their way. He sobers abruptly, hand splayed against the curve of Jared's shoulder before he adds, "I'm glad Gen's okay," and stalks off.
Jensen tells himself twice that even in the face of terrifying new not-quite revelations there are lines he refuses to cross.
Watching Misha wander away is one of them.
Jared has no such qualms it seems, but the furrow creeps back between his brows as he follows Misha's meandering progress across the lobby.
"Don't think I'll ever get over what a nutcase Misha can be."
"Says the man who didn't walk in on him half naked and elbow deep in glow-in-the-dark finger paint."
Jared smiles and slides around the table to take the stool Misha just vacated.
"Everyone has hobbies."
Tiny Bartender appears at his elbow then, a frosted bottle of Misha's brand of beer clutched in one hand and a plate balanced on the other. He's loathe to admit it, but the cheeseburger and mixed greens look like a slice of heaven when she sets them down.
His stomach plays it a little less coy, growling loudly as soon as ceramic strikes wood.
She waves off his thanks with a smile, turning her attention to Jared who says simply, "Yes," and points at Jensen's plate. With any luck the grill's still warmed up.
The burger tastes as good as it looks, thick and juicy, and he only has to raise an eyebrow at Jared's incredulous, "You're really gonna eat in front of me," to shut him up. There's forgiveness and then there's madness. Jensen chooses the way of sanity, at least for now. He nods his way through his half of the conversation while Jared relates the rest of Gen's harrowing battle. How the dogs went nuts over the smoke alarm and that the sheetrock will have to be replaced.
Mostly he just focuses on chewing and swallowing, finding his way back to center. But there's a small part of him that can't get over how much things have changed and how fast. It's stupid and childish. He knows better. And it's not like they partied all that hard before. It's just -
It's never going to be the same.
Jensen keeps himself busy with the burger until he can't anymore, the last bite polished off too quickly when he licks a spot of mustard off his thumb. The beer goes down smooth and cold behind it, the fruit-infused afterburn clinging to the back of his tongue. As it turns out, Misha has decent taste.
Go figure.
Tiny Bartender takes about half as much time to show with Jared's food as she did with Jensen's. It lends credence to the theory that the grill was already warm, sure, but it also gives him ammunition to tease Jared mercilessly about preferential treatment and the trappings thereof.
Jensen's winding up to do exactly that when his pants vibrate. More specifically, his phone does and when he reaches into his pocket to slide it out, he comes away with two crumpled cranes in tow. No use hiding them now they're out in the open, but he does his best to make it look casual when he tosses them on the tabletop anyway. Making a bigger deal of it will only complicate matters that are already complicated enough, thank you very much.
He gives Jay a minute to choke and chuckle, content to delay the inevitable ribbing as much as he's allowed. It works a little too well. Jared squints at the birds for mere moments before he goes on chewing, the movement of his jaw slowed to half speed. Almost like he's trying to choose his words, let the lettuce buy him time.
Interesting.
Try as he might, Jensen can only come up with two reasons that Jared, of all people, would tread so carefully.
The first is to spare someone's feelings. While Jay's proven countless times that he cares, their friendship has never been about pulling punches. They make fun of each other's failings. Keep each other honest. Put each other back together when the seams start to unravel. Jared knows better than to pull that shit with him. They aren't kid glove guys.
The alternative is worse, because it means his best friend's getting ready to lie to his fucking face.
Jensen busies himself with his phone, trying to work through the logic in his head while Jay does his very best impression of a cow chewing cud. As it turns out, the text message came from Selena - or, not Selena but an 'anonymous' source demanding ransom with a picture of Ick imprisoned behind a baby gate attached. It's just what he needed. And even though he can't enjoy it fully, Jensen allows himself a small smile and a minute to wonder who the hell is to blame for the flashing light in his room if not Selena. Bigger fish to fry now, though. Time to do old Captain Ahab proud.
So long as he doesn't drown.
Or get eaten by a whale.
Jared swallows.
"So," Jensen says, spearing a hefty forkful of his own greens. "Let's just get the lie out of the way first. In my experience it makes the truth easier to find."
The corner of Jay's mouth twitches, beer bottle caught in stasis half way between the table and his lips.
For an actor, Jared sucks ass at this. Thankfully, Jensen does not. Waiting isn't any more of a hardship for him than breathing, so he's got all the time in the world. He shoves the monstrous mouthful past his lips, savors the tang of vinegar and mustard, the bitter bite of endive against the barely-there base of spinach. And he waits.
But Jared just says, "I don't know what you're talking about," and shovels another scoop in, doesn't even have the good grace to look guilty as he does it.
Jensen picks at the label on his beer bottle, willing to give Jay the benefit of the doubt as long as he's able. Doubt runs out when he plucks one of the misshapen paper creations from between their plates and Jared's eyes follow it like it's on fire.
He knows something.
"Really? 'Cause it looks like you might."
Jared shrugs and chews, glances over his shoulder at the big Wurlitzer sitting dark in the corner, takes time to catalog the minutiae of every bottle stacked against the wall behind the bar. What he won't do is look Jensen in the eye. And Jensen's done being dicked around tonight.
"Right," he says, palming his phone off the table and back into his pocket. The cranes follow closely, something sticky rubbing off on the back of his hand as he thrusts them in after. It's late - much too fucking late for high school bullshit and Jared's unexpected Marceau act. So Jensen does the sane thing and tosses back the last swallow of his beer. He can't say for sure if the wave of exhaustion that washes over him is symptom or side-effect, but it doesn't really matter.
He's done.
With a sigh, Jensen strips a couple of bills out of his wallet and tucks them under the lip of the plate. It should be more than enough to cover both dinners if need be, but right now he's not particularly inclined to wait for change.
"See you in the morning, Jay."
As he walks away, he hears Jared say his name once but with the late night bustle in the lobby, it's easy to pretend he doesn't. Even if doing it makes him a bitch.
The room's dark when Jensen turns the deadbolt behind him, nothing but the reflected glare of streetlights kicking up off the rain soaked parking lot to greet him. He remembers the placement of the phone on the nightstand because it's part of his job to notice things, evaluate and find the right stride to fit the blocking. No need though, to notice the message indicator or the fact it's not blinking.
That's one answer Jensen already has.
He'd made the mistake of stopping at the front desk on his way through the lobby. Since the light on the phone obviously wasn't Selena's doing, he thought there might be new pages for tomorrow maligning in a cube behind the desk downstairs. Most PAs would have stuck them in a manilla envelope and slid them under the door. There are new faces this year though, and one method was no better or worse than the other.
Anyway.
What he thought doesn't make a damn bit of difference because when he'd asked the night manager if there were any messages for him at the front desk, she'd wrinkled her nose, jabbed at a button behind the counter, and pushed a very different kind of paper across the counter at him.
A black, beetle-shaped piece of paper to be exact.
Jensen tosses it and the two cranes from the bar on the desk and decides, very pointedly, that morning will be soon enough to worry about their origins and undoubtedly innuendo-fueled offerings. Instead of pondering the three ring circus his life has become in the past week, he roots himself in routine. Peeling the hoodie off over his head, Jensen pads into the bathroom, the tile cool beneath bare feet. Two handfuls of water splashed across his face and thirty seconds with his trusty travel toothbrush make all the difference in the world.
Given the ridiculous length and complexity of this particular day, Jensen's tempted just to pass out - pull the covers up to his ears until they call the manager for the master key and kick him out of bed because he missed call. He's better than that though. So he slips his laptop out of its sleeve and pokes at the power button, spends the boot time sifting through the promotional materials scattered across the desk until he finds the information for the hotel's wireless.
He doesn't look at the paper animals lined up between the room service menu and table lamp. Can't and won't. If he does, he'll never get to sleep. In his experience, there's a lot of real estate between 'not right now' and 'never', and he'd rather live somewhere in that limbo tonight than be stuck staring at a bunch of cryptic chicken scratch designed to seduce him until the sun comes up.
Just because he's not immediately bound for an unconscious state doesn't mean he can't get comfortable. He can. He will. He's fucking earned it.
The track pants, of course, are the first to go and Jensen shucks them quickly, slinging them across the arm of the wingback in the corner. SportsCenter is the second order of business, muted for now because he's not all that interested in the hockey stats this early in the season. Finally, he snatches one of the pillows from the head of the bed and stretches out on his stomach with it tucked under his chin, the touchpad of his laptop slick and gleaming under his fingertips.
His mom, God love her, is the one and only reason for screwing with the laptop tonight at all. They'd played phone tag yesterday morning before he left for Jared's and broken down to base elements, his last message had been a rambling summary of his week followed by a promise to call during the dinner break Monday. A promise that he'd unintentionally reneged on since they hadn't had a break.
Semantics.
For a thirty second stretch, Jensen actually considers telling her about the origami, the stalker, Jared's probable involvement - everything he'd left out of the voicemail and some things he hadn't yet guessed at when he left it. When he looks up from tapping idly at the keyboard, there's a collection of gibberish splashed across the body of a new email he doesn't remember starting. Most of it could only be considered sentences by the most lenient of definitions. Some not even then. The vast majority has to do with were-dogs and dirty prose, his frustration over not being able to flush out the culprit.
The rest makes less sense, hiccups of adjectives and nouns strewn in amongst the rest that tug at his stomach and make him think about things better left to the dank corners of his imagination. Not a word of which is fit for a message to his mother.
Jensen learned long ago that sometimes the backspace key is man's best friend. No offense to Icarus.
When he selects the contents of the message and hits delete, the words duplicate instead of disappearing. Which is - weird. He tries again, adding the second set of text to the selection. It works. Sort of. All but fifteen of them vanish obediently. Those that remain, though, are huge and red and strobing on the display without quite tripping over the line into full-on flashing.
Blue. Blue. Blue. Mine. No. Crane. Shadows. Bow. He. Yes. Curve. Let it go. Know.
Jensen slaps the lid shut without powering the laptop down and slides it over the edge of the bed. The floor has more give to it than he remembers there being and the carpet squelches as it takes the weight of both the computer and his hand. He pats it gingerly, trying to figure out where the water's coming from, if the AC unit roaring away under the window has sprung a leak. His fingers come away dry.
It's fucking weird. Weird enough to drive him to early slumber anyway.
The remote vibrates in his hand when he grabs it to flick the TV off and the bedspread he could have sworn was a non-descript blue floral looks green and plaid no matter how furiously he rubs at his eyes.
When the knock comes, Jensen feels like he should be surprised but he isn't. His gut twists again, an echo of the tenuous tug from before. Briefly, he considers letting the knocker stay secreted beyond the pitted blue steel of the door. But his curiosity wins out in the end and he crosses the still squelching stretch of carpet with purpose.
The click of the deadbolt is just as heavy and metallic as he expects it to be, the tumblers in the knob groaning when he twists his wrist. Instead of sticking like logic says it might the door flies open of its own accord, impossibly weightless, missing the tip of his nose by no more than a quarter inch.
He also feels like it should surprise him to find Misha standing in the hall.
It doesn't.
Misha's state of undress does - bare feet and legs and chest, but even those can be explained away by the bright orange swim trunks slung low on his hips and the faded pink towel caught in the bend of his elbow. Jensen could have sworn the pool was outdoors instead of in though, and knows for a fact the staff would frown on anyone using it at this hour.
Misha smiles.
"Something I can help you with?" Jensen asks.
He starts to lean against the doorjamb but the paint has gone tacky when his elbow lands. It takes a minute to peel the skin away and when he does the texture's off, just wrong enough to raise his hackles. Rubbing his forearm makes it worse, the flesh there red and blotchy when he investigates, poking to see how far the hives go. Suddenly he's aware of his own state of undress, the chill of the air and the well-worn cotton of his favorite boxer briefs, and he's not sure which is worse - that or the fact that Misha's still smiling wide and silent.
Jensen can't quite decide if the silence is godsend or harbinger. Creepy ain't even a question.
The rash on his arm tingles as it spreads, and he's grateful for the distraction. The stillness with which Misha's standing creeps him out almost as much as the silence. Almost. If anyone asked, Jensen couldn't say why he's able to track the progress of the inflammation with microscopic precision, but he can. Especially when the back of his hand sears hot, a series of angry pink blisters blooming across his skin.
"Ought to have someone look at that," Misha says, still smiling, still just as creepy doing it.
"You offering?" Jensen asks, incredulous. Misha shrugs and does that Gumby thing with his face, the corners of his mouth pulled so far down they look poised to slide right off the edge of his jaw.
"A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell," Misha answers finally, chest heaving on a sigh.
Again, Jensen feels like it should bother him - both the content and the context of Misha's statement. It doesn't. For some unknowable reason it makes complete sense.
So he shuffles aside when Misha presses in, grabs at the door handle just to have something to hang on to. Their bare shoulders brush as Misha crosses the threshold and the spots on his skin flare bright and hot. Blinding. So much so he loses control, vision gone dark for a handful of terrifying seconds. Then the tiny hallway smashed between the closet and the bathroom erupts in a spray of sparks so tangible that Jensen glances up, trying to figure out who the fuck thought welding in his hotel room in the middle of the night was a good idea.
There's nothing there and when he levels his gaze, his sight's back to normal. Correction. His sight has returned, sure, but there's nothing about what he's seeing that qualifies as normal. Misha's rooted, smile faded down to a quiet little twist of lips that anyone else might read as indifference. Jensen knows better. But then Misha's also standing too close, Castiel close, their noses no more than an inch shy of bumping. His hands, Jensen realizes belatedly, aren't stilted on his hips anymore either, but only because they're cupped against either side of Jensen's face, every whorl of every fingerprint marked out against his cheekbones in heat.
In this case, there's no room for should anymore. He should have noticed, but didn't. Just like he should have noticed that Misha wasn't damp even though he'd presumably been at the pool. Or that Misha's skin is soft and smooth and taut and - that he should back the fuck off and breathe despite the fact he really doesn't want to.
The thought is too true for this rabbit hole he's tumbled down, too real to hang onto when Misha licks his lips and sways closer.
"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness," he whispers, and Jensen's caught too firmly between puzzled and pissed to protest the mouthful of Misha's tongue that follows.
It's both nothing and everything like he imagined, if he had actually imagined. He hasn't. But his ears are ringing, his heart thumping, the skin on his arm sizzling down to cinders, one big bright pink blister that Jensen couldn't care less about because Misha's kissing him.
Misha's kissing him.
And then he's not.
The ringing makes sense first. Jensen can vaguely make out the oblong lump of his phone, enough to tell who's calling. Jared's face blinks on the screen in time with the jangle. He starts to reach, but just as his fingertips land, the ringing stops and Jensen's left half asleep with a face full of keyboard and an inconvenient hard-on.
In retrospect he can reason through it, the dream obvious in the string of oddities his mind had tried so desperately to tame. As much as Jensen wants to explain them away, remind himself that he'd once dreamt of using a celery stalk to brush his great aunt's dead dachshund's teeth, he can't.
The dream lingers - the burn in his arm where it's tucked bloodless beneath his body, the frantic whump of his heart in his chest as the adrenaline works its way through his system. Mostly though, it's the shape of Misha's mouth tattooed against his lips, hot and slick and tasting exactly like the beer he'd tossed back at the bar earlier.
He blinks at the clock, the numbers smearing out into a blob that reads 3:23. Their call tomorrow may not be until ten, but Jay knows the rules as well as he does. Unless someone dies or needs bail money, the moratorium on phone calls begins promptly at midnight. Truthfully, Jensen can't decide whether to kiss or kill. There's no telling where the dream might have led, but wherever it was headed he's pretty sure his subconscious was the only one ready to go there.
Almost the only one.
But then, his dick has always been a contrary little bastard. In this particular instance, he's determined not to give it the satisfaction of being right, so he slaps the lid of his laptop closed for real this time and deposits it safely on the desk. Experience dictates that if he just turned over, he'd be less aware and as a result it would be more likely to go away. The only problem is that the slow, familiar roil in his gut seems to agree - the one that says he should give in, put his hands on himself with Misha still lodged in the sizable cracks of his subconscious.
Jensen rolls over anyway, pillow tucked tight against the back of his neck, and ignores it, tries to go back to sleep.
As soon as he closes his eyes, he drifts back down into the current of the dream, his awareness and purpose altering it in a thousand minute but instantly recognizable ways. For one, Misha feels more real, the sharp curve of hipbone more solid in Jensen's grip. Jensen himself can't tell yet whether he's pushing or pulling, but Misha makes a noise anyway - a dark little chuckle that gets choked off in a hiss when Jensen flexes his fingers.
Misha shifts closer and when he does Jensen feels everything, nothing more than the hard line of Misha's cock pressed against his thigh.
Dreaming works on very different principles, he knows that logically. In practice, it's disorienting to suddenly find himself not just horizontal but in his bed at home with Misha splayed beneath him. More confusing is how much he wants it, needs it, the ache in his chest bright and fierce when Misha's lashes flutter back, his eyes incandescent in the dark, and he says, "Tick tock, Jensen," tongue curled around the name like it knows things.
Then there are deft fingers, slender and strong, curling other places and Jensen starts awake.
The clock on the nightstand seems to think it's only 4:58, but there's no way in hell he's going back to sleep. Not now, maybe not ever. Setting aside the guy thing, on-set entanglements are a very, very bad idea. Sure, Gen and Jared had pulled it off, but that's because Jared's stupid and Gen's forgiving and - fuck, he's not actually thinking about this.
Not.
Because the guy thing can't be set aside, no matter how progressive he presumes himself to be or how vocally he will defend the right of two dudes to get it on. Things have happened before. He lived in Hollywood for fucks sake, spent years on daytime television before he was wizened enough to truly handle it. But an active attraction to a dude, one that might delve deeper than skin, is a brave new world. That's not even taking into account the fact that it's Misha. Misha, who could not be called average by the stretch of anyone's imagination. His abstract fondness and joie de vivre, his sharp tongue and sharper wit, his unapologetic otherness all held together by a constant, low-level amusement for the rigidity of the human race.
Misha comes part and parcel with complications even Satan would have a hard time justifying.
Jensen blames the underpants for this. It's not the sort of offer you extend to anyone and although Misha never officially extended anything, the implications were there and are apparently still there planting naked landmines in Jensen's brain.
He needs a diversion, something to hit reset on this perilously circuitous train of thought. Luck feeds Jensen the answer, his gaze searching and quickly landing on the cranes. Their wings are crumpled, necks bent over, but next to the beetle they're beautiful right down to the last grease stain. Apart from obviously being a beetle, the bug looks amateurish. Almost like he's dealing with two different folders, though the chances of that so slim as to be non-existent.
Curious.
Since sleep seems out of the question, Jensen happily abandons pretense and swings his legs over the side of the bed. His dick throbs as he stands, the weight of it urgent against the soft cotton of his boxer briefs. Just one more in a long line of things that need ignoring, he thinks, shuffling over to the desk.
The laptop sits idle, fans whirring quietly to keep it cool.
Research it is.
Jensen settles in the chair carefully, mindful of his proximity to the edge of the desk as much as the unflagging erection. Nonetheless, he ends up having to adjust himself twice, all knuckles and muttered curses before he finally gets comfortable.
The cranes get deconstructed first because they're easy - head and tail flipped out and under, flaps pulled back. Inside the first there's an address and phone number scribbled above what his brilliant deductive skills tell him is a day and time. Holmes would be proud.
395 Kingsway
(604) 555-8576
Sat 11P
He flips the laptop open, tapping it awake with a steady hand. Everything seems slow, the browser launching, the search running, the map compiling. It's so beyond frustrating he can't see straight, and more than once he's tempted to give up and go jack off in the shower like the fine upstanding, all-American boy he's supposed to be.
The mental movie he knows would accompany such a venture makes him think twice.
After what feels like a millennia, the street view finally loads to reveal a squat black building with a wide neon sign slapped against the brick. A venue. Not one he recognizes and not one he'd probably visit if given the choice, but desperate times.
Jensen peels a sheet off the hotel stationery and painstakingly transcribes the information before putting the bird back together. A search on the club's name turns up a website, a schedule, and an artist that he adds below the details on the gig. He stops short of Googling the band, then reconsiders.
Maybe he's coming at this all wrong. Maybe the cranes are bigger than themselves, bigger than whatever cryptic comment gets scrawled inside. Maybe instead of collecting bread crumbs he should take a step back and figure out what kind of person might be dropping them.
Maybe if his dick would behave he could get some shuteye instead of spending his precious down time hunting ghosts.
Jensen diligently types the band's name in the search box.
The results that surface are not what he expected. Apparently, they play punk-infused folk laid atop an undercurrent of funk, their influences ranging from The Replacements to Dylan. While not entirely in line with his own tastes, it's more refined, more evocative than he'd have imagined a note-passing stalker might listen to.
He'd have gone to the show either way, but knowing that it might not blow helps.
Inside the second crane he finds a passage that has absolutely nothing to do with him or the ridiculous paperbound courtship.
I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.
It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted- [3]
Words so personal, so internalized that it's obvious he was never meant to have these, see these. It makes Jensen question them all, especially their purpose. Were any of them meant for him or was it all a matter of chance? Was he just in the right place at the right time? Was Cheyenne responsible for tucking the crane in his jacket pocket too?
No way to know without asking, and no way to ask without looking like an obsessive-compulsive freak.
The other, more provocative, specimens are the only ones he can say with any certainty were intended for his eyes - the turtle in his trailer, the dog under his wiper blade, and now the beetle. Jensen refolds the second crane and tucks it in alongside the first, resolving to take another look at the ones littering the top of his bookcase when he gets home.
If he's right, it changes everything.
The beetle gives him pause. So far neither method nor madness have made a damn bit of difference in the state of things, the weight between his legs just as insistent as when he sat down. It's strange enough to pay attention to whether he wants to acknowledge it or not. Healthy sexual appetite notwithstanding, he's not eighteen anymore and so usually has a lot more control over the how long, when and why. And while he may not be actively thinking about the dream, his body doesn't seem to be coming along for the ride.
Jensen knows deep down what awaits him if he peels apart the beetle's paper carapace, that it won't help, couldn't possibly.
Curiosity inevitably wins out.
It takes longer to unfold the beetle, the paper ragged at the corners where it's been undone and redone already. Again the handwriting matches despite the vast differences in model quality, a fact that leads him to believe that while the cranes are compulsory, the other animals require time and practice to produce. It also implies a specific kind of person outside the words - careful, conscientious, tenacious with unfamiliar tasks.
As he suspected, the words paint an entirely different, though not contradictory, picture.
I find you in the spaces between -
the slope of your neck
the cut of your chin
the stillness that settles in your shoulders when you think you're alone.
I want you in the spaces between -
your hands
your lips
your tongue
your teeth
your passion turned on me with purpose but not thought.
I need you in the spaces between -
to drive me to madness
to possess and be possessed
to see
to know
to covet in all the forbidden ways.
Someday soon, I will find you in the spaces between.
Scrawled beneath it, there's another date and time, another place.
Sun 9A, Buntz Lk
Having a guaranteed opportunity to put a face and name to the culprit is all well and good, but that's not where his eye lingers.
On the third pass, he realizes he's touching himself, another squirming adjustment turned into something more. And Jensen lets it, gives himself over to the sensation because he can. Because this has nothing to do with dreaming. There's a real person on the other end of these words, whether they reveal themselves or not. Someone who wants. Someone who needs.
Jensen needs more than he's ready to own up to and this is better, safer - a carefully constructed fantasy replacing something, someone he would never-
So he doesn't. He uses the overactive imagination God gave him - sculpts her face from thin air, wide eyes, slender nose, pouty lips, long wheat-colored hair. He takes care to make her new and steers clear of any features that might remind him of someone else, her voice in his ear throaty but decidedly female.
It's only after he has the image firmly established that Jensen palms his dick for keeps, shimmying out of his underwear until they're caught in a bunch around his knees. His ass sticks to the chair and the arms of it dig into his thighs, but he can't risk losing her in the journey to the bed. The words spool through his head and he pictures the way her mouth would shape them, the graceful "O" that makes him want to slide his thumb across the curve of her lower lip and push in. Instead he slicks his thumb over the head of his cock and draws down, feels the sizzle start, urging him faster.
All things considered, he knows he won't last long. Here, with only himself to act as witness, he can almost admit the why, name the awkward ache that skitters under his skin.
Connection.
And so it isn't the vision of his manufactured shade that pulls him over the edge, but wanting to be wanted. Needed. In point of fact, the imaginary girl disappears before he takes the tumble, golden hair shot to ribbons on the tide of impulses sweeping from brain to groin and back again. At the end, when he's finally coming apart at the seams with a grunt and a shuddering sigh, the only things that stick are the sparks firing against the backdrop of his eyelids, a pair of grey blue eyes, and a short shock of wild, dark hair.
It takes Jensen a full thirty seconds to figure out how well and truly fucked he is, but he gets there.
Eventually.
( FIVE)