Unaware, You're Tearing Me Asunder, Thunder in Our Hearts
Fandom: Supernatural RPS
Characters: Jensen/Jared (Jensen/Danneel, Jared/Genevieve)
Summary: July 2011, Jared's birthday party
Follows Protège-moi De Mes Dèsirs, part of the Change of Season 'verse
Master Post
Wordcount: 2,244
Disclaimer:F.I.C.T.I.O.N.
Beta: agent_jl36
A/N: I have honestly no idea where this story is going, where the next part is going. I can't even tell you how many times I re-wrote this, can't believe it's been so long since I posted the previous part...
Title from Placebo (a little changed), art by Viv (foreverbm)
Mindlessly running his fingers through his hair, Jensen looks up to meet the face in the mirror, his own eyes of a stranger; oddly dark and huge against his pale cheeks, haunted. His head is throbbing dully with lack of sleep and overload of thoughts, and he feels sick. Ill with guilt and regret, and completely hollow at the same time. He wishes he could disavow the person gazing back at him.
The wardrobe mirror reflects the room behind him, the empty bed and its navy blue sheets, crumpled and half-kicked off onto the floor. The cooling coffee that still sits on the nightstand, filling the space with dark, bitter flavor, and supporting a scrap of paper torn out of a planner. Back in a few, it says in Jared's rushed but still somewhat neat handwriting, offering solution and even more complications in one simple sentence.
Jensen looks away with a weary sigh, staring at the carpet beneath his feet instead. He can't decide whether to flight or fight. Whether to leave without a word and rip another hole into their hardly rebuilt friendship, or to stay and face it. Him and anything that may have left. Nothing feels right, probably even can't at this moment, but something keeps him from running straight away. Someone.
Jared, who isn't even there. Not in person anyway, though everywhere else. In the colors on the walls, darker than they used to be, the half-finished book, turned upside down and partly concealed under the bed, the discarded jeans on the floor. In the fibers of the blue and red plaid shirt Jensen's wearing. Jared's shirt he doesn't remember putting on. Jared's smell and warmth cling to Jensen's skin, his fingerprints mark Jensen's hipbones and thighs.
It had rarely been like that between them; so wild or desperate, so needy or bruising, but last night was different. Last night was what broke the levee...
So it happened, Jensen thinks as he glances at the ring on his finger, the gleam the gold casts in the sunlight. It's a simple ring; in design at least. But unbelievably complicated in what it represents and means, in all the names it gives to random and less ordinary things and situations. From now on infidelity being one of them. It happened, he thinks of with some kind of horror of conceding facts and truths that seemed, naively, a little less real in the moonlight. They did it. One year and two months after he said I do. One year and five months after Jared did. One year and a few months only that took them to trip, to fall and tumble, break all their promises and vows. Nothing but them left to blame. Them, and the longing for times gone. The fear of detachment, and worries, inching too close to certainty, that this year is their last, that come Jared's thirtieth birthday they'll be completely somewhere else. Apart.
The night before...
Fingers wrapped around a half-empty glass of red wine, Jensen sat on the kitchen island, watching as the late night yielded slowly into an early, blueberry-colored morning.
The party was over; gifts unpacked, colorful papers ripped and lying everywhere, plates empty and bottles lined on the coffee table, some knocked over and dripping their contents onto the tiled floor. Only the bittersweet taste of after-party lingered, soaking up the rooms with strange emptiness and melancholy. The air was thick with it, almost unbearably heavy. But there was something more.
Jensen had heard many stories about haunted places and houses, about ghost appearances, cold spots with ten degrees difference drops and voices coming from nowhere. Had filmed a few episodes about the exact same phenomenon. He had never believed in any of that. But Jared's house was haunted. And the ghosts that came to haunt this place were them. Their love and their passion. Their words spoken months ago that never lost their meaning and weight. 'Love you. Want you. Can't. I'm sorry. Miss you...' All of that felt suddenly too vivid, palpable, seemed more real and much closer than their new lives they had built, the paths they were walking, separated. Every room, every corner spoke of them and of what they'd lost.
Jared walked into the kitchen without a word, nursing a bottle of beer he'd been holding for the last hour or so. He wasn't drunk, neither of them were, but there was something hanging between them. Energy that wouldn't go away and refused to be ignored. Tension that didn't seem to fade a bit, not even in a crowd, among their co-stars and co-workers, sparkling only the more when the house had gone silent, familiar cars pulling out of the driveway, one by one.
Jensen knew why he was there; for Jared and because it was his birthday. But he wasn't that sure he had any idea why he was actually staying.
Jared didn't say anything when he pulled himself up onto the counter opposite to Jensen, his back leaned against the wall, bare feet dangling in the air. He said nothing for a while, and it was disturbing, not like him at all. He was watching Jensen though, his look fixed and intense, penetrating.
Jensen tried to ignore it, avert Jared's gaze because there was a danger there, but he couldn't help himself. Drawn to Jared's gaze like a baffled moth to the flame, he stared back. Noticing how Jared's generally hazel eyes looked almost blue in the fluorescent light, how his perfectly tanned skin seemed even darker in the contrast of his white T-shirt. How beautiful, unfairly attractive, he was.
“Jensen?”
Jensen jerked, startled out of his thoughts by Jared's voice that was quiet, but surprisingly loud in the minutes-lasting silence. There was something vulnerable in Jared's tone, but so urgent it made Jensen's heart skip a beat.
“Yeah?” he asked, unsure and nervous, scared, although he wouldn't have been able to say why.
Jared opened his mouth, and then he closed it again, measuring Jensen, then the bottom of his bottle. When he glanced up again, he looked all of a sudden much younger than he had the right to. “There were good times. Right, Jensen?”
Jensen's stomach dropped. “Jared...”
“I'm just... Sometimes I'm having troubles remembering the good stuff through everything that went wrong.”
Jensen wanted to lie, deny everything. All the nights they spent together, each kiss and stolen moment, every time they made love, because those memories only hurt now. And lying seemed easier somehow. But it was lying.
“There were,” he replied, sounding broken even to his own ears. “Of course there were. I didn't lose my mind for you for no reason.”
He jumped off the counter, planning to leave, maybe run again, and stop the torrent of painful reminiscences, but before he managed one step, Jared was there. His body strong and hard, unyielding just like the kitchen island behind Jensen, his hands resting on the kitchen desk on each of Jensen's sides, cornering him there. His heat and fragrance filled the space in between them, overpowered Jensen's senses, and he looked up helplessly, swallowing thickly at the undisguised want he found in Jared's eyes.
“Y-you should let me g-go,” he said, low and breathy, and stammering because as true as the words were, they weren't really his. Didn't feel like his.
“And if I won't?” Jared returned, challenging.
“Then we'll both be regretting that you didn't.”
Jared sighed and looked away, leading Jensen's eyes down to where his fingers moved closer to Jensen's hip, playing with the hem of his shirt. “We can't keep on runnin' forever.”
“We can try.” We can. We have to.
“Can you really?”
Jared's palm felt heavy on Jensen's chest, hot even through the fabric of his shirt and it left a burning trace in its wake as it moved lower. Jensen hated the way his whole body shuddered when Jared's fingers splayed over his stomach, the tips slipping through the gap between two buttons, brushing bare skin.
“Jare--”
“Say no.” Jared leaned closer and cocked his head to the side slightly, looking down at Jensen. His breath was warm on Jensen's face, tasting of beer and tequila, and faintly of lemon and salt. “C'mon, Jen. Say it.”
Jensen's eyelashes fluttered, his eyes sliding closed as he tried to maintain the control he was so rapidly losing. His body was reacting to Jared's proximity, to his words and contact, his skin prickling where Jared was touching him, feeling cold where he wasn't.
Truth was, Jensen was tired. Exhausted of fighting and denying his feelings, too tired to keep on running from them. And it seemed that no matter how fast or how far he ran, what he felt for Jared was still there, still that strong and persistent.
They had parted in the middle of what could have been something, of what had been something, just not something either one of them was ready for. They had panicked and they ran, in opposite directions. And now, from the moment they had parted, they were being pulled back, lulled back to where they had used to be.
“I can't,” Jensen breathed finally, defeated, opening his eyes again to meet Jared's. Dark. Hot.
Jared smiled, just a little. He touched Jensen's mouth with the tip of his fingers, running his thumbnail along Jensen's lower lip, his eyes tracking intently the invisible lane it left. His hand moved further, sliding through Jensen's hair to cup the back of his neck, tilting his head just right. “Then stop tryin',” he said, voice quiet and soft like it really was that easy. Like it wasn't completely wrong.
Jensen meant to protest, he was sure he did, made something like a weak attempt at an objection, but Jared's lips, resting fully and firmly on his, cut him off, turned his brain to mush. He reached out, convinced that to try and stop Jared, push him away, but his fingers had a different idea. They slipped through the loops in Jared's jeans, tugging him closer, and he parted his lips, moaning when Jared's wet, soft tongue brushed over his, caressing it, teasing... It wasn't enough. Couldn't be.
Sipping on his coffee, fresh and hot, Jensen stands at Jared's back porch, watching the ribbons of the mild rain and trying not to think about all the mornings they spent here, the late nights, tropical hot or freezing cold. Trying not to think period. Failing miserably.
It's where Jared finds him a while later, propped up against the railing of the porch, eyes closed and face tipped towards the sunlight.
Jensen feels him before he hears him; in the way the air shifts with Jared's presence, how the timbers beneath Jensen's feet vibrate slightly with his weight. Jared's pace is slow, hesitant even. Jensen knows he's there, but he still flinches when Jared's fingers touch the small of his back, almost by an accident.
“Hey,” Jared says as he leans against the railing, two steps from Jensen.
Jensen nods and opens his eyes, turning his head just enough to meet Jared's gaze. “Hey.”
The silence that occurs then is the loudest one Jensen's ever heard. It's tense and tough, and he feels like he's choking on it. He likes silence, usually, but he doesn't like Jared's silence. Not this kind of quietness that is like the calm before the storm, the blank moment between lightning and a thunder. And it's not really surprising that when Jensen finally speaks up, without truly knowing what he's planning to say, Jared does, too.
“Last night--”
“Jensen, I--”
Jensen smirks at that bitterly, “You, uh... You first.”
“Okay, uhm.” Jared takes a deep breath, then pauses, hesitating. “I, uh... I just wanna say that I'm not sorry about last night... I know it wasn't right -- Well, on the contrary, really, but... it wasn't a mistake. Not for me. And I'm not sorry that it happened. If there is something I'm sorry for, something that I regret, it's... not last night. It's not being with you.” He looks straight at Jensen, piercing his eyes with his own that seem endless and full of something Jensen can't quite name. Embarrassment. Fear. Honesty. Love. A hint of each, a breathtaking mixture of all. “But you feel it quite differently, I suppose.”
Jensen puts his empty cup onto the flattened bar of the railing and shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans, biting his lip thoughtfully. “A... little, I guess.”
“You... You wanna tell me how you feel?”
“I don't... I don't even know, Jare.” Jensen sighs and shakes his head, then leans heavily against the railing. “Awfully sorry for hurting them like this... Not sorry enough for spending a night with you.”
Jared looks shocked, for a moment. Then relieved. Confused in the next second. “I guess that asking what now? wouldn't be the best question I could put right now.” When Jensen shakes his head again, Jared smiles. “Right. Hey... you want scrambled eggs?”
Jensen wants to go home. Cry. Throw up. He wants to run away screaming, then dig a hole and crawl into it, possibly die. What he does though, is offer a tight smile and a shrug. “Wouldn't hate them.”