Fic: "In From the Cold" J2 AU rated-R Ch. 6/?
Jensen wakes.
Jared dreams.
Beta and bunny from Embroiderama
=============
Jensen wakes in the morning with an old couch cushion between him and the alleyway’s asphalt, cardboard sheets and some bubblewrap covering him and a wooden pallet keeping the chill of a metal dumpster from leaching the heat out of his body. It’s good. It’s the most warm he’s had except the day he stayed at Jared’s place. Jeff finds the best spots and the warmest places but Jensen's never seen where Jeff sleeps, never seen Jeff sleep at all.
He stretches a little to loosen his joints -- knees and hips and elbows stiff from sleeping in a ball. The back pack that Jared gave him is tucked safely between his side and the wall. Jeff said it wasn’t important. Just things. Not worth getting hurt over. Jensen thinks it is important. The bag and the things in the bag aren’t things he needs, they’re nice. All nice things and Jensen's never had a nice thing. The water tastes clean and the roll of paper is soft to wipe with, softer than newspaper even, and he feels glad to know that when the socks he wears are stiff and old that he can put new ones on.
He counts the things that Jared gave him. Nineteen, counting the bag. Nineteen things he doesn’t need. Nineteen things just to be nice.
And he wants for the first time, wants to give nice things back. He crawls from his night’s shelter and feels the sun on his hair. He swings the nearly empty pack onto his shoulder and starts to walk. He’ll find food somewhere in a garbage can or at one of the shelters if he gets there at the right time.
A shattering of bright green glass spills across the alleyway like moss growing in the cracks and Jensen considers the effect of it for a moment, cocking his head to get a new perspective.
He turns away for long enough to find a piece of newspaper and to take some of the softer paper out of his pack. He picks up the bits, sharp and hard and bright and rests them in their new nest. He balls the papers up and tucks them into one of the pack’s little pockets. The green glass isn’t nice yet, isn’t a gift, but it’s a part and he just has to find the rest and it’ll be special. Good enough for Jared.
=========
Before he leaves work, Jared calls a guy he knew back in his EMT days, a motorcycle cop that had flirted with him when they got a call together. Not a bad guy, but a little pushy and overconfident in his advances, and not Jared’s type with his 70’s mustache and swaggering attitude. The grapevine had mentioned Alan getting banged up in a wreck, his knee screwed so bad it put him on a desk job. If Jared’s any judge, the guy’s doubling up on his PT and doing illegal steroids to get back on the streets. While he’s desk-bound though, it’s an angle Jared can work to get to look at missing persons photos without too much of a fuss.
It takes half an hour of chit-chat on the phone, catching up on old times they never had and good times that didn’t quite happen for Jared to get to ask his favor, and then Alan schedules for him to come down to the station as Alan’s getting off work so they can “maybe” go get a beer after.
Jared gets his foot in the door with that maybe, and as he’s sitting and looking at the computer screen paging through the few pictures of men 25-35, brown hair, green eyes, 5’9”-6’3”, reported missing between December first and January thirty-first, he makes his apologies and says he’s sort of seeing someone and really hoping it can be more, but if he’s ever single when Alan’s single maybe they should hook up then. He’s not really sure why he says it but it hardly feels like a lie. At least the seeing someone part. The idea of being with Alan, being with anybody right now, twists in his stomach like a bad burrito.
He leaves the station around noon, glad that he got in and glad that he got out un-obligated, but wishing like hell he’d found a familiar face among those that someone actually cared enough to miss. It hurts, to know a person can end up on the streets in such a short time span and nobody thinks it’s odd, nobody misses him or gives a damn where he’s gone.
It makes him think of himself, so far from home. He wonders if George would go down and file the paperwork if he didn’t come in to work, how long it would take before his mom’s unanswered calls prompted her to call the police all the way from San Antonio. Who would walk the streets for him, peering at the unwashed and unloved, looking for his face?
The wind feels colder when he steps out of the station and the sun does nothing to warm his mood. He drives home alone and gets dressed for bed. He’s got the next day--night--whatever off, but it screws him up to flip his sleep schedule so he sticks with the vampire lifestyle. The blacked out windows in his bedroom lie and say the time for resting has come. He falls asleep thinking about the warmth of his bed and the electric blanket and how he never really appreciated that before. He thinks of Jensen, and hopes the cold weather breaks soon.
He dreams of summer days and a bright park with white flowers. The sky is so full of sunshine that it hurts to look at and a light rain mists down at the same time. He laughs and twirls in the sprinkles and someone spins there with him, dancing in the rain. He can’t make his dream-self focus on the man’s face, but he feels loved. He feels not-alone. He feels happy.
=======
Jensen walks all day, eyes to the ground, searching for the rest, searching for perfect things in the rubble of the gutters and alleys and plazas. He finds a tool, a rusted box-cutter blade. He rubs it on the smoothest brick he can find until the edge shines bright again and the point can work and bend and poke.
He finds a tangle of wires in bright colors, blue and white and red and green and yellow. Inside they’re orangeish metal and bright like dreams and fire. Jensen sits in a doorway and cuts the plastic away. He wraps the sharp-green glass with the copper wire to see how it can fit together and how it can be made to stay. What it wants to be.
He doesn’t mean to make a little man from the wire, the glass shining in his chest like a heart to light the world. It’s just that one wire wants to bend and wrap and fold again and another on top of it and the glass only fits one way, has to be that way. The figure looks like he might stand at any moment, one foot under him and the other in front, knees bent. His hands are stretched out for help or to help or for both.
Jensen holds it between his wind-cracked hands and watches to see if it holds together strong enough to last. He takes a slow breath in and feels his thoughts slotting into place. “Jared,” he whispers. Even though he talks all the time, saying go-away words to keep himself safe, it feels new to speak on purpose and know before the word comes out what it will be.
“Jared’s,” he clarifies to himself. “For Jared. For you.”
The sun is down and the cold is coming but the little wire man needs to go to Jared. Jensen needs to go to Jared.
It’s not hard to get to the clinic. Jensen knows the way--one step and another step then a turn and a cross the road. He follows the signs and colors on the walls. He follows the cracks on the cement that tell him the way in their broken lines language.
Outside the clinic he watches through the window into the inside. People are there being helped and people are there helping but none of them is Jared. He holds the wire man with one hand while he tucks the other one down in his pocket until he’s too cold and has to switch. He switches hands six times and he still doesn’t see Jared. He puts the little man down and puts the socks Jared gave him on his hands and the cold can’t get him so easy. With his gift in hand he walks to the back. The cage behind the clinic has many cars but none of them is the blue with the dark spots along the bottom. None of them is Jared’s.
The cold makes his ears ache and the high-pitched hurt in his head grinds hard against how much he wants to take the little gift to Jared. The dark sky means he should find a place to sleep warm and safe.
The best spots have people in them already and Jensen knows he should have started looking earlier. Under the bridge he can’t sleep with all the people so close they could touch him and so close they could hurt him and no Jeff there to keep him safe. He walks to a sunk-back door he knows and the place under the stairs but people sleep there already. He goes by the place Jeff found for him with the crates and cardboard and cushion but it has feet sticking out and it was never his anyway.
He goes to the last place where the wind will stay away and if somebody is already there he’ll have to pull garbage out of a dumpster and sleep on top of it. Never in the dumpster, Jeff always says, never in the storm drains even if he could fit and the wind can’t find him.
Nobody is there and Jensen brings some flattened boxes with him to the building site with the big cement pipes. He pushes them in one of the bottom-row pipes and looks to be sure the other end is open. He knows not to sleep too long because the men in the morning won’t like him there. He curls up in the rounded space and listens to the distorted echoes of his own noise.
Beyond his feet a slow rain starts to fall and Jensen feels sad for the people in the places he looked first. He closes his eyes and curls up a bit more. He’s cold. He hurts where the men hit him and where Jared stitched him together again. He fears that it will be too frozen to look for food the next day or that the bad men will bother him and that fear never goes all the way away. He has a plan for the next day though, so many things to do and it feels good to have a Jared to see. He feels real and awake and that frightens him too but it’s a nice scared and he thinks he can live with that.
Jared dreams.
Beta and bunny from Embroiderama
=============
Jensen wakes in the morning with an old couch cushion between him and the alleyway’s asphalt, cardboard sheets and some bubblewrap covering him and a wooden pallet keeping the chill of a metal dumpster from leaching the heat out of his body. It’s good. It’s the most warm he’s had except the day he stayed at Jared’s place. Jeff finds the best spots and the warmest places but Jensen's never seen where Jeff sleeps, never seen Jeff sleep at all.
He stretches a little to loosen his joints -- knees and hips and elbows stiff from sleeping in a ball. The back pack that Jared gave him is tucked safely between his side and the wall. Jeff said it wasn’t important. Just things. Not worth getting hurt over. Jensen thinks it is important. The bag and the things in the bag aren’t things he needs, they’re nice. All nice things and Jensen's never had a nice thing. The water tastes clean and the roll of paper is soft to wipe with, softer than newspaper even, and he feels glad to know that when the socks he wears are stiff and old that he can put new ones on.
He counts the things that Jared gave him. Nineteen, counting the bag. Nineteen things he doesn’t need. Nineteen things just to be nice.
And he wants for the first time, wants to give nice things back. He crawls from his night’s shelter and feels the sun on his hair. He swings the nearly empty pack onto his shoulder and starts to walk. He’ll find food somewhere in a garbage can or at one of the shelters if he gets there at the right time.
A shattering of bright green glass spills across the alleyway like moss growing in the cracks and Jensen considers the effect of it for a moment, cocking his head to get a new perspective.
He turns away for long enough to find a piece of newspaper and to take some of the softer paper out of his pack. He picks up the bits, sharp and hard and bright and rests them in their new nest. He balls the papers up and tucks them into one of the pack’s little pockets. The green glass isn’t nice yet, isn’t a gift, but it’s a part and he just has to find the rest and it’ll be special. Good enough for Jared.
=========
Before he leaves work, Jared calls a guy he knew back in his EMT days, a motorcycle cop that had flirted with him when they got a call together. Not a bad guy, but a little pushy and overconfident in his advances, and not Jared’s type with his 70’s mustache and swaggering attitude. The grapevine had mentioned Alan getting banged up in a wreck, his knee screwed so bad it put him on a desk job. If Jared’s any judge, the guy’s doubling up on his PT and doing illegal steroids to get back on the streets. While he’s desk-bound though, it’s an angle Jared can work to get to look at missing persons photos without too much of a fuss.
It takes half an hour of chit-chat on the phone, catching up on old times they never had and good times that didn’t quite happen for Jared to get to ask his favor, and then Alan schedules for him to come down to the station as Alan’s getting off work so they can “maybe” go get a beer after.
Jared gets his foot in the door with that maybe, and as he’s sitting and looking at the computer screen paging through the few pictures of men 25-35, brown hair, green eyes, 5’9”-6’3”, reported missing between December first and January thirty-first, he makes his apologies and says he’s sort of seeing someone and really hoping it can be more, but if he’s ever single when Alan’s single maybe they should hook up then. He’s not really sure why he says it but it hardly feels like a lie. At least the seeing someone part. The idea of being with Alan, being with anybody right now, twists in his stomach like a bad burrito.
He leaves the station around noon, glad that he got in and glad that he got out un-obligated, but wishing like hell he’d found a familiar face among those that someone actually cared enough to miss. It hurts, to know a person can end up on the streets in such a short time span and nobody thinks it’s odd, nobody misses him or gives a damn where he’s gone.
It makes him think of himself, so far from home. He wonders if George would go down and file the paperwork if he didn’t come in to work, how long it would take before his mom’s unanswered calls prompted her to call the police all the way from San Antonio. Who would walk the streets for him, peering at the unwashed and unloved, looking for his face?
The wind feels colder when he steps out of the station and the sun does nothing to warm his mood. He drives home alone and gets dressed for bed. He’s got the next day--night--whatever off, but it screws him up to flip his sleep schedule so he sticks with the vampire lifestyle. The blacked out windows in his bedroom lie and say the time for resting has come. He falls asleep thinking about the warmth of his bed and the electric blanket and how he never really appreciated that before. He thinks of Jensen, and hopes the cold weather breaks soon.
He dreams of summer days and a bright park with white flowers. The sky is so full of sunshine that it hurts to look at and a light rain mists down at the same time. He laughs and twirls in the sprinkles and someone spins there with him, dancing in the rain. He can’t make his dream-self focus on the man’s face, but he feels loved. He feels not-alone. He feels happy.
=======
Jensen walks all day, eyes to the ground, searching for the rest, searching for perfect things in the rubble of the gutters and alleys and plazas. He finds a tool, a rusted box-cutter blade. He rubs it on the smoothest brick he can find until the edge shines bright again and the point can work and bend and poke.
He finds a tangle of wires in bright colors, blue and white and red and green and yellow. Inside they’re orangeish metal and bright like dreams and fire. Jensen sits in a doorway and cuts the plastic away. He wraps the sharp-green glass with the copper wire to see how it can fit together and how it can be made to stay. What it wants to be.
He doesn’t mean to make a little man from the wire, the glass shining in his chest like a heart to light the world. It’s just that one wire wants to bend and wrap and fold again and another on top of it and the glass only fits one way, has to be that way. The figure looks like he might stand at any moment, one foot under him and the other in front, knees bent. His hands are stretched out for help or to help or for both.
Jensen holds it between his wind-cracked hands and watches to see if it holds together strong enough to last. He takes a slow breath in and feels his thoughts slotting into place. “Jared,” he whispers. Even though he talks all the time, saying go-away words to keep himself safe, it feels new to speak on purpose and know before the word comes out what it will be.
“Jared’s,” he clarifies to himself. “For Jared. For you.”
The sun is down and the cold is coming but the little wire man needs to go to Jared. Jensen needs to go to Jared.
It’s not hard to get to the clinic. Jensen knows the way--one step and another step then a turn and a cross the road. He follows the signs and colors on the walls. He follows the cracks on the cement that tell him the way in their broken lines language.
Outside the clinic he watches through the window into the inside. People are there being helped and people are there helping but none of them is Jared. He holds the wire man with one hand while he tucks the other one down in his pocket until he’s too cold and has to switch. He switches hands six times and he still doesn’t see Jared. He puts the little man down and puts the socks Jared gave him on his hands and the cold can’t get him so easy. With his gift in hand he walks to the back. The cage behind the clinic has many cars but none of them is the blue with the dark spots along the bottom. None of them is Jared’s.
The cold makes his ears ache and the high-pitched hurt in his head grinds hard against how much he wants to take the little gift to Jared. The dark sky means he should find a place to sleep warm and safe.
The best spots have people in them already and Jensen knows he should have started looking earlier. Under the bridge he can’t sleep with all the people so close they could touch him and so close they could hurt him and no Jeff there to keep him safe. He walks to a sunk-back door he knows and the place under the stairs but people sleep there already. He goes by the place Jeff found for him with the crates and cardboard and cushion but it has feet sticking out and it was never his anyway.
He goes to the last place where the wind will stay away and if somebody is already there he’ll have to pull garbage out of a dumpster and sleep on top of it. Never in the dumpster, Jeff always says, never in the storm drains even if he could fit and the wind can’t find him.
Nobody is there and Jensen brings some flattened boxes with him to the building site with the big cement pipes. He pushes them in one of the bottom-row pipes and looks to be sure the other end is open. He knows not to sleep too long because the men in the morning won’t like him there. He curls up in the rounded space and listens to the distorted echoes of his own noise.
Beyond his feet a slow rain starts to fall and Jensen feels sad for the people in the places he looked first. He closes his eyes and curls up a bit more. He’s cold. He hurts where the men hit him and where Jared stitched him together again. He fears that it will be too frozen to look for food the next day or that the bad men will bother him and that fear never goes all the way away. He has a plan for the next day though, so many things to do and it feels good to have a Jared to see. He feels real and awake and that frightens him too but it’s a nice scared and he thinks he can live with that.