[fic] homo_pink: keep my fingernails clean
[ Jared/Jensen ]
Title: Keep My Fingernails Clean
Writer: homo_pink
Alternate links: AO3
Status of work: Complete
Characters and/or pairings: Jared/Jensen
Rating: R
Warnings, kinks & contents:[Click to read]underage, handwave-y techniques and aftermath
Length: 5,800
Summary: Jared's a teenage mortician secretly running the family's funeral home business when his ailing father can no longer do so. Jensen's a beauty pageant contestant who ends up on Jared's embalming table after he dies on stage.
Reccer's notes: Originally written for spn_cinema and inspired by Elvis & Anabelle.
I was a bit scared to read this in the beginning, I wasn't sure I was up for necrophilia and young J2, but the story wasn't about that at all and went a completely different and wonderfully tender route. As with all of homo_pink's work the writing is beautifully crafted with wonderfully well fleshed out characters that still feel like Jared and Jensen, but more. A gentle, quite story, hauntingly sad at times, but with a happy ever after. A must read!
[Short excerpt]Dad wasn't always sick like this, before.
There were times, good times, when he'd take Jared down to the pond in the evenings, when Jared was still really little, a tiny, skinny boy of six or so. They'd sit out on a couple of wide rocks, naturally sculpted into just-right benches, and point out flickering lightning bugs, make up silly stories about the shapes that star clusters made in the inked out sky. Jared's daddy was a lively man, serious and hard-working, but secretly funny in this special way he shared only with Jared.
They'd catch toads and crickets and little fuzzy moths, and Jared would give them all proper names - Sally the salamander and Gary G. Grasshopper - before they released them back out into the night on the walk home.
Better to never get attached, was how Jared understood it. Nothing ever lasts, being the silent fine print.
Jared never had any pets, and he never minded this, not once.
Dad was built of big bones, then, a looming stature that Jared was always awed by but never afraid of. He was grand and mysterious and he was every conqueror in every story Jared's momma would read to him before bed; he was every knight, every gun-slinging cowboy crusader, every Bo Duke a town could need on their side.
Joseph Padalecki, small-town mortician and father of one, was made of the very stuff superheroes were founded on.
Then one day out of the blue Momma got sick.