(no subject)
Alona wakes up at five, internal alarm clock attuned to the set of Moon and the rise of the sun. Genevieve’s hands twined around her waist sometime during the night, pulling her close for warmth and comfort and Alona takes a single, silent moment in the still darkness to snuggle deep into Gen’s stomach, hug her close and breathe in one deep, cleansing breath that smells nearly, almost like home.
Genevieve barely stirs when Alona slips from her arms, resetting the quilts behind her.
The jeans she shimmies into are worn supple, any of the stiffness of denim beaten out of them by overuse and they feel like a second skin: breathable, flexible, functional. She pulls on a pink sheer blouse over a black wife-beater that Seb bought but Danneel appropriated and she looks and feels natural.
Comfortable.
Alona twists in the mirror, taking in herself in her girl skin.
She’s quite pretty, she notices. Damn lovely, in fact.
She’s almost of courting age. Open for being engaged in a mate. Not that anyone’s made too big of a deal out of coming of age over the past two years.
Alona started cycling with every fourth moon four years ago in spring and there had been a celebration for her as well as the other girls who had come with the season, and they all thanked the Moon for fertility and potential and life with fire and howls. She’d always pitied the boys that they would never be received into the world with such pomp and circumstance. She’d thrived on the music and the sweet wine, indulging in the company of her sisters and moonlight as they spun tales of their futures, teasingly picking from the boys whom they would allow to pursue when the time came.
She supposes she could have been courted back then.
Not that anyone would have allowed it, they’ve adopted some habits from their own humanity after all, but it seems silly to her to wait another five years to start living.
There will be no songs sung for her if she chooses a mate in this house.
There have been no songs for two years.
It doesn’t matter how lovely she is.
Alona pulls on her sneakers. They’re ratty, thready and worn past the point of comfort and into poverty. The soles stick-tear against the floor when she leaves.
When Alona finds Jensen he’s sitting alone in his bedroom with his back to the open door, staring at the single lit candle on his desk, surround by a clergy of dark ones. Which is odd because Jensen usually lights them in tens, more if he can manage. It must be a new purchase because Alona’s never seen or smelled it before. It’s not really Jensen’s type, either. He goes for the simple, singular smells with identifiable sources. He likes natural things.
The thing burning on his desk is not a natural scent.
Man Town, Alona catches the label of the purple candle and momentarily tries to imagine Jensen purchasing a ‘Man Town’ scented candle. It’s mostly liquid from the heat of the flame and she wonders how long he’s been letting it burn.
“Jensen,” she calls softly and knocks her knuckle into the doorframe. “It’s time to get going for school.”
The room is silent and still all around him, settling on his skin like dust and he doesn’t even twitch. In fact, Alona is about to go as far as to assume that he’s fallen asleep sitting up or into some deep meditative trance before she catches the sweep of his eyelashes over the edge of his cheekbone she’s got a view of.
“Jensen, come on,” she goads gently. “It’s Thursday. Only today and then tomorrow and then you’ve got the weekend to yourself. It’ll be fine.”
Those eyelashes drop. He looks down to where his hands are cradled in his lap and Alona follows his sight.
“Jesus!” she gasps and defies every law surrounding Jensen’s bedroom by rushing in and hitting her knees next to the floor with a force that probably bruises down to her kneecaps. She pries his hands out of his lap, pulling frenziedly to get his fingers to uncurl from his palm to see the hurt. For some reasons flashes of holes in his palms cut through her mind, rusty nails and wooden crosses, but that’s not it at all. The pads of his hands are worn raw and cracked deeply, dried blood flaking off onto Alona’s fingers and he doesn’t even flinch when the scabs fissure and ooze. “What happened? Jensen!”
When he turns his eyes on her he moves like cold molasses. His faces is pale and disturbingly vacant, like he’s wearing a mask of himself with blurry red eyes and deep purple smudges painted in thick sweeps underneath them.
“Have you slept?” Alona cups at the side of his face, leaving rusty smears as she angles his chin up towards the light of the sole candle to see if his pupils respond. “Jensen? Come on, talk to me; what’s going on?”
“I fucked up,” he slurs, shrugging sloppily.
She leaves his hands folded like wilting lilies in his lap, on top of his bloody feet, and holds his face. Her knees dig into the hardwood flooring as she leans up into his space and presses her forehead tight into his, clutching desperately.
“What happened?” she whispers into his air. “Are you okay?”
“I…” A stroke of something closely related to helplessness, but not exactly, passes over his face and creases up the corners of his eyes deeply. “I’m okay,” he rasps.
Her fingernails scrape gently along the hair of his temple, soothing and he closes his eyes like he’s in pain and leans into the small comfort. “Do I need to eat someone?”
He shakes his head and forces a shaky, tired smile on her behalf as she thumbs over his eyelids and cheekbones.
“It’s my fault,” he mumbles.
“What?” She wants to bundle him up, pull him into her lap rock him to actual calmness and not this eerie façade. “What’d you do? Jensen, talk to me,” she pleads.
“I fucked up,” he repeats.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not.”
She helps him limp to the bathroom with one arm hauled over her shoulder, dried blood leaving rusty sedimentary stains all over her pretty pink blouse. He goes pliantly into the bottom of the tub, poured like liquid into the porcelain because he doesn’t care enough to constitute himself independently from gravity.
Alona tries to grill him gently while she turns on the tap and steps to the mirrored cabinet to grab the first-aid kit stowed up in the high corner, but he doesn’t stray from monosyllables and blank staring.
Alona exhales heavily and kneads at her eyes.
They were doing so well. He was doing so damn well.
“C’mon,” she ushers for his hand as she lowers herself to the reasonably grimy tile of the bathroom floor.
Jensen’s knees are up around his ears and the bathwater is orange and scalding, making the white of him pink and fugging up the air with coils of steam. There’s other marks on Jensen that she can make out through the humidity. Some bruises that look like someone took a switch to him, a couple of fine cuts on his face and neck that are too thin and precise to be the random beating of low, unseen branches in the night.
Alona sighs to herself, exhausted in her bones with taking care of Jensen, but not nearly so much as Jensen must be. She bares her teeth in sympathy hisses occasionally as she cleans and bandages her way through the mess when the torn flesh opens and Jensen tenses against the cutting sting of antibacterial.
“Jensen.” Her voice comes out softly, weak. “Did you do this to yourself?”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time, until the last swirls of blood-muddy water slither down the drain and Alona’s sure he just won’t answer at all.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she says, because what else is there to say. One step forward, seven steps back. “Okay.”
His head rolls on his neck until he’s looking blankly in her direction, maybe taking her in, maybe staring at the wall behind her. “I fucked up,” he says and she’s starting to get that.
“Okay.” She’s nodding now, head bobbling like her skull is on hydraulics. “Yeah, yeah, alright. You know what? You and me, we’re going to go rent some more movies and we’re going to hang out on the couch all day, yeah?” she babbles rapidly, words funneling out of her mouth in a fizz like champagne bubbles. “I’ll make some mac and cheese for lunch and we’re just gonna relax, okay? Sound good?”
Jensen’s eyebrows twitch and crease. “What about school?”
“We’re skipping,” Alona declares.
The crease deepens. “I can’t.”
“What?”
Jensen’s shaking his head, gaining momentum and when he starts talking the words flow from him in torrents like river waters flooding. “No, I gotta go, I’ve got to see, I can’t, you don’t understand, I fucked up, I fucked up so bad, I can’t-”
She cuts him off with gripping hands on his shoulders, wide eyes, and a nearly shouted, “Alright!”
Jensen curls up into himself, trembling all over so hard that his teeth chatter. The sheen of sweat and wet on his skin sinks his eyes into his skull, makes the dark darker and the pale flush a ruddy, inhuman red. The same red that’s started to spot through the white Alona’s swaddled his hands and feet in. He looks sick. Broken.
The knees of Alona’s jeans are soaked wet and stained pink. She thinks that maybe there won’t ever be songs to sing again.
-
Alona puts a bag of M&M’s in his backpack. One of the bigger ones. Jensen can hear the individual candies clatter and shift against each other when he rocks on his feet and stares at the raw brick of the high school.
The warning bell rang already. While there’s six more minutes before school starts, this is officially the latest Jensen has ever been.
His feet ache and his hands are pressing tightly against the bandages with swelling. He clenches his fists and feels each split flare hotly into his bones, pain settling over him like a cloak of self-possession.
He hasn’t slept in twenty six hours. His body aches through every fiber of his being with exertion and exhaustion, and his eyes have been burning for hours. His head hurts, his stomach feels queasy, he wants to crawl into bed, into a hole, and just die.
Really, truly die. Cease to be. Fall through the cracks of reality so that he doesn’t have to choose between walking through those doors and walking away and he doesn’t have to confront his own folly. He wants to breathe in deeply and the on the exhale he wants the soul of him to leak out of his nostrils and swirl into the air like fog, dissipating into the chill because there is an English classroom on the second floor of the building in front of him, and Jensen knows every secret the boy who sits one desk in from the back window has.
There has never been a person conceived into existence that was lower than Jensen, he’s sure of it. No one could even compare to this useless pile of shit, too piss terrified to own up to himself or his own mistakes.
He bites his lip so hard his eyes water.
He doesn’t want to go inside. Holy Moon, he does not want to go inside.
He does anyway.
Jared looks like fresh hell. There’s the obvious; the paleness of him, the way his eyes don’t focus, how he sways in his seat and curls into his sweatshirt. He looks ill, maybe. Like he’s fighting a flu. But then there’s the things that aren’t so obvious. His back isn’t touching the back of the seat. He reeks like anti-septic and sterile medical tape. He doesn’t look up or smile when Jensen steps in the room.
For the first time Jensen thinks that maybe sitting in the back of the room was a strategic move by Jared rather than an act of convenience. He’s deep enough in the room that Mr. Hawthorne’s eyes barely reach him and there’s no one behind him to see how his shoulders hunch or his breathing shutters. There’s just Jensen.
“Hi,” Jensen whispers and his voice comes out more like a shiver than a word. Jared either doesn’t hear him or doesn’t have enough energy to lift his eyes to meet Jensen’s. He blinks slowly, staring off blankly and Jensen just sits in his unsteady desk as the bell rings.
He smells like blood and the stale cinnamon spice flavor of fear as if he let it dry on his skin because he ran out of time to shower between treating himself and getting ready for school. On top of that, though, is that thick pain smell; like rotting leaves and wet earth and burning tears. It smells the way milk on the edge of spoiled tastes, if milk on the edge of spoiled could sink into your marrow and ache. If it was sour and cloying and in every fiber of you.
Jared’s breath rattles in his lungs.
“Jared.”
“Hm?” Jared’s eyes move and then the rest of his body follows, like he’s on time delay when he finally does look to Jensen. “Hey, Jensen,” he croaks and his lips curved into a subdued smile that doesn’t touch even his teeth.
“Hi,” Jensen shivers again.
What is he supposed to say? What else is there to say?
Through his own haze of pain Jared still registers the abnormality of Jensen initiating conversation and his smile cranks up while his eyes, by contrast, go a little duller. “Hey.”
The bandages that wallpaper Jared’s back crinkle when he shifts in his seat and he winces slightly before turning towards Jensen, like it’s just another day.
Jensen sweats and licks his lips and jounces his knee and tries to think up something to say. He’s got forty five minutes to think of something, anything. He doesn’t know.
Jensen scratches at his neck, long red lines welting his skin where his nails are a little thicker, a little longer, a little darker, than they normally would be. He swallows, blinks, and figures maybe he should start with a ‘How are you feeling’ or a ‘What’s up’ or really any sort of question that might lead to any sort of conversation.
He scratches at the back of his neck and those welts bleed.
“Are you alright?”
Great question.
Jensen wishes he’d thought of it.
“What?” Jensen frowns.
“Your hands.” Jared gestures to the bandages that Jensen’s practically wearing as gloves. “Are you alright?”
Jensen bleats out a thin little laugh that stinks like mania.
Jared’s actually asking him if he is okay.
“Burns,” he finally gets out after his reedy laugh exhausts itself.
“Sucks, man.” Jared nods sympathetically but he’s obviously waning, fading away from the conversation and maybe reality itself.
Jensen clenches his fist so hard that splotches of red seep through the white wrappings. There’s an ache in his bones, restless and zinging up and down his spine, coiling up in the base of his tailbone like the phantom of the tail he isn’t wearing. It’s whipping at him with anxiety and relentless, harrowing need. He needs to say something, do something, but he doesn’t know what and the weight of that responsibility is so wholly crushing Jensen can feel his ribs buckling under the weight of it.
Jensen opens his mouth and after an initial blurt of useless noise, “You look terrible,” stumbles off his tongue. God damn it.
“What?” Jared’s brow crinkles up and he squints at Jensen like he’s a million miles away instead of the distance between their desks.
Jensen thinks he used to have a brain.
“I-I mean,” he stutters and drums his fingers on his desk, sending shocky pulls of pain dancing through his nerves. “Are you alright, too? Like… You… Are you alright? Because you asked me if I was alright, and you look, I mean you don’t look bad or anything you just look…”
“Terrible?”
“Yes,” Jensen says. “No. Wait…”
Jared has mercy and cuts him off before he can really get going. “I’m fine. Just a little head cold.”
Jensen’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.
He nearly tears the bag of M&M’s when he wrenches them out of his bag.
He wishes he had some kill to lay at Jared’s feet, some mangled meat he could offer up for absolution. He wishes he could come to Jared covered in blood with the fruits of labor to prove that he’s worth some ounce of the forgiveness he’s begging for, for everything that he is and everything that he doesn’t understand and everything that he doesn’t know how to do.
Jared doesn’t know that the handful of M&M’s Jensen scatters across his desk are apologies. He eats them anyway.
“Thanks.” Jared smiles and, if the way he eats the candies like they’re precious is any indication, he didn’t eat breakfast this morning. Probably not even dinner last night.
Jensen can smell when one of the gashes across Jared’s back opens up, fresh and wet. The blood’s too thick for the abuse to be purely cosmetic. Maybe over his kidneys, Jensen thinks, paranoid. Maybe enough to burst something Jared doesn’t know is bleeding out inside of him right this second, stench of organs ruptured oozing from his pores and into Jensen’s air. He’d coughed up blood yesterday, Jensen remembers. That might not have just been trauma, that could have been something torn.
He whines in his throat and shovels more M&M’s over to Jared’s desk as he tries to think of something to say for forty-five minutes. Jared steadily gets slower and paler, dulling around the edges, fading out.
The bell rings and the bag’s empty.
-
Jared isn’t at lunch.
-
Jared isn’t at school the next day.
--
Alona likes pottery. She likes the feel of gritty wet earth malleable between her fingers, excess gathering up in the dips of her skin, and she likes shaping it into something solid and beautiful. It’s an enjoyable way to start the day. Relaxing.
Pottery is her Zen place.
She doesn’t appreciate it when her Zen place is disrupted.
Staccato rapping at the door has most everyone in first period pottery class glancing away from their wheels sharply. Alona has wet clay under her fingernails and in her hair and there’s a streak of it drying like itchy chalk on her cheek where she’d had to scratch.
The knocking grows louder, more obnoxiously persistent and Mrs. Wei, who generally contents herself not to do anything remarkably exerting before ten o’ clock, grouses irritably and mutters, “I’m coming,” as she shuffles her way towards the door.
The wheels whirr but most hands stop working over the mounds of wet clay as the small class of sixteen all watch as Mrs. Wei’s slippered feet scrape against the dirty floors, interest piqued by the unusual disruption.
The knocking is so forceful that when Mrs. Wei does finally get around to tripping the lock the kid behind the knocks comes practically tumbling into the room.
“What do you want?” Mrs. Wei demands, vexed that she’d had to pry herself out of her chair.
“S-Sorry,” the kid stutters and Alona’s ears perk up. “I- I’m looking for Alona.”
“Jensen?” Alona’s chair teeters and her pot sloughs off to one side as she abandons both.
“You know him?” Mrs. Wei asks.
Jensen looks like shit. Shittier than he looked twenty minutes ago when she last saw him, which Alona wouldn’t have thought even possible if the evidence weren’t staring her right in the face with glazed eyes and pallid skin.
“What’s wrong?” Alona demands quickly, checking him over for any obvious injury because Jensen has never, not once in his life, actively sought her out this way. “Are you alright?”
“I just…” Jensen swallows and the noise makes a sticky, thick sound down his neck. His eyes cut around the room and take in all the eyes that are on him, shifting on his feet and rolling his shoulders restlessly. “I need to talk to you.”
“C’mon.” She grabs for his wrist and starts tugging.
“Where are you-” Mrs. Wei starts.
Alona shuts the door in her face.
-
They make it out to the field before Jensen starts to crack up, breath coming choppier the farther he gets from the last time he saw Jared. He hits his knees on the fifty yard line and clutches at himself as the sobs wrench out of his throat.
Frosted grass pokes out between the fingers of the one hand he has braced against the ground to keep from collapsing in on himself. The muddy splash of his fall is flecked across his face, neck, and chest; dirt indiscernible from freckles.
“Hey, hey!” Alona’s there, in his space, breathing deeper to compensate for Jensen’s spiral towards hyperventilation. Her fingers are caked with the chalky dust of dry clay, clumped up in under her fingernails and drying hard and grey on her cuticles. The dust smears across his face when she cradles his jaw, soothing the tears away, grounding him as she hushes and holds with flurried, dirty hands. “Jensen? Jensen! Talk to me, what’s going on?” she asks frantically.
“I lost him,” Jensen wheezes. “I fucking lost him, can’t do anything right, didn’t know what to say or do, froze up, and now he’s gone, I lost him.”
“Who?” Desperation and distress stroke over her face and pump acidic adrenaline through her veins.
“Jared,” Jensen wheezes, and then again: “I lost him.”
“Jared?” Alona feels her eyebrows hitch as she gropes urgently for a connection. “Jared? Jared, who? Jared- that kid Mike was talking about?”
Jensen nods and sucks down a wet lungful of cold air.
“What happened to Jared, Jensen?” She can feel her voice starting to wing out as she bares anxious teeth.
“Blood,” he rasps.
“Did you hurt him?” Her fingers bite viciously into his face, denting his flesh deeply as claws dig into his cheekbones. “Were you fucking stupid enough-”
He’s shaking his head violently before she even really starts, eyes closed tight.
“Wasn’t me,” he heaves and once he starts he can’t stop. “I wouldn’t- couldn’t ever, you don’t- fuck, fuck, but I let it happen, I was there and I couldn’t even- so fucking useless, should have gone in the fire, should have been me instead of her, so useless,” he rambles and quakes, all of his words coming out in a fragmented torrent of stuttered syllables and broken phrases like he’s been holding them in so long he can’t keep them from hemorrhaging out of him.
Alona’s palm stings when it crosses Jensen’s cheek.
It’s another few minutes of stifled sobs and soothing rubs before Jensen calms down enough to tell her the whole story in shudders and stops.
“You knew?” she asks when he’s reached the part where he sat in the classroom with an extra lunch and a half packed in his backpack, waiting for someone who didn’t show up. “Before you followed him home, you knew.”
Jensen sniffs and doesn’t look at her. “I had an idea.”
“We need to tell someone,” she insists as she dredges up memories of health class lectures and school wide assemblies on what they’re supposed to do in situations like this.
Jensen snorts darkly, a sudden strength filling his throat. “And tell them what? He’ll deny it if they ask him -he’ll tell them he got it in a fight somewhere, he’s being bullied or something. And it’s not like we have any evidence. He’s not going to say anything. He’s too proud or too smart, but he knows what he’s into. He’s so... I don’t know how to explain. Strong. He’s so fucking strong, Alona, you don’t even know. If he’s in this, it’s by his own choice. He could leave. He could. He just doesn’t.”
Jensen stares off into the layered greys of the sky and the black silhouettes of the bare branches reaching towards the shrouded sun. “He’s only been here a month,” he mutters to himself, face blank in thought. “Started school half-way through the year. Drove up a month ago. He’s living with his uncle. He’s from Texas, doesn’t even like the cold; hates it here. He’s not here ‘cause he wants to be, he’s here because he doesn’t have a choice.” His brow creases up. “Why, though?”
“I don’t know, Jensen.” Alona purses her lips. “And it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what we’re going to do about it.”
Jensen’s shoulders collapse into his ribs again, the weight of the world, bowing him towards the ground.
“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “I don’t know anything. What if-” his voice cracks and he looks up to her, pleading with glossy eyes. “What if he never comes back? What if it’s already too late? What if he-” Jensen cuts himself off with an unsteady exhale as the tears start to drip again.
Alona wants with every fiber of her being to tell him that it’s okay, but she’s not going to lie to him. One mistake is all it takes. There aren’t second chances when it comes to things like this.
There’s a question -just one question- that’s been eating at Alona’s tongue since Jensen hit the field and she knows that now isn’t the time and she shouldn’t, really, really shouldn’t; but then she is, saying: “Why him, Jensen?”
“What?” He blinks at her, too distraught to comprehend.
She should back off, beg never mind and get him home, but it’s like her mouth has a mind of its own while her brain has none.
“Why do you care?” Her tone is small but holds a definite note of demand. “Why do you care about him?”
The question feels cruel on her lips, but not invalid. If it had been any other person sitting next to Jared the answer would have been obvious; a kid in need is something that demands care.
But Jensen doesn’t care about things, especially not human things. Jensen is inept at caring. Jensen is out of practice at caring. He’s plain not good at it; why would he start now? For a regular boy, no less. Some teenage kid with one form and a life that may be nightmarish, but surely couldn’t even compare to the travesties Jensen held the entire race of man accountable for.
Jensen started waking up for this boy.
Alona’s not complaining, but she’s curious.
“I...I don’t know,” he admits, looking a little wide-eyed and lost; a face Alona hasn’t seen in years. He pauses for a long time, licking his lips and glancing out to the forest. “I just do.”
Alona figures that’s the best she’s going to get for now.
-
It takes Jensen four hours to convince himself to retrace his steps and walk by Jared’s house.
He doesn’t really have a plan other than that. He entertains the brief fantasy that Jared’s going to be sitting on the porch and Jensen won’t even have to walk down the street to see that he’s still alive, just taking a well-earned sick day to recuperate, but of course that’s ridiculous.
Maybe Jared will be inside, sitting at that island counter, enjoying the calm between storms. Maybe he’ll be curled in bed, sleeping off painkillers or just plain old pain. Maybe if Jensen knocked he’d open the door and not ask questions about how Jensen knows where he lives, invite him inside, or Jensen could invite him out, lure him away from the grey brown house on the grey brown street and take him somewhere where there’s enough color for him.
Not that any of Jensen’s imaginings matter any, when it comes down to it.
The piece of shit Maverick isn’t in the driveway. There’s no one home.
He wouldn’t have been able to knock anyway.
-
Moon is a sliver on Saturday and nonexistent on Sunday. Jensen watches the light chase the dark in two complete circuits from his bed, and he feels as empty as the night sky.
It’s a monthly collapse of faith. Abandoned by his goddess, Jensen feels for the first time that he won’t ever see Her again.
He howls dirges for a boy he barely knew and the blankness of the dark surrounds him.
-
Jensen first met death when he was five and a fox got into the rabbit cage.
There had been one rabbit in particular that Jensen had grown fond of while he helped his mother and Auntie Sam tend to the animals. The one brown rabbit was notable from the others through a splotchy white discoloration over half of her chest and Jensen named her Sonny, Sonny the Bunny, and had fallen incandescently in love. He’d understood in the back of his mind that the rabbits they kept and the rabbits they ate were one in the same, but he was sure, positive, that he would be able to save Sonny Bunny, keep her safe and warm and loved and fed fat on clover to the end of his days.
Rebecca had tried to warn him any time he’d kneel next to her and cuddle Sonny close that these rabbits were marked for death, show them love but don’t get attached. Jensen hadn’t listened. His daddy was Alpha; what did that mean if he couldn’t keep one rabbit to himself?
He’d appealed to his father tenaciously until he was gifted Sonny, torn her from the jaws of death itself and he was pleased as punch, planning their futures of lazing in the sunshine and eating the vegetables out of the garden while no one was tending.
It was interesting, in retrospect, how sure Jensen was that he’d halted death in its tracks or that his father had the ability to conjure such power in the natural order of the world to allow Jensen to cheat the reaper out of one sweet bunny soul.
The fox had burrowed and wriggled and dragged itself under the chicken wire, leaving it curled up like a dry leaf in the corner.
Massacre.
Bloody, violent, silent genocide.
Sam had tried to keep Jensen back while his father and Jeff started prying the stakes out of the ground so they could get to cleaning, but Jensen slipped her bracing arm and hit his knees in the sodden ground next to a mangled corpse of a rabbit he’d held hours before.
Hours. A series of minutes and seconds and brief instances slipping by him between the last time he’d seen Sonny with a beating heart and now minutes, seconds, terrifyingly fleeting instances were dragging him away from Sonny’s death. And he hadn’t been able to do anything about it.
There had been no consoling the five year old Jensen, just as there was no consoling the eighteen year old one.
Honestly, he’s not even really sure how he got to school.
Jensen blinks and glances around the English classroom, dutifully ignoring the empty desk next to him as he tries to hash out what time it is and what state of order he’s in.
His shirt’s on backwards and inside out but other than that, the pounding headache, and the hollowness of his chest cavity, everything seems to be in order.
“Jensen?”
Jensen’s slow to roll his eyes up and up and up to Mr. Hawthorne standing over him. Mr. Hawthorne’s expression is some splice of sympathetic, concerned, and scared; eyes creased in the corners and mouth downturned into well used grooves. Jensen probably looks every second of the last four sleepless days.
Jensen makes a sound that’s really just a vibration of vocal chords to no motive other than to prove he was listening and still living.
“Are you alright?” Mr. Hawthorne asks. “Do you want to go to the nurse?”
There’s six other students in the room, one girl smelling overwhelmingly of onion bagel, and Jensen figures the bell hasn’t rung yet or there’d be way more people staring at him like he’s about to snap.
Jensen shakes his head.
“You sure?” Mr. Hawthorne asks again, laughing a little anxiously. “You look a little green around the gills, son.”
Jensen wants to tell him that he’s not his son but instead he compulsively smoothes over his eyebrow and mumbles, “I’m sure.”
Mr. Hawthorne concedes defeat and retreats back towards the front of the room, presumably to greet the remaining students that are filtering it.
His body would collapse in a day or two and he’d sleep twenty hours straight and never want to get up again. When he woke up the world would make a little bit more sense. He thought so, anyway. Not that he cared all that much, but, whatever.
Jensen’s head lists off to the side and he stares out the window into the grossly crystalline blue sky and the clear cut of brilliant sunshine through the trees. The snow’s melted.
The bell rings and Jensen doesn’t even glance up, too busy trying to remember how he woke up this morning or how his mother smelled and what Jared’s hands felt like down the back of his neck.
“Late,” Mr. Hawthorne chirps to the students that file in after the bell, loitering out in the hall a second and a half too long.
“Sorry, sir.”
Jensen tenses up. Every fiber stringing his muscles together and linking flesh to bone goes cold glass rigid and just as breakable. He turns in phases, a disjointed movement that reflects the spring of hope and the burn of that hope repressed as he tries to decide if he even wants to see, confirm that he’s right but risk being wrong in the process.
He isn’t wrong, though.
“Hey, Jensen.”
Jared looks amazing. He’s still hobbling a little and his shoulders hunch up and forward, nearly around his pinked ears. The red flush on his face is half wind-burn, his hair is greasy thick with being unwashed and he hasn’t shaved. His eyes are a little blood shot and he reeks wholly of himself and the interior of his car.
“Wow, man,” Jared laughs and swipes playfully at Jensen’s shoulder as he passes by, casual in a way that defies labeling. “You look like shit.”
Jensen laughs, eyes burning as he stares and stares and stares his fill without blinking.
Jensen is too exhausted to comprehend anything as complex as the soup of emotions at a rolling boil in his chest, so he just lets it stew and steep and the predominate relief overwhelms every last inch of him. “You weren’t here on Friday.” He says, and his voice cracks.
Jared grins and sits gingerly. “I had to take care of a thing. Don’t worry about it.”
He doesn’t smell like tobacco and sour milk.
Previous. - Next.
Genevieve barely stirs when Alona slips from her arms, resetting the quilts behind her.
The jeans she shimmies into are worn supple, any of the stiffness of denim beaten out of them by overuse and they feel like a second skin: breathable, flexible, functional. She pulls on a pink sheer blouse over a black wife-beater that Seb bought but Danneel appropriated and she looks and feels natural.
Comfortable.
Alona twists in the mirror, taking in herself in her girl skin.
She’s quite pretty, she notices. Damn lovely, in fact.
She’s almost of courting age. Open for being engaged in a mate. Not that anyone’s made too big of a deal out of coming of age over the past two years.
Alona started cycling with every fourth moon four years ago in spring and there had been a celebration for her as well as the other girls who had come with the season, and they all thanked the Moon for fertility and potential and life with fire and howls. She’d always pitied the boys that they would never be received into the world with such pomp and circumstance. She’d thrived on the music and the sweet wine, indulging in the company of her sisters and moonlight as they spun tales of their futures, teasingly picking from the boys whom they would allow to pursue when the time came.
She supposes she could have been courted back then.
Not that anyone would have allowed it, they’ve adopted some habits from their own humanity after all, but it seems silly to her to wait another five years to start living.
There will be no songs sung for her if she chooses a mate in this house.
There have been no songs for two years.
It doesn’t matter how lovely she is.
Alona pulls on her sneakers. They’re ratty, thready and worn past the point of comfort and into poverty. The soles stick-tear against the floor when she leaves.
When Alona finds Jensen he’s sitting alone in his bedroom with his back to the open door, staring at the single lit candle on his desk, surround by a clergy of dark ones. Which is odd because Jensen usually lights them in tens, more if he can manage. It must be a new purchase because Alona’s never seen or smelled it before. It’s not really Jensen’s type, either. He goes for the simple, singular smells with identifiable sources. He likes natural things.
The thing burning on his desk is not a natural scent.
Man Town, Alona catches the label of the purple candle and momentarily tries to imagine Jensen purchasing a ‘Man Town’ scented candle. It’s mostly liquid from the heat of the flame and she wonders how long he’s been letting it burn.
“Jensen,” she calls softly and knocks her knuckle into the doorframe. “It’s time to get going for school.”
The room is silent and still all around him, settling on his skin like dust and he doesn’t even twitch. In fact, Alona is about to go as far as to assume that he’s fallen asleep sitting up or into some deep meditative trance before she catches the sweep of his eyelashes over the edge of his cheekbone she’s got a view of.
“Jensen, come on,” she goads gently. “It’s Thursday. Only today and then tomorrow and then you’ve got the weekend to yourself. It’ll be fine.”
Those eyelashes drop. He looks down to where his hands are cradled in his lap and Alona follows his sight.
“Jesus!” she gasps and defies every law surrounding Jensen’s bedroom by rushing in and hitting her knees next to the floor with a force that probably bruises down to her kneecaps. She pries his hands out of his lap, pulling frenziedly to get his fingers to uncurl from his palm to see the hurt. For some reasons flashes of holes in his palms cut through her mind, rusty nails and wooden crosses, but that’s not it at all. The pads of his hands are worn raw and cracked deeply, dried blood flaking off onto Alona’s fingers and he doesn’t even flinch when the scabs fissure and ooze. “What happened? Jensen!”
When he turns his eyes on her he moves like cold molasses. His faces is pale and disturbingly vacant, like he’s wearing a mask of himself with blurry red eyes and deep purple smudges painted in thick sweeps underneath them.
“Have you slept?” Alona cups at the side of his face, leaving rusty smears as she angles his chin up towards the light of the sole candle to see if his pupils respond. “Jensen? Come on, talk to me; what’s going on?”
“I fucked up,” he slurs, shrugging sloppily.
She leaves his hands folded like wilting lilies in his lap, on top of his bloody feet, and holds his face. Her knees dig into the hardwood flooring as she leans up into his space and presses her forehead tight into his, clutching desperately.
“What happened?” she whispers into his air. “Are you okay?”
“I…” A stroke of something closely related to helplessness, but not exactly, passes over his face and creases up the corners of his eyes deeply. “I’m okay,” he rasps.
Her fingernails scrape gently along the hair of his temple, soothing and he closes his eyes like he’s in pain and leans into the small comfort. “Do I need to eat someone?”
He shakes his head and forces a shaky, tired smile on her behalf as she thumbs over his eyelids and cheekbones.
“It’s my fault,” he mumbles.
“What?” She wants to bundle him up, pull him into her lap rock him to actual calmness and not this eerie façade. “What’d you do? Jensen, talk to me,” she pleads.
“I fucked up,” he repeats.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not.”
She helps him limp to the bathroom with one arm hauled over her shoulder, dried blood leaving rusty sedimentary stains all over her pretty pink blouse. He goes pliantly into the bottom of the tub, poured like liquid into the porcelain because he doesn’t care enough to constitute himself independently from gravity.
Alona tries to grill him gently while she turns on the tap and steps to the mirrored cabinet to grab the first-aid kit stowed up in the high corner, but he doesn’t stray from monosyllables and blank staring.
Alona exhales heavily and kneads at her eyes.
They were doing so well. He was doing so damn well.
“C’mon,” she ushers for his hand as she lowers herself to the reasonably grimy tile of the bathroom floor.
Jensen’s knees are up around his ears and the bathwater is orange and scalding, making the white of him pink and fugging up the air with coils of steam. There’s other marks on Jensen that she can make out through the humidity. Some bruises that look like someone took a switch to him, a couple of fine cuts on his face and neck that are too thin and precise to be the random beating of low, unseen branches in the night.
Alona sighs to herself, exhausted in her bones with taking care of Jensen, but not nearly so much as Jensen must be. She bares her teeth in sympathy hisses occasionally as she cleans and bandages her way through the mess when the torn flesh opens and Jensen tenses against the cutting sting of antibacterial.
“Jensen.” Her voice comes out softly, weak. “Did you do this to yourself?”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time, until the last swirls of blood-muddy water slither down the drain and Alona’s sure he just won’t answer at all.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she says, because what else is there to say. One step forward, seven steps back. “Okay.”
His head rolls on his neck until he’s looking blankly in her direction, maybe taking her in, maybe staring at the wall behind her. “I fucked up,” he says and she’s starting to get that.
“Okay.” She’s nodding now, head bobbling like her skull is on hydraulics. “Yeah, yeah, alright. You know what? You and me, we’re going to go rent some more movies and we’re going to hang out on the couch all day, yeah?” she babbles rapidly, words funneling out of her mouth in a fizz like champagne bubbles. “I’ll make some mac and cheese for lunch and we’re just gonna relax, okay? Sound good?”
Jensen’s eyebrows twitch and crease. “What about school?”
“We’re skipping,” Alona declares.
The crease deepens. “I can’t.”
“What?”
Jensen’s shaking his head, gaining momentum and when he starts talking the words flow from him in torrents like river waters flooding. “No, I gotta go, I’ve got to see, I can’t, you don’t understand, I fucked up, I fucked up so bad, I can’t-”
She cuts him off with gripping hands on his shoulders, wide eyes, and a nearly shouted, “Alright!”
Jensen curls up into himself, trembling all over so hard that his teeth chatter. The sheen of sweat and wet on his skin sinks his eyes into his skull, makes the dark darker and the pale flush a ruddy, inhuman red. The same red that’s started to spot through the white Alona’s swaddled his hands and feet in. He looks sick. Broken.
The knees of Alona’s jeans are soaked wet and stained pink. She thinks that maybe there won’t ever be songs to sing again.
-
Alona puts a bag of M&M’s in his backpack. One of the bigger ones. Jensen can hear the individual candies clatter and shift against each other when he rocks on his feet and stares at the raw brick of the high school.
The warning bell rang already. While there’s six more minutes before school starts, this is officially the latest Jensen has ever been.
His feet ache and his hands are pressing tightly against the bandages with swelling. He clenches his fists and feels each split flare hotly into his bones, pain settling over him like a cloak of self-possession.
He hasn’t slept in twenty six hours. His body aches through every fiber of his being with exertion and exhaustion, and his eyes have been burning for hours. His head hurts, his stomach feels queasy, he wants to crawl into bed, into a hole, and just die.
Really, truly die. Cease to be. Fall through the cracks of reality so that he doesn’t have to choose between walking through those doors and walking away and he doesn’t have to confront his own folly. He wants to breathe in deeply and the on the exhale he wants the soul of him to leak out of his nostrils and swirl into the air like fog, dissipating into the chill because there is an English classroom on the second floor of the building in front of him, and Jensen knows every secret the boy who sits one desk in from the back window has.
There has never been a person conceived into existence that was lower than Jensen, he’s sure of it. No one could even compare to this useless pile of shit, too piss terrified to own up to himself or his own mistakes.
He bites his lip so hard his eyes water.
He doesn’t want to go inside. Holy Moon, he does not want to go inside.
He does anyway.
Jared looks like fresh hell. There’s the obvious; the paleness of him, the way his eyes don’t focus, how he sways in his seat and curls into his sweatshirt. He looks ill, maybe. Like he’s fighting a flu. But then there’s the things that aren’t so obvious. His back isn’t touching the back of the seat. He reeks like anti-septic and sterile medical tape. He doesn’t look up or smile when Jensen steps in the room.
For the first time Jensen thinks that maybe sitting in the back of the room was a strategic move by Jared rather than an act of convenience. He’s deep enough in the room that Mr. Hawthorne’s eyes barely reach him and there’s no one behind him to see how his shoulders hunch or his breathing shutters. There’s just Jensen.
“Hi,” Jensen whispers and his voice comes out more like a shiver than a word. Jared either doesn’t hear him or doesn’t have enough energy to lift his eyes to meet Jensen’s. He blinks slowly, staring off blankly and Jensen just sits in his unsteady desk as the bell rings.
He smells like blood and the stale cinnamon spice flavor of fear as if he let it dry on his skin because he ran out of time to shower between treating himself and getting ready for school. On top of that, though, is that thick pain smell; like rotting leaves and wet earth and burning tears. It smells the way milk on the edge of spoiled tastes, if milk on the edge of spoiled could sink into your marrow and ache. If it was sour and cloying and in every fiber of you.
Jared’s breath rattles in his lungs.
“Jared.”
“Hm?” Jared’s eyes move and then the rest of his body follows, like he’s on time delay when he finally does look to Jensen. “Hey, Jensen,” he croaks and his lips curved into a subdued smile that doesn’t touch even his teeth.
“Hi,” Jensen shivers again.
What is he supposed to say? What else is there to say?
Through his own haze of pain Jared still registers the abnormality of Jensen initiating conversation and his smile cranks up while his eyes, by contrast, go a little duller. “Hey.”
The bandages that wallpaper Jared’s back crinkle when he shifts in his seat and he winces slightly before turning towards Jensen, like it’s just another day.
Jensen sweats and licks his lips and jounces his knee and tries to think up something to say. He’s got forty five minutes to think of something, anything. He doesn’t know.
Jensen scratches at his neck, long red lines welting his skin where his nails are a little thicker, a little longer, a little darker, than they normally would be. He swallows, blinks, and figures maybe he should start with a ‘How are you feeling’ or a ‘What’s up’ or really any sort of question that might lead to any sort of conversation.
He scratches at the back of his neck and those welts bleed.
“Are you alright?”
Great question.
Jensen wishes he’d thought of it.
“What?” Jensen frowns.
“Your hands.” Jared gestures to the bandages that Jensen’s practically wearing as gloves. “Are you alright?”
Jensen bleats out a thin little laugh that stinks like mania.
Jared’s actually asking him if he is okay.
“Burns,” he finally gets out after his reedy laugh exhausts itself.
“Sucks, man.” Jared nods sympathetically but he’s obviously waning, fading away from the conversation and maybe reality itself.
Jensen clenches his fist so hard that splotches of red seep through the white wrappings. There’s an ache in his bones, restless and zinging up and down his spine, coiling up in the base of his tailbone like the phantom of the tail he isn’t wearing. It’s whipping at him with anxiety and relentless, harrowing need. He needs to say something, do something, but he doesn’t know what and the weight of that responsibility is so wholly crushing Jensen can feel his ribs buckling under the weight of it.
Jensen opens his mouth and after an initial blurt of useless noise, “You look terrible,” stumbles off his tongue. God damn it.
“What?” Jared’s brow crinkles up and he squints at Jensen like he’s a million miles away instead of the distance between their desks.
Jensen thinks he used to have a brain.
“I-I mean,” he stutters and drums his fingers on his desk, sending shocky pulls of pain dancing through his nerves. “Are you alright, too? Like… You… Are you alright? Because you asked me if I was alright, and you look, I mean you don’t look bad or anything you just look…”
“Terrible?”
“Yes,” Jensen says. “No. Wait…”
Jared has mercy and cuts him off before he can really get going. “I’m fine. Just a little head cold.”
Jensen’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.
He nearly tears the bag of M&M’s when he wrenches them out of his bag.
He wishes he had some kill to lay at Jared’s feet, some mangled meat he could offer up for absolution. He wishes he could come to Jared covered in blood with the fruits of labor to prove that he’s worth some ounce of the forgiveness he’s begging for, for everything that he is and everything that he doesn’t understand and everything that he doesn’t know how to do.
Jared doesn’t know that the handful of M&M’s Jensen scatters across his desk are apologies. He eats them anyway.
“Thanks.” Jared smiles and, if the way he eats the candies like they’re precious is any indication, he didn’t eat breakfast this morning. Probably not even dinner last night.
Jensen can smell when one of the gashes across Jared’s back opens up, fresh and wet. The blood’s too thick for the abuse to be purely cosmetic. Maybe over his kidneys, Jensen thinks, paranoid. Maybe enough to burst something Jared doesn’t know is bleeding out inside of him right this second, stench of organs ruptured oozing from his pores and into Jensen’s air. He’d coughed up blood yesterday, Jensen remembers. That might not have just been trauma, that could have been something torn.
He whines in his throat and shovels more M&M’s over to Jared’s desk as he tries to think of something to say for forty-five minutes. Jared steadily gets slower and paler, dulling around the edges, fading out.
The bell rings and the bag’s empty.
-
Jared isn’t at lunch.
-
Jared isn’t at school the next day.
--
Alona likes pottery. She likes the feel of gritty wet earth malleable between her fingers, excess gathering up in the dips of her skin, and she likes shaping it into something solid and beautiful. It’s an enjoyable way to start the day. Relaxing.
Pottery is her Zen place.
She doesn’t appreciate it when her Zen place is disrupted.
Staccato rapping at the door has most everyone in first period pottery class glancing away from their wheels sharply. Alona has wet clay under her fingernails and in her hair and there’s a streak of it drying like itchy chalk on her cheek where she’d had to scratch.
The knocking grows louder, more obnoxiously persistent and Mrs. Wei, who generally contents herself not to do anything remarkably exerting before ten o’ clock, grouses irritably and mutters, “I’m coming,” as she shuffles her way towards the door.
The wheels whirr but most hands stop working over the mounds of wet clay as the small class of sixteen all watch as Mrs. Wei’s slippered feet scrape against the dirty floors, interest piqued by the unusual disruption.
The knocking is so forceful that when Mrs. Wei does finally get around to tripping the lock the kid behind the knocks comes practically tumbling into the room.
“What do you want?” Mrs. Wei demands, vexed that she’d had to pry herself out of her chair.
“S-Sorry,” the kid stutters and Alona’s ears perk up. “I- I’m looking for Alona.”
“Jensen?” Alona’s chair teeters and her pot sloughs off to one side as she abandons both.
“You know him?” Mrs. Wei asks.
Jensen looks like shit. Shittier than he looked twenty minutes ago when she last saw him, which Alona wouldn’t have thought even possible if the evidence weren’t staring her right in the face with glazed eyes and pallid skin.
“What’s wrong?” Alona demands quickly, checking him over for any obvious injury because Jensen has never, not once in his life, actively sought her out this way. “Are you alright?”
“I just…” Jensen swallows and the noise makes a sticky, thick sound down his neck. His eyes cut around the room and take in all the eyes that are on him, shifting on his feet and rolling his shoulders restlessly. “I need to talk to you.”
“C’mon.” She grabs for his wrist and starts tugging.
“Where are you-” Mrs. Wei starts.
Alona shuts the door in her face.
-
They make it out to the field before Jensen starts to crack up, breath coming choppier the farther he gets from the last time he saw Jared. He hits his knees on the fifty yard line and clutches at himself as the sobs wrench out of his throat.
Frosted grass pokes out between the fingers of the one hand he has braced against the ground to keep from collapsing in on himself. The muddy splash of his fall is flecked across his face, neck, and chest; dirt indiscernible from freckles.
“Hey, hey!” Alona’s there, in his space, breathing deeper to compensate for Jensen’s spiral towards hyperventilation. Her fingers are caked with the chalky dust of dry clay, clumped up in under her fingernails and drying hard and grey on her cuticles. The dust smears across his face when she cradles his jaw, soothing the tears away, grounding him as she hushes and holds with flurried, dirty hands. “Jensen? Jensen! Talk to me, what’s going on?” she asks frantically.
“I lost him,” Jensen wheezes. “I fucking lost him, can’t do anything right, didn’t know what to say or do, froze up, and now he’s gone, I lost him.”
“Who?” Desperation and distress stroke over her face and pump acidic adrenaline through her veins.
“Jared,” Jensen wheezes, and then again: “I lost him.”
“Jared?” Alona feels her eyebrows hitch as she gropes urgently for a connection. “Jared? Jared, who? Jared- that kid Mike was talking about?”
Jensen nods and sucks down a wet lungful of cold air.
“What happened to Jared, Jensen?” She can feel her voice starting to wing out as she bares anxious teeth.
“Blood,” he rasps.
“Did you hurt him?” Her fingers bite viciously into his face, denting his flesh deeply as claws dig into his cheekbones. “Were you fucking stupid enough-”
He’s shaking his head violently before she even really starts, eyes closed tight.
“Wasn’t me,” he heaves and once he starts he can’t stop. “I wouldn’t- couldn’t ever, you don’t- fuck, fuck, but I let it happen, I was there and I couldn’t even- so fucking useless, should have gone in the fire, should have been me instead of her, so useless,” he rambles and quakes, all of his words coming out in a fragmented torrent of stuttered syllables and broken phrases like he’s been holding them in so long he can’t keep them from hemorrhaging out of him.
Alona’s palm stings when it crosses Jensen’s cheek.
It’s another few minutes of stifled sobs and soothing rubs before Jensen calms down enough to tell her the whole story in shudders and stops.
“You knew?” she asks when he’s reached the part where he sat in the classroom with an extra lunch and a half packed in his backpack, waiting for someone who didn’t show up. “Before you followed him home, you knew.”
Jensen sniffs and doesn’t look at her. “I had an idea.”
“We need to tell someone,” she insists as she dredges up memories of health class lectures and school wide assemblies on what they’re supposed to do in situations like this.
Jensen snorts darkly, a sudden strength filling his throat. “And tell them what? He’ll deny it if they ask him -he’ll tell them he got it in a fight somewhere, he’s being bullied or something. And it’s not like we have any evidence. He’s not going to say anything. He’s too proud or too smart, but he knows what he’s into. He’s so... I don’t know how to explain. Strong. He’s so fucking strong, Alona, you don’t even know. If he’s in this, it’s by his own choice. He could leave. He could. He just doesn’t.”
Jensen stares off into the layered greys of the sky and the black silhouettes of the bare branches reaching towards the shrouded sun. “He’s only been here a month,” he mutters to himself, face blank in thought. “Started school half-way through the year. Drove up a month ago. He’s living with his uncle. He’s from Texas, doesn’t even like the cold; hates it here. He’s not here ‘cause he wants to be, he’s here because he doesn’t have a choice.” His brow creases up. “Why, though?”
“I don’t know, Jensen.” Alona purses her lips. “And it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what we’re going to do about it.”
Jensen’s shoulders collapse into his ribs again, the weight of the world, bowing him towards the ground.
“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “I don’t know anything. What if-” his voice cracks and he looks up to her, pleading with glossy eyes. “What if he never comes back? What if it’s already too late? What if he-” Jensen cuts himself off with an unsteady exhale as the tears start to drip again.
Alona wants with every fiber of her being to tell him that it’s okay, but she’s not going to lie to him. One mistake is all it takes. There aren’t second chances when it comes to things like this.
There’s a question -just one question- that’s been eating at Alona’s tongue since Jensen hit the field and she knows that now isn’t the time and she shouldn’t, really, really shouldn’t; but then she is, saying: “Why him, Jensen?”
“What?” He blinks at her, too distraught to comprehend.
She should back off, beg never mind and get him home, but it’s like her mouth has a mind of its own while her brain has none.
“Why do you care?” Her tone is small but holds a definite note of demand. “Why do you care about him?”
The question feels cruel on her lips, but not invalid. If it had been any other person sitting next to Jared the answer would have been obvious; a kid in need is something that demands care.
But Jensen doesn’t care about things, especially not human things. Jensen is inept at caring. Jensen is out of practice at caring. He’s plain not good at it; why would he start now? For a regular boy, no less. Some teenage kid with one form and a life that may be nightmarish, but surely couldn’t even compare to the travesties Jensen held the entire race of man accountable for.
Jensen started waking up for this boy.
Alona’s not complaining, but she’s curious.
“I...I don’t know,” he admits, looking a little wide-eyed and lost; a face Alona hasn’t seen in years. He pauses for a long time, licking his lips and glancing out to the forest. “I just do.”
Alona figures that’s the best she’s going to get for now.
-
It takes Jensen four hours to convince himself to retrace his steps and walk by Jared’s house.
He doesn’t really have a plan other than that. He entertains the brief fantasy that Jared’s going to be sitting on the porch and Jensen won’t even have to walk down the street to see that he’s still alive, just taking a well-earned sick day to recuperate, but of course that’s ridiculous.
Maybe Jared will be inside, sitting at that island counter, enjoying the calm between storms. Maybe he’ll be curled in bed, sleeping off painkillers or just plain old pain. Maybe if Jensen knocked he’d open the door and not ask questions about how Jensen knows where he lives, invite him inside, or Jensen could invite him out, lure him away from the grey brown house on the grey brown street and take him somewhere where there’s enough color for him.
Not that any of Jensen’s imaginings matter any, when it comes down to it.
The piece of shit Maverick isn’t in the driveway. There’s no one home.
He wouldn’t have been able to knock anyway.
-
Moon is a sliver on Saturday and nonexistent on Sunday. Jensen watches the light chase the dark in two complete circuits from his bed, and he feels as empty as the night sky.
It’s a monthly collapse of faith. Abandoned by his goddess, Jensen feels for the first time that he won’t ever see Her again.
He howls dirges for a boy he barely knew and the blankness of the dark surrounds him.
-
Jensen first met death when he was five and a fox got into the rabbit cage.
There had been one rabbit in particular that Jensen had grown fond of while he helped his mother and Auntie Sam tend to the animals. The one brown rabbit was notable from the others through a splotchy white discoloration over half of her chest and Jensen named her Sonny, Sonny the Bunny, and had fallen incandescently in love. He’d understood in the back of his mind that the rabbits they kept and the rabbits they ate were one in the same, but he was sure, positive, that he would be able to save Sonny Bunny, keep her safe and warm and loved and fed fat on clover to the end of his days.
Rebecca had tried to warn him any time he’d kneel next to her and cuddle Sonny close that these rabbits were marked for death, show them love but don’t get attached. Jensen hadn’t listened. His daddy was Alpha; what did that mean if he couldn’t keep one rabbit to himself?
He’d appealed to his father tenaciously until he was gifted Sonny, torn her from the jaws of death itself and he was pleased as punch, planning their futures of lazing in the sunshine and eating the vegetables out of the garden while no one was tending.
It was interesting, in retrospect, how sure Jensen was that he’d halted death in its tracks or that his father had the ability to conjure such power in the natural order of the world to allow Jensen to cheat the reaper out of one sweet bunny soul.
The fox had burrowed and wriggled and dragged itself under the chicken wire, leaving it curled up like a dry leaf in the corner.
Massacre.
Bloody, violent, silent genocide.
Sam had tried to keep Jensen back while his father and Jeff started prying the stakes out of the ground so they could get to cleaning, but Jensen slipped her bracing arm and hit his knees in the sodden ground next to a mangled corpse of a rabbit he’d held hours before.
Hours. A series of minutes and seconds and brief instances slipping by him between the last time he’d seen Sonny with a beating heart and now minutes, seconds, terrifyingly fleeting instances were dragging him away from Sonny’s death. And he hadn’t been able to do anything about it.
There had been no consoling the five year old Jensen, just as there was no consoling the eighteen year old one.
Honestly, he’s not even really sure how he got to school.
Jensen blinks and glances around the English classroom, dutifully ignoring the empty desk next to him as he tries to hash out what time it is and what state of order he’s in.
His shirt’s on backwards and inside out but other than that, the pounding headache, and the hollowness of his chest cavity, everything seems to be in order.
“Jensen?”
Jensen’s slow to roll his eyes up and up and up to Mr. Hawthorne standing over him. Mr. Hawthorne’s expression is some splice of sympathetic, concerned, and scared; eyes creased in the corners and mouth downturned into well used grooves. Jensen probably looks every second of the last four sleepless days.
Jensen makes a sound that’s really just a vibration of vocal chords to no motive other than to prove he was listening and still living.
“Are you alright?” Mr. Hawthorne asks. “Do you want to go to the nurse?”
There’s six other students in the room, one girl smelling overwhelmingly of onion bagel, and Jensen figures the bell hasn’t rung yet or there’d be way more people staring at him like he’s about to snap.
Jensen shakes his head.
“You sure?” Mr. Hawthorne asks again, laughing a little anxiously. “You look a little green around the gills, son.”
Jensen wants to tell him that he’s not his son but instead he compulsively smoothes over his eyebrow and mumbles, “I’m sure.”
Mr. Hawthorne concedes defeat and retreats back towards the front of the room, presumably to greet the remaining students that are filtering it.
His body would collapse in a day or two and he’d sleep twenty hours straight and never want to get up again. When he woke up the world would make a little bit more sense. He thought so, anyway. Not that he cared all that much, but, whatever.
Jensen’s head lists off to the side and he stares out the window into the grossly crystalline blue sky and the clear cut of brilliant sunshine through the trees. The snow’s melted.
The bell rings and Jensen doesn’t even glance up, too busy trying to remember how he woke up this morning or how his mother smelled and what Jared’s hands felt like down the back of his neck.
“Late,” Mr. Hawthorne chirps to the students that file in after the bell, loitering out in the hall a second and a half too long.
“Sorry, sir.”
Jensen tenses up. Every fiber stringing his muscles together and linking flesh to bone goes cold glass rigid and just as breakable. He turns in phases, a disjointed movement that reflects the spring of hope and the burn of that hope repressed as he tries to decide if he even wants to see, confirm that he’s right but risk being wrong in the process.
He isn’t wrong, though.
“Hey, Jensen.”
Jared looks amazing. He’s still hobbling a little and his shoulders hunch up and forward, nearly around his pinked ears. The red flush on his face is half wind-burn, his hair is greasy thick with being unwashed and he hasn’t shaved. His eyes are a little blood shot and he reeks wholly of himself and the interior of his car.
“Wow, man,” Jared laughs and swipes playfully at Jensen’s shoulder as he passes by, casual in a way that defies labeling. “You look like shit.”
Jensen laughs, eyes burning as he stares and stares and stares his fill without blinking.
Jensen is too exhausted to comprehend anything as complex as the soup of emotions at a rolling boil in his chest, so he just lets it stew and steep and the predominate relief overwhelms every last inch of him. “You weren’t here on Friday.” He says, and his voice cracks.
Jared grins and sits gingerly. “I had to take care of a thing. Don’t worry about it.”
He doesn’t smell like tobacco and sour milk.
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