(no subject)

[sammehsayum]

Jensen watches Jared burn out fast while they eat, face stuck in that same eager-to-please mask he wore the first day of school, staying firmly affixed to his features even as his eyes fizzle out like a popped light bulb. He scoots closer to Jensen inch by inch in the eight minutes it takes him to eat his lamb and fight back that sticky clot of tears in his throat when he answers Misha and Rachel’s stupid questions with tact and charm and lies under the watchful eye of the whole pack.

Well, my parents are dead, ma’am. Car crash. When I was seven. No siblings to speak of. Been living with my uncle, but he got ill and couldn’t take care of me. I’m eighteen in a few months, figured I could take care of myself for a bit and couch surfing loses its charm quick.

Jared stammers and when he laughs it’s a little too loud. He scoots a half inch nearer to Jensen. Trying to draw closer to the only familiar thing in the room, Jensen guesses and leans in to press their shoulders together in what’s supposed to be a comforting little butt, emboldened by Jared actively tilting towards him but Jared startles and flinches away.

His eyes skip all over the room flightily and even Jensen can see he’s overwhelmed. Jensen can’t remember the last time they were all together in a room at once, let alone under the same roof, and feels like a jackass for leading Jared to believe that he wouldn’t have to face them all.

Well, not all of them.

Jensen glances to the empty chair at the head of the table and ducks his head.

They’re loud. They squabble over seared lamb and brown rolls, touching each other in what Jensen guesses someone like Jared would consider inappropriateness -bare skin sliding all over as they rub affectionately and steal food out of mouths playfully. Gen headbutts Matt gently in the shoulder as she steals his drink, nuzzling even as he rolls his eyes and swipes the mashed potatoes off her plate in reciprocation. She licks the edge of his jaw and Jared’s fingers shake.

Jensen feels self-conscious to the point of nausea. It’s his raggedy boots all over again but a million times worse because it’s his raggedy family. Broken, strange, inhuman.

Too much, too soon.

“C’mon,” Jensen interrupts Misha mid-question, standing abruptly and Jared nearly trips over himself following him out of dining room.

“Jensen! C’mon!”

“You’re no fun!”

“Jen!”

“Spoilsport!”

“We were just getting to know him, don’t be such a prick!”

“He isn’t yours!”

“Hog!”

“Sorry,” Jensen mumbles for what feels like the millionth time.

“No problem, man.” Jared’s smile doesn’t unscrew from his face even as he tries to curl in on himself. “Don’t worry about it.”

Jensen tries to rub out the premature creases of his forehead as he steps into his bedroom, Jared following behind, stinking to high heaven of discomfort.

Somewhere in the back of his mind Jensen had known that it would have been too much to ask for Jared to stop lying about himself the second Jensen took him in. He isn’t going to open up like a day lily just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to deal with a shitty situation with an inept tour guide to hold his hand the whole way. He’s still the kid that told Jensen he had a cold two weeks ago. He’s just going to be sleeping in Jensen’s bed now.

“What’s wrong?” Jensen asks when he notices Jared come up short in the middle of the room, staring blankly at the bed.

“Huh?” Jared startles slightly. “Oh. Sorry. I just…” He rubs at the back of his neck and glances around. “I had work.”

“Work?” Jensen repeats.

“Yeah, like… my job,” Jared says, pauses, and then buzzes out a “ssss” sound, pluralizing. A small stroke of helplessness crosses over his face and the mask cracks up. “I guess I can’t go back to work for a while. It’d be hard to explain…”   His eyes lose focus again.

“I…” Jensen starts, stops, licks his lips. “I have money…”

Jared eyes sharpen up and he scoffs. “I don’t want your money, Jensen. I can take care of myself, don’t worry about it.”

Always so dismissive.

Jensen’s fingers drum along his thigh and he wants to tell Jared that he doesn’t have to take care of himself because he’s got Jensen now and they’re pack and that’s going to mean something, but Jared’s just a few hours old still. It’ll take time.

“Okay.” Jensen nods.

“Sorry,” Jared sighs again and combs his fingers through his hair. “I don’t mean to be a dick, just, I feel like I’m losing control of my life, y’know? It’s a lot to take in all at once.”

“Like you had a whole lot of control to begin with,” Jensen mutters under his breath.

“What?” Jared squints.

“Nothing.” Jensen shrugs the question off. “Don’t worry about it. You should get some sleep.”

“Here?” Jared voice wants to rise up an octave but he’s too exhausted to conjure the scandal.

“Yeah.” Where else was he expecting to sleep?

“I mean…” Jared looks around the room. “In your bed?”

Their bed, now.

Jensen doesn’t say that. Instead he tries to copy some of Alona’s facial expressions and says, “I’ll sleep on the floor, it’s not a big deal.”

“We’re sharing a room.” Jared seems to be just tapping into the concept. “Like- like Katie and them?”

Jensen nods slowly for him. It’s a pretty simple notion, even for someone who’s been sleeping in a car for however long. It might take some getting used to if Jared never shared space with anyone before but Jensen can’t give him any space that they don’t have and isn’t willing to sacrifice the proximity just for Jared’s comfort at the risk that something goes wrong and Jensen isn’t close enough to react.

“I’m going to go for a run,” Jensen relents in their silent staring contest first. “Give you some time to get comfortable. Lock the door, don’t let anybody in.”

Jared opens his mouth, maybe to ask a question, but Jensen’ already crawling across the bed and jamming the window open, stripping off his shirt as he slithers out onto the slope of the roof below. From there it’s a reach, a climb, and a hop towards the ground. Jared’s still watching him as he jumps the back fence in the dark and disappears into the woods.

He doesn’t go far, but he gives Jared space until sun breaks.

-

Jared dreams about coins being pressed into his eyes and his mouth being sewn shut to quiet his screaming, fingers snapping as he struggles and Death trusses him up with bony hands, wraps him in white. Those coins balance and totter on his eyelids but never fall. He dreams that he’s being lowered into the ground, wet black earth pulling him deeper into the cold until he hits the bottom and he can’t see it but he knows that there’s only a small square of yellow-brown dust clouds above him. He screams into the stitches and dirt hits his face.

He wakes up paralyzed with fear and delirious with anxiety. He curls up tight into pillows that aren’t his own, feeling like his back is exposed even though he’s pressed hard into the wall, and he sobs quietly in deep, hitching drags like he hasn’t since the first time Ben hit him. Crying himself to sleep feels childish, but he’s shaking and alone. Alone, alone, alone.

He wants to go home.

The sun is up by the time Jared actually wakes up, inhaling deep the scent of fabric softener and Jensen all around him as he stretches into waking. Jensen’s sitting on the floor next to the bed with his eyes closed, head rolled back on the mattress next to Jared’s knees, neck bared to the room with his forearms propped up on his knees. He looks almost serene there, a statue still wearing a ratty sweatshirt zipped up to the halfway point of his breastbone and jeans with the knees blown out. His fingers are long out of the cuffs of the black sleeves, curling into empty air. Sun falls over the bed in thick stripes, contouring over Jared’s hip and the edge of Jensen’s cheekbone, catching golden blond in his hair.

Jared curls his arms around the pillow and buries his nose into the grey-blue casing.

“Awake?” Jensen rumbles without opening his eyes, throaty with lack of sleep.

Jared nods on a mild yawn, like Jensen can see him with his eyes shut.

The corner of Jensen’s mouth tugs up slightly but he doesn’t make any move to chase Jared out of his bed.

There’s something off about the house and it takes Jared a few long moments to realize it’s too quiet. Not clattering pots or scrambling feet, heavy breathing or shifting hardwood. Jared can’t hear a thing. He leans up, propping himself upright to listen closer and the sheet falls away from his chest. He’s still wearing the clothes Jensen gave him yesterday.

“Alona, Katie, and Chris went to school,” Jensen answers the unasked question, eyes slitting open lazily. “I think Mike and Tom stayed home. Sam and Rebecca took the little ones to the park. Mark, Seb, Danni, and Gen went to work. Misha and Matt just got back in and crashed. Sean’s out back fixing the heater.”

“What time is it?” Jared sits up taller, looking around for a clock. He automatically gropes for his cellphone out of habit but remembers after a bleary second that he doesn’t have a cellphone anymore.

Jensen rolls his head back, neck arching up as he squints out the window. “A little after eleven. I thought you’d want to sleep in.”

“What I want,” Jared mutters into his palms as he scrubs his hands over his face in an attempt to rouse himself more awake, “is to not miss any more school.”

Jensen snorts and rolls his eyes. “Why?”

Normally Jared would scoff. School has been his life lately. He’s gone to school with broken bones and internal bleeding recently, he thinks he’s going to be okay muscling through lycanthropy. He has a test in Statistics and a project due in Political Science, and if he doesn’t show up for a day or two Chad’s going to start getting needy and then it hits him.

Really, really hits him.

Not in his bullshit-y ‘I might be crazy, so just hang on for the ride whatever’ way, but in reality.

He’s a fucking werewolf and he’s worried about his political science project. The political science project that was assigned a week ago when he was a different person, a different species. When he goes back he’ll be the thing his friends are afraid of, the thing they whisper about behind their hands at the lunch tables. Weird, strange, dangerous. Freak.

“Shit!” Jensen scrambles when Jared starts to hyperventilate, dragging down thin gasps of air on wheezes as his muscles start to seize up hard. He tries to slap Jensen’s hands away from touching him but he’s too weak, jittery, and he can’t coordinate the basic grace necessary to stop Jensen from hauling him off the mattress and out the door. He feels exposed from every angle, open for the world to sink its teeth into and the walls are growing taller and his vision’s blurring up as he stumbles beside Jensen on jerky legs to a nowhere destination in an empty house.

Jared’s panicking and he’s a werewolf. Jared can’t breathe and he’s a werewolf. Jared’s being dragged into a bathroom and he’s a werewolf. Jared is being ditched in a bathtub haphazardly with one leg in and one leg out and he’s a werewolf.

Jensen (is also a werewolf) fumbles (with his werewolf hands) the knobs of the faucet and before Jared can even scream he’s being pummeled in the chest with a jet of frigid water that soaks him straight through, red shirt and light jeans darkening up instantly.

Some of it gets up his nose when he inhales sharply, system plummeting straight from ‘panic’ into blatant shock and Jared gasps so hard he coughs violently, curling up in the bottom of the tub as icy water sluices around him, plastering his hair to his forehead and beating down against his back.

“Asshole!” Jared splutters on a raspy gasp, wiping aggressively at his face. He’s breathing is still ragged and rattling deep in his chest but it’s starting to even out as anxiety is replaced with rage.

“What?” Jensen demands harshly. His neck is red and splotchy from the collar of his shirt up and he’s breathing almost as unsteadily as Jared is.

Jared grabs the closest thing he can -a mostly empty bottle of Garnier Fructis Haircare Triple Nutrition Fortifying Hair Shampoo- and hurls it straight at Jensen’s chest where it bounces off unsatisfactorily with a small squirt of rose scented gel. “Someone’s having a panic attack and your first fucking instinct is to throw them in the shower and turn on the cold water?” Jared shouts, groping around the edge of the bathtub for something else to pelt at Jensen as he gets wet hair and cold water in his eyes.

“I’ve never done this before!” Jensen defends, matching Jared in volume. “How was I supposed to know?”

“It’s common fucking sense!” Jared screams emphatically, face hot.

“Shit,” Jensen mutters and scrubs his shaking hands roughly through his hair, fingernails scoring against his scalp before he locks his hands behind his neck and stares at Jared through the showerhead mist. “Sorry. Sorry, I’m bad at this.”

“No shit,” Jared grunts, reaching a hand out for assistance.

Jensen’s up and grasping his hand quickly, eager to be useful and Jared hauls.

Jensen’s weight crushes all the air out of his lungs and squashes him painfully into the unyielding porcelain, but it’s worth it for the shocked shout Jensen chokes on when the cold water hits him.

-

“It does get easier, you know,” Jensen tells him later when they’re toweling off.

Jared will believe him when he can say it while keeping eye contact.

-

Jensen feels like they should be doing something.

Huge changes should require huge actions but really they’re just sitting in his bedroom being lethargic, Jared wrapped up in the two blankets from the back of his car Jensen brought in earlier so tight that Jensen can’t even see his head, just a little tuft of hair that pokes out through the make-shift hood. He’s tucked into the corner of the bed, one shoulder pressed into the window with his back braced against the wall, curled up as small as a boy as tall as him can get. His hands emerge from the part in the draping, long fingers dancing across the faded keys of his laptop and Jensen wonders what he’s writing about while attempting to look very busy not wondering what Jared’s typing about.

Maybe he’s sending out an email.

‘Help! I’ve been abducted by werewolves! The stupid one I’m stuck with threw me in the shower!’

Jensen swallows compulsively, fingers skittering along the edge of the book he doesn’t even know the title of. He resists the urge to rip the computer out of Jared’s hands and make sure he’s not putting them in danger because he doesn’t think it would go over well.

Jensen’s in the opposite corner of the room from Jared, tucked into the cranny behind the door that had only existed in theory to him until he remembered he could close the door, hardwood steadily numbing his ass. His shoulders are starting to cramp up from being wedged so hard into the corner but he does actually feel better being so close to the door. Close to the door and as far away from Jared as possible while still keeping him in sight, it feels like the safest place to be.

“Hey, Jensen?” Jared calls, voice a little weathered.

Jensen hums a questioning sound and most definitely does not tense up.

“Where are you guys from?”

“What?” Jensen looks up sharply but Jared is squinting at his computer screen.

“I mean, shot in the dark here, you guys aren’t from Asia.” Jared down keys. “So, what? Europe? Scandinavia? Jensen sounds Scandinavian.”

“What?” Jensen says again, more emphatically as he shakes his head and hauls himself upright.

“I mean originally,” Jared clarifies, peeking out from his personal blanket fort.

“Are you…” Jensen circles the room, edging towards the bed. “Looking up werewolves?”

Jared angles the screen toward him and, yes, he’s looking up werewolves. He has eleven tabs open, all of them some different version of ‘werewolf’ searched and Jensen closes his eyes and smiles softly as he scrubs over his eyebrow.

“Do I have to eat hearts now?” Jared asks, mostly joking but Jensen can see a small haunt in his eye. “Because I think I’m going to be okay with the whole growing hair thing if I don’t have to eat virgin heart.”

Jensen exhales a soft snort of a laugh. “No. Virgin hearts are terrible anyway.”

It’s the first time he tells a joke and Jared laughs. Softly, more of a rasp, but it’s there.

Jensen shifts on his feet uncomfortably before taking the initiative for only the second time in the brief history of their tentative friendship to close the distance between them, kneeing up onto the bed cautiously. Jared doesn’t cower away and, aside from opening up his chest slightly and leaning back against the window to make room, doesn’t make any indication that Jensen’s presence is unwelcome so Jensen settles next to him, close enough that they can both see the screen at the same time but not so close that they touch.

“What else?” Jensen asks, skimming over the article about lycanthropy with the engraving of the grotesque wolf man clutching at a bodice clad young lady as she screams in terror in the upper right hand corner.

“Does wolfsbane really do anything?” Jared pulls his knees into his chest and props up his chin.

Jensen shrugs. “Just don’t eat it, you’ll get really sick.”

“And what about silver?”

Jensen winces. “We… we have a book around here somewhere. From before. Peter started writing things down, if you’re really curious.”

Jared hums and switches the angle his chin digs into his kneecap from the point to the flat of his jaw, hair sloping over his forehead. “Who’s Peter?”

“He’s dead,” Jensen clips. The wolf man in the portrait snarls right at him. “I’ll be right back. Don’t open the door for anyone.”

Jensen knows where the book is just like he knows that no one’s touched it in two years, and while he’d like to think that’s out of respect for Peter’s death he knows that it’s just because no one cared enough to keep it updated. Really, it’s not even a book in the strictest sense, more of a binder. Jensen actually thinks that it was supposed to be a cook book before Peter stole it, which would explain the faded out peaches on the front.

The thin linoleum of the cover crackles when Jensen starts to gently ease it off the shelf in the living room. The outer shell of the binder is cracked and blackened with char. The first few pages were lost completely and the remaining ones have curling corners and still smell distinctly like burnt. Jensen tries not to breathe too deeply as he leads himself back upstairs and lets himself in.

Jared glances up at him, still tapping away at the computer. Jensen crawls up next to him, sheets rucking up under his knees and he dares to sit half an inch closer as he passes over the book.

Jared takes it from him gingerly, taking point from Jensen’s delicacy with the binder as he settles it into his lap and starts to leaf through the pages.

“Cool,” Jared says lightly under his breath as he gently turns over short passages about the accelerated healing of the wolf people compared to the half forms and how it affects breaks, burns, and cuts. There’s some mundane stuff Jensen assumes are the basics of setting bones and sewing together flesh before pages and pages of poisonous plants, how to treat the symptoms and apply the antidotes when appropriate. Pressed flowers with fraying petals resist smoke sullied scotch tape, pulling away from the yellowed pages as Jared sifts through the book. Charcoal illustrations and newspaper clippings are tacked to some pages, worn soft and tattered with age and abuse.

Jared pauses to touch over a few of the flowers, fingers tracing the dried stems and shriveled leaves absently as he reads over each entry with dedication.

There’s only a brief entry on changing humans. That it’s possible, but only during the full moon and only if Moon decides to let them live first. Jared lingers on that page and Jensen watches him closely for any indication that he’s going to snap again, but he just hums another interested sound in his throat before turning towards the next entry.

Silver poisoning.

A small avalanche of free floating Polaroids come slipping out from between the pages and puddle in Jared’s lap. Jared picks them out of the folds of his blankets carefully and Jensen cranes his head to see if he can catch a glimpse. He doesn’t remember there ever being new photographs.

The photos run in a series and Jensen doesn’t recognize them for the first few moment of staring. Some skinny, naked boy limp and face down in the back of a flatbed truck, maybe passed out. The pictures are taken from high up, like someone was standing on the edge of the tailgate, looming tall above the kid while snapping off a set of photos.

He’s filthy. His hair is matted brown with dried mud and blood, the same brown that streaks down his body, splotchy with the sweat that’s been cutting clean trails through the dirt. His wrist is swaddled in grimy wrappings and his knee is held straight with a crude brace of duct tape and what looks like the stem of a broom snapped from the brush and then broken in half to splint both sides of the bloated, purple appendage. The real pièce de résistance of the image is the center focus: the kid’s back. The gauze is peeled back from the wound, curled away like a wilting orchid and just as yellow. Blackened like death, deadened flesh is carved open and wet, seeping dark blood that pools in the dip of his lower back and streaks down his side, probably reopened when they peeled away his bandage. The scab stretches outside the limits of the wound itself, blistering the flesh grotesquely across his pale skin by following the paths of veins and it looks like he’s been burned and stabbed and poisoned all in one, all at once.

“Jesus Christ,” Jared mutters and turns the picture to the side for a better look at the wound.

Jensen’s body is numb until his fingertips come into contact with the corner edge of the thick film, so sharp the photoprint feels like it could cut. Jared’s fingers give easily when he tugs.

“Jensen?” The voice filters in through Jensen’s one ear but doesn’t hit anything on the way out of the other.

He flips through the pictures, feels the camera move closer to the gaping black hell of his back.

“I didn’t know they took pictures,” he mumbles dumbly, voice sounding strange in his own ears. It’s dark in the photos, near dusk probably if they felt comfortable enough to stop long enough to pull the tarp off of him and snap some pictures for science.

His hands go lax and the photos flutter down to the sheet.

“Wait.” Jared leans forward into Jensen’s space disruptively. “That’s you?” His voice climbs up even higher, going tighter and cracking straight down the middle. He snatches the pictures up off the bed, and then again, more forcefully: “Jesus Christ!”

Jensen thinks he should be feeling something right now, but there’s nothing. A sharp reminder in a nerve-dead scar.

“When was this?” Jared demands, sorting through the pictures rapidly and going paler with each second. “Jesus Christ.”

There was a girl in town when Jensen was twelve who tried to explain Jesus Christ to him. She was the daughter of the preacher or the pastor or the priest, whatever the hell, and thought she was hot shit for it. Jensen would always beg to be let along on the trips into town to pick up feed or clothes. He’d sit by the car and watch the people, the real type people-people, move on through their days even if they sometimes cast strange glances in the way of the quiet little boy in the clothes that were too big for his frame. He’d wait out whatever job they were supposed to be on and then his father would come out and ruffle his hair and take him for ice cream. She worked behind the counter of the gas station and looked down her nose at Jensen’s parents. When he came up with a fistful of sweaty dollars and an ice cream sandwich she asked him if he’d found Jesus.

Jensen hadn’t known Jesus was lost.

She’d given him the ice cream for free and sat him down, told him that Jesus was love and forgiveness and the only way that bad little boys would find their way to salvation.

He told her he didn’t need anyone to lead him, he’d find the way himself.

She told him he was going to hell.

In a way she was right. It just came a lot sooner than either of them thought it would.

“Jensen!” Jared’s shaking his shoulder. “Jensen, what happened?”

“Hunters,” Jensen scrapes out.

“Hunters?” Jared repeats and his voice gets even tighter if at all possible.

There are fingernails biting into his shoulder and this is Jared’s life now too, so Jensen elaborates in monotone: “Two years ago. They came through the forest, downwind so we didn’t catch their scent, in the middle of the day. Waited for Alpha to leave, but there’s no way they could have known -probably just dumb luck for them.” He tries to shrug the hand off his shoulder but Jared persists. “Our ancestors used to hunt people like game, but we’ve never… not ever.”

They did nothing to provoke the attack. Nothing but existing.

“Hey, look at me, calm down.” There’s a hand on Jensen’s face, fingers curling into the corner of his jaw and angling his face away from the frozen image of some instance in the worst week of this dumb kid’s short, pathetic existence, and Jensen finds the statement odd.

He is calm. He’s the poster child for calm. Any extreme emotions have been scooped up out of him and laid aside so that he’s an empty cardboard box of a soul. When he breathes in the air doesn’t go to his lungs because he threw them away to keep the weight off his chest, so the cold just fills up every inch of him.

“Jensen,” Jared says and Jensen hadn’t realized his eyes had lost focus until he has to blink to make out the shapes of Jared’s face so close to his, expression equal parts concern and absolute fear. “Don’t you do this to me, not right now! We can’t both be freaking out, come on.” He blinks big, wet eyes, pleading.

“Sorry.” Jensen shakes his head out and gets some feeling back into his hands. The world starts turning again and Jared’s hands are on his face, fingers splayed out over his cheeks warm and pressured. “Wow, holy shit, sorry.” He shakes his head again and those fingers fall away.

Jensen blushes and runs his fingers through his hair, pointedly not looking at the other boy on the bed. “Sometimes I just…” His fingers twitch next to his temple in illustration because he doesn’t have words to describe the way his brain glitches and goes offline sometimes. He chews on his lower lip and glances across the room towards the blank wall.

“Yeah,” Jared laughs shakily and leans back into his blanket nest, giving Jensen space. “I’ve noticed.”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

“Sorry.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Jensen doesn’t.

“That’s… really invasive,” Jared comments uncomfortably, fingering at the edge of one of the photos taken from an angle and Jensen’s not sure if he means the gross gaping wound in his back or his bare ass.

Jensen shrugs and Jared flips the picture over face down so there’s nothing but a black square framed in white where Jensen used to be.

“I still have the scar,” Jensen adds, asinine.

Jared looks up at him and Jensen can see the war waging over his face between curiosity and distress, and he knows that Jared wants to ask, but he doesn’t force him to actually give the urge voice. He leans forward over his own knees and knuckles his shirt at the collar, pulling it over his head so Jared can get a clear look the before and the after.

“Jesus…”

Maybe Jensen should have looked harder for Jesus.

He knows the scar is ugly; perhaps the ugliest thing to come out of the fire. It looks like a raised diamond surrounded by boiled pudding skin and he avoids looking at and thinking about it whenever possible. Most of the nerves in that part of his back are frazzled and unresponsive, but some of them are hypersensitive.

Jared touches the hypersensitive ones.

“Jensen…” Finger pads brush over the skin gently, like it might still hurt if he presses any harder than a whisper. Jensen wishes briefly that he could see what Jared’s face looks like but he doesn’t turn his head to actually take a peek. Jared’s hands are warm and his touch is solid, tracing the outer edges of the scar and skirting up Jensen’s side where he has to twitch away when the feather light touch tickles. The touches are soft, strangely reverent and Jensen shudders.

He curves away from the touch and the moment, ducking back into his shirt.

“So if you’ve got any silver jewelry now’s the time to toss it out,” Jensen grunts over his shoulder as he rolls off the bed.

-

The house is great. It’s warm, it’s dry, it has running water, it’s bigger than the back seat of the old Mav, no one’s punching him in the kidney around every corner; it’s everything Jared could have possibly asked for. Sure, the bathroom’s a little cluttered but the water pressure puts the community center to shame.

The next three days play out in the same pattern.

Jared wakes up with Jensen sitting around the room somewhere with his head angled back and his eyes closed, but he won’t be sleeping. Jared will get up and get dressed while Jensen lounges, stretched out across the floor or balancing on the back legs of the chair with his feet propped up on the desk, and keeps his eyes closed. By the time Jared pulls a sweatshirt -his own or Jensen’s, he’s stopped caring about the distinction in anything except his underwear, just so long as it’s warm and Jensen’s clothes do tend to be warmer than his carry overs from Texas- Jensen’s up and about, leading him wordlessly downstairs into the invasive smells and deafening sounds of the world.

Most everyone is cleared out by that point, though Jared thinks he saw Mike scuttling out one morning.

Sam sits them down at the island and asks Jared what he wants to eat and Jared never knows.

“You look like you could use some food, come on,” she’ll say on a smile and Jared will flounder even further because his mother used to say things like that to him. He’ll stall until she decides for him that he wants waffles or bacon and eggs or grits.

Jensen fetches them coffee and practically bathes himself in the steam while Jared and Sam chat idly as she works, him asking questions about what she’s doing because he figures that at some point in his life it’s going to be handy to know how to make waffle batter from scratch, and she prying slightly at his life and how Jensen’s treating him. She never asks Jensen what he wants to eat and, as far as Jared can tell, Jensen never really wants to eat. He’ll nibble a bit at whatever she puts in front of him but he never seems to elect to eat voluntarily. When lunch time comes swinging around Jared is the one who has to bring it up, distracting Jensen out of whatever lists he’s writing over in the corner, buried nose deep in candles as he crouches over the desk and the food process begins all over again, only this time with sandwiches, which he uses as an excuse to bat Sam out of his way and make his own.

Then it’s back to Jensen’s room, Jensen back to his scribbling, and Jared back to dicking around on the unprotected network he is just assuming belongs to the house because it’s named “Misha. No.” thinking inane little thoughts while he does inane little tasks like ‘wow I haven’t checked the weather since I was human,’ or, ‘golly, the last time I watched a stupid video about cats I wasn’t arguably being held hostage.’ Jared plays Dolphin Olympics 2 until his high scores are internationally ranked.

Jared gets restless quickly, muttering under his breath that he wants to go back to school and get back to his life but Jensen tells him shortly that he’s not going anywhere until he can stand in the middle of the kitchen during the lunch rush and not get a splitting headache. Those are the only times that they speak. Jared, because he doesn’t really know what to say to Jensen or really if he wants to say anything to Jensen at all. Jensen, because if people could get high scores in not talking Jensen would be internationally ranked, too.

The sun sets and Jensen crawls out the window, leaving Jared alone, alone, alone and when Jared tries to stay up waiting for him he falls asleep waiting and has nightmares where he’s being dissected on operating tables and branded with acid and stabbed in the back with a silver knife and he’ll thrash and scream and sob but when wakes up Jensen is there, at the foot of the bed with this skull rocked back onto the mattress and his ankles crossed out in front of him and then the cycle repeats.

Which makes it odd that on the sixth day the easy routine is disrupted by Jensen shaking him awake.

“Wh-?” Jared mumbles unintelligibly, batting ineffectively at the hand jostling his shoulder.

“Come on, get up,” Jensen chides. “You’re gonna hang out with Alona while I go down to the school to fix our schedules.”

“What?” Jared asks again, more coherently as he wrings out his eyes with the heels of his hands. He’s awake enough to register that Jensen’s playing hot potato with him and feels a pang of irritation that he has to be handed off to someone else for surveillance, even if it’s supposedly for his own good or whatever. He isn’t a child, he isn’t some toy dog, and he could have probably just slept straight through Jensen’s schedule.

“And I’m gonna pick up your assignments,” Jensen continues, undeterred by Jared’s bleariness. “Is there anything you need me to turn in for you while I’m there?”

“I-,” Jared squints hard through the hair falling in front of his face. “Yeah? My backpack’s in the passenger’s seat of my car. I have some stuff.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Jensen cuts him off and glances out the window as his foot bounces, obviously in some sort of hurry. “Come on, get up.” It’s the most he’s said while looking directly at Jared in almost a week.

Jared blunders out of bed and follows Jensen downstairs, yawning and rubbing some feeling back into his face with the rough fabric of the sweatshirt sleeve grating into his cheeks where it’s overlapped his palms and Jared doesn’t think he’s ever owned a rowing sweater.

They take the back way through the living room into the kitchen and Jared wakes up fully somewhere along the way, coming around as he stares at the black thermal stretched across Jensen’s shoulders. He’s deposited at the island counter just like every morning only with the distinct difference of company.

Alona’s sitting on top of the counter next to the fridge, pale feet swinging against the cabinets. Her legs aren’t bare today but instead swimming through black sweatpants that are six sizes too big for her frame, kept up only by a draw string tied in triple knots. She’s wearing a white tank top, her face is clean, and her hair is messy.

“Did you steal those out of my closet?” Jensen plucks at the sweatpants on his way to the coffee thermos.

“Yup.” Alona grins. “I think this is the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing your ugly mug in my life; I needed something to remember you by.”

Jensen snorts and rolls his eyes into the rim of his coffee mug and Jared watches them, feeling detached from the situation like he’s watching a television show instead of real life.

“I’m gonna be late,” Jensen spares as he glances at the actual clock above the oven on the other side of the kitchen and Jared has the wheel around to catch a look, too. 10:43. He hasn’t slept in so late since he came here.

Jensen’s second pass through the kitchen is significantly less successful, namely because Alona reaches out and snags his chin just as he hurries by, wheeling him around so they’re eye-to-eye, even as Jensen whines. “’Lona! I’m gonna be late!”

“Late for what?” Jared rubs at his eyes.

“He’s got a meeting with his counselor,” Alona explains even as levels Jensen with a speculative look, delicate features hardening as she twists his face to the side. “Did you eat anything yesterday?”

“I mean, sort of, I ate-”

“No,” Jared chimes in idly, dedicating himself to becoming an active audience member, and Jensen shoots him a withering look. It’s the first time Jensen’s really looked directly at him in a solid week and Jared grins vapidly.

“Thank you,” Alona chirps brightly before turning pointedly to Jensen. She’s poised to say something pithy if the curve of her mouth is anything to go by, but then seems to notice something else hidden in Jensen’s face, and her brow creases. “Have you been sleeping?”

“Yeah,” Jensen intones and twists out of her grip. “Come on, I really do have to go.”

Alona looks to Jared for confirmation and Jared, as much as he would delight into getting Jensen into a little bit more trouble for his own good, has to sit back in his seat and blink because he doesn’t know. He honestly has no clue if Jensen has even slept a wink since he came here.

He cuts his eyes to Jensen, really taking him in for the first time in a few days -since the scar thing- and he realizes that Jensen looks drawn, like his skin has been pulled a little too tight over his features so it’s begun to white out, sinking deep into the hollows of his cheeks where the stubble has begun to cultivate. The shadows under his eyes have shadows.

Jared feels suddenly and crushingly guilty for hogging Jensen’s bed.

Jensen ducks into the hallway and Alona’s off the counter and across the kitchen in a flurry of tiny limbs and excess cloth faster than Jared can readily comprehend.

“Wait!” she shouts, sprinting to the terracotta fruit bowl sitting primly in the center of the kitchen table and nearly tipping it over in her haste to snatch up an apple. “At least take some fruit with you to eat on your way, dickhead!” She pitches the apple down the hall -really pegs it- and Jared hears it connect with something meaty.

“Ow! Shit!”

“Eat it!” She braces herself into the yell, fists held tight by her sides as she really leans into it and the door slams shut.

Jared is amused. At least, he’s pretty sure he’s amused. He’s never really seen an interaction truly akin to that before in his life, so he has no basis to really compare his emotions to so he can decipher the mix of fondness and fear burbling in his chest.

The tension eases slowly out of Alona’s body and she reminds Jared of a marionette with the strings sliced when her shoulders slump and her fingers straighten back out. She motors out an exhale and cards her fingers through thick blonde hair, scrambling the sloppy bun clinging haphazardly to the back of her head as she goes.

“Is it always like this?” Jared ventures hesitantly.

“What?” Alona blinks at him, as if she’d forgotten momentarily that he was there. “What do you mean? With Jensen?”

Jared nods and she shrugs.

“I mean,” she starts softly and ambles over to the seat next to Jared’s, bracing her forearms against the back, “Not always. Usually I can’t get away with teasing. Only on the good days.”

“Today’s a good day?” Jared scoffs and rolls his eyes. He’s seen Jensen’s bad days, he guesses. But really, Jensen looking like he just crawled out of a grave is a good day?

Alona stares at him steadily. “Today’s the best day he’s had in a while,” she says flatly and then, after a moment, perkily: “Coffee?”

Jared reels momentarily, but recovers gracefully. “I can get it myself,” he assures on a half-smile and proceeds to do just that. The coffee smells like a world war and fills Jared’s head with cluttered senses because it’s so much, nearly too much and he has to rub out his sinuses every couple of seconds while he waits for his body to acclimate. He adds his sugar and he adds his cream and he doesn’t speak.

The moment of silence elapses where Jared can feel the opportunity for him to continue asking questions and have the conversation continue to flow naturally fading, a window of opportunity closing as every hesitated second brings him closer to sounding like he prying invasively whenever he finally comes around to asking, so he bites the bullet and blurts out: “How can you tell?” because he’s curious. He wants to know.

Maybe in the future it will help him out knowing Jensen’s tells on the subtle shifts in his moods; maybe it’s some leftover curiosity from when Jensen was the strange, sad boy who never spoke next to him in school; maybe Jared’s just allowed to be curious about the guy he’s been confined to close quarters with.

“That today was a good day?” Alona clarifies. Jared nods again, a little short and a little hesitant because he’s waiting to be reprimanded for his interests but she smiles, the apples of her cheeks rounding out sweetly. “He called me ‘Lona.”

A smile tugs across Jared’s lips and he smothers it in the rim of a chipped mug the inner meat of his lip catching on dry, raw ceramic where the glaze is flaked away. His lips stick when he pulls away, clears his throat, and asks, “Why?”

“Well, I mean my name is A-lona, so I guess when you drop the-“

“No,” Jared laughs softly, cutting her off and she shoots him a wrinkled nose and a smug little grin. “I mean… why is he… like…” Jared waves his hand out in the air in front of himself, hunting for some word that is simultaneously accurate and inoffensive, but thinking of nothing.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Alona chuckles, but it’s a little dryer around the edges before. Her smile isn’t as pronounced. “I know what you mean.”

She motions for the stool Jared had been sitting at earlier, settling herself as she beckons with a floppy hand and Jared brings his coffee with him when he hesitantly picks his way to her side.

The only thing that Jared really knows about Alona is that she’s the only person that touches Jensen. Whether that’s because she’s the only person that Jensen allows it from or if she’s the only person who’s actually willing to battle the gauzy film of inaccessibility that clouds Jensen, Jared isn’t sure.

Either way he hopes Megan grows up to be something like her. Strong, nurturing, understanding.

Alona scrubs her hand over her forehead while Jared gets himself settled, picking at the chipped edges of his coffee cup and feeling the warmth seep into his thin fingers.

“I don’t know how much to tell you,” she admits into her palms. “Jensen’s not the most open guy in the world.”

“He…” Jared starts, licks his lips and they taste sweet and sticky like his coffee. He hesitates, thinks he shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t tell, but it’s been eating at him and he needs to know more than he wants to keep Jensen’s secrets. “He showed me… on his back.”

Alona’s head rolls on her neck when she looks at him, eyebrows climbing her forehead with genuine surprise. “Yeah? What’d he say?”

“Just that there were hunters,” Jared says, before adding sheepishly while picking at the edge of the sleet granite counter, “I’m not actually sure what that means.”

There is a sense of endless patience in Alona’s smiles, even the softest ones, even when her head is titled to the side and she’s laughing at his expense a little. “They’re just what they sound like. Hunters. Usually big guys with big guns who think it’s their job to purge the demons from the world.” She scoffs.

Jared asks, “Are you the demons of the world?” when he really should be asking ‘are we.’ He picks harder, his finger nail fraying as he worries at the seam between slabs of sleek stone.

She snorts under her breath and rolls her eyes significantly right at him. “I don’t feel like a demon.”

She tugs the elastic band out of her hair and the sloppy bun comes unraveled, yellow hair tumbling out all over and she gathers it back up as she continues, arms working mechanically in practiced motion as she puts it back up and splits her attentions between Jared and herself. “I mean, usually they go more for the lone wolf types: the rogue renegades out for blood or whatever. They can’t really track wolves unless they’re leaving trails, so it’s really only the ones who are hurting people that get caught in the crosshairs, so to speak.”

Her hair’s piled up high on top of her head and she gets her hands back to the counter before they’re back on her head, yanking the tie out a second time as she huffs in exasperation. Alona isn’t so much wriggling as she is vibrating. Her small, pale foot is tapping against the tile floor restless from the folds of Jensen’s sweatpants, knee joggling so hard the stool wiggles and Jared thinks she just needs something to do with her hands while she’s talking.

“We never did anything,” she says, staring at her strained reflection in the front of the stainless steel refrigerator blankly. “They came to our home, burned it down to the ground. Killed our chickens and our pigs. Fourteen people.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jared exhales and wonders if he regrets asking.

Alona nods mildly, still looking blankly ahead before she blinks herself back into the moment. “Anyway,” she shakes herself, “Jensen… God, Jensen was fantastic. He saved four people from a burning building and then crawled into the forest on a broken leg and saved my life, he - you can’t imagine, it was so awful- but he had to kill a man to save me and he didn’t even hesitate for a second.” She cuts a glance to Jared. “Didn’t hesitate then and he didn’t hesitate in calling everyone together. He stepped up while his father wasn’t there, did the job that Alpha should have been doing.” Bitterness twinges in her voice and spasms across her face because she’s back to focusing on Jared, leaning more and more into his space like she’s imploring him to see something and Jared is unconsciously leaning away.

“He saved us,” Alona swears and Jared believes her so much that he can’t breathe, is afraid to move on the risk that he’ll break the raw truth of her expression or reveal the terror in his own.

She sighs and eases back, fingers coming through her loose locks. “I don’t know what did it. Maybe killing that guy, the blood or the fire or his mom dying or what, I don’t know. He just… shut down. Everything just shut down. He used to have this spark,” she whispers like a secret. “He was lit up from the inside. He used to be so happy. We all- we all took the hit, but Jensen, he took the blame.”

She licks her lips and stares off, eyes losing focus as she picks at her own fingernails.

Jared doesn’t know what to say.

He’s sorry, he’s so sorry for everything that happened to her and to them and to Jensen and he wants to say something but all that comes out of his mouth is a big fat nothing because sorrys don’t mean shit for something this heavy.

He feels like he should offer up something in return -my parents didn’t actually die in a car crash, the last four months of my life have been hell, I want you to know, I want you to understand that I understand, I don’t want you to be alone- but it wasn’t really Alona’s story and he doesn’t really want to share.

“He’ll come back,” Alona comments offhandedly. “And he’ll be amazing. You’ll see.”

Jared tries to imagine Jensen the way Alona describes -unflinching, stoic- and it’s not so hard to fathom, not really.

Happy, though. That’s a tougher pill to swallow.

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