(no subject)
The next week at school is like the first except better. Not by much, but by enough.
Jensen wakes up when his body is hard-wired programmed to wake up and realizes all over again that Jared is a stealth snuggler and sometime during the night Jensen became his unwitting victim. They always start the night with their backs to each other, edged against the side of the bed and the wall, but now Jared’s arm is slung over Jensen’s neck, a barely comfortable weight along the side of his throat that curls up around his head, fingers wound into the loose fabric of the pillowcase. Jensen can feel the point of Jared’s nose gouging into the slope of his shoulder and the flare and ebb of hot breath as it sinks into the soft cotton of his t-shirt and then fades away. There’s a leg tossed over Jensen’s and Jensen presses his lips together to swallow a fond little smile and he lets Jared sleep in until five.
They take Jared’s car, which is strange and a little scary for Jensen, whose most profound experience with vehicles is when he was thrown into the back of one once. Sure there had been the bumpy truck rides into town when he was younger, but all of that was eclipsed by the move and Jensen spends every drive with his eyes closed and his teeth gritted, waiting for something awful to happen.
Nothing ever does and Jared never teases him.
Jared’s mood starts to dip right around the time they hit the door and the mass stink of human that the high school exudes and Jensen stands back and lets Jared have his day to himself, keeping an eye out for anything triggering that might get either of them in any sort of trouble that could get back to Alpha.
But Jared keeps to himself, stays calm, stays collected, and Jensen only has to step in once more when Jared nearly collapses when a girl sitting two rows over from him pulls a sandwich out of her bag that had obviously been trapped between two books for a number of weeks.
Jared’s friends shoot them looks sometimes and Jensen never really points their attentions out, but Jared notices that he notices and just turns his nose up at them and Jensen doesn’t ask.
They spend their lunch periods out on the field, alone in the chill of winter and they talk sometimes or watch the clouds, but they come back and Jared toughs out the last few periods until they’re free and then he drives with the window down, speeding down Main Street and sometimes around then Jensen can open his eyes and watch the scenery streak by them.
Jensen takes Jared into the forest after dinners on their human feet and teaches him the same way he was taught, tag and hide and seek to learn the lay of the land, shoving and rough housing to know how the body works and just how far it will go. They’ll play into the dark, Jared laughing until he’s red in the face and Jensen grinning along with him before they hike back down, hit the mattress in the early morning and catch a few hours before getting up and doing it all over again.
Jensen hits the door Friday afternoon exhausted and ready to pass out for a few hours.
“Read!” Nikki strikes the second the door is shut behind him, pulling on his hand hard enough to get him stumbling a step forward.
“Nikki, come on,” Jensen appeals, trying to subtly disengage his arm. “It’s been a long week and Mr. Jared and I are very tired and I’m sure he doesn’t want to-”
“No,” Jenna protests indignantly, taking up Nikki’s game and grabbing Jensen’s other hand. “There’s been no read in forever! Read to us, Jesen!”
“I don’t mind,” Jared offers and that’s how Jensen ends up on the floor crammed between two beds with a charred leather-bound copy of Le Petit Prince in his lap, Nikki and Jenna curled together on one bed and Jared on the other with Robby sitting still in his lap, sucking on his thumb and observing the book with deep brown eyes.
“Okay,” Jensen heaves a sigh and flips through to the English translation, one of the five in the edition. “The Little Prince.”
“No,” Jenna whines. “Do it in the voice!”
“I’m not reading it in French, Jen,” Jensen says vehemently. “It takes too long and little puppies need their sleep.”
“You speak French?” Jared asks, head tilting to the side as he looks strangely and incredibly impressed by the insight.
Jensen makes a face. He doesn’t, not really. Just the stuff that his mother taught him, the things he needed to get by in a stilted conversation about the quality of chickens and pork when trying to sell to the Moroccan butcher and his wife for some spending money when he was twelve and that’s what he thought he wanted to do with the rest of his life, and everything in this book that his mother used to read to him as a child. He’d point at the pictures and demand she explain, in the silly words, what was going on and he’d giggle and mimic her over and over until the entire story was ingrained in his head, backwards and forwards in English and French because it just sounded so much lovelier in its mother tongue.
“I’m a little rusty,” Jensen admits, though he’s never really considered French to be among his skill set.
“Mr. Jared wants to hear it in the funny voice,” Nikki pipes in.
“I want to hear the funny voice,” Robby adds in a mumble around his fingers.
Jensen stalls out as long as he can but then Jared’s grinning at him and whispering, “It’s not gonna hurt,” and Jensen is flipping back through to the front of the book and a small illustration of little boy with yellow hair standing alone on an asteroid.
“Le Petit Prince,” Jensen begins, using the voice his mother gave him. “d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”
He probably flubs half the words and most of them don’t make real sense to him anymore outside of the context of the story but the girls are enraptured, leaning over his shoulders and pointing to the pictures and the words, trying to pronounce them again and again until Jensen corrects their form to something vaguely less atrocious for the first few pages before they settle back down on the bed and start to drift as Jensen tells them about a lost man in the middle of the desert who finds a little boy with golden hair and a scarf that just wants to go home to his rose because he didn’t understand how to love her in his youth.
The little prince journeys from planet to planet, meeting kings and businessmen and lamp lighters until finally he comes to earth and meets a fox who wants to be tamed because there are a million foxes in the world and a million little boys, but to tame something is to make it unique and it gives life meaning. Nikki asks and he tries to explain, has to flip through to the English version to find the right words but then they force him back to French. The taming is a slow process, the little prince sitting closer and closer to the fox until they’ve tamed one another and one hour is different from the other hours and life has companionship and purpose. Jenna giggles sleepily, whispers, “Foxes can’t talk.”
When the prince leaves the fox cries and the prince apologizes for the heartache he’s causing, points out that the fox wanted to be tamed and the fox says of course, of course he wanted to be tamed, even if it was going to hurt in the end.
“Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé,” Jensen reads, glancing up at Jared. Jared grins at him and doesn’t understand. Jensen flushes and looks back to the book, reading on.
His mother used to change the ending for him, cutting off abruptly that the man and the prince went away together and had many adventures and found many roses and Jensen likes to think that she was trying to protect him, because it took him years of looking at the same pictures over her shoulders until he began to piece together the true tragedy of the book with a man and a little boy alone in the middle of the desert with an extravagant story and a snake.
Jensen still thinks he doesn’t really get it, and really he never wants to understand on a level deeper than the perception of a child because it would ruin something, but he doesn’t shield the little ones from the truth of the ending the way his mother did, reads straight through to the appeal, if a boy appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back.
“Ne me laissez pas tellement triste : écrivez-moi vite qu’il est revenu…” Jensen finishes with a sore throat and a cracked voice. Deep breathing fills the void his voice leaves when he cuts out and Jensen glances over to see Jared’s chest rising and falling in a steady pace alongside Robby’s, fast asleep.
--
Jensen wakes up Saturday morning as the sun is breaking the horizon in bloody reds and purples leaking into the clouds. He watches through the window, Jared’s head pillowed on his chest, mouth lax and face smooth. His knee is gouging hard into Jensen’s thigh and his shirt is statically attached to Jensen’s.
Usually around now Alona would drop by and ask him if he wanted to walk with her to the mall. Goad him outside and into interacting with the world like a worm breaking dirt to writhe in the sunshine for the first time.
She doesn’t, and Jensen’s okay with that.
He settles and drifts off again.
-
“You know these are all like three months overdue,” Jared comments, rooting through the bag of movie rentals.
Jensen shrugs and folds himself into the corner seat of the sofa, leaning so he can peer over Jared’s shoulder and see if maybe he can catch a hint if Jared approves of his movies.
“Ha,” Jared chuffs and holds up The Princess Bride. “Classic.”
“Yeah?” Jensen perks.
“Oh yeah.” Jared scoffs. “Please, it’s so quotable I’m pretty sure it might be a cardinal sin not to understand when someone shouts ‘Inconceivable!’” Jensen chuckles and Jared sifts through the last of the movies before craning his head up at Jensen. “Anything else?”
Jensen points towards the shelves and a shoddily taped box stuffed into a corner on the lowest one that reads ‘MOVIES N SHIT’ in sloppy sharpie on the side. “Anything we have would be in there.”
Jared grumbles under his breath at the distance between him and the box before rolling to his feet and dragging it out with considerable effort.
He still doesn’t have a real hang of calling up pieces of the wolf on command so it takes Jared a few moments of fixating completely on his hand with his knees braced strangely into the floor for the beds of his nails to blacken up.
“Breathe through it,” Jensen coaches as he observes with his chin laying over his folded hands and Jared lets out the breath that he was holding explosively and the claws twist out of him.
“Ow, shit,” Jared hisses and shakes out his hand before slicing through the tape keeping the box sealed tight with one smooth, continuous draw of sleek nails and tense muscle. The claws recede easily, like butter melting. The box flays open under his blunt fingertips and Jared starts to sort, pulling out small stacks of DVDs and free floating discs. “It’s mostly CDs, man,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Sorry.” Jensen frowns.
Jared is turned away from him but Jensen can see the eye roll telegraph through his shoulders. “It’s not your fault, don’t be sorry.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh!” Jared gasps, abrupt and ecstatic, startling Jensen upright. “Oh my god!”
“What?” Jensen eases up on his feet, padding forward toward the frenzy of sudden movement that is Jared prying a disc out of a case. He scrambles upright and slaps Jensen in the chest with the casing as he practically sprints to the player.
The case has the saturated image of a muzzled, masked man in a padded room struggling against the restraint of a straitjacket.
Quiet Riot.
“I’ve never heard of them,” Jensen comments idly, flipping the case over and reading the song list. The whole set up of the colors and font feels classic eighties to Jensen and he figures the disc might have been Jeff’s once up on a time.
“My brother used to listen to them all the time,” Jared chatters over his shoulder as he fiddles with the volume from his knees. “He had this big thing for hair rock.”
The music starts with sharp percussion and a screaming man before Jensen can add anything more, bursting into the room with such a sudden intensity and escalated volume that Jared winces bodily but refuses to turn it down, smiling brightly even as he covers his ears.
“Isn’t it great?” he shouts to be heard.
There’s a sound like thunder rising up from the basement, catching them by surprise. Someone isn’t just coming up the stairs, they’re sprinting, and Jensen registers a half a second too late that if the CDs aren’t Jeff’s then they are absolutely, without a doubt, Mark’s.
Mark, the kid who used to huff, “Tattle tale,” and, “Daddy’s little bitch,” under his breath whenever Jensen would thwart their plans to get into trouble in their youth. The boy who once punched Casey right in the dick for rearranging his rock collection without his express permission. Mark; the borderline sociopath that last year was nearly arrested for armed robbery but got off on the technicality that he wasn’t actually armed, just that the cashier was mostly blind and he could hold his fingers menacingly, and he didn’t actually walk away with any money - leading Jensen to firmly believe that he did it just to see if he could.
Before Jensen can even begin to spit out a proper blue streak and lunge bodily for the player to turn the music off the basement door is kicked open from the inside, slamming so hard into the wall that the plaster cracks audibly and the pictures jump.
“Jesus!” Jared startles and whips around to see Mark standing in the doorway, chest heaving, eyes manic.
“I,” Mark exhales harshly, nostrils flaring as he pants with his chest, “fucking love this song.”
Jared lights up.
“Come on feel the noise!” Mark screams with the lyrics, face contorting as he really leans into the words, knees bowing and hands clenching into the air as if the song’s inside of him, tearing out through his mouth.
“Girls rock your boys!” Jared matches him volume and intensity, pointing across the room to Mark like he’s calling him out and Jensen feels like he’s missed something, afternoon suddenly tail-spinning out of his control.
They scream along -Wild! Wild! Wild!- because what they’re doing barely counts as speaking let alone singing; laughing and air guitaring and head banging so hard Jared’s hair slings back and forth and Jensen laughs until his eyes water. Jared tugs him up off the couch, shouting, “Come on!” and the lyrics are repetitive enough that Jensen can scream along, to Mark and Jared’s absolute delight.
“I get next one!” Mark crows, breathless and eyes lit up bright with the music and the company and someone willing to be just as asshole obnoxious as he is about it and Jared laughs. He hits his knees next to the box and starts flinging discs around, searching for the perfect one.
“Hell yeah!” Jared hollers back once Mark holds up a Manfred Mann’s Earth Band CD above his head reverently.
Jensen doesn’t know how long he spends doubled over on the couch, clutching his sides while watching Jared and Mark stumble their way through lyrics they only half know -With a boulder on his shoulder, feeling kinda older- but it feels like forever. An eternity in a moment of watching two boys who barely knew each other ten minutes ago bond so wholly in the course of two songs, posturing and dancing and holding each other upright when they’re laughing too hard to do it themselves and Jensen forgot that it really is that easy.
They’re in the middle of trying to explain that the chorus is “revved up like a deuce” and not something else horrible to Jensen when Danneel flits in, bypasses all of them with her nose high up in the air as she makes a beeline for the player and the music cuts off abruptly.
“Danni, what the fuck?” Mark snaps and she flashes her middle finger over her shoulder at him as she digs through the box deftly, swapping out the disc with a smug little grin and setting the track before twisting to stand upright with her arms extended, awaiting praise.
It’s a few seconds before the songs really kicks in, Danneel standing with arms wide open, grinning brightly as they all wait, amused and expectant.
And then the piano kicks in and they’re all howling laughter, Danneel laughing so hard she snorts into her palm and Jared burying his face into Jensen’s neck and holding onto his shoulder for support.
I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand walking through the streets of Soho in the rain!
They all howl along -Aahoo! Werewolves of London!- and Danneel shouts, “Yeah! C’mon, I’m awesome!” at Mark and all their singing and howling and laughing brings others. It’s Gen and Adrianne first, looking for Danneel but staying once they get swept up in wanting to be a part of the laughter and the familiarity. And then Seb, barreling in and declaring that no one is allowed to have a party without inviting him. -Aahoo! Werewolves of London!- and everyone is screaming, howling, touching, laughing and Jensen hasn’t felt so in tune with them, any of them, since he was fifteen. They reach out for Jared when they sing -And his hair was perfect!- and he ducks behind Jensen’s shoulder, hot breath exploding down Jensen’s collar as he pants and cackles, and Chris and Mike come ambling in, demanding to know what the fresh hell is going on in here and diving right in to teasing at Jared’s hair, respectively.
The song ends and they’re all breathless, wheezing, half collapsed on the floor and Jensen feels like he could fly, Jared mostly laying on top of him, weight crushing Jensen’s lungs and pressing the scar-dead part of his back so hard into the arm of the sofa he can feel it, red-faced and struggling for dry gasps of air with laughing too hard for too long.
Alona’s in the doorway, beaming.
-
Misha comes and with him comes the largest, cheapest bottle of tequila Jensen has ever seen in his life and suddenly they’re real teenagers doing real, dumb teenager shit like taking shots out of mismatched glasses with every single lime they have in the house sliced and spread out over the coffee table in a small sprinkled sea of table salt.
And, of course, shots turn into drinking games and when none of them can actually keep up with drinking to every ‘monkey’ in Brass Monkey -Chris coughs tequila up his nose and Jared turns the brightest color of red Jensen has ever seen in his life just trying- Sebastian declares that they’re playing Never Have I Ever.
“Me first!” Danneel grabs for the bottle and demands everyone sit, filling glasses and passing them around.
Jensen ends up on the corner of the table with the edge of the wood digging into his stomach. Jared’s on the other corner and it might be the farthest they’ve ever been apart with other people in the room but Genevieve had insisted that Jensen was being a big, fat, stupid Jared hog and everyone else deserved some fledgling time too.
Their eyes catch and Jared grins at him.
Jensen has a brief moment to wonder when the last time Jared was a part of something this big, this close, this pack-oriented before a shot is being pressed into his hand and Danneel’s calling for their attention again.
“Okay, let’s start easy,” she starts, tucking tawny hair behind her hair. The music is still going in the background, but it’s nothing that Jensen recognizes. “Never have I ever kissed a girl.”
The boys all groan and Seb demands, “One shot for each girl, or?”
Jensen hesitates until he sees Jared slam one back -eyes squeezing shut tight as he presses the lime to his lips and sucks so hard his cheeks hollow out- before tipping his head back and letting the burn of alcohol rush down his throat and hit his empty stomach hard.
“Alona, you’re next, go!” Danneel pokes at Alona’s shoulder.
“Oh, uh,” Alona stalls. “Never have I ever…” She licks her lips and screws her face up and thinks about it hard. “Never have I ever run naked through public.”
“That was one fucking time!” Matt snaps and then he and Sebastian drink.
“I have a feeling like I’m going to lose this game,” Sebastian mutters, shaking his head to clear the burn from his sinuses.
“Wait,” Jared interrupts, laughing. “What? What happened?”
“It was a dare,” Sebastian bemoans.
“Yeah, that Mark totally pussied out on!” Matt narrows his eyes and Mark raises his hands up and scoffs on an eye roll.
The game starts out pretty tame with everyone picking on Sebastian with ‘never have I ever tried to kiss a goat,’ ‘never have I ever been caught with the sheriff’s daughter wearing nothing but a sailor hat and a lei on the fourth of July,’ ‘never have I ever thought it was a good idea to try and climb up a mountain through a waterfall,’ and Sebastian curses them between shots, going quickly red in the face as everyone laughs at his agony. Jared stops them all and demands explanations, wincing sympathetically as Katie cackles her way through the story of how the goat head-butted Seb in the stomach so hard that his appendix burst and Jensen has to sit back and wonder at how Sebastian made it past puberty.
“Fuckers,” Sebastian grouses as they all laugh at his expense, but he’s grinning, bursting with pride at being regaled by his own conquests. “My turn. Never have I ever sucked a dick.”
“Gross!” Gen throws a lime rind at him. “Call it a blow job; don’t be icky, Seb.”
Sebastian rolls his eyes and then reiterates sarcastically: “Alright, sorry. Never have I ever given a down and dirty, cock sucking, deep throating blow job.” He ducks under his arms as he’s showered with used limes and pelted with handfuls of stray salt. “Don’t you assholes tell me no one at this table has sucked a cock!”
Adrianne snorts under her breath and downs the small glass of alcohol, hissing and tossing her head in a tumble of long curls after and everyone choruses an ‘oooooh’ and Jensen’s clapping out a laugh when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye.
Jared’s far beyond flinching at the burn of tequila by now, he can just throw back his head, open up his neck and his throat and let it drop straight from his teeth to his stomach without so much as a shudder, dulled to it.
The laughter of the room fades out.
Jensen can’t quite explain the cold sweat that breaks out over the back of his neck as he watches the pink of Jared’s lips stick to the edge of the stunted glass when he pulls it away. It clacks against the hardwood of the coffee table and the only sound in the room is the dull thrum of Stairway to Heaven in the background.
“No way!”
Chris said it, Jensen thinks, but he can’t be sure because he can’t hear a thing outside of the rush of blood to his ears and the breathy “Ah,” Jared heaves after swallowing, wiping his mouth with his forearm and leveling a challenging stare around the circle.
“I think it’s story time!” Adrianne elects, over enunciating to compensate for the numbness of her tongue as she points Jared out a little sloppily. “You. Go. Explain. Now.”
Jared snorts a slurred laugh -a giggle, really- into his hand, obviously more than halfway to completely toasted or he wouldn’t have taken the shot in the first place. His fingers look pale against the flush red of his cheeks and his glossy eyes are dancing as he tries to pull himself together enough to crisp out: “A lady never blows and tells.”
Everyone bursts into uproarious laughter except Jensen, Adrianne hopping on her knees as she fans her face for air, Seb listlessly clinging to Danneel’s shoulder as she wipes tears from her eyes, Alona covering her mouth and her rosy cheeks.
Jensen can’t remember how to laugh. He can barely remember how to breathe.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Matt wheezes. “Was this just a thing? Or is it, like, a thing?”
Jared just winks.
Jensen knew this.
Jensen thinks he knew this.
This isn’t strictly new information.
But this is so much different from overhearing Jared’s uncle calling him some derogatory name that could be all insult and no circumstance and this isn’t Jensen watching Jared’s face while they’re watching a movie this- Jared openly drinking to blowing someone -some nameless, faceless person Jensen doesn’t even know, can’t even imagine - this is so fucking different. Jared did that- Jared let someone- Jared-
“Jensen!” Mark shouts right into his ear and Jensen startles so hard he nearly knocks his own drink over. “It’s your turn, come on!”
“Right,” Jensen shakes himself, tequila sloshing heavily through his head and clouding up all of his senses. “Uh… Never have I ever,” been beaten by my uncle, slept in a car, worked two jobs because no one was taking care of me, bought the idiot kid who sat next to me in English class a candle, “fucked a guy.”
He doesn’t know what makes him say it or why he’s staring at Jared when he does.
The noise falls back out of the room.
Maybe a couple of girls take hesitant little sips of their drinks but Jensen doesn’t see them and they aren’t even thoughts in his head, and they’re all watching Jared anyway because he’s the only person in the room that they don’t know everything about.
“Fucked one?” Jared repeats and makes a show of stroking his chin thoughtfully as he looks Jensen over for some sort of tell, but Jensen’s entire body is a tell right now, from the sweat in his hairline to the shaking of his hands. Jared grins slowly, smoldering. “No.”
Something Jensen didn’t even realize was clenched up tight in his chest eases.
“Been fucked by, though?” Jared slams back the drink, tongue spiraling deep into the shallow glass to lick the liquor from the basin, folding over on itself red and wet and then the laughter is back, echoing harshly in Jensen’s ears. It feels suddenly like they’re laughing at him, right in his face.
By the time Jensen realizes his hands are clenched and his claws are burrowing into his own palms he thinks he’s had too much to drink.
There’s a general upheaval of discontent when Jensen hauls himself unsteadily to his feet, staggering and bracing his hands against the coffee table for a few moments while his body readjusts to the altitude.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Sebastian demands with a muddled mouth, squinting harshly like he can’t see clearly.
“I think I’ve had enough,” Jensen dismisses pretty coolly for a kid with such a hot face.
“Bed time?” Jared leans forward, elbows pressed forward so far onto the table that the edge is jammed up into his armpits, cheeks squashed into his palms.
“For me,” Jensen clarifies. “You can stay if you want.”
Honestly, a little time apart would probably do them some good. Jensen has his head so full of Jared, too full of Jared, and he can’t feel it leading anywhere good unless he gets some fresh air in his lungs to distill it a bit.
Wolves are territorial by nature. Werewolves doubly so.
Jared isn’t his.
Letting himself believe any differently is a mistake.
“Nah,” Jared grins dismissively and uses Gen’s shoulder and the coffee table to hoist himself upright. “I’ll come too.”
He stumbles when he tries to walk and Jensen waits until Jared teeters and ‘good-bye’s his way around the table begrudgingly.
When Jared slings an arm over his shoulder Jensen nearly topples over under their combined weight and it takes a few floundering moments to get the hang of balancing between the two of them.
There’s a general grumbling of disgruntlement behind them as Jared gives one last sloppy megawatt grin over his shoulder and Jensen tries to coordinate his feet one in front of the other without getting distracted by the citrus and alcohol smell of Jared’s breath flooding over him.
They conquer the stairs one step at a time, Jensen taking the major lead in coordinating their mess of limbs that are too long and have too many uncontrollable joints as the pleasant warmth of Jared seeps into his side through his clothes and penetrates deep into muscle and bones, soaking through to the marrow of him and Jensen wants to hate it. He wants to push Jared away, flash his teeth and growl until the other boy is running the other way with a better idea of what Jensen’s capable of.
He should be running, Jensen thinks as Jared’s head lolls onto his shoulder. He should have been running for a long time now, but that -the thing- what Jared said, admitted to- it changes things. It changes what Jensen can’t get away with, what he’s too afraid to try, adds mountains to the lists of thing he’ll never dare to do.
But then Jared’s humming, “Hey, Jensen,” into his ear and the last thing in the whole world Jensen wants to do is push him away again.
“Yeah?” Jensen coughs up, throat tight.
“That was really fun.” He can feel the edge of Jared’s smile pressed into the back of his neck when he shuffles them in through the door to his bedroom and kicks it shut behind them. “I like them.”
It’s the first time Jared’s said anything vaguely akin to feeling something other than disdain and fear for the pack and Jensen’s heart seizes up slightly in his chest.
Too much.
Too much for one night.
“They’re pretty okay,” Jensen concedes pithily as he shoves Jared at the bed and thankfully hits his target. Jared hits the mattress with a bounce and a laugh and Jensen crawls in after him, suddenly and absolutely drained.
There’s some kicking and grumbling and repositioning like always that ends with Jensen on his stomach with one arm slung across Jared’s chest and their legs tangled, denim scraping.
Jensen feels overheated, a little sweaty but he buries his nose deeper into Jared’s shoulder, letting the sweet scent of hot skin and fabric softener soothe the raw spots inside his chest before he closes his eyes.
There’s a hitch in the chest underneath his arm right before Jared mumbles, “You know, I actually really like it here,” sleepy and distorted through a yawn.
Jensen rolls his eyes behind his eyelids, his blood a messy swamp of tequila and Jared. “Anywhere’s better than your uncle’s house.” He burrows deeper into Jared’s side, wriggling and jostling in the hunt for comfort until he finally settles again, only fractionally readjusted but still wholly exhausted.
Jared is still underneath him. “What?”
“What?” Jensen mutters blearily, lips smearing into the seam of Jared’s t-shirt as he battles muted irritation that Jared’s dragging this out.
“What did you just say?” Jared breathes, confused and distressed right in Jensen’s ear and Jensen scrapes together the energy to review whatever just came out of his mouth just to see if he can put this to bed so that Jared will just stop talking and he can finally get some sleep.
There’s a half a second of disconnect before Jensen’s eyes split open.
“Oh…my god.”
Jensen is up like a shot and rolling out of bed before Jared can really start to piece anything together wholly, brain too mucked up to put together any coherent response other than, “Don’t freak out,” but he is the farthest thing away from sleepy now, heart pumping, eyes watering, hands braced out in the air in front of him. “Just, don’t freak out, okay?”
“Don’t freak out?” Jared barks, lips pulling tight against the words and Jensen can see through the dark of the night that Jared’s eyes are shifting yellow. “What the fuck are you talking about? How did you know about-”
The sentence drops midair and Jensen backs himself up into the wall, breathing choppy and curling in on himself. His hands tremble as he curls them around his own stomach.
“No.” Jared shakes his head, slow at first and then building momentum until he’s clutching at his temples and pulling at his hair. “Please tell me that you didn’t-,” he starts helplessly before a small stroke of realization hits him full in the face, scrambling up his expression into disbelief. “Oh my god, the fucking dog- the dog, that was- that was you? Jensen?”
Jared doesn’t need more confirmation than his silence.
“You knew.” It’s a statement, not a question, fallen from Jared’s trembling lips. He pieces it all together, puts together all the implications that if Jensen was the dog that Jared dragged home that did nothing when he was watching Jared being brutally beaten then Jensen was still the boy at school the next day that said and did nothing outside of sharing a bag of M&Ms and Jensen was the boy that lived every moment fully aware and let Jared tell lies while he knew, knew explicitly.
Jared covers his slack mouth with his long fingers and comprehends fully what and who Jensen is.
A coward. A fool. A waste of time and space.
Jensen doesn’t have to flash his teeth at all.
“Sorry.” The word is broken by the spasming of his throat where the sobs are building. He mumbles it to floor because he knows it doesn’t matter, but he wants it said.
And it’s not a sorry for not acting and it’s a not a sorry for not telling and it’s not a sorry for any single thing in particular: it’s just a sorry for himself. Sorry that he exists. Jensen apologizing for Jensen, because it needs to be said.
“Don’t. No,” Jared barks, voice short and abrupt with the harsh pulls of air he takes in as he shakes his head and tugs hard at his hair. His breaths are coming severe and choppy, too much to drink and too much to think about together and he’s coping badly. “Shut up, just shut up for one minute I need to- I can’t-” He growls and shakes his head out.
The window sounds like a riot when Jared muscles it open and scrambles out.
Jensen doesn’t even look up.
-
Jensen doesn’t look for Jared. Jensen doesn’t bother Jared. Jensen gives Jared all the space and time in the world.
He sits on the floor in his bedroom and pulls out every candle he owns and lights them all up, basks in their heat and light until he’s sweating and then caps them one by one, watching the flames dim, cavern of glass clouding with smoke until the light fades and they snuff themselves out for hours and hours.
The Man Town candle is nearly burned down to nothing and Jensen cups his hands over it, scalding glass curving the outer edge of his palms as he closes his hands tight over the lid. The flame burns and blisters his fingers and he hisses but presses down harder until the candle seals and the small fire burns itself out.
His hands smells like smoke. His hands always smell like smoke.
-
The sun is just beginning to think about breaking the horizon when he hears it outside of his window. A light scratching, like someone just itching along the textured roofing tiles because Jared isn’t going to come to him and certainly isn’t going to call him out, so Jensen goes to him. He slips out of the window feet first and climbs up the narrow strip of the roof towards the main slope, bare feet rubbing raw against the rough sheets, and Jared’s there, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest staring off into the horizon and dragging a single clawed finger across the roof.
Jensen sits far off to the side, giving Jared as much space as he can while still edging as close as he dares.
Jensen hasn’t slept and he knows Jared hasn’t either.
Jared is framed in pink and grey clouds, profile lit up by the early morning sun beams.
“I’m not mad,” Jared says calmly.
Jensen doesn’t believe him, so he says nothing.
They sit in silence long enough that the true yellows start to bleed into the sky before Jared starts to talk.
“His name was Milo.” Jared’s voice is even and his face is impassive, even in profile. “I knew I didn’t love him, but I think I could have. I liked him. He was fun and he had a nice smile and, I don’t know, I liked being around him. He made me happy and I was just a kid. It was six months ago and I was just a kid.”
He sighs and leans his forehead down into his palm, scrubbing at the lines of his brow.
“I don’t blame him for anything. Never did. It’s not his fault. I’m glad he got out of the way. And I should have known better, never even let him try to start talking me into blowing him while my parents were out. We’d been fooling around for a while and, I mean, where else in the whole state of Texas was I going to find somebody else who wanted to experiment, you know? We weren’t dating. I don’t think we were dating, anyway. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that his dick was in my mouth when my mother came home from the grocery store. They both freaked out and he splits before she can really get going, throwing things, telling me that I was going to Hell, that I was a freak, that I wasn’t her son anymore. She tells me to go to my room and wait for my dad to get home and I’m losing it, right? But I think, no, they’re my parents, they love me. I just caught her by surprise, s’all. As soon as she gets a second to calm down and think about it, about me, and how I’m still the same brat she had to walk to preschool because I was too afraid to let go of her hand-”his voice cracks up and he clears his throat.
Jensen feels cold.
Jared clears his throat again and coughs before rolling his head back on his neck and exhaling out a cloudy sigh into the air. “It didn’t quite work out like that.”
Jensen’s eyes slip closed and his face crumples.
“My dad gets home and I’m listening at the door as my mother explains that they’ve raised a sinner for a son. Unnatural. And I expect my dad to say something, you know? But there’s just silence. Nothing. And my dad’s a big guy, right, but I’ve never been afraid of him before because he’s always been real calm with us, barely ever raised his voice, never hit us or anything. I hear him coming down the hall and I’ve never been more afraid of anything else before in my entire life. He’s going to kill me, that’s it, the end. My obituary’s gonna be, ‘Well, he was a fag anyway.’ So I stand in the middle of the room and I’m not even really sure what I was thinking except that there is no way I’m going to put myself in a corner for this. I’m not sorry I like boys, I’m not going to apologize to him, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna apologize to his fist. Fuck that.” He laughs a bitter bark of a sound, but there’s steel in it.
“It was stupid anyway because he comes in and he’s calm, calm as I’ve ever seen him and he says, ‘Son, we need to talk.’” Jared rolls his eyes. “So I go out into the kitchen and we sit down at the table like we’re going to have a civil conversation and my mother won’t even look at me and my dad turns to me and says, ‘Your mother tells me that you’ve been up to some unsavory activities.’ Unsavory activities, he actually said that. And then he tries to tell me that there’s things that can be done for ‘people like me,’” he sneers. “Tells me he knows a guy whose brother runs a camp for ‘confused individuals.’ Says they’ll let me come home for Christmas and I’m not allowed electronics so I can write. Like gay rehab.” He shrugs. “So I told him that I wasn’t going to any camp because there was nothing wrong with me and -pow.”
Jensen’s eyes burn. He doesn’t want to hear this, doesn’t want to know.
“So my kid sister,” Jared forges ahead, voice and face completely detached from the story. “Megan, I guess she’d been listening in the whole time, and hears me hit the ground and she starts screaming. Shit, it was the worst thing. My mom’s crying, my dad’s yelling, and she just keeps going and going and I know somebody’s bound call the police sooner or later and if I didn’t want to deal with my parents finding out I like dick I sure as shit don’t want the cops around there to know. So I run back to my room, lock the door, and open the window. I got as much stuff as I could into the trunk of my car and I got myself the hell out of there. I remember my mother’s got a piece of shit for a brother that nobody ever talks to anymore because he sucks, but when I was a kid Uncle Ben always had a bit of a soft spot for me. So I head up to Vermont, show up on his doorstep, explain the whole thing and he’s too drunk to care if I crash on his couch.”
The sun appears first as yellow slivers of purity in the distance, bringing the subtlety of colors one inch of sky at a time. Not just silver and shadows for the animals that prowl, Moon’s brother brings the true colors of the world for the beasts who make life.
“The first time he ever hit me was because I left some dishes out. He leaves shit out all the time I didn’t think he’d mind if I let them wait until after I got back from meeting with the principal because I was running late and, uh… I mean, I guess I was wrong.” He shrugs again, still staring out into the break of light among the trees. He voice has reached the lyrical cadence of storytelling, low and rumbling and soothing.
“For a while there I stayed because I needed a place to sleep more than I didn’t like being hit. I’d never been punched before in my life and then suddenly it was a routine. Called me piece of shit, useless, worthless, the typical stuff but I didn’t really care. He was just some guy I had to live with when I wasn’t at school or working, his opinion about what I was or wasn’t didn’t mean shit to me. I was going to be there for, what? Four months? Five? I could take a fist or two for five months and then I was out of there, graduated and on my own. First time he took a belt to me, though, was because I brought a dog home.”
He looks to Jensen for the first time and Jensen nearly startles.
“I guess you know that part already.” Jared stares until Jensen looks away, flushing with shame.
“After that I decided I didn’t need a place to sleep more than I didn’t like getting hit, so I left. Slept in my car, showered at the community center, ate leftovers at work. It wasn’t ideal but whatever: same deal with Ben. I can sleep in the back of a car until I’m done with high school, it’s not a big deal. But you know,” he puts his hands up and makes a ‘what can you do’ expression, “I had to go and get bitten by a werewolf.”
Jensen flinches.
“But I’m not angry, Jensen.” Jared leans back onto his hands and his hair catches in the sunshine, golden brown.
“You’re… not?” Jensen feels strangely empty.
“Nah,” Jared shrugs. “Hell, I’m glad you got out of there when you did. I didn’t want you getting into it with Ben, somebody would have ended up hurt. And then what were you going to say about it later? I get it.”
“You’re not angry?” Jensen repeats.
“Not at all,” Jared grins. “What I am is disappointed, Jensen.”
Jensen licks his lips and curls his shoulders.
“I’m disappointed that you didn’t help me, but more than that I’m disappointed that you didn’t do it because you were afraid,” he says simply. “You’re afraid of people, you’re afraid of responsibility, you’re afraid of caring, and you’re terrified that you want to kiss me. You’re afraid of everything and you don’t even care, you don’t want to change. Something terrible happened, you tried to take control of a situation and it backfired so you gave up. But fuck you, Jensen,” he laughs, bright and terrible. “Bad things happen. You take them in, you make them a part of you, and then you keep fucking going, or you’re dead.”
Jared draws himself up to his feet and Jensen has to angle his head back on his neck and look up. Jared breathes in deeply as he stares out at the sunrise and smiles, squinting off into the distance.
“I don’t have time for people who are always scared.”
He walks past Jensen and he doesn’t look back.
-
Jared doesn’t look at him for three days.
Jensen keeps trail behind him in the halls because they’re going to the same places but he gives Jared space, only drawing closer when Jared starts looking overwhelmed because, if anything, pulling away from Jensen gives him something other than the onslaught of smells and sounds to focus on.
He loses Jared after school and spends fifteen minutes fretting it over in the parking lot, wondering if Jared’s getting himself in trouble somewhere, if he’s left entirely because his car is gone, if he’s going to get them both into such a mess that he can’t save either of their asses from the wrath of his father this time around. He settles on shuffling back to the house alone because he can worry in the lot or he can worry in the kitchen, it’s all still worrying.
The Maverick isn’t in the driveway.
He thinks maybe if it comes down to blows he’ll be able to shoulder both of their punishments if he can get his father angry enough. Maybe if he mentions his mother Alpha will focus on him long enough for someone, probably Alona, to get Jared away.
It would break everyone apart, shatter the pack right down the middle and there would be a reawakening that Jensen can’t even fathom if Alpha killed him, but Jensen can’t bring himself to care that far into the future.
There is an image in his head of the old punishments, when they would drag the guilty deep into the forest under Moon’s light, find some still water and wade out into Her reflection before slitting the throat and purging the pack and Jensen can imagine that his death will be nothing like that if Jared breaks law. It will be quick and messy at the hands and teeth of the man who Jensen used to believe could shift the very laws of nature to gift life.
Jensen worries himself nauseous for an hour before Jared kicks open the door to Jensen’s room - not out of anger, but because his arms are too full to manage the task on his own. Jensen startles off the bed when the door crashes into the wall and Jared backs in with his arms full of a mass of synthetic fabric that smells of cedar chips and the stringy fibers of cotton stuffing.
Jared drops the dog bed in the corner that Jensen slept in the night he slept on the floor, the farthest from the bed before struggling with a plastic bag with the logo of the pet store in the next town over printed on the side.
The bowl clatters to the ground with a loud metallic ping that reverberates hollowly around the room as it wobbles the circumference of the base, teetering on the bottom edge in the hunt for the center of gravity until it finally falls with another tinny resonation and Jensen can read the engraving on the side.
Jared.
Jared hums appreciatively to himself, inspecting the corner before nodding once and walking out again without sparing Jensen a glance.
Jensen sits slowly on the floor and nods silently, lips pressed tight, eyes burning. He deserves this.
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