Rise, Olympia [2b/?]
Title: Rise, Olympia [2b/?]
Pairing: J2
Disclaimer: The boys belong to each other themselves.
Summary: AU. Winter Olympics 1980 at Lake Placid. An American hockey player, and a Soviet figure skater. Need I say more?
Notes: Much thanks to chasethecat, for writing a hockey!AU and setting the zombie!plot bunnies after me. Also? I am completely and totally ashamed of myself. Seriously. Not to mention, LJ hates me, so I'm way sorry for the messed up formating.
(T-minus 15 days)
(T-minus 11 days)
T-minus 10 days
1. someone who stood by your side
“Remind me, why did I agree to this?” Tom asks, trudging along blearily, kept in a straight line - barely, he thinks through the fog that settled somewhere around his ears about the time Jared had hauled him out of his warm bed, because they’re sort of weaving back and forth and that loud, angry noise? He thinks that was a bus passing three or so inches from his nose - by Jared’s hand tangled in the baggy sleeve of his track jacket.
“You didn’t,” Jared tells him, eyeing the glassy black surface stretching out in front of them well into the haze of the too early morning. Probably it’s black ice, but they don’t have the time to navigate around it, so Jared, ever the pragmatist, pushes Tom out in front of him, to, ah, test the ice, as it were.
He goes down with an indignant squawk.
“Whoops,” Jared says cheerily. Sure of what he’s up against, he shuffle-walks past Tom, a twitching lump of dark blue nylon, picking up speed as the end, also known by its more pedestrian name ‘gravel’ in some circles, is in sight.
Maneuvering to his feet, a tricky balancing act involving outstretched arms, ridiculous faces, and truly inventive profanity, Tom wonders if the IOC would kick him off the team if Jared were to mysteriously disappear, last seen in his company. Then he wonders if he cares. “I have another question,” he says, “and it may seem totally out of leftfield, but humor me. What, exactly, did I not agree to?”
“Ah,” Jared says, “er, that is - hmm.”
“Clearly,” Tom says.
2. a face you have known
Jared frowns at his would you like some coffee with that sugar, sir?
Tom bemoans the day he first picked up a hockey stick, a snot nosed brat with penny candy sticky hands latching onto the first ooh shiny he saw when his older brother really needed those new baseball cleats, or so his brother tells the story. He wrote the athletics store a Hallmark card thanking them for having the footwear selection set up so far from the ballet outfits, as his sister’s fondness for using him as a living doll made it very clear from a young age that he could not pull off tights. He even included a picture. Then he received a restraining order in the mail.
Where is he again?
“Would you two like an early breakfast?” Their waitress asks, long fingers topped with bubblegum pink nail polish curled around a fuzzy pen.
Right. The memory comes rushing back, hand in hand, making eyes and cooing sickly sweet, with one of what he had for breakfast yesterday. “Oh, god yes,” Tom moans, nostrils flaring, catching the scent of what he thinks might be hot, sizzling bacon. He can see the bubbling fat in his mind’s eye, drool pooling at the side of his mouth.
She stares at him, he stares back.
“You’ve a clump of mascara,” he says at last, “just - there, and I’d love some bacon and eggs. And toast, with strawberry jam, and more bacon; yeah, definitely more bacon.”
“Uhm,” Jared says, “’m sorry about him, but, uh, he had half a grapefruit for breakfast yesterday. And every day before that for a week - punishment for a donut binge.”
She, Sandy, or so the neat red plastic nametag would have him believe, nods sagely, shiny brown hair bouncy in its pink scrunchie. “Don’t worry honey; I know exactly how it is. What’ll you be having?”
Jared goes a bit dreamily cross-eyed, overwhelmed by all the possibilities. Maybe, he thinks, if he gets it out of his system now, his brain won’t short out when he sees Jensen, and his lips. God, those lips. Breakfast, he tells himself firmly, and do not even think about asking if they have Russian on the menu, because he would be obligated to kill himself for a pun that awful, even this early in the morning. “Pancakes,” he says at last, “blueberry pancakes, with, with syrup. Er, please.”
Sandy chuckles, tucking the pen and pad back into her apron skirt. “I think I can remember that,” she says. “Need any more sugar for that coffee?”
“Please,” Jared says, before his brain catches up from those lips, and the way they had curled around his name, like tasting it for the first time, wanting to commit it to memory… and he realizes, probably, she was just teasing. He grins sheepishly as she clunks a fresh sugar shaker onto the orange Formica tabletop, liberated from the oppressing prison a bottle of ketchup and pair of pinup doll salt’n’pepper shakers make on the table at his back.
3. where do you run when it’s too much to bear
“Jared,” Tom says, hunched lovingly over the plate heaped high with bacon Sandy had set before him with a wink, “what do you want?”
“What? Nothi-” Jared blurts, checking hurriedly over both shoulders, apparently concerned the quiet old man pushing a bit of egg ‘round and ‘round his plate, or maybe the two girls in scrubs - he says girls because they look sixteen and maybe eighteen, respectively, talking low over coffee black as Jared’s is cloudy grey, supersaturated with sugar, are listening in. As if they’re spies for whoever it is he thinks might care what two hockey players on the lamb babble about over the breakfast of kings and presidents and God.
Tom cuts him off before he gets hysterical in public.
“Because whatever it is? All yours man, even if I miss us playing fucking Russia for the gold because I’m rotting in a goddamn jail cell.” He stuffs four stripes of bacon in his mouth, chomping with relish. “Hell,” he says, waving his fork in the air, spewing pig bits all over the table, “I will fucking marry you, for this breakfast. Nay, for this bacon alone.”
Jared blinks at him, mouth hanging open from his attempted denial of… whatever it was he was going to deny. “Huh?” he says eloquently, syrup smeared all over the lower half of his face. Tom would lick it off if that weren’t, yaknow, totally weird, and likely to get them thrown out before he even has a chance to start on the sky scraper of toast waiting patiently at his elbow.
“Are you being intentionally dense?” Tom asks, “because I am way too into this breakfast to tell.”
“I’d noticed,” Jared says dryly, “I was this close to making a polite exit.”
“This breakfast is fucking epic,” Tom says seriously. “Don’t even pretend otherwise, ‘cause I saw what you did to those poor pancakes.”
“’m a growing boy,” Jared protests, slurping his coffee noisily. Tom suspects this is because it has the approximate thickness of peanut butter.
All he says is “god, I hope not. They would probably count you as two players and there goes my rink time. And stop changing the subject, my IQ rises in direct proportion to how much bacon is currently at work settling on my hips and thighs.”
Jared raises his eyebrows.
“It'd be easier if you didn't wait until I blackmail you into talking, for both of us,” Tom says.
“I - ” Jared says, hesitantly, shoulders scrunching under his ears, eyes flicking up and around the diner before staring intently at his coffee cup, spinning it slowly on its edge. “I need some advice, I think. Or maybe just a good, swift kick. I’m not really sure, which I guess is part of the problem, huh?”
Tom sets down his fork, not because he needs to give Jared all his attention or anything, but because all the bacon is gone, and he feels a bit ridiculous with his fork just hanging in midair. “First,” he says, “I’m gonna need you to spit out the marbles, ‘cause we speak real English in California, and you’re laying the Texas on a little thick.”
“Strange,” Jared tells him, “I keep hearing about how fake California, and Californians are. Something about silicon?”
“Yeah,” Tom says, “because I have breast implants. Obviously. And my girlfriend certainly doesn’t, I don’t think a person exists who’d take that bet.”
Raising his cup to his lips, Jared mutters, “that’s just it, isn’t it?” before downing the last dregs of grayish sugary soup.
“D’y’mean seeing as how I don’t actually have one?” Tom asks. “I’m really not seeing where this could go advice wise.”
“Mike,” Jared says, “I need you to tell me about Mike.”
4. who do you turn to in need
Team USA plays a set of scrimmages during their allocated practice time, Herb and Jeff hollering insults from the boards as the cabin fever that has been setting in for the past few days becomes apparent in their sloppiness.
When Tom and Jared collide toward the end of the third mockup, it is attributed to more of the same, as is the fistfight that breaks out, the eleventh of its kind. Everyone is tired, anxious, and angry, for one reason or another; Chad nearly tore Jim’s ear off for squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube when it comes up as Mark goes for Ken’s throat for hogging the washroom that morning.
They elevate it by soundly thrashing each other. Jared’s right eyebrow and lower lip split, the blood flowing thick down his face to the ice, Tom’s nose breaks with a satisfying crunch. It takes Jeff, Chad, who had narrowly missed being taken down in the initial collision, and four others to separate them.
“God fucking damnit boys!” Jeff yells, holding Jared by the front of his jersey, hands slippery in his blood.
Tom snarls at the hand on his shoulder, but the look on Herb’s face takes the fight right out of him. He visibly wilts, mutters, “sorry, coach.”
“Damn right you’re sorry,” Herb says angrily. “What the hell has gotten into you two?”
“Sorry coach,” Jared manages to force past his useless lip without spitting too much blood in Herb’s face. Jeff does not fair nearly as well.
“We’re gonna have to get him to the hospital,” Jeff says, nodding at Jared. “Probably needs at least ten stitches for both.”
Herb sighs, shaking his head in obvious disappointment. “And Welling’s nose’ll need to be set,” he says, looking at Jeff so that he doesn’t have to see the contrite and bloodied boys. “Can you take care of that?”
“Yeah,” Jeff says, before turning back to look Jared in the eye, as well as he can anyway with all the blood. “If I let go, can I trust you to behave yourself?”
Jared stares at him blankly, bruised brain struggling to catch up. “I can’t go to hospital,” he says thickly.
“What?”
Jared frowns, eyebrows coming together, trying to comprehend Jeff’s question. “Can’t go hospital?” he repeats, hopefully.
Herb pinches the bridge of his nose, knuckles going white; Tom winces, and immediately regrets it as a white-hot spike of pain drives in between his eyes. “Concussion,” he says. “Christ.”
“No hospital,” Jared insists, “having coffee with lips. Coffee.”
“Jay,” Tom says, “please, shut up.”
5. when nobody’s there
Two hours and seventeen minutes later, Jensen Ackles sits at a table with a clear view of the café entrance and the flow of people outside, head jerking up every time the doorbell jingles, face falling from a nervous smile to a quiet frown each time.
One hour and thirty-eight minutes later, the waitress tells him it’s on the house when he tries to pay for his now lukewarm coffee - and that only because he’s sitting next to the radiator - offers a sympathetic smile and “their loss,” when he looks around one last time before walking back out into the cold.
He hopes Lana doesn’t gloat too much; this hurts more than he is willing to admit, even to Svetlana Aleksandrovna.
Posted to padacklesrps.
Posted to snslashnotebook.
Pairing: J2
Disclaimer: The boys belong to each other themselves.
Summary: AU. Winter Olympics 1980 at Lake Placid. An American hockey player, and a Soviet figure skater. Need I say more?
Notes: Much thanks to chasethecat, for writing a hockey!AU and setting the zombie!plot bunnies after me. Also? I am completely and totally ashamed of myself. Seriously. Not to mention, LJ hates me, so I'm way sorry for the messed up formating.
(T-minus 15 days)
(T-minus 11 days)
T-minus 10 days
1. someone who stood by your side
“Remind me, why did I agree to this?” Tom asks, trudging along blearily, kept in a straight line - barely, he thinks through the fog that settled somewhere around his ears about the time Jared had hauled him out of his warm bed, because they’re sort of weaving back and forth and that loud, angry noise? He thinks that was a bus passing three or so inches from his nose - by Jared’s hand tangled in the baggy sleeve of his track jacket.
“You didn’t,” Jared tells him, eyeing the glassy black surface stretching out in front of them well into the haze of the too early morning. Probably it’s black ice, but they don’t have the time to navigate around it, so Jared, ever the pragmatist, pushes Tom out in front of him, to, ah, test the ice, as it were.
He goes down with an indignant squawk.
“Whoops,” Jared says cheerily. Sure of what he’s up against, he shuffle-walks past Tom, a twitching lump of dark blue nylon, picking up speed as the end, also known by its more pedestrian name ‘gravel’ in some circles, is in sight.
Maneuvering to his feet, a tricky balancing act involving outstretched arms, ridiculous faces, and truly inventive profanity, Tom wonders if the IOC would kick him off the team if Jared were to mysteriously disappear, last seen in his company. Then he wonders if he cares. “I have another question,” he says, “and it may seem totally out of leftfield, but humor me. What, exactly, did I not agree to?”
“Ah,” Jared says, “er, that is - hmm.”
“Clearly,” Tom says.
2. a face you have known
Jared frowns at his would you like some coffee with that sugar, sir?
Tom bemoans the day he first picked up a hockey stick, a snot nosed brat with penny candy sticky hands latching onto the first ooh shiny he saw when his older brother really needed those new baseball cleats, or so his brother tells the story. He wrote the athletics store a Hallmark card thanking them for having the footwear selection set up so far from the ballet outfits, as his sister’s fondness for using him as a living doll made it very clear from a young age that he could not pull off tights. He even included a picture. Then he received a restraining order in the mail.
Where is he again?
“Would you two like an early breakfast?” Their waitress asks, long fingers topped with bubblegum pink nail polish curled around a fuzzy pen.
Right. The memory comes rushing back, hand in hand, making eyes and cooing sickly sweet, with one of what he had for breakfast yesterday. “Oh, god yes,” Tom moans, nostrils flaring, catching the scent of what he thinks might be hot, sizzling bacon. He can see the bubbling fat in his mind’s eye, drool pooling at the side of his mouth.
She stares at him, he stares back.
“You’ve a clump of mascara,” he says at last, “just - there, and I’d love some bacon and eggs. And toast, with strawberry jam, and more bacon; yeah, definitely more bacon.”
“Uhm,” Jared says, “’m sorry about him, but, uh, he had half a grapefruit for breakfast yesterday. And every day before that for a week - punishment for a donut binge.”
She, Sandy, or so the neat red plastic nametag would have him believe, nods sagely, shiny brown hair bouncy in its pink scrunchie. “Don’t worry honey; I know exactly how it is. What’ll you be having?”
Jared goes a bit dreamily cross-eyed, overwhelmed by all the possibilities. Maybe, he thinks, if he gets it out of his system now, his brain won’t short out when he sees Jensen, and his lips. God, those lips. Breakfast, he tells himself firmly, and do not even think about asking if they have Russian on the menu, because he would be obligated to kill himself for a pun that awful, even this early in the morning. “Pancakes,” he says at last, “blueberry pancakes, with, with syrup. Er, please.”
Sandy chuckles, tucking the pen and pad back into her apron skirt. “I think I can remember that,” she says. “Need any more sugar for that coffee?”
“Please,” Jared says, before his brain catches up from those lips, and the way they had curled around his name, like tasting it for the first time, wanting to commit it to memory… and he realizes, probably, she was just teasing. He grins sheepishly as she clunks a fresh sugar shaker onto the orange Formica tabletop, liberated from the oppressing prison a bottle of ketchup and pair of pinup doll salt’n’pepper shakers make on the table at his back.
3. where do you run when it’s too much to bear
“Jared,” Tom says, hunched lovingly over the plate heaped high with bacon Sandy had set before him with a wink, “what do you want?”
“What? Nothi-” Jared blurts, checking hurriedly over both shoulders, apparently concerned the quiet old man pushing a bit of egg ‘round and ‘round his plate, or maybe the two girls in scrubs - he says girls because they look sixteen and maybe eighteen, respectively, talking low over coffee black as Jared’s is cloudy grey, supersaturated with sugar, are listening in. As if they’re spies for whoever it is he thinks might care what two hockey players on the lamb babble about over the breakfast of kings and presidents and God.
Tom cuts him off before he gets hysterical in public.
“Because whatever it is? All yours man, even if I miss us playing fucking Russia for the gold because I’m rotting in a goddamn jail cell.” He stuffs four stripes of bacon in his mouth, chomping with relish. “Hell,” he says, waving his fork in the air, spewing pig bits all over the table, “I will fucking marry you, for this breakfast. Nay, for this bacon alone.”
Jared blinks at him, mouth hanging open from his attempted denial of… whatever it was he was going to deny. “Huh?” he says eloquently, syrup smeared all over the lower half of his face. Tom would lick it off if that weren’t, yaknow, totally weird, and likely to get them thrown out before he even has a chance to start on the sky scraper of toast waiting patiently at his elbow.
“Are you being intentionally dense?” Tom asks, “because I am way too into this breakfast to tell.”
“I’d noticed,” Jared says dryly, “I was this close to making a polite exit.”
“This breakfast is fucking epic,” Tom says seriously. “Don’t even pretend otherwise, ‘cause I saw what you did to those poor pancakes.”
“’m a growing boy,” Jared protests, slurping his coffee noisily. Tom suspects this is because it has the approximate thickness of peanut butter.
All he says is “god, I hope not. They would probably count you as two players and there goes my rink time. And stop changing the subject, my IQ rises in direct proportion to how much bacon is currently at work settling on my hips and thighs.”
Jared raises his eyebrows.
“It'd be easier if you didn't wait until I blackmail you into talking, for both of us,” Tom says.
“I - ” Jared says, hesitantly, shoulders scrunching under his ears, eyes flicking up and around the diner before staring intently at his coffee cup, spinning it slowly on its edge. “I need some advice, I think. Or maybe just a good, swift kick. I’m not really sure, which I guess is part of the problem, huh?”
Tom sets down his fork, not because he needs to give Jared all his attention or anything, but because all the bacon is gone, and he feels a bit ridiculous with his fork just hanging in midair. “First,” he says, “I’m gonna need you to spit out the marbles, ‘cause we speak real English in California, and you’re laying the Texas on a little thick.”
“Strange,” Jared tells him, “I keep hearing about how fake California, and Californians are. Something about silicon?”
“Yeah,” Tom says, “because I have breast implants. Obviously. And my girlfriend certainly doesn’t, I don’t think a person exists who’d take that bet.”
Raising his cup to his lips, Jared mutters, “that’s just it, isn’t it?” before downing the last dregs of grayish sugary soup.
“D’y’mean seeing as how I don’t actually have one?” Tom asks. “I’m really not seeing where this could go advice wise.”
“Mike,” Jared says, “I need you to tell me about Mike.”
4. who do you turn to in need
Team USA plays a set of scrimmages during their allocated practice time, Herb and Jeff hollering insults from the boards as the cabin fever that has been setting in for the past few days becomes apparent in their sloppiness.
When Tom and Jared collide toward the end of the third mockup, it is attributed to more of the same, as is the fistfight that breaks out, the eleventh of its kind. Everyone is tired, anxious, and angry, for one reason or another; Chad nearly tore Jim’s ear off for squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube when it comes up as Mark goes for Ken’s throat for hogging the washroom that morning.
They elevate it by soundly thrashing each other. Jared’s right eyebrow and lower lip split, the blood flowing thick down his face to the ice, Tom’s nose breaks with a satisfying crunch. It takes Jeff, Chad, who had narrowly missed being taken down in the initial collision, and four others to separate them.
“God fucking damnit boys!” Jeff yells, holding Jared by the front of his jersey, hands slippery in his blood.
Tom snarls at the hand on his shoulder, but the look on Herb’s face takes the fight right out of him. He visibly wilts, mutters, “sorry, coach.”
“Damn right you’re sorry,” Herb says angrily. “What the hell has gotten into you two?”
“Sorry coach,” Jared manages to force past his useless lip without spitting too much blood in Herb’s face. Jeff does not fair nearly as well.
“We’re gonna have to get him to the hospital,” Jeff says, nodding at Jared. “Probably needs at least ten stitches for both.”
Herb sighs, shaking his head in obvious disappointment. “And Welling’s nose’ll need to be set,” he says, looking at Jeff so that he doesn’t have to see the contrite and bloodied boys. “Can you take care of that?”
“Yeah,” Jeff says, before turning back to look Jared in the eye, as well as he can anyway with all the blood. “If I let go, can I trust you to behave yourself?”
Jared stares at him blankly, bruised brain struggling to catch up. “I can’t go to hospital,” he says thickly.
“What?”
Jared frowns, eyebrows coming together, trying to comprehend Jeff’s question. “Can’t go hospital?” he repeats, hopefully.
Herb pinches the bridge of his nose, knuckles going white; Tom winces, and immediately regrets it as a white-hot spike of pain drives in between his eyes. “Concussion,” he says. “Christ.”
“No hospital,” Jared insists, “having coffee with lips. Coffee.”
“Jay,” Tom says, “please, shut up.”
5. when nobody’s there
Two hours and seventeen minutes later, Jensen Ackles sits at a table with a clear view of the café entrance and the flow of people outside, head jerking up every time the doorbell jingles, face falling from a nervous smile to a quiet frown each time.
One hour and thirty-eight minutes later, the waitress tells him it’s on the house when he tries to pay for his now lukewarm coffee - and that only because he’s sitting next to the radiator - offers a sympathetic smile and “their loss,” when he looks around one last time before walking back out into the cold.
He hopes Lana doesn’t gloat too much; this hurts more than he is willing to admit, even to Svetlana Aleksandrovna.
Posted to padacklesrps.
Posted to snslashnotebook.