A Close Call (SPN / SPN RPF, gen, 2000+ words, complete)
Title: A Close Call
Fandom: Supernatural / Supernatural RPF
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None
Characters: Jared Padalecki,
[Spoiler (click to open)]
Sam Winchester
Word Count: 2000
Disclaimer: I own nothing
Summary: When Jared calls up a fan for his Represent campaign, the voice on the other end sounds oddly familiar.
Author's note: Warnings for language, discussion of depression and of suicide. This was inspired mostly by something Jared said at a con (you might wanna click through after reading the fic), I had the idea and wrote it up all in an afternoon.
“Goodnight, baby,” Jared says. “Goodnight Shep, goodnight, Tom.” They wave at him, his little family, and he keeps waving until Gen leans forward and shuts off the video chat. He sighs. There might be all kinds of reasons to base themselves in Austin, but sometimes it can feel lonely up in Vancouver, knowing that they’re all giggling away together down South.
Still. It’s not like he’s short of people to talk to. There are how many hundred thousand out there online?
He switches tabs, glances at Twitter, rolls his eyes and smirks at Misha’s latest post. On a whim, he replies to a fan who has tagged him in a message about feeling discouraged at school. Her exclamation-peppered response makes him laugh. Then he checks his email. There’s another message from Jenny at Represent: they’ve hit 30,000 shirts. This is nuts, Jared thinks, shaking his head. Who’d’a thought thirty thousand people would wanna wear his big dumb face on their chests? Not that that’s the point, obviously. It’s about the cause. But the thing has certainly taken on a bigger scale than he’d ever anticipated.
He checks his watch. Really, he ought to upload another video - he’s been so busy hanging out with the kids over his few days off that he’s slacked off on the Facebook content, and there’s a definite correlation between his updates and the spiking sales. But he doesn’t really have time before he’s supposed to be calling this guy, the latest competition winner from the campaign.
Jared has found himself unexpectedly touched by the extent to which his fans have taken this whole thing to their hearts. He’s received an insane number of messages, thanking him, telling him about people’s individual stories, their struggles with depression or anxiety in its various forms. If he hadn’t been sure before that this big difficult weight hung on a lot more shoulders than his own - than Matt’s - he couldn’t be any less than certain now. And it makes him certain, too, that this was a worthwhile thing to do; that it was worth squashing the fear and putting himself out there, talking about his own difficulties to help others share their own. The whole point of the thing is to get people communicating.
It’s nice, therefore, to get the chance through these competitions to connect with a few people one-to-one. The women he called last weekend - one teenage girl, living on her own in Chicago; one mother, at home with her two young sons - had both been gratifyingly direct, opening up about their anxieties and struggles so much that Jared had found himself prompted into an unforeseen emotional honesty of his own. It had been an unexpected pleasure, so that he was more than happy to oblige when the fans suggested a second round for the next set of prizes.
He flicks back to his email, opens up the forwarded message from the team giving the contact details for this next pair of fans. The girl he’s going to call tomorrow morning; the guy, tonight. Tom, he reads. Excellent name. And it’s a Kansas number, something else that makes Jared smile. He wonders if this will be the same as the other calls; if it’ll end up somewhere personal and deep, or if he’ll just end up chatting sports or giving acting advice. Surely not everybody who bought one of these shirts has waded through ten levels of crap. Or maybe this is just a representative sample and every single person out there is jousting every day with monsters of their own.
The clock in the corner of the computer screen ticks over. 19.23. It’s probably not too early to call.
Jared punches in the numbers, hears it ring just once before the guy picks up with a cautious, “Hey.”
“Tom?” Jared asks.
There’s a pause. Then “Oh,” Tom says. “Jared, right?”
“It’s me!” Jared says, feeling faintly foolish. Maybe the poor dude just wanted to buy a T-shirt. He might not be up for this chat at all.
“Great,” says the guy. “That’s great. Just… hang on a moment.”
There’s the noise of a chair scraping back, footsteps echoing down a hallway, the clunk-click of a door. When Tom speaks again, Jared can hear that he’s somewhere smaller. “OK.”
“So,” says Jared. There is another tiny pause. Jared chews on his lip, digs his thumbnail into the tip of his finger, then decides to push through. For all he knows the guy is desperately shy, or painfully anxious about something he wants to say. Jared is the world’s biggest extrovert and if there’s one thing he should be good at doing by now, it’s making people comfortable; bringing them out of their shell. So, Tom had better ready himself for the full Padalecki charm.
“It’s great to talk to you,” Jared says. “Thanks so much for buying the shirt.”
“Oh, hey, no problem,” says Tom. “Thank you. I mean. I’ve been kind of... following your work. And this campaign... it’s a really good thing that you’re doing. People need to talk about this stuff, you know?”
“Absolutely,” Jared says. He thinks. “I’m glad that it’s struck such a chord. Although also, I suppose, that’s not so good. Because it means all these people have been struggling too.”
“Better together, I guess,” Tom offers.
“Yeah,” Jared agrees. There’s something almost familiar about the guy’s voice. It’s like the echo of something that Jared can’t quite place. “Are you a Texan?” he asks.
Tom laughs, quiet. “No,” he says. “Kansas.”
“Born and bred,” Jared supplies.
Tom makes a very noncommittal noise.
“Whereabouts are you based?” Jared asks.
“Oh, you know,” Tom says. “Out in the sticks.”
“Not a big city guy, then?”
“No. Not really.”
Tom sounds distracted, not really present, and Jared wonders again if he’s really into the call at all; if Jared should just let him off the hook and let him hang up. But on the other hand… if he didn’t want to talk, this man, then he could just have refused, have passed on the prize to the next person drawn. So there must be something he wants to say.
Fuck it, Jared decides.
“Is everything OK, Tom?” he asks.
“I’m fine,” Tom says. The phrase carries no conviction, feather-light.
Jared brushes it aside.
“Serious,” he says. “I mean. I don’t wanna overstep. But you know. I’m here, I’m listening. I’ve got time. If you wanna talk. About anything. Like, anything at all.”
“Oh,” Tom says. “Um.”
Jared doesn’t really know why he’s making the offer. It’s strange. He never met this guy in his life, knows nothing about him. Their only connection comes via a few clicks of the mouse. But something about the familiar tone of Tom’s voice, the isolation implicit in the cautious control of his tone, makes Jared feel a stab of sympathy. And he wants to help.
“It’s,” Tom says.
Jared waits.
“I don’t usually talk about… about my feelings,” Tom offers eventually.
“You don’t gotta,” says Jared, again. “But if you want to. I hear it can help.” He smiles, hoping Tom feels able to pick up the cue, to step back into a lighter mood if that’s where he wants to go.
“I…” Tom begins again, and there’s a dangerous waver in his voice this time.
“Do you live by yourself?” Jared asks. That had been the case with the girl last week, but then she’d needed no push to begin to speak, had started gabbling excited and a little hysterical about how she knew she didn’t know him but she felt like they were friends, that Sam had helped her get through so much. After all this time, Jared is surprised that he’s still susceptible to hearing that stuff; still finds himself properly touched by the thought that his own feelings, channelled through Sam, are speaking to all these people whom he’ll never meet. It’s an odd kind of magic.
“No,” Tom says. “That’s actually…” He draws a deep breath. Jared can hear the tears at the back of his throat. “Oh God.”
“Hey,” says Jared. “It’s OK.”
Tom exhales, half a sob. “Sorry,” he says, thick.
“It’s OK,” says Jared, again. He wonders. If this is like a domestic violence thing, he’s in over his head. “Is it just that you can’t talk to people at home? Or. I mean… you’re not…”
“Oh no,” Tom says, startled. “Nothing like that.” He takes another deep breath and when he starts speaking again, his voice is steadier. “Sorry, this is the most stupid conversation. You must have better things to do.”
“Not me,” Jared says. “Kids are a few thousand miles away. Just a boring night in.”
“OK,” Tom says. “OK.”
“So, you live with…” Jared leaves it hanging.
“I live with… my friend,” Tom says. “It’s kind of… I mean. I don’t want to say he’s the problem. But he’s not well right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Jared says.
“Yeah…” says Tom. He trails off, starts up again. “It’s kind of. He’s more or less depressed. He’s ill, I guess. But he won’t do anything about it. I mean. I’m not blaming him. It’s hard, when you feel like that. But he’s just… I guess he’s just resigned himself to die.” His voice wobbles again. “It’s hard.”
“It must be, really hard,” Jared says.
“But that’s bullshit, isn’t it,” says Tom, and his voice is heated now, more confident. “Like, it’s so much worse for him. He’s the one not sleeping and feeling like shit. And so why am I feeling sorry for myself? It’s bullshit. It’s crap.”
“I don’t know,” Jared says, cautious. “I think you gotta give yourself a break. It’s difficult when you’re trying to look after someone who feels that bad. It’s hard not to feel a bit responsible. And it’s hard to feel bad about it yourself, but not to make them feel like they’re getting you down.”
“All our friends are the same friends, you know?” Tom says. “So I don’t wanna sound off about him, there’s nobody I can talk to, because it’s not fair. On him. But sometimes I kind of. Nothing I do is ever right. He’s always kind of rolling his eyes at me, oh Sam, I know you’re trying but it’s doing fuck all good so why don’t you just give up?”
Jared is quiet. There’s a little tingle of something at the top of his spine.
“It’s just hard,” Tom (Tom?) says again. “I just. It’s like every day, I’m failing. And I’ve failed enough. I can’t keep fucking failing with this, every day. I can’t. Because then, eventually, he’s gonna be dead. And I… it’ll be on me.”
“Hey,” Jared says. “Hey. It’s not your fault.”
“You don’t know,” Tom says.
“It’s not,” Jared says. “This kind of thing… it’s not his fault, but it’s certainly not yours. It’s just shitty. It’s just really bad luck.”
“I should just be glad I even have him,” Tom says, his voice catching. “He almost died last year. I mean. I thought he was dead. And so. But I just can’t go through that again. And he doesn’t see. And then I think, what kind of selfish dick do I have to be, to make this all about me? You know?”
Jared thinks. “It is about you, too,” he says.
“Not really,” says Tom. “Shouldn’t be.”
“You matter,” Jared says.
Tom laughs, but not big and nice like he did at the start of the call. “Sometimes I wonder,” he says.
Jared takes a breath, lets the silence sit there while he considers. “You do. And,” he says, “You’re not failing every day, y’know? You’re not. Every day that he’s still here, you’re helping him. Even if the worst happened,” he says, “you still wouldn’t have failed. You can only do what you can do. And what you’re doing… It’s not nothing. It’s big.”
The guy breathes out, a heavy uncertain sigh. “Maybe,” he says. “I just. He’s done so much for me, you know?”
There’s a bang then, through the phone, the yell of a voice. Just like Tom’s, the tone of it sends a warm shock of familiarity through Jared’s stomach.
“Oh shit. I gotta go,” Tom says.
“Oh right,” says Jared, surprised.
“Sorry,” Tom says. “Sorry, I don’t… I didn’t mean. I probably took this phone call off somebody else who really needed it.”
“Hey,” Jared says. And then, absurdly, “You’re allowed to have nice things.” He pauses. “Not that this…”
He can hear the smile in Tom’s voice. “I know what you mean,” he says. There’s a pause. The muffled voice yells again. Tom covers the phone with his hand and yells. “Coming!”
“Brothers,” Jared says, bold.
“Yeah,” the guy agrees. And then a gasp. “Um. What?”
“You better go, man,” says Jared.
“Yeah. I better had.”
“Always keep fighting,” Jared offers: a little sarcastic, a little sincere.
“I will,” Tom says. “I will.” He pauses. “Thanks for listening, man.”
“Any time,” says Jared. “I mean it.” But the guy has already gone.
Jared sits back in his chair, looks at his phone. He scrubs a hand over the back of his neck, feels the goosepimples prickling there.
“No way,” he says. “No way.”