That Daring Young Man 1/6
J2 RPS AU
NC-17
Part 1 of 6
Master post
Art
The first time Jared falls in love with the circus, he is ten years old.
His parents take him, his brother, and sister to see it when it comes through town. He is enchanted by the whole thing - the animals in brightly-painted wagons, the sideshows, the lion tamer, the high-wire acts, the bareback riders, the clowns, the little performing dogs, the trapeze artists, the ringmaster, the reedy music of the calliope, even the heavy, pungent smells of wild animals and hot straw, and the press of people packed close together. Of course he falls in love with the carnival food - cotton candy, popcorn, peanuts still in the shell, cold bottles of Coca-Cola. It is overwhelming and magical.
That night he and his brother plot to run away and join the circus. They huddle under the blankets on Jeff's bed making their plans.
"I'll be a lion tamer," Jared says, having been impressed by the man's fearlessness and excited by the way he fended off the big cats. "Or the dog trainer."
"I want to be an acrobat," Jeff says, and looks offended when Jared stifles a giggle. Jeff has hit a growth spurt and corresponding clumsy stage as he adjusts to longer legs, longer arms, and bigger feet, and Jared can't imagine his older brother performing any of the jumps and tumbles and rolls that the acrobats did without falling all over himself.
"You should be a clown."
Jeff punches him in the arm. "Acrobat. It's the circus, you can be anything you want."
"We'll have to sneak onto the train. You can't drive Daddy's car."
Jeff has actually grown tall enough to reach the gas pedal on their father's Model T touring car, but neither of them knows how to drive. Riding the rails is more adventurous, anyway.
"What if we can't catch up to it?" Jeff whispers.
"We will."
They get dressed as quietly as they can, trying to see by the dim light from outside. Jeff trips over his shoes and Jared puts his shirt on inside-out. They throw some extra pairs of socks and undershorts and shirts into a pillowcase, open the bedroom door, and discover their little sister sitting in the hallway.
"Megan!" Jeff hisses. "Why aren't you in bed?"
"Why aren't you in bed?" she retorts. She points to the pillowcase in Jared's hand. "You're running away!"
"We're going to join the circus," Jared whispers.
"I knew that." She stands up. "Take me, too."
"No," Jeff says.
"Yes!" She puts her hands on her hips and makes a determined face. She looks silly blocking their way in her long white nightdress. Jared wants to just push her aside, but his parents always told him he should never push a girl, and besides, every time he pushes his sister he gets yelled at. "Take me or I'll tell."
"You're too little," Jared says.
"I am not!"
"Shh!" Jeff hisses.
"Mama! Daddy!" Megan raises her voice in the direction of their parents' bedroom. "Jared and Jeff are running away!"
Jared drops the pillowcase and clamps his hand over her mouth. She manages to lick his palm. Surprised and a little disgusted, he lets go. She runs down the hall and yells "Jared and Jeff are running away to join the circus!" at their parents' door. Jared and Jeff exchange worried looks, Jared grabs the pillowcase again, and they take off towards the stairs.
Their father stops them with a command - "Jared! Jeffrey! You stay right there!" - stomps down the hall and marches them back to their room. Megan shoots the boys a smug look as they pass her. Jared sticks out his tongue.
No matter, he thinks, as he climbs into bed under his father's watchful eye. Next time.
The second time he falls in love with the circus, he is fifteen.
His high school shuts down for the day because all the students would be skipping class anyway. He and his friends crowd into the stands with the rest of San Antonio. He eats peanuts and clouds of pink cotton candy, sneezes the sawdust out of his nose, and stares transfixed at all the performers, especially a pair of bareback riders, a man and a woman, alike enough to be brother and sister. They are dark-haired and dark-skinned, dressed in red and brown and gold, performing tricks on quarter-horses with tall plumes attached to their bridles. They are beautiful and graceful and strong, and Jared’s friend Chad elbows him in the side and laughs at him when he notices Jared gaping in awe.
Chad says he wants to run away and join the circus, and he has Jared half-convinced to go with him until Jared realizes he’s joking. As if Chad would ever leave San Antonio, even with Jared trailing behind him.
The last time Jared falls in love with the circus, he is twenty-six years old and he has finally run off to join it.
At the time, he doesn't think he has much choice.
Kenzie, Chad's on-again-off-again girlfriend and his public cover to protect his sexual preferences, is the catalyst that drives Jared to the big top, on the day she discovers him and Chad together in Chad's apartment. Chad does genuinely like her and claims he would eventually like to marry her, someday when the economy is better and he's ready to settle down. But she is bound and determined to claim him sooner rather than later, because as far as she's concerned, he is hers, and only hers, now and forever.
Then one day she sneaks into his apartment to surprise him with food cooked in his own kitchen, and instead she discovers him with his friend, both of them naked and sweaty and hard.
Well, Jared is hard, anyway - his cock is in Chad's mouth and Chad is sucking enthusiastically.
They're so wrapped up in each other that they don't realize Kenzie's there until she screams. Jared pushes Chad away, Kenzie runs, Chad scrambles to his feet and chases after her. (He doesn't get far, realizing just before he gets to the stairwell that he's naked.)
On Monday Jared is pulled out of his high school classroom in the middle of leading a discussion of The Scarlet Letter - which seems oddly appropriate - and is told the principal wants to see him.
The principal fires him with "Some things have come to light about your, er, preferences," and "We can't have you in a classroom with impressionable children," and "Your mother must be so disappointed."
"I don't understand," Jared says, except he thinks he does. Kenzie must have gone to the administration, maybe even the school board. She would never betray Chad like this, and of course she would blame Jared for what she saw.
"I'm sorry, Mr Padalecki," the principal says, not sounding particularly sorry at all. "We’ve already called a substitute to take over your class."
The principal's secretary escorts him out of the school without a word.
Suddenly he’s twenty-six years old and out of a job - a job he hasn't even had for a full school year - worried that half the city now knows he likes sex with men. He could be blackballed from teaching anywhere in western Texas. He was lucky to get that job, lucky his mother's years in front of a classroom had built up enough goodwill for her to successfully recommend her younger son for a teaching position. He doesn’t know what he'll do now. He's worked on ranches as seasonal help, he did construction for a bit, but even though it's already eight years since the Crash of '29 and four years since the first of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, jobs are still kind of thin on the ground.
"Maybe you should leave town for a bit," his mom suggests. "Your aunt and uncle in Corpus Christi might let you stay with them."
"Didn't Milo's cousin get a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps?" his sister says.
"You like the outdoors," his dad offers.
But it's Chad, of all people, who gives him the best idea.
"We should've run off and joined the circus when we were kids," he says mournfully.
"You're a genius, Murray," Jared tells him, grabbing his face and kissing him.
A week later Jared's in Florida, in Sarasota, winter headquarters of the K&G Circus, and a week after that, in the middle of April, he's stepping out of a train car in Georgia for his first day of putting up the big top and then taking it down.
Sixteen years ago he wanted to run away and join a traveling circus, and now he finally has.
Life with a railroad circus is hard work, much harder than he was expecting. He sleeps in a train car with other canvasmen - the laborers whose specific job it is to deal with the tents - in a shared berth that's barely big enough for him, never mind him and another roustabout, and in the early morning everyone rolls out of bed, gulps coffee (breakfast comes later), and busts their asses erecting the big top. While they're doing that, elephants and draft horses haul wagons off the flatbed cars, other men erect the menagerie tent, the sideshow tent, the wardrobe and dressing tents, and kids from whatever town they're in try to cadge jobs in exchange for free tickets to the show.
Setting up the big top is called working the haul and it's the most physically demanding thing Jared has ever done - pounding stakes, dragging masses of heavy canvas, pulling ropes, heaving tent poles upright - and while he's a quick learner and can keep up with it, he discovers that his fellow roustabouts start out completely uninterested in helping him. They hide his boots, they steal his socks, they get the waiters to serve him last at mealtimes, they tease him, they ignore him, they make a point to share in-jokes he won't understand. It's always been easy for him to make friends, and at first it hurts to feel so unwanted, but he's been the new man on an old crew before, and he perseveres, and after a week or so they start to thaw and Jared settles more into this new life.
In his free time, between the afternoon and evening shows, he hangs out with his fellow roustabouts, now that they've warmed up to him, and does all those little domestic tasks he doesn't have time for during the rest of the day. He plays chess (Aldis, who was unlucky enough to end up sharing a berth with him in the sleeper car, is a very crafty player), writes home, tries to find something good to read, does his laundry, and attempts to befriend anyone who will talk to him, especially if they work in the cookhouse and are willing to slip him snacks between meals. Gina, one of the sideshow performers - she's one of the Warrior Women of Kilimanjaro, even though she's part Cuban and from New York - has learned not to ask him to help her with a crossword puzzle, because he'll try to finish it for her instead.
After the evening show starts, if he's not responsible for helping with props or tearing down and packing up anything in what he thinks of as backstage - more commonly known as the lot - Jared will sometimes sneak into the big top and watch. He's seen half the performers walking around in street clothes, some of the girls with scarves tied over their hair to protect it before the show, and he's learning the mechanics of a three-ring circus, all the framing propping up the illusions, and yet watching it is still a magical experience. The animal acts and the aerialists are his favorites. The animals are so well-trained and the work involved is still a mystery to him. The trapeze artists perform the most heart-stopping and exhilarating flips, their graceful, gravity-defying tricks the closest a person can come to flying. Even though the routines don't vary significantly from day to day and town to town, he doesn't think he'll ever get tired of watching.
He can hear Chad laughing in his head - Yeah, and it doesn't have anything to do with how hot the aerialists are. Especially one of the star trapeze artists, a guy well-known enough to have his own dressing tent. His name is Jensen, and in addition to being good-looking, athletic, and wildly talented, he's either standoffish or shy, and barely even acknowledges Jared's attempts to befriend him, much less responds to them.
"What's up with the performers?" Jared asks Aldis during his second week working for the circus.
"What do you mean?"
"I wave and say hi and most of them ignore me."
"Oh, that's the hierarchy," Aldis responds.
Jared nods, more in acknowledgement than understanding. Christian, the lion tamer, at least grunted a hello, and the other Warrior Woman of Kilimanjaro - Rachel, who's really Canadian - waved and said hi back (the sideshow performers, Jared has discovered, are slightly more friendly than the big top performers), but overall Jared isn't used to being outright ignored. It isn't as if he needs to prove himself to the performers the way he evidently had to prove himself to the canvasmen.
He, Aldis, and several other roustabouts move from one big wooden stake to the next, driving them in with sledgehammers to anchor the ropes that will help hold up the main tent. As soon as they get the big top up, the riggers will rush in to secure the web of high wires and swings and rings and platforms for the aerialists. Much to his disappointment, Jared has only been able to watch them once.
"You didn't know there was a hierarchy?" Aldis goes on, as the two of them and five other canvasmen arrange themselves around the next stake and start swinging their mallets in turn. Aldis has worked for the circus for several seasons and can talk and pound at the same time, and Jared's impressed. It's a foggy early morning in West Virginia and their shirts are already darkening with sweat. Jared shakes his head to get damp hair out of his face, almost losing his rhythm. "The big acts are at the top, of course," Aldis goes on. "When you get your own tent and a stateroom on the train, that's a sign you're a big marquee name and you can pretty much do what you want. Then it goes down through all the performers, the sideshow acts, the chorus, and finally us."
"Some of them are just rude," comments another roustabout, a guy named Tom. "Some of the clowns? Assholes."
Jared is a little disappointed by this new information. There are some veils that should just not be lifted.
"More tenting, less talking!" someone yells, because their talking is breaking the rhythm of their stake-pounding. The guys get back to their work.
A couple days later Jared is sent on an errand between shows to find the wardrobe mistress and ask about one of the bareback rider's outfits, and walks in on Jensen having a costume fitted. At least Jensen is clothed, for his modesty and Jared's sanity, although the leotard and tights that aerialists wear leave little to the imagination, especially up close. Jared has just enough time to register the details of slightly mussed brown hair, glasses, and freckles on Jensen's broad shoulders before he stammers an apology and backs out of the tent to the sound of the wardrobe mistress' laughter.
Aldis laughs at him, too, for being embarrassed. There's very little privacy in a traveling circus, with so many people crammed into such close quarters for months at a time. They've seen the big divided dressing tent for the performers, men on one side and women on the other, everyone with a little station for dressing and putting on makeup and storing belongings, but no privacy from anyone else.
But that doesn't mean Jared can't be a little discomfited at suddenly finding himself staring at Jensen's groin, and it doesn't mean Aldis is right to have a laugh at his expense.
Of course, a week later Jared isn't paying attention to where he's walking and smacks right into Jensen and causes him to spill coffee all over himself, which is worse than walking in on him getting dressed. Jared feels his face heat up, mortified. It's the lull between the matinee and evening shows, which means there's a bit of an audience for Jared's inattention. Just what he needs - people watching him make a fool of himself in front of the guy he's interested in.
"Shit, man," he says, embarrassed, trying to wipe coffee off Jensen's shirt with his hands, "I'm so sorry. I wasn't looking."
"It's okay," Jensen says, even though it patently isn't. The coffee's hot, his shirt is - or was - white, and Jared has already heard the wardrobe mistress' assistant, Miss Smith, yelling at someone for getting jam on their costume.
"Miss Connelly's going to give you shit, isn't she."
"It's Miss Smith you really need to watch out for." Jensen grins suddenly, uncharacteristically friendly. He's wearing glasses and his eyes are green and amused behind the lenses. "I could ask them to dye it brown. You might've done me a favor. Thanks." He nods in acknowledgment of Jared's contribution to his closet, and walks back towards the cookhouse, presumably to refill his coffee cup. Jared watches him go, wondering why he ever thought the guy was stuck-up or shy, and coincidentally admiring the view of Jensen's ass.
After that, Jared takes every opportunity to say hi, adding some extra conversation when he can, and Jensen not only returns the hello but responds to the small talk. Jared can't quite figure out why Jensen is suddenly chatty when before he was so distant, but it doesn't really matter as long as Jensen keeps talking to him.
Aldis just shrugs when Jared mentions it over a chess game. "Sometimes they warm up. Guess he likes you."
"Well, I am pretty likable." Jared preens and fluffs his hair like a pretty girl showing off for the object of her affections, and Aldis chuckles.
"You're also about to lose. Check." He moves a chess piece. Jared stares at the board.
"Shit. Where'd you learn to play?"
"Little old men in the park took pity on a poor chess-starved little boy." Aldis just grins wider. "Nah, my granddad. He tried to teach all of us. My brother got pretty good. My mom didn’t have any patience with it - Edwin'd be thinking about different moves when he should've been doing his chores - but my granddad would tell her we were learning strategy and how to put ourselves in someone else's head, and those were useful skills to have. So she'd yell at Edwin to pay attention to what he was doing, and then for Christmas she bought us a chess set. Not a lot of chess players in the circus. I was just waiting for you to come along so I could beat your ass." Another grin.
"You gonna move or not?" Tom asks, leaning over Jared's shoulder. He doesn't really know how to play but he likes to watch. Jared elbows him, trying to get him to back off.
"Don't rush the genius," Aldis says. Jared concentrates.
"Hey, Welling!" someone yells. "Give me a hand here!"
Tom pats Jared on the shoulder and says "I got two bucks on you" as he walks off.
"Two bucks on me against who?" Jared asks Aldis, who plasters a look of fake innocence on his face. "You're betting against me? For the same game you're playing?"
"It's two bucks more than I had yesterday. Come on. They're gonna start the show and we'll have to get back to work before you make a move."
"Okay, okay." Jared moves his bishop, takes his hand off the piece, sees a better move, realizes he just left his queen open, and mutters "Shit" again as Aldis takes his queen with a triumphant "Checkmate!"
"I used to be good at this," Jared mutters as Aldis collects the pieces and folds up the board. "Next time, man. I'll get you next time."
"It's a good thing we're not keeping track of the wins and losses. Maybe you should ask your friend the trapeze artist if he knows how to play."
Jared knows Aldis is just teasing him, and the fact that there really are no secrets in the circus means he's not surprised Aldis knows he's been trying to befriend the aerialist, but asking Jensen if he'd join Jared in a game of chess is actually not that bad an idea.
It's just Jared's luck that when he finally gets a chance to ask, Jensen isn't in his dressing tent. He's not in the dining tent and he's not in wardrobe either. Fortunately Jared recognizes the girl sitting on a folding chair under the awning of Jensen's tent - his trapeze partner, Danneel. She's wearing a yellow dress with a white collar, reading a book, and idly fanning herself with a folding paper fan, and she looks up when Jared stops in front of her.
"Yes?" she says. She squints at him and he realizes he's blocking the sun so totally she probably can't see his face.
"I'm looking for Jensen," he says. "Do you know where he is?"
"The main tent." She points to the box in his hand, the carrying case for Aldis' chess set. "Is that backgammon?"
"Chess. Do you play?"
"No."
"Do you know if Jensen does?"
"I never asked. He's working on part of our act right now - there's a - you don't need to know all the technical details - but I can ask him later."
"Thanks. Oh, I'm Jared." He holds out his hand and walks closer so she can take it and shake, which she does.
"Danneel. But you probably knew that."
Of course he does - she's as big a marquee name as Jensen. They're a well-known team. In fact, she's a big enough name to have her own dressing tent as well.
"Why aren't you in your own tent?" Jared asks, realizing as soon as the words are out of his mouth that maybe it's a rude question.
"Nosy, aren't we." But she grins to show she's teasing, and gestures to the folding chair she's sitting in. "My chair broke. While they're fixing it I figured I could sit in Jensen's. I know he doesn't mind."
"Is it really broken? Maybe I could fix it." It never hurt to be helpful, and he's learned that sometimes you can do little jobs for people for extra money.
"No, Carpentry has it. I sat down too hard." She laughs at herself. "I broke my own chair by sitting in it. You know how much grief I got for that? Katie's still laughing at me."
Katie is one of the other aerialists. She does a trick where she hangs by a rope around her neck and spins in circles. Jared wants to ask her how she does it without strangling herself or breaking her neck, but at the same time he's not sure if he really wants to see past that particular illusion.
"If you want to talk to Jensen you'll have to catch him right when he's done with practice," Danneel says. "He'll be working until it's time for dinner, and after that we have to get ready. So my suggestion, if you have the time to kill and my guess is you do, is that you go watch him practice, and after he's done you can talk to him. Tell him he looked good at the matinee." Her face and voice are suddenly earnest. "He's worried about his performance, and he doesn't listen to me when I tell him he was fine."
"I can do that. Thanks." He didn't sneak into the matinee show - he ended up talking to Vincent, the strongman, about space travel and colonies on Mars - but it's not hard to compliment any of the performers on their acts.
Because Danneel is right, and he does have time to kill, and Aldis hasn't hunted him down to get the chess set back, Jared heads over to the big top and ducks inside to watch the aerialists practicing. There are a couple of acrobats practicing in one of the side rings, and the dog trainer is putting the performing dogs through their paces on the other side, but Jared is only interested in what's going on over his head.
From down in the seats it looks like Jensen and Katie and another one of the male aerialists up on the trapeze, plus a high-wire walker practicing with a parasol. Jared watches the aerialists swinging back and forth, throwing and catching each other, hurling themselves across the open expanse of the big top, doing flips before catching the trapeze on the other side. His heart skips every time Jensen, hanging from a swinging bar by his knees, flings Katie into the air so she can turn a quick flip and grab the other trapeze, and his heart skips twice when it's Jensen turning flips fifty feet in the air.
Jared thinks he can hear them calling to each other - "Pull your legs in tighter for the roll", "Hold your arms straighter", "Don't fucking drop me" - and when the high-wire walker loses her balance trying to walk on her hands and falls off her wire and into the net, all three aerialists stop moving, stop talking, and wait for her to crawl off the net and swing down to the floor, shaking her head and swearing under her breath.
They take the net down for the performances. When Jared asked why, because it seemed like that was just begging for trouble, Aldis explained that leaving it up is a sign of weakness and insecurity, and only amateurs perform for paying crowds with a net.
"Besides," he added, "it looks better this way."
It's nerve-wracking in the extreme to watch them perform for an audience without a net, although it's also incredibly exhilarating, and Jared can't really argue.
Aside from the high-wire walker, though, no one seems to need the net now. Jared entertains the thought that if he was a performer, and he worked on the trapeze or the high wire, he'd be falling on purpose just to bounce in it. It's probably a good thing he's a roustabout.
He loses his chance to ask Jensen about chess when someone comes into the tent and yells, "Dinner's ready!" and the three trapeze artists, the high-wire walker, the acrobats, and the performing dogs with their trainer, all file out, the performers heading for the cookhouse and the dogs and trainer heading for their own tent. Jared follows the aerialists, finds Aldis, and gives him the chess set back.
"Guess you're stuck losing to me," Aldis says, grinning. "We could teach Tom how to play. You'd have someone to beat."
The next afternoon, between shows, Jared and Aldis attempt to teach Tom how to play chess. They don't make a lot of progress, but it's as good a way to pass the time as any.
Part Two!
NC-17
Part 1 of 6
Master post
Art
The first time Jared falls in love with the circus, he is ten years old.
His parents take him, his brother, and sister to see it when it comes through town. He is enchanted by the whole thing - the animals in brightly-painted wagons, the sideshows, the lion tamer, the high-wire acts, the bareback riders, the clowns, the little performing dogs, the trapeze artists, the ringmaster, the reedy music of the calliope, even the heavy, pungent smells of wild animals and hot straw, and the press of people packed close together. Of course he falls in love with the carnival food - cotton candy, popcorn, peanuts still in the shell, cold bottles of Coca-Cola. It is overwhelming and magical.
That night he and his brother plot to run away and join the circus. They huddle under the blankets on Jeff's bed making their plans.
"I'll be a lion tamer," Jared says, having been impressed by the man's fearlessness and excited by the way he fended off the big cats. "Or the dog trainer."
"I want to be an acrobat," Jeff says, and looks offended when Jared stifles a giggle. Jeff has hit a growth spurt and corresponding clumsy stage as he adjusts to longer legs, longer arms, and bigger feet, and Jared can't imagine his older brother performing any of the jumps and tumbles and rolls that the acrobats did without falling all over himself.
"You should be a clown."
Jeff punches him in the arm. "Acrobat. It's the circus, you can be anything you want."
"We'll have to sneak onto the train. You can't drive Daddy's car."
Jeff has actually grown tall enough to reach the gas pedal on their father's Model T touring car, but neither of them knows how to drive. Riding the rails is more adventurous, anyway.
"What if we can't catch up to it?" Jeff whispers.
"We will."
They get dressed as quietly as they can, trying to see by the dim light from outside. Jeff trips over his shoes and Jared puts his shirt on inside-out. They throw some extra pairs of socks and undershorts and shirts into a pillowcase, open the bedroom door, and discover their little sister sitting in the hallway.
"Megan!" Jeff hisses. "Why aren't you in bed?"
"Why aren't you in bed?" she retorts. She points to the pillowcase in Jared's hand. "You're running away!"
"We're going to join the circus," Jared whispers.
"I knew that." She stands up. "Take me, too."
"No," Jeff says.
"Yes!" She puts her hands on her hips and makes a determined face. She looks silly blocking their way in her long white nightdress. Jared wants to just push her aside, but his parents always told him he should never push a girl, and besides, every time he pushes his sister he gets yelled at. "Take me or I'll tell."
"You're too little," Jared says.
"I am not!"
"Shh!" Jeff hisses.
"Mama! Daddy!" Megan raises her voice in the direction of their parents' bedroom. "Jared and Jeff are running away!"
Jared drops the pillowcase and clamps his hand over her mouth. She manages to lick his palm. Surprised and a little disgusted, he lets go. She runs down the hall and yells "Jared and Jeff are running away to join the circus!" at their parents' door. Jared and Jeff exchange worried looks, Jared grabs the pillowcase again, and they take off towards the stairs.
Their father stops them with a command - "Jared! Jeffrey! You stay right there!" - stomps down the hall and marches them back to their room. Megan shoots the boys a smug look as they pass her. Jared sticks out his tongue.
No matter, he thinks, as he climbs into bed under his father's watchful eye. Next time.
The second time he falls in love with the circus, he is fifteen.
His high school shuts down for the day because all the students would be skipping class anyway. He and his friends crowd into the stands with the rest of San Antonio. He eats peanuts and clouds of pink cotton candy, sneezes the sawdust out of his nose, and stares transfixed at all the performers, especially a pair of bareback riders, a man and a woman, alike enough to be brother and sister. They are dark-haired and dark-skinned, dressed in red and brown and gold, performing tricks on quarter-horses with tall plumes attached to their bridles. They are beautiful and graceful and strong, and Jared’s friend Chad elbows him in the side and laughs at him when he notices Jared gaping in awe.
Chad says he wants to run away and join the circus, and he has Jared half-convinced to go with him until Jared realizes he’s joking. As if Chad would ever leave San Antonio, even with Jared trailing behind him.
The last time Jared falls in love with the circus, he is twenty-six years old and he has finally run off to join it.
At the time, he doesn't think he has much choice.
Kenzie, Chad's on-again-off-again girlfriend and his public cover to protect his sexual preferences, is the catalyst that drives Jared to the big top, on the day she discovers him and Chad together in Chad's apartment. Chad does genuinely like her and claims he would eventually like to marry her, someday when the economy is better and he's ready to settle down. But she is bound and determined to claim him sooner rather than later, because as far as she's concerned, he is hers, and only hers, now and forever.
Then one day she sneaks into his apartment to surprise him with food cooked in his own kitchen, and instead she discovers him with his friend, both of them naked and sweaty and hard.
Well, Jared is hard, anyway - his cock is in Chad's mouth and Chad is sucking enthusiastically.
They're so wrapped up in each other that they don't realize Kenzie's there until she screams. Jared pushes Chad away, Kenzie runs, Chad scrambles to his feet and chases after her. (He doesn't get far, realizing just before he gets to the stairwell that he's naked.)
On Monday Jared is pulled out of his high school classroom in the middle of leading a discussion of The Scarlet Letter - which seems oddly appropriate - and is told the principal wants to see him.
The principal fires him with "Some things have come to light about your, er, preferences," and "We can't have you in a classroom with impressionable children," and "Your mother must be so disappointed."
"I don't understand," Jared says, except he thinks he does. Kenzie must have gone to the administration, maybe even the school board. She would never betray Chad like this, and of course she would blame Jared for what she saw.
"I'm sorry, Mr Padalecki," the principal says, not sounding particularly sorry at all. "We’ve already called a substitute to take over your class."
The principal's secretary escorts him out of the school without a word.
Suddenly he’s twenty-six years old and out of a job - a job he hasn't even had for a full school year - worried that half the city now knows he likes sex with men. He could be blackballed from teaching anywhere in western Texas. He was lucky to get that job, lucky his mother's years in front of a classroom had built up enough goodwill for her to successfully recommend her younger son for a teaching position. He doesn’t know what he'll do now. He's worked on ranches as seasonal help, he did construction for a bit, but even though it's already eight years since the Crash of '29 and four years since the first of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, jobs are still kind of thin on the ground.
"Maybe you should leave town for a bit," his mom suggests. "Your aunt and uncle in Corpus Christi might let you stay with them."
"Didn't Milo's cousin get a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps?" his sister says.
"You like the outdoors," his dad offers.
But it's Chad, of all people, who gives him the best idea.
"We should've run off and joined the circus when we were kids," he says mournfully.
"You're a genius, Murray," Jared tells him, grabbing his face and kissing him.
A week later Jared's in Florida, in Sarasota, winter headquarters of the K&G Circus, and a week after that, in the middle of April, he's stepping out of a train car in Georgia for his first day of putting up the big top and then taking it down.
Sixteen years ago he wanted to run away and join a traveling circus, and now he finally has.
Life with a railroad circus is hard work, much harder than he was expecting. He sleeps in a train car with other canvasmen - the laborers whose specific job it is to deal with the tents - in a shared berth that's barely big enough for him, never mind him and another roustabout, and in the early morning everyone rolls out of bed, gulps coffee (breakfast comes later), and busts their asses erecting the big top. While they're doing that, elephants and draft horses haul wagons off the flatbed cars, other men erect the menagerie tent, the sideshow tent, the wardrobe and dressing tents, and kids from whatever town they're in try to cadge jobs in exchange for free tickets to the show.
Setting up the big top is called working the haul and it's the most physically demanding thing Jared has ever done - pounding stakes, dragging masses of heavy canvas, pulling ropes, heaving tent poles upright - and while he's a quick learner and can keep up with it, he discovers that his fellow roustabouts start out completely uninterested in helping him. They hide his boots, they steal his socks, they get the waiters to serve him last at mealtimes, they tease him, they ignore him, they make a point to share in-jokes he won't understand. It's always been easy for him to make friends, and at first it hurts to feel so unwanted, but he's been the new man on an old crew before, and he perseveres, and after a week or so they start to thaw and Jared settles more into this new life.
In his free time, between the afternoon and evening shows, he hangs out with his fellow roustabouts, now that they've warmed up to him, and does all those little domestic tasks he doesn't have time for during the rest of the day. He plays chess (Aldis, who was unlucky enough to end up sharing a berth with him in the sleeper car, is a very crafty player), writes home, tries to find something good to read, does his laundry, and attempts to befriend anyone who will talk to him, especially if they work in the cookhouse and are willing to slip him snacks between meals. Gina, one of the sideshow performers - she's one of the Warrior Women of Kilimanjaro, even though she's part Cuban and from New York - has learned not to ask him to help her with a crossword puzzle, because he'll try to finish it for her instead.
After the evening show starts, if he's not responsible for helping with props or tearing down and packing up anything in what he thinks of as backstage - more commonly known as the lot - Jared will sometimes sneak into the big top and watch. He's seen half the performers walking around in street clothes, some of the girls with scarves tied over their hair to protect it before the show, and he's learning the mechanics of a three-ring circus, all the framing propping up the illusions, and yet watching it is still a magical experience. The animal acts and the aerialists are his favorites. The animals are so well-trained and the work involved is still a mystery to him. The trapeze artists perform the most heart-stopping and exhilarating flips, their graceful, gravity-defying tricks the closest a person can come to flying. Even though the routines don't vary significantly from day to day and town to town, he doesn't think he'll ever get tired of watching.
He can hear Chad laughing in his head - Yeah, and it doesn't have anything to do with how hot the aerialists are. Especially one of the star trapeze artists, a guy well-known enough to have his own dressing tent. His name is Jensen, and in addition to being good-looking, athletic, and wildly talented, he's either standoffish or shy, and barely even acknowledges Jared's attempts to befriend him, much less responds to them.
"What's up with the performers?" Jared asks Aldis during his second week working for the circus.
"What do you mean?"
"I wave and say hi and most of them ignore me."
"Oh, that's the hierarchy," Aldis responds.
Jared nods, more in acknowledgement than understanding. Christian, the lion tamer, at least grunted a hello, and the other Warrior Woman of Kilimanjaro - Rachel, who's really Canadian - waved and said hi back (the sideshow performers, Jared has discovered, are slightly more friendly than the big top performers), but overall Jared isn't used to being outright ignored. It isn't as if he needs to prove himself to the performers the way he evidently had to prove himself to the canvasmen.
He, Aldis, and several other roustabouts move from one big wooden stake to the next, driving them in with sledgehammers to anchor the ropes that will help hold up the main tent. As soon as they get the big top up, the riggers will rush in to secure the web of high wires and swings and rings and platforms for the aerialists. Much to his disappointment, Jared has only been able to watch them once.
"You didn't know there was a hierarchy?" Aldis goes on, as the two of them and five other canvasmen arrange themselves around the next stake and start swinging their mallets in turn. Aldis has worked for the circus for several seasons and can talk and pound at the same time, and Jared's impressed. It's a foggy early morning in West Virginia and their shirts are already darkening with sweat. Jared shakes his head to get damp hair out of his face, almost losing his rhythm. "The big acts are at the top, of course," Aldis goes on. "When you get your own tent and a stateroom on the train, that's a sign you're a big marquee name and you can pretty much do what you want. Then it goes down through all the performers, the sideshow acts, the chorus, and finally us."
"Some of them are just rude," comments another roustabout, a guy named Tom. "Some of the clowns? Assholes."
Jared is a little disappointed by this new information. There are some veils that should just not be lifted.
"More tenting, less talking!" someone yells, because their talking is breaking the rhythm of their stake-pounding. The guys get back to their work.
A couple days later Jared is sent on an errand between shows to find the wardrobe mistress and ask about one of the bareback rider's outfits, and walks in on Jensen having a costume fitted. At least Jensen is clothed, for his modesty and Jared's sanity, although the leotard and tights that aerialists wear leave little to the imagination, especially up close. Jared has just enough time to register the details of slightly mussed brown hair, glasses, and freckles on Jensen's broad shoulders before he stammers an apology and backs out of the tent to the sound of the wardrobe mistress' laughter.
Aldis laughs at him, too, for being embarrassed. There's very little privacy in a traveling circus, with so many people crammed into such close quarters for months at a time. They've seen the big divided dressing tent for the performers, men on one side and women on the other, everyone with a little station for dressing and putting on makeup and storing belongings, but no privacy from anyone else.
But that doesn't mean Jared can't be a little discomfited at suddenly finding himself staring at Jensen's groin, and it doesn't mean Aldis is right to have a laugh at his expense.
Of course, a week later Jared isn't paying attention to where he's walking and smacks right into Jensen and causes him to spill coffee all over himself, which is worse than walking in on him getting dressed. Jared feels his face heat up, mortified. It's the lull between the matinee and evening shows, which means there's a bit of an audience for Jared's inattention. Just what he needs - people watching him make a fool of himself in front of the guy he's interested in.
"Shit, man," he says, embarrassed, trying to wipe coffee off Jensen's shirt with his hands, "I'm so sorry. I wasn't looking."
"It's okay," Jensen says, even though it patently isn't. The coffee's hot, his shirt is - or was - white, and Jared has already heard the wardrobe mistress' assistant, Miss Smith, yelling at someone for getting jam on their costume.
"Miss Connelly's going to give you shit, isn't she."
"It's Miss Smith you really need to watch out for." Jensen grins suddenly, uncharacteristically friendly. He's wearing glasses and his eyes are green and amused behind the lenses. "I could ask them to dye it brown. You might've done me a favor. Thanks." He nods in acknowledgment of Jared's contribution to his closet, and walks back towards the cookhouse, presumably to refill his coffee cup. Jared watches him go, wondering why he ever thought the guy was stuck-up or shy, and coincidentally admiring the view of Jensen's ass.
After that, Jared takes every opportunity to say hi, adding some extra conversation when he can, and Jensen not only returns the hello but responds to the small talk. Jared can't quite figure out why Jensen is suddenly chatty when before he was so distant, but it doesn't really matter as long as Jensen keeps talking to him.
Aldis just shrugs when Jared mentions it over a chess game. "Sometimes they warm up. Guess he likes you."
"Well, I am pretty likable." Jared preens and fluffs his hair like a pretty girl showing off for the object of her affections, and Aldis chuckles.
"You're also about to lose. Check." He moves a chess piece. Jared stares at the board.
"Shit. Where'd you learn to play?"
"Little old men in the park took pity on a poor chess-starved little boy." Aldis just grins wider. "Nah, my granddad. He tried to teach all of us. My brother got pretty good. My mom didn’t have any patience with it - Edwin'd be thinking about different moves when he should've been doing his chores - but my granddad would tell her we were learning strategy and how to put ourselves in someone else's head, and those were useful skills to have. So she'd yell at Edwin to pay attention to what he was doing, and then for Christmas she bought us a chess set. Not a lot of chess players in the circus. I was just waiting for you to come along so I could beat your ass." Another grin.
"You gonna move or not?" Tom asks, leaning over Jared's shoulder. He doesn't really know how to play but he likes to watch. Jared elbows him, trying to get him to back off.
"Don't rush the genius," Aldis says. Jared concentrates.
"Hey, Welling!" someone yells. "Give me a hand here!"
Tom pats Jared on the shoulder and says "I got two bucks on you" as he walks off.
"Two bucks on me against who?" Jared asks Aldis, who plasters a look of fake innocence on his face. "You're betting against me? For the same game you're playing?"
"It's two bucks more than I had yesterday. Come on. They're gonna start the show and we'll have to get back to work before you make a move."
"Okay, okay." Jared moves his bishop, takes his hand off the piece, sees a better move, realizes he just left his queen open, and mutters "Shit" again as Aldis takes his queen with a triumphant "Checkmate!"
"I used to be good at this," Jared mutters as Aldis collects the pieces and folds up the board. "Next time, man. I'll get you next time."
"It's a good thing we're not keeping track of the wins and losses. Maybe you should ask your friend the trapeze artist if he knows how to play."
Jared knows Aldis is just teasing him, and the fact that there really are no secrets in the circus means he's not surprised Aldis knows he's been trying to befriend the aerialist, but asking Jensen if he'd join Jared in a game of chess is actually not that bad an idea.
It's just Jared's luck that when he finally gets a chance to ask, Jensen isn't in his dressing tent. He's not in the dining tent and he's not in wardrobe either. Fortunately Jared recognizes the girl sitting on a folding chair under the awning of Jensen's tent - his trapeze partner, Danneel. She's wearing a yellow dress with a white collar, reading a book, and idly fanning herself with a folding paper fan, and she looks up when Jared stops in front of her.
"Yes?" she says. She squints at him and he realizes he's blocking the sun so totally she probably can't see his face.
"I'm looking for Jensen," he says. "Do you know where he is?"
"The main tent." She points to the box in his hand, the carrying case for Aldis' chess set. "Is that backgammon?"
"Chess. Do you play?"
"No."
"Do you know if Jensen does?"
"I never asked. He's working on part of our act right now - there's a - you don't need to know all the technical details - but I can ask him later."
"Thanks. Oh, I'm Jared." He holds out his hand and walks closer so she can take it and shake, which she does.
"Danneel. But you probably knew that."
Of course he does - she's as big a marquee name as Jensen. They're a well-known team. In fact, she's a big enough name to have her own dressing tent as well.
"Why aren't you in your own tent?" Jared asks, realizing as soon as the words are out of his mouth that maybe it's a rude question.
"Nosy, aren't we." But she grins to show she's teasing, and gestures to the folding chair she's sitting in. "My chair broke. While they're fixing it I figured I could sit in Jensen's. I know he doesn't mind."
"Is it really broken? Maybe I could fix it." It never hurt to be helpful, and he's learned that sometimes you can do little jobs for people for extra money.
"No, Carpentry has it. I sat down too hard." She laughs at herself. "I broke my own chair by sitting in it. You know how much grief I got for that? Katie's still laughing at me."
Katie is one of the other aerialists. She does a trick where she hangs by a rope around her neck and spins in circles. Jared wants to ask her how she does it without strangling herself or breaking her neck, but at the same time he's not sure if he really wants to see past that particular illusion.
"If you want to talk to Jensen you'll have to catch him right when he's done with practice," Danneel says. "He'll be working until it's time for dinner, and after that we have to get ready. So my suggestion, if you have the time to kill and my guess is you do, is that you go watch him practice, and after he's done you can talk to him. Tell him he looked good at the matinee." Her face and voice are suddenly earnest. "He's worried about his performance, and he doesn't listen to me when I tell him he was fine."
"I can do that. Thanks." He didn't sneak into the matinee show - he ended up talking to Vincent, the strongman, about space travel and colonies on Mars - but it's not hard to compliment any of the performers on their acts.
Because Danneel is right, and he does have time to kill, and Aldis hasn't hunted him down to get the chess set back, Jared heads over to the big top and ducks inside to watch the aerialists practicing. There are a couple of acrobats practicing in one of the side rings, and the dog trainer is putting the performing dogs through their paces on the other side, but Jared is only interested in what's going on over his head.
From down in the seats it looks like Jensen and Katie and another one of the male aerialists up on the trapeze, plus a high-wire walker practicing with a parasol. Jared watches the aerialists swinging back and forth, throwing and catching each other, hurling themselves across the open expanse of the big top, doing flips before catching the trapeze on the other side. His heart skips every time Jensen, hanging from a swinging bar by his knees, flings Katie into the air so she can turn a quick flip and grab the other trapeze, and his heart skips twice when it's Jensen turning flips fifty feet in the air.
Jared thinks he can hear them calling to each other - "Pull your legs in tighter for the roll", "Hold your arms straighter", "Don't fucking drop me" - and when the high-wire walker loses her balance trying to walk on her hands and falls off her wire and into the net, all three aerialists stop moving, stop talking, and wait for her to crawl off the net and swing down to the floor, shaking her head and swearing under her breath.
They take the net down for the performances. When Jared asked why, because it seemed like that was just begging for trouble, Aldis explained that leaving it up is a sign of weakness and insecurity, and only amateurs perform for paying crowds with a net.
"Besides," he added, "it looks better this way."
It's nerve-wracking in the extreme to watch them perform for an audience without a net, although it's also incredibly exhilarating, and Jared can't really argue.
Aside from the high-wire walker, though, no one seems to need the net now. Jared entertains the thought that if he was a performer, and he worked on the trapeze or the high wire, he'd be falling on purpose just to bounce in it. It's probably a good thing he's a roustabout.
He loses his chance to ask Jensen about chess when someone comes into the tent and yells, "Dinner's ready!" and the three trapeze artists, the high-wire walker, the acrobats, and the performing dogs with their trainer, all file out, the performers heading for the cookhouse and the dogs and trainer heading for their own tent. Jared follows the aerialists, finds Aldis, and gives him the chess set back.
"Guess you're stuck losing to me," Aldis says, grinning. "We could teach Tom how to play. You'd have someone to beat."
The next afternoon, between shows, Jared and Aldis attempt to teach Tom how to play chess. They don't make a lot of progress, but it's as good a way to pass the time as any.
Part Two!