Jared and the Undead Bartender Author's Note
J2 RPS AU
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
This fic is the second iteration of the third idea for this year's bang, which I think is some kind of record. The first idea involved Jared driving cross-country after breaking up with Jensen - altho maybe Jensen just suggested a temporary separation, not an actual breaking up - and was going to involve a bunch of random encounters, lots of introspection, and short calls to Jensen's voice mail. That went through at least one other version before I gave up and shifted to idea 2, which was set in Chicago and which I thought was both adorable and really dumb. I briefly considered throwing in time travel or reincarnation in an attempt to salvage it, realized that was really dumb too, and was sucked in by a couple of posts about vampires on tumblr. (Scroll all the way down that second one. There's a lot of stuff in it that doesn't apply. Jensen's not really interested in setting everyone straight about colonial Boston and the Sons of Liberty. He's not TV-"Sleepy Hollow" Ichabod Crane.)
Fucking tumblr.
I thought those kinds of vampires could be fun. But I also couldn't give up the road trip idea - I blame my off-and-on fascination with canned ham campers - so cute and so tiny! - so here we are. Non-traditional vampires who either missed big world events or were so on the periphery they were irrelevant, plus a camper with blackout curtains. But not a canned ham, because did I mention they're really tiny? And Jared is not?
I'd love to have the kind of job - or the kind of money - where I can just take off for a couple of weeks to tow a tiny pastel camper across the country. In the absence of big blocks of time or independent wealth, we have fic. :D
Credit for Jensen's attempts to live a normal, non-tradititionally-vampiric life also goes to Only Lovers Left Alive, specifically the scene of Eve trying to book flights from Tunisia to Detroit without ever having to see the sun. Jensen's way of life is probably closer to hers than Adam's. I mean, he has a smartphone and a flat-screen TV, and he doesn't get his electricity from a generator in the back yard. I think that movie is also where I got the idea for vampires getting their blood from blood banks, but that might be a more popular addition to modern vamp canon than I think.
This is the second bang set in Boston (mostly), and while I know a reasonable amount of local history, because Jensen moves back from Dallas after the creation of the Back Bay, I had to look up some details to make sure I had them right. It's the only neighborhod in Boston with a street grid, on account of it was built on landfill in the late nineteenth century. (The rest of the city I swear is built on glorified cow paths. So many ridiculous one-way streets.) The city fathers filled what was a significant chunk of the bay with rubble, laid straight streets at right angles over it, and built brownstones. It's a tony and expensive part of town, and was even back then. If you're ever in Boston and are interested in late-nineteenth-century domestic architecture and interior design, there's a house museum in the Back Bay called the Gibson House that I highly recommend.
Abigail's is not in the Back Bay. It's in the West End, almost Beacon Hill, on Charles Street. I have no idea if it's even possible for a single person to own a block of apartments - there are six above the bar, one for Jensen and five to rent out, altho there's also a super/maintenance person but I'm not sure where he lives - but I figure Jensen bought it so long ago that maybe it was possible when he did. He's been hanging on to a few commercial buildings in Dallas since the mid-late nineteenth century, so why not six apartments in Boston? I took a bunch of pictures up and down the street, and I went up some of the side streets and into some alleys, and I'm pretty sure I've configured the inside of the building wrong. Like, I don't think there are necessarily inside stairs up the back of the bar to the backs of the apartments. Legally apartments have to have a second egress, so they'd all have back entrances, but as to how those are really configured, I have no idea. For all I know the fire escape counts as a second egress. It made enough sense to me to have a back stair, and it's the only thing that would work with Jensen's sun allergy, so I went with it.
I just realized I missed a chance to mention that Boston was the first city in the US to build a subway system. The streets were so clogged with trolleys that the city fathers went "This is bullshit, we need to dig a tunnel." The first station opened in 1897, but I think it was many, many years before Jensen ever rode the T underground.
I blame one of the girls in my writing group for the mention of Dogtown, which was originally called the Commons Settlement but according to legend became known as Dogtown for the dogs kept by the widows who lived there after the Rebvolutionary War. It's on Cape Ann, north of Boston, and is protected land now, but at the time Jensen and Joanna went to visit her cousin, just after the war, it was inhabited by war widows and tenant farmers and was starting to decline. It was totally abandoned by 1839. One of the later inhabitants was a woman called Thomazine Younger who had a witchy reputation, which stuck to the place even after she (and other supposed "witches") had died. I have no idea what happened to the vampire who bit Jensen, if it's still alive or not, so when he tells Jared he's the only one, he might be right.
I'm apparently incapable of writing about either of the Js without putting them both in Texas at some point, and I needed to have Chris in the fic somewhere, so that's why Jensen runs off to Dallas, rather than staying in Boston or going somewhere else. (I imagine the trip down was something of a trial, considering this was the 1850s and he was likely traveling by covered wagon and what was he going to eat? Boy must have been desperate to go. Handwave, handwave. :D ) In the mid-nineteenth century Dallas was kind of a crossroads of various Native American tribes - the Comanche, the Caddo, the Wichita, probably a bunch of others. I went with the Comanche as the tribe to mention mostly because they're the only one I know anything about, and because they were so terrifying to white settlers and mounted such a strong offensive that for a brief period they managed to push the frontier back, as white folks packed up their shit, abandoned their settlements, and returned to the east.
If you read last year's bang, When the Devil Came to Pluto, you've already met the ghost horses. This time they're very specifically the ghost horses of Palo Duro Canyon, because that's where Jared and Jensen are. Someday I'll get over my weird fascination with their story. Maybe.
This is also the second bang in which the Sacred Cod rates a mention. I'm tickled by the fact that there's a giant wooden fish hanging in the State House. The book about cod is by Mark Kurlansky and is called... Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. I know you're all surprised. :D
If you read my 2016 bang, The Solid Body of a Dream, you might recognize the Krays, the punk band from New York that's playing in the bar when Jared and Jensen leave for New Mexico, and if you read my 2011 bang, Angels on Ariels, you might recognize Oklahoma Ford, the Nashville band playing in the bar in the epilogue. I don't think I'll ever get over my need to seed the current bang with obscure references to previous ones.
Ten points if you recognize the woman who teaches Jensen some Romanian and her son who got them lost. No points for recognizing the story that Alona references in naming her superhots Socorro devils.
This is the second time I've written Jensen as a bartender/bar owner, and I still don't know that much about beer. I know Harpoon because it's almost as ubiquitous as Sam Adams around here. I know Night Shift and Far from the Tree because I've been to both with tamalinn to sit outside and drink flights (where I first tasted Lei, which is sweet and pineappley and has a little bite from the jalapenos), and I know Jack's Abby because they serve it at my curling club. I think I first tried Downeast at a pig picking put on by a BBQ place near me, and I like it because it's not dry.
It may or may not be evident that I've never been on a road trip in a camper van. I mapped out Jared and Jensen's route to New Mexico with the help of Go RVing and Free Map Tools, which helped me figure out how far, say, 500 miles is from a specific point. I love the internet.
It may also be evident that I know nothing about hot peppers, especially superhots. I don't have a particularly high tolerance for chile peppers, altho I have had vodka infused with Carolina reaper. When I visited wrenlet a few years ago we went to @lasrina's house and I tried the reaper-infused vodka her cousin made. I really, really needed a glass of milk to wash it down. Holy hell. So when I needed to know about growing superhots in one's own kitchen, I asked her to ask her cousin for advice. (She ended up asking Mrs Cousin, aka @ursulav, because I don't know Ursula and felt weird approaching her with "I know your husband's cousin and have some questions about Carolina reapers....") I also made liberal use of Chilli World, PepperScale, and Peppers by Mail. Have I mentioned how much I love the internet? :D Any mistakes about the growing or eating of the hottest peppers going are all mine. There really is a guy in Wales who seems to have bred a pepper even hotter than the Carolina reaper, which would make it the hottest pepper in existence. He bred it to use as an anesthetic, because if you eat it, it will kill you.
Genevieve's comment that Alona is too concerned about whether or not she can breed superhots to worry about whether or not she should, and Alona calling her "Dr Malcolm", are of course references to Jurassic Park and the glorious Jeff Goldblum.
The fact that there's a pepper farmer in the fic at all is probably dear-tiger's fault. The pepper ghosts definitely are. A lot of things can be laid at her feet.
The vampire movie about the skateboarding vamp in a chador is A Girl Walks Home at Night. I found out about it by googling for obscure or foreign vampire movies, but I've never actually seen it. I have however seen Near Dark, which I liked for its 80s-ness and its hillbilly vampires. If a vampire movie can be watched without leaving the house, Jensen has watched it. He's making up for all the years when his only option was to go to a theater after dark, at a time when the bar would be closed anyway. He embraced Netflix with both hands, back in the day when their thing was DVDs by mail.
I got the idea that vampires in this world can't taste anything from an episode of Angel, in which Angel becomes human and suddenly he can taste things! And yogurt is more disgusting than he remembered! At least that's how I remembered it. I just cranked up the vampire inability to taste anything, to the point that something has to be VERY STRONGLY FLAVORED - ie, hot as hell - for Jensen to be able to taste it. The fact that alcohol doesn't affect him unless it's mixed with blood must have come from somewhere, but I don't know where. I think most of the rest of the vampiric details are pretty standard vampire lore - the sun allergy, the needing human blood, etc etc.
I submitted the first part of the fic to my writing group - occasionally people submit fanfic - because I wasn't sure about the beginning, and ended up cutting the very first scene. Jared walking into Abigail's and meeting Misha was originally his second visit to the bar, but I thought it made a better opening. I mean, if nothing else you get a brief introduction to Jensen's crossword puzzle habit, and you meet Misha right away. I hoped it served to get the reader's attention better.
My writing group also told me that there's already a bar in Cambridge called Abigail's. Wtf.
So this isn't quite the story I set out to tell, when I first set out to tell it. The only thing it has in common with the original idea is that there's a road trip. But the original idea was never going to work, and this was more fun to write. I hope you forgive my pepper mistakes and enjoy it. :D
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
This fic is the second iteration of the third idea for this year's bang, which I think is some kind of record. The first idea involved Jared driving cross-country after breaking up with Jensen - altho maybe Jensen just suggested a temporary separation, not an actual breaking up - and was going to involve a bunch of random encounters, lots of introspection, and short calls to Jensen's voice mail. That went through at least one other version before I gave up and shifted to idea 2, which was set in Chicago and which I thought was both adorable and really dumb. I briefly considered throwing in time travel or reincarnation in an attempt to salvage it, realized that was really dumb too, and was sucked in by a couple of posts about vampires on tumblr. (Scroll all the way down that second one. There's a lot of stuff in it that doesn't apply. Jensen's not really interested in setting everyone straight about colonial Boston and the Sons of Liberty. He's not TV-"Sleepy Hollow" Ichabod Crane.)
Fucking tumblr.
I thought those kinds of vampires could be fun. But I also couldn't give up the road trip idea - I blame my off-and-on fascination with canned ham campers - so cute and so tiny! - so here we are. Non-traditional vampires who either missed big world events or were so on the periphery they were irrelevant, plus a camper with blackout curtains. But not a canned ham, because did I mention they're really tiny? And Jared is not?
I'd love to have the kind of job - or the kind of money - where I can just take off for a couple of weeks to tow a tiny pastel camper across the country. In the absence of big blocks of time or independent wealth, we have fic. :D
Credit for Jensen's attempts to live a normal, non-tradititionally-vampiric life also goes to Only Lovers Left Alive, specifically the scene of Eve trying to book flights from Tunisia to Detroit without ever having to see the sun. Jensen's way of life is probably closer to hers than Adam's. I mean, he has a smartphone and a flat-screen TV, and he doesn't get his electricity from a generator in the back yard. I think that movie is also where I got the idea for vampires getting their blood from blood banks, but that might be a more popular addition to modern vamp canon than I think.
This is the second bang set in Boston (mostly), and while I know a reasonable amount of local history, because Jensen moves back from Dallas after the creation of the Back Bay, I had to look up some details to make sure I had them right. It's the only neighborhod in Boston with a street grid, on account of it was built on landfill in the late nineteenth century. (The rest of the city I swear is built on glorified cow paths. So many ridiculous one-way streets.) The city fathers filled what was a significant chunk of the bay with rubble, laid straight streets at right angles over it, and built brownstones. It's a tony and expensive part of town, and was even back then. If you're ever in Boston and are interested in late-nineteenth-century domestic architecture and interior design, there's a house museum in the Back Bay called the Gibson House that I highly recommend.
Abigail's is not in the Back Bay. It's in the West End, almost Beacon Hill, on Charles Street. I have no idea if it's even possible for a single person to own a block of apartments - there are six above the bar, one for Jensen and five to rent out, altho there's also a super/maintenance person but I'm not sure where he lives - but I figure Jensen bought it so long ago that maybe it was possible when he did. He's been hanging on to a few commercial buildings in Dallas since the mid-late nineteenth century, so why not six apartments in Boston? I took a bunch of pictures up and down the street, and I went up some of the side streets and into some alleys, and I'm pretty sure I've configured the inside of the building wrong. Like, I don't think there are necessarily inside stairs up the back of the bar to the backs of the apartments. Legally apartments have to have a second egress, so they'd all have back entrances, but as to how those are really configured, I have no idea. For all I know the fire escape counts as a second egress. It made enough sense to me to have a back stair, and it's the only thing that would work with Jensen's sun allergy, so I went with it.
I just realized I missed a chance to mention that Boston was the first city in the US to build a subway system. The streets were so clogged with trolleys that the city fathers went "This is bullshit, we need to dig a tunnel." The first station opened in 1897, but I think it was many, many years before Jensen ever rode the T underground.
I blame one of the girls in my writing group for the mention of Dogtown, which was originally called the Commons Settlement but according to legend became known as Dogtown for the dogs kept by the widows who lived there after the Rebvolutionary War. It's on Cape Ann, north of Boston, and is protected land now, but at the time Jensen and Joanna went to visit her cousin, just after the war, it was inhabited by war widows and tenant farmers and was starting to decline. It was totally abandoned by 1839. One of the later inhabitants was a woman called Thomazine Younger who had a witchy reputation, which stuck to the place even after she (and other supposed "witches") had died. I have no idea what happened to the vampire who bit Jensen, if it's still alive or not, so when he tells Jared he's the only one, he might be right.
I'm apparently incapable of writing about either of the Js without putting them both in Texas at some point, and I needed to have Chris in the fic somewhere, so that's why Jensen runs off to Dallas, rather than staying in Boston or going somewhere else. (I imagine the trip down was something of a trial, considering this was the 1850s and he was likely traveling by covered wagon and what was he going to eat? Boy must have been desperate to go. Handwave, handwave. :D ) In the mid-nineteenth century Dallas was kind of a crossroads of various Native American tribes - the Comanche, the Caddo, the Wichita, probably a bunch of others. I went with the Comanche as the tribe to mention mostly because they're the only one I know anything about, and because they were so terrifying to white settlers and mounted such a strong offensive that for a brief period they managed to push the frontier back, as white folks packed up their shit, abandoned their settlements, and returned to the east.
If you read last year's bang, When the Devil Came to Pluto, you've already met the ghost horses. This time they're very specifically the ghost horses of Palo Duro Canyon, because that's where Jared and Jensen are. Someday I'll get over my weird fascination with their story. Maybe.
This is also the second bang in which the Sacred Cod rates a mention. I'm tickled by the fact that there's a giant wooden fish hanging in the State House. The book about cod is by Mark Kurlansky and is called... Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. I know you're all surprised. :D
If you read my 2016 bang, The Solid Body of a Dream, you might recognize the Krays, the punk band from New York that's playing in the bar when Jared and Jensen leave for New Mexico, and if you read my 2011 bang, Angels on Ariels, you might recognize Oklahoma Ford, the Nashville band playing in the bar in the epilogue. I don't think I'll ever get over my need to seed the current bang with obscure references to previous ones.
Ten points if you recognize the woman who teaches Jensen some Romanian and her son who got them lost. No points for recognizing the story that Alona references in naming her superhots Socorro devils.
This is the second time I've written Jensen as a bartender/bar owner, and I still don't know that much about beer. I know Harpoon because it's almost as ubiquitous as Sam Adams around here. I know Night Shift and Far from the Tree because I've been to both with tamalinn to sit outside and drink flights (where I first tasted Lei, which is sweet and pineappley and has a little bite from the jalapenos), and I know Jack's Abby because they serve it at my curling club. I think I first tried Downeast at a pig picking put on by a BBQ place near me, and I like it because it's not dry.
It may or may not be evident that I've never been on a road trip in a camper van. I mapped out Jared and Jensen's route to New Mexico with the help of Go RVing and Free Map Tools, which helped me figure out how far, say, 500 miles is from a specific point. I love the internet.
It may also be evident that I know nothing about hot peppers, especially superhots. I don't have a particularly high tolerance for chile peppers, altho I have had vodka infused with Carolina reaper. When I visited wrenlet a few years ago we went to @lasrina's house and I tried the reaper-infused vodka her cousin made. I really, really needed a glass of milk to wash it down. Holy hell. So when I needed to know about growing superhots in one's own kitchen, I asked her to ask her cousin for advice. (She ended up asking Mrs Cousin, aka @ursulav, because I don't know Ursula and felt weird approaching her with "I know your husband's cousin and have some questions about Carolina reapers....") I also made liberal use of Chilli World, PepperScale, and Peppers by Mail. Have I mentioned how much I love the internet? :D Any mistakes about the growing or eating of the hottest peppers going are all mine. There really is a guy in Wales who seems to have bred a pepper even hotter than the Carolina reaper, which would make it the hottest pepper in existence. He bred it to use as an anesthetic, because if you eat it, it will kill you.
Genevieve's comment that Alona is too concerned about whether or not she can breed superhots to worry about whether or not she should, and Alona calling her "Dr Malcolm", are of course references to Jurassic Park and the glorious Jeff Goldblum.
The fact that there's a pepper farmer in the fic at all is probably dear-tiger's fault. The pepper ghosts definitely are. A lot of things can be laid at her feet.
The vampire movie about the skateboarding vamp in a chador is A Girl Walks Home at Night. I found out about it by googling for obscure or foreign vampire movies, but I've never actually seen it. I have however seen Near Dark, which I liked for its 80s-ness and its hillbilly vampires. If a vampire movie can be watched without leaving the house, Jensen has watched it. He's making up for all the years when his only option was to go to a theater after dark, at a time when the bar would be closed anyway. He embraced Netflix with both hands, back in the day when their thing was DVDs by mail.
I got the idea that vampires in this world can't taste anything from an episode of Angel, in which Angel becomes human and suddenly he can taste things! And yogurt is more disgusting than he remembered! At least that's how I remembered it. I just cranked up the vampire inability to taste anything, to the point that something has to be VERY STRONGLY FLAVORED - ie, hot as hell - for Jensen to be able to taste it. The fact that alcohol doesn't affect him unless it's mixed with blood must have come from somewhere, but I don't know where. I think most of the rest of the vampiric details are pretty standard vampire lore - the sun allergy, the needing human blood, etc etc.
I submitted the first part of the fic to my writing group - occasionally people submit fanfic - because I wasn't sure about the beginning, and ended up cutting the very first scene. Jared walking into Abigail's and meeting Misha was originally his second visit to the bar, but I thought it made a better opening. I mean, if nothing else you get a brief introduction to Jensen's crossword puzzle habit, and you meet Misha right away. I hoped it served to get the reader's attention better.
My writing group also told me that there's already a bar in Cambridge called Abigail's. Wtf.
So this isn't quite the story I set out to tell, when I first set out to tell it. The only thing it has in common with the original idea is that there's a road trip. But the original idea was never going to work, and this was more fun to write. I hope you forgive my pepper mistakes and enjoy it. :D