Kneeling by the Roadside Author's Note
J2 RPS AU
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
So this is a weird one. I said that about last year's bang but this is weird in a different way. It's the first and only idea I had, instead of the second or the third or some variation of either. I think it's the first story I've ever written directed at a specific "you" rather than a general audience. I did write a J2 fic in second person POV, but that's not the same thing, and it was much shorter. This was always intended to be written as if it's Jared talking to Jensen. Originally I conceived of it as all road trip with Jared leaving Jensen voice mails talking about what he's doing and where he's been and what he's thinking, and while I still like that idea, I realized I couldn't sustain it for an entire bang.
That concept, that the entire story is the POV character telling it to a particular person, was lifted wholesale from a story by crotalus-atrox called The Delta Blues. It's either gone offline or is locked but it was first person POV about a guy who goes down to Mississippi to face his past and fix up the house that belonged to the old lady who raised him, and every so often he says something directed at his boyfriend who's in an entirely different part of the country. I loved the story so much I bound it for the author, so at least I still have the text if I'm feeling it for a reread, but if you want to read it I can't point you to it. crotalus-atrox and I are no longer friends. It was weird and disconcerting - and more than a little sad - to take the format of a fic I loved written by someone I no longer talk to and steal it for my own purposes. I make no apologies. I don't care what her reaction would be and I can't imagine how she'd find out anyway.
The seed of the story itself, the actual plot and not just the format, was sparked into being by the movie 24 Hour Party People, specifically the stuff about Ian Curtis's suicide and the immediate aftermath. Kim's memorial show was the first scene from the bang that I could really see in my head, although it took a while before I figured out who had to die for it to happen, and then I had to add something else because I thought just one person passing away wasn't quite enough to send Jared across the country without any forethought or any plan, freaking out because he thinks his world is irrevocably changed.
(I saw the movie on TV and not quite from the beginning, but if you were - or still are - into the Manchester scene from the 80s and early 90s - Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, those guys - I might recommend it.)
I'm not sure how Tom Petty became the soundtrack, considering the very 80s, very British seed of the idea, but probably because I kept hearing "Yer So Bad" on the radio when I was thinking about the fic, and the chorus seemed to fit - "But not me, baby, I've got you to save me" - and part of me has just never gotten over the desire to write songfic. Which this isn't, but still. I take public transportation to work and I'm in my car maybe twice a week, so I listen to the radio a lot less than I used to, so when it's on I pay attention.
This is the route Jared takes. According to Googlemaps it's 2117 miles, or thirty-three hours. It's a bit of a drive. And Jensen is in Seattle because it was the farthest I could get from Austin without being a. New England, or b. Alaska. I mean, I couldn't see him in Maine, and I didn't want Jared to have to drive through Canada. Besides, I have a couple friends in Seattle I could use for fact-checking. :D
So I had the format and POV, and I had the catalyst for the actual story, and I had the shortest route, and then I just had to figure out what Jared does with himself for 2100 miles, besides talk to someone who isn't there. Someone in my writing group mentioned a place called Koosharem Cafe, in Utah, which looks really fun, but it ended up being too out of the way. Don Maria's, where he has breakfast in Clovis, is a real place, as is the 24-hour diner in Salt Lake City (Dee's Family Restaurant, which was open twenty-four hours as of February 2022). God bless Trip Advisor. I've been exactly two of the places in this fic - Austin and Seattle - and neither for very long (and I went to Seattle literally decades ago) so everything Jared passes on his road trip, and everywhere he drives, required some research. I set the fic in April so I could mention the bluebonnets, so I'd know what at least one thing looked like without having to look it up.
The Gum Wall in Pike Place Market is also a real place. If I ever go back to Seattle I'll have to make a point to see it, because ew. It looks so disgusting I need to see it in person. The bakery where Jared gets the peanutbutter cookie as big as his hand is called Cinnamon Works, and from the pictures the pig statue in the original Starbucks looks very cute but to be fair I like a good pig sculpture. If you're curious what the Athenian serves, here's the lunch menu.
dear-tiger who is both dedicated beta reader and Seattle resident told me about the beach - Alki Beach - and the fact that it's currently a pain in the ass to get to because you can't take the bridge, you have to go around. "You can use that", she said, so I did.
I was thisclose to getting the ghost horses of Palo Duro Canyon into this fic - it would've been their third appearance in a bang - but it was too far off Jared's route. Ditto Roswell, ditto Ketchum. Another time, maybe.
I'm 99.44% sure that Grandma's superstition about putting your bag or a jacket or something on the passenger seat when you're driving by yourself, to keep an unexpected (and possibly inhuman) passenger from joining you in the car, came from a post on Tumblr. I love that kind of thing, the references to what a weird and spooky place the US can be, especially the more sparsely inhabited places, the wide open, empty spaces west of the Mississippi. I've lived in the eastern half of the country my whole life and I'm a sucker for a creepy story about cornfields, and I love the vast midwestern plains and the dusty southwestern deserts, and the determination of people to make their mark on parts of a country that really, really doesn't want them there.
Gory Alice is a callback to bang 2016, The Solid Body of a Dream ( El Jay, AO3), and the album Danneel plays for Jared is Twenty Flags in a Row, their debut. She makes a joke about him running off to join the circus - and what would he do in the circus anyway, play in the orchestra? - as the vaguest possible reference to bang 2013, That Daring Young Man, in which he does run off to join the circus and becomes a roustabout, putting up and taking down the big top. If I didn't have a random reference somewhere I wouldn't be me, and the last three bangs being set in non-contemporary AUs (two in fantasy pasts and one in outer space) made it a little difficult to plant mentions from recent previous fics.
This is my third bang with bands, although only the second in which Jared plays in one. (The first is the aforementioned bang 2016, in which his band was called the Krays. They were more popular, and more marketable, than Gory Alice.) Writing it reminded me that I'm way out of practice coming up with band names. Jake's soon-to-be-former band with Matt, The Heart of the Stone, was originally called A Day in the Life, but since I also had Sunday All Day (and I like that name) I thought that was one too many Days, plus now Matt can joke that his band's nickname is the HOTS. Because, you know, they're hot. Maybe it's funnier in my head. Potatoes of Defiance, as Danneel learns, gets its name from Terry Pratchett's Small Gods - "Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground." I always thought it would make a great band name, although considering the source it might be better for a more underground, activist kind of group, made up of people who want to disrupt the status quo. Which is not Jared's band. He doesn't really want to disrupt anything. He just wants to earn a living making music.
For reasons that escape me I really wanted an excuse for Smith's to host a full day of bands covering country songs, and it made sense to me to make it a fundraiser, but I don't live in Texas, I don't know what kinds of non-profits there are in greater Austin that could benefit from a club owner's good will and a bunch of musicians' willingness to do something fun for a good cause. There's an Austinite on one of the discord servers I'm on who coincidentally works for (and with) non-profits, so I asked her for suggestions. HAAM (Health Alliance for Austin Musicians) was one of them. Every year they do a fundraising event, HAAM Day, which was too appropriate to not use. Look it up on YouTube. There's some neat shit there.
The title of the fic comes from a poem by Anne Carson called "O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love":
I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck - here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a roadtrip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
And the feeling I had in my head for when Jared suddenly decides without warning or plan to drive from Austin to Seattle has its roots in the most random, unrelated quote from Carla Speed McNeil's Finder, issue 1 - "But I was a mess, and I'd stayed six months instead of six weeks as I'd planned. Felt like time to do something else. I found myself close to the northern foothills and something said 'Go see Emma' so I went." It's a little voice in your head telling you to do something, because it makes the most sense at that point in time and what else are you going to do?
I started writing this with no idea as to why exactly Jared and Jensen break up, or why exactly Misha's to blame - although I don't think he really is, regardless of how Jared feels - a vague idea formed while I was editing, and while I know more now, I don't know the whole story. I finally decided Jensen got a really good opportunity up in Seattle (not performance related, as he doesn't write music or sing in public although he does occasionally fill in for someone in Christian's band Lucy Long if they need a singer), and maybe he was tired of being a musician's boyfriend, and Jared wouldn't go with him and Jensen didn't think Jared was enough of a draw to stay. Jared thinks it's partly his fault Jensen left, because he's driving halfway across the country to see someone who by rights shouldn't really want to see him - but who he still really wants to see - so who knows. Maybe he gave Jensen an ultimatum he shouldn't have. I know just enough time has passed and there's just enough water under the bridge that whatever happened two years ago, they're both over it and can be friends again.
(As a semi-related aside, Lucy Long gets its name from one of Robert E Lee's horses. The band members are in no way Lee apologists, or even equestrians. I just thought it was a good name.)
Misha had the hots for Jensen and didn't mind that Jensen had a boyfriend. He had it in his head that Jared should be ok with it, and that Jensen could date more than one person at a time, and was very insistent about it to both of them. And neither of them was interested. Misha was, well, we'll say "persistent". (Jared would say he was a dick but Jared is biased.) I guess I needed an asshole in this fic and it was Misha's turn. Sorry, Misha.
dear-tiger pointed out that the first draft made it sound like Jensen cheated. Hopefully I clarified enough that it doesn't read that way any more. Because, for the record, Jensen did not cheat on his boyfriend, especially not with Misha.
I'm not 100% sure what kind of sound Chad has in mind for the new band, other than he apparently wants to poach Alona from Sunday All Day, and thinks this is his best bet. A fiddle player would be nice too. Listening to the radio doesn't actually help me here, so I have no references to point readers to and say "This is what I was thinking, this kind of thing". Imagine a fiddle and a guitar and a bass and drums and something vaguely western and vaguely Appalachian folk. Vaguely. I love writing about musicians but I know nothing about music, and this time I didn't even use anyone for research. Sometimes it's a problem.
Unlike last year's bang, where Jared and Jensen part ways in the end because Jensen's a ghost and he has to move on and the boys never get a life together, this time they part ways because Jared realizes he can't keep avoiding the big changes in his life and he has to go home and face them. But he and Jensen are now legitimately friends - turns out they've each kind of patched up their relationship separately without the other really being aware. At least that's what I want to get across, that Jared can drive across half the country to see someone because he needs them, because at bottom he never really stopped needing them, and in the meantime the other person has independently reached the conclusion that he's fine with that. They can be friends. They can each make a place for the other in their lives, even if it's not the same place they used to occupy. And all it took was Jared thinking his life was falling apart and he couldn't patch it up on his own.
Sometimes it do be like that. You're able to fix your shit yourself, if you think through it enough times, but you need someone else to unload on and hurry you along. I figured out and settled into the overall arc of the story the longer I wrote it - all I knew at first was that Jared couldn't cope and needed Jensen to help him work out how, and he had to drive to Seattle for it - originally it was really just a very long road trip fic - but it makes sense to me now it's done. I hope it makes sense to you too.
NC-17
Author's Note
Master post
Art
So this is a weird one. I said that about last year's bang but this is weird in a different way. It's the first and only idea I had, instead of the second or the third or some variation of either. I think it's the first story I've ever written directed at a specific "you" rather than a general audience. I did write a J2 fic in second person POV, but that's not the same thing, and it was much shorter. This was always intended to be written as if it's Jared talking to Jensen. Originally I conceived of it as all road trip with Jared leaving Jensen voice mails talking about what he's doing and where he's been and what he's thinking, and while I still like that idea, I realized I couldn't sustain it for an entire bang.
That concept, that the entire story is the POV character telling it to a particular person, was lifted wholesale from a story by crotalus-atrox called The Delta Blues. It's either gone offline or is locked but it was first person POV about a guy who goes down to Mississippi to face his past and fix up the house that belonged to the old lady who raised him, and every so often he says something directed at his boyfriend who's in an entirely different part of the country. I loved the story so much I bound it for the author, so at least I still have the text if I'm feeling it for a reread, but if you want to read it I can't point you to it. crotalus-atrox and I are no longer friends. It was weird and disconcerting - and more than a little sad - to take the format of a fic I loved written by someone I no longer talk to and steal it for my own purposes. I make no apologies. I don't care what her reaction would be and I can't imagine how she'd find out anyway.
The seed of the story itself, the actual plot and not just the format, was sparked into being by the movie 24 Hour Party People, specifically the stuff about Ian Curtis's suicide and the immediate aftermath. Kim's memorial show was the first scene from the bang that I could really see in my head, although it took a while before I figured out who had to die for it to happen, and then I had to add something else because I thought just one person passing away wasn't quite enough to send Jared across the country without any forethought or any plan, freaking out because he thinks his world is irrevocably changed.
(I saw the movie on TV and not quite from the beginning, but if you were - or still are - into the Manchester scene from the 80s and early 90s - Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, those guys - I might recommend it.)
I'm not sure how Tom Petty became the soundtrack, considering the very 80s, very British seed of the idea, but probably because I kept hearing "Yer So Bad" on the radio when I was thinking about the fic, and the chorus seemed to fit - "But not me, baby, I've got you to save me" - and part of me has just never gotten over the desire to write songfic. Which this isn't, but still. I take public transportation to work and I'm in my car maybe twice a week, so I listen to the radio a lot less than I used to, so when it's on I pay attention.
This is the route Jared takes. According to Googlemaps it's 2117 miles, or thirty-three hours. It's a bit of a drive. And Jensen is in Seattle because it was the farthest I could get from Austin without being a. New England, or b. Alaska. I mean, I couldn't see him in Maine, and I didn't want Jared to have to drive through Canada. Besides, I have a couple friends in Seattle I could use for fact-checking. :D
So I had the format and POV, and I had the catalyst for the actual story, and I had the shortest route, and then I just had to figure out what Jared does with himself for 2100 miles, besides talk to someone who isn't there. Someone in my writing group mentioned a place called Koosharem Cafe, in Utah, which looks really fun, but it ended up being too out of the way. Don Maria's, where he has breakfast in Clovis, is a real place, as is the 24-hour diner in Salt Lake City (Dee's Family Restaurant, which was open twenty-four hours as of February 2022). God bless Trip Advisor. I've been exactly two of the places in this fic - Austin and Seattle - and neither for very long (and I went to Seattle literally decades ago) so everything Jared passes on his road trip, and everywhere he drives, required some research. I set the fic in April so I could mention the bluebonnets, so I'd know what at least one thing looked like without having to look it up.
The Gum Wall in Pike Place Market is also a real place. If I ever go back to Seattle I'll have to make a point to see it, because ew. It looks so disgusting I need to see it in person. The bakery where Jared gets the peanutbutter cookie as big as his hand is called Cinnamon Works, and from the pictures the pig statue in the original Starbucks looks very cute but to be fair I like a good pig sculpture. If you're curious what the Athenian serves, here's the lunch menu.
dear-tiger who is both dedicated beta reader and Seattle resident told me about the beach - Alki Beach - and the fact that it's currently a pain in the ass to get to because you can't take the bridge, you have to go around. "You can use that", she said, so I did.
I was thisclose to getting the ghost horses of Palo Duro Canyon into this fic - it would've been their third appearance in a bang - but it was too far off Jared's route. Ditto Roswell, ditto Ketchum. Another time, maybe.
I'm 99.44% sure that Grandma's superstition about putting your bag or a jacket or something on the passenger seat when you're driving by yourself, to keep an unexpected (and possibly inhuman) passenger from joining you in the car, came from a post on Tumblr. I love that kind of thing, the references to what a weird and spooky place the US can be, especially the more sparsely inhabited places, the wide open, empty spaces west of the Mississippi. I've lived in the eastern half of the country my whole life and I'm a sucker for a creepy story about cornfields, and I love the vast midwestern plains and the dusty southwestern deserts, and the determination of people to make their mark on parts of a country that really, really doesn't want them there.
Gory Alice is a callback to bang 2016, The Solid Body of a Dream ( El Jay, AO3), and the album Danneel plays for Jared is Twenty Flags in a Row, their debut. She makes a joke about him running off to join the circus - and what would he do in the circus anyway, play in the orchestra? - as the vaguest possible reference to bang 2013, That Daring Young Man, in which he does run off to join the circus and becomes a roustabout, putting up and taking down the big top. If I didn't have a random reference somewhere I wouldn't be me, and the last three bangs being set in non-contemporary AUs (two in fantasy pasts and one in outer space) made it a little difficult to plant mentions from recent previous fics.
This is my third bang with bands, although only the second in which Jared plays in one. (The first is the aforementioned bang 2016, in which his band was called the Krays. They were more popular, and more marketable, than Gory Alice.) Writing it reminded me that I'm way out of practice coming up with band names. Jake's soon-to-be-former band with Matt, The Heart of the Stone, was originally called A Day in the Life, but since I also had Sunday All Day (and I like that name) I thought that was one too many Days, plus now Matt can joke that his band's nickname is the HOTS. Because, you know, they're hot. Maybe it's funnier in my head. Potatoes of Defiance, as Danneel learns, gets its name from Terry Pratchett's Small Gods - "Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground." I always thought it would make a great band name, although considering the source it might be better for a more underground, activist kind of group, made up of people who want to disrupt the status quo. Which is not Jared's band. He doesn't really want to disrupt anything. He just wants to earn a living making music.
For reasons that escape me I really wanted an excuse for Smith's to host a full day of bands covering country songs, and it made sense to me to make it a fundraiser, but I don't live in Texas, I don't know what kinds of non-profits there are in greater Austin that could benefit from a club owner's good will and a bunch of musicians' willingness to do something fun for a good cause. There's an Austinite on one of the discord servers I'm on who coincidentally works for (and with) non-profits, so I asked her for suggestions. HAAM (Health Alliance for Austin Musicians) was one of them. Every year they do a fundraising event, HAAM Day, which was too appropriate to not use. Look it up on YouTube. There's some neat shit there.
The title of the fic comes from a poem by Anne Carson called "O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love":
I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck - here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a roadtrip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
And the feeling I had in my head for when Jared suddenly decides without warning or plan to drive from Austin to Seattle has its roots in the most random, unrelated quote from Carla Speed McNeil's Finder, issue 1 - "But I was a mess, and I'd stayed six months instead of six weeks as I'd planned. Felt like time to do something else. I found myself close to the northern foothills and something said 'Go see Emma' so I went." It's a little voice in your head telling you to do something, because it makes the most sense at that point in time and what else are you going to do?
I started writing this with no idea as to why exactly Jared and Jensen break up, or why exactly Misha's to blame - although I don't think he really is, regardless of how Jared feels - a vague idea formed while I was editing, and while I know more now, I don't know the whole story. I finally decided Jensen got a really good opportunity up in Seattle (not performance related, as he doesn't write music or sing in public although he does occasionally fill in for someone in Christian's band Lucy Long if they need a singer), and maybe he was tired of being a musician's boyfriend, and Jared wouldn't go with him and Jensen didn't think Jared was enough of a draw to stay. Jared thinks it's partly his fault Jensen left, because he's driving halfway across the country to see someone who by rights shouldn't really want to see him - but who he still really wants to see - so who knows. Maybe he gave Jensen an ultimatum he shouldn't have. I know just enough time has passed and there's just enough water under the bridge that whatever happened two years ago, they're both over it and can be friends again.
(As a semi-related aside, Lucy Long gets its name from one of Robert E Lee's horses. The band members are in no way Lee apologists, or even equestrians. I just thought it was a good name.)
Misha had the hots for Jensen and didn't mind that Jensen had a boyfriend. He had it in his head that Jared should be ok with it, and that Jensen could date more than one person at a time, and was very insistent about it to both of them. And neither of them was interested. Misha was, well, we'll say "persistent". (Jared would say he was a dick but Jared is biased.) I guess I needed an asshole in this fic and it was Misha's turn. Sorry, Misha.
dear-tiger pointed out that the first draft made it sound like Jensen cheated. Hopefully I clarified enough that it doesn't read that way any more. Because, for the record, Jensen did not cheat on his boyfriend, especially not with Misha.
I'm not 100% sure what kind of sound Chad has in mind for the new band, other than he apparently wants to poach Alona from Sunday All Day, and thinks this is his best bet. A fiddle player would be nice too. Listening to the radio doesn't actually help me here, so I have no references to point readers to and say "This is what I was thinking, this kind of thing". Imagine a fiddle and a guitar and a bass and drums and something vaguely western and vaguely Appalachian folk. Vaguely. I love writing about musicians but I know nothing about music, and this time I didn't even use anyone for research. Sometimes it's a problem.
Unlike last year's bang, where Jared and Jensen part ways in the end because Jensen's a ghost and he has to move on and the boys never get a life together, this time they part ways because Jared realizes he can't keep avoiding the big changes in his life and he has to go home and face them. But he and Jensen are now legitimately friends - turns out they've each kind of patched up their relationship separately without the other really being aware. At least that's what I want to get across, that Jared can drive across half the country to see someone because he needs them, because at bottom he never really stopped needing them, and in the meantime the other person has independently reached the conclusion that he's fine with that. They can be friends. They can each make a place for the other in their lives, even if it's not the same place they used to occupy. And all it took was Jared thinking his life was falling apart and he couldn't patch it up on his own.
Sometimes it do be like that. You're able to fix your shit yourself, if you think through it enough times, but you need someone else to unload on and hurry you along. I figured out and settled into the overall arc of the story the longer I wrote it - all I knew at first was that Jared couldn't cope and needed Jensen to help him work out how, and he had to drive to Seattle for it - originally it was really just a very long road trip fic - but it makes sense to me now it's done. I hope it makes sense to you too.