It's past 4 am and I don't give a fuck anymore.
Title: I Could Stick Around and Get Along With You
Fandom: Supernatural RPF
Rating: PG
Pairing: Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki
Summary: AU in which Jared’s a fabulous Broadway star and Jensen’s been in way too many tween movies.
Notes: My life stopped making sense three hundred words into this story. I knew I’d regret coming back to fandom. Title taken from Martin Solveig's Hello.
“Help make me queer.”
That’s not really the first thing Jared wants to hear first thing on a Monday morning (or, you know, ever), particularly not from a worryingly earnest looking Jensen Ackles. He blinks a couple of times and checks out the immediate vicinity discreetly to ensure Jensen was speaking to him. Which, as it turns out, he was.
“Um,” Jared manages. “What?”
“Or gay, or homosexual.” Jensen pushes his clunky black glasses (…where’d those come from?) up the bridge of his nose. “I’m not as cripplingly pedantic as I’m told I seem, but if you prefer to argue semantics-“
“Oh my God,” Jared says helplessly and it sort of comes out as a whimper. He must have had another of Mike’s pot brownies, because this cannot be actually happening. Jensen turning up in his room and demanding to be made magically gay was just too weird to be real, even for him.
“Well, you’re well within your rights, since most terms have negative connotations in popular culture. But to further convince you,” Jensen holds out his coffee, “I ordered that girly stuff you liked.”
Jared’s illusions of being quick on the draw shatter with a loud clinking noise as he dumbly reaches out and takes the cup from Jensen’s hand. “It’s not girly,” is all he can come up with.
“Effeminate, then.” Jensen shrugs. “Anyway. I need you to help make me gay.”
Jared’s long-harbored suspicion that Mike’s pot brownies are more pot than brownie are pretty much confirmed at this point, so he says, “Why?” and it sounds nearly calm. He’s not staring at Jensen with his mouth open at any rate, so there’s a win right there.
Jensen fiddles with his irrationally unattractive glasses again. “It’s for a role. The role of Jensen Ackles in real life,” and he does one of those half-smirk half-grimace things, and adds quickly, “no, it’s actually this progressive Sam Mendes flick. Word is the Pitt’s going to be in it.”
Jared, who is by now mostly used to the weird mini-tangents Jensen tends to take mid-conversation, to say nothing of his truly horrendous collection of puns, has to blink further for this to compute. “You’re going gay for the Pitt?”
Jensen fixes him with a stare, its potency mostly detracted by the plastic frames. “So would you. Hypothetically. Were it an option.”
Jared flails a little, but he’s already been beaten into a state of horrified deference to this conversation. So he says, “And you want me to…”
“Make me gay,” Jensen crosses his arms defensively, like anything he’s saying makes any form of sense. “Make me seem gay. I reasoned that you’d be the best mentor, taking into consideration your own homosexuality and passable talent.”
Jared can’t help snorting at that one. “Thanks.”
“It’s not as if you have trouble exhibiting what’s popularly accepted as gay behavior,” Jensen argues, and Jared literally can only stare on in dumbstruck fascination. “You wear glitter mascara regularly, have a daily moisturizing routine that exceeds thirty minutes and wear girl jeans. Conclusion, openly gay.”
They’re not girl jeans, is all Jared’s brain can come up with.
“What, exactly,” and he’s almost afraid to ask, “does teaching you to act gay entail?”
Jensen brightens. Jared is inevitably reminded of the posters his sister has plastered across her walls, ones that feature Jensen looking at them soulfully, holding a guitar as Disney tweens with too much makeup and hypnotically symmetrical hair cluster around him like moths. “Technically, the character’s bisexual, but I’m willing to be open with my interpretation. So I want you to explain the minutiae of your thought process in your daily life.”
Jared frowns. “So…you’re gonna stalk me?”
Disturbingly, Jensen doesn’t deny this. He goes for another shrug instead. “If that’s what it takes.”
Hearing Jensen expound upon it at length means Jared’s coming to see this as a distinct reality instead of one of his pot-induced hallucinations (the clue should’ve been the clothes, really. When Jared hallucinates, Jensen’s always wearing delectable ensembles that consist mainly of scarf-dress shirt-skinny jeans and has a haircut that doesn’t actually make him look like a reject from a Justin Bieber concert.) He takes a sip of his coffee and doesn’t quite know what to think of the fact that Jensen actually has gotten his order right. “Oooookay.” He takes a deep breath. “Okay.”
Jensen lights up. Like, his eyes fucking twinkle. Jared finds himself wondering whether this was the OMG My Tomboyish Yet Fundamentally Attractive Best Friend Was in Love With Me This Whole Time look, or the classic This Duet has Helped Me Realize My Feelings one. Either way, he totally wasn’t expecting it when Jensen launches himself at him and gives him a hug.
“…Dude,” Jared says, shocked to his very core.
“I’ve been a singing, dancing heartthrob since I was seventeen!” Jensen says, voice slightly muffled by Jared’s shirt. “I can’t physically stop hugging you!”
Jared pats him awkwardly on the back. “You’re not going to sing, are you?”
Jensen draws away, and Jared surreptitiously checks his clothing for Wal-Mart cooties and adjusts his hat. Jensen says, “Not this time, no.”
Jared’s utterly bewildered at this point. Nothing makes any sense. “Okay,” he mumbles. “Goodie.”
Jensen looks patronizing. “Eloquent,” he says cattily.
“Shuddup.”
*
“So, how’s this new friendship thing going with Jensen?” Sandy asks him a few days later. “I mean, you aren’t turning into a caricature of yourself, so I can only conclude he's not planning to make you join his android army ranks."
"Jensen's more of a wannabe android," Jared points out absently, adding an extra spritz of hairspray to a lock on the side that will not go right before stowing it away in his bag. "It's Tom you gotta look out for."
When he turns, he finds Sandy is staring at him, looking a mixture of stunned and concerned.
“You don’t like him, do you?” she asks in an urgent whisper, looking a little horrified. "He is mindless, Jay. Mindless."
"I know that," Jared says defensively. "His only redeeming feature is his OCD, and even that doesn't kick nearly often enough." Ask Jared even now and his mental picture of Jensen can be summed up by hideous clothes, lamentable haircut, and special Wednesday socks, wtf.
(What he doesn't point out is that they've begun texting a lot when they aren't hanging out, and not all of it is to do with Jensen's re-invention of himself as Jensen the Gay. Like when Jared's stuck next to the nutter in the gym who keeps talking to himself as he lifts weights, or when Jensen thinks of a song that he was compelled to sing but couldn't because he was in public.
A giraffe cn kick a lion's head clean off, Jensen writes once, at about one am on a Tuesday when they don't have anything in the morning.
Lovely stuff. Now go to bed
Harley lets out an unhappy whine as his phone lights up again, jarring in the darkness of the room. Word penguin is derived from the welsh. Means 'white head' fyi, think about that next time u buy clearasil
I don't buy clearasil- perfect complexion already. Stop watching the Discovery channel
Wht r u doing
Jared has to stare at the screen for a while. He tries and retries, and eventually he just goes with instinct and types, Sexytimzz
Rly?
Jesus, how are you even real? no, of course not. now go stop watching Attenborough and go to sleep
I 1ce watched him film 2 ants go @ it. srsly creepy
that's...nice?
isnt it?
And then radio silence for a week, only meeting at rehearsals, until Jensen texts him something inane about buying a slanket.)
Sandy's’ expression turns to one of relief. “Good. ‘Cause, you know, you’ve already got enough drama going on without a Ken doll who sings showtunes in your life."
“My life is perfectly under control,” Jared protests, “and I’m offended that you’d think I would have such poor taste as to fall for a man whose idea of high-end fashion is Target.”
Sandy looks bemused. "Really?"
"That, and the fact the he seems to scrounge up sweatshirts from the dumpsters behind Wal-Mart."
Sandy snorts. "Well, as long as you know what you're doing."
“I do,” Jared assures her, because maybe if he can convince Sandy he can convince himself.
It’s not working so far, but if he keeps it up it just might work out. Maybe if he somehow counteracted all that psychological fuckery that went on when Megan had gone through the standard Jensen Ackles phase and plastered glossy pictures of him everywhere.
Maybe.
*
Shortly after the third rehearsal , before Jensen joined but after Jared had memorized nearly all his lines, he had officially come out to the rest of the cast. This was in spite of the fact that Mike knew and Sandy knew and everyone else had drawn fairly safe conclusions from the way he dressed. Kripke had smiled encouragingly, albeit vaguely, and Tom had wandered over to stare deeply into his eyes and say, I feel you, man, in a way that left Jared feeling a bit violated. Not to mention that Mike has let slip a week earlier that Tom was the sort of guy who hung out around ER’s and wrote pacey poetry about having sex on the beach. Jared could never look at him without thinking, sand on my dick. You fucked-up gypsy.
Anyway, Jensen was probably the only one on the whole cast and crew who didn’t know for certain that he was flamin’. And Jared had kind of liked the idea of his sexual orientation being covered in enigma, if only because Jensen had recently grown out of his plasticky teenage good looks and was beginning to attain a stubble-y level of ruggedness, and Jared would have quite liked to have a former teen star fall in love with him and be pathetically unsure whether Jared would welcome his attentions.
Dreams of Jensen giving him looks of thinly-veiled passion in over tech week are effectively dashed by this new development. You simply don’t ask the guy you’re planning to have a sexuality crisis over to give you tips on how to act gay.
That said, the signals Jensen was currently sending were seriously fucked-up.
“Honey, limp wrists are a stereotype that went out of style in the fifties,” Jared says sharply as Jensen tries to pull that particular maneuver, whilst looking at him coyly through his eyelashes. Even he couldn’t do that. Hell, the Pitt probably couldn’t do that. Disney boot camp had a lot to answer for.
They’ve been running lines for almost a solid hour now, and the part Jensen wants to try out for has the disadvantage of being ridiculously complicated. The character’s bisexual, represses, closeted, and his name’s Bob. Jared maintains that playing a palindrome bisexual was considerably harder than playing an ordinary one.
Jensen drops the coy thing pretty fast and glares up at him sulkily. “My main attraction -aside from my rakish good looks- is my sexual appeal. You’re trying to make me understate that.”
“God forbid you be subtle,” Jared agrees. They’re mostly alone in the enormous dance studio, so there isn’t really anyone he can make eye contact with to exchange a meaningful look when Jensen’s getting his diva on. “Come on, it isn’t that hard. It’s all in the posture.”
Jensen mutters a swearword (or the android equivalent, Jared’s still not sure). “Any role that requires anything other than a voice able to fill a large cathedral such as I have is not a role worth the effort.”
Jared runs a hand through his hair, which, he thinks wistfully, was perfectly coiffed in the morning. But Jensen was being particularly difficult, and, well. There really isn’t enough hairspray in the world.
“Look,” he says tiredly, “so you’re not really into this. I should have known, really, when you began slipping Brokeback Mountain quotes in between your lines for Victor/Victoria last week.”
Jensen has the grace to look chastised. One of his lips is quirking, though. “It was endearing?” and the fact that he ends it as a question makes Jared’s heart melt a little.
“It was endearing,” Jared confirms reluctantly. “As was the-“
Jensen’s hands were warm, and his fingers were obscenely long as he cupped Jared’s face. And his mouth -oh- was on Jared’s in a hard, sweet kiss.
It takes Jared a while to register what’s even happening. Then Jensen’s too-warm fingertips brush the skin of his stomach, under his shirt, and Jared jerks away. He holds Jensen’s wrists away from him. Jensen’s green eyes were fever-bright: his lower lip shone.
“Jay,” he says hoarsely. Jared’s face burned, where they had been making contact with Jensen’s fingers. “C’mon, don’t tell me this is a bad idea.”
“This is a bad idea,” and shit, his career as a countertenor on Broadway was fucked if that’s what he sounded like from now on. Jensen slips his hands from Jared’s, and reaches up to cup his face once more.
Jensen smiles a little, sighs a little. “You’re going to be characteristically uptight about this, aren’t you?”
What is this, Jared wants to demand. Sit down and write me a thousand-word essay with double-spacing. Use your guitar if necessary.
When Jared doesn’t reply immediately, Jensen sighs again. “I’m literally burrowing tips from angsty teenagers I’ve played in musicals in saying that I’m going to kiss you again now.”
The fact that he still sounds uncannily mechanical when he’s not making out like a god goes a long way to comfort Jared. “Just no showtunes.”
Jensen looks ready to haggle this point, but then his inner Zac Efron visibly kicks in and he nods firmly. “Deal.”
They don’t break away from this kiss for quite a long time.
THE END