"blind night" (Jensen/Sam, PG-13) (Revised/Reposted)
I've had my week of mourning, and it's back on the horse I climb. I've missed you all. ♥
Reposting the following ("Blind Night", aka the Beauty and the Beast 'verse). I'd taken it down as it didn't seem somehow right to me to have it lingering about in the shape of a prologue when I hadn't written more, but some have come looking for it and the story's caught my imagination again. This bit has been revised and the next part is being beta'd. Writing is good therapy, methinks.
To that end:
Title: Blind Night
Pairing: Jensen/Sam (SPN/RPS crossover)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jensen, a rising Hollywood star on the fast track to burning out, sees something he shouldn't have and pays the consequences. Sam, learning to be human in a world not his own. Sanctuary beneath the cities, forgotten by almost all, found only by those in need.
Warnings: Post S3 of SPN, AU Jensen. Much with the hurt/comfort.
A/N: As with the Scrubs stuff, this is a re-conceptualization of "Beauty and the Beast" (Linda Hamilton, Ron Perlman aka "Vincent").
Blind Night
Jensen wakes slowly, wishing he hadn't. Darkness wraps him in a smothering cocoon. There are bandages around his eyes that remind him more of a blindfold by the hour, or by the day, or for however long he's been trapped down here. Wherever this place is. No one will tell him.
His ribs ache where Lauren's hired hit men kicked him. If he breathes too quickly or upsets himself, the pain stabs sharp, fierce, hot. The man who's taken care of him since he woke the first time tells him that two are broken, as is his collarbone. His tibia is fractured.
He'd thought Lauren was a classy lady. One of the good people left in the business.
All Jensen knows about medicine is what he's learned from playing bit parts on hospital dramas but with this much damage, he's sure he should be in a hospital. Why isn't he?
"It's not safe," was all his caretaker would say, too far away for Jensen to touch and know more about than the sound of his voice. "I did what I had to do. If you get worse, we'll do what we have to do then. I -- we -- won't let you die." He laughed, but it wasn't funny, and he didn't sound like he was smiling. "I promise."
And then he went away, and Jensen slept, and when he woke his eyes had been re-bandaged, the gauze cool and soft. The bandages wrapped around his face are wet with some kind of gel -- a poultice, the guy said -- who uses poultices when they have antibiotics, Jesus, where is he --
"Calm down," the man says, arriving without Jensen noticing in his rising panic, the rush of blood in his ears drowning all other sound. Except his voice. "You'll relapse if you're not careful. We've worked too hard for you to let that happen."
"You." Jensen turns his head, though it hurts, and tries to strain to see through the bandages, though he can't. "Let me go home. C'mon. I just wanna go home. Please."
The man sighs, heavy and long, frustrated and tired and hanging on to the last thin strand of his patience. "I can't. Not yet. You wouldn't survive the trip, and the men who attacked you are still hunting." He's quiet for a moment. "I can't risk you. I won't."
"Why?" Jensen tries to wrestle his hands, also bandaged, free of the too-heavy bedding keeping him pressed down and still, and press them to his head. He doesn't, because the fiery pain that prickles in his face is at a low throb and he won't risk that kind of agony again. "What makes me so special?"
"I know you're upset," the man says, not answering Jensen's question. He's calm again, maddeningly so. "You have a right to be. I know you're scared."
"I keep blacking out," Jensen says, giving up the attempt to move. It costs him too much strength and he guesses that proves the mystery man's point right there. "And when I wake up, it's always night. Can't see a thing."
"That's the bandages. Your eyes aren't hurt."
Jensen twitches one shoulder, irritable, and hisses through the stab of hurt. He laughs raggedly, once, when it's passed. "Silver linings."
"Don't take them for granted. You're lucky to be alive."
"Buried alive."
The man doesn't deny that.
"Sucks to be me, huh?"
"A little. Do you remember anything else about the men who attacked you?"
Jensen goes still. "No," he lies right away. Doesn't matter where he goes or how well he tries to hide himself, he knows now that Cohan's men will find himself and when they do, they'll finish the job.
***
"Think you're smart, huh?" The razor tip of a knife pricked the underside of Jensen's chin. He could smell the man behind him if he couldn't turn his head to get a look, sour breath and ripe sweat beneath top-quality leather and heavy cologne. "Not smart enough to think maybe you shouldn't walk home alone."
Jensen's gone as still as death. "Whatever you want, it's yours," he says. He'd been mugged before, all part of life in L.A. "Take my wallet, my keys, anything, and we both walk away. Deal?"
"Not even close." The knife penetrated a centimeter or two deep, drawing hot blood that ran down Jensen's throat. "You and me are going for a ride, pretty boy."
Jensen's breath caught. He knew what this was about. His stomach knotted with a sudden gut-deep terror, the taste of bile heavy in the back of his throat. Cohan. She must have sent these guys. Shit. "No."
"You think you have a choice? Cute." The man drew his knife in a shallow line over Jensen's throat, warning him of what he can do. Hard and not interested in hiding it, getting his rocks off on drawing Jensen's blood. "Our employer doesn't want you dead. She wants to teach you a lesson. People won't open their doors to you if you're not so pretty anymore, will they?"
The knife trailed up Jensen's cheek, blood running thin and fast. "I won't tell anyone what I saw," Jensen says, knowing he's talking too fast and breathing too shallowly, pitch thinning with fear. "I swear."
It wasn't much, what he'd seen, what Lauren wanted him punished for. He hadn't thought it was anything. An envelope stuffed with money changing hands, Lauren passing the cash to a dark-haired man whose skin was so white the low lamplight turned him almost the blue shade of skimmed milk.
Jensen forgot almost right away and would have forever. Only the next day a newcomer died. Prettier than Lauren, younger, sweeter. She'd been drained dry. No blood left in her, almost no spinal fluid, her brain dried up like a raisin. One bullet that'd gone through her dry skull out her shriveled left eye. Not pretty at all now.
He hadn't said a word, not to anyone, but Lauren knew she'd been compromised. Somehow, she knew.
And now there was a man with a knife pressed to his neck.
"Your word's worth precisely dick. Get in the van." The knife moves to the small of Jensen's back. "Now."
"No." Jensen tried to break for it, to run. He didn't get far.
***
When it was over, they pitched him out of the van with his ribs broken and his face on fire.
He can't remember anything else before waking up underground, a deep-voiced man taping the edge of heavy bandages around his eyes. "You're safe," the man said. It was all he said.
Jensen didn't believe him for a second. There's no such thing as safe in the world where he lived.
***
"Jensen," the man says, impatient and struggling not to be. "I need you to pay attention. Don't lie to me. What did you see?"
Jensen's gotten good at reading the nuances in his speech. Cohan would be proud. She always worked hard with Jensen on that. Called Jensen her protégé, funny from a woman barely thirty but that's the biz for you, and that's so many kinds of fucked-up now that Jensen can only laugh and know the sound is a crazy one.
Jensen can picture the man shrugging and knows he's grinning faintly, but can't imagine what his face looks like. That bothers him deeply, a needle of curiosity piercing soul-deep, and what else does he have to think about?
"Why'd you save me?" he blurts. "You could have left me there to bleed out. Why didn't you?"
"I can't answer that."
"No. You owe me."
"I owe you?" The man snorted. "That's a good one."
"Please, man, throw me a bone. I just…" Jensen tries to move his hands to show he's in the dark here, in more ways than one. "I need to know why you bothered."
The man's quiet for too long. "Partly because you're the kind of guy who'd say that," he says, no louder than a whisper that still rings in Jensen's ears. "Partly because I knew it was vampires, and a guy I knew once upon a time loved getting one up on them."
"Vampires," Jensen says, and tries not to betray his disappointment at the bullshit. There's no such things as vampires.
Except the director had been drained dry…
Jensen shudders. "I don't believe you."
"That's your choice, isn't it?" The man's mercurial mood changes, darkening like a thundercloud. "Some things you're better off not knowing, Jensen. Lie still. Sleep. It'll help."
"I've slept for days already," Jensen grumbles. He senses the man's had enough, that he's about to go, and he panics all over again. Deep down it still burns Jensen to say it out loud, to ask like he's a kid who needs a nightlight, but he's already fallen this far. What's a little further?
He licks his lips. "Stay? Just for a while, man. Give me someone to talk to. Please?"
The man hesitates, then mumbles under his breath, then, thank God, his footsteps draw closer. Jensen thinks it's bare stone he walks across, and he's noticed that the air outside his bed is chilly.
A cave? he wonders, the idea coming to him for the first time. There are other noises, sometimes, mechanical sounds. Maybe it's a mine instead?
The clattering noise of a chair, or maybe a stool drawn across -- what, cobbles? -- is loud, almost drowning out the clank and clatter. Jensen's grown so used to it, that it's pure background. "What would you like to talk about?"
Jensen tries to nod before he remembers why he shouldn't. He tries to swallow the groan of pain and only half-succeeds.
The man waits until he's calm again, sparing his dignity; Jensen knows he's not undone enough of the healer's work to need attention. This is something he has to learn to control, that's all.
When Jensen can speak without gritting his teeth, he asks, "The noise… I can't figure out what it is."
"What noise?"
Jensen can hear the perplexed frown in the man's voice.
"That." Jensen listens to an intricate series of metallic tapping. "It sounds like Morse code, but it's too fast. The rhythm's wrong."
"You know Morse code?"
There; that's surprise. Jensen would grin if he could. "I played a Lieutenant in a Navy SEALS action flick once," he explains. "I don't know how to say anything, but I remember this one guy going on for hours and hours… clink, clink, clink, tap, tap, tap… it gave me a hell of a headache." He grimaces. "Those were the good old days."
"Don't think I ever saw that one," the man says. There's a silence, and Jensen thinks maybe the man is listening to the tapping. He doesn't say it's not code. Huh.
"Where am I?" he asks again, the echoes of every time he's asked that hanging heavy over him.
The man doesn't answer.
Jensen gives up when the quiet grows too thick to bear. "I'm sorry."
The man grunts.
He hates this so much. God. "Is… is there any water?"
For a moment Jensen doesn't think the man will give in, but he should have known better. Whoever this is, when it's really, truly needed, he'll help. Jensen clings to the muffled sounds of movement that answer his small, humiliated request, and then the plastic coolness of a straw touches his lips. "Slowly," the man cautions.
The man's close, so close Jensen could reach out and touch him -- if he --
Jensen relaxes, muscles he didn't know were tense protesting their ill-treatment. He sips, the water flowing over his parched tongue and down his scratchy throat better than anything he's ever drunk in his life.
"That's good," the man says. "Not the drinking. I figure you've got that part mastered."
Jensen lets go of the straw. "Then what…?"
"You didn't try to grab me, though you sure did want to." Beat. "Thanks."
Jensen's heart speeds, panicky. "You knew?"
"I don't miss much." A pause is filled by a fast, light pat on his shoulder, clumsy and awkward, as if the man doesn't often touch people and isn't used to it. "Try to get some sleep."
He walks away and God, Jensen can't let that happen, can't go back to the dark all alone. "Stay, please stay."
"I can't. I'm needed elsewhere. They were calling for me on the pipes." A soft tapping comes, one that Jensen's mind puts together as someone drumming their fingers softly on a doorframe. "Look, Jensen… if you need me, and no one else will do… then call. I won't be too far, and if I am, someone will come let me know you're asking for me."
Jensen grasps at the slender straw. "Then tell me your name. I have to know who to ask for, right?" He tries to laugh, and it comes out raw and broken. Maybe Lauren's thugs tried to choke him, too, though after the third slice of the knife he can't remember much. "Who are you? That's all I'm asking for now. Just your name."
He thinks the man won't answer him. The man's so quiet that Jensen thinks he's slipped away during that plea, that he's long gone and won't ever come back oh god --
"Sam," the man says. "You can call me Sam." He growls, low and nearly animal. "My name is Sam. That's enough. Sleep."
Jensen falls instantly into deep, warm ebon sleep where Cohan's men don't haunt his dreams, where there aren't any dreams at all, knowing only before he goes under that Sam's leaving as fast as he can.
And then he's gone. And Jensen's asleep, drawing the name into the blackness with him.
Sam.
Reposting the following ("Blind Night", aka the Beauty and the Beast 'verse). I'd taken it down as it didn't seem somehow right to me to have it lingering about in the shape of a prologue when I hadn't written more, but some have come looking for it and the story's caught my imagination again. This bit has been revised and the next part is being beta'd. Writing is good therapy, methinks.
To that end:
Title: Blind Night
Pairing: Jensen/Sam (SPN/RPS crossover)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jensen, a rising Hollywood star on the fast track to burning out, sees something he shouldn't have and pays the consequences. Sam, learning to be human in a world not his own. Sanctuary beneath the cities, forgotten by almost all, found only by those in need.
Warnings: Post S3 of SPN, AU Jensen. Much with the hurt/comfort.
A/N: As with the Scrubs stuff, this is a re-conceptualization of "Beauty and the Beast" (Linda Hamilton, Ron Perlman aka "Vincent").
Blind Night
Jensen wakes slowly, wishing he hadn't. Darkness wraps him in a smothering cocoon. There are bandages around his eyes that remind him more of a blindfold by the hour, or by the day, or for however long he's been trapped down here. Wherever this place is. No one will tell him.
His ribs ache where Lauren's hired hit men kicked him. If he breathes too quickly or upsets himself, the pain stabs sharp, fierce, hot. The man who's taken care of him since he woke the first time tells him that two are broken, as is his collarbone. His tibia is fractured.
He'd thought Lauren was a classy lady. One of the good people left in the business.
All Jensen knows about medicine is what he's learned from playing bit parts on hospital dramas but with this much damage, he's sure he should be in a hospital. Why isn't he?
"It's not safe," was all his caretaker would say, too far away for Jensen to touch and know more about than the sound of his voice. "I did what I had to do. If you get worse, we'll do what we have to do then. I -- we -- won't let you die." He laughed, but it wasn't funny, and he didn't sound like he was smiling. "I promise."
And then he went away, and Jensen slept, and when he woke his eyes had been re-bandaged, the gauze cool and soft. The bandages wrapped around his face are wet with some kind of gel -- a poultice, the guy said -- who uses poultices when they have antibiotics, Jesus, where is he --
"Calm down," the man says, arriving without Jensen noticing in his rising panic, the rush of blood in his ears drowning all other sound. Except his voice. "You'll relapse if you're not careful. We've worked too hard for you to let that happen."
"You." Jensen turns his head, though it hurts, and tries to strain to see through the bandages, though he can't. "Let me go home. C'mon. I just wanna go home. Please."
The man sighs, heavy and long, frustrated and tired and hanging on to the last thin strand of his patience. "I can't. Not yet. You wouldn't survive the trip, and the men who attacked you are still hunting." He's quiet for a moment. "I can't risk you. I won't."
"Why?" Jensen tries to wrestle his hands, also bandaged, free of the too-heavy bedding keeping him pressed down and still, and press them to his head. He doesn't, because the fiery pain that prickles in his face is at a low throb and he won't risk that kind of agony again. "What makes me so special?"
"I know you're upset," the man says, not answering Jensen's question. He's calm again, maddeningly so. "You have a right to be. I know you're scared."
"I keep blacking out," Jensen says, giving up the attempt to move. It costs him too much strength and he guesses that proves the mystery man's point right there. "And when I wake up, it's always night. Can't see a thing."
"That's the bandages. Your eyes aren't hurt."
Jensen twitches one shoulder, irritable, and hisses through the stab of hurt. He laughs raggedly, once, when it's passed. "Silver linings."
"Don't take them for granted. You're lucky to be alive."
"Buried alive."
The man doesn't deny that.
"Sucks to be me, huh?"
"A little. Do you remember anything else about the men who attacked you?"
Jensen goes still. "No," he lies right away. Doesn't matter where he goes or how well he tries to hide himself, he knows now that Cohan's men will find himself and when they do, they'll finish the job.
***
"Think you're smart, huh?" The razor tip of a knife pricked the underside of Jensen's chin. He could smell the man behind him if he couldn't turn his head to get a look, sour breath and ripe sweat beneath top-quality leather and heavy cologne. "Not smart enough to think maybe you shouldn't walk home alone."
Jensen's gone as still as death. "Whatever you want, it's yours," he says. He'd been mugged before, all part of life in L.A. "Take my wallet, my keys, anything, and we both walk away. Deal?"
"Not even close." The knife penetrated a centimeter or two deep, drawing hot blood that ran down Jensen's throat. "You and me are going for a ride, pretty boy."
Jensen's breath caught. He knew what this was about. His stomach knotted with a sudden gut-deep terror, the taste of bile heavy in the back of his throat. Cohan. She must have sent these guys. Shit. "No."
"You think you have a choice? Cute." The man drew his knife in a shallow line over Jensen's throat, warning him of what he can do. Hard and not interested in hiding it, getting his rocks off on drawing Jensen's blood. "Our employer doesn't want you dead. She wants to teach you a lesson. People won't open their doors to you if you're not so pretty anymore, will they?"
The knife trailed up Jensen's cheek, blood running thin and fast. "I won't tell anyone what I saw," Jensen says, knowing he's talking too fast and breathing too shallowly, pitch thinning with fear. "I swear."
It wasn't much, what he'd seen, what Lauren wanted him punished for. He hadn't thought it was anything. An envelope stuffed with money changing hands, Lauren passing the cash to a dark-haired man whose skin was so white the low lamplight turned him almost the blue shade of skimmed milk.
Jensen forgot almost right away and would have forever. Only the next day a newcomer died. Prettier than Lauren, younger, sweeter. She'd been drained dry. No blood left in her, almost no spinal fluid, her brain dried up like a raisin. One bullet that'd gone through her dry skull out her shriveled left eye. Not pretty at all now.
He hadn't said a word, not to anyone, but Lauren knew she'd been compromised. Somehow, she knew.
And now there was a man with a knife pressed to his neck.
"Your word's worth precisely dick. Get in the van." The knife moves to the small of Jensen's back. "Now."
"No." Jensen tried to break for it, to run. He didn't get far.
***
When it was over, they pitched him out of the van with his ribs broken and his face on fire.
He can't remember anything else before waking up underground, a deep-voiced man taping the edge of heavy bandages around his eyes. "You're safe," the man said. It was all he said.
Jensen didn't believe him for a second. There's no such thing as safe in the world where he lived.
***
"Jensen," the man says, impatient and struggling not to be. "I need you to pay attention. Don't lie to me. What did you see?"
Jensen's gotten good at reading the nuances in his speech. Cohan would be proud. She always worked hard with Jensen on that. Called Jensen her protégé, funny from a woman barely thirty but that's the biz for you, and that's so many kinds of fucked-up now that Jensen can only laugh and know the sound is a crazy one.
Jensen can picture the man shrugging and knows he's grinning faintly, but can't imagine what his face looks like. That bothers him deeply, a needle of curiosity piercing soul-deep, and what else does he have to think about?
"Why'd you save me?" he blurts. "You could have left me there to bleed out. Why didn't you?"
"I can't answer that."
"No. You owe me."
"I owe you?" The man snorted. "That's a good one."
"Please, man, throw me a bone. I just…" Jensen tries to move his hands to show he's in the dark here, in more ways than one. "I need to know why you bothered."
The man's quiet for too long. "Partly because you're the kind of guy who'd say that," he says, no louder than a whisper that still rings in Jensen's ears. "Partly because I knew it was vampires, and a guy I knew once upon a time loved getting one up on them."
"Vampires," Jensen says, and tries not to betray his disappointment at the bullshit. There's no such things as vampires.
Except the director had been drained dry…
Jensen shudders. "I don't believe you."
"That's your choice, isn't it?" The man's mercurial mood changes, darkening like a thundercloud. "Some things you're better off not knowing, Jensen. Lie still. Sleep. It'll help."
"I've slept for days already," Jensen grumbles. He senses the man's had enough, that he's about to go, and he panics all over again. Deep down it still burns Jensen to say it out loud, to ask like he's a kid who needs a nightlight, but he's already fallen this far. What's a little further?
He licks his lips. "Stay? Just for a while, man. Give me someone to talk to. Please?"
The man hesitates, then mumbles under his breath, then, thank God, his footsteps draw closer. Jensen thinks it's bare stone he walks across, and he's noticed that the air outside his bed is chilly.
A cave? he wonders, the idea coming to him for the first time. There are other noises, sometimes, mechanical sounds. Maybe it's a mine instead?
The clattering noise of a chair, or maybe a stool drawn across -- what, cobbles? -- is loud, almost drowning out the clank and clatter. Jensen's grown so used to it, that it's pure background. "What would you like to talk about?"
Jensen tries to nod before he remembers why he shouldn't. He tries to swallow the groan of pain and only half-succeeds.
The man waits until he's calm again, sparing his dignity; Jensen knows he's not undone enough of the healer's work to need attention. This is something he has to learn to control, that's all.
When Jensen can speak without gritting his teeth, he asks, "The noise… I can't figure out what it is."
"What noise?"
Jensen can hear the perplexed frown in the man's voice.
"That." Jensen listens to an intricate series of metallic tapping. "It sounds like Morse code, but it's too fast. The rhythm's wrong."
"You know Morse code?"
There; that's surprise. Jensen would grin if he could. "I played a Lieutenant in a Navy SEALS action flick once," he explains. "I don't know how to say anything, but I remember this one guy going on for hours and hours… clink, clink, clink, tap, tap, tap… it gave me a hell of a headache." He grimaces. "Those were the good old days."
"Don't think I ever saw that one," the man says. There's a silence, and Jensen thinks maybe the man is listening to the tapping. He doesn't say it's not code. Huh.
"Where am I?" he asks again, the echoes of every time he's asked that hanging heavy over him.
The man doesn't answer.
Jensen gives up when the quiet grows too thick to bear. "I'm sorry."
The man grunts.
He hates this so much. God. "Is… is there any water?"
For a moment Jensen doesn't think the man will give in, but he should have known better. Whoever this is, when it's really, truly needed, he'll help. Jensen clings to the muffled sounds of movement that answer his small, humiliated request, and then the plastic coolness of a straw touches his lips. "Slowly," the man cautions.
The man's close, so close Jensen could reach out and touch him -- if he --
Jensen relaxes, muscles he didn't know were tense protesting their ill-treatment. He sips, the water flowing over his parched tongue and down his scratchy throat better than anything he's ever drunk in his life.
"That's good," the man says. "Not the drinking. I figure you've got that part mastered."
Jensen lets go of the straw. "Then what…?"
"You didn't try to grab me, though you sure did want to." Beat. "Thanks."
Jensen's heart speeds, panicky. "You knew?"
"I don't miss much." A pause is filled by a fast, light pat on his shoulder, clumsy and awkward, as if the man doesn't often touch people and isn't used to it. "Try to get some sleep."
He walks away and God, Jensen can't let that happen, can't go back to the dark all alone. "Stay, please stay."
"I can't. I'm needed elsewhere. They were calling for me on the pipes." A soft tapping comes, one that Jensen's mind puts together as someone drumming their fingers softly on a doorframe. "Look, Jensen… if you need me, and no one else will do… then call. I won't be too far, and if I am, someone will come let me know you're asking for me."
Jensen grasps at the slender straw. "Then tell me your name. I have to know who to ask for, right?" He tries to laugh, and it comes out raw and broken. Maybe Lauren's thugs tried to choke him, too, though after the third slice of the knife he can't remember much. "Who are you? That's all I'm asking for now. Just your name."
He thinks the man won't answer him. The man's so quiet that Jensen thinks he's slipped away during that plea, that he's long gone and won't ever come back oh god --
"Sam," the man says. "You can call me Sam." He growls, low and nearly animal. "My name is Sam. That's enough. Sleep."
Jensen falls instantly into deep, warm ebon sleep where Cohan's men don't haunt his dreams, where there aren't any dreams at all, knowing only before he goes under that Sam's leaving as fast as he can.
And then he's gone. And Jensen's asleep, drawing the name into the blackness with him.
Sam.