J2 Fic. Bars At My Window 8/8
Title: Bars At My Window
Author: Blueeyedliz
Summary: Jared Padalecki, guilty of auto theft, is put away in San Quentin. Jensen Ackles takes it upon himself to instruct the younger man in the brutal protocol of San Quentin and the strategies essential for survival. A friendship born of mutual need ends up becoming much more and one thing they’ll come to learn is that prison is no place for a love story.
Rating: NC/17
Warning, A/N & Disclaimer for this part: As Part One. I really must give a huge thank you once again to Heatherofnight, Scarlettraven9 and Amtamburo. I wouldn't have finished this without them.
Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8
I was going to post this tomorrow but heck it's ready, I'm ready. I just hope you're ready....
Part 8
“What’re you doing?”
Jensen glances up to find Jared wandering into his cell. He waves a hand at the half-finished letter in front of him. “Writing Chad’s grandma. He talks...talked...about her all the time. About her big old house in Vermont surrounded by Sugar Maples and all the chickens she keeps in her backyard. Man, he'd prattle on about them like they were real people. Chad was a strange guy.”
Jared sits down on the edge of Jensen’s bed and stares at the wall. He’s been quiet since it happened, more withdrawn. His face is covered with a light layer of stubble and he hasn’t combed his hair. It goes without saying that he hasn’t taken a shower once in the two weeks that he’s been discharged from the infirmary, preferring instead to make do with hastily washes using the cold water in his prison cell sink and even that had been at Mike's insistence.
He looks exhausted and unkempt. There’s a hard edge to his eyes which wasn’t there before, a cold gaze which only softens when he’s alone with Jensen. They haven’t talked about Chad’s death, not properly and the subject is a festering open wound, not only between them but between Jensen and his crew. They want revenge for Chad and deep down, Jensen does too but he knows it’s got to stop. At some point the vicious circle of life for life and blood for blood, it’s all got to stop.
"How'd your dad's visit go?" Jensen asks needing a change of subject as badly as Jared clearly does.
Jared unconsciously puts a hand to his cheek, a finger following the length of the puckered red scar which begins at the bottom of his chin and curves upwards in an arc to end at the lower rim of his left eye. "It just about killed my dad when I got sent here. This..." Jared says, finger tracing the scar again. "This might have been the final nail in his coffin. He-” Jared stops talking, turns his head away to face the wall again. There’s nothing there worth looking at, save for a wide crack and some chipped blue paint so Jensen knows Jared is lost in thought over something.
"He what?" Jensen presses.
"He told me about a friend of his who runs a parrot farm in Costa Rica."
Jensen snorts. "That's cool, I'm down with birds." Then Jensen's eyes go wide as he absorbs the true meaning of Jared's words. "You want to escape." A statement not a question.
"Lately I feel like I’ve got to walk around with one hand over my balls and the other over my asshole. I can’t let anyone else get hurt because they want to protect me. If we stay here both of us will end up dead, sooner or later. I can’t lose you...I won't.” Jared's hands are curled into tight balls, nails digging into his palms hard enough to leave tiny crimson crescents imprinted in his skin.
Jensen glances down at the letter, unable to handle watching Jared hurting without wanting to get up and start throwing punches at the nearest brick wall. Paper and ink is all he has to send to Chad’s only family, paper and ink which doesn’t even begin to sum up how important Chad was to him. The unofficial baby of his crew, too naive for his own good but also smart as fuck and someone who deserved so much more out of life than bleeding to death on a shower room floor. Jensen swallows. “I always thought San Quentin would be it for me but when you used to talk about being on the outside, about getting a little place all our own in Texas, I let myself dream about it. I wanted it too, Jare. Costa Rica ain't Texas but...I'll take it."
Chad’s loss is still red-raw and painful, will be for a long time. Jensen’s lost enough friends the hard way to know that much. He also knows that losing Jared to some random act of prison violence would be the same as dying himself, like having his heart cleaved right out of his chest. Now that he’s given himself to Jared, it’d be something he’d never recover from. “I’d take friggin’ Mongolia to be with you.”
Jared smiles slightly as he walks to the high window and stares out at the letterbox slit of perfect blue sky which he can see if he cranes his neck far enough. He stands there with his forehead pressed firmly against the cool iron bars. When he turns around to face Jensen, there something burning bright in his eyes that has filled the empty void in residence ever since Chad died. Right at that moment, Jensen is so completely overwhelmed by his feelings for the man in front of him that he can do little more than stare hopelessly back. Jared slaps both hands against his thighs in a defeated gesture. "Yeah, we’ll do it but I'm telling you, we must be crazy."
"Certifiable." Jensen agrees without missing a beat.
-0-
There aren't many cons who don't have dreams of escaping running through their brain every once in awhile but it's something which has been lingering at the back of Jensen's mind like constant radio static for months. He sometimes wonders if he started thinking about it the very first time he clapped eyes on Jared's tall lean frame and expressive hazel eyes out in the yard. In any case, Jensen can finally admit to himself that he wants something better. Something more than rotting away in San Quentin.
Jensen tries asking Jared if he wants to move back to North Block but Jared answers that he’s alright with Mike for now, but what he really wants is to move to Costa Rica. Jensen grins, white teeth flashing, he’s already spending every waking moment thinking about how they’re going to manage it.
The more Jensen hashes it out in his head, the more he grows certain that they need a truck. At first he thinks they could use the laundry truck, a route taken five years earlier without the officials ever learning how the man got out. The laundry foreman watches while the panel truck is loaded with bundles of clothing and then rides it to the sallyport gate to give it clearance. But there is a thirty second weakness. After the truck is loaded at the vehicle entrance, the foreman locks it from the inside and walks fifteen feet to come out of the building through a pedestrian entrance. While he covers the fifteen feet there is plenty of time for a con to burrow under the bundles of clothes. But the scheme requires co-operation from the truck driver and the guy being used as driver at present is a definite stool-pigeon. Jensen contemplates having the driver bashed in the head with a pipe, hurt but not killed, to get him out of the way but quickly decides against it. If he's escaping with Jared he doesn't want the friends he leaves behind to get into trouble.
The trucks easiest to use would be those loaded with products in the industrial area. A guard always stands sentry on the loading dock, watching everything get loaded and then locks the truck. It's good security if the procedure is followed diligently. But after years of uneventful routine, it's only human nature for there to be flaws. After all, what can be duller than watching a truck be loaded night after night?
The answer comes two days later when Jensen is laid out on his bunk with Jared curled up next to him. It’s late in the evening, around half an hour before main lockdown but more importantly for Jensen, half an hour before Jared will have to leave to go back to his own cell block. Jared’s eyes are flittering behind their lids as he twitches gently in REM sleep and Jensen isn’t really thinking about anything in particular other than the soft silky feel of Jared’s hair as he curls the tangled brown locks around his fingers. As he lays there he remembers something Lieutenant Hornby had said to him just that morning, about how he’d love to put trouble-making cons in the Dempsey Dumpster. Jensen had chuckled and looked at the huge trash truck parked up out front of the education building. The two cons who regularly work the dumpster were busily dumping barrel after barrel of trash into it. Jensen had discounted the dumpster long ago for the same reason that the guard could sit in the cab instead of watching the cons emptying the barrels. Anyone climbing into the dumpster would be committing suicide, the crusher inside has enough pressure behind it to turn even the most rotund con into a San Quentin inmate pancake. But...
Maybe...
If....
Jensen’s heart starts pounding as his brain shifts into overtime, rapidly filling with exciting thoughts. He squeezes his eyes closed and resists the urge to shake Jared awake. He needs to be certain first.
-0-
When morning comes and the space where Jared had been laying has long since grown cold, Jensen gets up and dresses. He barely pauses to take a leak and wash his hands before he hurries out of his cell and heads for the mess hall. Once inside he joins the long line of cons queuing for their breakfast but the split-second the guard has his back turned, Jensen abandons his tray and walks straight up the aisle into the kitchen. It’s normally out of bounds but convict cooks and dish-washers provide enough cover and Jensen moves quickly with a sense of real purpose.
He heads down a short corridor towards a wired door that leads to a vegetable room where a half-dozen cons are shucking corn and listening to some music on a portable radio. Jensen motions to show he wants nothing from them and moves through to the double-doors, which are located behind a row of tall free-standing shelves at the back of the room. There's a small glass panel window in one door which he peers out of at the yard beyond. The yard is a loading area for trucks and filled with empty crates and milk cans.
A quarter of an hour and much foot tapping later and the dumpster truck arrives, backing into the loading dock. The guard stays in the cab as expected as the same two cons from the day before disappear to fetch the trash barrels. Once the barrels are emptied, one of the cons signals the driver who presses a lever so that the compressor whirs into motion and begins crushing the trash. “It’ll work.” Jensen whispers to himself, practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. “It will fucking work.”
-0-
“The trash truck?!” Jared groans, trying not to roll his eyes. He wasn’t expecting a high drama escape, some James Bond style flight to freedom in a stolen helicopter, but riding out of San Quentin in the back of a trash truck isn’t anything like what he was envisaging.
It’s freezing cold in the yard but the two bright smudges of color on Jensen’s cheeks have more to do with excitement than the weather conditions. Tommy rubs a hand against the back of his neck and unlike Jared, he does roll his eyes. “Leaving in style eh, Jen? That's not exactly Butch and Sundance.”
“Butch and Sundance get shot down, numbnuts." Jensen gives Tommy a swift playful cuff to the side of his head. "Trash truck or not, right now I’d leave in a pink tutu.” Jensen grins, his excitement not dampened in the slightest. “The clincher is that we need some sort of brace to stop the compactor, like four-by-fours....”
“Or the weight-bars in the gym.” Jared finishes not quite believing that he’s actually starting to accept Jensen’s idea as anything other than impossible. “It can’t be that easy. How could the guard be that dumb?”
“It ain’t easy, trust me. If the bars don’t hold, well, you won’t end up being quite so pretty.” Jensen says, tilting Jared's chin upwards with one finger before Jared huffs and bats his hand away. But Jensen has thought this through and a brace will hold, he’d bet his hidden stash of cigarettes on it.
“What about your hand?” Jared says, staring down at the white cast covering Jensen’s right hand and half of his forearm.
“It’ll be fine.” Jensen dismisses Jared’s concerns quickly. It does hurt, like a total bitch, but it’s healing and he’s not about to let a fractured metacarpal bone ruin his plans.
“When can we go? Tonight?” Jared snorts, the last obviously in jest.
“Come on, Jare. We gotta find out where it goes to unload, where your dad can pick us up...or somebody else, if you think he can’t make it?”
“He can make it. He’s so impatient, last time we talked I had to convince him not to try hijacking a semi to bust down the prison walls himself.”
“We’ll have to smuggle a letter out, otherwise he’ll have heat on him. Heck, we’ll have heat on us the second we’re on the outside. It ain’t like we're running away from summer camp.”
“I know, okay. I still want to do it.”
Jensen smiles at that. He’s so pumped, he has to keep biting his lip to stop himself from singing.
-0-
Preparations for escape move quickly. A clerk in the maintenance office finds a manual for the dumpster and confirms the drop off point for the prison trash. Jared speaks to his father using the chapel phone, then they smuggle out a letter and Mr Padalecki confirms the details with a telegram. He would have money and a car waiting for them whenever they were ready to make a move. Fake IDs would be easy to come by once they reached LA, as easy as picking up a newspaper from a convenience store Jensen assures Jared.
The escape is set for the last Friday in January and come the morning of the escape Jared and Jensen find themselves making lists to share out their belongings amongst Jensen's crew. “We’ve got half an hour, so chill.” Jensen says, watching Jared's knee jiggling as he chews on a pencil held loosely between his teeth.
"I'm giving all my books to Mike. He was crying last night. I actually ended up petting his bald head." Jared says, finally removing the pencil from his mouth which has left smudges of graphite around his bottom lip.
"What, you mean he can read?" Jensen answers back with a snicker, rubbing the smudge away with the pad of his thumb. "We should get moving, go say our goodbyes?"
Jared pulls in a deep breath and nods, getting up to follow Jensen out of the block and into the yard.
Goodbyes-which leave all of the men involved with glistening eyes-are exchanged. Jared stands back to watch Jensen hug Tommy, before moving on to Chris and Steve. It's nice to see this other side of Jensen. Normally around his crew he's full of bullshit, bravado and banter but now Jensen is subdued, genuinely saddened to be leaving them behind. "Remember to send a fucking postcard, bitch." Tommy says before leaning towards Jared and whispering in his ear, "take care of Jen for me?"
"I will." Jared manages before being scooped up in a hug.
Finally they part ways, Jared and Jensen disappearing off in the direction of the mess hall. Breakfast won’t be served for another hour so the mess hall is virtually empty. Again the convicts scuttling around the kitchen provided perfect cover and both men walk hurriedly through to the vegetable room, eyes checking and double-checking for guards. It's too early for there to be anyone in the vegetable room and Jared side-steps several large sacks of potatoes before going to stand by the double-doors which lead to the yard, checking for the dumpster.
Tommy had stolen the two weight bars from the gym the night before and left them in the vegetable room store cupboard standing in mop buckets. So, providing nobody looked too closely, it would appear that the steel bars were mop handles. Jensen fetches the bars and goes to wait by Jared's side at the double-doors, eyes glaring out of the small window at the yard. Ten extremely tense minutes pass by before the low rumble of the truck announces its arrival.
-0-
Once the cons working the dumpster have walked away to fetch the barrels, Jensen swings the double-doors open. “C’mon.” Jensen whispers as he hurries towards the back of the dumpster. He turns to look at Jared, taking in how fast the younger man is breathing. “Calm down okay? You get in first, brace one end of the bar against the back wall of the truck and hold it tight. Don’t drop it, for fuck's sake, don’t drop it.”
Jared doesn't answer, seemingly unable to compose himself enough to formulate anything even remotely resembling a sentence. Instead he puts his head down and plunges into the hole, running straight into a wall of thick stench.
The moment Jared’s head and shoulders disappear into the darkness, Jensen is sliding in behind him. They clamber blindly towards the back, knees wading through trash, covering themselves with the bags as best they can.
Huddled there in the dark, they hear voices outside of the truck and both men shiver with the horrible sensation of prickling goose-flesh, knowing they’re about to be caught...then another barrel-load of trash flies in, sending a spray of dust and splatters of something cold and wet-which neither of them want to think too hard about-onto their faces and torsos.
They brace the bars against the wall and hold them like jousting lances. Even though he can barely see him in the gloom, Jared can feel the nervous tension radiating off of Jensen. “If this doesn’t work Jen...I love you. And thank you, I owe you so fucking much.”
“Christ, don’t make what could be my last few seconds on Earth a Hallmark moment, I could be about to get squished to death in a huge pile of stinking trash.” Jensen shoots back before becoming serious, “I lov-” Jensen starts but then is forced to stop as the sound of the crusher coming to life all but drowns him out. “Oh shit, oh god, this is it.” Jensen pants as trash starts to creep up over their feet.
They can feel the narrow space getting smaller and smaller and there barely seems to be any air at all and it’s so damn dark...but when the crusher hits the two steel braces, it stops. For several seconds nothing happens, then abruptly the crusher starts to recede.
In the moments that follow there are no other sounds except for their heavy breathing and the rustle of plastic trash bags. Jensen can feel Jared shaking at the side of him and he’s pretty damn sure he's shaking too.
“I love you too.” Jensen whispers finally managing to heave enough oxygen into his lungs to get the words out and he swiftly receives a hard punch on the shoulder for his troubles.
“Fucker, if we’d have been crushed I wouldn’t have heard you say it.” Jared grumbles but the complaint is laced with relief and out of the blue Jensen feels the soft warmth of Jared's lips brush against his cheek.
There’s elation and surging love growing inside Jensen’s chest, the pressure of it practically groans against his rib-cage so it feels like he might explode. The dumpster starts to move and they collapse back onto the mounds of trash in a heap of tangled limbs. It’s as black as a tar pit but their groping hands find each-other and they scrambled even closer to exchange kisses which in the darkness hit their noses more than their mouths but every single one is made of pure unadulterated happiness. They’re far too euphoric to even notice the stink now.
In a few more minutes, they’ll be free...
-end-
Click here for six months later time-stamp.