FIC: Pretty Parts, Pretty Whole | j2 au NC-17
Dr. Frankenstein and George Romero walk into a bar...
Wanted to get this lunacy posted before Halloween (HOLY SHIT, IS THAT TOMORROW ALREADY?) and I made it just 3 hours shy, just in time to go read other 'ween-inspired fics I see floating around in the punch.
If this were a book (some cheap horror knockoff you'd find in the clearance bin), the dedication at the beginning would go something like: For eric_idle_rules, who stayed by my side even when I lost my mind, and supplied me with such unspeakable scenes that I couldn't not attempt to write. ♥
As I do not wish to offend anyone, ever, please do not take the warnings lightly.
Title: Pretty Parts, Pretty Whole - j2 au NC-17
Author: homo_pink
Summary: A lonely serial killer with romanticized notions and warped logic, Jensen is tired of his solitary life. Jared is the unorthodox result of it all.
Word Count: 7.5k
Warning: multiple killings, gore, zombies, and hints of necrophilia
Inspired by a gorgeous painting that my very favorite and most loved author made for me.
(Photo and painting courtesy of Poppy Z. Brite)
Or on AO3
"I tried to keep the person alive by inducing a zombie-like state. By first injecting a dilute acid solution into their brain, or hot water. And it never did completely work."
- J. Dahmer
Pretty Parts, Pretty Whole
Jensen figures it out when he's still young, just how unlike his peers he truly is.
At fifteen, even he himself can't quite yet grasp the full extent of his burgeoning desires, but most of it shows itself early on. He feels quite near nothing for the people he sees in his day to day, all circle shapes to Jensen’s too triangular mold. There’s not a soul in his school, in his town, that sparks anything more than a passing interest for him.
Sometimes, it'll give him a vague sense of dread, the looming threat that he may never find someone to be with.
But Jensen doesn't like to muddy his brain with that sort of thinking.
He’ll wait it out. He’s held on this long. Someday, he’ll find someone who can see past his thick lens glasses and unthreading t-shirts and there will be pretty insides attached to pretty outsides. Jensen knows it’ll happen for him, that One True Love thing everyone talks about in whispers. He just has to practice his patience.
-
“Look mister,” a kid named Joy is saying, drumming the table.
“Jensen,” Jensen says for the fourth time.
“Right. So Jensen, I appreciate the drinks. And dinner.” He pauses, like he’s unsure how to go about cutting ties but Jensen knows what’s coming, knows what always comes. Eventually. “Think I’m just gonna grab a cab and head out though, early morning for me. Devil boss, ya know?”
Jensen nods, like he’s thinking this over. Even manages a smile, too. He studies a strange path of ink jutting out above the collar of Joey’s shirt, something he hadn’t seen before, and his smile shifts down. He hopes that sort of art isn’t present on much more of the canvas. That’s not what Jensen had been going for at all.
He convinces Joey to stay for one more drink. "My specialty," he tells the boy.
Later, when he’s rearranging the contents of his refrigerator and searching for a viable container, Jensen realizes the silly little tattoos hadn’t even mattered.
While Joey had the appropriate height he’d been after, his physique wasn’t quite up to Jensen’s standards. And after twenty-three years of being alone, they were, even by his own regard, unquestionably high. Unquestionable, not unattainable. He’d just keep looking.
Joey’s hands, though. They’re ideal.
Trim, neatly placed nails and golden skin over thick knuckles. The sort of able hands he can picture still looking model-pretty when layered over with car grease or paint splatters or semen. Or pulpy, clotting blood. They're firm and wide. Huge. Bigger than Jensen’s when he presses them flat against his own, palm to palm. He barely holds back the manic giggle slithering at the edge of his throat when he sees how right they are for him.
In the far back corner of the cold box, he finds an old pickle jar and empties it out. Peels off the stickers. Washes it 'til it sparkles. Refills it with all new contents.
-
Most of what he needs to know, his grandmother taught him before she passed on. She hated to see his poor, second life clothes always becoming untethered at the seams after so many washes. He also needed to eat.
Jensen can slice and chop and boil a nice stew, and he can work a needle and thread with near surgical expertise. Everything else, he learns between the back rows of the public library.
-
It turns out that there’s a lot more to this whole thing than Jensen could have foreseen. Precise locations for certain cuts, steady hands, a calm heart.
He’s certain he’s capable of these things, a few cat and dog rehearsals during his formative years to level out his experience some, But there’re other things he’s learning and he absorbs it all like a starving, bone-dry sponge. Jensen spends hours seated cross-legged on the floor between stacks, the musty, glorious smell of old books easing him into a place of hush.
That’s where Ricky happens upon him one afternoon.
Jensen flips the page and studies the newest diagram with an intensity so thick it comes close to arousal.
Jensen's brow is low against the bridge of his nose and he pushes his glasses back up when they start to sag. He doesn’t notice someone passing in front of him, nor the linger in their step when they glance down and take in the sight of some unknowingly pretty boy deep in concentration, in love with his book and his dreams and the way the old, crinkly pages are a direct path right to them.
“Biochem major?”
Jensen’s head snaps up, nearly slamming his book closed on his fingertips, a deep blooming pink tickling at his ears. Someone’s talking to him. To him. He looks down at his lap, at the words and pictures printed right there like a handy instruction manual.
“No, it’s just a hobby,” he says, uneasy. A curious expression is bounced back to him and before it can change to discomfort he adds, “Reading a wide variety of topics, stimulates the brain into action. Or something."
The guy must think it’s a joke, because he grins delightedly and crouches down like he’s trying to read along with Jensen. Like maybe he, too, cares about how close the mandible bone is to the carotid artery and that just the slightest little nick- But he smells like soap and sweat and male and in a sudden sensation, Jensen is infinitely grateful to have the book spread open across his lap.
Ricky’s faultless face is porcelain smooth, clean like he takes care of it habitually and when he starts to talk, there’s a set of dimples carved out in his cheeks. Deep ones. His jaw is strong, nose a sloping angular thing that stops just short of being too much. His beauty is a vision.
With his pulse jackrabbitting beneath his jaw, Jensen starts to understand that some things just happen for a reason.
-
He’s only half paying attention when the elderly man behind the counter explains to him the different types of threads and sutures they have in stock. Jensen nods, his mind and eye elsewhere. Jensen blinks syrup-slow and mumbles a half-hearted thank you, hands turning to babyfists at the sight of the girl.
He lingers just outside the pharmacy doorway when he's all done with his purchase, sucks in a breath as she swish-swishes past him in her neon yellow jogging shoes. He notes the direction in which she heads home.
She’s got a wonderful head of hair, loose and flowing, burnt honey brown past her chin just a little. He can picture his hands wrist deep in the waves, something to cling to and clutch at and guide just where he wants.
The last traces of sunshine glitter the strands' ends as she goes and Jensen watches dreamily, caught in his own web of silk.
-
He thinks about them when he’s away, when he’s gone and can’t be around to hold them and pet them and tell them how beautiful they are.
They keep each other company, of course, but just thinking about them, there at home without him. It makes his heart clench with a sick ache when he imagines how lonely they must be. Jensen misses them all the time.
When he can get back home to them, slip the door softly shut behind him, they’re all exactly where he left them, waiting dutifully for him to return. They stare at him with wide-eyed expressions and smiles that never wilt or sour or whisper behind their hands, behind his back. They don’t think he’s creepy. Jensen is all they think about too.
Ricky’s still there in the La-Z-Boy where Jensen left him, his legs spread and his head sort of lolled off to the side, like he’s thinking about how Jensen looks beneath his clothes.
“No free peep shows,” Jensen says to the others, silly.
He feels silly, getting naked when everyone else is still mostly dressed. But he’s happy too, his happiest yet, and he moves Joey and Annabelle so they’re facing the other direction. Let those two entertain themselves for now, talk about mimes with no hands or mannequins with no hair or whatever it is they do when he’s away.
Jensen tugs off his heavy boots, peels his clothes away like a dried out membrane and shyly goes to sit on Ricky’s lap, making sure to bring his favorite fleece throw. Ricky’s one of those perpetually cold types, and Jensen never minds lending some of his warmth.
-
His dreams have shifted in the weeks since he met them and they’ve snuck up on him now, even here in his sleep.
He only knows it’s a fake, chalk outline of his life because they’re sitting around the oak table in Jensen’s gran’s dining room, chattering and giggling and touching themselves in a manner that make his cock grow stiff in his underwear. They’re polishing gory gloss on their lips, pouting in the mirror, making eyes at each other, at him. The ones who still have them.
The house was demolished when Jensen was nineteen, torn down by the city after having stood condemned for too long. Gran was already dead by then. None of what’s happening is happening. And still he takes his seat at the head of the table.
Ezra and Dave, the kind Mormon boys that had come to his door Tuesday evening, are also here.
Dave looks like a carved out stone sculpture. Tall enough to make Jensen feel safe, arms muscled enough to give great hugs. Well over 6 feet, nearing the halfway mark to 7. Well. He had been when Jensen eyed him standing there in his front doorway, holding a pamphlet and stumbling his way through it. When he still had his head on right.
There’s just a gaping hole between his shoulders now but he’s still a gorgeous, lovely thing that Jensen would have no other way. And Ezra’s multicolored eyes…
They huddle around Jensen, whispering and cooing and rubbing their distended bellies against his crotch. But it's not right. They’re not quite right. None of them look the way they once had.
Annabelle’s scalped head is a raw wet wound that smells faintly of puss when she pats it demurely. Ezra's mangled black cavities are becoming unattractive, and Ricky, sweet Ricky, he's just a gaping face in a little aquarium. Even Joey, the quiet one all evening, is stretching out to hug Jensen and his arms end in poorly little stumps right at the wrists.
A strongly scented drop of red infection wells out of one of them and lands tellingly on the top of Jensen’s bare foot.
He stares at it until it eats through to the bone like acid and he knows that come morning, he won’t be able to wait any longer. The change is starting and they’re already becoming alien to him, distorting from their natural beauty. The romance is fading.
The night, like them, is purpled and bloated and the room is growing smothered with a trace of decay.
-
The third book he picks up is skinny and well thumbed through. He flicks the pages with something between hunger and terror curling in his guts and after a satisfying look through, he walks up to the little register and places his paperback on the countertop. Jensen rocks back on his heels and squirms from pure anticipation.
The white-eyed lady behind the counter charges $6.99 for Secrets of Haitian Vodou: Raising the Dead and knows nothing of how she just changed his life.
-
After a hurried stop at the grocery mart, Jensen races home and dumps his ingredients out on the kitchen countertop, softly humming while he rummages for bowls and mixing spoons.
In his own personal meat shop, Jensen the butcher hacks off useless chunks he won’t need and he slices carefully around the ones he will.
When the smell of copper and a slightly spoiled tang is so thick in the air he can barely see, his work is almost done. The scraps go in one pile, the rest in another. He wipes sweat from his brow, happy tears from his cheeks, and gathers everything he’ll need into his arms.
He references his library books while he works, squinting at the illustrations and fine typewriter print. The music on the radio is turned down low and he chews his bottom lip in concentration as he arranges all his pieces like a puzzle on the living room floor.
Most of Dave, a little Ricky, couple bits of Joey and a fragment of Annabelle to top it off.
-
“The head bone’s connected to the - neck bone. The neck bone’s connected to the - back bone…”
He has to full-body resist from swaying around his living room in a joyful dance of what’s to come.
And that reminds him. He’s going to have company in a while, he'll need to tidy up soon.
-
When the majority of his masterpiece is sewn complete, he plunks the last two bits - Ezra's glass-pretty eyeballs - into Ricky's scooped out sockets. And with the finishing touch in place, Jensen threads up the last of it and makes sure all the nerves and tissues are attached to the best of his abilities, sewn up just so.
Giving himself only a moment to admire his creation, he wipes the pink smudges from his lenses and retrieves his mixture from the sink, reaches for his special book.
He thumbs the pages until he finds the incantation it'll take to reanimate a corpse. He doesn't like to think of it as that, because it hurts. He'll miss his old friends, he very much will. But what he'll have will be so much more precious: a best friend.
Jensen recites the words in a calm chant, stirs the liquid in the bowl and brings the rim up close.
With his insides banging up against the cage of his bones, he gulps in a mouthful of the mixture, swallows half of it, and leans in to press his mouth to the cold, dry counterpart of his sleeping one. He empties the rest between barely parted waxy lips.
Some time may be necessary, he imagines, and exhausted from the night's excitement, he scoots down to the floor and lays next to his beloved. Head on his chest, an arm flung over the thin waist. Jensen promptly slips away, the two of them slotted together like an inexorable, pre-matched fit.
-
Ten hours from the time he shut his eyes, Jensen wakes to find himself curled on the hard, uncomfortable floor. And something feels different. He doesn't stretch and twist or rub out any leftover sleep from his face but he knows it all the same - something is different.
Everything.
For a moment, Jensen questions whether or not the man can see him. If those colorful eyes watching him inquisitively function better than his own useless pair, if he'd done the job in putting him together all the way, and he's scooting back to blindly grope around for his glasses when two long arms snake out towards him, huge hands reaching out for him.
Jensen's friend is bruised up sporadically, dried bits of blood crusting at his seam lines. He looks like the aftermath of a fatal car crash. He's so fucking gorgeous.
Jensen Ackles, who's never voluntarily embraced another, can't help himself from lunging forward and hugging the body for the very first time, holding on too strong and too much and so fiercely possessive his eyes are clamped tight to hold the stinging wetness in.
It leaks out anyway. When his friend hugs him back, the icy fingertips feel almost warm.
-
At first, Jensen doesn’t know what to call him.
Secretly, in his head, he thinks of him in a hundred different ways and words Jensen's too shy to ever say aloud. But he can’t keep referring to the guy as Um, he just cannot. Um, how do you feel? or Umm.. are you hungry? He knows he has to decide soon, before Um starts believing that’s really his name.
When it comes to him, Jensen thinks of it as a sort of tribute, a sweet homage to what the others have given him.
He’s at his desk one evening, scribbling out his brainstorms and striking them out as he goes, frustrated, his beautiful one watching some small movement out the window with a curiously tilted head, when the whole thing works itself out.
Jensen borrows a letter from each of his comrades - D, E, A, R, J - scrambles them up, rearranges them until something slots into place and tries the shape of it out between his trembling lips.
“Hey... Jared?” he says, hands shaking when he puts the pen down.
The boy in the window turns to meet his stare and Jensen's belly goes warm with butterfly flaps.
-
Jared doesn’t say much by way of conversation.
He doesn't actually say a thing.
Deep down, Jensen knows he messed something up, severed a vocal chord during his grim cross-stitching most likely. Or maybe they'd never have worked at all.
Jensen’s not real choosy either way, he’s just happy to have Jared around. Even if he smells faintly sour, like some spoiled thing forgotten so long the odor of expiration is almost gone again. Even if he fumbles and groans and drools on himself by accident sometimes.
They sit together on the couch and pretend to watch TV. Or Jensen pretends, while taking in Jared’s TV-star features out of the corner of his eye. Jared stares straight ahead, but he might not be looking at anything at all.
He’ll lurch around the little apartment occasionally, studying things in his own Jared way, making small clicks and ticks in his throat, like he's unaware of the sound. Just like he's unaware of what he does to Jensen's heart.
-
Jensen always wanted to keep a boy of his own.
Someone who would be with him and hold him and never, ever leave.
-
Sometimes he'll find himself thinking of the peculiar way Jared’s scalp will still shift if Jensen runs his fingers through the sun-soft hair too forcefully. Or how Jared's body is dampy cool to the touch, a little rubbery the few times Jensen’s dared to reach out.
He wonders if Jared knows how to touch himself, if he does it when Jensen’s not home to see. If he experiments and prods himself or if he maybe tries opening old lesions. If he knows to do anything at all.
Jensen, pining and obsessed and completely smitten with a thing that will never love him back, thinks about his dead boy all the hours of his workday. Jared's a real wish come true.
-
The evening Jensen comes home and doesn't hear the usual stumbling noises or the ragged grunts that mean Jared's heard the door snick open and is making his way to the sound, that's the day things start to shift.
Outside, it's grey gloom and soppy puddles gathering in sidewalk cracks. The rain pelts down and clatters against Jared's favorite windows.
On the inside, it’s all silence and needle drops for a heart-stopping second that makes Jensen go stiff, full of grief until he picks up on the dragscrapedrag coming from the hallway.
“Jared?” he calls out, already halfway there.
There’s no reply, of course, but it very nearly seems like there wants to be, a light rumbling sob greeting him when he’s made it all the way to the bathroom. The look in Jared’s eyes is blank but the rest of him appears almost - frustrated. Even if Jensen knows it isn’t possible, the groused set of his jaw looks it. Almost.
He’s on the floor when Jensen finds him, sprawled out in a twisted, unnatural angle against the hard tiles.
The ratty black sweatpants that were always too bunchy on Jensen but fit just right on long, long legs are ripped up one side, a gash in the material running clear up to the thigh. And then Jensen sees the broken ankle.
He's there right away, immediately curled over Jared’s body, down on his knees to inspect the damage.
The finely made leg is bent all wrong, misshapen into something sadly unrecognizable, sharp juts of bone puncturing through the skin. When Jensen softly touches it, Jared just watches. He doesn’t gasp or jerk or even make one of his animal sounds.
Jared looks at Jensen, looks at his own foot. He gurgles wetly around his tongue and slumps back down against the side of the toilet bowl.
With something like granted permission, Jensen shoves the tattered pant leg up and off to hang limply at the side and now able to get a much better look at the mess, he sees it isn’t just the ankle. Not nearly.
Jared, sweet thing, must have fractured the bone and just kept right on walking until he eventually destroyed his knee too. It’s a swollen, mottled thing and Jensen has no choice but to heave Jared up and into the bathtub to clean off the oozy bits he managed to get all over both feet, one hand, and bizarrely, his mouth too.
Jensen doesn’t stop to wonder what Jared was doing to end up like that, thinking on it too long will make his cock grow fat and heavy and he doesn’t have time for that right now.
Setting his glasses aside so the steam doesn't interfere, he plops Jared into the porcelain, tugs off the pants - gently, like it matters - and starts up the shower. Jared doesn’t care if the water is cool or scalding.
Bent over the lip of the tub, Jensen runs his washcloth over the ruined areas, wipes away old messes and methodically scrubs Jared down, taking care to stay away from certain places. And he doesn’t let himself look, no matter how badly he wants it.
Around the stitches, Jensen’s even sweeter, barely there baby-strokes so nothing comes undone. Jensen’s steady pulse starts to spike and Jared continues to rest rigid against the wall, his hair falling into his eyes in wet vines.
-
He’s not sure what he’d been expecting to happen when he leant down and pressed his mouth to the slice marks on Jared’s inner left wrist, when he ran his tongue against the bumps of thick thread.
But as he shut his adoring eyes and continued to suck at the wound, he was 100% certain it was not for Jared to scratch at Jensen's shirt until he’d clawed in enough to drag Jensen under the warm spray of the showerhead.
Jensen’s now inside the bathtub, lying weirdly on top of Jared, trying to get his bearings as he hovers up to all fours, awkward and stiff-jointed.
Within seconds he’s soaked through and his clothes cling uncomfortably but it doesn't matter because Jared’s looking at him now, not at some indistinct point over Jensen's shoulder and Jared, Jared is naked and massive in the tiny tub and whole rivers are trailing down his nicely cut abs and Jensen’s done staring. He's done.
Surging forward, he shoves his face into Jared’s neck, licks at the old incision there at the bottom of his throat and pulls it up between his teeth to taste. It’s bitter and stale but beneath that somewhere, it’s wonderful.
Jensen tongues and softly bites at the thick, spongy skin and one of Jared’s arms lifts from where it'd been trapped between them. A wide-open hand lands on the back of Jensen's overheated, slippery neck. Jared holds Jensen in place, there against the sleek and scarred line of his wetdream throat.
Jensen sighs and squirms and he nestles his groin atop Jared’s, huffing and rubbing and too in love to concentrate. He pulls back to see Jared’s dull cherry mouth hanging open, just barely. Just enough.
Foggy-eyed and driven by the ache in his pants, Jensen leans into Jared, closer to the face that's mannequin perfect until Jared’s gone nearly cross-eyed looking back at him, and Jensen licks into the perpetually parted lips, sloppy and one-sided and the fact of it doesn’t even register because Jensen’s in a world all his own, all their own.
Jared’s head sways to the side and the angle is just right for Jensen to get even deeper.
He holds the side of Jared’s face by the finely cut cheekbone, wraps the other behind his ear, fingertips happily burrowed in the damp tangles just like he knew they’d be. Jensen mouths at the coolness of Jared’s lips and chin and sucks on his tongue greedily.
The water at the drain is still swirling a rusty pink color but Jensen's lost sight of the leg he meant to mend. He's too busy feeling up all the rest that's attached to it.
_
Every night under the blankets where they've been sleeping in Jensen’s bed, together, apart, Jensen would wonder quietly if tonight would be the night Jared finally touched him with intent.
Jensen couldn't make the first move. He'd already done everything else.
Though maybe not quite from the path of his loins, he'd birthed Jared in some respect, and that spot between his legs was exactly where he wanted Jared to find his way to. On his own.
Night after night, Jensen would fall asleep still wondering. But now.
-
Jensen re-tightens the threads along the hairline, smooths down the fleshy bits Jared had started to pick open again like a child with a new scab, and Jensen concentrates on the task.
The seam runs through the top of the forehead to the temples, behind the ears, back of the neck and up again to the other side, meeting again front and center. More than once, he’s found Jared absently jerking at the stitches and Jensen will yelp and cry and have to rush and stop him before he ruins himself.
Jensen never likes to see the separating folds yawning at him and inviting him to peek inside.
Jared leans back against the headboard, lets Jensen go on gluing eggshells back together, and clutches a huge fist in the stretched collar of Jensen’s shirt. Jared always pulls too hard. Jensen never minds.
When it’s like this, eerie calm and Jensen not saying a word, Jared will suddenly start biting at Jensen's lips, his face, anything within reach, like he wants something but doesn’t know, couldn’t know, what it is. Jensen kisses him deep and sloppy and holds him in by the shoulder blades and jadedly wonders if Jared will ever really be a whole.
-
The first time the phone rings, it startles Jensen so bad the blade he’s been using to chop mushrooms for his dinner sauce slips from his grip and on the slam down, slices two fingers clean off just above the top knuckle, right at the tippy top. The phone hasn’t rung in months.
Even Jared, who’d been sitting on the floor, propped up against the sofa, turns to look at the old landline in a great show of curiosity.
Jared with his gauzed up leg and casually vacant stare. He doesn’t reach for it, or know what it does even, but he listens as the shrill ring wails around him until Jensen, dripping fantastically bright droplets all over the carpet, comes by to answer it.
“Yes?” he says weakly into the phone. "Yeah, this is Mr. Ack- This is Jensen."
He’s already feeling lightheaded and clammy and he holds the phone stiffly in his good hand while his fingers continue the constant drip drip drip. The sight of red life never makes him queasy, not once, not even his own. Distressingly, it usually has the opposite effect on his body.
He grips the phone tighter and strains to listen.
“I understand,” he says, though he doesn’t. Jared doesn’t make that much noise most of the time. The landlady makes it seem like wild teenage parties are being thrown in his absence throughout the midday work hours.
“No, still just me up here.” He can’t afford the extra rent she’s suggesting if he’s moved someone in without the building’s consent. “I might’ve left the TV going and forgotten all about it. Won’t happen again.”
That doesn’t account for the excessive stomping and thudding she says other tenants claim to have heard, but it must placate her enough for the time being because she lets it go. Jensen has always been a model tenant; rent paid on time, fixes his plumbing himself, never makes waves around the community. She takes his word for it.
By the time he hangs up, Jensen has no idea what else they were even talking about anymore, nothing of the neighboring apartment across the corridor complaining about a foul stench. Or that trash days are still Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It's all gone from his ears.
Jensen puts the receiver back in the cradle and calmly realizes that Jared’s dragged himself over to Jensen. That he's been merrily chewing at Jensen’s fingers for the last however long it’s been.
Dear Jared's lips are a bright splash of a scarlet rose, all thorn, sucking and mouthing at Jensen’s mutilated hand, holding onto it with both of his. His uneven teeth scrape at it, work another gush of liquid out and Jensen watches like he’s floating above his own dream.
It’s only later after he’s come back to himself and tugged out of Jared’s grasp that he recognizes how he somehow, horrifyingly, excitingly, came in his pants from just that.
It trickles down his leg in a slow drip and Jensen rushes out to get his needle and thread for himself this time.
-
This is the life Jensen always dreamed of during class, at the library, in his hopeful heart.
The sheets are entangled in a heap at Jensen’s ankles, at the base of the bed.
It’s three in the morning and Jared woke him up with all his groping and gnawing, Jensen blinking awake to find Jared attempting to masticate his jaw and collarbone. It had been a little funny at first, until Jensen started getting turned on. Again.
The slobbery trails hadn’t even dried before Jensen was putting Jared onto his back and crawling between his thighs.
He holds Jared down now with a heavy arm across his belly, good hand wrapped roughly around a sharp hipbone, letting Jared’s cock rest in his mouth and slowly rolling it about his tongue, just keeping it there and feeling the weight of it.
Jensen pushes wetly at the tip, sliding into the slit and spreading his saliva over and around and all down the length of it. Jared’s cock sits soft between his fevered lips and Jensen wants to scream childishly from the unfairness of it all.
He’s been at it for hours now, days, and nothing ever happens. Jared stays sprawled in place, reaches feebly into the air every now and then, clutching at nothing Jensen is able to see, and makes strange little bubbling sounds.
Jensen enjoys them though, enjoys the thought of what they might be.
He keeps working at Jared’s dick, taking it to the back of his throat and letting it block his airway. It might not get all thick and hard, and Jared might not know how satisfying this should be feeling, but even flaccid, it’s huge and perfect and Jensen likes knowing he’s doing it anyway.
He moans around the whole thing, embarrassingly whorish, and touches himself between the legs. He’s already wet, thick strings of excitement seeping out of him that he works between his fingers, fisting himself while he goes down on Jared like it means something special to them both.
-
Ricky had been nice to look at, of course. It’s the only real reason he’d been chosen. That, and his sweet schoolboy interest in Jensen. Though admittedly, Jensen liked him a whole lot more once he was dead. Still.
While Jared might be wearing Ricky's mask now, the carved jaw and once-tan skin and those silly ol’ sideburns, Jared is so much more.
“I only ever wanted this,” Jensen says, a humid, whispered confession into the crease of Jared’s thigh.
“It was never about them, you have to know that.” Jared’s legs fall open a little wider and Jensen takes that as proof he’s hearing him. “Was only ever about you.”
Jensen watches as Jared coughs up a little glob of spit, tracks it as it dribbles out of the corner of Jared's mouth. The way it slides down near the bulged vein in Jared’s throat vaguely reminds Jensen of the way Annabelle had cried pretty black mascara trails.
“My beautiful one,” Jensen grins helplessly, hooking his hands under Jared’s knees and spreading him out gorgeously, holding him in place while he sinks back down to leave a smeared wet kiss against Jared’s asshole.
He loves Jared like this; draped across the bed and almost mumbling and Jensen’s to do what he wants with. Whatever he wants with.
-
Jared, beautiful Jared, shifts around in the bed and lets his head fall so far to the side it looks in danger of falling right off. And Jensen most of all, knows it could very well happen.
It doesn’t make it quite that far, to the point of snapping and rolling like a child's lost ball. Jared’s back comes off the bed just enough that his ass causes the mattress around Jensen’s knees to dip from the sudden pressure and a tiny tremor quakes the innermost part of Jared’s left thigh. Jensen feels it shudder beneath his palm.
He works his fingers in harder and harder, smoother, then rougher, then wild with no remorse because the sight of his fingers doing that, in there, it’s too much at once and it makes him crazy and feral and sick with despair and then he slows down to catch his breath and right there, right then, the most incredible thing he’s ever seen starts to happen.
As he stares, stock still in rapture, Jared’s cock starts to drool.
Still resting limp against his leg, Jensen watches, holding his breath, fingers starting to punch back in, as a filmy, stringy substance dribbles out.
It’s thin and runny, a lot messier than Jensen’s, like that of his own young wetness when he was first experimenting with how things worked in that area. But the more force he uses in fucking his fingers deep into Jared, the more he gets rewarded. It’s stunning. Jared’s already given him so much, so much, and now he’s giving him this too.
Jensen brushes his lips down for a taste, unable to resist a second longer, his own erection throbbing wetly in his three fingered fist.
He darts his tongue out, real soft along the head, working it around on his lips and he pulls back when a cold string of semen is connecting them. And yes - yes - that’s exactly what it is.
Jensen starts to cry and doesn’t stop until he’s emptied his load all over Jared’s thighs and flat stomach, sobbing and shaking, and when his wobbly knees can hold him steady once more, he licks Jared completely clean again.
-
He eventually starts calling in sick to his job, citing some trauma or another, an unforeseen injury that's left him debilitated and weak and unable to move. And it’s not entirely a lie.
He really hadn’t planned on ripping the sutures out of his fingers and letting Jared have at it. He hadn’t planned on making fresh gashes on his chest or thighs either, just so Jared would have more variety. He hadn’t planned on any of that but he still does it. And he still savors the rush he gets from having Jared love him so intimately.
And the wonders it does to Jared’s enthusiasm. God.
He’ll feast on Jensen’s body for hours, leaving it spitty and bruised, torn open like an artist’s splatter. Jensen comes so hard from it he passes out most times. And when he comes to, Jared will have never left his side.
It's a Thursday morning the day Jensen finally calls the factory and tells them he won't be going back.
-
Nothing else has ever mattered. Nothing else has ever come close to this.
He looks down at the ideal body fidgeting on the carpet, looks down at the place where he's buried tight within it, where he never ever wants to leave. Looks at those hands trailing down the fuck-warm skin of Jensen’s sweaty chest.
Jared's blunt nails dig in enough to puncture, drawing the scent of wet copper into the air. The black of his pupils dilute the rainbow of colors in his eyes and Jensen knows what that look means. Spends most of his time waiting for that look to come back from wherever its been hiding, shadowed behind hollowed walls.
Tonight, they’ve made it as far as the floor.
Jensen tried to be a gentleman and get them to the bed but Jared, the lovable boy, can be almost violent when he wants something. Jensen’s head pounds in time with his heart in time with his dick and Jared’s arms reach up for him like he knows. On some level, Jared probably understands what’s happening. Jensen thinks so anyway. It’s a nice thought he lets himself have.
“I’m going to tell you something, Jared. But you can’t laugh, okay?”
He bends down to press his face just under Jared’s jaw, pretends he can hear a heartbeat. Jared doesn’t answer him and Jensen knows he won’t laugh. Dead people usually don’t.
He mouths at the juncture of muscle, right at the line of stitches bringing them together. Jared’s arms cradle him like a womb and Jensen is safe and whole in a way he's never truly felt.
Jensen’s been hard half the night and having Jared coddling and feeling him, it isn’t doing anything to make him less desperate. He pulls out softly, just to touch where Jared's all exposed and open for him. Jensen's cock leaks sticky between them and the early smell of ejaculate and deathrot blood saturates the air, intensifies his urgency.
Pushing himself back inside, he falls back down on top of Jared, licking the inside of his mouth, working his hips in an effort to do whatever it is that gets Jared all wet, like when Jensen uses his fingers in there. It works, works brilliantly, and soon they’re just as messy on the outside as Jared’s about to be on the inside.
“Right now is - Jared.” Jensen ducks down a little, feels Jared looking at him when Jensen says, stutteringly shy, “This is my first time. With anyone.”
He holds Jared close like he might go far away if given the chance, shoves in deeper and goes still, content to never move another muscle again.
Jared gnashes at his lips, making new wounds on Jensen as he goes, and Jensen lets his blood, come and tears earnestly let Jared in on the secret. Jared's actually the one who put Jensen together.
-
The next time he sees Jared, he’s blurry, coming in and out of focus.
Jensen doesn’t know where his glasses are but he can only seem to open one eye as it is. When he looks down, his torso's a mess, concaved and shredded, air warm like fresh slaughter. The inside of his mouth is buzzy and swollen, void of a crucial piece, it feels.
Jared shuffles in closer, right up to Jensen’s face. He grabs him by the jaw, leans down to kiss the shell of Jensen's ear.
“Jensen,” he says, smiling red teeth in the dark. "My Jensen," Jared says, with Jensen's own tongue.
The agony is sharp and clear now, like an orgasm - but purer. It's as beautiful as he always knew it could be. When Jensen screams, only Jared can hear him.
end.
Wanted to get this lunacy posted before Halloween (HOLY SHIT, IS THAT TOMORROW ALREADY?) and I made it just 3 hours shy, just in time to go read other 'ween-inspired fics I see floating around in the punch.
If this were a book (some cheap horror knockoff you'd find in the clearance bin), the dedication at the beginning would go something like: For eric_idle_rules, who stayed by my side even when I lost my mind, and supplied me with such unspeakable scenes that I couldn't not attempt to write. ♥
As I do not wish to offend anyone, ever, please do not take the warnings lightly.
Title: Pretty Parts, Pretty Whole - j2 au NC-17
Author: homo_pink
Summary: A lonely serial killer with romanticized notions and warped logic, Jensen is tired of his solitary life. Jared is the unorthodox result of it all.
Word Count: 7.5k
Warning: multiple killings, gore, zombies, and hints of necrophilia
Inspired by a gorgeous painting that my very favorite and most loved author made for me.
(Photo and painting courtesy of Poppy Z. Brite)
Or on AO3
"I tried to keep the person alive by inducing a zombie-like state. By first injecting a dilute acid solution into their brain, or hot water. And it never did completely work."
- J. Dahmer
Pretty Parts, Pretty Whole
Jensen figures it out when he's still young, just how unlike his peers he truly is.
At fifteen, even he himself can't quite yet grasp the full extent of his burgeoning desires, but most of it shows itself early on. He feels quite near nothing for the people he sees in his day to day, all circle shapes to Jensen’s too triangular mold. There’s not a soul in his school, in his town, that sparks anything more than a passing interest for him.
Sometimes, it'll give him a vague sense of dread, the looming threat that he may never find someone to be with.
But Jensen doesn't like to muddy his brain with that sort of thinking.
He’ll wait it out. He’s held on this long. Someday, he’ll find someone who can see past his thick lens glasses and unthreading t-shirts and there will be pretty insides attached to pretty outsides. Jensen knows it’ll happen for him, that One True Love thing everyone talks about in whispers. He just has to practice his patience.
-
“Look mister,” a kid named Joy is saying, drumming the table.
“Jensen,” Jensen says for the fourth time.
“Right. So Jensen, I appreciate the drinks. And dinner.” He pauses, like he’s unsure how to go about cutting ties but Jensen knows what’s coming, knows what always comes. Eventually. “Think I’m just gonna grab a cab and head out though, early morning for me. Devil boss, ya know?”
Jensen nods, like he’s thinking this over. Even manages a smile, too. He studies a strange path of ink jutting out above the collar of Joey’s shirt, something he hadn’t seen before, and his smile shifts down. He hopes that sort of art isn’t present on much more of the canvas. That’s not what Jensen had been going for at all.
He convinces Joey to stay for one more drink. "My specialty," he tells the boy.
Later, when he’s rearranging the contents of his refrigerator and searching for a viable container, Jensen realizes the silly little tattoos hadn’t even mattered.
While Joey had the appropriate height he’d been after, his physique wasn’t quite up to Jensen’s standards. And after twenty-three years of being alone, they were, even by his own regard, unquestionably high. Unquestionable, not unattainable. He’d just keep looking.
Joey’s hands, though. They’re ideal.
Trim, neatly placed nails and golden skin over thick knuckles. The sort of able hands he can picture still looking model-pretty when layered over with car grease or paint splatters or semen. Or pulpy, clotting blood. They're firm and wide. Huge. Bigger than Jensen’s when he presses them flat against his own, palm to palm. He barely holds back the manic giggle slithering at the edge of his throat when he sees how right they are for him.
In the far back corner of the cold box, he finds an old pickle jar and empties it out. Peels off the stickers. Washes it 'til it sparkles. Refills it with all new contents.
-
Most of what he needs to know, his grandmother taught him before she passed on. She hated to see his poor, second life clothes always becoming untethered at the seams after so many washes. He also needed to eat.
Jensen can slice and chop and boil a nice stew, and he can work a needle and thread with near surgical expertise. Everything else, he learns between the back rows of the public library.
-
It turns out that there’s a lot more to this whole thing than Jensen could have foreseen. Precise locations for certain cuts, steady hands, a calm heart.
He’s certain he’s capable of these things, a few cat and dog rehearsals during his formative years to level out his experience some, But there’re other things he’s learning and he absorbs it all like a starving, bone-dry sponge. Jensen spends hours seated cross-legged on the floor between stacks, the musty, glorious smell of old books easing him into a place of hush.
That’s where Ricky happens upon him one afternoon.
Jensen flips the page and studies the newest diagram with an intensity so thick it comes close to arousal.
Jensen's brow is low against the bridge of his nose and he pushes his glasses back up when they start to sag. He doesn’t notice someone passing in front of him, nor the linger in their step when they glance down and take in the sight of some unknowingly pretty boy deep in concentration, in love with his book and his dreams and the way the old, crinkly pages are a direct path right to them.
“Biochem major?”
Jensen’s head snaps up, nearly slamming his book closed on his fingertips, a deep blooming pink tickling at his ears. Someone’s talking to him. To him. He looks down at his lap, at the words and pictures printed right there like a handy instruction manual.
“No, it’s just a hobby,” he says, uneasy. A curious expression is bounced back to him and before it can change to discomfort he adds, “Reading a wide variety of topics, stimulates the brain into action. Or something."
The guy must think it’s a joke, because he grins delightedly and crouches down like he’s trying to read along with Jensen. Like maybe he, too, cares about how close the mandible bone is to the carotid artery and that just the slightest little nick- But he smells like soap and sweat and male and in a sudden sensation, Jensen is infinitely grateful to have the book spread open across his lap.
Ricky’s faultless face is porcelain smooth, clean like he takes care of it habitually and when he starts to talk, there’s a set of dimples carved out in his cheeks. Deep ones. His jaw is strong, nose a sloping angular thing that stops just short of being too much. His beauty is a vision.
With his pulse jackrabbitting beneath his jaw, Jensen starts to understand that some things just happen for a reason.
-
He’s only half paying attention when the elderly man behind the counter explains to him the different types of threads and sutures they have in stock. Jensen nods, his mind and eye elsewhere. Jensen blinks syrup-slow and mumbles a half-hearted thank you, hands turning to babyfists at the sight of the girl.
He lingers just outside the pharmacy doorway when he's all done with his purchase, sucks in a breath as she swish-swishes past him in her neon yellow jogging shoes. He notes the direction in which she heads home.
She’s got a wonderful head of hair, loose and flowing, burnt honey brown past her chin just a little. He can picture his hands wrist deep in the waves, something to cling to and clutch at and guide just where he wants.
The last traces of sunshine glitter the strands' ends as she goes and Jensen watches dreamily, caught in his own web of silk.
-
He thinks about them when he’s away, when he’s gone and can’t be around to hold them and pet them and tell them how beautiful they are.
They keep each other company, of course, but just thinking about them, there at home without him. It makes his heart clench with a sick ache when he imagines how lonely they must be. Jensen misses them all the time.
When he can get back home to them, slip the door softly shut behind him, they’re all exactly where he left them, waiting dutifully for him to return. They stare at him with wide-eyed expressions and smiles that never wilt or sour or whisper behind their hands, behind his back. They don’t think he’s creepy. Jensen is all they think about too.
Ricky’s still there in the La-Z-Boy where Jensen left him, his legs spread and his head sort of lolled off to the side, like he’s thinking about how Jensen looks beneath his clothes.
“No free peep shows,” Jensen says to the others, silly.
He feels silly, getting naked when everyone else is still mostly dressed. But he’s happy too, his happiest yet, and he moves Joey and Annabelle so they’re facing the other direction. Let those two entertain themselves for now, talk about mimes with no hands or mannequins with no hair or whatever it is they do when he’s away.
Jensen tugs off his heavy boots, peels his clothes away like a dried out membrane and shyly goes to sit on Ricky’s lap, making sure to bring his favorite fleece throw. Ricky’s one of those perpetually cold types, and Jensen never minds lending some of his warmth.
-
His dreams have shifted in the weeks since he met them and they’ve snuck up on him now, even here in his sleep.
He only knows it’s a fake, chalk outline of his life because they’re sitting around the oak table in Jensen’s gran’s dining room, chattering and giggling and touching themselves in a manner that make his cock grow stiff in his underwear. They’re polishing gory gloss on their lips, pouting in the mirror, making eyes at each other, at him. The ones who still have them.
The house was demolished when Jensen was nineteen, torn down by the city after having stood condemned for too long. Gran was already dead by then. None of what’s happening is happening. And still he takes his seat at the head of the table.
Ezra and Dave, the kind Mormon boys that had come to his door Tuesday evening, are also here.
Dave looks like a carved out stone sculpture. Tall enough to make Jensen feel safe, arms muscled enough to give great hugs. Well over 6 feet, nearing the halfway mark to 7. Well. He had been when Jensen eyed him standing there in his front doorway, holding a pamphlet and stumbling his way through it. When he still had his head on right.
There’s just a gaping hole between his shoulders now but he’s still a gorgeous, lovely thing that Jensen would have no other way. And Ezra’s multicolored eyes…
They huddle around Jensen, whispering and cooing and rubbing their distended bellies against his crotch. But it's not right. They’re not quite right. None of them look the way they once had.
Annabelle’s scalped head is a raw wet wound that smells faintly of puss when she pats it demurely. Ezra's mangled black cavities are becoming unattractive, and Ricky, sweet Ricky, he's just a gaping face in a little aquarium. Even Joey, the quiet one all evening, is stretching out to hug Jensen and his arms end in poorly little stumps right at the wrists.
A strongly scented drop of red infection wells out of one of them and lands tellingly on the top of Jensen’s bare foot.
He stares at it until it eats through to the bone like acid and he knows that come morning, he won’t be able to wait any longer. The change is starting and they’re already becoming alien to him, distorting from their natural beauty. The romance is fading.
The night, like them, is purpled and bloated and the room is growing smothered with a trace of decay.
-
The third book he picks up is skinny and well thumbed through. He flicks the pages with something between hunger and terror curling in his guts and after a satisfying look through, he walks up to the little register and places his paperback on the countertop. Jensen rocks back on his heels and squirms from pure anticipation.
The white-eyed lady behind the counter charges $6.99 for Secrets of Haitian Vodou: Raising the Dead and knows nothing of how she just changed his life.
-
After a hurried stop at the grocery mart, Jensen races home and dumps his ingredients out on the kitchen countertop, softly humming while he rummages for bowls and mixing spoons.
In his own personal meat shop, Jensen the butcher hacks off useless chunks he won’t need and he slices carefully around the ones he will.
When the smell of copper and a slightly spoiled tang is so thick in the air he can barely see, his work is almost done. The scraps go in one pile, the rest in another. He wipes sweat from his brow, happy tears from his cheeks, and gathers everything he’ll need into his arms.
He references his library books while he works, squinting at the illustrations and fine typewriter print. The music on the radio is turned down low and he chews his bottom lip in concentration as he arranges all his pieces like a puzzle on the living room floor.
Most of Dave, a little Ricky, couple bits of Joey and a fragment of Annabelle to top it off.
-
“The head bone’s connected to the - neck bone. The neck bone’s connected to the - back bone…”
He has to full-body resist from swaying around his living room in a joyful dance of what’s to come.
And that reminds him. He’s going to have company in a while, he'll need to tidy up soon.
-
When the majority of his masterpiece is sewn complete, he plunks the last two bits - Ezra's glass-pretty eyeballs - into Ricky's scooped out sockets. And with the finishing touch in place, Jensen threads up the last of it and makes sure all the nerves and tissues are attached to the best of his abilities, sewn up just so.
Giving himself only a moment to admire his creation, he wipes the pink smudges from his lenses and retrieves his mixture from the sink, reaches for his special book.
He thumbs the pages until he finds the incantation it'll take to reanimate a corpse. He doesn't like to think of it as that, because it hurts. He'll miss his old friends, he very much will. But what he'll have will be so much more precious: a best friend.
Jensen recites the words in a calm chant, stirs the liquid in the bowl and brings the rim up close.
With his insides banging up against the cage of his bones, he gulps in a mouthful of the mixture, swallows half of it, and leans in to press his mouth to the cold, dry counterpart of his sleeping one. He empties the rest between barely parted waxy lips.
Some time may be necessary, he imagines, and exhausted from the night's excitement, he scoots down to the floor and lays next to his beloved. Head on his chest, an arm flung over the thin waist. Jensen promptly slips away, the two of them slotted together like an inexorable, pre-matched fit.
-
Ten hours from the time he shut his eyes, Jensen wakes to find himself curled on the hard, uncomfortable floor. And something feels different. He doesn't stretch and twist or rub out any leftover sleep from his face but he knows it all the same - something is different.
Everything.
For a moment, Jensen questions whether or not the man can see him. If those colorful eyes watching him inquisitively function better than his own useless pair, if he'd done the job in putting him together all the way, and he's scooting back to blindly grope around for his glasses when two long arms snake out towards him, huge hands reaching out for him.
Jensen's friend is bruised up sporadically, dried bits of blood crusting at his seam lines. He looks like the aftermath of a fatal car crash. He's so fucking gorgeous.
Jensen Ackles, who's never voluntarily embraced another, can't help himself from lunging forward and hugging the body for the very first time, holding on too strong and too much and so fiercely possessive his eyes are clamped tight to hold the stinging wetness in.
It leaks out anyway. When his friend hugs him back, the icy fingertips feel almost warm.
-
At first, Jensen doesn’t know what to call him.
Secretly, in his head, he thinks of him in a hundred different ways and words Jensen's too shy to ever say aloud. But he can’t keep referring to the guy as Um, he just cannot. Um, how do you feel? or Umm.. are you hungry? He knows he has to decide soon, before Um starts believing that’s really his name.
When it comes to him, Jensen thinks of it as a sort of tribute, a sweet homage to what the others have given him.
He’s at his desk one evening, scribbling out his brainstorms and striking them out as he goes, frustrated, his beautiful one watching some small movement out the window with a curiously tilted head, when the whole thing works itself out.
Jensen borrows a letter from each of his comrades - D, E, A, R, J - scrambles them up, rearranges them until something slots into place and tries the shape of it out between his trembling lips.
“Hey... Jared?” he says, hands shaking when he puts the pen down.
The boy in the window turns to meet his stare and Jensen's belly goes warm with butterfly flaps.
-
Jared doesn’t say much by way of conversation.
He doesn't actually say a thing.
Deep down, Jensen knows he messed something up, severed a vocal chord during his grim cross-stitching most likely. Or maybe they'd never have worked at all.
Jensen’s not real choosy either way, he’s just happy to have Jared around. Even if he smells faintly sour, like some spoiled thing forgotten so long the odor of expiration is almost gone again. Even if he fumbles and groans and drools on himself by accident sometimes.
They sit together on the couch and pretend to watch TV. Or Jensen pretends, while taking in Jared’s TV-star features out of the corner of his eye. Jared stares straight ahead, but he might not be looking at anything at all.
He’ll lurch around the little apartment occasionally, studying things in his own Jared way, making small clicks and ticks in his throat, like he's unaware of the sound. Just like he's unaware of what he does to Jensen's heart.
-
Jensen always wanted to keep a boy of his own.
Someone who would be with him and hold him and never, ever leave.
-
Sometimes he'll find himself thinking of the peculiar way Jared’s scalp will still shift if Jensen runs his fingers through the sun-soft hair too forcefully. Or how Jared's body is dampy cool to the touch, a little rubbery the few times Jensen’s dared to reach out.
He wonders if Jared knows how to touch himself, if he does it when Jensen’s not home to see. If he experiments and prods himself or if he maybe tries opening old lesions. If he knows to do anything at all.
Jensen, pining and obsessed and completely smitten with a thing that will never love him back, thinks about his dead boy all the hours of his workday. Jared's a real wish come true.
-
The evening Jensen comes home and doesn't hear the usual stumbling noises or the ragged grunts that mean Jared's heard the door snick open and is making his way to the sound, that's the day things start to shift.
Outside, it's grey gloom and soppy puddles gathering in sidewalk cracks. The rain pelts down and clatters against Jared's favorite windows.
On the inside, it’s all silence and needle drops for a heart-stopping second that makes Jensen go stiff, full of grief until he picks up on the dragscrapedrag coming from the hallway.
“Jared?” he calls out, already halfway there.
There’s no reply, of course, but it very nearly seems like there wants to be, a light rumbling sob greeting him when he’s made it all the way to the bathroom. The look in Jared’s eyes is blank but the rest of him appears almost - frustrated. Even if Jensen knows it isn’t possible, the groused set of his jaw looks it. Almost.
He’s on the floor when Jensen finds him, sprawled out in a twisted, unnatural angle against the hard tiles.
The ratty black sweatpants that were always too bunchy on Jensen but fit just right on long, long legs are ripped up one side, a gash in the material running clear up to the thigh. And then Jensen sees the broken ankle.
He's there right away, immediately curled over Jared’s body, down on his knees to inspect the damage.
The finely made leg is bent all wrong, misshapen into something sadly unrecognizable, sharp juts of bone puncturing through the skin. When Jensen softly touches it, Jared just watches. He doesn’t gasp or jerk or even make one of his animal sounds.
Jared looks at Jensen, looks at his own foot. He gurgles wetly around his tongue and slumps back down against the side of the toilet bowl.
With something like granted permission, Jensen shoves the tattered pant leg up and off to hang limply at the side and now able to get a much better look at the mess, he sees it isn’t just the ankle. Not nearly.
Jared, sweet thing, must have fractured the bone and just kept right on walking until he eventually destroyed his knee too. It’s a swollen, mottled thing and Jensen has no choice but to heave Jared up and into the bathtub to clean off the oozy bits he managed to get all over both feet, one hand, and bizarrely, his mouth too.
Jensen doesn’t stop to wonder what Jared was doing to end up like that, thinking on it too long will make his cock grow fat and heavy and he doesn’t have time for that right now.
Setting his glasses aside so the steam doesn't interfere, he plops Jared into the porcelain, tugs off the pants - gently, like it matters - and starts up the shower. Jared doesn’t care if the water is cool or scalding.
Bent over the lip of the tub, Jensen runs his washcloth over the ruined areas, wipes away old messes and methodically scrubs Jared down, taking care to stay away from certain places. And he doesn’t let himself look, no matter how badly he wants it.
Around the stitches, Jensen’s even sweeter, barely there baby-strokes so nothing comes undone. Jensen’s steady pulse starts to spike and Jared continues to rest rigid against the wall, his hair falling into his eyes in wet vines.
-
He’s not sure what he’d been expecting to happen when he leant down and pressed his mouth to the slice marks on Jared’s inner left wrist, when he ran his tongue against the bumps of thick thread.
But as he shut his adoring eyes and continued to suck at the wound, he was 100% certain it was not for Jared to scratch at Jensen's shirt until he’d clawed in enough to drag Jensen under the warm spray of the showerhead.
Jensen’s now inside the bathtub, lying weirdly on top of Jared, trying to get his bearings as he hovers up to all fours, awkward and stiff-jointed.
Within seconds he’s soaked through and his clothes cling uncomfortably but it doesn't matter because Jared’s looking at him now, not at some indistinct point over Jensen's shoulder and Jared, Jared is naked and massive in the tiny tub and whole rivers are trailing down his nicely cut abs and Jensen’s done staring. He's done.
Surging forward, he shoves his face into Jared’s neck, licks at the old incision there at the bottom of his throat and pulls it up between his teeth to taste. It’s bitter and stale but beneath that somewhere, it’s wonderful.
Jensen tongues and softly bites at the thick, spongy skin and one of Jared’s arms lifts from where it'd been trapped between them. A wide-open hand lands on the back of Jensen's overheated, slippery neck. Jared holds Jensen in place, there against the sleek and scarred line of his wetdream throat.
Jensen sighs and squirms and he nestles his groin atop Jared’s, huffing and rubbing and too in love to concentrate. He pulls back to see Jared’s dull cherry mouth hanging open, just barely. Just enough.
Foggy-eyed and driven by the ache in his pants, Jensen leans into Jared, closer to the face that's mannequin perfect until Jared’s gone nearly cross-eyed looking back at him, and Jensen licks into the perpetually parted lips, sloppy and one-sided and the fact of it doesn’t even register because Jensen’s in a world all his own, all their own.
Jared’s head sways to the side and the angle is just right for Jensen to get even deeper.
He holds the side of Jared’s face by the finely cut cheekbone, wraps the other behind his ear, fingertips happily burrowed in the damp tangles just like he knew they’d be. Jensen mouths at the coolness of Jared’s lips and chin and sucks on his tongue greedily.
The water at the drain is still swirling a rusty pink color but Jensen's lost sight of the leg he meant to mend. He's too busy feeling up all the rest that's attached to it.
_
Every night under the blankets where they've been sleeping in Jensen’s bed, together, apart, Jensen would wonder quietly if tonight would be the night Jared finally touched him with intent.
Jensen couldn't make the first move. He'd already done everything else.
Though maybe not quite from the path of his loins, he'd birthed Jared in some respect, and that spot between his legs was exactly where he wanted Jared to find his way to. On his own.
Night after night, Jensen would fall asleep still wondering. But now.
-
Jensen re-tightens the threads along the hairline, smooths down the fleshy bits Jared had started to pick open again like a child with a new scab, and Jensen concentrates on the task.
The seam runs through the top of the forehead to the temples, behind the ears, back of the neck and up again to the other side, meeting again front and center. More than once, he’s found Jared absently jerking at the stitches and Jensen will yelp and cry and have to rush and stop him before he ruins himself.
Jensen never likes to see the separating folds yawning at him and inviting him to peek inside.
Jared leans back against the headboard, lets Jensen go on gluing eggshells back together, and clutches a huge fist in the stretched collar of Jensen’s shirt. Jared always pulls too hard. Jensen never minds.
When it’s like this, eerie calm and Jensen not saying a word, Jared will suddenly start biting at Jensen's lips, his face, anything within reach, like he wants something but doesn’t know, couldn’t know, what it is. Jensen kisses him deep and sloppy and holds him in by the shoulder blades and jadedly wonders if Jared will ever really be a whole.
-
The first time the phone rings, it startles Jensen so bad the blade he’s been using to chop mushrooms for his dinner sauce slips from his grip and on the slam down, slices two fingers clean off just above the top knuckle, right at the tippy top. The phone hasn’t rung in months.
Even Jared, who’d been sitting on the floor, propped up against the sofa, turns to look at the old landline in a great show of curiosity.
Jared with his gauzed up leg and casually vacant stare. He doesn’t reach for it, or know what it does even, but he listens as the shrill ring wails around him until Jensen, dripping fantastically bright droplets all over the carpet, comes by to answer it.
“Yes?” he says weakly into the phone. "Yeah, this is Mr. Ack- This is Jensen."
He’s already feeling lightheaded and clammy and he holds the phone stiffly in his good hand while his fingers continue the constant drip drip drip. The sight of red life never makes him queasy, not once, not even his own. Distressingly, it usually has the opposite effect on his body.
He grips the phone tighter and strains to listen.
“I understand,” he says, though he doesn’t. Jared doesn’t make that much noise most of the time. The landlady makes it seem like wild teenage parties are being thrown in his absence throughout the midday work hours.
“No, still just me up here.” He can’t afford the extra rent she’s suggesting if he’s moved someone in without the building’s consent. “I might’ve left the TV going and forgotten all about it. Won’t happen again.”
That doesn’t account for the excessive stomping and thudding she says other tenants claim to have heard, but it must placate her enough for the time being because she lets it go. Jensen has always been a model tenant; rent paid on time, fixes his plumbing himself, never makes waves around the community. She takes his word for it.
By the time he hangs up, Jensen has no idea what else they were even talking about anymore, nothing of the neighboring apartment across the corridor complaining about a foul stench. Or that trash days are still Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It's all gone from his ears.
Jensen puts the receiver back in the cradle and calmly realizes that Jared’s dragged himself over to Jensen. That he's been merrily chewing at Jensen’s fingers for the last however long it’s been.
Dear Jared's lips are a bright splash of a scarlet rose, all thorn, sucking and mouthing at Jensen’s mutilated hand, holding onto it with both of his. His uneven teeth scrape at it, work another gush of liquid out and Jensen watches like he’s floating above his own dream.
It’s only later after he’s come back to himself and tugged out of Jared’s grasp that he recognizes how he somehow, horrifyingly, excitingly, came in his pants from just that.
It trickles down his leg in a slow drip and Jensen rushes out to get his needle and thread for himself this time.
-
This is the life Jensen always dreamed of during class, at the library, in his hopeful heart.
The sheets are entangled in a heap at Jensen’s ankles, at the base of the bed.
It’s three in the morning and Jared woke him up with all his groping and gnawing, Jensen blinking awake to find Jared attempting to masticate his jaw and collarbone. It had been a little funny at first, until Jensen started getting turned on. Again.
The slobbery trails hadn’t even dried before Jensen was putting Jared onto his back and crawling between his thighs.
He holds Jared down now with a heavy arm across his belly, good hand wrapped roughly around a sharp hipbone, letting Jared’s cock rest in his mouth and slowly rolling it about his tongue, just keeping it there and feeling the weight of it.
Jensen pushes wetly at the tip, sliding into the slit and spreading his saliva over and around and all down the length of it. Jared’s cock sits soft between his fevered lips and Jensen wants to scream childishly from the unfairness of it all.
He’s been at it for hours now, days, and nothing ever happens. Jared stays sprawled in place, reaches feebly into the air every now and then, clutching at nothing Jensen is able to see, and makes strange little bubbling sounds.
Jensen enjoys them though, enjoys the thought of what they might be.
He keeps working at Jared’s dick, taking it to the back of his throat and letting it block his airway. It might not get all thick and hard, and Jared might not know how satisfying this should be feeling, but even flaccid, it’s huge and perfect and Jensen likes knowing he’s doing it anyway.
He moans around the whole thing, embarrassingly whorish, and touches himself between the legs. He’s already wet, thick strings of excitement seeping out of him that he works between his fingers, fisting himself while he goes down on Jared like it means something special to them both.
-
Ricky had been nice to look at, of course. It’s the only real reason he’d been chosen. That, and his sweet schoolboy interest in Jensen. Though admittedly, Jensen liked him a whole lot more once he was dead. Still.
While Jared might be wearing Ricky's mask now, the carved jaw and once-tan skin and those silly ol’ sideburns, Jared is so much more.
“I only ever wanted this,” Jensen says, a humid, whispered confession into the crease of Jared’s thigh.
“It was never about them, you have to know that.” Jared’s legs fall open a little wider and Jensen takes that as proof he’s hearing him. “Was only ever about you.”
Jensen watches as Jared coughs up a little glob of spit, tracks it as it dribbles out of the corner of Jared's mouth. The way it slides down near the bulged vein in Jared’s throat vaguely reminds Jensen of the way Annabelle had cried pretty black mascara trails.
“My beautiful one,” Jensen grins helplessly, hooking his hands under Jared’s knees and spreading him out gorgeously, holding him in place while he sinks back down to leave a smeared wet kiss against Jared’s asshole.
He loves Jared like this; draped across the bed and almost mumbling and Jensen’s to do what he wants with. Whatever he wants with.
-
Jared, beautiful Jared, shifts around in the bed and lets his head fall so far to the side it looks in danger of falling right off. And Jensen most of all, knows it could very well happen.
It doesn’t make it quite that far, to the point of snapping and rolling like a child's lost ball. Jared’s back comes off the bed just enough that his ass causes the mattress around Jensen’s knees to dip from the sudden pressure and a tiny tremor quakes the innermost part of Jared’s left thigh. Jensen feels it shudder beneath his palm.
He works his fingers in harder and harder, smoother, then rougher, then wild with no remorse because the sight of his fingers doing that, in there, it’s too much at once and it makes him crazy and feral and sick with despair and then he slows down to catch his breath and right there, right then, the most incredible thing he’s ever seen starts to happen.
As he stares, stock still in rapture, Jared’s cock starts to drool.
Still resting limp against his leg, Jensen watches, holding his breath, fingers starting to punch back in, as a filmy, stringy substance dribbles out.
It’s thin and runny, a lot messier than Jensen’s, like that of his own young wetness when he was first experimenting with how things worked in that area. But the more force he uses in fucking his fingers deep into Jared, the more he gets rewarded. It’s stunning. Jared’s already given him so much, so much, and now he’s giving him this too.
Jensen brushes his lips down for a taste, unable to resist a second longer, his own erection throbbing wetly in his three fingered fist.
He darts his tongue out, real soft along the head, working it around on his lips and he pulls back when a cold string of semen is connecting them. And yes - yes - that’s exactly what it is.
Jensen starts to cry and doesn’t stop until he’s emptied his load all over Jared’s thighs and flat stomach, sobbing and shaking, and when his wobbly knees can hold him steady once more, he licks Jared completely clean again.
-
He eventually starts calling in sick to his job, citing some trauma or another, an unforeseen injury that's left him debilitated and weak and unable to move. And it’s not entirely a lie.
He really hadn’t planned on ripping the sutures out of his fingers and letting Jared have at it. He hadn’t planned on making fresh gashes on his chest or thighs either, just so Jared would have more variety. He hadn’t planned on any of that but he still does it. And he still savors the rush he gets from having Jared love him so intimately.
And the wonders it does to Jared’s enthusiasm. God.
He’ll feast on Jensen’s body for hours, leaving it spitty and bruised, torn open like an artist’s splatter. Jensen comes so hard from it he passes out most times. And when he comes to, Jared will have never left his side.
It's a Thursday morning the day Jensen finally calls the factory and tells them he won't be going back.
-
Nothing else has ever mattered. Nothing else has ever come close to this.
He looks down at the ideal body fidgeting on the carpet, looks down at the place where he's buried tight within it, where he never ever wants to leave. Looks at those hands trailing down the fuck-warm skin of Jensen’s sweaty chest.
Jared's blunt nails dig in enough to puncture, drawing the scent of wet copper into the air. The black of his pupils dilute the rainbow of colors in his eyes and Jensen knows what that look means. Spends most of his time waiting for that look to come back from wherever its been hiding, shadowed behind hollowed walls.
Tonight, they’ve made it as far as the floor.
Jensen tried to be a gentleman and get them to the bed but Jared, the lovable boy, can be almost violent when he wants something. Jensen’s head pounds in time with his heart in time with his dick and Jared’s arms reach up for him like he knows. On some level, Jared probably understands what’s happening. Jensen thinks so anyway. It’s a nice thought he lets himself have.
“I’m going to tell you something, Jared. But you can’t laugh, okay?”
He bends down to press his face just under Jared’s jaw, pretends he can hear a heartbeat. Jared doesn’t answer him and Jensen knows he won’t laugh. Dead people usually don’t.
He mouths at the juncture of muscle, right at the line of stitches bringing them together. Jared’s arms cradle him like a womb and Jensen is safe and whole in a way he's never truly felt.
Jensen’s been hard half the night and having Jared coddling and feeling him, it isn’t doing anything to make him less desperate. He pulls out softly, just to touch where Jared's all exposed and open for him. Jensen's cock leaks sticky between them and the early smell of ejaculate and deathrot blood saturates the air, intensifies his urgency.
Pushing himself back inside, he falls back down on top of Jared, licking the inside of his mouth, working his hips in an effort to do whatever it is that gets Jared all wet, like when Jensen uses his fingers in there. It works, works brilliantly, and soon they’re just as messy on the outside as Jared’s about to be on the inside.
“Right now is - Jared.” Jensen ducks down a little, feels Jared looking at him when Jensen says, stutteringly shy, “This is my first time. With anyone.”
He holds Jared close like he might go far away if given the chance, shoves in deeper and goes still, content to never move another muscle again.
Jared gnashes at his lips, making new wounds on Jensen as he goes, and Jensen lets his blood, come and tears earnestly let Jared in on the secret. Jared's actually the one who put Jensen together.
-
The next time he sees Jared, he’s blurry, coming in and out of focus.
Jensen doesn’t know where his glasses are but he can only seem to open one eye as it is. When he looks down, his torso's a mess, concaved and shredded, air warm like fresh slaughter. The inside of his mouth is buzzy and swollen, void of a crucial piece, it feels.
Jared shuffles in closer, right up to Jensen’s face. He grabs him by the jaw, leans down to kiss the shell of Jensen's ear.
“Jensen,” he says, smiling red teeth in the dark. "My Jensen," Jared says, with Jensen's own tongue.
The agony is sharp and clear now, like an orgasm - but purer. It's as beautiful as he always knew it could be. When Jensen screams, only Jared can hear him.
end.