Dead Tidy - j2 | R | 2.6k
Jensen spends all his time at the boneyard perfecting his garden. That's where he meets the boy.
Warning: underage stuff, past trauma
For
alexisjane, who is beautiful and thoughtful and kind, always. I hope I didn't completely butcher your gorgeous ideas. With all my ♥ happy birthday.
AO3 Dead Tidy
flowers, flowers everywhere, in the garden, in my hair
Not every section is quite so handsome, to be sure. Some have but only a few looping strands of vine placed and replaced, others with blossoming supermarket-wrapped bouquets and cellophane decorations dug into the earth around, hasty but well meaning. A sad many are simply barren, nothing left to wilt or fade, just empty with too many years between the stretch and nobody to mourn them further.
Jensen’s little area is lush with an artist’s utopia of color splash, maintained with dedication and nurtured with a fond smile, able hands. An 8x3 patch of green swarming with zinnias and hydrangeas and a whole troupe of swaying, dancing black-eyed susans.
It’s his most visited and most favorite place in the wide wide world. And Jensen will mourn for lifetimes.
-
As days pass and time creeps, asters and begonias shift into red camellias, snapdragons, and Jensen bottle-feeds each with a full heart and silly, made up rain dances. Sometimes saltwater is all he can afford them, but on those days, it feels more like an offering anyway. Jensen likes that.
He's there, sitting on the grass with his chin on his knees, admiring the slutty new spread of the peonies, ripe with their purple-pink allure and fluttering delicately, when Sister Helena first comes to him.
"You're here so often," she says, though not pitying, like this is something admirable. "And you do what you do so beautifully. We can't offer much," she admits, but Jensen's already blooming with a smile.
He doesn't need much anyway.
Once, he had it all.
-
It's a simple job, tossing dead branches when they gather, discarding rotten arrangements from recently deceased's, hedging and trimming, push-mowing the expanse of the lawn in neat rows, respectfully careful of all who rest. It's a simple job, but Jensen enjoys it.
Plus, this way he gets to be close by all the time. Not close enough, but close enough.
-
The nuns give him a small paycheck at the end of each week, give him a wicker bowl of fresh fruit, give him the whispered word of the Lord as thank you. Jensen doesn't directly understand them, not really, but on some levels he can relate to them. Sister Helena mentioned a vow of chastity to him once, lips bitten red-raw and eyes pulling hastily away from his when he looked at her searchingly, said it was an oath of love.
That's something relatable anyway. Jensen doesn't want to fuck anybody either. Not in years.
The nuns are kind to him, though. They ooh and ahh and delight in his keeping of the grounds, very lovely, they coo, professional. For those few minutes that he wanders in to collect, the prayer house always smells deeply of incense and even deeper of devotion.
Outside, it's tree sap and ozone and freshly turned dirt. Jensen inhales thoughtfully, hugely. He's very devoted, too.
-
He meets the boy on an evening off, a Sunday, the last wash of daylight just beginning to go into hiding. There's a slight drizzle when he tongues at the air, eyes slipped shut, burying himself in helplessly fond snapshots of time, his happiest memories, his dirtiest nighttime wants, face tilted to the rain clouds in a zen state of lust.
It's pleasantly arousing, laying flat out on the ground next to his garden, remembering details, inventorying the only souvenirs he allowed himself to keep, all locked up in his brain and lodged beneath his hollowed ribs. He's got lots to choose from. Jensen's never forgotten a thing. Confused smiles and easy dimples. Eternally long legs. An invitingly bare nape of neck.
"What are you doing?" somebody says, the moment Jensen realizes he's getting hard.
He reacts quickly by not reacting at all. Peeks open an eye, assesses the interrupter, closes the eye again. Careful owl. And he says, "Just breathing a little." He doesn't bother covering the risen crotch of his corduroys.
The boy was the one intruding. It's the boy's fault if he sees something unwanted. He doesn't think the boy is looking anyway.
"Not a lot?"
"No," Jensen says. "I only take what air I need. The flowers do better with it. They make beauty." He knows his flowers are very pretty. Everybody says so.
"A lot of beauty," the boy agrees, and Jensen preens inside, knowing for sure now that his garden is being rightfully looked upon, admired properly, another honeybee sipping nectar he helped churn. It is indeed the day of worship. "So much in one place."
Jensen needn't open his eyes again, not for a long time, but he can hear the stirring of the grass, a sweep of motion. The boy is sitting nearby. Silent, but friendly. They share some air. Jensen's still hard in his pants.
-
New arrival coming in shortly, the nuns tell him Monday morning, big sorrowful eyes and accepting tones, wooden rosaries in hand. Day after tomorrow, looks like.
Jensen sections off the area, does his measurements, and gets to use a small digger machine for part of the hole. It's all very new and very exciting for him, pink-cheeked with exertion and elation alike, using these special tools. He's only ever done it by shovel before, by hand. Jensen's super great at digging holes.
-
Tuesday afternoon the boy comes back.
"What are you doing?" he asks, appearing over the edge, blinking down at where Jensen's sitting quietly in the hole, soothed by the simple act of it. "Breathing?"
"Not a lot," Jensen says. He thumbs at a long squirmy earthworm, watches it fumble its way across his wrist.
"Saving it for the flowers?"
"Or for you," Jensen tells him, even though that's a lie. He wasn't saving any air. He was thinking about masturbating actually, wondering if it felt better while four feet below. He'd bet it does. Still, the boy's here now and Jensen's pleased for it. He pats the soft dirt beside him but the boy's already climbing in, dropping down.
-
"I'd seen you before, you know," the boy admits. It's full dark now, misty, even blacker in the whole of the hole. Only night creatures are out now. Jensen's always felt a little night creature-ish, a different species in his veins. "Around. Not just here."
Jensen hmms beside him, claws quietly into the dirt at the thought, squishes it between his fingers. He finds the idea blood-hot and tempting, being watched.
"At home or in town, once through your window."
Jensen ought to be appalled, what a pervert. But Jensen ought to be a lot of things. The dirt's gone to mud beneath his fingernails, squoze and wet, palms sweaty, armpits warm with pleasure. One of his school teachers called him perverse once, when he was just a little one. It's still true.
"I see you best here, though," says the boy, and Jensen smiles. This hole was a great idea. "I've been watching you for a long time."
-
In his bed, Jensen touches himself most frequently. He shouts and he giggles and puts his fingers right where he wants the boy, slutty and open like the peony. He starts leaving the bedroom window cracked, just in case.
-
"Jensen," Sister Helena calls, weaving through the flowerbeds toward him. She has a rigid palm to her coif and veil, cutting the sun. "Are you very busy?"
The easy truth is no, not really, but the boy's been hanging around all morning and Jensen's not tired of it, far from. He might be getting high off it, having a friend again. The boy with a cocaine smile that Jensen's starting to crave, and heroin hips that make Jensen fatten up when the boy lifts his arms now and again.
But he can't tell Sister Helena to go away, can't tell her shh, I'm trying not to stick my hand in my pants right now, so he turns from the boy, smiles at the woman, shrugs sweetly.
"Who were you speaking with?" she asks, looking around the shady little alcove. Jensen looks too. It's only the two of them now. That boy can be so shy. Now where did he go? Sister Helena seems to forget her thought much more easily than Jensen quite can. "I've made lunch today. Tuna with apples and sweet iced tea. You must be just famished."
Jensen's positively starving. But not for any of that. She's already tugging him along. The boy is hidden. Jensen walks along behind her quietly, listening for footsteps.
-
The acid boy doesn't return for three days. Three mornings and afternoons and three nights, and Jensen is miserable to his marrow.
The hole garners its new forever-occupant, clutches on tightly, refilled and repurposed, and Jensen is left alone once again.
He's got an apology bouquet already plucked and ribboned together, direct from his garden, something he never does, ever, hoping hard on a maybe. Whatever it was he did, he'll undo it, whatever he said, he'll unsay it, all he needs is the chance, he can't mourn another.
A bony finger prods his shoulder right on the cusp of morning, and Jensen, relieved and outrageously verklempt, thrusts the little bouquet right at the boy, the bundle only slightly haggard from too hard holding, from too hard hoping.
It's nothing but red roses.
-
"She wants it inside her," the boy says to him later, hours of trailing Jensen through his chores, muted, rubbing those long spindly fingers across the petals - innocent, idle motions that make Jensen long to trade places with the thing.
"What? Who does?" Jensen's cheeks and neck burn tulip-pink.
"That God woman," the boy says, snappish, like Jensen should know this. He thumbs a thorn deep, but he doesn't bleed. "She wanted you to fuck her."
"Well I don't want to." The pruning saw trembles in his grasp and Jensen can't dare risk a glance at that face, those eyes, the lovely bone structure he's only seen in one other before, not in the condition he's in right now.
"You don't wanna be in her? You sure? Up under that nice skirt, bet she's all pure and soft, bet she'd thank Christ for your dick."
"No."
"Okay," the boy says easily, and walks on, like maybe they were just discussing a storm on the horizon and not Jensen's wet, wet cock.
"Not her," Jensen says after him, shy, quieted, and the boy's curled in shoulders go perky.
-
"That's not really a garden, is it?" The boy is staring at the 8x3 one evening, purpled in dusk's shadow, shrewd and thinky. Jensen's been wooed by knobby shoulders, been thinking about touching the boy's hand, holding it, touching his legs, between, holding that too.
"No," Jensen says, because he's never said it out loud before and it sends a thrillful rush right through him, like he's experiencing it all over again. "It's a shrine."
It's a floral love song and it's so, so beautiful.
"Who's in there?" the boy asks, startling Jensen for a moment with his sharpness. He sees too much.
"A boy I knew," Jensen admits, dreamy.
"What happened to him?"
And this part's okay, he thinks. This he can do. It might scare the boy away, but Jensen doesn't think so. So far, the boy hasn't frightened easily. He's seen traces of Jensen's monster and he hasn't run yet. "I loved him too much."
-
He wanders through Jensen's life as he pleases, shows up at random times, in unusual places, meets him in his frenzied, soppy sleep; his young, fat cock making Jensen weep when he wakes, dirty underwear. The clouds are always peach, baby skin peach, and the boy hums sad songs. Jensen wants badly to unflesh him, find his secret heart. The nuns have grown suspicious, because the grass has grown in stalks.
-
In September, Jensen hears footsteps like church mice out on his terrace.
-
"Was he very big?"
Jensen's now accustomed to discussing his old friend with his new friend, has learned to savor its sweetness. There are shades of both in each other, childlike qualities, mirrored glimpses, distorted. They look so similar sometimes, but Jensen might just be seeing what he wants. They used to say he was prone to that. It's nice though, like a gentling mother's bossom, warm hand cupping his maw.
"Not yet."
"Then why?" the boy asks, skirting the length of the garden, tiptoeing delicately so as not to rouse even the beetles, and Jensen understands.
"He was going to be a long one," Jensen says, eyes gone soft, mouth wet, remembering legs he'd long dreamt of one day running to him, lanky arms not fully developed, a body that would extend to great lengths should it have been allowed.
8x3 is an ode to a tall boy that never made it there.
-
In October, the boy comes inside for the first time. It's a gauzy night, nothing but bullfrogs and a lone flickering streetlight down the road, and Jensen's naked under his blanket, his knees are bent.
-
On his belly, thighs rubbed raw from the force of it, the boy has broken Jensen wide open, has had Jensen begging for things he's never heard himself say, crude, unmentionable things. Things the boy fulfills filthily.
Face mashed into his own sweaty pillow, mouthing shamelessly at a hem, Jensen can't see a thing.
He's a sobby, weakened mess on the bed, cock drooling sluggishly with every punched thrust the boy gives behind him, bones shifting pleasantly, stabby-thin hips to his ass, painful fingers holding him down, loving him hard, and Jensen thrives.
"His name was Jared, wasn't it?" the boy says in his ear, low, still fucking him deliciously. "I think mine is, too."
Jensen's eyes roll to their whites just hearing it again, skin going chilled, then fevered, another rush of slick on the mattress, puddled around his straining stiffness, saturated. He makes a muffled noise, his best reply, nodding frantically, sighing hotly. Jared, Jared. They were twelve years old, and Jensen wanted to marry him, even then, wanted to keep him forever.
"And you hugged him too hard, didn't you?"
The boy pulls him apart, touches the overly warm split of his ass, damp and whorish and spread so wide around his thick dick, hands like hot welts where they touch, and Jensen burns and burns.
"Yes," Jensen moans, because he did. He did that. He hugged too tight and had to turn sweet Jared into a bed of flowers. It was an accident, just an accident, and oh how he had longed to tear down one of the Missing posters tacked on trees around town that year, hide it in his train set box. But he never had. Instead, he watered his daisies. He's sure it was an accident.
The boy's got him by the hips now, all trembled puppy thrusts and grasping fingers, the room stenched of hormones, shaken with Jensen's bitten out, wet howls, brothel house.
"I begged him to come back to me," he chokes out, and gets another good dicking for his troubles. "I waited."
"You're still waiting," the boy says, tapping each knob up Jensen's spine like a keyboard. "What if he couldn't come back to you, not like that, how you want," the boy asks, tiny teeth against his neck, and Jensen's already unloading a thick, shuddered orgasm out onto the sodden bed, eyes glazing stupidly, you perverse child. "But he could come back for you? What if he loved you, too?"
-
Jensen goes as soon as the morning calls him, goes directly to the spot acid Jared said to meet. When he gets there, he's alone, and he kneels over his garden, picking out the last of the gumdrop roses. Jensen waits. Jensen will always wait.
Two familiar hands punch through the dirt, pull Jensen down and through, so handsome.
flowers, flowers everywhere, in the garden, in my hair; in the vase, at the store, in my mouth, on the floor